Chevron Corp. projected capital spending plans for 2016 of $26.6 billion, which the oil giant said is 24% below expected capital and exploratory spending this year. Source: WSJ
Author: The Board
America’s middle class has shrunk to just half the population for the first time in at least four decades as the forces of technological change and globalisation drive a wedge between the winners and losers in a splintering US socjety. Source: FT
As Spain’s flagship renewable energy giant Abengoa teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, concerns are mounting over the fate of thousands of employees and its numerous projects around the world, just weeks ahead of crux general elections. Source AFP
Cutbacks are part of overhaul that includes shrinking bank’s balance sheet by €150 billion by 2020. The job cuts, which will mainly be in back office and support functions, represent around 19% of the bank’s global workforce and are in addition to 3,000 job losses already planned. Source The Wall Street Journal
Canada is open to rethinking the contentious issue of investor protection in its free trade accord with the European Union but warns that EU demands for change risk unravelling the entire deal, a senior negotiator said on Wednesday. Source: Reuters
Azerbaijani tanks on Wednesday shelled positions in the breakaway Nagorny Karabakh region for the first time in more than 20 years, as Armenia arrested a retired military officer on suspicion of spying for its archfoe. Source: AFP/France24
The US has asked Denmark, Finland, and Sweden to join the global fight against the IS. Media sources in each say they’ve each received a request. Finland’s minister of defence was quoted by Finnish state media outlet YLE as saying the request had come from the US embassy. Source: EUobserver
The police were targeted by dozens of mortar fire in Albi (Tarn) last night. Three officials were injured during this deluge of violence. The night from Thursday to Friday was long for the police in Albi. It all started with a refusal to comply in the sensitive district of Cantepau around 10 p.m. A motorist refused to stop when ordered by a municipal police patrol. The alert was given and reinforcements were requested. Source Actu17
The populist opposition party Alternative for Germany has filed legal action against reported plans to put the whole party under intelligence observation for alleged links to far-right extremism. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has launched legal action against the country’s domestic intelligence agency amid reports that it is preparing to put the whole party under surveillance over potential ties to far-right extremism. Source Deutsche Welle
Turkey and the European Union were set to discuss the renewal of a 2016 migration agreement during a meeting late on Jan. 21, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said ahead of the meeting.
“We conveyed our proposal to update the migration agreement. We will discuss the details of this,” Çavuşoğlu said at a joint press conference with the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, ahead of their meeting in Brussels. Source Daily News
The Tokyo District Court ruled Thursday that the country’s nationality law, which forbids citizens from holding multiple nationalities, is constitutional, in a judicial decision believed to be the first concerning the regulation. Source JapanTimes
French President Emmanuel Macron has ruled out issuing an official apology for abuses in Algeria, his office said Wednesday, ahead of a major report on how France is facing up to its colonial past in the country. Source France
The deep economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has contributed to the political minefield on the Czech-German border. Are Czechs the dangerous neighbors that a German newspaper called them? Source Deutche Welle
In last night’s riots in the migrant center in Blazuj near Sarajevo, 20 vehicles of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sarajevo Canton and several IOM vehicles were damaged. This information was confirmed for Klix.ba by the Minister of the Interior of Canton Sarajevo, Admir Katica. Source Sarajevo Times
Taiwanese troops using tanks, mortars and small arms have staged a drill aimed at repelling an attack from China, which has increased its threats to reclaim the island and stepped up its own displays of military might. Source Aljazeera
Jack Ma, the founder of China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba, on Wednesday made his first public appearance since October when he spoke to a group of teachers online.
The Jack Ma Foundation said in a statement Wednesday, “Jack Ma participated in the online ceremony of the annual Rural Teacher Initiative event on January 20.” Source Deutsche Welle
The teenagers quickly fled before the police arrived. Stupor at the Paul Eluard college in Vigneux-sur-Seine (Essonne) this Monday morning around 10:40 am. A group of four or five teenagers fired twice in the air with a handgun. They were in front of the entrance gates of the school. The latter also exhibited a tear gas canister at the time of the events. Source Actu17
Cities, towns and villages across France were practically empty on Saturday as residents stayed home and businesses shut to observe a nationwide curfew intended to help stem the spread of coronavirus, especially a more infectious variant. Source France24
Dutch airline KLM is cutting another 800 to 1 thousand jobs. The aviation sector is not recovering and it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet, the Dutch airline announced on Thursday.
KLM is cutting 500 full-time jobs among the cabin crew, 100 jobs among pilots, and 200 to 400 jobs among the ground crew. This comes on top of the 5 thousand job cuts the airline announced last year with its reorganization plans to get through the coronavirus pandemic. Source NLTimes
Fraport Greece reported a 71.4% annual decline in passenger traffic last year at the 14 regional airports it operates in Greece. The total number of passengers who used the airports of Thessaloniki, Corfu, Hania, Cephalonia, Zakynthos, Aktio, Kavala, Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Mytilene, Mykonos, Santorini and Skiathos reached 8,611,780, of which 5,994,180 were on international flights – a year-on-year decline of 74.2%. Source Ekathimerini
Russian oil drilling giant Gazprom Neft opened a crypto mining farm running on associated gas energy unlocking the power of Russia’s oil and gas resources for the needs of bitcoin (BTC) mining, reports Yahoo Finance. The venue for cryptocurrency mining is on one of the company’s oil drilling sites in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug in Siberia. It is using the associated gas from Gazprom Neft’s oil field as an energy source and has its own power plant to transform this gas into electricity. Source Realnoevremya
The United States’ trade deficit surged to its highest level in more than 14 years in November as businesses boosted imports to replenish inventories, offsetting a rise in exports. Source Reuters
U.S. bankruptcy filings hit their lowest level since 1986 last year thanks to unprecedented fiscal and monetary support from the Fed and Congress.
By the numbers: Total bankruptcy filings for the year fell to 529,068 filings across all chapters, while total filings in the month of December was 34,304, the lowest monthly total since January 2006, according to a release from legal services company Epiq AACER. The number of total 2020 filings was about 1/3 of the number seen in 2010. Source Axios
Italy is working on a plan to take on about 14 billion euros ($17 billion) of UniCredit’s impaired loans to make a takeover of state-owned Monte dei Paschi more attractive for the country’s second-biggest bank, sources told Reuters.
Volkswagen Group has liquidated its unit in Turkey after cancelling plans to establish its first factory in the country, Turkish television channel BloombergHT reported on Tuesday.
The decision to shutter the firm was registered with the Turkish Trade Registry and a call to creditors was issued on Monday, BloombergHT said. Source Ahval
The former head of one of China’s biggest asset management companies has been sentenced to death for corruption, in a relatively rare instance of the country meting out the death penalty for financial crimes. Source FT
Russian natural gas transported to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline touched 28.8 million cubic metres per day, as of Jan. 3, to feed homes and factories as northern China faces frigid weather conditions, national oil and gas pipeline giant PipeChina said. Source Business Recorder
Dec. 22, France’s national statistic agency INSEE reported that, the country’s public debt hit 2,674.3 billion euros (around USD3,255.93 billion) before the end of the July-September period of the present year, making up for 116.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Source MenaFN
14 December France has ordered a dozen public and private bodies to keep their deposits at the Treasury, government documents show, as it quietly builds up safeguards to reinforce its cash flow during the pandemic and ahead of Brexit. Source Reuters
