US Business

Adidas said Thursday it was investigating claims against Kanye West after a report detailed alleged inappropriate behaviour, just weeks after the German sportswear giant ended its partnership with the rapper.

US magazine Rolling Stone reported claims that the rapper played pornography to Adidas staff in meetings, and discussed porn and showed an intimate photo of ex-wife Kim Kardashian in job interviews.

It said former members of the team involved in “Yeezy” — the product line designed with the rapper — had released a letter alleging Adidas executives were aware of the behaviour, which went on for years, but turned a blind eye.

“It is currently not clear whether the accusations made in an anonymous letter are true,” Adidas said in a statement.

“However, we take these allegations very seriously and have taken the decision to launch an independent investigation of the matter immediately to address the allegations.”

The Rolling Stone report, citing unnamed former staff, alleged the rapper used intimidation tactics with employees, which were often directed towards women.

In the letter, the ex-Yeezy employees urged Adidas to address “the toxic and chaotic environment that Kanye West created”.

The new revelations came after Adidas last month terminated its lucrative tie-up with West — known formally as Ye — after a series of anti-Semitic outbursts by the star. 

At the time, the company said his comments were “unacceptable, hateful and dangerous”.

– Controversial rapper –

The sports outfitter took a heavy financial blow from the move, which it forecast would cuts its 2022 net income in half. 

In its latest statement Thursday, Adidas said it has been and continues to be “actively engaged in conversations with our employees about the events that lead to our decision to end the partnership.

“They have our full support and as we’re working through the details of the termination.”

Adidas began a review of its relationship with West after he appeared at a Paris fashion show wearing a shirt emblazoned with “White Lives Matter”, a slogan created as a backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Days later he was locked out of Twitter and Instagram over anti-Semitic threats.

The artist was associated with rival sportswear company Nike for years but broke away in 2013, lending his name to Adidas as they launched their first Yeezy shoe in 2015 — a partnership that went on to make him a billionaire.

Along with Beyonce, Stella McCartney and Pharrell Williams, West has been one of the top names used by Adidas to boost sales, especially online.

But rights campaigners and entertainment world figures had heaped pressure on Adidas to stop working with the rapper.

US clothing company Gap and Paris-based fashion house Balenciaga have also recently ended tie-ups with West.

Earlier this month, Adidas named a new CEO — Bjorn Gulden, chief of rival outfitter Puma. As well as the fallout from the West controversy, he faces the task of improving sales that have been hit by Covid restrictions in key market China. 

United States skipper Tyler Adams says his teammates are embracing their underdog status as they chase another World Cup upset against mighty England on Friday.

The US head into Friday’s Group B clash at the Al Bayt Stadium desperately needing a positive result after being held to a 1-1 draw against Wales on Monday.

England meanwhile go into the game on a high after a 6-2 mauling of Iran, and a win for Gareth Southgate’s side would see them assured of a place in the last 16.

Leeds midfielder Adams however says the Americans are unfazed by the prospect of taking on a team he regards as one of the tournament favourites.

“I think England are currently one of the favourites to win the World Cup,” Adams told a press conference on Thursday.

“I think that in a lot of games people say we’re the underdogs. But we carry that with pride. It doesn’t mean anything to us to be underdogs, or to be favourites. That being said, when we step on the field against England we have to be prepared or else a win is not possible.”

In two previous meetings at the World Cup, the United States have never lost to England.

They famously sent the English crashing out of the tournament in 1950 with a 1-0 defeat, and in 2010 held a star-studded England team to a 1-1 draw in South Africa.

Adams says Friday’s game is a chance to accelerate a positive shift in how American soccer is perceived around the world.

“It’s a huge opportunity to fast track the impact that we can have,” Adams said.

“These are the games where it’s a high pressure, privileged moment to step on the field against some of these guys… When you get a result in a game like this people start to respect Americans a little bit more.”

US coach Gregg Berhalter meanwhile said the Americans were confident of being able to pose a threat to England’s hopes of victory.

“We think there’s areas that we can exploit and we can hurt them,” Berhalter said.

The United States have the second youngest team in the World Cup, with a talented largely Europe-based squad brimming with technical ability.

Berhalter however said suggestions that the current crop of American players represented a “Golden Generation” were premature.

“That’s just TBD (to be determined),” Berhalter said. “We haven’t achieved anything as a group on the world stage. 

“When you’re talking about England — they came fourth (at the 2018 World Cup) and second (at Euro 2020). Those are tangible things that you can point to. We’re just not there yet.

“We need to use this World Cup to establish ourselves and then hopefully move to the next World Cup and do the same. We’re getting a little bit of ourselves calling the team that.”

Berhalter meanwhile revealed that his off-field friendship with Southgate had been put on hold in the build-up to Friday’s game.

“I’ve been Whatsapping him but I haven’t seen the blue check marks,” Berhalter said.

“We kind of took a hiatus. I’m sure we’ll pick up our relationship after tomorrow.”

Ukraine struggled Thursday to repair its battered power and water services after Russia targeted the electricity grid with dozens of cruise missiles and temperatures plunged.

The Ukrainian energy system is on the brink of collapse and millions have been subjected to emergency blackouts for weeks due to systematic Russian bombardments of the grid.

The World Health Organisation has warned of “life-threatening” consequences and estimated that millions could leave their homes as a result.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said more than two-thirds of the capital was still cut off despite municipal workers in Kyiv restoring some water service overnight.

“Seventy percent of the capital remains without electricity,” Klitschko said. “Energy companies are making every effort to return it as soon as possible,” he added.

Kyiv shivered Thursday as temperatures hovered just above zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) with some rain.

Ukraine’s military accused Russian forces of firing around 70 cruise missiles at targets across the country on Wednesday and of deploying attack drones.

Ten people were killed and around 50 wounded, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin told local media.

But Russia’s defence ministry denied striking any targets inside Kyiv and said damage in the capital was the result of Ukrainian and foreign air defence systems.

– ‘Scariest day’ –

“Not a single strike was made on targets within the city of Kyiv,” it said.

Moscow’s targeting of power facilities is their bid to force capitulation after nine months of war that has seen Russian forces fail in most of their stated territorial objectives.

“So many victims, so many houses ruined,” 52-year-old Iryna Shyrokova told AFP in Vyshgorod on the outskirts of Kyiv after Wednesday’s Russian strikes.

“People have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep. It’s cold. I can’t explain it. What for? We are also human beings,” she said, calling it “the scariest day”.

This month Moscow’s troops withdrew from the only regional capital they had captured, destroying key infrastructure as they retreated from Kherson in the south. 

Kostin said Ukrainian authorities had discovered a total of nine torture sites used by the Russians in Kherson as well as “the bodies of 432 killed civilians”. He did not specify how they were killed.

Wednesday’s attacks disconnected three Ukrainian nuclear plants automatically from the national grid and provoked blackouts in neighbouring Moldova, whose energy network is linked to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s energy ministry said that all three nuclear facilities had been reconnected by Thursday morning.

The governor of Kharkiv region — home to the country’s second largest city — said the eponymous city was suffering electricity supply issues and “emergency power shutdowns”.

The head of the central region of Poltava, Dmytro Lunin, said authorities were “working around the clock to restore power”.

– ‘Shutdowns’ –

“In the coming hours, we will start supplying energy to critical infrastructure and then to the majority of households,” Lunin said.

About 50 percent of central Dnipropetrovsk region had electricity, governor Valentyn Reznichenko said.

“The energy supply situation is complicated. So shutdowns will continue in the region to reduce the pressure on the grid as much as possible,” Reznichenko warned.

Repair work was ongoing elsewhere, including in the Rivne, Cherkasy, Kirovograd and Zhytomyr regions, officials said.

The Kremlin said Ukraine was ultimately responsible for the fallout from the strikes and that Kyiv could end the strikes by acquiescing to Russian demands.

Ukraine “has every opportunity to settle the situation, to fulfil Russia’s demands and as a result, end all possible suffering of the civilian population,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Moscow announced separately it had issued tens of thousands of Russian passports to residents of four Ukrainian territories, which President Vladimir Putin claimed to have annexed in September.

“More than 80,000 people received passports as citizens of the Russian Federation,” Valentina Kazakova, a migration official with the interior ministry, said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies. 

In September, Russia held so called referendums in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and claimed residents had voted in favour of becoming subjects of Russia.

Putin formally annexed the territories at a ceremony in the Kremlin later that month, even though his forces have never had full control over them.

From the Arab Spring uprisings to the MeToo movement in which women spoke up about sexual assaults, Twitter has proven itself a formidable ally for political activists and opposition groups, one whose reach and impact would be difficult to replace.

Other social media platforms may have more users, but the network now owned by the billionaire Elon Musk dominates the global conversation — even as Twitter’s future is being called into doubt.

“Twitter is clearly very influential in getting the media and officials to pay attention. So it has a very special and unique place in that way,” said Mahsa Alimardani, a senior researcher at the human rights NGO Article 19.

During the anti-government protests that have rocked Iran in recent months, tweets are “helping Iranians bear witness to the pain and struggles of their fellow countrymen, helping the world bear witness to what’s happening,” she told AFP.

Especially in countries that have clamped down on independent journalism or foreign correspondents, Twitter provides a crucial lifeline to the outside world.

This week, posts from inside the Chinese iPhone factory operated by Foxconn showed workers rebelling against a total Covid lockdown, shattering the government’s attempts to portray a veneer of calm amid its draconian efforts to contain the virus.

“It’s very important to get information out to the international media but also to document human rights violations and atrocities,” said Marcus Michaelsen, a researcher specialised in digital activism under authoritarian regimes.

– ‘Protest identity’ –

Twitter had some 237 million daily users at end-June, well below the nearly two billion Facebook or one billion TikTok users.

But its pithy, at-a-glance format allows the network to punch far above its weight for opposition groups, since anyone can become a “citizen journalist” who instantly shares images that government authorities don’t want to be seen.

For  Nadia Idle, an Egyptian-British activist who took part in the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt in 2011, tweets of anti-regime protests across the Middle East also encouraged people by showing that they were not alone.

“Its capacity to broadcast this event, and the amount of activists that were tweeting in English, made it a spectacle for people from the outside,” she said.

Faced with viral tweets provoking global outrage, outside governments can also feel domestic pressure to take action or at least condemn repressive governments.

And even in democratic countries, Twitter’s function as a digital town hall can provide activists with a megaphone that previously might have been out of reach.

Over the past decade, the BlackLivesMatter hashtag has become synonymous with the movement to highlight racism and police violence against African Americans, shining a light on discriminations that often went unseen.

“They use the features of Twitter, of social media, to create a protest identity, to create a common feeling within the movement,” Michaelsen said.

“They know that they can reach journalists and policymakers more, more directly than on Instagram, for instance.”

– ‘Would be a big loss’ –

Since the upheaval created by Musk’s takeover, Twitter has seen a wave of defections as people worry that posts will no longer be sufficiently curated to weed out disinformation and provocations.

Activists warn that if Twitter dies, the world will lose a crucial historical record of social movements that might not have gained traction without the digital documentation.

“Twitter has maintained an archive of so many different movements and so many different events… So losing that archive would be a big loss, it’s a historical record in some way,” Alimardani said.

Charles Lister, a political scientist at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said oppressive regimes or terror groups would be the only beneficiaries of losing a powerful check on their behaviour.

In his work on the Syria civil war, Lister says Twitter has been “vital” to documenting war crimes and providing aid.

Ukraine struggled Thursday to repair its battered power and water services after Russia targeted the electricity grid with dozens of cruise missiles and temperatures plunged.

The Ukrainian energy system is on the brink of collapse and millions have been subjected to emergency blackouts for weeks due to systematic Russian bombardments of the grid.

The World Health Organisation has warned of “life-threatening” consequences and estimated that millions could leave their homes as a result.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said more than two-thirds of the capital was still cut off on Thursday despite municipal workers in Kyiv restoring some water service overnight.

“Seventy percent of the capital remains without electricity,” Klitschko said. “Energy companies are making every effort to return it as soon as possible,” he added.

Ukraine’s military accused Russian forces of firing around 70 cruise missiles at targets across the country on Wednesday and of deploying attack drones.

Moscow’s targeting of Ukrainian power facilities is their latest strategy hoping to force capitulation after nine months of war that has seen Russian forces fail in most of their stated territorial objectives.

– ‘Scariest day’ –

Wednesday’s attacks left multiple people dead, disconnected three Ukrainian nuclear plants automatically from the national grid and even provoked blackouts in neighbouring Moldova, whose energy network is linked to Ukraine.

“So many victims, so many houses ruined,” 52-year-old Iryna Shyrokova told AFP in Vyshgorod on the outskirts of Kyiv after the Russian strikes.

“People have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep. It’s cold. I can’t explain it. What for? We are also human beings,” she said, calling it “the scariest day”.

Ukraine’s energy ministry said that all three nuclear facilities had been reconnected by Thursday morning.

The governor of Kharkiv region — home to the country’s second largest city — said the eponymous city was suffering electricity supply issues and “emergency power shutdowns”.

The head of the central region of Poltava, Dmytro Lunin, said authorities were “working around the clock to restore power”.

“In the coming hours, we will start supplying energy to critical infrastructure and then to the majority of households,” Lunin said.

– ‘Shutdowns’ –

About 50 percent of central Dnipropetrovsk region had electricity, governor Valentyn Reznichenko said.

“The energy supply situation is complicated. So shutdowns will continue in the region to reduce the pressure on the grid as much as possible,” Reznichenko warned.

Repair work was ongoing elsewhere, including in the Rivne, Cherkasy, Kirovograd and Zhytomyr regions, officials said. 

Moscow announced separately it had issued tens of thousands of Russian passports to residents of four Ukrainian territories, which President Vladimir Putin claimed to have annexed in September.

“More than 80,000 people received passports as citizens of the Russian Federation,” Valentina Kazakova, a migration official with the interior ministry, said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies. 

In September, Russia held so called referendums in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and claimed residents had voted in favour of becoming subjects of Russia.

Putin formally annexed the territories at a ceremony in the Kremlin later that month, even though his forces have never had full control over them.