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US e-cigarette manufacturer Juul Labs said on Tuesday it had reached a settlement with about 10,000 plaintiffs in California after the company was accused of marketing its products to teenagers.

The vaping giant did not disclose the amount of the settlements, which it said were related to more than 5,000 cases, but said the agreements “represent a major step toward strengthening Juul Labs’ operations and securing the company’s path forward.”

The complaints had been filed for personal injury, with some in consumer class action lawsuits, and others filed by government entities or Native American tribes.

Juul is battling to stay afloat after the US Food and Drug Administration found the company had failed to address safety concerns and ordered all its products off the market in the United States.

The company has appealed the decision but announced last month it had been forced to lay off around 400 employees and cut its operating budget by up to 40 percent.

Juul said in November it had secured financing from early investors to maintain its operations.

Europe is likely to scrape through this winter without cutting off gas customers despite reduced Russian supplies, but even adjusting to colder homes and paying more may not be enough in coming years, analysts say.

“I like a hot house, I have to admit… I really used a lot of gas,” said Sofie de Rous, who until this year kept her home on the Belgian coast at a toasty 21 degrees Celsius (70F).

But like millions of other Europeans, the 41-year-old employee at an architectural firm has had to turn down the thermostat after energy prices surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Russia’s progressive reduction of gas supplies to Europe via pipeline triggered a bidding war for liquefied natural gas (LNG), sending prices sharply higher.

If certain countries like France and Spain froze prices for consumers, others like Belgium let suppliers more or less pass along the higher costs.

“I was a little panicked in the beginning,” said de Rous, who saw the gas bill to heat her 90-square-metre (970-square-foot) house in Oostduinkerke jump from 120 euros ($126) per month to 330 euros.

She has lowered her thermostat to 18 degrees and is looking into installing double-pane windows and a solar panel.

Like de Rous, the lack of concern about energy consumption of a whole generation of Europeans ended abruptly in 2022, and everyone is mindful of where their thermostat is set.

If previously natural gas was cheap and plentiful, it is now scarce and expensive.

The European wholesale reference price used to fluctuate little, hovering around 20 euros per megawatt hour. This year, it shot as high as 300 euros before dropping back to around 100 euros.

“It’s the most chaotic time I’ve witnessed in all of those years,” Graham Freedman, a European gas analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, told AFP.

– Big drops in consumption –

Sky-high energy prices have caused numerous factories, particularly in Germany’s chemicals sector which was highly dependent upon cheap Russian gas, to halt operations.

But European nations were able to fill their gas reservoirs and no one has been cut off yet.

“Until February, the very idea of Europe without Russian energy was seen as impossible,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.

“What was impossible became possible.”

A warm autumn that allowed many consumers to put off turning on their heating also helped put Europe in better position for the winter.

Overall, the reduction in EU gas consumption by consumers and industry was around 25 percent in October compared to the 2019-2021 average for the month, according to calculations by Bruegel.

In Germany, where half the households use gas for heat, data shows consumption down by 20 to 35 percent depending on the week.

“That’s much more than anyone expected,” said Lion Hirth, a professor of energy policy at the Hertie School in Berlin.

“And that’s completely contradictory to the talk that we’ve been hearing from doomsday talkers saying, people just don’t respond. People just keep heating. People don’t change their behaviour. People don’t respond to prices.”

In the space of several months Russia has lost its top gas customer, Europe, with purchases passing from 191 billion cubic metres in 2019 to 90 billion this year. 

Wood Mackenzie forecasts deliveries will fall to 38 billion cubic metres next year.

The EU has been able to import large quantities of LNG, but only by outbidding South Asian nations like Pakistan and India.

This has pushed these nations to increase their dependence on coal — negatively impacting global efforts to curb climate change.

– In 2023? –

Europe’s ability to import LNG has been limited by a lack of infrastructure. 

While France and Spain each had several terminals to unload LNG from tankers and convert it back into gas at the start of the Ukraine conflict, Germany didn’t have one.

And while construction of more LNG terminals is under way, in 2023, unlike at the beginning of this year, Europe will mostly have to do without Russian gas to fill its reservoirs.

This could set up an even fiercer bidding war between European and Asian nations for supplies.

“The key factor is most certainly going to be: what is the weather going to be like this winter,” said Laura Page, a gas analyst at commodity data firm Kpler.

“If we have a cold winter in Asia, and we have a cold winter in Europe… this fight will intensify.”

The problem is that LNG supplies are limited.

“There isn’t enough gas in the world at the moment to actually cope with that loss of supply from Russia,” said Wood Mackenzie’s Freedman.

New LNG projects to boost supply won’t be able to come on line before 2025, meaning Europeans will have to get used to living with homes heated to just 18 degrees.

China’s imports and exports plunged in November to levels not seen since early 2020, as strict Covid restrictions hit the economy hard, according to official figures released Wednesday. 

Beijing’s strict zero-Covid policy of snap lockdowns, travel curbs and daily mass testing has left businesses reeling, disrupted supply chains and dampened consumption. 

November imports fell 10.6 percent year-on-year, the biggest collapse since May 2020. 

Exports fell by 8.7 percent year-on-year, the biggest drop since February 2020, when the country was mired in the early stages of the pandemic. 

The threat of recession in the United States and Europe, coupled with soaring energy prices, is weakening demand for Chinese products. 

After nationwide anti-lockdown protests last week, the government has signalled a shift in messaging and local authorities have begun easing some restrictions — which may brighten the outlook in the coming months.   

But travel between provinces remains complicated and an economic recovery may take time, with health measures highly variable across the country. 

China’s factory activity shrank for a second straight month in November, official data last week showed, as large swathes of the country were hit by lockdowns and transport disruptions.

The Purchasing Managers’ Index — a key gauge of manufacturing in the world’s second-biggest economy — came in at 48.0, down from October’s 49.2 and well below the 50-point mark separating growth from contraction, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Chinese leaders have set an annual economic growth target of about 5.5 percent, but many observers think the country will struggle to hit it, despite announcing a better-than-expected 3.9 percent expansion in the third quarter.

This was supposed to be the comeback year for the world economy following the Covid pandemic.

Instead, 2022 was marked by a new war, record inflation and climate-linked disasters. It was a “polycrisis” year, a term popularised by historian Adam Tooze.

Get ready for more gloom in 2023.

“The number of crises has increased since the start of the century,” said Roel Beetsma, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Amsterdam

“Since World War Two we have never seen such a complicated situation,” he told AFP.

After the Covid-induced economic crisis of 2020, consumer prices began to rise in 2021 as countries emerged from lockdowns or other restrictions.

Central bankers insisted that high inflation would only be temporary as economies returned to normal. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February sent energy and food prices soaring.

Many countries are now grappling with cost-of-living crises because wages are not keeping up with inflation, forcing households to make difficult choices in their spending.

“Everything has become more expensive, from cream to wine and electricity,” said Nicole Eisermann from her stand at the Frankfurt Christmas market.

Central banks played catch-up. They started to raise interest rates this year in an effort to tame galloping inflation — at the risk of tipping countries into deep recessions, since higher borrowing costs mean slower economic activity.

Inflation has finally started to slow down in the United States and the eurozone. 

– Careful spending –

Consumer prices in the Group of 20 developed and emerging nations are expected to reach eight percent in the fourth quarter before falling to 5.5 percent next year, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The OECD encourages governments to provide aid to bring relief to households.

In the 27-nation European Union, 674 billion euros ($704 billion) have been earmarked so far to shield consumers from high energy prices, according to the Bruegel think tank.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and the most dependent on Russia energy supplies, accounts for 264 billion euros of that total.

One in two Germans say they now only spend on essential items, according to a survey by EY consultancy.

“I am very careful but I have a lot of children and grandchildren,” said Guenther Blum, a shopper at the Frankfurt Christmas market.

Rising interest rates have also hurt consumers and businesses, though US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell signalled last week that the pace of hikes could ease “as soon as” December.

He warned, however, that policy will probably have to remain tight for some time to restore price stability.

For her part, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde sent a clear signal that the ECB would maintain its tightening policy, saying that eurozone inflation had yet to peak.

Economists expect Germany and another major eurozone economy, Italy, to fall into recession. Britain’s economy is already shrinking. Rating agency S&P Global foresees stagnation for the eurozone in 2023.

But the International Monetary Fund still expects the world economy to expand in 2023, with growth of 2.7 percent. The OECD is forecasting 2.2-percent growth.

The coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, remains a wildcard for the global economy.

China’s zero-Covid policy restrained growth in the world’s second biggest economy, but the authorities have started to relax restrictions following nationwide protests.

– Climate costs –

But for Beetsma, the biggest crisis is climate change, which is “happening in slow motion”.

Natural and man-made catastrophes have caused $268 billion in economic losses so far in 2022, according to reinsurance giant Swiss Re. Hurricane Ian alone cost an estimated insured loss of $50-65 billion.

Floods in Pakistan resulted in $30 billion in damage and economic loss this year.

Governments agreed at United Nations climate talks (COP27) in Egypt in November to create a fund to cover the losses suffered by vulnerable developing countries devastated by natural disasters.

But the COP27 summit ended without new commitments to phase out the use of fossil fuels, despite the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming.

“It is not an acute crisis but a very long-term crisis, protracted,” Beetsma said. “If we don’t do enough this will hit us in unprecedented scale.”

From “intelligent” vacuum cleaners and driverless cars to advanced techniques for diagnosing diseases, artificial intelligence has burrowed its way into every arena of modern life.

Its promoters reckon it is revolutionising human experience, but critics stress that the technology risks putting machines in charge of life-changing decisions.

Regulators in Europe and North America are worried.

The European Union is likely to pass legislation next year — the AI Act — aimed at reining in the age of the algorithm.

The United States recently published a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and Canada is also mulling legislation.

Looming large in the debates has been China’s use of biometric data, facial recognition and other technology to build a powerful system of control.

Gry Hasselbalch, a Danish academic who advises the EU on the controversial technology, argued that the West was also in danger of creating “totalitarian infrastructures”.

“I see that as a huge threat, no matter the benefits,” she told AFP.

But before regulators can act, they face the daunting task of defining what AI actually is.

– ‘Mug’s game’ –

Suresh Venkatasubramanian of Brown University, who co-authored the AI Bill of Rights, said trying to define AI was “a mug’s game”.

Any technology that affects people’s rights should be within the scope of the bill, he tweeted.

The 27-nation EU is taking the more tortuous route of attempting to define the sprawling field.

Its draft law lists the kinds of approaches defined as AI, and it includes pretty much any computer system that involves automation.

The problem stems from the changing use of the term AI.

For decades, it described attempts to create machines that simulated human thinking.

But funding largely dried up for this research — known as symbolic AI — in the early 2000s.

The rise of the Silicon Valley titans saw AI reborn as a catch-all label for their number-crunching programs and the algorithms they generated.

This automation allowed them to target users with advertising and content, helping them to make hundreds of billions of dollars.

“AI was a way for them to make more use of this surveillance data and to mystify what was happening,” Meredith Whittaker, a former Google worker who co-founded New York University’s AI Now Institute, told AFP.

So the EU and US have both concluded that any definition of AI needs to be as broad as possible.

– ‘Too challenging’ –

But from that point, the two Western powerhouses have largely gone their separate ways.

The EU’s draft AI Act runs to more than 100 pages.

Among its most eye-catching proposals are the complete prohibition of certain “high-risk” technologies — the kind of biometric surveillance tools used in China.

It also drastically limits the use of AI tools by migration officials, police and judges.

Hasselbach said some technologies were “simply too challenging to fundamental rights”.

The AI Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is a brief set of principles framed in aspirational language, with exhortations like “you should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems”.

The bill was issued by the White House and relies on existing law.

Experts reckon no dedicated AI legislation is likely in the United States until 2024 at the earliest because Congress is deadlocked.

– ‘Flesh wound’ –

Opinions differ on the merits of each approach.

“We desperately need regulation,” Gary Marcus of New York University told AFP.

He points out that “large language models” — the AI behind chatbots, translation tools, predictive text software and much else — can be used to generate harmful disinformation.

Whittaker questioned the value of laws aimed at tackling AI rather than the “surveillance business models” that underpin it.

“If you’re not addressing that at a fundamental level, I think you’re putting a band-aid over a flesh wound,” she said.

But other experts have broadly welcomed the US approach.

AI was a better target for regulators than the more abstract concept of privacy, said Sean McGregor, a researcher who chronicles tech failures for the AI Incident Database.

But he said there could be a risk of over-regulation. 

“The authorities that exist can regulate AI,” he told AFP, pointing to the likes of the US Federal Trade Commission and the housing regulator HUD.

But where experts broadly agree is the need to remove the hype and mysticism that surrounds AI technology.

“It’s not magical,” McGregor said, likening AI to a highly sophisticated Excel spreadsheet.

From the United States to Brazil and Israel, a barrage of election-related misinformation hammered voters around the world in 2022, but many pushed back against the conspiracy-laden Trumpian tactic of sowing distrust in the democratic process.

A tsunami of falsehoods flooded Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube — from “deep fake” videos to doctored photos seeking to manipulate voters — with pro-democracy activists accusing the platforms of doing too little to combat the menace.

Candidates around the world borrowed from Donald Trump’s playbook in peddling unfounded allegations of election fraud, but in countries such as the United States and Brazil many voters appeared to reject the narrative.

Defying widespread predictions of a Republican “red wave” in the November midterms, several of Trump’s handpicked candidates lost in close-fought races, with observers saying their continued refusal to accept the 2020 election result may have put off voters.

Republican leaders and supporters “seem to be coming to terms with the way that embracing conspiracy theories has led to poor candidate selection, inefficient voter mobilization, voter cynicism, and a host of other ills,” Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, told AFP.

“Many will try to wean their supporters off election fraud conspiracy theories… It’s going to be a very tough problem to solve.”

Likewise, the Brazilian election, which led to a tense runoff in late October after an inconclusive first round, was awash in disinformation as far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro echoed Trump’s election fraud claims without evidence.

His leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ultimately won the runoff and polls showed the public’s confidence in the voting process remained strong.

But analysts caution that many voters still believe Bolsonaro’s claim, and the country’s fight against disinformation remains far from over.

– ‘Misleading’ narratives –

Candidates in Israel’s November polls also increasingly followed Trump’s playbook, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, Likud, starting a “stop the steal” campaign as soon as the election was announced.

“Likud was pushing (the) conspiracy that the elections are rigged, that the central election committee of Israel is controlled by (the) deep state,” said Achiya Schatz, head of disinformation watchdog group FakeReporter. 

Netanyahu went on to win, and the veteran right-winger’s claims of a corrupt vote faded away as he stood poised to reclaim power after 14 months in opposition. 

Trump was also a major presence in Hungarian politics, with the former US president personally endorsing far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of April elections that were rife with disinformation.

Orban’s party Fidesz “took maximum advantage of its media dominance… to spread factually incorrect or otherwise misleading allegations and narratives about its political opponents,” according to a study from Hungarian think tank Political Capital.

Just ahead of the vote Orban, who has nurtured close relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, alleged that his rivals “made a pact with the Ukrainians” to offer them weapons and support in the event of an opposition victory.

He offered no evidence and Fidesz roared back to power with a parliamentary majority.

– ‘Powerful tool’ –

Across the world, misinformation and disinformation typically spike around elections, eroding public trust in democratic institutions and sometimes unleashing chaos as nefarious state or non-state actors try to manipulate the results.

In presidential polls in the Philippines in May, the volume of election-related disinformation spiked to “unprecedented” levels, said Rachel Khan, from the fact-checking alliance Tsek.ph.

An increase in fact-checking operations compared with previous elections could not tame the disinformation — primarily focused on the two frontrunners, Ferdinand Marcos, who went on to win by a landslide, and Leni Robredo.

“We can see that in terms of election results we had very little impact,” Khan said, of the alliance’s work. “I think the problem really is media literacy. Even those who claim that they can distinguish disinformation actually cannot.”

In Kenya, presidential rivals William Ruto and Raila Odinga are both alleged to have hired so-called digital “warriors” tasked with spreading election-related disinformation.

The falsehoods began spreading almost a year before the August vote, with fact-checkers noting an increase in the use of “deep fake” videos with manipulated content.

While Kenya’s supreme court upheld Ruto’s victory, many Odinga supporters believe the election was rigged.

And as Nigeria gears up for elections early next year, similar tactics are visible online — deep fakes and photoshopped images to smear political opponents.

In the United States, meanwhile, analysts warn disinformation about election integrity could flare again as the 2024 presidential race picks up steam — with Trump vying to reclaim the White House.

“Disinformation is a powerful tool,” Pamela Smith, president of the nonpartisan nonprofit Verified Voting, told AFP. “And those who only approve of elections that go their way will keep using it.”

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