Archives for October 2021

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Shareholders in Daimler AG, maker of Mercedes-Benz luxury cars, on Friday approved the spinoff of the company’s truck division, a move intended to let the world’s largest maker of trucks react faster to change and focus on the new low-emission technologies transforming the automotive industry.

The voting at an online shareholder meeting also means that Stuttgart-based Daimler will rename itself as Mercedes-Benz Group AG as of Feb. 1, 2022.

Daimler CEO Ola Kallenius said that “by unlocking the full potential of both companies, we are establishing two undisputed innovation leaders who will set the pace in the transformation of their industries.”

One reason for the spinoff is that the luxury cars and trucks are pursuing different technological approaches to developing zero local emission vehicles, with Mercedes-Benz focusing on battery-powered cars while the truck business is developing hydrogen powered vehicles for long-haul transport. The move is intended to let the separate companies make faster, more independent decisions in a rapidly shifting environment and serve distinct customer bases.

The company says luxury cars and big trucks are fundamentally different businesses. The Mercedes-Benz car division sells a luxury product to well-heeled consumers, while the truck division sells big-ticket goods to businesses focused on the return on their investment. Splitting the two businesses will, Daimler hopes, reduce what it calls a conglomerate discount — meaning the two companies would be worth more separately than they are together.

Daimler Truck is testing the GenH2 long-haul truck which uses liquid hydrogen to generate electric power from a fuel cell; the vehicle could be ready for use by 2027 if the hydrogen fuel infrastructure is ready. Hydrogen trucks will be needed because increasing numbers of electric vehicles put more pressure on the electricity grid as tougher emission standards in Europe aimed at fighting climate change mandate larger numbers of electric cars. “Europe needs a hydrogen economy,” said Daimler Truck CEO Martin Daum.

Daimler Truck includes Freightliner trucks made in Cleveland, North Carolina, Mt. Holly, North Carolina and Santiago Tianguistenco, Mexico, as well as its North American headquarters and styling and test centers in Portland, Oregon.

The spinoff was approved by 99.9% of represented capital, and the renaming by 99.9%, with 56.4% of share capital represented at the meeting.

Shareholders in Daimler are to get one share in Daimler Truck Holding AG for every two shares they hold, giving them 65% of the new company. Daimler will keep a minority interest of 35%. The company expects that the listing will take place later this year on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

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Nineteen-year-old Gigi Painter hopes Facebook’s planned “Instagram Kids” never becomes a reality.

Growing up in a small Ohio town, Painter said she and most of her friends created Instagram accounts by lying about their ages years before they turned 13.

She recalls constant pressure to post good photos that would garner lots of “likes” or positive comments. And then there was the ever-present threat of bullying on the platform. Some people at her school would create anonymous Instagram accounts where they’d upload photos of other students with mean or sexualized captions.

She isn’t alone. An unlikely alliance of congressional Democrats and Republicans, along with a host of child development experts and online advocacy groups, is now pressuring Facebook to scuttle Instagram Kids, a proposed service for tweens. Their reasoning could be summarized this way: A company that cannot keep human trafficking, hate speech and the live-streaming of suicides off its platform should not be trusted with making an app for children.

“This is serious,” said Painter, who can rattle off all the social media accounts she has on her phone. “People are basing their whole view of themselves off of the feedback they get from a picture.”

Instagram, a small but beloved photo sharing app when Facebook bought it for $1 billion in 2012, is having its Facebook moment. It’s not an enviable one. Damning newspaper reports based on the company’s own research found that Facebook knew about the harms Instagram can cause to teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.

In a swift PR offensive, Facebook tried to play down the reports — including its own research. It didn’t work.

On Thursday, senators — one from each side of the aisle — called the first of several hearings on the subject. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, defended Instagram’s efforts to protect young people using its platform, insisting that Facebook cares “deeply about the safety and security of the people on our platform.”

The Senate Commerce Subcommittee is is examining how Facebook handled information from its own researchers on Instagram’s potential threat to younger users while the company publicly played down the issue.

The episode threatens to rival the scale of Facebook’s 2018 Cambridge Analytica debacle. Revelations at the time showed that the data mining firm had gathered details on as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission, eventually leading to congressional hearings in which Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg testified for the first time.

But the Cambridge Analytica scandal was complicated and hard to follow. During those hearings, some lawmakers didn’t seem to have even a basic understanding on how social media works.

Thursday’s hearing showed that they’ve done some homework. The fallout could put an end to the tech company’s plan for a children’s product — and might even spur lawmakers to regulate the company, if only they can agree on how.

“It’s abundantly clear that Facebook views the events of the last two weeks purely as a PR problem,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the children’s online watchdog group Fairplay. The group, formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, doesn’t take money from Facebook or other corporations, unlike the nonprofits Facebook tends to bring in for expert advice on its products.

There is a good side to children’s use of the internet, said Dr. Nusheen Ameenuddin, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Communications and Media. It can be a great place for kids to talk with friends during a pandemic lockdown, explore a museum virtually or even make money as budding influencers.

But some of her pediatric patients have endured harassment or spend too much time scrolling through an endless stream of photos on apps like Instagram.

That’s why she and other pediatricians want Facebook to do a better job of making sure young kids don’t find their way onto sites like Instagram. And they want legislators to pass regulations on how tech companies can advertise to kids.

“I understand they’re a businesses,” Ameenuddin said. “(But) we don’t have to exploit the most vulnerable members of society.”

Legislators have failed to regulate the tech companies in a meaningful way, despite dozens of hearings in recent years in which politicians publicly assailed Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for making big money off of Americans’ data and privacy.

But Facebook had a harder time defending itself on Thursday to a U.S. senators who came prepared with research and tough questions, noted Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University. The hearing was starkly different from the Senate’s 2018 grilling of Zuckerberg in which senators asked him basic questions — like how Facebook makes money.

“The focus on protecting children may be much more of a catalyst for regulation than other concerns and criticisms,” Duffy said. “The senators deployed this knowledge of big tech in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen before.”

Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who is now one of the company’s biggest critics, said it’s important to remember how Instagram got its start. It was a photo sharing app, born in 2010 when smartphone cameras were pretty lousy by today’s standards, its creators added photo filters so people could make them look better.

“The culture was from the start making things look better than in real life,” McNamee said. “This created an entire culture of envy that was the original design of the product and they leaned into it every step of the way. Think about the whole influencer movement that began on Instagram. All that was designed for that envy model.”

“We need to recognize, just as we did with food and pharma and chemicals that this industry cannot operate safely without regulation,” McNamee said. “We are running out of time.”

Now a college student, Painter says she cares less now about getting “likes” on Instagram. But she worries about younger relatives who seem anxious to post perfect pictures on the platform. Looking back on how Instagram was used when she went to school, she hopes it’s different for them.

“Oh gosh, I don’t want them to have to experience a lot of that stuff,” Painter said.

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — A lack of answers from Hungary’s government about alleged spying on journalists, politicians and business figures has raised questions for a fact-finding committee of the European Union’s legislature on whether the government itself may be behind the surveillance.

The head of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, said Friday that while on an official visit to Hungary this week, her delegation interviewed several Hungarian journalists whose phones had been infected by Pegasus, a malicious spying software.

An investigation by a global media consortium published in July showed that Pegasus, a military-grade spyware from Israel-based NSO Group, was used in Hungary to infiltrate the digital devices of a range of targets — including at least 10 lawyers, one opposition politician and several government-critical journalists.

Speaking at a news conference in Budapest, Delbos-Corfield said that several of the journalists the delegation spoke with said the Pegasus affair had been “quite traumatizing.” The malware infiltrates phones to collect personal and location data, and can surreptitiously control the phone’s microphones and cameras.

In the case of journalists, that lets hackers spy on reporters’ communications with sources.

Delbos-Corfield said the Hungarian government’s refusal so far to confirm or deny whether it was responsible for the spying was “of great concern for the European Parliament.” While the malware was shown to have been used in other EU countries, “elsewhere it seems that it’s not coming from the governments of the member states,” she said.

“I’m not saying for sure, because I have doubts about this, but Hungary is the case where today, we have a clear sign that it was done by the government itself,” Delbos-Corfield said.

Hungarian officials, without denying having used Pegasus, have maintained that all secret surveillance activities are conducted in accordance with Hungarian law.

Justice Minister Judit Varga declined to appear for questioning by the Hungarian Parliament’s national security committee and told reporters in July that “every country needs such tools.”

“It’s an illusion if anyone tries to make an issue out of it,” Varga said.

The LIBE committee was in Hungary to gather information on judicial independence, media pluralism, fundamental rights, academic freedom and the functioning of democratic institutions, part of a so-called Article 7 procedure the EU launched against Hungary in 2018 for alleged breaches of the bloc’s fundamental values.

Delbos-Corfield said the delegation had met with “refusal to answer questions” and “clear hostility” in meetings with Hungary’s Constitutional Court and the Curia, its highest court.

Delegates were twice threatened with “contempt of justice” in meetings with the Curia, she said.

The delegation originally planned to be in Hungary in March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the visit.

“We came with concerns. Those concerns are there since 2018, at least.…These concerns remain,” Delbos-Corfield said.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Ford’s blockbuster announcement this week that it would build four sprawling new factories in Kentucky and Tennessee by 2025 and hire nearly 11,000 workers raised a big unanswered question: Just how good will those jobs be?

No one — not Ford, not the United Auto Workers union, not the future job holders themselves — yet knows how much the workers will be paid or whether they will vote for union membership.

Three of the plants, to be built with Ford’s South Korean corporate partner, SK Innovation, would produce batteries for 1 million electric vehicles annually. A fourth would make the next generation of electric F-Series pickup trucks, a version of America’s top-selling vehicle.

The new factories represent an $11.4 billion bet by Ford on a vision for the future in which tens of millions of drivers will shift from pollution-belching internal combustion engines to electric vehicles that emit nothing from the tailpipe.

The stakes are high for Ford’s employees as well as for the UAW, which is counting on ensuring union membership at battery factories to replace jobs that will be lost should the transition to electric vehicles happen as Ford and others envision. Union workers generally are paid, on average, 20% more than their nonunion counterparts, typically receive more generous benefits and wield a larger voice on safety and other workplace rules at their factories.

On Monday, when Ford’s plans were announced, CEO Jim Farley stopped short of publicly supporting the UAW, saying only that union representation at the plants would be decided by the workers themselves. In Kentucky and Tennessee, states in which unions have often been shunned by workers and opposed by political leaders, representation by the UAW is far from assured.

On Wednesday, Ford said it expected to continue a “strong, mutually beneficial” relationship with the UAW.

“We respect the UAW’s efforts to organize future hourly workers at the new facilities coming to Tennessee and Kentucky,” Ford and SK said in statements.

By stopping short of offering explicit support for union membership at its new plants, experts say, Ford may be trying to appease politicians who have been vocal opponents of union organizing. Political leaders in both states still have to approve money for worker training and other incentives to Ford, said Dan Cornfield, who teaches sociology and political science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and the company wouldn’t want to jeopardize that support.

“The company is in between its union partners and its state government partners in this,” Cornfield said. “So they probably are not speaking out about unionization one way or the other because they don’t want to antagonize their longstanding partners.”

Not to mention rankle President Joe Biden, who has frequently promoted an industry-wide transition to electric vehicles as a vital way to counter climate change and create “good-paying union jobs.”

A letter attached to Ford’s national contract with the UAW pledges that the company will remain neutral when the union tries to organize any new factories. It will agree to “card check” sign-up efforts, which let unions recruit workers to sign cards saying they want to be represented. Once 51% of workers sign on, the plant becomes union.

Generally, that’s the union’s favored way of organizing plants. But in Southern states, card check doesn’t mean automatic union factories. Kentucky and Tennessee have “right-to-work” laws, which bar companies from signing deals that force workers to pay union dues.

In Tennessee, in particular, political leaders, including Republican Gov. Bill Lee, have fought the UAW, which lost recent factory-wide organizing votes at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. In opposing the UAW, Lee argued that union membership would make it harder for the state to recruit other manufacturers.

“It is more difficult to attract companies into states that have a high level of organized union activity,” Lee said ahead of a 2019 vote at VW. “For that reason, I think that Volkswagen remaining a merit shop facility is beneficial to the economy of Tennessee.”

Difficult as it is, union organizing in the South is not impossible. The UAW already represents nearly 16,000 hourly workers at two Ford plants in Louisville and at a General Motors complex in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

UAW President Ray Curry, who attended the Tennessee ceremony this week, said he didn’t think Ford had chosen sites in Stanton, Tennessee, and Glendale, Kentucky, to avoid the UAW. He expressed optimism about organizing the new factories.

“We’ve got a long-term working relationship with Ford,” Curry said. “It’s just a great opportunity to continue in that relationship.”

Todd Dunn, president of the UAW local office in Louisville, sounded hopeful, too. He said he regarded the remarks this week by Ford’s CEO Farley as cautionary in a politically charged environment.

“I think that might be them saying, ‘Hey, in a right-to-work state, we’re going to make sure they (workers) have their choice.’ “

The union, Dunn said, will campaign on a promise to seek better wages and benefits, health and safety advocacy and a greater voice for workers.

The new Ford site in Stanton, Tennessee, lies in rural Haywood County, about 50 miles east of Memphis, one of only a few counties in the state that voted for Biden in the 2020 election. That bodes well for union organization, Vanderbilt’s Cornfield said. Unions historically have succeeded in the South, he said, when they organize branch operations of companies from the North that already are unionized.

“On the other hand,” Cornfield noted, “the Southern political climate in terms of government tends to be Republican and opposed to unionization.”

Tennessee’s “right to work” law has existed for more than seven decades. Republican state lawmakers have already established a question for the 2022 ballot asking voters whether that law should be enshrined in the Tennessee Constitution, further complicating the conversation for Ford.

So far, Republican U.S. Sens. Bill Hagerty and Marsha Blackburn haven’t publicly opposed a union at the Ford facilities, which are still years away from opening. But both stressed the state’s right-to-work law, with Hagerty saying he hopes future workers who will decide whether to unionize “will be mindful of the pro-business, pro-competition and pro-worker policies of Tennessee.”

The Ford plants could raise the standard of living in Haywood County and those surrounding it. Workers at union auto assembly plants earn an average of around $32 an hour, compared with the national average auto manufacturing wage of $25. But in Tennessee, Cornfield said, production workers in all industries are paid an average of only $19 an hour.

Auto companies generally want to pay less at plants that make parts, such as batteries, rather than assemble vehicles. But the UAW will seek assembly-plant wages at those facilities.

It may be easier for the union to organize in Kentucky, a solidly red state but one with a Democratic governor who supports the UAW. Glendale is about 50 miles south of Louisville, a union stronghold that includes the only unionized teachers in the state, said Kenneth Troske, an economics professor at the University of Kentucky.

The state has some history with unions in coal mining and auto production and only recently, in 2017, did it pass a “right to work” law.

But it has voted solidly Republican of late. And a huge Toyota factory in the center part of the state has remained nonunion.

“We used to be a pretty strongly pro-union state,” Troske said. “That certainly has changed. We are Republican. We are as red as red gets now.”

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This story was first published on Sept. 30, 2021. It was updated on Oct. 1, 2021 to correct a reference to Tennessee auto manufacturing workers making an average of $19 per hour. The $19 figure is for production workers in all industries.

Krisher reported from Detroit and Schreiner from Louisville, Kentucky. AP writer Adrian Sainz contributed from Stanton, Tennessee.

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — After eight years of planning and billions of dollars in spending, the Middle East’s first world’s fair opened Friday in Dubai, with hopes that the months-long extravaganza will draw both visitors and global attention to this desert-turned-dreamscape.

The coronavirus pandemic pushed Expo 2020 back a year and may affect how many people flock to the United Arab Emirates. But the six-month-long exhibition still offers Dubai a momentous opportunity to showcase its unique East-meets-West appeal as a place where all are welcome for business.

Not long ago, the site of the 1,080 acre (438 hectare) Expo was barren desert. Now, it’s a futuristic landscape buzzing with robots that bark automated orders at bare-faced visitors to mask up, a new metro station, multi-million dollar pavilions and so-called districts with names like “sustainability” and “opportunity” — all built, like much of the Gulf, by low-paid migrant workers.

More than 190 nations are using their pavilions to spotlight their greatest tourist attractions, discoveries and ambitions. The American pavilion, paid for by the UAE after the U.S. could not raise the funds in time, boasts a replica of the Space X Falcon 9 rocket and takes visitors on a conveyor belt past multimedia infomercials for American inventions. It also displays a Quran that belonged to the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, as an example of how religious freedom ”is woven into the very fabric of American society.”

China’s vast, lantern-shaped pavilion focuses on the nation’s space ambitions and future inventions, featuring a Transformer-like car that SAIC Motor hopes will function one day also as a submarine and helicopter.

Draped over Italy’s pavilion is 70 kilometers (40 miles) of rope made from 2 million plastic bottles. The main attraction, though, is a marble 3-D replica of Michelangelo’s biblical hero, David. The 5.2 meters (17 feet) high nude giant is not easily accessible — visitors must must enter separate floors of a building to view it at eye-level or peer up from its feet. Public nudity is outlawed in the UAE, where traditional Muslim norms largely prevail.

The UAE’s falcon-shaped pavilion, by far the site’s largest, takes visitors on a two-hour-long immersive experience through dunes of real orange sand and footage from the country’s 50-year history.

Other attractions include an African food hall, a massive mirror-like fountain with silver cascades of water flowing back and forth, a recently excavated royal Egyptian mummy, concerts and performances from around the world, and the option to dine on a $500 three-course meal with glow-in-the-dark cuisine.

As night fell and the call to prayer echoed musically through the grounds, pavilions came to life with lights, lasers and kaleidoscopic shows.

Isabel Fu, 50, said she flew in for Expo all the way from Beijing to see “the kind of changes that we’ll see in the future, the technology that makes us look forward to the next era.” Upon her return to China, she faces 21 days of quarantine.

Since first making a splash in London in 1851, world fairs have long served as an opportunity for nations to meet, exchange ideas, showcase inventions, promote culture and build business ties.

For more than a century, global exhibitions have captured the imagination and showcased some of humanity’s most important innovations. The first world’s fair held in the United States in 1876 debuted Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the typewriter, a mechanical calculator and Heinz Ketchup. One of its main buildings, Memorial Hall, is now a museum.

Other fairs introduced inventions like the sewing machine, the elevator, carbonated soda, the Ferris wheel and, in 1939 in New York, the television.

This year’s Expo is unfolding as the virus continues to course across the world, with untold numbers still working and studying remotely — and connecting to the world virtually. It’s unclear how many visitors Dubai can attract, and how much the Expo will stimulate its tourism-driven economy — especially in the blistering early autumn heat, which on Friday caused tempers to flare, some visitors to faint and most people to sweat through their shirts.

“We’re dying! Humans can’t tolerate this weather,” exclaimed 35-year-old Warda Abadi from Saudi Arabia as she shepherded her limping mother into the shade.

To enter the Expo site, visitors must show a negative PCR test or proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

Dubai’s ruler and the force behind the emirate’s transformation, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, described Expo 2020 as a chance to showcase the best of human excellence.

“It offers a platform to forge a united worldwide effort to build a more sustainable and prosperous future for all of mankind,” he told guests at the Expo’s opening ceremony.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince and de-facto ruler of the UAE’s seat of power, Abu Dhabi, emphasized “the ethos of this land” as a meeting point for cultures and tolerance.

Whether Iran or Israel, every nation is welcome at Dubai’s Expo. The space marked for Afghanistan’s pavilion, however, appeared vacant weeks after the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

“It makes me very proud to see so many different kinds of cultures, countries and traditions coming to my country for the first time,” said Isa Nuaimi, a 25-year-old government pilot from the Emirati city of Al Ain.

Human Rights Watch, however, said that the UAE’s efforts to promote itself as an “open and tolerant country” remain at odds with its human rights abuses, including the suppression of peaceful criticism, jailing of activists and pervasive government surveillance.

“The UAE has embarked on a decades-long effort to whitewash its reputation on the international stage,” the rights group said.

The Expo site will attempt to dazzle visitors with a centerpiece dome, marketed as the world’s largest 360-degree projection screen.

Some world’s fair structures remain iconic markers of the human journey and our industrial evolution. None more so than the Eiffel Tower, which was constructed in Paris, not only to be the tallest structure in the world at the time, but to serve as the entrance to the 1889 world’s fair. The Space Needle in Seattle, Washington, built for the 1962 world’s fair, also continues to enjoy global prominence.

While most fairs were held in Europe and the United States, none have been hosted in the Middle East until now.

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Follow Aya Batrawy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ayaelb and Isabel DeBre at https://twitter.com/IsabelDeBre

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