News Portal

RUTH SUNDERLAND: Hubris of Post Office's Paula Vennells

RUTH SUNDERLAND: Hubris of Post Office's Paula Vennells Former Post Office chief Vennells is facing fresh calls to hand back her CBE She has hired an expensive London law firm to try to salvage her reputation Vennells is cushioned by wealth and well-equipped to defend herself By Ruth Sunderland for the Daily Mail Updated: 21:50, 7 January 2024 e-mail View comments Hubris: Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells Many things have changed in my three decades in financial journalism. Back in the early days, we used call boxes, copy takers, tape recorders and pagers. Now we carry all that capability in our pocket – in an iPhone. In my…

BYD Constructing Sodium-Ion Battery Gigafactory (30 GWh)

For all the hype around non-lithium-ion battery chemistries in the past decade, nothing has really been competitive with the king of batteries. Until now? We’ve been getting intrigued by sodium-ion batteries for a while. Well, you could say going back 9 years , but for EVs and from established companies, it’s really been the past two to three years. In 2021, Steve Hanley covered CATL’s potential sodium-ion batteries . In 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy put out a bullish note on longer-lasting sodium-ion batteries . At the end of 2022, Steve wrote that BYD ( the largest plugin vehicle producer in the world ) might start…

The Geopolitics of Gas: Turkmenistan's Westward Push

For Turkmenistan and its ambitions to export its vast natural gas reserves westward, Iran is a tantalizing but also potentially cheap, and quick, Plan B. Relying on a partner like Tehran, however, creates potentially profound complications. if(window.innerWidthADVERTISEMENTfreestar.config.enabled_slots.push({ placementName: "oilprice_medrec_atf", slotId: "oilprice_medrec_atf" });';document.write(write_html);} The possibility of falling prey to Western sanctions cannot be discounted. And Iran has at times proven an unreliable supplier. Turkmenistan is already sending gas to Iran, albeit as part of a swap arrangement with Azerbaijan…

China's capitalist reforms are said to have moved 800 million out of extreme…

It has become an article of faith among many economists that China’s pro-market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s ushered in a sustained reduction in poverty. This narrative relies on figures from the World Bank, showing that over the past 40 years the number of people in China living in “extreme poverty” (less than US$1.90 per day) fell by almost 800 million . That’s a fair chunk of the world population, which is currently about eight billion. The World Bank’s calculations suggest China’s rate of extreme poverty has plummeted from one of the highest in the world – 88% – in 1981, to virtually zero today, with the fastest gains in the…

Federal law could help Texas semiconductor plants get built faster

ROUND ROCK, Texas — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was in Central Texas on Thursday, taking part in a roundtable on the future of semiconductor plants in the state. Semiconductor chips are used in electronic devices – everything from the cars we drive to our cellphones to the screen you're reading right now. Chips are largely produced overseas and there is a shortage, something experts say creates a national security concern. In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS for America Act , allocating billions of dollars to build chip manufacturing plants. But Sen. Cruz said environmental regulations are delaying construction of those plants by…