US Business

World leaders meeting Monday for climate talks in Egypt are under pressure to deepen cuts in emissions and financially back developing countries already devastated by the effects of rising temperatures.

The UN’s COP27 climate summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes as nations worldwide are facing increasingly intense natural disasters that have taken thousands of lives this year alone and cost billions of dollars.

At the opening ceremony on Sunday, COP27 officials urged governments to keep up efforts to combat climate change despite the economic crises linked to Russia’s war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the persistent Covid-19 pandemic.

“The fear is other priorities take precedence,” top United Nations climate change official Simon Stiell told a news conference.

The “fear is that we lose another day, another week, another month, another year — because we can’t”, he said.

The world must slash greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above late-19th-century levels.

But current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and Earth’s surface heat up 2.8C, according to findings unveiled in recent days.

Only 29 of 194 countries have presented improved climate plans, as called for at the UN talks in Glasgow last year, Stiell noted.

Some 110 heads of state and government are expected to participate in two days of talks, with the notable absence of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose country is the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases.

US President Joe Biden, whose country ranks second on the top-polluters list, will join COP27 later this week after midterm elections on Tuesday that could put Republicans hostile to international action on climate change in charge of Congress.

– ‘Loss and damage’ –

Fresh from his own election victory, Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is expected to attend the summit, with hopes high that he will protect the Amazon from deforestation after defeating climate-sceptic President Jair Bolsonaro.

Another new leader, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, reversed a decision not to attend the talks and is due to urge countries to move “further and faster” in transitioning away from fossil fuels.

He will also hold discussions with French President Emmanuel Macron.

On Sunday, the heads of developing nations won a small victory when delegates agreed to put the controversial issue of money for “loss and damage” on the summit agenda.

Pakistan, which chairs the powerful G77+China negotiating bloc of more than 130 developing nations, has made the issue a priority.

“We definitely regard this as a success for the parties,” said Egypt’s Sameh Shoukry, who chairs the COP27.

The United States and the European Union have dragged their feet on the issue for years, fearing it would create an open-ended reparations framework.

But European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans welcomed the inclusion of loss and damage, tweeting that the “climate crisis has impacts beyond what vulnerable countries can shoulder alone”.

Rich nations will also be expected to set a timetable for the delivery of $100 billion per year to help developing countries green their economies and build resilience against future climate change. 

The promise is already two years past due and remains $17 billion short, according to the OECD.

COP27 is scheduled to continue until November 18 with ministerial meetings.

Bullish Republicans on Sunday promised to deliver a “wake-up call” to Joe Biden and retake Congress in this week’s crucial midterm elections, as the US president’s Democrats insisted they were still in the fight with two days to go.

Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump have been pulling out the stops to draw voters to the polls in Tuesday’s contest — which Biden says marks a defining moment for US democracy.

After rival Saturday night rallies in battleground Pennsylvania, both men had new appearances set for Sunday — Biden in New York, Trump in Miami — while senior party leaders took to the airwaves seeking out every last American vote.

A massive 40 million Americans have already voted early, according to NBC News on Sunday, and both sides were predicting victory.

But the latest polls have put Democrats on the defensive, while Senator Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, summed up the mood in his party by predicting “a great night” in both chambers of Congress.

Fellow Republican Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, told ABC News talk show “This Week” that his camp was the one now “offering common-sense solutions” to pressing issues like sky-high inflation and crime.

“This is going to be a wake-up call to President Biden,” Youngkin said.

With Republican figurehead Trump doubling down on voting conspiracy theories ahead of the midterms, and several candidates in his camp casting doubt on the upcoming results, party leaders sought to assure voters that Republicans will accept the outcome — even if they lose.

Asked directly whether every Republican candidate will accept the results, whatever they are, party chair Ronna McDaniel told CNN: “They will.” 

Several hundred Republicans seeking office next week have endorsed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in 2020 — and a number are casting doubt on the midterms as well. 

Kari Lake, the party’s far-right candidate for governor in Arizona, for example has refused to say whether she would honor the results.

Asked by CNN last month if she would accept the outcome of her race, which polls show is a toss-up, she said: “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.”

– ‘A defining moment’ –

US midterm elections are typically seen as a referendum on the president in power, whose party tends to lose seats in Congress, particularly if — as with Biden — the president’s approval rating is under 50 percent. 

Polls put Republicans ahead in the fight for the House, and also show them gaining momentum in key Senate races as voters seek to take out frustration over four-decades-high inflation and rising illegal immigration.

A new NBC News poll contained a particularly worrying result for Democrats: It found that a whopping 72 percent of voters believed the country is headed in the wrong direction, to 21 percent who saw it as being on the right track, auguring badly for the party in power.

But there was one glimmer of good news for the president’s party: After trailing earlier, Democrats have caught up with Republicans in election interest, with an identical 73 percent of each party’s voters expressing high interest.

Biden attended mass early Sunday in Wilmington, Delaware, before flying to New York to rally in support of Governor Kathy Hochul, who faces an unexpectedly strong Republican challenge.

Biden joined forces with Democratic superstar Barack Obama in key swing state Pennsylvania a day earlier — campaigning alongside Senate hopeful John Fetterman and governor candidate Josh Shapiro.

Speaking to thousands in a Philadelphia arena, Biden cited Trumpists’ growing support for conspiracy theories to highlight what is at stake.

“Democracy is literally on the ballot. This is a defining moment for the nation,” Biden warned.

Trump himself was attending a rival rally to boost Fetterman’s opponent, TV celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, and Shapiro’s far-right opponent Doug Mastriano.

In a rambling speech, Trump defended his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and urged Americans to “vote Republican in a giant red wave” — while teasing his potential new White House run in 2024.

“I promise you in the very next very, very, very short period of time, you’re going to be so happy,” Trump told his supporters.

Democrats have pushed back against the narrative of an inevitable Republican takeover of Congress.

“We’re going to hold this majority,” congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who heads the Democratic congressional campaign arm, insisted to NBC, saying Biden unfairly received a “bum rap” for inflation while getting too little credit for successes like job growth.

But polls suggest Biden’s Democrats have struggled to convince voters on kitchen-table issues central to the election — and there is little indication that Biden’s dire warnings of a threat to democracy have turned the tables in their favor.

The whirlwind week that Elon Musk took over Twitter began with sleepless nights for company engineers — and ended with half the staff getting the axe.

“It was a strange week,” said one former employee speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Executives were getting fired or were resigning, but there was basically no official communication until 5 pm Thursday,” some seven days after the deal was made official.

The employees received a first email Thursday informing them that they would know their fate the next day. On Friday, the second email confirmed the rumors: 50 percent of the staff lost their jobs.

The cull hit the marketing department hard, took two-thirds of the design department and maybe 75 percent of managers. Content moderation was somewhat spared, with a layoff rate of only 15 percent, according to Yoel Roth, head of safety at the platform.

After 24 hours without addressing the layoffs, Musk finally tweeted that “unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day” and that all those who lost their jobs were “offered three months of severance.”

The layoff decision did not come as a surprise to employees — rumors had been growing — but they were shocked by how brutally it was carried out.

“People would find out not by any phone call or any email… but just by seeing their work laptop automatically reboot and just to go blank,” Emmanuel Cornet, a French engineer who had been at Twitter for a year and a half, told AFP on Friday.

– Class-action suit –

Cornet was dismissed Tuesday after being told in an email he had “violated” several company policies, without further explanation, after spending an entire weekend in the office on projects launched by edict of the new owner.

“I’m still trying to find out what the actual reason is,” he said.

The Tesla chief executive had engineers from his flagship company parachute in to assess the work of Twitter developers, examining in particular the volume of code produced by each, Cornet said. 

He is one of five former Twitter employees who filed a class-action suit against the company on the grounds that they had not received the 60-day notice required by the 1988 federal Warn Act in the event of a plant closing or mass layoff.

The French expat said many laid-off colleagues were in an unenviable “position in terms of health insurance or visas.”

“Some were on parental leave. One colleague gave birth yesterday, only to be laid off today.”

Those laid off must continue to abide by the company’s rules during the notice period. Many fear that the new management will look for excuses to accuse them of misconduct and not pay them severance.

“If anyone says something disparaging, or does anything they can use to dismiss them for cause they’ll do that instead of severance,” said the former employee, speaking anonymously.

– A summer exodus –

For six months, the platform’s employees were preparing for the possibility that the world’s richest man might take control. 

He is preceded by his reputation, from the punishing work rates in his plants to his rejection of telecommuting, which is highly popular in the tech sector, and his absolutist vision of free speech, which his detractors claim can only lead to harassment, disinformation and a tolerance for hate speech.

This summer, more than 700 people left on their own, even before they knew whether the $44 billion acquisition would go through.

The radical change in corporate culture was confirmed as early as last Friday, when teams of engineers were mobilized to redesign certain features in a very short time, with their jobs on the line.

“There probably was too many layers of management… Twitter was not a well-oiled, efficient machine,” said the anonymous ex-employee. “But I don’t know if (the mass layoffs) is gonna fix it.”

“I think lots of people who remain now will leave, and maybe that’s what Elon wants,” he added.

This weekend, online groups connecting current and former employees were abuzz with talk about their future — but also about the fact several people hit by Friday’s firings said they were called back to work a day later, after management realized their services were needed. 

“I feel sorry for anyone who didn’t get fired… Elon will run those left into the ground with his hare-brained ideas,” said James Glynn, a London-based content moderation team leader who was laid off. “Any kind of Twitter we knew before is dead.”

Ukraine’s Russian-occupied city of Kherson was cut off from water and electricity supplies Sunday after an air strike and a key dam in the region was also damaged, local officials said.

It is the first time that Kherson — which fell to Moscow’s forces within days of their February offensive — has seen such a power cut.

“In Kherson and a number of other areas in the region, there is temporarily no electricity or water supply,” the city’s Moscow-installed administration said on Telegram. 

It said it was the “result of an attack organised by the Ukrainian side on the Berislav-Kakhovka highway that saw three concrete poles of high-voltage power lines damaged”.

Energy specialists were working to “quickly” resolve the issue, the Russian-backed authorities said, as they called on people to “remain calm”.

But the head of the regional administration, Yaroslav Yanushevych, blamed Russia for the power outages.

He said that in Beryslav city around 1.5 kilometres (just under a mile) of electric power lines had been destroyed — cutting off power entirely because the “damage is quite extensive.”

“Probably, there will be no light in Beryslav until the city is completely de-occupied,” he wrote on the Telegram social media platform.

“It is impossible to promptly repair the lines — there is a lack of specialists, equipment, and the Russian invaders will not allow this to be done.”

News of the outage followed reports that the Kakhovka dam in the Russian-controlled region of Kherson was “damaged” by a Ukrainian strike.

“Today at 10:00 (0800 GMT) there was a hit of six HIMARS rockets. Air defence units shot down five missiles, one hit a lock of the Kakhovka dam, which was damaged,” Russian news agencies quoted local emergency services as saying.

The RIA Novosti news agency quoted a local Moscow-backed official saying the damage was not “critical”.

Ukraine in recent weeks warned that Moscow’s forces intended to blow up the strategic facility to cause flooding. 

The Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine was captured by Moscow’s forces at the start of their offensive. It supplies Russian-annexed Crimea with water. 

– Flooding threat – 

For weeks, Russian forces have rained missiles and explosive drones onto Ukraine’s infrastructure, as a major Ukrainian ground offensive — propelled by Western arms deliveries — has pushed Russian troops back in swathes of the country.

Russian strikes over the past month have destroyed around a third of Ukraine’s power stations and the government has urged Ukrainians to conserve electricity as much as possible.

But until now, Ukraine had only rarely struck Russian-held civilian energy infrastructure in territory annexed by Moscow, preferring to target Russian army supply lines.

As Ukraine presses a counteroffensive in the south, Moscow’s occupational forces in Kherson have vowed to turn the city into a “fortress”.

Russian forces have for weeks organised a civilian pull-out from the Kherson region as Ukrainian troops advance, which Kyiv has called “deportations”.

Moscow-installed Kherson governor Vladimir Saldo said he was moving people further into the region or to Russia because of the risks of a “massive missile attack”.

The dam’s destruction would lead to flooding of the left bank of the Dnipro River, he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month that Russian forces had mined the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant with the intent of blowing it up.

Its destruction could cause flash-flooding for hundreds of thousands of people, he warned.

He said cutting water supplies to the south could also impact the cooling systems of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — the largest in Europe.

Meanwhile a Taiwanese man who volunteered to fight in Ukraine has died on the battlefield, Taipei’s foreign ministry said, in what is believed to be the first person from the island killed in the conflict.

And in a final address on his visit to Bahrain, Pope Francis on Sunday urged congregants to pray “for Ukraine, which is suffering so much”, and for an end to the war.

Bullish Republicans on Sunday promised to deliver a “wake-up call” to Joe Biden and retake Congress in this week’s crucial midterm elections, as the US president’s Democrats insisted they were still in the fight with two days to go.

Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump have been pulling out the stops to draw voters to the polls in Tuesday’s contest — which Biden says marks a “defining” moment for US democracy.

After rival Saturday night rallies in battleground Pennsylvania, both men had new appearances set for Sunday — Biden in New York, Trump in Miami — while senior party leaders took to the airwaves seeking out every last American vote.

A massive 40 million Americans have already voted early, according to NBC News on Sunday, and both sides were predicting victory.

But the latest polls have put Democrats on the defensive, while Senator Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, summed up the mood in his party by predicting “a great night” in both chambers of Congress.

Fellow Republican Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, told ABC News talk show “This Week” that his camp was the one now “offering common-sense solutions” to pressing issues like sky-inflation and crime.

“This is going to be a wake-up call to President Biden,” Youngkin said.

With Republican figurehead Trump doubling down on voting conspiracy theories ahead of the midterms, and several candidates in his camp casting doubt on the upcoming results, party leaders sought to assure voters that Republicans will accept the outcome — even if they lose.

Asked directly whether every Republican candidate will accept the results, whatever they are, party chair Ronna McDaniel told CNN: “They will.” 

Several hundred Republicans seeking office next week have endorsed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in 2020 — and a number are casting doubt on the midterms as well, in contrast with McDaniel’s comments. 

Kari Lake, the party’s far-right candidate for governor in Arizona, for example has refused to say whether she would honor the results.

Asked by CNN last month if she would accept the outcome of her race, which polls show is a toss-up, she said: “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.”

– ‘Bum rap?’ –

US midterm elections are typically seen as a referendum on the president in power, whose party tends to lose seats in Congress, particularly if — as with Biden — the president’s approval rating is under 50 percent. 

Polls put Republicans ahead in the fight for the House, and also show them gaining momentum in key Senate races as voters seek to take out frustration over four-decades-high inflation and rising illegal immigration.

Biden attended mass early Sunday in Wilmington, Delaware, before flying to New York to rally in support of Governor Kathy Hochul, who faces an unexpectedly strong Republican challenge.

Biden joined forces with Democratic superstar Barack Obama in key swing state Pennsylvania a day earlier — campaigning alongside Senate hopeful John Fetterman and governor candidate Josh Shapiro.

Speaking to thousands in a Philadelphia arena, Biden cited Trumpists’ growing support for conspiracy theories to highlight what is at stake.

“Democracy is literally on the ballot. This is a defining moment for the nation,” Biden warned, as he sought to push his party to the finish line.

Trump himself was attending a rival rally to boost Fetterman’s opponent, TV celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, and Shapiro’s far-right opponent Doug Mastriano.

In a rambling speech, Trump defended his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and urged Americans to “vote Republican in a giant red wave” — while teasing his potential new White House run in 2024.

“I promise you in the very next very, very, very short period of time, you’re going to be so happy,” Trump told his supporters.

Democrats have pushed back against the narrative of an inevitable Republican takeover of Congress.

“We’re going to hold this majority,” congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who heads the Democratic congressional campaign arm, insisted to NBC, saying Biden unfairly received a “bum rap” for inflation while getting too little credit for successes like job growth.

But polls suggest Biden’s Democrats have struggled to convince voters on the kitchen-table issues central to this week’s election — and there is little indication that Biden’s dire warnings of a threat to democracy have turned the tables in their favor.

Warner Bros.’ superhero film “Black Adam” held onto the top spot in North American theaters on a sleepy weekend, taking in an estimated $18.5 million, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations reported Sunday.

The Dwayne Johnson vehicle, a spinoff from 2019’s “Shazam!,” has now grossed $182 million internationally.

But its box-office dominance is not expected to survive the arrival next weekend of Marvel and Disney’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” The release of that highly anticipated sequel will help return Hollywood “to world-class form,” said David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research. 

In second place for the weekend was Crunchyroll’s anime movie “One Piece Film: Red,” at $9.5 million. The film, drawing warm response from fans of the long-running manga series, is already the ninth highest grossing release ever in Japan, Variety reported.

Universal’s rom-com “Ticket to Paradise” came in third, earning $8.5 million, behind the proven chemistry of stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney. It has earned $85 million abroad.

In fourth was Paramount’s horror movie “Smile,” at $4 million, still drawing viewers even after the Halloween holiday. Originally set for streaming-only release, it is now barely $1 million shy of the $100 million mark domestically.

And in fifth was supernatural horror film “Prey for the Devil” from Lionsgate, at $3.9 million. Jacqueline Byers plays a nun trained in exorcism who, with the help of a certain Father Dante, battles demonic forces.

Overall, the box office remains well below its pre-pandemic levels — down 33.8 percent so far this year compared to 2019, according to Gross. 

But with more wide releases set for next year “the recovery should gain more strength,” he said. 

Rounding out the top five were:

“Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” ($3.4 million)

“The Banshees of Inisherin” ($2 million)

“Till” ($1.9 million)

“Halloween Ends” ($1.4 million)

“Terrifier 2” ($1.2 million)