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By Doyinsola Oladipo

(Reuters) -The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said on Monday it was unlawful for Tesla Inc to prohibit employees from wearing shirts bearing union insignia, ruling in a 2017 dispute between the electric car maker and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union.

NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran said the decision reaffirms “any attempt to restrict the wearing of union clothing or insignia is presumptively unlawful and – consistent with Supreme Court precedent – an employer has a heightened burden to justify attempts to limit this important right.”

In a 3-2 decision, the NLRB said that when companies interfere with employees’ rights to display union insignia the employer “has the burden to establish special circumstances” and the majority “found that Tesla failed to establish special circumstances in this case.”

Tesla and the UAW did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Doyinsola Oladipo in New YorkWriting by David ShepardsonEditing by Mark Porter and Matthew Lewis)

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — From fire departments to governments, from school districts to corporations, from local utilities to grassroots organizers around the world, Twitter at its best is a tool to get a message out quickly, efficiently, directly.

It’s also a constant risk-and-reward calculation.

A recent bombshell whistleblower report from Twitter’s former head of security alleges that the social media company has been negligently lax on cybersecurity and privacy protections for its users for years. While worrisome for anyone on Twitter, the revelations could be especially concerning for those who use it to reach constituencies, get news out about emergencies and for political dissidents and activists in the crosshairs of hackers or their own governments.

“We tend to look at these companies as large, well-resourced entities who know what they’re doing — but you realize that a lot of their actions are ad hoc and reactive, driven by crises,” said Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit in India. “Essentially, they’re often held together by cello tape or chewing gum.”

Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who served as Twitter’s security chief until he was fired early this year, filed the complaints last month with federal U.S. authorities, alleging that the company misled regulators about its poor cybersecurity defenses and its negligence in attempting to root out fake accounts that spread disinformation. Among Zatko’s most serious accusations is that Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 FTC settlement by falsely claiming that it had put stronger measures in place to protect the security and privacy of its users.

Waghre said the allegations in the complaint about India — that Twitter knowingly allowed the Indian government to place its agents on the company payroll where they had “direct unsupervised access to the company’s systems and user data” — were particularly worrisome. He also pointed to an incident earlier this month where a former Twitter employee was found guilty of passing along sensitive user data to royal family members in Saudi Arabia in exchange for bribes.

The consequences of privacy and security lapses can range from inconvenience and embarrassment — such as when an Indiana State Police account was hacked and tweeted “poo-poo head” earlier this year — to much worse. In October 2021, a Saudi humanitarian aid worker was sentenced to 20 years in prison because of an anonymous, satirical Twitter account that the kingdom says he ran. It’s possible that the case is linked with the men accused of spying on behalf of the kingdom while working at Twitter.

As an advocate for dissidents and others detained in Saudi Arabia, Bethany Al-Haidari has been concerned for years about Twitter’s user privacy safeguards. The new whistleblower allegations make her all the more worried.

“Given what we know about how social media is used around the world, that is incredibly problematic,” said Al-Haidari, who works for The Freedom Initiative, a U.S.-based human rights group. The possibility of hackers or governments exploiting the alleged cybersecurity lapses at Twitter to get users’ identities, private messages or other personal information “is quite disturbing to me,” she said.

Chinese-Australian artist and activist Badiucao, who regularly publishes art that criticizes the Chinese Communist Party, expressed concern about the whistleblower’s allegations, noting that many users provide their phone numbers and emails to Twitter.

“Once that personal information is leaked, it could be used to trace your identity,” he said. Badiucao said he regularly receives death threats and propaganda from what appears to be bot or spam accounts.

But the artist plans to keep using Twitter, saying it’s probably the best option Chinese-speaking activists and artists have for a “shelter for free speech.”

Twitter says the whistleblower claims present a “false narrative” about the company and its privacy and data security practices, and that the claims lack context. “Security and privacy have long been company-wide priorities at Twitter and will continue to be,” the company said in a statement.

Despite the heightened concerns sparked by Zatko’s claims, none of the groups The Associated Press spoke to this week plan to stop using Twitter. Security experts say while the whistleblower’s claims are alarming, there’s no reason for individual users to delete their accounts.

High-profile Twitter users and world governments may be at greater risk than average users, experts say. In 2020, for instance, Twitter suffered an embarrassing hack by a teenager who accessed the accounts of then-President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Musk is currently embroiled in a battle with Twitter as he tries to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company.

Yet another security incident raised alarms for Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor who follows Twitter closely. In 2017, a Twitter customer support worker deactivated then-President Donald Trump’s account for a few minutes during their last day on the job. While the account was restored quickly, Grygiel said, the incident showed how vulnerable Twitter was when it comes to governments, heads of state and military branches that use the platform.

“Am I surprised and shocked by the whistleblower’s allegations? I’m not,” said Trav Robertson, chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, which uses Twitter to communicate with about 18,700 followers. But he argues that it’s especially important for people not to assume that “the constant attacks on our emails, our databases, our Twitter accounts, our Facebooks” are the new normal. “When we become desensitized to it, we fail to be proactive,” he said.

At the City of Denver’s fire department, public information officer JD Chism acknowledges concern over security issues. But the department has to weight that risk against the way Twitter has become integral to communicating emergencies to the public. The department’s Twitter feed hosts real-time updates on fires and consequent road closures and injuries, alongside retweets from other agencies warning of dangers such as flash floods.

For now, the department will keep using Twitter as it always has, Chism said, “It’s good for taking care of people, and that’s what we are here for.”

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Associated Press Writers Krutika Pathi in New Delhi; Jesse Bedayn in Denver; Jennifer Peltz in New York; James Pollard in South Carolina; Zen Soo in Hong Kong; Margaret Stafford in Kansas City; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama; Amy Taxin in Orange County, California; Rebecca Santana in New Orleans; Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee; and Michael Goldberg in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed to this story.

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By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Sunday that she was very worried that the Federal Reserve was going to tip the nation’s economy into recession and that interest rate hikes would put people out of work.

“Do you know what’s worse than high prices and a strong economy? It’s high prices and millions of people out of work. I am very worried that the Fed is going to tip this economy into recession,” Warren told CNN on Sunday.

The U.S. central bank’s chief, Jerome Powell, warned on Friday that Americans were headed for a painful period of slow economic growth and possibly rising joblessness as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to fight high inflation.

Powell said in a speech on Friday the Fed will raise rates as high as needed, and would keep them there “for some time” to bring down inflation that is running at more than three times the Fed’s 2% goal.

“While higher interest rates, slower growth, and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses. These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain,” Powell had said in his speech.

“What he calls ‘some pain’ means putting people out of work, shutting down small business because the cost of money goes up because the interest rates go up,” said Warren, whose views on the economy are often influential among progressive Democrats.

Warren said inflation was high partly due to supply chain problems, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine.

“There is nothing in raising the interest rates, nothing in Jerome Powell’s tool bag, that deals directly with those and he has admitted as much in congressional hearings,” Warren said.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Alistair Bell)

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ROME (AP) — Italian authorities scrambled on Sunday to relieve overcrowding in shelters after scores of boats carrying a total of about 1,000 migrants reached Italy’s southern shores and two of its tiny islands over the weekend.

Nearly 50 boats arrived between Friday night and Saturday on Lampedusa island off Sicily, according to state radio and other Italian media. Other boats carrying migrants reached Pantelleria, another tiny island favored by vacationers.

Hundreds of migrants stepped ashore from the virtual flotilla of smugglers’ vessels on those islands. Several of the vessels launched by migrant smugglers held as few as eight passengers. But others had around 100 passengers aboard, many of them from Tunisia, according to the reports.

Other boats reached the shores of the Italian mainland on Saturday, either unaided or assisted by Italian coast guard vessels.

The Italian news agency ANSA said that 92 migrants, most of them from Afghanistan, reached Puglia — the “heel” of the boot-shaped peninsula — in a sailboat on Saturday. Still other migrants sailed to Calabria in the “toe” of the peninsula, while other boats reached Sicily and Sardinia, Italy’s two biggest islands, in the last two days.

On Sardinia, Carabinieri paramilitary police spotted 29 migrants walking along a road, ANSA said.

The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders tweeted that one of its rescue ships, Geo Barents, saved 25 migrants, including five minors, from a small boat in distress in international waters near Libya on Saturday night. Geo Barents already had other migrants abroad plucked to safety in other rescue operations, the group said.

With the disembarkation of hundreds of migrants from boats in the last days, the residence temporarily housing rescued migrants on Lampedusa quickly became overcrowded. Corriere della Sera said the residence housed 1,500 asylum-seekers, nearly four times its capacity.

Interior ministry authorities arranged for a commercial passenger ferry to sail from Sicily to Lampedusa, where it was expected to arrive on Sunday night, embark 250 migrants and take them to Sicilian migrant residences to lessen crowding on the tiny island’s facility.

While hundreds of thousands of migrants have set sail from Libyan shores aboard smugglers’ boats in the last decades, many also set out from Tunisia.

Italian media noted the Tunisian coast guard had thwarted at least a score of attempts by vessels filled with migrants to head toward Italy and rescued many others from boats in distress on Friday and Saturday.

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Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

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PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Diesel and heating oil supplies in the Northeast are more than 50% below the recent average, raising concerns that an extreme weather event could cause supply disruptions, federal officials said.

Fuel supplies are lower than normal across the country for a variety of reasons, including the war in Ukraine. But it’s the worst in the Northeast.

Diesel fuel and heating oil, which comprise the distillate category, are 63% below the five-year average in New England and 58% below the same average from Maryland to New York, according to a survey by the Department of Energy. Gasoline inventories are not as bad, but are still at their lowest levels in nearly a decade along the entire East Coast, the agency said.

The Northeast is heavily dependent on heating oil to keep homes warm in the winter, while other regions rely more on natural gas and electricity. Also, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has projected an active hurricane season, and a powerful weather event could cause disruptions, since most fuel consumed from the Middle Atlantic states to Maine comes from Gulf Coast refineries, energy officials say.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is convening a meeting of New England governors and their energy directors after Labor Day to discuss the situation. In the meantime, she has urged governors in a letter to take whatever steps they can to shore up fuel supplies in coming weeks to prevent any problems.

The Energy Department also sent letters to seven major oil companies, asking them to hold onto their stocks to help offset low stocks.

The federal agency has been monitoring the problem and is attempting to be proactive with outreach. But there’s little incentive for buyers to stock up on high-priced fuel for storage because it is anticipated that prices will drop, said Michael Ferrante, of the Massachusetts Energy Marketers Association.

The fuel inventory concerns come against a backdrop of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine further shaking up an energy supply chain that was seeking to catch up with growing demand. The war is causing worries about the adequacy of energy supplies around the world.

In New England, the immediate concern in the late summer is diesel fuel, but the winter heating season looms not far behind.

Heating oil disruptions would hit the region hard because the percentage of homes that rely on it range from 24% in Massachusetts to more than 60% in Maine, the most heavily dependent states.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, has urged the Energy Department to expedite its meeting with governors to talk about maintaining a stable heating oil supply.

Maine is “distinctly vulnerable to the increased prices and volatility the global fossil fuel market is now experiencing due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” said Anthony Ronzio, a spokesperson for the Mills administration.

Despite the concern, wholesale suppliers and retailers are working well together, and Ferrante said he anticipates inventories will increase in September and October, easing the immediate concerns.

He said he is optimistic that there will be an ample supply of heating oil.

“Suppliers and retail delivery companies are concerned about prices and inventory, but there’s not any alarm bell being rung at this time,” he said. “I don’t see a crisis at this point.”

The Energy Department created a heating oil reserve that holds 1 million barrels in terminals in the Northeast. Those could be tapped in an emergency.

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Follow David Sharp on Twitter @David_Sharp_AP

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By Tatiana Bautzer and Aluisio Alves

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – A new law allowing soccer clubs in Brazil to seek outside investment is attracting hundreds of millions of dollars to a country renowned as football’s biggest source of talent, a change that could see Brazilian teams rival Europe’s top tier.

The surge of fresh, mostly foreign, cash coincides with an agreement last May by Brazil’s largest clubs to create a league modeled on Britain’s Premier League that will centralize talks to sell transmission rights and marketing contracts.

Together, the recent developments have spawned a funding bonanza for the Brazilian teams, which have long been fan-owned operations closed to outside investors.

That may allow Brazil – the world’s largest exporter of footballers – to keep its best players in the country longer and charge higher fees for talent that does move overseas.

The biggest deal in the works is for a 51% stake in Brazilian league champion Atletico Mineiro, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who said the club had met with dozens of investors. The deal could fetch 1 billion reais ($200 million), one of the people said.

The people requested anonymity to disclose private discussions. The club did not respond to a request for comment.

Guilherme Avila, sports investment banking partner at XP, a Brazilian broker, predicted that at least 10 fan-owned Brazilian soccer clubs will become investor-owned companies over the next two years.

In December, the sale of second-division club Cruzeiro to retired Real Madrid and Brazil striker Ronaldo became the first deal to take advantage of the law, approved roughly a year ago.

Deal for Rio de Janeiro’s cash-strapped Botafogo followed earlier this year. Its crosstown rival Vasco da Gama was sold this month.

Next in line is second-division Esporte Clube Bahia’s possible sale to City Football Group, an Abu Dhabi company with investments in Manchester City and 10 other football clubs.

Bahia’s ongoing negotiations with City Football Group were first announced by the Brazilian club’s president, Guilherme Bellintani, earlier this year. Bellintani told Brazilian media the deal’s value is 650 million reais ($126.4 million).

City Football Group declined to comment on the Bahia deal. Bahia did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

TV RIGHTS WINDFALL

As for lucrative TV rights, talks are expected to start next year about 2025 and beyond.

Brazilian network TV Globo bought exclusivity from the clubs through 2024 for the national soccer championship and many regional tournaments. But going forward, the league will divide the rights – as the leagues in England, Italy, Spain and Germany do – into packages for which different groups may bid, including Globo but also other local and international media companies that show interest.

Last year, clubs in Brazil’s first division received 3.5 billion reais ($687 million) in transmission rights, mainly from Globo, with a part from Amazon Prime.

By contrast, England’s Premier League, which has the world’s top soccer transmission rights revenues, got $3.9 billion in the 2021 from broadcasters including Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon.com Inc’s Prime Video.

In a glimmer of things to come, the rights for the regional championship in Sao Paulo, long held exclusively by Globo, was last year split for the first time between local broadcaster Record and also YouTube, with a slice of pay-per-view games going to HBO Max/TNT Sports as well as Globo. The new model raised revenues by 30%.

ATLETICO LOOKS OVERSEAS

Atletico Mineiro is being advised by investment bank BTG Pactual. The club reached out to City Football as a potential suitor, but the group was not interested in the deal, one of the sources said.

Rafael Menin, scion of the family that controls Brazilian homebuilder MRV and one of four businessmen who have lent the team some 500 million reais in recent years, told Reuters the club prefers an international investor “with experience or ownership of a large European soccer club”. He declined to comment on the potential price.

Rio de Janeiro’s 120-year-old Fluminense has also hired BTG to help it look for investors, but three people with knowledge of the matter that spoke with Reuters expect the club to fetch less than Atletico given its weaker finances. Fluminense did not respond to a request for comment.

Three bankers said the largest clubs, including Corinthians and Palmeiras, may be candidates for initial public offerings. Some clubs with healthy balance sheets may be against selling their control to one investor and would prefer a more diverse shareholder base, according to the bankers.

“Depending on the financials, listing may make more sense than a private deal”, said BTG head of M&A Bruno Amaral.

Corinthians and Palmeiras did not immediately respond to requests for comment on their potential for an IPO.

Soccer club listings elsewhere have had a mixed history, with the world’s largest listed club Manchester United having chronically underperformed the S&P index. United made headlines last week when billionaire Elon Musk said in jest that he was buying the famed team, sparking takeover speculation.

NEW SOCCER LEAGUE

Libra, as the new Brazilian league is known, has 13 clubs including Flamengo, Corinthians, Palmeiras, Sao Paulo and Santos. A second group, comprised of 25 teams, is in public talks to join Libra.

“A professional league may completely change Brazilian soccer” said Alessandro Farkuh, sports and media banker at BTG, which is advising the new league. A professional negotiation of rights may drastically increase revenues for clubs, he said.

Brazilian clubs get just 1% of their revenues from international transmission rights, whereas the Premier League gets 48% and Spain’s La Liga gets 44%.

XP analysts, in a June report about the soccer business, forecast that Brazilian clubs could reap 200 million reais ($39 million) from international rights in the first year, still amounting to less than 5% of their total revenues.

The new scenario may lead Brazilian soccer to $5 billion annual revenue, said KPMG sports and media leader, Francisco Clemente, up from $1.3 billion last year. The firm is advising Vasco da Gama and Corinthians, Brazil’s second-largest club by number of fans.

“If Brazilian soccer gets the same GDP share as Spanish and British soccer, annual revenues could quadruple”, he said.

This could also reverse the recent trend of Brazilian players being sold to European clubs before they reach peak potential, analysts say. The average transfer value in Brazil fell to 12.9 million euros last year from 19.2 million euros in 2018, according to XP.

The average Brazilian transaction is just a third of the 35.7 million euros average Spanish transfer deal.

With larger revenues, Brazilian clubs may afford to take time for the development of exceptional players, instead of using transfers as recurring revenue, XP’s Avila said. This could result in larger average transfer values in the future.

“With higher revenues, Brazilian clubs will be able to keep the top talent playing longer in the country”, Avila said.

(The story corrects 32nd paragraph to clarify KPMG is advising Vasco da Gama, not Atletico)

(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Aluisio Alves; Editing by Christian Plumb and Frank Jack Daniel)

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — As hopes faded of rescuing 10 men trapped in a flooded Mexican coal mine, evidence mounted that the current administration’s populist policies have driven the revival of the dangerous, primitive mines that continue claiming lives.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador enacted a plan two years ago to revive coal-fired power plants in northern Mexico and give preference to buying coal from the smallest mines. The purchases were part of the president’s policies to give more income to the poorest Mexicans.

In doing so, the administration resuscitated a form of coal mining so dangerous that lawmakers in both houses of Mexico’s Congress had tried to ban it a decade ago.

Experts say that mines so narrow and primitive that only one miner at a time can be lowered into a narrow shaft — and only one bucket of coal extracted — are inherently unsafe. At some pits, known as “pocitos,” or “little wells,” air is pumped in and water pumped out through plastic hoses. Some don’t even have that. There are usually no safety exits or auxiliary shafts.

Fifteen men were working inside the Pinabete mine in Sabinas, Coahuila, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas, on Aug. 3. A wall of water from an abandoned mine next door — and possibly wastewater pumped in from a nearby town — filled the single shaft about 40 meters (yards) deep. It blew out so many wooden supports that they have formed floating barriers to rescue crews.

Five workers managed to escape as the mine flooded, but there has been no contact with the rest.

Promoting coal is part of López Obrador’s effort to shore up the state-owned power utility, the Federal Electricity Commission, headed by old-guard politician Manuel Bartlett. Not only was the policy questioned by environmentalists; many also said it endangered miners.

“Manuel Bartlett’s brilliant idea of buying more coal from the smallest producers, and less from big producers, gave rise to a black market that wound up in the exploitation of mines that lack the safeguards needed to protect the lives of the workers,” Miguel Riquelme, the governor of Coahuila state and member of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, said after the accident.

The government utility had defended its decision to buy about two-thirds of coal for power generation from small mines.

“We had to have the mindset of favoring the smallest (producers) because we had to make their economic conditions more equal,” Miguel Alejandro López, the subdirector of purchasing for the company, said in July, describing the orders he got under López Obrador. “Because as he (the president) has said, one of this country’s main failings is inequality.”

López said small mine owners were required to submit proof they complied with labor laws, which in Mexico govern mine safety.

But even the president acknowledged that the Pinabete mine had not complied with the few existing safety and labor standards.

Accidents at small coal mines have been depressingly frequent.

In June 2021, seven miners were killed at a similar small mine in Muzquiz township, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of Eagle Pass, Texas. The shaft at the Micarán mine also flooded and partially collapsed, and it took days to recover the miners’ bodies.

The operations resemble wildcat mines from the U.S. Old West: Horizontal coal faces spread out from the bottom of the shaft and are shored up with wooden poles.

At some mines, the pit-head winches used to extract miners and coal are run off old car engines placed on blocks.

Lawmakers already knew the dangers of the narrow, unreinforced vertical shafts; explosive gas accumulations and flooding risks are common.

As far back as 2012, Mexican legislators tried to pass laws to do away with such primitive mines. The 2006 tragedy in the nearby Pasta de Conchos mine, where 65 miners died after a gas build-up caused a fire and explosion, was still fresh in their minds. That was a larger mine where gas monitoring proved to be insufficient.

A 2012 Senate bill proposed “the outright ban on vertical coal mines, also known as ‘pocitos,’ because that is where the greatest risks occur.”

In 2013, a bill in the lower house stated, “Coal mining activities have generalized risks, because their techniques are artisanal and rudimentary … Risky mining practices must be minimized or eliminated.”

It is unclear why those laws were never passed.

Mine safety activist Cristina Auerbach noted that coal is politically sensitive in Coahuila, especially among the impoverished communities that once made a living from it.

“Coal is a political issue in Coahuila, not an economic one,” said Auerbach.

She said that from 2006 through last year at least 80 miners had died in accidents in Coahuila. “The smallest businesses in the coal region are the most precarious, like Pinabete,” she said.

But small-scale coal mining appeared to be dying out in Coahuila until López Obrador directed the Federal Electricity Commission to ramp up purchases.

“The region was revived with the new purchase orders from the federal commission,” said Diego Martínez, a professor of applied earth sciences at the Autonomous University of Coahuila.

López Obrador wanted to eliminate subterfuge and corruption in coal purchases, but apparently failed at that; one man was arrested in connection with the Pinabete mine accident after it was found that the mine was apparently registered under different names or titles on purchase contracts and in labor department records.

No one has been sentenced for the 2006 deaths at the Pasta de Conchos mine.

It is not the first time that Coahuila coal mines have been accused of illegal practices; miners make as little as $200 per week, and even when the few government inspectors have found violations, it has been hard to shut them down.

López Obrador said that the Pinabete mine contract with the Electricity Commission said explicitly it could not be subcontracted, but apparently was anyway.

Auerbach, the mine safety activist, said that hundreds of “high risk” small mines continue operating.

“That’s why we’re asking that all of the coal concessions granted in high risk areas be cancelled, because (miners) are always going to die,” she said.

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By Aditi Shah

GANDHINAGAR, India (Reuters) -Suzuki Motor Corp will set up a global research and development company in India, its president said on Sunday, pushing deeper into a market that is set to become an electric vehicle (EV) hub for the Japanese carmaker.

The new company, a wholly owned unit of Suzuki Japan, will strengthen the carmaker’s R&D competitiveness and capabilities in India and other global markets, Toshihiro Suzuki told an event in Gandhinagar, the capital of western Gujarat state.

“India has become one of the most important countries for Suzuki Group,” he said, adding that Suzuki would keep investing heavily in the country.

Suzuki, which already builds combustion engine cars in India for its local unit Maruti Suzuki and for export, will in 2025 start producing EVs at its factory in Gujarat. It is also setting up a separate plant in the state to build batteries for EVs starting 2026.

The Japanese carmaker has said it will spend more than 104 billion rupees ($1.3 billion) on its electrification plans in India, making it one of Suzuki’s biggest battery and EV investments globally. It has already invested 650 billion rupees in the country.

“India plays a significant role as a global automobile production hub in Suzuki Group,” Suzuki said.

Suzuki also has a joint venture with Japan’s Denso Corp and Toshiba Corp to build lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars for local use and exports.

Suzuki is the majority-owner of Maruti, which dominates India’s car market with its small, low-cost vehicles. But the company faces growing competition as buyers shift to bigger cars such as sports-utility vehicles (SUVs) and regulators demand safer and greener cars, increasing costs.

India is also pushing carmakers to build more electric cars by offering companies billions of dollars in incentives.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said EVs are starting “a silent revolution in the country” and that his government was acting to boost demand and supply of these clean vehicles.

“This silent revolution is set to bring major changes,” he told Sunday’s event, which marked 40 years of Suzuki’s partnership with Maruti.

Modi laid the foundation stones of two major projects – Suzuki’s EV battery manufacturing facility in Gujarat and Maruti’s car-making facility in the northern state of Haryana.

Electrification is seen as a challenge for Maruti that wants New Delhi to incentivise all cleaner technologies, including hybrid and ethanol, and not just EVs, which it expects to launch only in 2025.

($1 = 79.9610 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Aditi Shah in Gandhinagar, India; Additional reporting by Abhirup Roy; Editing by Alex Richardson, Hugh Lawson and Barbara Lewis)

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OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s Equinor is considering selling a 28% stake in Statfjord field, which straddles the Norwegian and British continental shelves, alongside minority stakes in several satellite fields, a presentation seen by Reuters showed.

The company has hired U.S. investment bank Houlihan Lokey to advise on the sale, which could fetch up to $500 million, a source familiar with the sale told Reuters.

Equinor also plans to sell minority stakes in the connected fields Statfjord North, Statfjord East and Sygna, the presentation showed.

Statfjord has been producing oil and gas for more than 40 years and by the end of 2021 still had 107 million barrels of oil equivalent left, about half of which are gas reserves.

In 2020, Equinor decided to extend the field’s lifetime towards 2040, with a planned decommissioning of Statfjord A platform postponed until 2027. Platforms Statfjord B and C are expected to operate beyond 2035.

Statfjord produced 38,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) in 2021, with gas accounting for more than a third, according to data from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate.

Stafjord North, Stafjord East and Sygna produced a total of nearly 16,000 boepd of mainly oil the same year.

Oil from Statfjord is exported via shuttle tankers, while gas is piped to the St Fergus terminal in Britain.

Equinor, which is expected to remain a stakeholder in the fields after any sales, now holds 78.6% of Statfjord, 45% of Statfjord North, 43.3% of Statfjord East and 43.4% of Sygna.

Equinor and Houlihan Lokey were not immediately available for comment outside normal working hours.

(Reporting by Ron Bousso and Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by Nora Buli and Edmund Blair)

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(Reuters) – Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook has in-principle agreed to settle a lawsuit in the San Francisco federal court seeking damages for letting third parties including Cambridge Analytica access the private data of users, a court filing showed.

The financial terms were not disclosed in the filing on Friday that asked the judge to put the class action on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalize a written settlement.

The four-year-old lawsuit alleged that Facebook violated consumer privacy laws by sharing personal data of users with third parties such as the now-defunct British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook has said its privacy practices are consistent with its disclosures and “do not support any legal claims”.

Facebook and its lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding the settlement.

Of the two law firms representing the plaintiffs, Keller Rohrback did not comment while Bleichmar Fonti & Auld declined to comment.

(Reporting by Eva Mathews and Praveen Paramasivam in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

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