California utility PG&E to pay $13.5 billion to settle claims from wildfire victims - CNN

The agreement still has to be approved by a bankruptcy court. PG&E has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allows for restructuring.

The claims stem from the 2015 Butte Fire, the 2017 Northern California fires, the 2018 Camp Fire, as well as the fire at Oakland's Ghost Ship warehouse in 2016.

"From the beginning of the Chapter 11 process, getting wildfire victims fairly compensated, especially the individuals, has been our primary goal," CEO and PG&E President Bill Johnson said. "We want to help our customers, our neighbors and our friends in those impacted areas recover and rebuild after these tragic wildfires."

PG&E has previously settled claims with insurance companies for $11 billion and local governments for $1 billion.

Equipment linked to deadly fires

The company has been criticized for the role its equipment has played in the outbreak of numerous fires in California, among them the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history.

An investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission's Safety and Enforcement Division (SED) concluded that the company's equipment helped lead to last November's Camp Fire, which killed 85 people.

The report pointed specifically to inadequate maintenance and inspection of transmission line towers. PG&E conceded that a part separated from a transmission-line tower, likely starting the fire in dry vegetation near the town of Pulga. Inspections would have identified wear that would have warranted a close climbing inspection, the report said, but PG&E's records do not show a climbing inspection of that tower in at least 17 years.

"We remain deeply sorry about the role our equipment had in this tragedy, and we apologize to all those impacted by the devastating Camp Fire," the company said in a statement responding to the report. "PG&E's most important responsibility must always be public and employee safety, and we remain focused on helping affected communities recover and rebuild, resolving wildfire victims' claims fairly and expeditiously, and further reducing wildfire risks."

Recently, PG&E has tried to avoid causing fires by cutting power to its customers during particularly dry and windy periods.

Fires push company to bankruptcy

PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January to shed some of its debt and pay for damages and stay in business. The company cited at least $7 billion in claims from the Camp Fire.

If the utility does not pull itself out of bankruptcy, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state would take over.

"PG&E as we know it may or may not be able to figure this out. If they cannot, we are not going to sit around and be passive," Newsom said. "If Pacific Gas and Electric is unable to secure its own fate and future ... then the state will prepare itself as backup for a scenario where we do that job for them."

Newsom said that his office aims to get the company out of bankruptcy by June 30, 2020 by first working on a plan with PG&E and other stakeholders, but added that the company could not continue without making changes to its safety culture.

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2019-12-07 06:29:00Z
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M. Annette Cox, Wife of Papa John's Founder John Schnatter, Files for Divorce - Newser

(Newser) – The "finest human being" John Schnatter says he's ever met has filed for divorce from him. The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that M. Annette Cox, 59, submitted paperwork Thursday in Kentucky to end her marriage to the 57-year-old Papa John's founder. Schnatter stepped down as CEO in early 2018, then as chairman of the board later that year after controversial comments about anthem protests in the NFL, as well as the use of a racial slur during a conference call. Per Cox's filing, the couple has been separated since April 1; Cox says their marriage is "irretrievably broken."

Based on the court document, it seems like the two, who were married for 32 years, already had a settlement of sorts in place, as Cox simply asked for that agreement to be entered into the official divorce decree. The couple's assets are said to include an $11 million Kentucky mansion, a $23 million ski condo in Utah, and a $6 million condo in Naples, Fla. Schnatter most recently made headlines just last month, when he claimed to have tested the current quality of Papa John's pizzas by devouring 40 of them in a month's time, per the New York Post. His verdict: "It just doesn't taste as good." The couple have two adult children, per the court filing. (Read more John Schnatter stories.)

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2019-12-06 13:38:00Z
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Jobs growth soars in November as payrolls surge by 266,000 - CNBC

The jobs market turned in a stellar performance in November, with nonfarm payrolls surging by 266,000 and the unemployment rate falling to 3.5%, according to Labor Department numbers released Friday.

Those totals easily beat the Wall Street consensus. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for solid job growth of 187,000 and saw the unemployment rate holding steady from October's 3.6%.

The jobs growth was the best since January. While hopes already were up, much of that was based on the return of GM workers following a lengthy strike. That dynamic indeed boosted employment in motor vehicles and parts by 41,300, part of an overall 54,000 gain in manufacturing.

Stock market futures surged in reaction to the better-than-expected report. Bond yields also surged.

The vehicles and parts sector had fallen by 42,800 in October. However, the job gains were spread among a multitude of sectors. Health care added 45,000 positions after contributing just 12,000 in October.

Leisure and hospitality increased by 45,000 and professional and business services rose by 31,000; the two sectors respectively are up 219,000 and 278,000 over the past 12 months. Wage gains also were a touch better than expectations.

Average hourly earnings rose by 3.1% from a year ago, while the average work week held steady at 34.4 hours.

Economists had been looking for wage gains of 3%. A separate gauge of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and the underemployed declined as well, falling to 6.9%, one-tenth of a percentage point below October.

In addition to the robust November gains, revisions brought up totals from the two previous months. September's estimate went up 13,000 to 193,000 and the initial October count increased by 28,000 to 156,000. Those changes added 41,000 to the previous tallies and brought the 2019 monthly average to 180,000, compared to 223,000 in 2018.

The U.S. economy needs to create about 107,000 jobs a month to keep the unemployment rate steady, according to calculations from the Atlanta Federal Reserve.

The unemployment rate of 3.5%, down from 3.6% in October, is back to the 2019 low and matches the lowest level of unemployment since 1969.

The news was not all good. As the holiday shopping season accelerated, retail companies added just 2,000 net hires as gains in general merchandise of 22,000 and motor vehicle and parts dealers of 8,000 were offset by an 18,000 loss in clothing and clothing accessories.

Mining also showed a loss of 7,000 positions, bringing to 19,000 the total jobs lost since May.

The strong jobs report comes amid a challenging year for the U.S. economy. Recession fears surged in late-summer amid worries that a global slowdown would spread to American shores. The back-and-forth lobbing of tariffs between the U.S. and China also raised fears of instability, and the bond market sent what has been a reliable recession indicator when short-term government yields rose above their longer-term counterparts. The Fed reacted by cutting its benchmark interest rate three times, part of what officials deemed insurance against a potential slowdown.

Those recession fears have ebbed recently, though, as consumer and business sentiment remains high, spending remains resilient and the stock market scales new highs.

The Fed meets next week, and officials have been clear that they plan no further rate changes unless conditions change significantly.

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2019-12-06 13:30:00Z
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Uber's sex assault scandal is set to wipe $1 billion from the stock (UBER) - Business Insider

Reuters

• Uber is set to lose just over $1 billion from its market cap after the ride-sharing company said that roughly 6,000 sexual assault cases took place in its cars over the last two years. 
• At 5 a.m. in New York, Uber's stock fell 2.2% in premarket trading.
• That translates to about $1.1. billion off a market cap of $48.9 billion.
• In a tweet, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: "Doing the right thing means counting, confronting, and taking action to end sexual assault."
• View Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

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Uber is set to lose just over $1 billion from its market cap after the ride-sharing company said that roughly 6,000 sexual assault cases took place in the company's cars over the last two years. 

Uber's stock fell 2.2% in premarket trading at about 5 a.m. in New York, equivalent to about $1.1. billion of its market cap from Thursday's close of $48.9 billion.

The unicorn tech firm released a report on its website on Thursday detailing the number of sexual assaults, car crashes, and murders that took place in 2017 and 2018 in the US. 

It said that during those two years 2.3 billion trips were taken in its cars over the two years and in just 2018, 58 people had been killed in car crashes, while nine were murdered.  

The number of sexual assault cases numbered 2,936 in 2017 and 3,045 in 2018 or 5981 over the two years. 

In a tweet, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: "Doing the right thing means counting, confronting, and taking action to end sexual assault. My heart is with every survivor of this all-too-pervasive crime. Our work will never be done, but we take an important step forward today." 

He added: "In the long run, we will be a better company for taking this step today — because I firmly believe that companies who are open, accountable, and unafraid are ultimately the companies that succeed. "

For more on the report click here. 

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2019-12-06 10:25:22Z
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Uber releases safety report revealing nearly 6,000 incidents of sexual assault - WJW FOX 8 News Cleveland

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

1. Uber releases safety report revealing nearly 6,000 incidents of sexual assault  WJW FOX 8 News Cleveland
2. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year  The New York Times
3. Uber's s Shares Tank As Company Reports 6,000 Sexual Assaults  Yahoo Finance
4. Uber reports 107 US deaths connected to car-hire app over two years  The Jerusalem Post
5. Uber reveals extent of sexual assault problem: thousands of abuse reports a year  NBC News
6. View full coverage on Google News

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2019-12-06 09:48:00Z
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OPEC and Russia seek to ratify deeper oil production cuts - CNBC

Energy ministers from some of the world's largest oil producers will attempt to ratify a deeper round of output cuts on Friday.

OPEC and non-OPEC partners, sometimes referred to as OPEC+, have gathered in Vienna, Austria to decide the next phase of their oil production policy.

Led by Saudi Arabia, the 14-member group agreed in principle on Thursday to cut production by an additional 500,000 barrels per day (b/d) through to the end of March 2020, according to CNBC sources. This level of output curbs is much larger than many had expected.

OPEC will now request the approval of non-OPEC allies, including Russia, in a bid to prop up oil prices.

International benchmark Brent crude traded at $63.53 on Friday morning, up around 0.2%, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) stood at $58.47, little changed from the previous session.

Oil prices have rallied in recent trading sessions, amid intensifying speculation of deeper-than-anticipated production cuts. However, Brent crude futures remain around 15% lower when compared to an April peak, with WTI down almost 12% over the same period.

"It is fair to say that this agreement has left market players with mixed feelings," Stephen Brennock, oil analyst at PVM Oil Associates, said in a research note published Friday.

"On the one hand, the extent of these extra supply curbs surprised to the upside. On the other hand, there is concern that there was no mention of an extension to cuts beyond the current March 2020 deadline."

As OPEC+ prepares to meet on Friday, sources told CNBC'S Brian Sullivan that the energy alliance still had multiple issues to resolve.

Contentious meeting

It was initially unclear whether a preliminary meeting of OPEC members had secured a deal.

The group announced it had canceled its customary press conference on Thursday, following an acrimonious meeting that ran late into the evening.

"I think it sets us up for a tough day of negotiations," Cornelia Meyer, CEO of Meyer Resources, told CNBC's Dan Murphy in Vienna on Friday.

"Now, the question is: How much OPEC (and) how much non-OPEC?" Meyer said, referring to how OPEC+ might try to split the cuts between each producer.

Saudi Arabia, which has been producing less than it agreed to, has been adamant that those overproducing — such as Iraq and Nigeria — must comply with their quota.

OPEC+ has reduced output by 1.2 million b/d since the beginning of the year. The current deal, which runs through to March 2020, replaced a previous round of production cuts that began in January 2017.

The energy alliance was prompted to act after global oil prices tumbled in mid-2014 due to an oversupply, but U.S. shale producers are not a part of the deal and shale oil supply has grown exponentially.

The U.S. is now the world's largest oil producer hitting 12.3 million b/d in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, up from 11 million b/d in 2018. It produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia now, although there are signs that production growth is slowing in the States.

Along with rampant shale supply, faltering demand due to a global economic slowdown, exacerbated by the Sino-U.S. trade war, has once again threatened to unbalance oil supply and demand dynamics.

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2019-12-06 09:19:00Z
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Uber Safety Study Finds More Than 3,000 Reports of Sexual Assaults in U.S. Rides Last Year - Gizmodo

Photo: Alastair Pike (Getty)

In addition to recent news of its bizarre issue with segregating bathrooms, Uber has long struggled with keeping its passengers safe, though we only now know the extent of the problem (in the U.S., at least) courtesy of the company’s first study on unsafe incidents involving the ridesharing service.

According to Thursday’s report, which only covered U.S. rides between 2017 and 2018, last year alone Uber received 3,045 reports of sexual assaults during trips with another nine people murdered and 58 killed in crashes. The numbers from 2017 tell a nearly identical story. Uber said it used an intentionally broad definition of sexual assault that ranges from nonconsensual kissing of any “nonsexual body part” to attempted rape and rape, with the majority of documented incidents involving unwanted touching of a “sexual body part,” i.e. a person’s mouth or genitalia.

Though previous investigations have already shed plenty of light on how pervasive reports of sexual assault and other violent acts involving the service are, Uber’s transparency marks some of the first official numbers on the subject, as no police department or government body currently tracks crimes specifically related to ridesharing services. Competitors like Lyft haven’t shared comparable figures either.

“We don’t believe corporate secrecy will make anyone safer,” Uber states in the report’s executive summary.

In reminders diligently peppered throughout the study, the company reiterates that these incidents represent a small fraction of the total 2.3 billion Uber rides completed in the U.S. during that same period, and that of the nearly 4 million trips taken every day using the service, 99.9 percent end with no reported safety incidents.

Even still, Uber’s chief legal officer and a leading force behind the report, Tony West, called the findings “jarring and hard to digest” in an interview with the New York Times. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also expressed his sentiments on Twitter for the victims of these thousands of documented incidents.

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“My heart is with every survivor of this all-too-pervasive crime. Our work will never be done, but we take an important step forward today,” he tweeted Thursday.

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And apparently people booking a ride aren’t the only ones at risk. “Drivers are victims, too,” the company wrote in its executive summary. While 92 percent of reported rape victims were passengers, drivers and riders both reported other types of sexual assaults such as unwanted kissing and touching at similar rates, Uber said. And of the 19 murders Uber documented during that two-year period, seven of the victims were drivers while eight were passengers (the company refers to the remaining four as “third-parties” such as nearby bystanders).

With this report (and a promise to keep releasing these stats every two years from now on), Uber appears to be making good on last year’s promise that the company’s “getting serious about safety”. Since then, Uber’s implemented several new security features such as an in-app emergency button that silently shares your location and trip details with 911, an option to share your ride information with a trusted third-party so they can know you’ve arrived safely, and an ID check feature that makes drivers prove with a selfie that they are who their account says they are. The company’s also purportedly tripled the size of its safety team to 300 employees since 2017, which I can assume was in part made possible by its several recent rounds of lay-offs that gutted other departments such as marketing and engineering.

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Uber’s also apparently been beefing up its screening requirements for who’s allowed to drive for the company in the first place. According to Uber, more than 40,000 drivers have been kicked from the service after it implemented a system that continuously screens drivers for any possible recent criminal offenses. Uber’s background checks disqualify anyone with a felony conviction in the last seven years, though in the case of certain violent felonies like sexual assault, kidnapping, and murder, there’s no such time period limit. During the two-year period studied in Uber’s safety report, the company said its screening process filtered out more than a million prospective drivers who failed to pass these checks.

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Along with today’s report, the company noted its currently researching ways to create a black-list of banned drivers in addition to several other new safety measures planned for 2020. According to the Times’ report, West also said Uber plans to share information with competing ridesharing companies about possibly dangerous drivers that passengers have reported, though he didn’t go into detail.

Admittedly, the bar is ridiculously low for any safety features Uber comes up with. After all, this is the company that marketed a phony “Safe Rides Fee” to scam passengers out of billions. All Uber has to do is avoid shamelessly profiting off its shady reputation.

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2019-12-06 07:10:54Z
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