AFP

Joe Biden pitched a temporary fuel tax break Wednesday to help American drivers face the highest inflation in four decades, but critics called it window dressing by an unpopular US president ahead of difficult midterm elections.

Biden asked Congress to suspend the federal gas tax for three months as price increases — in large part spurred by fallout from President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent Western sanctions on Russia — drive general inflation.

But so far, lawmakers seem unlikely to give his plan the green light.

In a televised address, Biden called for lifting the federal tax on gasoline of 18 cents a gallon until September. He also asked state governments to suspend their own taxes for the same period.

Noting that gas prices — now averaging near $5 per gallon — had gone up almost $2 a gallon since the start of the Ukraine invasion, Biden said he was doing what he could.

“I fully understand that the gas tax holiday alone is not going to solve the problem but it will provide families some immediate relief,” he said.

– Skepticism –

A handful of states including New York and Connecticut have already suspended fuel taxes or delayed planned tax increases. 

But some 46 states have yet to act, including Democratic-governed California, where gasoline is the most taxed and the most expensive in the country, at well over $6 a gallon.

Federal tax revenues on gas and diesel help pay for the Highway Trust Fund, which is used to maintain roads and support public transport, but Biden says Congress can ensure the estimated $10 billion gap that would be caused by a three-month tax break is made up from other sources.

Whether Congress — where Democrats hold only a narrow majority over Republicans — will pass tax relief is a big question. Even Biden’s backers are lukewarm.

“I’ve not been a proponent,” Steny Hoyer, a senior Democratic leader in Congress, told Politico. “I just don’t know that it gives much relief.”

Jason Furman, a former top economic adviser to president Barack Obama — who himself once dismissed so-called gas tax holidays as a “gimmick” — also said the move would not help regular people. 

“It would be very unlikely that gas prices would fall by more than a dime because of this change. And oil company profits would go up by billions of dollars,” he told NPR.

– Biden’s populist mission –

Biden urged retailers at filling stations to apply any tax cuts immediately and he pushed refiners to expand their crude processing capacity in the hopes that the combined measures could cut gas prices by as much as a dollar a gallon.

He has previously tried other measures, including releasing a million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, negotiating the release of an additional 60 million barrels from international partners, and expanding access to biofuels.

Nothing so far has had an appreciable effect.

With Democrats fearing a severe defeat in November midterm elections — thereby leaving Biden weakened for the rest of his first term in office — the president has turned to an increasingly populist message, portraying himself as fighting for the middle class against profiteering Big Oil.

The White House recently called out groups including ExxonMobil and Chevron, denouncing their profit margins as “well above normal” and calling it their patriotic duty to increase output.

In his remarks, Biden repeatedly underlined that the blame for high prices lay with Russia and the oil industry, not the White House.

“This is a time of war, global peril, Ukraine — these are not normal times,” he said, addressing the oil companies. “Bring down the price.”

Responding to criticism growing within the Republican Party, he also defended his leadership of the strong Western response to Russia, including the highly disruptive sanctions on Russian energy exports.

“We could have turned a blind eye to Putin’s murderous ways and the price of gas wouldn’t have spiked,” he said. “I believe that would have been wrong.”

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is due to meet with refiners Thursday to urge them to contribute to these measures, including increasing their output.

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel quickly dismissed the president’s speech, saying: “No one is buying Biden’s gimmicks, yet Americans are paying the price for his anti-US energy agenda.”

Google has agreed to pay for ramped-up Wikipedia services, part of a growing trend for the US tech giant to strike commercial deals with other web companies.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that oversees the online encyclopedia, said Google was the first paying customer for its commercial venture Wikimedia Enterprise, which it launched last year.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit that runs a site called the Wayback Machine that saves snapshots of websites and is used to fix Wikipedia links, will be offered the commercial services for free.

“We’re thrilled to be working with them both as our longtime partners,” said Wikimedia’s Lane Becker in a statement on Tuesday.

Wikipedia, one of the world’s most visited websites, is free to use, updated by volunteers and relies on donations to keep afloat.

The new commercial venture will not change that arrangement for individual users, the foundation said.

Google uses material from the site for its “knowledge panel” — a sidebar that accompanies the main search results.

The source of the information is not always shown, a practice that had sparked complaints from Wikimedia.

The foundation said its new product gave customers a “feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects” beyond what is available to the public.

The product was “designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content”, it said in a statement.

Google has previously given money to Wikipedia through donations and grants but the new deal puts their relationship on a more formal commercial footing.

“We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuit of our shared goals of expanding knowledge and information access for people everywhere,” said Google’s Tim Palmer.

The foundation’s statement did not reveal the value of the Google contract.

Google has long had a troubled relationship with other websites — it even attempted to create a rival to Wikipedia called Knol, though the venture failed.

But the company has changed tack in recent years and is increasingly making deals, particularly with media companies.

French regulators and Google ended a years-long dispute on Tuesday by agreeing a framework for the US firm to pay news outlets for content.

Google said it had already made deals with hundreds of news outlets across Europe, Agence France-Presse among them.

The controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, now under construction in western Canada after being nationalized, is no longer profitable as costs have spiralled, Parliament’s budget watchdog said Wednesday.

In a report, the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer said a review of the project’s finances found “that the government’s 2018 decision to acquire, expand, operate, and eventually divest of the Trans Mountain assets will result in a net loss for the federal government.”

Ottawa purchased the pipeline for Can$4.4 billion (US$3.4 billion) from Kinder Morgan four years ago to salvage the troubled expansion project.

But its current value, the PBO estimated, is only Can$3.9 billion, after construction costs soared to $21.4 billion — a threefold increase from the original price tag — and its completion was pushed one year to late 2023. 

The negative valuation is based on the pipeline’s future cash flows over 40 years, minus construction costs.

In response, Adrienne Vaupshas, the spokeswoman for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, told AFP the project is “in the national interest and will make Canada and the Canadian economy more sovereign and more resilient.”

She cited independent analyses from BMO Capital Markets and TD Securities that concluded the project remains commercially viable at the higher costs.

The pipeline’s sale, Vaupshas added, will only proceed after further consultations with Indigenous groups and the risks associated with it are reduced.

The project is to replace an aging conduit built in 1953 to deliver 890,000 barrels of oil a day from landlocked Alberta to the Pacific coast for shipping to new markets in Asia and elsewhere.

Prior to the government taking over the project, it had been stalled by legal challenges and protests by Indigenous groups and environmental activists.

On Wednesday, Environmental Defense called the project a “financially dangerous boondoggle” that will lead to “more carbon emissions for the planet.”

“As the costs of the project keep ballooning, the government should cut its losses and cancel construction of the expansion pipeline — before even more of our dollars are wasted,” the group said in a statement.

Antibody therapies are offering promising treatment breakthroughs for cancer and other illnesses, generating greater investor interest more than 20 years after they were first commercialised.

Antibodies are proteins that recognise foreign substances, known as antigens, attaching themselves to them to alert the rest of the human immune system.

In 1975, scientists Georges Koehler and Cesar Milstein discovered how to produce them in a laboratory, which later earned them a Nobel Prize for medicine. Dozens of synthetic antibodies have since been developed.

New antibody treatments to be used with chemotherapy have arrived on the scene in recent years.

Most recently, a clinical trial of an antibody developed by pharmaceutical groups Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca caught the attention of leading cancer specialists gathered at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual congress in Chicago this month.

The treatment, Enhertu, was already authorised for breast cancer patients who had large amounts of a protein called HER2. 

The antibody also performed well in patients with smaller quantities of the protein — increasing the number of people who could benefit.

The antibody latches onto the surface of a cancer cell whose receptors no longer work and the cell then “digests” the receptors to recycle them, activating the chemotherapy, explained cancer specialist William Jacot.

“We hadn’t seen such progress, in terms of survival, with a chemotherapy treatment for dozens of years,” said Jacot, a professor at the Montpellier Cancer Institute in southern France.

Although antibody therapy technology has a complex production process, it is less difficult to implement than new treatments using cellular therapy.

Antibodies can be used in different ways to fight cancer. They can target and destroy the proteins necessary to produce cancer cells or act to regulate the immune response.

French biotech firm Inatherys is in the first stage of clinical trials of an antibody treatment for leukaemia, its boss Pierre Launay said.

He said the company’s antibody will be designed act as a “guided missile” and target a receptor that lets iron enter cancer cells, which need the substance. 

The antibody will then release a poison within the cell to destroy it.

Some antibody treatments are being used preventively while others are treatments. For example, AstraZeneca’s Evusheld antibody treatment is used preventively to ward off Covid-19, while Xevudy by British company GSK is used as a treatment.

Treatments are also being developed for inflammatory diseases, which are also a major killer. 

– Booming market –

The promising announcements have triggered interest beyond the scientific community and a flood of investment. French biotech firm ImCheck Therapeutics recently raised almost 100 million euros ($106 million) for an antibody treatment in development.

Pharmaceutical giants are also prepared to spend big to ensure they do not miss out. French company Sanofi bought Belgian biotech firm Ablynx and its mini antibodies, nanobodies, for almost four billion euros in 2018.

Dupixent, Sanofi’s flagship immunotherapy antibody medication, earned more than five billion euros for the pharma giant last year, and Keytruda, an oncological treatment by US firm MSD, generated more than $17 billion in 2021.

According to predictions by research firm Market Data Forecast, the market could grow to reach $249 billion in three years’ time.