FRANKFURT
(Reuters) - Volkswagen's luxury sports car unit Porsche AG is setting up a
joint venture with Customcells to produce high-performance batteries that will
significantly reduce charging times.
The
partnership with Customcells, a company in southern Germany specializing in
lithium-ion cells, will aim to produce car batteries with higher energy density
than prototypes used in Porsche's current electric cars.
European
carmakers are pushing to reduce their dependence on Asia for batteries as they
roll out all-electric models to meet stricter emissions targets in the European
Union.
In addition
to cutting charging time, improving energy density will reduce the amount of
raw material needed in batteries to achieve the same range. It will also cut
battery production costs, making electric cars more affordable.
Porsche will
invest a high double-digit million euro sum in the joint venture in which it
will hold 80%.
The
production facility will have a capacity of 100 kilowatt hours, which will
translate into about enough batteries for 1,000 cars a year.
Porsche's
parent company Volkswagen will build half a dozen battery cell plants across
Europe and expand infrastructure for charging electric vehicles globally.
An American Airlines flight attendant was captured on viral TikTok videoberating passengers who verbally abused the crew after the flight was diverted in bad weather.
In the viral clip, a 22-year-old man on the Monday flight from LA to Charlotte, North Carolina, calls a female flight attendant “a fat gorilla” and also shouted obscenities at her after she told him to wear a face mask.
“There was absolutely no excuse for it,” said musician Brent Underwood, 39, of the band 87&Pine, who recorded the video.“It doesn’t matter what you look like. Everybody deserves respect. And everybody deserves to be punished equally for being a rude person like that. Why would you call a person a fat gorilla?”.
Bad weather forced the flight to divert to the Raleigh Durham airport, where it sat for three hours and was refueled. It had circled the Charlotte airport for a half-hour earlier.
When a male flight attendant announces the flight would return to Raleigh if passengers don’t behave, a woman sarcastically complains that the crew members were just upset because they hadn’t eaten, the video shows.
“Give them a Snickers!” a passenger yells.
While sitting in Raleigh, only water and cookies were available onboard.
“Just like you, we have not eaten also,” the male flight attendant is heard telling the passengers. “We’ve catered to you the entire flight. We do it because we love this job. But the fact that we get insulted and mistreated by passengers over things we cannot control is disgusting. But shame on the passengers that have made this flight a living hell for the flight attendants.”
His comments were met by applause in the cabin.
“Flight attendants on @officialamericanairways are done with your b.s.!” Underwood wrote on TikTok with the hashtags #AmericanAirlines, #facemask and #dumbcustomers.
“The flight crew did absolutely nothing wrong. They were more professional than I would have been.”
American Airlines said in a statement: “We take the health and safety of our customers seriously, and our crew members work hard to uphold the federal mask mandate that remains in effect on aircraft and in airports.
“We value the trust our customers place in our team to care for them throughout their journey, and we expect those who choose to fly with us to treat each other — and our team members — with respect,” it added.
None of the passengers were removed or arrested, according to the report.
Shipping
containers are stacked high at the Port of Los Angeles
Frederic J. Brown/AFP via
Getty Images
How about filling in the
blanks with the English for the given words?
John Nephew thought he had a winner with a new
tabletop game called Dice Miner. ………………….. (sin embargo)
Importing the games from China turned out to be its own roll of the dice.
Nephew, founder of Atlas Games in Duluth, Minn.,
ordered a 40-foot cargo container full of games from Shanghai in December,
anticipating delivery in about six weeks. ………………….. (en cambio), the games took nearly six months to arrive
— an increasingly common example of the supply chain bottlenecks pushing inflation to its highest level in more than a dozen years.
When the cargo with his games finally arrived on
the West Coast, the container was immediately emptied so it could be sent back
to China for another load.
The games then continued on to Minnesota by truck, ………………….. (en vez de)
rail, which would have been more economical. The final shipping cost was about
$12,000, at least 50% more than the game maker had budgeted.
Businesses around the country are wrestling with
similar challenges in getting their goods. Soaring demand from Americans for
everything from iPads to cars is leading to a surge in freight crossing the
Pacific, hitting business owners such as Nephew.
………………….. (Aunque)things aren't quite so busy on the East Coast,the cost of bringing a refrigerated
container from Italy to New Jersey has soared to $10,000, more than twice the
going rate before the pandemic.
"They say there are not enough containers in
Europe" says Philip Marfuggi, CEO of the Ambriola Co. and a board member
of the Cheese Importers Association of America. “It not only takes up to twice
as long for shipments to arrive, but deliveries have become less predictable. Like
the other day, I had eight containers show up. They should have been like two a
week. And then all of a sudden, they all showed up at once."
All of this unpredictability creates costs and
headaches for businesses that had grown accustomed to reliable, just-in-time
delivery.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said …………………..
(dado que)these "bottleneck
effects" have been larger than he and his colleagues anticipated, the
central bank raised its forecast for inflation this year to 3.4%.………………….. (De
todos modos) Powell expressed confidence that the cargo
constraints won't last indefinitely.
"Prices have moved up really quickly ………………….. (debido a)the
shortages and bottlenecks and the like — they should stop going up, and at some
point they in some cases should actually go down," Powell told reporters
last week.
The Biden administration has created a task force
to address the most urgent shortages – such as computer chips – ………………….. (al mismo tiempo)also looking for ways to build more resilient
delivery networks for the future.
…………………..
(Como)pandemic fears are receding and people are beginning
to spend more of their money on travel and entertainment, demand for goods is
expected to decline.………………….. (A pesar de eso), it could take months to untangle the traffic
jam.
Gene Seroka,
executive director of the country's busiest cargo port thinks it will be early
next year before cargo volumes shrink back to more normal levels.
That's bad
news for business owners such as Nephew, who is already bracing for even higher
shipping costs.
“…………………………..(Aunque)I had to pay 50% more to ship my Dice Miner games,
that shipping price is going to look like a bargain within the next couple of
weeks", Nephew says.
The Port of Los Angeles logged its busiest month in history in May.
According to most workers, the answer is simple: I would prefer not to. Not yet. Not every day, anyway — and maybe not ever.
The obvious answer is a new model that allows for in-office, hybrid or fully remote work. But it’s an open question how many workplaces agree.
A poll by the Best Practice Institute found that some 83 percent of CEOs want employees back full-time, while only 10 percent of workers want back in.
“There is a belief in our culture that we’ve proven that most jobs can be done virtually,” Melissa Swift of consulting firm Korn Ferry told Newsweek. “But that’s not the belief within the leadership of organizations, so we’re headed for a real clash.”
Certainly some people are thrilled to rejoin the office. But for many, it is a nightmare. People across industries and pay grades express the same fears, including legal administrators, analysts, people who book athletic travel for colleges, corporate office workers, software engineers and those in administrative health care..
The pandemic’s dramatic expansion of remote work, with its attendant humanization (Your toddler interrupts a meeting? A colleague joins the Zoom from their car? Just another day at the “office”!), suggested there was a different culture on the horizon — one that accepted the realities of family, health, disability and more, and that, critically, treated workers as adults capable of managing their lives and their deadlines.
But many higher-ups seem eager to maintain the status quo and are directing all employees to return to the office by a specific date, no exceptions. Others have expressed “concern” about the “erosion” of company culture; in The Post this month, Washingtonian Media chief executive Cathy Merrill wrote that employees who don’t want to return risk being demoted to the status of hourly contractor — if they keep their jobs at all.
WeWork chief executive Sandeep Mathrani told the Wall Street Journal that the least engaged workers are easy to identify — they’re the ones who prefer remote work.
Smarter companies are already preparing for a limited return or for fully remote work. They know that the “office” is never going to be the same, and that a rigid refusal to change their culture will cost them their best people, who will flee to more flexible rivals.
It was sunny and clear on
Friday morning and the water was calm off the coast of Provincetown, Mass.,
where Michael Packard was diving for lobsters.
His longtime fishing
partner, Josiah Mayo, was following him in their fishing vessel, the J&J.
The men had already caught 50
kg of lobster, and Mr. Packard was about 12 m underwater, looking for more.
Suddenly, the bubbles
stopped, Mr. Mayo said. Then, the water began to churn violently. A creature
breached the surface Mr. Mayo thought it was a white shark. Then, he saw the head
of a whale. Moments later, he saw Mr. Packard fly out of the water.
The whale, a humpback, swam
away as Mr. Mayo and another fisherman helped Mr. Packard back into the boat.
Such terrifying encounters
are virtually unheard-of, according to Charles Mayo, Josiah Mayo’s father and a
senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, a town of
about 3,000 people on the tip of Cape Cod.
There is an account of a
woman who was pulled down by
a pilot whale. There are reports of sperm whales that went on
the offensive after being harpooned. And in 1896, The New York Times reported
the implausible tale of a whaler who was found in the belly of a whale in
October 1891 and rescued alive.
“I’ve never heard of that
ever happening,” Dr. Mayo said of Mr. Packard’s ordeal. Still, the encounter is
explainable, he said.
The whale, possibly a 10- to 12-meter juvenile that had previously been seen swimming in the area, was
most likely diving for food when it inadvertently caught Mr. Packard in its
enormous mouth.
Humpback whales spend much
of their time in that part of New England, searching for fish, said Jooke
Robbins, director of the humpback whale studies program at the Center for
Coastal Studies.
When the whale realized it
had caught something that was not its typical prey it responded the way a human
who accidentally ingested a fly would, Dr. Mayo said.
“We certainly don’t eat any
more,” he said. “We spit the food out.”
Accounts of Mr. Packard’s
ordeal captivated
Twitter on Friday. That afternoon, Mr. Packard told
reporters that he was on his second dive, going toward the bottom
of sea when he felt “this truck hit me.”
His first thought was that
a white shark had attacked him, but when he did not feel teeth piercing into
him, he realized he was inside a whale.
“I was completely inside;
it was completely black,” Mr. Packard told
The Cape Cod Times. “I thought to myself: There’s no way I’m
getting out of here — I’m done, I’m dead. All I could think of was my boys —
they’re 12 and 15 years old.”
Mr. Packard said he was in
the mouth for at least 30 seconds, wondering whether he would run out of air or
be swallowed. He said he struggled against the mouth of the whale and could
feel its powerful muscles squeezing against him. Then, he saw light and felt
the whale’s head shaking and his body being thrown into the water.
Mr. Mayo said he called 911
and an ambulance met them at the dock. He then called Mr. Packard’s wife.
“‘Hi, Mike is OK,’” Mr.
Mayo recalled telling her. “You’ve got to lead with that.”
Mr. Packard, who was
released from the hospital on Friday, had extensive bruises, but no broken
bones.
He said, “As soon as I heal
up, I’ll be back in the water.”
Last month, a cyberattack on the USA company Colonial Pipeline, ___________ operates a pipeline providing
nearly half the East Coast's fuel supply, triggered a massive shutdown. Hackers infiltrated its computer network and ___________ more than $4 million in ransom; the company
shut down the pipeline.
Colonial Pipeline___________ the decision to pay the ransom___________ the same day, and it ___________ 6 days to restart the pipeline.
In the interim, several governors in affected states declared states of
emergency and urged the public not to hoard gas.___________ ,panic-buying led to temporary outages in 11 states and Washington, D.C.
Last week, the Transportation Security Administration announced a new policy which requires pipeline operators ___________report cyberattacks to the federal government
within 12 hours and ___________Thursday, the White House released a memo to
corporate executives and business leaders urgingthem
to take immediate ___________ to protect against ransomware risks in the wake
of attacks on both Colonial Pipeline and the meat company JBS.
"The most important takeaway from the recent ransomware attacks on
U.S., Irish, German and other organizations ___________the world," said Anne
Neuberger, deputy national security adviser, in the memo, "is that
companies that view ransomware as a threat to their core business operations rather
___________a simple risk of data theft
will react and recover more effectively."
Joe Blount, CEO of Colonial Pipeline spoke with National Public Radio about
getting the pipeline safely back online, making the tough call to shut down the
gas over a cyberattack and why paying the ransom was "the right decision
to ___________for the country."
ØActivity 2 - Read on for highlights of the interview. Ask a question
based both on what Colonial Pipeline CEO Joe Blount says and on each sentence
beginning with ON
On whether operations are fully restored
Your question:
No, definitely not fully restored. And I think if you talk to anybody
who suffered from one of these criminal cyber-attacks, they would tell you that
it takes months and months and months to restore your entire IT infrastructure.
In our case, our focus initially was to get the pipeline back up and running
safely and as soon as we possibly could. So we got the critical IT structure
put back together. But we have months and months of work ahead of us.
On why the company shut down the gas over a
computer system attack
Your question:
Let me take you back to the early morning of May 7. We knew immediately
that there was an issue, and we are programmed to only operate the pipeline if
we feel that it's in safe operating condition: it won't cause any harm to
employees, the communities we serve or to the environment. So we have what we
call "stop work authority" at Colonial; any of our employees has the
opportunity to use it. If they identify a risk, their job is to contain it
immediately. In this case, a ransom ware note came across the screen in our
control room. It was immediately recognized, and the control room supervisor
immediately decided to shut down the pipeline. It was the right decision to
make because you don't know what you have to deal with at that point in time.
On his decision to pay a nearly $4.5 million ransom
in crypto currency
Your question:
It was obviously, probably the hardest decision I've ever made in my
career. I've been an employee of Colonial Pipeline for three and a half years,
but I've been in the industry for almost 39 now. So once we identified the risk
and contained the risk by shutting the pipeline system down and immediately
called in cyber experts to help us with identifying further what had been done
to our system, one of the things that came up, ultimately, was the ransom and
whether to pay the ransom or not.
The conversation went like this: Do you pay the ransom or not? And of
course, the initial thought is: You don't want to pay the ransom. You don't
want to encourage hackers; you don't
want to pay these criminals. But our duty is to the American public. So when
you know that you have 100 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuels and jet
fuels that are going to go across the Southeastern and Eastern seaboard of the
United States, it's a very critical decision to make. And if owning that
de-encryption tool gets you there quicker, then it's the decision that had to
be made. And I did make that decision that day. It was the right decision to
make for the country.
On the government's role when private companies
face cyber-attacks and ransom
Your question:
At the end of the day, it's a decision that has to be made by the
company. ... I think that obviously private industry has a responsibility here.
Pipelines do invest in cyber-ware and security. It's a natural extension of
what we've done historically, which is focus on the physical security of our
asset. So it really pretty much needs to become a private-public partnership.
I think once we complete our investigation into this event, partnering
with the government, sharing those learnings with our peers in the
infrastructure space and more broadly across other sectors, is very important
so that they can learn lessons from our event.
ØActivity 3 – Should a company facing
a cyber-attack pay hackers the ransom they demand?
What do you get when you put a pair of
Crocs and stilettos together? Something very interesting indeed.
Design house Balenciaga recently unveiled
its latest collaboration with the footwear brand at its spring 2022 runway
show.
According to the show notes,
the creations are called ‘Balenciaga Crocs 2.0’ and are available in several colors, including black, grey,
and green.
The stilettos are the classic Croc shape
but with an added heel to elevate them to new fashion heights.
When Balenciaga’s creative director Demna
Gvasalia first collaborated with Crocs in 2017, he told French Vogue: ‘We were
inspired by Crocs and we worked with them on a Balenciaga reinterpretation.
Balenciaga x Crocs isn’t impossible, the question of taste is a very subjective
value. I just wanted to give them a fashionable touch: a platform. At the end
of the day, fashion is all about having fun.’
That collaboration was a huge success and
quickly sold out, so the same may happen for these Croc creations.
Thanks to TikTok and Gen Z, Crocs have found a new
place among the cool kids. They are
no longer a shoe to laze around the house in, they are now a regular feature in
the outfits of the day #ootds of the youth.
While the idea for the
collaboration is certainly a creative one, many have criticized the collection.
"These are
horrid," someone tweeted, while another added, "Who thought this was a good idea?"
"When we talk about
wastefulness in fashion, this should be held up as an example,"
another wrote.
"Balenciaga and Crocs
made a baby and I am having mixed thoughts," added another.
"Maybe there's no
creative heads handling fashion for Balenciaga if this is all they could come
up with. I bet they will put some crazy amount of money on each of them and
celebrities will still buy it like their lives depend on it".
Despite the negative
reactions the collaboration has received, the unconventional designs have
caused Crocs' demand to spike 9,900%. The stiletto Crocs are rumored to cost
upward of $1,000.
What do you think about the newest Crocs
on the market?
