Corruption Ledger

LONDON – Airbus set a sales record in 2023 by racking up more than 2,000 net orders, as airlines splashed out on purchases amid surging demand for fuel-efficient aircraft following the Covid-19 pandemic. The European plane-maker registered 2,094 net orders, driven largely by mega deals from India’s IndiGo and Air India, as well as a purchase by Turkish Airlines that was announced in December 2023. Airbus also beat its annual delivery target in 2023 by achieving 735 handovers. The goal…

WASHINGTON – Huawei Technologies, the Chinese wireless equipment maker that spent tens of millions of dollars trying to win over US policymakers only to eventually be blacklisted, has shuttered its in-house lobbying operations in Washington. Huawei’s last two registered lobbyists there – Jeff Hogg and Donald Morrissey – left in recent months, Bloomberg News found. Huawei filed its own notice that it was terminating lobbying efforts at the Capitol.  The lobbyists’ recent departures follow an exodus of staff from Huawei’s…

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Today Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo called for a “halt to the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” in a press release and X thread. In a statement posted on X, Ladapo wrote, “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have always played it fast and loose with COVID-19 safety, but their failure to test for DNA integration with the human genome – as their own guidelines dictate – when…

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manipulating science to favor specific commercial interests. Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact. The Unmaking of Science The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette…

Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday. In one of the first of several teams of science agencies to calculate how off-the-charts warm 2023 was, the European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in…

A mid-air blowout aboard a Boeing 737-9 MAX passenger plane has led to dozens of aircraft worldwide being grounded while engineers try to establish what went wrong. Six people aboard Alaska Airlines flight 1282 from Portland to California were injured after a window and chunk of fuselage blew out of the plane in mid-air shortly after takeoff on 5 January. Questions around the safety of the jets are swirling and various airlines have come out with statements saying what actions…

Bottled water has been found to contain hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic particles, the vast majority of which are nanoplastics (<1μm in length), according to new research. Nanoplastics are thought to be more toxic to humans because their small size means they can pass more easily from the gut into the body than microplastics (1μm to 5mm in length). However, there is a gap in understanding the effects of these tiny particles on organisms due to the challenges associated…

NEW DELHI: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 made an emergency landing as a part of the plane flew off mid-flight going from Portland, Oregon to Ontario, California on January 5, causing panic and worldwide concerns on flight safety. Following the incident, aviation authorities and airline companies are conducting checks on their own planes to prevent any more potential disasters.An investigation has been launched to determine the cause of the incident. Here’s what we know so far about the investigation: Alaska Airlines…

Canada, Britain, Sweden and Ukraine on Monday formally complained to the U.N. aviation council in their bid to hold Iran accountable for the downing of a Ukrainian passenger airliner in January 2020 that killed 176 people, they said on Monday. Most of the dead were citizens from the four nations, which created a coordination group that seeks to hold Iran to account. “Today we have jointly initiated dispute-settlement proceedings before the International Civil Aviation Organization against the Islamic Republic of…

Not for the first time, Boeing is again the subject of unwanted attention from regulators and customers over safety issues. The shocking scenes on Friday night, in which a Boeing 737 MAX 9 operated by Alaska Airlines suffered a mid-air blow-out, has again raised questions over the safety of the jet. Boeing shares fell by 8% in pre-market trading today while shares of Spirit AeroSystems, which made and installed the fuselage part on the jet, were down by as much…

ALBANY – Alphabet’s Google violated US labour law by refusing to bargain with a union representing contract workers for YouTube Music, a federal agency has ruled. The National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) in a decision on Jan 3 rejected claims by Google, which owns YouTube, that it should not be considered the employer of workers provided by staffing firm Cognizant Technology Solutions. The group of YouTube Music content operation workers voted 41-0 in April 2023 to join the Alphabet Workers…

A Marine veteran held hostage in Iran for more than four years has filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Justice after FBI allegations reversed a decision that had awarded him $20 million from a fund for victims of state-sponsored terrorism. Attorneys for Amir Hekmati filed the federal civil lawsuit on Dec. 19. They claimed that Hekmati has been denied his due process rights to counter claims made by the FBI and they challenged the decision of the special…

Court documents related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein are expected to be released soon with many names that were previously redacted, and prominent figures on the right are holding up the impending disclosures as evidence of wrongdoing by Democrats despite a lack of concrete information about what they will show. Most of the names being made public – currently cited as John Does – have previously been identified in other court documents or in news reports as having been associated…

HONG KONG – ByteDance’s TikTok aims to grow the size of its US e-commerce business tenfold to as much as US$17.5 billion (S$23.3 billion) in 2024, according to people familiar with the matter, posing a bigger threat to Amazon.com. The 2024 merchandise volume goal for the US version of TikTok Shop – which melds online entertainment with impulse buying – was discussed in internal meetings in recent weeks and may still change depending on how the business goes, said the…

Adult media giant Aylo has blocked access to many of its websites, including PornHub, to visitors from Montana and North Caroline as new age verifications laws go into effect. This move also impacts other adult sites owned by the company, including Tube8, RedTube, and Brazzers. As of January 1st, new age verification laws went into effect in Montana and North Carolina that require adult websites to verify the age of visitors from those states.  Under these new laws, failure to…

NEW YORK – Mr Nikesh Arora has repeatedly succeeded in winning big pay cheques. At Google, he became the firm’s highest-paid executive after getting a compensation package worth about US$51 million in 2012, and collected stock awards worth at least US$200 million by the time he left. Poached in 2014 by SoftBank Group’s Mr Masayoshi Son – and touted as the legendary investor’s likely successor – he amassed a US$135 million first-year compensation package that broke Japanese records and made…