A financial mismanagement scandal has hit the sport of Ice Hockey in Australia, and its President has stepped down in disgrace. Sandi Logan with the story.
Ice Hockey is not a major sport in Australia, or anywhere else in the southern hemisphere. In Northern and Eastern Europe, Russia and North America, however, it has a huge following as a professional (and Olympic) sport. But now the game of heavy padding, squared off sticks, and flat pucks is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
In what has come as no surprise to many in Australia’s small and disparate (some say desperate) ice hockey community, president, Dr Ryan O’Handley, has stepped down in disgrace, admitting to understating financial losses at Ice Hockey Australia (IHA).
Indications are his board’s underreporting runs into at least six figures – maybe much more.
“Recognising the inconsistencies from the past reporting period, Dr O’Handley will step down as President and Chair of the Board,” newly appointed president Tim Kitching said in a 9 September statement posted to IHA’s website. “Last financial year’s reported losses are expected to be larger than initially stated.”
Kitching said there were no indications yet of potential fraud or misappropriation, but he has ordered “a thorough investigation and review” into the organisation’s finances with a two-week deadline.
He said until such time as the evidence suggests anything more than the re-issuing of an accurate financial statement, he wouldn’t speculate on any matters being referred to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and/or the Victorian Police Fraud Squad.
Skating on thin ice
In February 2022, the former treasurer of the 5000-member strong IHA, Adrian Miller was was dumped from the board in a coup.
Miller had stood up to then-Melbourne fraudster Grove Bennett, who O’Handley backed into the role as president at the same time. Canadian creditors were chasing the Australian fugitive for over $1M in unpaid debts as he made his run for the presidency of the IHA board.
“When I was deposed, IHA’s members were left with $1.9m in cash reserves, and that’s now down to $328,000 if the accounts submitted are to be believed – which IHA has admitted they cannot be,” says Miller.
Ice hockey has been played in Australia since 1906, and is one of the International Ice Hockey Federation’s oldest members. It has attracted a cohort of questionable characters to staff its board.
IHA operates under the Corporations Act 2001 as a company limited by guarantee.
Members’ annual dues are essentially its sole income. The only time in recent years the IHA has secured taxpayer (Commonwealth) funding was when the Department of Social Services allocated $342,000 in 2022 for the sport’s fledgling para (or sled) hockey program. Both the men’s and women’s para teams travel overseas, competing in events where they are regularly humiliated by far stronger and more experienced opposition. Scores of 40-0 are not uncommon.
No financial records have ever been published on IHA’s website or released to its membership about this program. “If I were still on the IHA board,” says Miller, “I’d be shoring up my own case against an accusation of impropriety.”
Poor reporting and governance
A respected Victorian businessman (who asked to remain nameless) with a strong community sports background said: “I’m amazed at the continual incompetence being overlooked or accepted by the membership-paying people. Unjustifiable spending seems to go unnoticed or not challenged.”
Kitching, a former NSW police officer and detective, who transitioned into roles in risk management, governance and more recently as an Executive Coach, was appointed to the IHA board in July; weeks later, he has been catapulted into the president’s chair.
“Dr O’Handley stepped down at a Board meeting on September 5,” Kitching told me. “I am not privy to any conversation/s prior to July with the ex-president or treasurer, and would be cautious to speculate as such.”
Those familiar with that 5 September meeting describe it as tense and at times confrontational. O’Handley was queried about a lack of supporting evidence for IHA expenditure. He allegedly said it was not necessary to share that with the eight member associations, let alone the broader membership. Several board members stood up to O’Handley, demanding transparency and accountability, at which point O’Handley threw in the towel.
Kitching told MWM,
In short, this is an issue of poor governance, poor communication and poor financial control.
“I need time to speak with all my fellow directors to establish the best way forward. We cannot simply operate on a break-even basis year in and year out.”
“Ice Hockey Australia is committed to sharing the updated financial position for FY25 with our key stakeholders, and if the regulation requires, an amended statement to ASIC or any other body. The loss relates to growing costs and over-investment with national teams and leagues, a reduction in key income streams, and complications with the timing of funding.”
“Ice Hockey Australia does not believe there’s been any impropriety, and are committed to a full, transparent, and thorough review as we seek to establish the best governance standards in sport. We will be transparent with our member associations regarding the outcome.”
Another former president of Ice Hockey Australia and veteran company director, Sydney-based Miranda Ransome, says, “I don’t think member associations are all that engaged, so they probably have no idea about the business of IHA and what the pertinent issues may be.
“In most instances, they are struggling to do their jobs at a state level. Clearly, it was a disengaged board that didn’t understand its fiduciary duties,” she said.
Herein lies the great challenge for IHA: its constitution assigns control to its eight member associations, a small pool of electors easy to control and corral into a voting bloc. There has long been a call to adopt an election model in which 5,000 members vote directly for board members to manage and operate IHA.
Three days after the Mountain Fire tore through the hillsides of Camarillo in Southern California last November, Craig Crosby was at home assessing the damage when he spotted two men canvassing the neighborhood. Crosby’s house was still standing, but the blaze had burned down the northwest corner of the structure and his avocado orchard. Every surface was covered in ash and soot. The windows had melted, the doors were scorched, and everything reeked of smoke.
The men eventually made it to his doorstep and introduced themselves as franchise employees of the national restoration company Servpro. They told him they could help with the cleanup, and that they worked with all major insurance firms, including AAA Insurance, where he held a policy.
Crosby, who is a consumer advocate and founder of The Counterfeit Report, was wary. He told them he was not ready to authorize repairs, but that they could assess the damage. When they handed him a one-page access form, he scrawled a few amendments: his insurance adjuster’s information and a line clarifying that he only wanted “evaluation, recommendation, documentation, and inspection.”
“I like to memorialize exactly what I say,” Crosby later recalled. “And it struck me a little unusual that they didn’t have a problem with me changing a corporate form.”
An authorization form signed by Craig Crosby shows he clarified that he only wanted “evaluation, recommendation, documentation, and inspection.”
Craig Crosby / Grist
Over the next 10 days, the company sent more than a dozen workers to his house. They moved furniture, wiped the walls, and dusted surfaces. Along the way, they copied a AAA Insurance representative on emails, leading Crosby to believe that his policy would cover the work. But Crosby started to notice they were cleaning surfaces that probably needed to be ripped out and tossed. Then they began causing new problems. As they tore out insulation in the attic, they damaged HVAC pipes and vents. (An HVAC technician would later deem the system inoperable due to the damage.) They also dinged the garage door, stained carpeting, and broke an attic access door.
When Crosby called his insurance adjuster to complain about the company’s shoddy workmanship and excessive billing, he was shocked to learn that AAA had never approved the work. In fact, they told him One Silver Serve, LLC, the franchise that had approached Crosby, was on their internal blacklist. When he told the cleaning company it would cost roughly $16,000 to replace the HVAC system, they initially offered in writing to cover the cost if he signed a liability waiver. Once he did, the company reversed course. Instead of paying, its lawyer told him he owed the company more than $62,000 for their services.
Then, on Valentine’s Day, the company escalated it further. Its lawyer filed a mechanic’s lien — a legal claim against a property for unpaid work — on Crosby’s home. He couldn’t believe it. He’d never paid a credit card bill late, let alone had a lien on his property. “I pay all my bills a month in advance,” he said. “That’s how conscious I am not to jeopardize my reputation and standing.”
A sign in Altadena, California warns people whose homes burned in the Eaton Fire in January of being approached by unlicensed contractors. David McNew/Getty Images
Based in Encino, California, One Silver Serve LLC is one of Servpro’s roughly 2,300 independently owned franchises. It benefits from Servpro’s national reputation, but operates with little direct oversight from the parent company. The quality of work, billing practices, and ethical standards are entirely left to the local franchise.
About a dozen of Crosby’s neighbors had similar experiences with One Silver Serve following the Mountain Fire, according to county records and court filings. Each was approached by workers at their doorstep in the days after the fire, told insurance would cover costs, signed an authorization form, and later received exorbitant bills for cleaning. Some, like Robert Perez, a funeral director down the street, received notice of a mechanic’s lien for roughly $58,000. When Crosby, Perez, and others didn’t cough up the money, One Silver Serve sued them in the Ventura County Superior Court. Crosby’s insurance adjuster eventually declared the home a total loss from the fire — a determination that restorationprofessionalstypically identify during their initial assessment, before cleaning commenced. Crosby has since filed counterclaims for fraud, breach of contract, property damage, and elder abuse.
An attorney for One Silver Serve declined to comment. Kim Brooks, director of communications for Servpro, said the company is aware of the lawsuit against Crosby and does not comment on pending litigation.
Craig Crosby / Grist
More than a third of people impacted by a disaster report experiencing fraud, according to a survey commissioned by the American Institute of CPAs, a national organization of accountants. About 8 percent said they experienced contractor fraud, and another 10 percent reported vendor fraud, which involves improper payments to real or fictitious businesses. Post-disaster scams come in many forms. In some cases, contractors ask for money up front and then disappear. In others, they may tear down walls damaged by floodwaters or fires, collect a portion of their fees, and never return to rebuild the home. But in the case of more sophisticated actors, they use insurance companies and the legal system to put homeowners in a bind.
“Any component that involves people who have been impacted and are vulnerable, people will try to find a way to capitalize,” said Niambi Tillman, a regional director with the nonprofit National Insurance Crime Bureau. “You’ll see people price gouging or inflated costs with excessive billing, trying to convince people to make decisions very quickly and cough up money on the front end, and then not delivering the services.”
As hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding become more frequent and severe, the disaster economy has ballooned — and with it, opportunities to take advantage of people in crisis. Disaster survivors who have already lost homes, and in some cases, loved ones, are left further traumatized and financially strained.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau estimates that upward of 10 percent of post-disaster spending is lost to scams every year. With nearly $183 billion in infrastructure losses from weather-related disasters in 2024, contractor fraud has become a lucrative business. And its consequences ripple throughout the economy. The rising cost of recovery, fueled in part by fraudulent activity, then causes insurance premiums to rise and insurers to reduce coverage or leave a region altogether. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, fraud, particularly as perpetrated by contractors and other third parties, is “a threat to the stability of the insurance market.” USI Insurance Services, one of the largest insurance brokerage and consulting firms in the country, estimates that fraud is responsible for $900 more in premiums per policyholder.
One of Crosby’s neighbors, who asked for her name to be withheld, was not home when the Mountain Fire ripped through her neighborhood and burned part of her house. One Silver Serve charged more than $100,000 to clean the property — an amount she never agreed to — and put a mechanic’s lien on her house when she didn’t pay. Since the fire, she’s rented an apartment in the nearby city of Oxnard and has been coordinating repairs with a licensed contractor. For now, she’s focused on rebuilding and plans to deal with the lien afterward.
“In my whole 82-year-old life, I have never come across such absolute crooks,” she said. “Here you are, a devastating thing that your house … has burned, and they come and do this. It’s horrible. Right now, I don’t know how to get the lien off of my house.”
In the aftermath of wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding, state attorneys general, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local law enforcement officials have taken to warning homeowners to be on the lookout for scammers. Servpro franchises aren’t the only offenders in post-disaster contractor fraud. But Servpro’s national reputation and professional branding lend an air of credibility to franchisees’ operations, making them harder to scrutinize.
Servpro was founded in 1967 as a small painting operation in Sacramento, California. Within two years, the company launched as a franchise cleaning business and began expanding its operations. By 2000, it had 1,000 franchises, and by the end of the decade, it made more than a billion dollars in revenue. Today, the company has a network of over 2,300 franchises and is a multibillion-dollar organization that can serve 97 percent of the country’s ZIP codes within two hours.
A green Servpro of Belmont/San Carlos service van is parked in San Francisco, California. Servpro franchises can serve 97 percent of zip codes within two hours.
Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images
Once franchisees are approved, they receive classroom and hands-on training at the company’s headquarters in Gallatin, Tennessee. The company requires that franchisees use Servpro-branded equipment and professional cleaning products, paint any service vehicles with the company’s green logo and decals, and wear its black and green uniforms. “Servpro has a proprietary brand identity guide that establishes and maintains a consistent professional customer-facing image for brand awareness and professionalism,” the company’s website notes.
But it’s unclear if Servpro has processes in place to hold franchise owners accountable for questionable practices. Across the country, there are hundreds ofcomplaints with the Better Business Bureau and other consumer websites about price gouging, overcharging, and engaging in intimidation tactics by Servpro franchises. For instance, the Better Business Bureau profile for Servpro Northeast Salem in Oregon has multiple complaints of fraudulent liens placed on homes after the company damaged property and overcharged for work. Similar complaints exist for franchises in Naperville, Illinois; Douglasville, Georgia; and Marietta, Georgia.
In 2023, when a major storm blew through central California and dumped nearly 5 inches of rain over 24 hours, the floodwaters damaged Wee Shack, a family-run burger restaurant in Morro Bay, a seaside city near San Luis Obispo. The restaurant’s owner, Hoai Duc Ngo, hired Servpro of Morro Bay/King City for water and mold remediation. The company required him to sign a contract to receive an estimate and later told him the work would cost about $130,000 — nearly equal to his entire insurance coverage. When he refused to pay the charges, the company filed a mechanic’s lien against the property and sued him, despite the fact that they hadn’t provided an estimate up front, had done minimal restoration work, and had caused additional property damage. Ngo later had the work completed for about $15,000, and filed counterclaims against the company for negligence, misrepresentation, fraud, and concealment, among other charges.
Owners, volunteers, and community members clean up mud and debris at a coffee shop in Marshall, North Carolina, after Hurricane Helene in 2024. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Some franchises have also faced regulatory action. After Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina in 2018, Servpro of Boise, an Idaho-based franchise, sent workers to the region for cleanup. They approached residents of an apartment building that had suffered water damage, conducted cleanup, and then filed a lien and a lawsuit against the condo owners for $100,000 when they refused to pay what they saw as an exorbitant bill. The North Carolina attorney general’s office took on the case and ultimately settled with the company, canceling the outstanding lien and dismissing the lawsuit. (According to the Better Business Bureau, Servpro of Boise also includes a nondisparagement clause in its contracts with customers, prohibiting them from filing complaints or posting negative reviews.)
But the accountability that happened in North Carolina is rare. Since the rules and regulations for how contractors are required to operate change from one region to another, fraudsters often cross jurisdictional lines after natural disasters to seek out work in regions with the least protections. Amelia Hoppe, co-founder and executive director of Emergency Legal Responders, an organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and justice after natural disasters, said that homeowners need to be particularly careful about out-of-state businesses. “The vetting for local governments is really paying attention to who’s coming in from out of state,” she said.
In at least one case, the national Servpro headquarters does appear to have taken action against a franchise. After multiple complaints from customers of excessive billing, charging for work not performed, and intimidation, the company terminated its agreement in 2018 with Servpro of Rosemead/South El Monte, which operated near Los Angeles. When the franchise continued to operate with Servpro’s logo on a van, the company sued. A federal court ultimately sided with the national company. According to California records, Servpro of Rosemead/South El Monte’s business license is suspended, though where its owners and past employees have gone since is uncertain.
In Camarillo, One Silver Serve displayed red flags typical of fraudulent contractors, experts said. For one, door-to-door canvassing after a natural disaster, though common, can be a telltale sign of predatory behavior aimed at exploiting vulnerable homeowners. The practice is so prevalent among unscrupulous actors that state laws often require a three-day rescission period, giving homeowners and businesses a brief window to cancel contracts signed under pressure at their doorstep. California is one of the states with a three-day rescission period, and for contracts signed in regions with a disaster declaration, the law guarantees seven days to rescind the agreement.
“The lien tactic, especially, we warn about that a lot,” said Hoppe. “It’s legal leverage without informed consent. Even when it’s technically allowed, it often plays out as coercive. People are overwhelmed, underinformed, and don’t have good options.”
Another red flag was that One Silver Serve never provided Crosby an estimate of the damage or a scope of work before starting. Without a detailed breakdown of the planned repairs and their costs, the company could later demand virtually any fee it wanted, consumer advocates warned. In one Camarillo homeowner’s case, the bill they eventually received stretched dozens of pages, with line items like “clean baseboard,” “clean recessed light fixture,” and “clean closet organizer and rod.” None of those items needed cleaning at all — they had to be ripped out and replaced because of fire damage.
A final warning sign, experts said, is failing to confirm whether the insurance company has a track record with the contractor and will cover the repairs.
“A call to the insurance company, an estimate of benefits from the insurance company, these can be valuable checks on the validity of that relationship,” said Keegan Warren, executive director of the Texas A&M Health Institute for Healthcare Access, who has advocated for the role lawyers can play in identifying and combating harmful practices after a disaster.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors clear the remains of a church burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire, as seen in May in Altadena, California. Mario Tama/Getty Images
For Crosby and others, their experience with One Silver Serve has left them shaken and mistrustful of the disaster-restoration industry. Crosby has since moved back into his house and has been slowly making repairs to the sections that were damaged by the fire. His neighbor, however, faces a longer road to recovery. She’s in the midst of securing permits to rebuild the deck and other parts of the house that burned down. She hopes to be back in her home by January.
“When you tell this story, it’s like, ‘Oh, come on, I had to be stupid,’” she said. “But it’s just unscrupulous. You lose your faith in humanity.”
Meanwhile, One Silver Serve continues to operate in Southern California. In January, after the Palisades Fire took 13 lives and burned more than 23,000 acres in and around Los Angeles, One Silver Serve filed at least seven lawsuits in the Los Angeles Superior Court for breach of contract and other allegations. It’s not clear how many of these cases are similar to the ones the company filed against homeowners in Camarillo.
In an April Facebook post, Servpro highlighted the work of its many franchises, including the cleanup One Silver Serve did after the Palisades Fire. “When Servpro franchises come together, wonderful work results,” the post said.
Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s foremost authority on the topic. But only some types of carbon removal are actually effective — and these are largely not the kind that major companies are investing in.
A new report from the NewClimate Institute, a European think tank, finds that 35 of the world’s biggest businesses are leaning on short-term tree-planting and other forms of “nondurable” carbon removal in order to say they’ve neutralized some of their climate pollution. The handful of companies investing in more reliable carbon removal are mostly not doing so in conjunction with deep decarbonization, or the elimination of carbon emissions altogether.
There is a “dangerous mismatch between corporate climate claims and the reality of what is needed to reach global net-zero,” the organization said in a press release. Reaching net-zero by the middle of the century — a scenario where all unavoidable human-caused climate pollution is canceled out via carbon removal — is considered necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, refers to efforts to capture CO2 after it’s been emitted into the atmosphere and store it in rocks, land, ocean reservoirs, or human-made products. The most reliable types of carbon removal, which the NewClimate Institute calls “durable CDR,” involve injecting carbon into geological formations or turning it into rocks, where it will stay put for at least 1,000 years — about the same amount of time that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere.
Currently, these durable techniques don’t work at scale: They account for just 0.1 percent of global carbon removal each year. The rest is based on methods like planting trees, restoring wetlands, and burying carbon in the soil, which are much cheaper but can only keep carbon out of the atmosphere for decades or a few centuries at most.
Government investment and regulations are needed to scale up durable CDR — experts consider the next decade to be “crucial” for developing the technology — but the private sector can help too, by funding durable CDR projects and research. In industries like construction, for which total decarbonization is not yet possible, companies will likely need to use durable CDR to offset residual emissions as part of a credible climate strategy.
The NewClimate Institute authors looked at 35 of the world’s largest companies across seven sectors: agrifood, aviation, automobiles, fashion, fossil fuels, tech, and utilities. Tech companies showed the most investment in durable CDR — Microsoft alone is responsible for 70 percent of all durable CDR ever contracted — but the report criticizes the sector for planning to claim “potentially significant amounts” of both durable and nondurable CDR toward net-zero targets. Tech companies can fully decarbonize without offsets, so their emissions targets should not depend on carbon removal.
Aviation was the other sector showing the greatest support for durable CDR, but only one airline — Japan’s All Nippon Airways — had a “reasonable” plan to use the technology to neutralize residual emissions by 2050. Three airlines lacked concrete plans.
Of the 15 companies across the agrifood, automobiles, and fashion sectors, only H&M and Stellantis are investing in durable CDR. Two of the five utilities in the report, Eon and Orsted, are supporting durable CDR projects, but it’s unclear whether Eon intends to use removals to count toward its net-zero goal, and the NewClimate Institute says some of Orsted’s removals are being double-counted in the emissions reduction targets of both Denmark and Microsoft. The five fossil fuel companies analyzed — Equinor, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Sinopec, and TotalEnergies — are focusing mostly on carbon capture and storage, which intercepts CO2 at the point of emission, before it escapes into the atmosphere, and does not reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
A Climeworks carbon removal facility in Iceland. John Moore / Getty Images
Silke Mooldijk, an expert with the NewClimate Institute and the lead author of the new report, said she wasn’t surprised to find limited support for durable CDR, except from some tech companies. What did surprise her was that companies investing in durable CDR projects did not publicly report any information on these projects’ environmental and social risks. Some CDR methods, for example, may jeopardize biodiversity, while others require large amounts of renewable energy that would have to be diverted from other uses. “Not a single company in our report disclosed details on potential risks of projects they support and how they mitigate those,” Mooldijk told Grist.
Grist reached out to all 35 companies included in the report. Adidas, Amazon, Enel, Google, H&M, Inditex, Microsoft, and TotalEnergies responded by describing their net-zero commitments. Adidas and Enel, which are not currently investing in durable CDR, said they would use “high-quality” carbon removals to offset their residual climate pollution after taking actions to decarbonize; Inditex said it is “exploring” durable CDR to offset residual emissions, and its use of the technology “will be determined by the evolution of reference scientific frameworks.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and H&M are currently investing in durable CDR. A spokesperson for H&M described the fast-fashion company’s purchase of 10,000 metric tons of durable CDR from the Swiss company Climeworks, one of the largest purchases to date, and said H&M plans to use them to neutralize residual emissions. The tech companies affirmed their commitment to reduce emissions first and then use carbon removal to offset residual emissions, though none of them addressed NewClimate Institute’s concerns that they would use large amounts of durable and nondurable CDR to claim progress toward net-zero.
A statement provided to Grist from TotalEnergies did not address CDR. It instead described the company’s support for carbon capture and storage and “nature-based solutions.” The latter refers to short-lived offsets, such as tree-planting, that the NewClimate Institute does not believe are appropriate for offsetting fossil fuel emissions.
Apple, Duke Energy, Google, and Shein declined to comment after seeing the report. The remaining 24 companies did not respond to inquiries from Grist.
Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan and the dean of its School for Environment and Sustainability, said the NewClimate Institute report is timely. “Right now the whole idea of CDR … is kind of a Wild West scene, with lots of actors promising to do things that may or may not be possible,” he said. He added that companies appear to be using CDR as an alternative to mitigating their climate pollution.
“The priority has to be on reducing emissions, not on durable CDR at this point,” he told Grist.
In the near term, durable CDR is doing virtually nothing to offset emissions. As of 2023, only 0.0023 gigatons of CO2 were removed from the atmosphere each year using these methods. That’s about 15,000 times less than the annual amount of climate pollution from fossil fuels and cement manufacturing.
According to the NewClimate Institute, voluntary initiatives are no substitute for government-mandated emissions reduction targets and investments in durable CDR. To the extent that these initiatives exist, however, the organization says they should provide a clearer definition of what constitutes “durable” carbon removal; determine companies’ responsibility for scaling up durable CDR based on their ongoing and historical emissions, or — perhaps more realistically — on their ability to pay; and require companies to set separate targets for emissions reductions and support for durable CDR. The last recommendation is intended to reinforce a climate action hierarchy that puts mitigation before offsetting. Companies should not “hide inaction on decarbonization behind investments in removals,” as the report puts it.
Mooldijk said voluntary initiatives can incentivize investments in durable CDR by recognizing “climate contributions.” These might manifest as simple statements about companies’ monetary contributions to durable CDR, instead of claims about the amount of CO2 that they have theoretically neutralized.
Some of these recommendations were submitted earlier this year to the Science-Based Targets initiative, the world’s most respected verifier of private sector climate targets. The organization is getting ready to update its corporate net-zero standard with new guidance on the use of CDR. Another standard-setter, the International Organization for Standardization, is similarly preparing to release new standards on net-zero, which could curtail some of the most questionable corporate climate claims while also drumming up support for durable CDR.
John Reilly, a senior lecturer emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said that ultimately, proper regulation of corporate climate commitments — including of durable CDR — will fall on governments. Companies “are happy to throw a little money into these things,” he said, “but I don’t think voluntary guidelines are ever going to get you there.”
What has your own involvement in design and craft been?
Since the beginning of my career, my work has centered on supporting emerging talent and making space for deserving voices—a commitment that continues to define Border&Fall. As an agency and lab, our focus is on shifting perceptions of the handmade, with expertise in “Made in India.” My work sits at the intersection of contemporary culture, strategy, and storytelling, partnering with clients globally to connect ideas across markets and disciplines. The agency focuses on branding, strategy, and communication, and it’s been a privilege to help build some of India’s most influential names in lifestyle, fashion, and design.
The lab is what holds my heart. It explores how culture, craft, and technology intersect to address systemic challenges within the handmade sector. Our goal is simple but urgent: to ensure greater economic value is assigned to craft skill and labor, and create greater democratic access to cultural narratives. Most often these end up being digital in nature, from The Sari Series to An Incomplete Manifesto to the Silpa Catalogues.
After 15 years in India, I’ve recently moved to NYC to grow our agency presence here. It’s a fascinating time to reframe “Made in India” as recognition continues to rise. There’s also a unique and delicate opportunity to reposition brands that may seem emerging internationally, but are household names back home.
The Tangaliya weave of Surendranagar has influenced the identity of Border&Fall.
I pitched this article during COVID for two reasons. First, these women who have a transformative legacy on Indian culture are celebrated in craft and academia, but largely absent from popular Indian media—I wanted to help bring more visibility to their work. It was the most read article of the magazine that year…each of them has a unique knowledge and way of looking at the sector, and I think people are fascinated by their stories.
The second reason was more selfish–I love learning from them. Hearing their stories planted the seed for a project we are currently working on, a series of “Made in India” craft monographs.
What are the structural challenges you have noticed that “crafts” in India, and how do they shape its global impact?
Craft in India is closely tied to geography, class, and culture, yet it continues to be undervalued—both in perception and price. Unlike in countries like Japan, where craftsmanship commands respect and premium pricing, India often recognizes skill without offering fair compensation. I often recall the revealing truth in what textile historian Rahul Jain once expressed, “if equitability was a real concern in India, say, via a wage increase that reflects a 21st century valuation of traditional crafts skills and labour, a lot of private players in the field would simply exit. Their profits would fall dramatically.”
Detail of a hand woven fabric using an ambar charkha. Its perceived ‘imperfections’ are integral to its existence and in fact, ‘perfect’ in nature.
Although craft is often cited as India’s second-largest industry after agriculture, quantifying its scale is tough. The last reliable figure from 2023 indicates around 7 million people in the handicraft sector, but unofficial estimates suggest many more (some reports suggest 200 million–the delta is enormous). Without consistent data, effective policy, advocacy, or progress remains limited to measure.
Indian craft runs on two tracks: domestic sales and exports—dominated by the latter, with around $4 billion in exports last year. But this success leans heavily on cheap labor and high markups.
At the Indian Handicraft and Gift Fair in Greater Noida, it hits home. Marble inlay coasters go for just $0.80 apiece, made in factories where legal minimum wages start at ₹178/day (around $2.07). Abroad, those same coasters can sell for $10 or more. No matter how you work it, the math doesn’t favor skilled labour. The question isn’t just whether Indian labor is undervalued, but whether the global market is willing to pay a fair price to support dignified livelihoods in craft. This is a question for both brands and consumers.
An interesting approach is to solve for “hours of labor.” For instance, if a garment is celebrated for requiring 1,200 hours of labor, then how much should it cost to make and sell? Often those numbers don’t add up comfortably.
What are the most common ways the work of craftspeople gets used by designers and creatives?
Craft is incorporated in various ways: as skilled labor (a tailor executing a designer’s vision), through genuine co-creation (designer and karigar collaborating from concept to finish), or via design interventions that tweak form, shape, or color within the craft’s language. Some artisans innovate solo—merging roles of maker, artist, and designer—while others work within inherited traditions with minimal deviation. Yet, even when both designer and karigar embed social meaning and material memory into their work, the karigar often remains invisible.
From top left: Various workshops, (top: Ganga Maki’s private weaving studio in Dehradun, bottom left: Master basket weaver Chato Kuotsu in Khonoma; middle: Interior of a woodworking workshop in Nagaland; bottom right: Detail of an agricultural raincoat).
In most cases the work of craftspeople is most commonly used by designers for its utility or decorative value—often stripped of context. Traditionally functional objects, like terracotta matkas, become symbols or aesthetic statements once removed from their everyday use, especially in Western settings.
Who is a karigar?
Terms like craftspeople or artisan feel too generic—especially given craft in India is deeply rooted in geography. Karigar (कारीगर) carries more geographic specificity given it can be traced through language but even that falls short. A weaver, for instance, would be a bunkar, not a karigar. And karigar itself isn’t exclusive to India—it spans South Asia. It’s nuanced.
Over time, I’ve become more flexible with how these terms are used, while also recognizing that English definitions are, at best, compromises. What we need are new semantics—language that reflects provenance, practice, and value.
One term worth revisiting is the Sanskrit word śilp (शिल्प), often translated simply as craft. But as art historian Stella Kramrisch wrote in 1958, “The meaning of this word is ‘variegated artistic work,’ comprising art, skill, craft, labor, ingenuity, rite and ritual, form and creation.”
Neither artist, artisan, nor craftsman fully capture the complexity of the śilpin (शिल्पिन्) or the karigar (कारीगर). The term holds space for an expansive practice—free of the rigid designer vs. maker binary rooted in Western thought.
Sivakumar Modha, an enterprising weaver designing with technology — from simplifying jacquard punch card creation to digitizing complex weaving patterns — all to make handloom work faster, cheaper, and smarter for traditional weavers.
How can we move beyond using craft as a novelty, a marketing hook or a surface treatment and truly center the makers and the process in what we create?
Craft has a direct relationship to production but first and foremost it has a relationship with the person. Practiced by communities over generations, it is a way of life for many. The Khumbars (potters) predict rainfall through their craft based on how clay behaves in response to atmospheric changes, and looms in homes occupy the most square footage of space.
Kanta Kadse from Mandla, Madhya Pradesh a skilled Khajur Broom maker, one of the many karigars featured in Border&Fall’s Silpa Catalogs.
I think the decorative or novelty aspect is much more prevalent in the craft export product, which is large (accounting for almost 4 percent of India’s GDP). In much of India, it is still connected to everyday utility, alongside being decorative.
“Design” credit often goes solely to the commissioner. This reflects a hierarchy imposed by design and consumer cultures. I’ve asked many karigars (craftspeople)—they see themselves as both designers and makers.
Label by Kardo, which credits every maker who has worked on the garment.
In Matters of Hand (2018), curator Rashmi Varma addressed this challenge. In one video, eight men are seen hand-beating a Kansa (bronze alloy)—a single step among many in crafting a bowl. Instead of crediting a single karigar, she listed every hand that touched the product. Some pieces had up to ten names. While not exhaustive, it mirrored the layered reality. Film is the only creative industry that credits contributions this deeply—and it’s a practice I believe craft could benefit from economically, although not a blanket suggestion.
Left: Tools used for making Kansa vessels Middle: Communal hammering by the Kansari craftsmen integral part of the process to make the vessels Right: Kansa vessels, image by Prarthna Singh from Sār: The Essence of Indian Design.
What is something that is often misunderstood about craft?
There are so many things that are misunderstood, even amongst us working in this space. A few that come to mind:
● Craft is not one mass. “Craft” employs well over the official estimate of 7 Million people in India–it includes the lohawalla (metalsmith), silk carpet weaver, to the potter—yet data often treats it as a monolith. Without better categorization, the public can’t understand the scale, complexity, or value of what’s being made.
● The notion that “handmade” equals sustainable is not always true. For instance, cotton production and dyeing can be water resource-heavy, working conditions are often harsh, and what’s sold as natural often contains chemical additives.
● Craft is unfortunately judged by industrial standards. The disclaimer “imperfections are due to it being handmade” misses the point. These aren’t flaws; they are intrinsic to the handmade process.
● India is both a design and manufacturing powerhouse–we are both mind and hand. Major global brands from Tom Dixon, Uniqlo, Chanel, and the LVMH group all produce here. Yet India is still largely seen as a nameless producer, not as a leader in design thinking. It’s been amazing to see the beginnings of this changing over the last three-to-five years with more brands in the international space, and more credit being asked for. The backtracking Prada recently did for their SS26 collection and use of the Kholapuri is one example.
● Khadi does not equal handspun and handwoven. While Gandhi’s Khadi was spun on a Desi Charkha, most Khadi today—including that sold by Khadi Gram Udyog—since 1955 are spun on the semi-mechanized Ambar Charkha, yet it’s still defined as Khadi. Semantics matter, especially as processes change behind the scenes.
● Craft is expected to stay cheap. Some things—like terracotta chai cups—should remain accessible. But many crafts are severely undervalued. Discount culture keeps wages low, even when they meet legal minimums. We need pricing transparency.
Craft often carries the burden of aestheticized truth. How do you see designers or brands using the “aura” of honest labor to tokenize craftsmen? Has labor become performative—Disneyfied—for marketing?
For Indian visual and material culture, the crafts are foundational. It is a knowledge base from which a lot of ways of seeing and making extend out of. Some designers are framed as saviors of craft—the international media loves this narrative. Locally, craft isn’t a headline; it’s foundational to every design practice.
Highly performative marketing tropes have already peaked, leading with the romanticization of handmade. It cleverly helps solve one of the largest problems design is facing: vacuous consumption. These tropes worked well but–how many hands on a loom can one see that exoticize and reinforce the “nameless worker”?. Point number seven in An Incomplete Manifesto was written to address this: “Transcend marketing trends. There is a delicate balance between revealing a process and pandering to the exoticism of ‘behind the scenes’ studio and weaving documentation.”
Broadly speaking, it has not evolved much past the problematic marketing campaigns of the 1990s “Feed Africa” campaigning, building and reinforcing stereotypes. From a branding lens, it’s tricky—anyone sharing their process now risks being seen as reacting to the trend of selective transparency. In our work we find a lens the client can lean into while still being true to the practice. When it’s non-performative the honesty is inescapable.
There are such strong aesthetic tropes whenever Indian design is shown–such as the glorified “maharaja” archetype. Why is that trope so resonant?
There are three dominant aesthetic schools in consumer India: Kitsch, Royal, and Rural. Globally, the royal archetype reigns—it signals a dated but enduring idea of “arrival,” and aligns neatly with the massive revenues of India’s billion-dollar bridal market.
How would you describe the other two?
The kitsch archetype is where we see the peacocks, cows and “tuk-tuks” and is reinforced largely by those outside India. I think the most compelling is the “rural” archetype — Gandhian in its austerity—with a color palette that ranges from terracotta, ash, and white to vibrant rani pinks and lime greens. Mistakenly, these are largely seen as “contemporary” or “minimalist” India, the truth being they have been present all along. Over the last 15 years we have seen a huge homegrown renaissance in this space.
Is there a phrase or word from a regional language that has really stayed with you when talking about craft?
The Idea of Riyaaz comes to mind–I love all the meanings of that word–of a committed, disciplined practice and pursuit of mastery.
How can we all be better collaborators to those who make craft?
Sometimes defining a term makes it easier to measure or engage with. I would define true collaborations, in essence, as a mutually beneficial exchange. Both parties derive pleasure, growth and different, yet relatively equitable, outcomes.
I would also invite a shift from recognizing “hands” to recognizing “minds.”
Left: Ajrakh piece by Aslam Abdulkarim Khatri, a generational Ajrakh artist and founder of the brand Mahfooz and a graduate of Somaiya Kala Vidya. Right: Khalid Amin Khatri is an Ajrakh artist from Ajrakhpur, Gujarat, known for his bold, asymmetrical take on traditional block printing, and a Kala Raksha Vidyalaya alum, his work was featured in the V&A’s Fabric of India exhibition (2015).
We often find that so much of what is written in the past is still relevant. For instance almost 40 years ago (in 1986), the artist K.G. Subramanyan’s manuscript “Do Hands Have a Chance?” stated: “Another important condition we need to give attention to are just wages or returns for the craftsmen. If we do not ensure this, by whatever means, the future of specialised handicrafts is bleak.” Decades later–and all the decades in between–his words still hold. And at the crux, that’s the main problem.
How do you form relationships with karigars in your own practice?
Like most of my relationships, it’s formed over a shared connection and time. I’ve travelled on the ground extensively and we’ve followed each other’s journeys over the years.
More specifically, I believe craftspeople are often spoken for rather than with, and our work tries to account for that sensitivity. For example, for a panel talk I led for Architectural Digest India, I planned a karigar-only lineup with translators. It was the first time I could facilitate a truly equal dialogue amongst peers. The artisans spoke in Hindi, English, Meitei Lon, and Gujarati—avoiding tokenism and allowing for more genuine exchange.
Respecting the karigar’s role also means acknowledging their creative authorship. A designer may provide a sketch, but it’s the weaver who mathematically calculates the loom setup, or the embroiderer who interprets and executes the design—often making critical creative decisions.
Top right: Rajesh Paratap Singh’s AW16 Merino wool suit with asymmetric banker stripes made by chains handwoven into wool. Photography by Namit Sirohi. Top left: campaign shot from ITOH LOT 14 SS 24, photograph by Sahil Babber; Bottom Left and Right: From Raw Mango, campaign shots from Children of the Night which explores technical weaving innovations, shot by Vikas Maurya and Cloud People, which focused on Chikankari, shot by Ashish Shah.
I’m also mindful of the Western gaze. The work we do—and that of our clients—resists postcolonial dilution in favor of authentic design narratives. Raw Mango is a strong example: questioning inherited beliefs while imagining new futures, all rooted in contemporary culture, of which tradition plays a large role. We’ve worked with Raw Mango since 2013–and in building their communication I’ve seen firsthand the impact of consistent, values-driven storytelling—theirs being culturally focused. Many share this ethos, each with distinct aesthetics but aligned in greater vision, including — Rashmi Varma, Out of the Shed, Khanoom, Itoh, Péro, and Rajesh Pratap Singh.
Top left: Work in progress of a Pietra Dura table by Frozen Music Jaipur Top center: A carrom board reimagined with marble inlay by Out of the Shed.Top left: Mountain Carousel made from marquetry off-cuts by Out of the Shed; Bottom left: Matka Jug by Studio IKKIS, made from pure copper with a terracotta coating Bottom center, right: Shisha ka kam and houndstooth ari ka kaam from Rashmi Varma.
How does craft advocacy work financially?
In India, the current funding is for on-the ground livelihood initiatives. Government and other available funds largely seem to acknowledge this as the parameter. Although this is important, I believe we need more technology based initiatives which favor widespread democratic reach and adoption. I understand that’s a large mental gap to bridge–people are often wary of what they don’t understand.
We created The Sari Series, a free digital resource that documents the regional sari draping styles of India, with $120,000. It took us a year to knock on doors and I kept being asked how many weavers it would impact, which I didn’t have an answer to. Its advocacy was focused on the demand, not supply side. Finally, we raised $50,000 on Kickstarter and found a lead patron in Anita Lal of Good Earth–she was brave enough to support this approach. The project is critically acclaimed, and in the last seven years since its release we’ve been able to measure how the perception of the sari drape has changed globally, The Sari Series has millions of views and informed a host of sari influencers online and most importantly, had given agency back to tens of thousands of people to revisit their relationship with the sari on their own terms. #TheSariSeries on Instagram is a testament to its usage.
The softer powers of culture and craft have the potential to influence change, and till date India has understandably had most funding models and philanthropy focused on livelihoods. As we grow economically I believe we will see more support for “seemingly” alternative projects.
Montage of how to drape the Yakshagana Mali Kase Drape from The Sari Series.
Don’t you feel that in craft, innovation often takes a backseat to “revival,” “continuity,” and “preservation”?
Yes. In the design and business worlds we often appoint ourselves as custodians of craft, imposing ideas of authenticity and preservation. But that desire can be counterproductive—craft is a living, adaptive skill. On a trip to Bhuj, I saw women making sheesha potlis using mirrored plastic and acrylic instead of glass and silk. What we might see as dilution, they saw as innovation—aspirational materials they were proud to use.
We all respond to fine craftsmanship, and it’s easy to mourn the loss of skill. But why is the burden always on the karigar to preserve it? When will the life of a karigar be seen as aspirational by the very people romanticizing their work?
Is there a contradiction you’ve made peace with in your own work?
Working within consumption-driven systems has taught me how they function, where they fall short, and my comfort level within them. I choose to engage with a mindset of enoughness, shaping work that imagines new forms of value, longevity, and peace beyond constant acquisition.
How can we form a trust in skills and community, rather than consumerism?
To be fair, we have been conditioned to seek validation in our purchases. Many things are bought driven by this need. If we removed brand names and marketing on products, it would be interesting to see what people bought given their own volition. This is effectively what we are asking people to do for craft product. It takes conviction of self and an understanding of process and material alongside an aesthetic alignment.
Jyotindra Jain classifies craft patronage into three categories: the court, the temple, and village. I wonder if we could add new ones now to this line of patronage?
Design practitioners and hopefully, the everyday consumer.
Malika Verma recommends:
The journey and destination to Chato Kuotsu, a Kophi Cane basket weaver in Khonoma, Nagaland.
For Donna Thomas, smokestacks are a typical sight from her home in Fort Bend County, Texas. Since she was a child, she has seen the coal and natural gas-powered W.A. Parish Generating Station puff clouds of haze during the day and light up brightly at night. The facility — which has been around since 1958 — is both part of the background and all she thinks about.
Thomas is not alone. For decades, residents have expressed concerns over the pollution emitted from the Parish coal plant — a separate facility from the natural gas plant — and called for its closure. The plant, located about 30 miles southwest of downtown Houston, is ranked by Texas environmental regulators as one of the worst polluters in the state for certain hazardous emissions. These include mercury, a toxic heavy metal particularly harmful for children and pregnant people.
This year, mercury has been top of mind for environmental activists and residents like Thomas. In April, President Donald Trump announced an exemption for companies from implementing stricter Biden-era mercury regulations for two years. Of the 163 eligible coal plants, 11 are in Texas and six have been approved, including Parish’s operator, NRG Energy. In Missouri and Illinois, five coal plants have been exempted, and in Pennsylvania, all 12 of the coal plants seeking approval have been approved.
Then in July, Trump exempted chemical companies for two years from Biden’s 2024 HON Rule, a set of regulations that control hazardous air emissions from chemical plants called the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.
The Trump administration determined the exemptions are in the country’s best interest and represent a burden on industry, and that the technology is not available to meet stricter regulations. Companies like NRG agree.
However, critics say the Biden administration’s 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — called MATS for short — and the HON Rule were long overdue and the two-year delay in implementing them is merely a tactic to protect industry profit margins at the expense of public health.
Moreover, critics point out that the MATS delay may be giving companies the freedom to ignore toxic air emissions rules until the Trump administration repeals the Biden-era regulations altogether. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump proposed a rule to eliminate the 2024 MATS rule completely.
The two rules together have set off alarm bells for experts and environmentalists in Texas, home to one of the world’s largest petrochemical sectors and 11 coal-powered plants. The exemptions will run from 2027 — when the Biden rules were supposed to take effect — to 2029.
“We know these rollbacks are not good for anyone, especially for those that are community fenceline,” said Thomas, also the founder and president of the Fort Bend Environmental — a grassroots organization focused on environmental justice. “We have around 1,000 homes within 3 miles of Parish, so that’s going to affect all of them.”
A two-year delay
The EPA has been working on stricter environmental regulations for chemical plants since the early 1990s. Only in 2020 did Biden’s EPA begin drafting new rules in earnest.
But owners of the chemical plants should not act so surprised, said Neil Carman, a former regulator for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
“The chemical industry has known for decades that this was all coming, but they don’t like rules, because it means they have to put on more pollution control and they have to do more leak inspections,” said Carman, now the clean air director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club. “These plants will always tell you, ‘Safety first, safety first,’ but then you run into this thing called money.”
Of the 79 chemical facilities in Texas requesting exemptions, 15 have been approved, including 13 along the Gulf Coast and the so-called petrochemical corridor.
Carman pointed out that the heads of chemical companies have been in talks with Trump’s EPA since the election. In March, the administration announced that companies could apply for exemption from MATS, HON, and seven other sets of emissions standards.
That same month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin met with Dow Inc. Chairman-CEO Jim Fitterling to discuss regulations imposed by the Biden administration, according to public records and emails obtained by the Sierra Club.
In one email sent on March 17, Dow reps asked to discuss “clarity” on the EPA’s recent announcement that it will reconsider the HON rule and “Dow has met with the Office of Air and Radiation regarding an extension of the current compliance deadline, which is impossible to meet.”
In May, Zeldin met with Fitterling and other chemical company CEOs to discuss the industry at large. Then in July, Trump announced the exemptions for HON, including for two chemical plants in Louisiana and one in Seadrift, Texas, operated by Dow and its subsidiary Union Carbide.
In a statement to Capital & Main, a Dow spokesperson said that “safety and integrity are at the core of both companies’ operations” and the “extensions are appropriate and necessary to address the technical challenges and to ensure the continued safe and efficient operation of these facilities.”
Carman doesn’t buy it. He worked as an environmental regulator in Texas for 12 years. Even then, he said, companies never seemed to be able to find the budget to limit their emissions and chemical leaks. For him, it’s still the cost.
“A lot of these are old plants and so when they go in and do all this work,” Carman said, “they have to find a place where they’re going to put in new controls and they have to engineer it. They have to design it all. It’s months of planning, but these rules were out there. They knew they were coming. They just want two more years of delay.”
Limiting mercury
When the EPA implemented the 2012 MATS rule, mercury emissions dropped 86 percent — or 4 tons — in five years.
In 2024, Biden’s EPA approved a rule to strengthen MATS by tightening the emissions standards for mercury by another 70 percent and reducing pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired plants by more than 660 million pounds per year.
The rule could prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths, 2,800 cases of chronic bronchitis, and 130,000 asthma attacks, according to the EPA under Biden.
However, in April, Trump approved the exemptions for 47 coal-powered plants across the nation. As of mid-August, 70 are now exempted, including Parish.
“These rules were just so critically important to people’s health,” said Surbhi Sarang, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. The Trump administration “was doing this process that was just not transparent. I mean, there was no process. Whereas in rulemaking, there’s public comment. This is just like a presidential action that was kind of taken in a vacuum and then announced.”
In response to the exemption, Erik Linden, senior director of communications at NRG, said the time is needed and will be used to evaluate the technology for air quality systems and monitoring equipment for compliance.
“All existing MATS emission controls will be properly maintained and remain in service,” Linden said of the current MATS rules that began in 2012. The exemption would give NRG until 2029 to implement the changes.
However, in July, Trump’s EPA proposed eliminating Biden’s rule entirely by the end of the year. Interested parties had three weeks to submit comments, and the Environmental Defense Fund’s request for an extension was denied.
“Rulemaking usually takes 12-18 months if not longer,” Sarang said. “They’re moving very quickly.”
All of this is alarming for residents living near industry. With the extent of the changes to environmental regulations coming down from the Trump administration, there’s a lot for Thomas, the Parish generating station neighbor, to process. But she hasn’t given up. Increasingly, Thomas is talking to her neighbors and fellow residents about fighting back.
This means sending letters to representatives in Texas and in Washington, D.C. Thomas said it pays to be loud.
Parish is “going to do the same thing it’s been doing,” Thomas said. “If the EPA does not put a stop to these [emissions] getting out, then everyone is going to pay for this with their lives and in their water and in their air.”
Vegan dining is in flux: headline-making closures of brick-and-mortar spots are colliding with a surge in private chefs, curated meal drops, and delivery-first brands. The shift is visible from Miami to New York to Los Angeles, powered by two forces moving in opposite directions: costs rising for restaurants and demand rising for at-home convenience. The result is an ecosystem where a night of plant-based lasagna baked at home, a chef-catered dinner party, and a ghost-kitchen burger can all live in the same week for the same consumer.
The economics behind the pivot
Restaurants are paying more for everything from fryer oil to payroll, and consumers keep ordering off-premises in high numbers. The National Restaurant Association reports average menu prices are up roughly 31 percent since February 2020, while key wholesale food costs climbed about 37 percent—pressure that squeezes already thin margins. At the same time, three in four operators say off-premises—takeout and delivery—are a significant part of their business, a behavior they expect to stick.
Getty
The pressure shows at the neighborhood level, too. In Miami, former Planta Queen pastry and sushi chefs Erica Marie Denis and Gabriel Lopez told Miami New Times that the chain’s Coconut Grove location closed with little warning. “We received notice on July 30 that we were basically immediately terminated,” says Denis. She remembers diners arriving as usual: “A lot of people went to Planta Queen not knowing that it would be the last time they would be eating there,” she says. “Even we, as employees, there were people in the building working when we received notice.”
Private chefs, meal drops, and a chef’s touch
What has replaced some of those lost dining rooms is not a one-to-one swap, but a patchwork of higher-touch, at-home offerings. In Los Angeles, private chef Aaron Elliott has turned the skills he honed for A-listers into Meal Ticket, a weekly, plant-based drop that reads like a chef’s tasting menu reimagined for your fridge. His service releases a new menu midweek with Monday evening delivery or pickup. Priced at $250, orders are capped at ten, and each order includes six mix-and-match dishes meant to carry a household through the week.
Elliott’s model mirrors a larger consumer pivot toward premium meal services. CookUnity, a chef-to-consumer platform, said it surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue this spring—evidence that diners will pay for restaurant-quality food at home. Meanwhile, the US meal kit category is hardly fading; IBISWorld pegs 2025 market size around $8.7 billion, and mainstream food media continue to rank prepared and kit services that foreground plant-forward options such as Purple Carrot and Green Chef.
Purple Carrot
The Miami chefs who lost their jobs at Planta are leaning into this direction. Denis says she and Lopez launched a private vegan service, 2TheRootss, to bring restaurant-quality meals straight to clients. “My boyfriend and I offer a private chef experience at clients’ homes. That’s been our way of providing high-quality vegan food to people who are interested,” Denis says. Her advice for locals hunting for good plant-based cooking: find the small operators that cook like a market cafeteria. “They actually have a rotating menu—think about it like hot prepared foods. You can go there and kind of build your own plate,” she explains.
In New York, the take-and-bake category shows how chef craft is migrating home. Cucina Fantasma, a Brooklyn-based vegan lasagna brand that just debuted last week, sells a Classic-ish pan layered with fresh pasta, slow-simmered seitan bolognese, tofu ricotta, and koji-almond mozzarella, designed to bake at home or stash in the freezer. As founder Lindsey Masterman puts it: “Lasagna is supposed to feel indulgent, satisfying, and celebratory. But I wanted to reimagine it for the New York lifestyle. These are lasagnas you can look forward to on a weeknight—or use as the centerpiece of your next dinner party, all just by turning on your oven.” Early drops include limited production, pickup in Downtown Brooklyn, and DoorDash delivery on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Ghost kitchens, hybrids, and the new distribution
So where do ghost kitchens fit in 2025? The pure delivery-only food hall has cooled from its pandemic-era hype, but the core idea—using lower-cost production space and virtual brands to expand reach—has not disappeared. Restaurant Business reports many virtual brands are “getting a little physical,” jumping onto in-store menus or opening limited-service counters, while industry experts point to an evolution toward hybrid footprints rather than a collapse. In practice, some operators use multi-brand platforms to monetize spare kitchen capacity while they rebuild dine-in.
Delivery demand continues to prop up these experiments. DoorDash’s 2025 survey finds that nearly half of consumers make delivery decisions in five to ten minutes, three-quarters placed a last-minute delivery order in the prior month, and almost half prefer ordering through third-party apps for ease—behavior that fuels fast-turn virtual brands, chef drops, and prepared vegan mains that bake off in a home oven.
There are bright spots on the traditional side, too. The Atlanta burger empire Slutty Vegan remains a cultural touchstone for plant-based comfort food, even as it restructures. Founder Pinky Cole re-acquired the brand in March and has described a tighter “Slutty Vegan 2.0” footprint; the website still lists open restaurants from Brooklyn to Baltimore. The through-line across vegan dining now is clear: more routes to the plate.
Madelynne Boykin
For diners, the takeaway is choice. Sit down at one of the surviving brick-and-mortar eateries. Order a nostalgia hit from a virtual brand. Book a chef for a night at home, or reserve a weekly slot on a drop like Meal Ticket. For professionals, the lesson is to design for an audience that loves plants and flexibility. As Denis puts it, “We don’t really have that many vegan restaurants in Miami,” Denis says. “Gabriel and I are passionate vegans and know there is a demand for vegan food here in Miami.”
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
Earlier this month an Australian-based Uyghur group launched legal action against Kmart in the federal court. The case has put the retailer’s supply chain under scrutiny for potential links to forced labour in China’s Xinjiang province.
Nour Haydar speaks with senior reporter Ben Doherty about the legal action against Kmart and the warnings that Australia could become a dumping ground for products linked to forced labour
Tell me about the first time you made a candle and how that experience led you to founding your business?
The first time I ever made a candle was with a candle-making kit that I stole from my sister. She had gotten the kit from Michael’s, and was selling candles at her home-ec fair in eighth grade. She made really cool stuff using paraffin wax or whatever she could get. I remember her pouring them into weird vessels like takeout containers. I love to craft and make things and I spent my after-school time at the craft store taking classes. After graduating from college, Etsy was starting to take off and I wanted to start an Etsy shop of my own. I thought, what can I make? I’ll make candles. So I bought some vintage molds and used my own molds too. The vintage aspect really speaks to the nostalgic ethos that P.F. still has, and this DIY spirit where I’m like, “What can I do? I’m going to make that.”
Have you been able to maintain that DIY spirit as the business has grown?
It’s so tricky. I was recently talking to a friend who just opened a rock store, and it’s so cool. He’s such a rock nerd in the best way, and I had the thought that he’d made this grave error of turning his passion and creativity into a business. But, he’s got this really specific vision in how he’s executing it. It’s so clear he’s not only trying to make money, but also to bring his vision to life.
There’s definitely been times throughout my career of making things where I felt super disconnected from what we were actually doing because I was busy running the business, so I try to carve out time to make things, and it’s not always candles. I also make incense. I have an entire craft closet. I’m always trying to paint with my daughter and do things that feel easy and that keep my hands busy, it helps turn off my mind.
What have you gained by growing your passion into a business? Have you had to sacrifice anything in the process?
I’ve gained so much through the process of growing P.F. I’ve been able to do my Etsy shop dream, and it’s such a funny job, I run a candle company. I don’t necessarily remember a moment where I thought, I’m going to grow the business. At the beginning I was very scrappy and took every opportunity that came our way. Of course, there were also conscious choices that led to growth, like taking on bigger orders, scaling, and hiring staff. Having started my business in the bottom of the recession in 2008, I operated on a scarcity mentality where I was so afraid that I wouldn’t get these opportunities again. We were like let’s grow, let’s hustle, and it felt fun. As we were growing very rapidly, I remember that we felt like it was going by so fast that we didn’t get to enjoy the moments where we were a ten person company.
Now we’re in a more stable time, we’re not in that rapid growth phase anymore. What I really like about this phase is that I get to enjoy the size that we are and feel the benefits of being this size, versus being a larger company. We were up to 95 people at one point, and that’s a really different type of company to run. In the beginning, Tom and I definitely sacrificed having a lot of friends. We had just moved to downtown LA, so we were in a new place, and it took us a really long time to make a group of friends because we were so focused on the business. I am happy to report I do have some friends now.
The scents you develop feel like direct channels to nature. Do your fragrances result from pointed research or do ideas arise by osmosis, through spending time in nature?
The osmosis thing is real. Nature is a huge source of inspiration, and I always say our scents smell very true to life. I don’t want them to be too cloying or overpowering. My sister-in-law and Tom are so sensitive to fragrance, so keeping it very light and smelling as true to life as possible is a goal of ours.
For our Hi-Fi Collection, which is our premium line, we pull all of the fragrance inspiration from fine fragrance by looking at what’s really popular in perfumery right now, and trying to create fragrances based on that. Skin scents are also huge. What would a light musky scent in a candle look like, and how would that apply to home fragrance? We’re still not doing body fragrance. We’ve dabbled in it, but our niche is obviously home scent and you want those to smell very different. Trying to pull inspiration from perfumery when those scents settle so differently on the skin than in wax is very fun.
Can you talk about your materials and the importance of sourcing?
We use soy wax. I think it’s cool that it’s grown here in America and that it’s lowering our carbon footprint to use it. I went to the factory where it’s made a couple years ago and saw it transformed from oil. They ran it through this 13 story whirling machine to purify it, essentially. They then ran it over an ice roller to turn it into flakes. It was so fascinating.
In terms of other materials, it’s about understanding where things are coming from. As I learned more about perfumery and I started looking at our MSDS [material safety data sheet] differently, I was really able to start recognizing some of the ingredients and familiarize myself with the different compounds and how they make up the structure of the fragrances. I felt a deepening [connection to my materials] when I started to understand the MSDS from the ingredient standpoint too. Connecting to the materials makes you feel connected to the process. For the incense workshop I’m teaching, we’re making it from scratch using a Mako powder in the base, and then adding in different plant materials. I have all of this sage growing in my front yard right now and I was cutting it back because it was overgrown, and I realized that I could use it for the workshop. It smells so good. I’m really excited to say I grew this sage and now we’re using it as a fragrant material.
Do you ever collaborate with other makers?
We love to host makers at our shop and to me that’s giving back because it’s how I got my start. In terms of collaborations, we just started doing that a couple years ago. We’ve collaborated with everyone from Toy Machine to Peanuts. We just collaborated with a cycling brand this year, Grin27. They’re a super small operation, really cool and niche. And we just did one with Sempervirens, which is a Redwoods conservation agency. We’re working on one coming out later this year that I can’t leak yet, it’s a food collaboration. Things come our way and sometimes it’s such a cool opportunity and can also feel so random. We get the opportunity to create a profile based on something that you wouldn’t think has a smell like with Toy Machine, it was the smell of the maple they use in their skateboard decks.
That’s so cool! What a nice way to keep the energy fresh and expand the way you consider what a scent can be.
I completely agree. This is the biggest thing collaborations have been for us. You would think that getting a request to make a scent based on these specific things would be a box, but it actually allows you to shine because you’re creating something that is out of your wheelhouse. That’s how we really started exploring different angles, and some of our new scents are things that were cast offs from collaborations that we’d worked on that didn’t go through, but the scent was incredible and a new vein for us.
The other thing that I’ve been getting more into is workshops. I’m teaching them myself, and it’s been so fun to get back into the candle making aspect of it that I don’t feel I usually have time for. That is my space where I really experiment. I’ll pull five to eight fragrances for the class and it will be designed for whoever I’m co-hosting with. In class, I’m not only getting to blend my own fragrances, but I’m seeing the reactions of everybody around the room to all of these different types of scents and learning more by being in person, and it reminds me of my roots when I did craft fairs. It’s been a really fun thing from me, a very different outcome of what I had expected going in.
The community building aspect must be an important element in keeping the spark around your work alive.
It feels like moving into a teaching role. When I’m preparing for these workshops, I’ll do a lot of research on the materials that we’re using, and it’s in that process that I feel really passionate and excited. I guess I’m kind of a nerd, too. I can’t wait to share these fragrance packs with people. And I don’t know whether it’s landing, but when you speak to someone who’s so passionate about what they’re doing and so excited about the knowledge that they’re sharing, you can feel it.
I’m sure it’s landing for people! Scent is so important, it connects us to memory and nostalgia in unique ways. Can you talk a bit more about your personal relationship to scent and what power you think it holds?
I really recognize the nostalgic aspect of it, and I like to use it to bookend periods of my life. If I’m going through a bad or stressful time I stop wearing all perfumes and become aware of what fragrances I’m using at my house on repeat, because I don’t want to lose a favorite scent to a sad time. It’s such a bizarre thing, but it is so fun the way that scent can encapsulate entire chapters.
I have a fragrance that I made with a natural perfumer here in LA at one of the first perfume workshops that I did. I called it Big Sur and I wore it for pretty much two years. It reminds me so much of building a business because I wore it to work, and it was a time when I was really investing in myself, learning more about fragrance and not just being a maker, but being able to present myself knowing about fragrance and perfume as well. Smelling it brings back this hit of nostalgia. It’s all the ambient scents that surround you and the laundry detergent and weird niche things, cleaning agents. I like to mix my own stuff for that. I also make my own face oils. I love thinking about creating these scents that by layering them, become so deeply personal to you.
What kind of impact do you hope you’re having on people’s lives through your company and your teaching?
My first impact would be on my staff and my team. When Tom and I set out to grow the company we didn’t really realize what we were doing, but we knew that we wanted to earn enough to make a living for ourselves. First and foremost I want to make sure that I am providing for our staff, making sure we’re paying them well and creating a good atmosphere. We’re doing fully subsidized healthcare. The second thing is allowing people to access luxury candles at an accessible price point. That’s my balancing act, is to pay my team well enough to make these incredible products, but also get [the candles] priced well enough that they can hit the market and people can burn them every day.
The unexpected thing about working in fragrances is that sometimes you’re just running the business, you’re like, “I’m just making these things, do people like it?” Then someone says, “Your candle was there during this really hard period of my life,” or “We used these scents during our wedding,” and you realize that people tie fragrance to their memories, and it can be this source of comfort or this little luxury that they’re using every day that cheers them up. That’s the really cool thing that I’ve been trying to stay connected to. I’ve been working in the shops more so that I can basically gossip with the customers. I want to know everything, I want them to tell me their life story. I love chatting to people.
It sounds like you’re doing a great job at remaining connected to why you started this project in the first place–it’s hard to do while things grow and evolve.
Oh, absolutely. I came up in that girl boss era. I had my craft fair friends, and then when I stopped doing craft fairs and didn’t see them as much, I remember thinking, who is my community? Then I started seeing a lot of people getting investment and growing and selling their business. It felt more like what they were selling was the business itself versus being connected to the product and wanting to be conscious of what they were bringing into the world. It’s just a different kind of mindset. I’ve really tried to stay close to what we’re doing and what we’re making.
Do you have a vision for the future of P.F. Candle Co.?
I’m thinking about the vision all the time, but this year, I will be completely honest that with all the changes that have happened, having to navigate constant shifts from the administration, I just have to live in the present. I feel like this is the year of the present and just trying to navigate down the river. I think a lot about the growth for P.F. and what I want for it, and what I’ve been connecting with is opening more retail stores.
It feels like a return to our roots, and I love creating the spaces, interiors; that’s my happy space. I’ve been thinking about how the product connects to those interior spaces and trying to continue to bring those to life in our retail stores so people have a space that they feel inspired by and connected to. I love the retail store. I love a good shopping experience, when you go in and you feel like you have incredible service. You make a connection with the person working there, and they know what they’re talking about, and you get excited. It’s like my rock guy. I love rocks anyway, but he made me so excited. And then we have a new scent coming out in July that I’m very excited about because it’s a very P.F. scent, so when we talk about getting back to your roots, that’s what this year feels like, getting back to our roots.
Kristen Pumphrey recommends:
Riding your bike instead of driving in LA
Stalogy 365 Notebook: the thinnest pages that become perfectly crinkly and sound amazing after you write on them in ballpoint
Pruning/cutting back your plants and garden – extremely satisfying immersive work
How did you learn to write with humor, especially when writing heavy themes, and what do you think the key to writing humor is?
One of my core principles in this life is to look at the conditions of my marginal identity not as sources of deprivation but of life-giving. So when I think, this is something that I encounter and endure because I am Black, this is something I encounter and endure because I’m queer. Yes, those things are difficult, but they’re real. Part of telling real stories is to write about the things that hurt and also the things that delight us. Oftentimes, those things happen at the same time.
My father passed away recently and there were things that happened at that funeral that were absolutely… I mean, the entirety of the funeral is just an absolutely devastating thing to have to face. But within the funeral there are all these funny little interactions happening. It’s almost absurdist. So, for the second part of your question, the way that I write comedy best is to do it via interpersonal interactions. How can I pump up this banter so it’s funny? How can we use a character misspeaking or misunderstanding something to one, indicate something deeper about the way these two characters interact but also use it as a moment for the other character to retort with something smart or snappy?
In writing the truth of a situation, which is that something can be bad and hilarious at the same time, you’re going to get to the heart of comedy every time. And if you think about the way all of us are moving through the world, how absurdist is it? It’s a form of absurdist humor that all of us are expected to keep going to work and write pitch decks and tweet out about our little gay stories while empire is crumbling around us. That’s absurd. And within that absurdity, there’s a lot of space for us to highlight the humor.
Where do you think humor’s place is in this current political climate, especially in literature?
When I first started writing, I told another writer, Kristina Forest, that I was afraid I was writing something passé. My first book was about a girl who runs for prom queen to get a scholarship to college then falls in love with her competition for queen. And I was like, haven’t we seen something similar to this? Her advice to me was, “You don’t have any obligation to reinvent the wheel because no, we haven’t seen this before. We haven’t gotten this particular brand of comedy, this particular brand of romance from a writer with your particular point of view.”
So, I got to do something that had rarely been done before and within that, was able to highlight some things that I felt were missing in the genre at that time. For many years, the job of the queer writer, the job of the Black writer, was to write really clearly about race or queerness or homophobia or racism. Often, that work was expected to be devoid of humor because that’s how we were intended to be received most seriously. But Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is a prime example–Baldwin was funny. Even when the work was serious and the issues were serious, the descriptions had lightness to them. There was some levity, there was some tongue-in-cheekness to the way he’s describing the environments and the conditions that he was coming up through.
I think all of us have an obligation in our work to tell the truth, but I don’t think that it is any longer the obligation of the Black writer to be the only people who speak seriously about the political moment. I think the Black writer, the queer writer should be able to write the funny thing and have that taken seriously. We should be able to write the absurdist thing and have that read with the same level of seriousness and scholarship that we would’ve approached it if it were completely devoid of humor, at least on the surface. The obligation for me is to keep doing exactly what I do, which is to write everyday situations with everyday queer Black girls and find ways to make those stories as resonant and as urgent but also as fun as possible. I am of the mind that we carried a lot of load for a lot of years and it’s time for people who are in less vulnerable positions to become more vulnerable in the work.
What did you set out to examine with Bree Boyd is a Legend, your most recent middle grade novel?
Bree is the first character that I’ve ever written who is not explicitly on-the-page queer. In this book, I start to navigate some complicated family dynamics, which is always part of my stories. But this one was close to my heart because I was dealing with the parentified older child, which hits home the idea of Black excellence and what we lose in pursuit of approval from white people or what we lose in pursuit of the white gaze.
I hadn’t really gotten to write that in the previous books, not as explicitly as I do in Bree. I mean, it’s obviously there in You Should See Me in a Crown. So much of Crown is about what it’s like to be a Black girl in a white space. But I wanted to talk about what it means to have inherited that. Liz intuited that because she has to live through it, move through it every day, but she wasn’t taught that necessarily. But Bree, from the moment she was conscious, was being inundated with this idea from her father that her worth is determined by her output. If you are not great, then you are not worthy of care. If you are not great, then you are not worthy of respect, et cetera.
I wanted to unpack that. I felt like it would be liberating for me, but I also for so many readers who were searching for the same things that I’m always searching for in a book, absolution.
What do you think you’re learning both about the stories you’re writing and maybe even about yourself as an author when you explore worth in each of your novels?
I’m learning that writing isn’t therapy. Therapy is therapy. And I would encourage writers to do the work of taking care of yourself off the page. Right now, one of my goals is to pursue stories that are fun and reinvigorate me as a writer, and not necessarily pursue stories because I’m trying to figure something out. I realized when I use the work as a vehicle to affirm and reaffirm myself, it’s very difficult to put that thing out in the world and hand it over to other people.
Because I spent so many years pouring bits of real Leah Johnson into these books, when the book came out and it underperformed, it felt deeply personal to me in a way that I don’t think it would if I had spent years divesting my likeness from my work.
But also, I’m learning more about what it takes to sustain yourself as a writer. At this point, I’ve been doing this for seven years. Since then, I have put out four solo novels, edited one anthology, and have another book coming by the end of this year. Because I was doing so much working, I didn’t leave myself a lot of room to think, how do I keep myself in this for a long time? How am I able to keep coming up with ideas and keep feeling excited and keep feeling motivated by this work? That wasn’t really the objective. The objective was to build a body of work and build it really quickly. But I’m not interested in building a body of work quickly anymore. I’ve done that. We now know I can do it now. I want to build a life and fold the books into my life and not the other way around.
Your bookstore, Loudmouth, has been open for almost two years now. How do you make the time to write now that you own a bookstore? And when you’re exhausted, tired, frustrated from book selling, how do you find excitement for your work?
Well, your guess is as good as mine queen. I’m still trying to figure this out. I had a particularly difficult end of 2023, beginning of 2024 because not only was I in the first couple of months of owning the bookstore but I had accepted a year-long appointment in an MFA program at a college nearby. And I also was on a deadline for I think two, three different projects over the course of that year.
It burned me out. It was very difficult for me to find the excitement in my work when I didn’t have anything left in the tank at the end of the day. I don’t think it’s natural for us to produce creative works so quickly, and I don’t think it’s natural to create work like that without being able to take the time to refill the well.
One of the keys was being a judge for the National Book Awards. I read so much over the course of 2024 that I was thinking about stories constantly. I was thinking about what’s working and what’s not, about who the readers are and who the gatekeepers are and what my objectives are in the work, what I think other people’s objectives should be. It was the single most useful tool in helping me re-evaluate what I’m trying to accomplish in my own work.
What made you open Loudmouth?
At the time that I opened Loudmouth, there was not a new general interest bookstore in Indianapolis. Within that year of deciding I was going to open the store and actually opening it, about eight bookstores opened in the city. So one, I identified a need: we were seeing record numbers of books being banned and challenged across the country. And more than half of those challenged books were challenged on the basis of race and queerness or gender and sexuality.
Because those topics are right in the wheelhouse of what me and so many of my friends are trying to do, it felt urgent in a way it hadn’t felt urgent for me before. I know that having queer people who are out and happy and successful is a major tool for showing kids that queer futures are possible. I wanted Loudmouth to exist because I wanted those writers to always have a place to go.
For a long time I was told, “Leah, if you weren’t from Indianapolis, we wouldn’t send you there because you don’t have an audience there.” We get DMs every week from people who are like, “Hey, can we see if we can get on this tour?” The enthusiasm is there. The job of the writer, I think, is to be possibility making. And people didn’t know to ask until they knew that it was possible. So now we’re here, we’re doing it, and people are asking the questions.
In the past few years, you have been working and writing collaboratively. You edited Black Girl Power. You have an upcoming YA novel with George M. Johnson. You’re running a bookstore. What is it like shifting from a more solitary effort–writing your own novels–to writing in community?
Writing is deeply solitary work. I think you should try whenever possible to write in community, whether that’s to work on collaborative projects or to just be in a space with other writers–doing FaceTime writing sessions with your friends, sitting in on writing workshops even once you feel like you are the one who has the potential to teach the writing workshop. All those opportunities are collaborative writing, and I think it’s really important to engage with them because the work is not done in a vacuum.
When I left grad school, I had spent two years being surrounded by other writers, and everything in my life was oriented towards writing. The further away from that you get, the harder it becomes to recapture that particular form of magic. It’s really useful for me to write collaboratively because even if the writers that I’m working with come from different backgrounds than me or have different specialties than me, it’s like being back in a classroom.
Everybody’s bringing a particular perspective. And you have to be reminded that your view of the world, your view of writing is not the only view. It makes me stronger and it makes the writers that I’m writing with stronger.
Now that you have more than a few novels under your belt, what do you think you’re exploring at this point of your career that’s different from where you began? What are you newly curious about?
After spending a few years in middle grade, I’m returning to YA full force and I’m back in the rom-com game. I think something that happens for me, and for a lot of writers who have debuted novels that have a certain measure of success, you either spend your whole career running from it or you spend your career taking ownership of that book.
I had received so many reviews from You Should See Me in a Crown that were like, “We love this about your main character, and we love that.” And I was like, “Yeah, but what if I didn’t do it that way?” One of the things too that I was really railing against, especially with Crown, was that I had this character who was by all metrics good with a capital G. She was a great daughter. She was a very present older sister. She had a job that she was really great at. She was a leader in the band. She was really supportive of her friends. And she had her life together, barring the few missteps she has to take in order for us to have a plot.
So in my second book, I was like, “What if I wrote a character who was just messy and chaotic and made all the worst decisions where Liz made all the best decisions?” I was trying to run this experiment: will you still love a Black girl if she’s flawed? The answer to that experiment is not quite as important as the larger picture, which is that I didn’t want to pivot away from rom-coms because I didn’t love the rom-coms. I wanted to pivot because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t a one trick pony and I wasn’t a one hit wonder. But what I’ve learned over the past couple of years is that there’s nothing wrong with being really good at a thing and going all in on that thing. I love rom-coms. I think it’s a beautiful form. And frankly, I think there’s a lot of science and technique required to be great at it.
That’s something to lean into. That’s something to take ownership of. In this next phase of my career, I am returning to the form because I’m good at it and because I love it and because there’s nothing wrong with making art that other people like, and there’s nothing wrong with making a thing that a bunch of other people really want you to make. You don’t have to push against that expectation. It’s like Kristina Forest said, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Everything we do is still being done for the first time. And so I’m excited to see how many different ways I can write something for the first time.
They came with promises of transformation: thousands of jobs, surging salaries, and a foothold in the booming electric vehicle market.
Imola Automotive USA, a Boca Raton, Florida-based startup, pitched officials in small, struggling towns in Georgia, Oklahoma, and Arkansas on a bold vision. The company planned to build six EV plants, create 45,000 jobs — and help these impoverished communities secure a place in America’s green future.
But more than 18 months later, the company hasn’t broken ground on a single site. And its top executive — whose background is in television and athletic shoes, not automotive manufacturing — has gone silent.
A Floodlight investigation did not uncover lost taxpayer money in Fort Valley, Georgia; Langston, Oklahoma; or Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Imola has sought free land, municipal financing, and other incentives for its shifting proposals.
But an economic development watchdog said the episode illustrates how the frenzy to land electric vehicle jobs can leave economically distressed towns vulnerable to empty promises.
Imola CEO Rodney Henry declined requests for an interview. He responded to Floodlight’s inquiries with a short statement, insisting the company had not given up on its plans, which have included a partnership with an Italian manufacturer of two-seat electric vehicles.
“Our timetable has been modified due to matters outside of our control,” Henry said in a statement. “We are highly focused on bringing our goals into alignment. Due to proprietary consideration as well as NDA (nondisclosure) agreements, we are not at liberty to discuss specifics at this juncture.”
Imola Automotive USA CEO Rodney Henry, left, looks on as Isaac Crumbly, of Fort Valley State University in Georgia, signs an agreement in 2024 to collaborate on science and workforce development. Fort Valley State University
That’s a stark shift from the company’s earlier promises. In a press release issued in January 2024, Henry claimed the company had already secured land in multiple states to build half a dozen plants and create tens of thousands of jobs.
Could someone with no experience in car manufacturing really deliver that?
“It’s ludicrous,” said Greg LeRoy, CEO of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and analyzes economic development projects.
Building large auto plants, he said, requires “a great deal of capital, a great deal of management skill, a great deal of engineering and marketing chops. And obviously, Tesla developed those, but they didn’t do it overnight, right?”
Langston, Fort Valley, and Pine Bluff weren’t the only towns swept up in the competition to attract electric vehicle plants. Spurred by federal policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which unlocked billions in private investment and expanded government incentives, local officials across the country scrambled to land high-paying manufacturing jobs and a slice of the booming clean energy economy.
Since the IRA passed in 2022, more than 150 EV plants have been announced in the United States, according to E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders who advocate for economic development good for the environment.
But that rush may be grinding to a halt. The recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which rolls back many federal tax credits and incentives for electric vehicles, is already throwing the EV sector into turmoil — threatening to stall or shrink the kinds of ambitious projects towns like Langston, Fort Valley, and Pine Bluff were counting on. E2 reports that plans for 14 EV-related plants have been canceled this year.
Bold promises, then silence
In three towns where Imola pledged massive investment, there’s no sign of construction and little more than confusion.
Langston — a town of 1,600 where more than 35 percent of residents live in poverty — never saw Imola’s plans take shape.
A 2023 letter to the city council from former Imola chief operating officer Eric Pettus stated that the company had run into “multiple obstacles,” including trouble acquiring enough land.
“In order for us to continue moving forward on the project we are requesting that the City of Langston convey to us any and all vacant properties owned by the city,” Pettus wrote.
Langston City Council member Magnus Scott said the company also asked the town to issue municipal bonds to help build the plant.
But before any land changed hands or bonds were issued, a company representative delivered unexpected news: The deal had been canceled. “I guess maybe they ran into financial problems,” Scott said.
Reached by phone, Pettus, of south Florida, said he’s no longer employed by Imola but instead works as a consultant for the company. Citing a nondisclosure agreement, he declined to discuss Imola’s plans.
Fort Valleygave its backing in early 2024 to Imola’s ambitious plan to build an EV plant that would employ 7,500 workers.
A year later, with no sign of progress on the plant, the company came back to the Georgia town with an entirely different proposal. This time, instead of building an EV plant, it pitched a high-tech lighting system for the town.
One city council member balked.
“You want us to sign an agreement for 99 years before you bring us the car company,” said council member Laronda Eason, according to minutes of the March 2025 meeting. “It feels like a bait and switch.”
Eason did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment on the Imola proposal.
In Pine Bluff, where per capita income last year was just over $21,000, city officials were initially all in. Writing to Henry in August 2024, then-mayor Shirley Washington said the city of 39,000 stood ready to buy land, build infrastructure, and issue industrial revenue bonds to support Imola’s vision.
“With an anticipated employment base of more than 8,000 jobs,” Washington wrote, “we firmly believe this investment will marshal a pivotal turning point in our community.”
But a year later, the project hasn’t moved. “We never did get off the ground with that,” Washington said in a brief phone interview.
LeRoy said Imola’s pitch fits a troubling pattern.
“It grabs me as an example of how the craze among governors and mayors to get the next big thing has caused some sloppy vetting,” he said of the struggling communities courted by Imola.
Such towns, he said, are “easy prey. … They’re desperate.”
Grand vision, missing details
Henry, who lives in Florida, touts a background as a longtime TV executive producer and the founder of Protégé, an athletic footwear brand. He claims on his IMDB profile that Protégé donated a million pairs of shoes to African nations.
But despite announcements of partnerships and promises of good-paying jobs, his EV company has yet to show any tangible progress.
In early 2024, Imola Automotive USA and the Tazzari Group — an Italian firm best known for its electric two-seater micro cars — jointly announced plans for a partnership.
Floodlight found that the website for Imola — named after the Italian city where Tazzari EVs are made — is no longer accessible without a password. A search of the Tazzari website found no mention of plants in the United States. But a 2024 version of the Imola site mentions the tiny vehicles “coming soon to America.”
The EVs that Tazzari makes in Italy aren’t designed for highway driving. Top speed on the company’s Opensky Sport model is about 56 miles per hour, while maximum speed on the Opensky Limited is about 37 mph, according to the company’s webpage.
Some of the electric two-seater micro cars made by the Tazzari Group.
Tazzari Group website
Tazzari didn’t respond to email messages from a Floodlight reporter.
Henry said at that time that the company chose Langston and Fort Valley because of their universities.
“Both of these locations are ideal,” he said in the January 2024 news release, “as their proximity to communities with institutions of higher learning will allow residents and students career opportunities in the fast-growing EV technology and innovation Industry.”
Many local officials in Fort Valley, Langston, and Pine Bluff did not respond to interview requests. Few documents were provided in response to Floodlight’s public records requests.
But it’s clear from available records that Imola’s promises stirred hope.
Langston Mayor Michael Boyles called the proposal “transformative” in a January 2024 news release.
But some local leaders soon began to question the details.
Erica Johnson, a real estate agent and former member of Langston’s economic development commission, said parts of the plan didn’t add up. How, for instance, would the company house more than 1,000 workers in such a small town? And how was it going to build such a large plant on land without utilities or water?
Her doubts deepened when she learned that Imola wanted to lock down land agreements without putting up any earnest money.
“My early feeling was that, ‘Something is not quite okay with this,’” she said. “But I think the hope for our community kind of outweighed the ability to just take things slow and look at them for where they are and what they are — versus where you hope them to be.”
Eventually, the promise fizzled.
“It was disappointing,” Johnson said. “We could have had our energy and time focused on something that seemed more valid and more substantial.”
Still waiting for the shovels
Some residents in Fort Valley are still holding out hope.
Mayor Jeffery Lundy said early last year that it was a “priority for my administration to land a company like Imola Automotive USA.” Local officials, he said, were looking forward to the economic boost the plant would bring.
At the time, Imola claimed it would break ground on a 195-acre site by the third quarter of 2024 and open the plant within 20 months, according to a report in the Macon Telegraph.
In early 2024, Imola Automotive USA promised that it would build an electric vehicle plant in Fort Valley, Georgia, that would employ 7,500 people. Michael Rivera / Wikimedia
During a February 2024 town hall meeting, Imola officials told residents that the plant would pay employees an average of $45 an hour, according to a Facebook post. Commenters buzzed with excitement, with one writing: “Application me !!!!”
In early 2024, Fort Valley rezoned land to accommodate the plant, and the city council signed off on the deal. But more than 15 months later, there’s still no sign of construction.
Council members were told that Georgia Power couldn’t provide sufficient power for the EV company, according to minutes of their March 2025 meeting. A spokesman for Georgia Power said that while the utility doesn’t discuss economic development projects, “We’re prepared and ready to meet the energy needs of any new customer.”
Makita Driver, one of the Facebook commenters who’d voiced excitement about the proposed EV plant, said there’s no doubt she would have applied for one of the jobs there — had the facility ever been built.
“The pay rate was really what got my attention,” she said.
As a medical assistant, Driver said she earns far less than what Imola had promised. But she eventually concluded the promises were too good to be true.
“Who really makes that kind of money starting out?” she asked.
In a brief interview with Floodlight on July 11, Mayor Lundy said he’s still in contact with Henry.
“We are patiently waiting for that groundbreaking,” Lundy said.
Letter from rights groups says RedBird Capital’s proposed takeover threatens media pluralism and transparency
A group of nine human rights and freedom of expression organisations have called on the culture secretary to halt RedBird Capital’s proposed £500m takeover of the Telegraph and investigate the US private equity company’s ties to China.
The international non-governmental organisations, which include Index on Censorship, Reporters Without Borders and Article 19, have written to Lisa Nandy arguing that RedBird Capital’s links with China “threaten media pluralism, transparency and information integrity in the UK”.
In early July, as the torrential rain that unleashed deadly flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country started to abate, a Kerr County resident standing on a bridge filmed something floating toward him through the trees. It was a cream-colored, ranch-style house with black trim — so perfectly intact it almost seemed like the swollen Guadalupe River might set it down and whoever owned it could pick up where they left off. “There’s a cat in there,” someone watching remarked.
Seconds later, the house plowed into the bridge, beams snapping as it crushed against the steel railing.
Kerr County appraisers estimate that thousands of homes like this one were damaged or destroyed by the July 4 floods, totaling more than $240 million in lost property value alone. In the end, the disaster killed more than 130 people and caused damage and economic losses worth $18 billion at minimum.
The tragedy in Texas is the latest addition to the country’s swelling disaster ledger, which is on track to well exceed $1 trillion this decade.
As countries continue to emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases, a warmer planet is fueling more severe hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and temperatures. Responding to — and rebuilding from — these disasters is costing Americans staggering amounts of money. The bigger the disaster, the wider the ripple of economic consequences.
Below are six graphs that demonstrate this growing disaster economy, from how much the federal government spends on relief to the rising prices of home insurance and building materials.
Decades ago, two meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started tracking the biggest natural disasters in the United States — the ones that incurred at least $1 billion in damages. The annual federal disaster counts have pointed in one direction since: up. Despite this worrying trend, the Trump administration this year directed NOAA to stop publishing data on billion-dollar disasters, destroying one of the clearest indicators of the growing cost of natural disasters on a warming planet.
FEMA disaster declarations have been steadily rising since the 1960s
Number of federal disaster declarations per year, 1953-2025
In its first decade of existence, FEMA handled 25 major disaster declarations per year on average. In the past decade, as disasters have carved larger paths through denser communities and more expensive infrastructure, the agency has had to field 63 declarations annually — a 150 percent increase.
Federal spending on disaster relief has surged in recent years
Annual FEMA Disaster Relief Fund spending, 1992-2021, billions of dollars
Federal Emergency Management Agency spending on disasters, including the COVID-19 public health crisis, has averaged $12 billion over the past 30 years. But the average obscures a concerning trend underway: The number of very large disasters is rising, corresponding with a significant uptick in the share spent specifically on response and recovery. Between 1992 and 2004, the agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, a federally appropriated pot of money for disaster response operations, averaged $3.4 billion per year. Now, annual spending is closer to $16 billion, as disasters get more intense and the number of people and amount of infrastructure in at-risk areas rises.
The costs of building a new home are ballooning, making it more expensive to rebuild post-disaster
New home construction price index, 1964-2024 (2005 = 100)
Disasters often require homeowners to rebuild from the ground up, but the cost of constructing a new home has nearly doubled since 1996 (after adjusting for inflation). So as extreme weather becomes more intense, rising building costs are making it even more difficult for families to recover.
Home insurance premiums are rising faster in high-risk areas
Average home insurance premiums by climate risk level, 2014-2023
Insurance premiums for American homes have risen 30 percent on average since 2020. The increase hasn’t been felt equally across the country. Homeowners in areas with the highest risk of natural disasters — along the coasts and in the middle of the country where tornados are common — have seen their premiums rise the most (controlling for all other factors). Households in some parts of Florida, for example, have seen their insurance premiums rise $4,000 or more.
More Americans are moving into disaster-prone areas
Net population movement by disaster risk level, thousands of people
Expensive disasters are striking more frequently, but Americans are also increasingly putting themselves in harm’s way. In 2023, roughly 63,000 people moved into counties at high risk for wildfires and about 16,000 moved into flood-prone counties, many of them in search of lower taxes and more ample and affordable housing. The opposite trend unfolded in low-risk areas: Some 38,000 people left the country’s low-fire-risk counties and nearly 7,000 people left low-flood-risk counties.
There is a way to break the cycle. By the federal government’s own calculations, every dollar spent on preparing for a disaster before it hits saves $6 down the line. But the Trump administration has turned that sound logic on its head, eliminating the nation’s main streams of disaster preparedness funding and severely weakening FEMA’s ability to both help states prepare for disasters and respond to them once they’ve struck.
Since April, the Trump administration has cut $750 million in new resilience funding and clawed back nearly $900 million in grant funding already promised but not yet disbursed to states for improvements like upgrading stormwater systems, conducting prescribed burns, and building flood-control systems. About 10 percent of FEMA’s staff has been laid off, fired, or put on leave, and the agency could lose up to 30 percent of its workforce by the end of the year.
Millions of people, particularly those in the most climate-vulnerable parts of the country, stand to lose as a result of the confluence of climate-driven extreme weather events and the Trump administration’s disaster-resilience reforms. But other parties stand to gain.
“There’s many reasons we don’t have global peace, and part of it is that war is profitable,” said Victoria Salinas, who led FEMA’s resilience initiatives under former president Joe Biden. “Similarly, disaster response is profitable. For some.”
Eight to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food wasted somewhere along its journey from farm to table. When that organic waste ends up in a landfill, it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as it slowly decomposes.
Food banks can help prevent food waste from occurring, by rescuing unsold food from grocers and retailers and redistributing it to families and individuals in need. Now, a small number of food banks around the world have recently started tracking their operations and quantifying how many emissions they’re avoiding — with the goal of using that data to better aid decarbonization efforts, as well as to sell carbon credits.
These carbon credits could help open up new avenues to raise money for food banks at a time when other sources of funding, like foreign aid from wealthy to developing countries, are threatened, according to the Global FoodBanking Network, or GFN. The nonprofit organization has piloted this carbon credit program in Mexico and Ecuador and is working to bring food banks in 12 other countries onboard.
But the carbon markets where such credits are traded have been heavily criticized for rampant fraud; the harshest critics say that purchasing credits representing avoided would-be emissions amounts to greenwashing. The rollout of GFN’s program for calculating food banks’ carbon footprint raises the question of whether nonprofits with social and environmental missions should make use of these controversial accounting instruments to stay afloat and further their impact.
Carbon markets are marketed as a way for big polluters (think: airlines, large corporations, even national governments) to minimize their impact on the environment without fundamentally changing the way they operate. In theory, buyers can emit carbon into the atmosphere and then purchase credits — which represent emission reductions — to make up for it, allowing them to claim their operations are carbon-neutral.
The problem is that, without rigorous standards and verification to show that credits represent additional, permanent cuts in emissions, analysis has shown that most of these credits are essentially meaningless. Among other issues, sellers and certification organizations have struggled to meet the additionality standard by proving that, if a buyer had not purchased the credits, the reduction of emissions would not have happened.
Socially driven and environmentally conscious nonprofits have experimented with selling carbon credits. For example, conservation programs have long offered offsets on carbon markets based on the idea that protected ecosystems sequester emissions, said Khaled Diab, communications director at Carbon Market Watch, a nonprofit watchdog organization that studies various carbon pricing programs. These groups can fall victim to overestimating just how much their work reduces emissions: For instance, a Bloomberg investigation in 2020 into The Nature Conservancy’s forest-based carbon credits program found that many of its emissions reductions were likely bogus. The Nature Conservancy has not stopped selling credits, but launched a review of its own practices and canceled one project the organization said did not meet its newly developed internal criteria.
Views of driving through the White Mountain National Forest in rural Stow, Maine.
Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images
In April, Carbon Market Watch released a report on programs that give gas or electric stoves to families in poor countries who would otherwise chop down and burn wood to cook food. These programs sold carbon credits based on the reduction in emissions that came from families going from burning wood to using a cleaner source of fuel. “We found that the climate impact is overstated significantly,” said Diab, in part because of assumptions the programs made when measuring emissions.
In the process of developing the Food Recovery to Avoid Methane Emissions, or FRAME, methodology, GFN was aware of these issues, said Ana Catalina Suarez Peña, head of strategy and innovation for the organization.
“All the scandals around voluntary carbon markets are associated with the rigor of the monitoring, reporting, and verification schemes” that underpin them, she said. If carbon credit sales are growing, and global temperatures are also continuing to rise, then “something is not correct,” said Suarez Peña.
So when GFN was researching how to quantify how many emissions it saves by diverting food to landfills, the organization was focused on ensuring “what we are reporting is real,” said Suarez Peña. The methodology is in the process of being certified by the Gold Standard, a standard-setting organization that verifies credits sold through voluntary carbon markets, according to GFN.
This involved getting specific about what counts as an avoided emission. In this case, participating food banks are comparing the emissions they run up by transporting rescued food, refrigerating it, and potentially losing some edible food to spoilage to a scenario where grocers and retailers dispose of their food in a way that doesn’t end up feeding people — i.e., sending it to a landfill or to be made into compost or animal feed.
The FRAME methodology only looks at food intended for human consumption that would otherwise arrive at one of these destinations but is then diverted by food banks and given to people who will eat it. It also only looks at food that is donated to food banks, rather than purchased by them.
But some experts say this framework is flawed. For one, it assumes that if shops don’t donate the leftover food, then the food will inevitably end up going to waste, said Marc Roston, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. That ignores a scenario where shops could get rid of leftover food by selling it at a discount — perhaps even directly to the food bank. “The food bank buys food very inexpensively: no credits. The grocery store gives food to the food bank: credits issued. That’s not good carbon accounting,” said Roston.
A member of Venezuela’s food bank organizes food before distributing it to beneficiary organizations serving vulnerable people in Caracas.
Pedro Mattey / AFP via Getty Images
In order for carbon credits to represent a legitimate offset in emissions, they also need to reflect new or additional work being done to reduce climate pollution. The idea is that, by selling credits, organizations can prevent even more carbon emissions than they were preventing before. The food banks in GFN have long diverted food at risk of being wasted — but according to GFN, its carbon credits program represents additional work in the sense that the funds generated by selling credits allow food banks to expand their capacity to rescue food. Suarez Peña said that member food banks ensure they’re capturing accurate data by tracking operations-related emissions in real-time and submitting quarterly reports to GFN.
Most food banks within GFN operate with a budget of $1 million or less, according to the organization — meaning that even relatively small losses in funding can have a big impact on its ability to stay open. As the Trump administration retracts billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, European countries are also reconsidering how much money they spend abroad. That means that food banks in the Global South, whose budgets are typically dependent on receiving funding from wealthier nations, are newly interested in exploring alternative sources of funding.
The Mexican Food Banking Network, or BAMX, which previously sold carbon credits under a separate methodology, participated in the pilot to test out the FRAME system. Asked what BAMX learned from the experience, BAMX head Mariana Jiménez said in an interview in Spanish that the organization has a greater awareness of its environmental impact. According to Suarez Peña, the food bank in Quito, Ecuador, that participated in the FRAME pilot has used the data it has collected to have conversations with representatives from the national government about Ecuador’s decarbonization platform.
But critics like Roston argue that unless credits represent actual carbon removed from the atmosphere — for example, by turning food scraps into biochar and then using the biochar to store carbon — they are unlikely to represent real, permanent emissions reductions. “I think there are probably better finance tools to fund food banks than voluntary carbon markets,” said Diab, of Carbon Market Watch.
Suarez Peña, however, sees value in food banks auditing their own operations and sharing that data extending far beyond carbon markets. “I think in the coming years, having better, accurate, and robust data will be the way to demonstrate how everyone is contributing” to climate targets, she said. As countries prepare to report on their climate progress at the annual United Nations climate summit later this year, data on food waste will be extremely valuable, she argued — even though most countries’ accounting methods do not yet make the connection between food waste and emissions. Suarez Peña hopes food banks can help “connect both in just one conversation.”
Mars Denyer, Preslie Fox, Nicholas Mykytyn, and Clara Torchet-Dit-Renard Every year since its founding in 2009, the Essex Human Rights Centre Clinic partners with human rights organisations around the world to bridge the gap between academic research and human rights practice. For the 2024-25 academic year, our project focused on implementing International Labour Organization (ILO) […]
International trade expert Steven Okun has warned that the “era of uncertainty” in global trade set in motion by US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies is likely to be prolonged as there is no certainty now of a US return to pre-Trump trade policy era
He has advised small economies like Fiji and Pacific countries to band together and try to negotiate a collective trade agreement with the US.
“We’re in a transitional phase and this transitional phase is going to take years,” Okun said in an interview with The Fiji Times during his visit to Fiji earlier this month.
“This isn’t months, this is going to be years and after Donald Trump is no longer president, the question is going to be who replaces him. And we just have no idea.
“If the replacement for Donald Trump is a Democrat, is that Democrat going to be more like Joe Biden — work with partners and allies — or is he going to be more progressive like Bernie Sanders, and he or she is going to have a different approach to trade.
“We don’t know which way the Democrats are going to go.
“We don’t know which way the Republicans are going to go. Either the successor is going to be somebody more of a traditional Republican, somebody like the Governor of Georgia or the Governor of New Hampshire who are both more establishment-type Republicans, or is the next president going to be Donald Trump Jr or JD Vance.
‘Upended’ system
“If it’s going to be one of those two, it’s going to be very similar presumably to what we have right now, which means we’re not going to get certainty any time soon.”
Okun, founder and chief executive officer of Singapore-based business advisory firm APAC Advisors and a former Clinton Administration official, said the United States under President Trump had upended the global multilateral trading system that the world had been operating on for the last 80 years.
The shifting dynamics in response to that had seen countries gravitating towards regional trading blocs, something that Pacific countries, including Fiji, should seriously consider, he said.
“We see from the US perspective the desire to have bilateral trade and we see other countries creating plurilateral systems or regional trading blocs . . . ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) would be one, CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) is such an agreement, RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) is another plurilateral system.
“That’s something that I think a country like Fiji should be looking at, same as a country in Southeast Asia — are there blocs that we can be part of and can the Pacific nations come together and collectively get a better agreement with the United States?”
The Fiji Cabinet revealed last week that negotiations were ongoing with the US for a potential US-Fiji Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART).
Okun, who came to Fiji at the invitation of the Fiji-USA Business Council, was also sceptical about the August 1 deadline set by President Trump in April for the activation of reciprocal tariffs against about 90 countries, which would mean Fijian exporters of goods into the US would pay 32 percent duty at the border.
Sky expected the deal to deliver revenue diversification and uplift of around $95 million a year.
Sky expected Discovery NZ’s operations to deliver sustainable underlying earnings growth of at least $10 million from the 2028 financial year.
Sky chief executive Sophie Moloney said it was a compelling opportunity for the company, with net integration costs of about $6.5 million.
“This is a compelling opportunity for Sky that directly supports our ambition to be Aotearoa New Zealand’s most engaging and essential media company,” she said.
Confidential advance notice
Sky said it gave the Commerce Commission confidential advance notice of the transaction, and the commission did not intend to consider the acquisition further.
Warner Bros Discovery Australia and NZ managing director Michael Brooks said it was a “fantastic outcome” for both companies.
“The continued challenges faced by the New Zealand media industry are well documented, and over the past 12 months, the Discovery NZ team has worked to deliver a new, more sustainable business model following a significant restructure in 2024,” Brooks said.
“While this business is not commercially viable as a standalone asset in WBD’s New Zealand portfolio, we see the value Three and ThreeNow can bring to Sky’s existing offering of complementary assets.”
Sky said on completion, Discovery NZ’s balance sheet would be clear of some long-term obligations, including property leases and content commitments, and would include assets such as the ThreeNow platform.
Sky said irrespective of the transaction, the company was confident of achieving its 30 cents a share dividend target for 2026.
‘Massive change’ for NZ media – ThreeNews to continue Founder of The Spinoff and media commentator Duncan Greive said the deal would give Sky more reach and was a “massive change” in New Zealand’s media landscape.
He noted Sky’s existing free-to-air presence via Sky Open (formerly Prime), but said acquiring Three gave it the second-most popular audience outlet on TV.
“Because of the inertia of how people use television, Three is just a much more accessible channel and one that’s been around longer,” Greive said.
“To have basically the second-most popular channel in the country as part of their stable just means they’ve got a lot more ad inventory, much bigger audiences.”
It also gave Sky another outlet for their content, and would allow it to compete further against TVNZ, both linear and online, Greive said.
He said there may be a question mark around the long-term future of Three’s news service, which was produced by Stuff.
No reference to ThreeNews
Sky made no reference to ThreeNews in its announcement. However, Stuff confirmed ThreeNews would continue for now.
“Stuff’s delivery of ThreeNews is part of the deal but there are also now lots of new opportunities ahead that we are excited to explore together,” Stuff owner Sinead Boucher said in a statement.
On the deal itself, Boucher said she was “delighted” to see Three back in New Zealand ownership under Sky.
While public attention has been focused on the domestic fast-track consenting process for infrastructure and mining, Associate Minister of Finance David Seymour has been pushing through another fast-track process — this time for foreign investment in New Zealand.
There are valid concerns that piecemeal reforms to the current act have made it complex and unwieldy. But the new bill is equally convoluted and would significantly reduce effective scrutiny of foreign investments — especially in forestry.
A three-step test Step one of a three-step process set out in the bill gives the regulator — the Overseas Investment Office which sits within Land Information NZ — 15 days to decide whether a proposed investment would be a risk to New Zealand’s “national interest”.
If they don’t perceive a risk, or that initial assessment is not completed in time, the application is automatically approved.
Transactions involving fisheries quotas and various land categories, or any other applications the regulator identifies, would require a “national interest” assessment under stage two.
These would be assessed against a “ministerial letter” that sets out the government’s general policy and preferred approach to conducting the assessment, including any conditions on approvals.
Other mandatory factors to be considered in the second stage include the act’s new “purpose” to increase economic opportunity through “timely consent” of less sensitive investments. The new test would allow scrutiny of the character and capability of the investor to be omitted altogether.
If the regulator considers the national interest test is not met, or the transaction is “contrary to the national interest”, the minister of finance then makes a decision based on their assessment of those factors.
Inadequate regulatory process Seymour has blamed the current screening regime for low volumes of foreign investment. But Treasury’s 2024 regulatory impact statement on the proposed changes to international investment screening acknowledges many other factors that influence investor decisions.
Moreover, the Treasury statement acknowledges public views that foreign investment rules should “manage a wide range of risks” and “that there is inherent non-economic value in retaining domestic ownership of certain assets”.
Treasury officials also recognised a range of other public concerns, including profits going offshore, loss of jobs, and foreign control of iconic businesses.
The regulatory impact statement did not cover these factors because it was required to consider only the coalition commitment. The Treasury panel reported “notable limitations” on the bill’s quality assurance process.
A fuller review was “infeasible” because it could not be completed in the time required, and would be broader than necessary to meet the coalition commitment to amend the act in the prescribed way.
The requirement to implement the bill in this parliamentary term meant the options officials could consider, even within the scope of the coalition agreement, were further limited.
Time constraints meant “users and key stakeholders have not been consulted”, according to the Treasury statement. Environmental and other risks would have to be managed through other regulations.
Forestry ‘slash’ after Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 . . . no need to consider foreign investors’ track records. Image: Getty/The Conversation
No ‘benefit to NZ’ test While the bill largely retains a version of the current screening regime for residential and farm land, it removes existing forestry activities from that definition (but not new forestry on non-forest land). It also removes extraction of water for bottling, or other bulk extraction for human consumption, from special vetting.
Where sensitive land (such as islands, coastal areas, conservation and wahi tapu land) is not residential or farm land, it would be removed from special screening rules currently applied for land.
There would no longer be a need to consider investors’ track records or apply a “benefit to New Zealand” test. Regulators may or may not be empowered to impose conditions such as replanting or cleaning up slash.
The official documents don’t explain the rationale for this. But it looks like a win for Regional Development Minister Shane Jones, and was perhaps the price of NZ First’s support.
Locked in forever? Finally, these changes could be locked in through New Zealand’s free trade agreements. Several such agreements say New Zealand’s investment regime cannot become more restrictive than the 2005 act and its regulations.
A “ratchet clause” would lock in any further liberalisation through this bill, from which there is no going back.
However, another annex in those free trade agreements could be interpreted as allowing some flexibility to alter the screening rules and criteria in the future. None of the official documents address this crucial question.
As an academic expert in this area I am uncertain about the risk.
But the lack of clarity underlines the problems exemplified in this bill. It is another example of coalition agreements bypassing democratic scrutiny and informed decision making. More public debate and broad analysis is needed on the bill and its implications.
In Chile’s drought-stricken Atacama desert, Indigenous people say desalination plants cannot counter the impact of intensive lithium and copper mining on local water sources
Photographs by Luis Bustamante
Vast pipelines cross the endless dunes of northern Chile, pumping seawater up to an altitude of more than 3,000 metres in the Andes mountains to the Escondida mine, the world’s largest copper producer. The mine’s owners say sourcing water directly from the sea, instead of relying on local reservoirs, could help preserve regional water resources. Yet, this is not the perception of Sergio Cubillos, leader of the Indigenous community Lickanantay de Peine.
Cubillos and his fellow activists believe that the mining industry is helping to degrade the region’s meagre water resources, as Chile continues to be ravaged by a mega-drought that has plagued the country for 15 years. They also fear that the use of desalinated seawater cannot make up for the devastation of the northern Atacama region’s sensitive water ecosystem and local livelihoods.
Australia’s government awards rich contracts to Israeli drone makers Elbit and Rafael, which skite to investors about killing Palestinians. Stephanie Tran reports.
Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has posted a video showing an unarmed man being stalked and killed by a drone in Gaza, using the footage to advertise the weapon responsible for his death.
The video, posted to the company’s official account on X, shows a Spike Firefly loitering munition drone as it hovers above a man walking alone through the rubble of a heavily bombed area. The drone silently tracks the man before detonating directly above him, killing him instantly.
Meanwhile, a young Palestinian girl, Hala, was executed yesterday with a bullet to the the head fired by a quadcopter drone. It is even more grotesque that Israeli weapons manufacturers are crowing about their human testing labs – which are the killing fields of Gaza.
The Spike Firefly drone, first unveiled by Rafael in 2018, is a lightweight, soldier-deployed loitering munition designed for urban combat. Weighing just three kilograms, the drone is launched from a canister and can fly silently above a target for up to 15 minutes before striking with high precision.
The drone can be operated remotely with a tablet, and its camera feed allows operators to stalk targets in real time.
According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has increasingly relied on drones like the Firefly to kill civilians in Gaza since October 7, 2023, with quadcopters being deployed in densely populated residential areas and refugee camps. Their report documents multiple instances of drones being used to assassinate individuals in violation of international humanitarian law.
Australia’s financial and military ties to Rafael
Despite mounting evidence that Rafael is complicit in war crimes, the Australian government continues to deepen its commercial and military ties with the company.
Data from Austender reveals that since 2007, the Department of Defence has awarded Rafael-linked entities over $168 million in contracts.
Of this, $42 million went directly to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and $126 million to Varley Rafael, a joint venture launched in 2018 by then Defence Minister Christopher Pyne between Rafael and the Australian engineering firm Varley Group.
The most significant of these is a 15-year missile procurement contract awarded in 2023, worth $108 million. The contract was originally priced at $50 million but was amended and expanded in October 2024, raising further concerns about the government’s ongoing commitment to the company amid the genocide in Gaza.
Beyond procurement, Rafael is also embedded in Australia’s military research ecosystem. The company is a partner in the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) enterprise, a cornerstone of the AUKUS defence initiative.
Through this program, Rafael is working with American firm General Atomics to develop a deep-strike missile. The missile system “will be built in the US for delivery to US military customers to support a variety of critical Department of Defence and coalition partners’ precision fires missions”.
MWM put questions to the Department of Defence about its ongoing collaboration with Rafael and whether the government would consider suspending contracts in light of the company’s apparent complicity in war crimes.
The Department did not respond to the request for comment.
“Snuff videos as a sales pitch”
Greens Senator David Shoebridge, who has long called for an end to Australian arms trade with Israel, condemned the video and the government’s silence.
“It’s obscene that we’re seeing weapons companies that are profiting from a genocide sharing snuff videos as part of their sales pitch,” he told Michael West Media. “It’s even more obscene that the Australian government is buying weapons from these companies.”
Shoebridge has previously raised concerns about Rafael’s marketing practices. At the 2024 Indian Ocean Defence & Security Conference in Perth, he witnessed the company using drone footage showing images of Israeli attacks in Gaza, Yemen and Lebanon being used to promote Israeli weapons systems.
Israeli arms manufacturers use the fact that they have tested their weapons on Palestinians as a sales pitch.
I saw this last year at a ‘defence’ conference in Perth.
Rafael was selling to the Australian Government by showing images of Israeli attacks in Gaza, Yemen and Lebanon
Under international human rights law, the extrajudicial execution of civilians constitutes a grave violation of the right to life. These acts are strictly prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and are prosecutable as war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
In her March 2024 report “Anatomy of a Genocide”, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, concluded that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since 7 October 2023 bears the hallmarks of genocide.
The report, presented to the UN Human Rights Council, documents a deliberate pattern of attacks on civilians, the systematic destruction of infrastructure essential to life, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid, actions that violate humanitarian law.
Albanese explicitly condemned the Israeli military’s use of advanced weaponry, including drones, to indiscriminately “target the Palestinian population as a whole”. These attacks, Albanese states, “cannot be proportionate and are always unlawful”.
As Albanese notes in her most recent report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”, the commodification of Palestinian death for weapons sales is part of a broader militarised economy in which violence against civilians is used to “battle test” weapons.
She highlighted the role of weapons manufacturers in enabling and profiting from these attacks, calling for international accountability not only for states but also for the companies complicit in atrocities. This convergence of state violence and corporate profit, she warns, reflects “an economy of occupation turned genocidal”.
One of the Australian Government’s top consultants, BCG, has been giving financial advice on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. Michael West reports.
A Financial Times investigation last week revealed that the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) undertook a seven-month engagement code-named Aurora, which included modelling the costs of ‘relocating’ Palestinians from Gaza and advisory support related to the establishment of the widely condemned US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
During the $4 million assignment (not carried out by BCG Australia but the US branch), which employed more than twelve people, the BCG team constructed a financial model for ‘relocating’ Palestinians out of Gaza, estimating in one scenario that over 500,000 residents would each require a ‘relocation package’ valued at US$9,000 each, less than the daily rate for one of these ‘management consultants‘ who are known to charge $16,000 a day, before discounts.
Whether this plan envisaged forced relocations requires further investigation to determine the degree to which the firm has provided support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
Since the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” started operating on May 27, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that 410 Palestinians have been killed, with at least 93 others killed by the Israeli army while attempting to approach the very few aid convoys of the UN and other humanitarian organisations. In addition, over 3,000 Palestinians have been injured.
On June 24, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Thameen Al-Kheetan said: “Desperate, hungry people in Gaza continue to face the inhumane choice of either starving to death or risk being killed while trying to get food.”
“Each of these killings must be promptly and impartially investigated, and those responsible must be held to account. The killing and wounding of civilians resulting from the unlawful use of firearms constitute a grave breach of international law and a war crime,” he said.
The Middle East Eye suggests that BCG was selected for this work in Gaza due to its ties to Phil Reilly, a former CIA veteran and long-time BCG adviser. Reilly subsequently founded Safe Reach Solutions, which became the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s principal security provider, with around six BCG staff joining him, the Middle East Eye reported.
Representatives from BCG are understandably scrambling with much hand-wringing: “Our ongoing investigation by an external law firm has substantiated the deep disappointment we expressed weeks ago.
“The full scope of these projects was not disclosed, including to senior leadership. The work carried out was in direct violation of our policies and processes.”
Their latest breathless sustainability report reflects this, stating: “BCG upholds internationally recognised human rights standards, committing to the principles of the UNGC, which are derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Labour Organisation’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
“We also commit to respect the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These commitments are reflected in our policies and business practices…..Although we aim to prevent or mitigate issues before they occur, we also have processes in place to ensure proper remediation of any negative impact suffered by value chain stakeholders.”
In this context, BCG must explain not only how it became involved but also how it plans to remedy and materially address the harm suffered by Palestinians. Its contribution to the founding and design of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation constitutes a potential “contribution” under the UN Guiding Principles’, to which it is a signatory.
Its endorsement of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s proposal during its formative stage lent considerable credibility to the scheme, to the extent that several former BCG staff members were reportedly able to leave and profit from the initiative.
This should trigger the firm’s responsibility to provide for or cooperate in remedying any adverse human-rights impacts to which it has contributed. Even if BCG did not directly inflict harm, its endorsement and technical support for GHF means it must now take steps to address the consequences of those impacts on affected Palestinians.
Practically, BCG should cooperate with credible, independent processes to ensure that victims can secure restitution or compensation, and it should establish or fund an operational grievance mechanism that is legitimate, accessible and predictable.
The reputational damage to BCG is serious, with many refusing to work with the agency, such as the charity Save the Children which has announced that it is suspending its work with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Will the Australian Government follow suit? Last year’s Senate Inquiry revealed a significant government reliance on management consultants such as BCG, with their use increasing threefold between 2010 and 2020 to over $1 billion, making Australia the fourth-largest user of such firms globally. It’s track record has hardly been unblemished yet the government contracts keep flowing.
It should be said that BCG is hardly alone in paying lip service to good corporate governance and ethics, while avoiding tax, treating statutory disclosure with contempt.
A series of investigations here have identified hypocrisy of major corporate names who are signatories to the UN General Principles on business and human rights while supporting organisations linked to war crimes in Palestine. It is not just governments who fail to stand up to the Israel lobby.
The Federal Government is expected to announce a support plan for struggling Nyrstar, part of a group well known for its toxic activities. Jude Manning reports.
Nyrstar produces lead and zinc and operates smelters in Port Pirie, South Australia and Hobart, Tasmania, which have been running losses of tens of millions of dollars per month amid rising energy costs and a global collapse in treatment fees.
Nyrstar is owned by Trafigura, a Singapore-based multinational with a grubby record ($) of bribes, illegal waste dumping, and attempts to shut down media scrutiny.
Nyrstar’s losses have prompted a review of Nyrstar’s Australian operations by Trafigura. In an effort to mitigate losses, the smelters have cut production by 25%, ceasing operations during peak periods of electricity demand, but have so far avoided any layoffs.
It is asking for the government to contribute ‘transitionary support’ while it conducts a $45m feasibility study of smelter upgrades at Port Pirie and Hobart, whose estimated costs total $1B. The proposed upgrades include expansion of capabilities for critical minerals processing, which can be captured as byproducts of zinc and lead refining.
Protecting the workforce
Over 1400 workers are employed at the two smelters combined, each with hundreds of suppliers underpinning thousands of indirect jobs. Both Tasmania Liberal Premier Jeremy Rockliff and opposition leader Dean Winter agree on the need to keep Nyrstar running, and the premier has confirmed he is working with the South Australian and federal governments, “To secure the operations of Nyrstar in Hobart.”
Dean Winter pledged $25 million in State funding yesterday morning if elected in the upcoming Tasmanian election on July 19. Stating that if Nyrstar shuts down, “The loss of hundreds of jobs and the flow-on impact to contractors and reliant businesses would devastate the local economy as well as jeopardise the viability of other industrials.”
It is clear to me that the cost of not supporting Nyrstar will be greater than the cost of supporting it.
This might well be true for the Tasmanian economy today. However, if Nyrstar’s operations cannot become profitable, government support for the smelters might only delay the inevitable, at massive cost to the taxpayer.
Nyrstar CEO Matt Howell states, “We’re looking for a hand up, not a hand out.” But what has caused the company’s revenue collapse? How much government support has it received already? And how much more does it really need to become self-sufficient?
Nyrstar claims Chinese subsidisation has created oversupply in metals processing, pushing smelters around the world into the red as it seeks to monopolise global supply of metals refining and the critical minerals that come with it.
According to Mr Howell, China has subsidised companies to purchase Australian raw materials at prices Australian smelters cannot afford. It then subsidises their processing and later places export controls on the finished product, which includes not only refined zinc and lead but also critical minerals such as antimony, bismuth, tellurium, germanium, and indium.
Amongst other uses, these minerals are considered essential in batteries, solar cells, rocket propellants, ammunition and as semi-conductors.
Existing subsidies
Treatment fees for zinc and lead have indeed dropped dramatically. Each year, the benchmark price is set by the contract between Korea Zinc and Teck Resources over the cost of refining ores from Red Dog, the world’s largest zinc mine in Alaska.
In March this year, Korea Zinc agreed to a fee of US$80 a tonne, down from US$165 last year, the lowest in a decade.
However, while market conditions are difficult, there is no indication that China will cease subsidising its smelters any time soon. Furthermore, Nyrstar already enjoys massive government subsidies.
Its shipping is subsidised under the Tasmanian Freight Equalisation Scheme, which cost the government $184m in 2023-24, of which Nyrstar is the largest beneficiary. It was promised last year a combined $70 million from the State and federal governments to upgrade the Hobart smelter, which apparently was not enough to go ahead with the investment, even before treatment fees were halved.
It also enjoys cut-price green power, which the Tassie government could instead export to the rest of Australia for a better return.
If existing subsidies haven’t been enough, and increased competition globally has made zinc smelting unprofitable,
why should taxpayers foot the bill to prop up such an uncertain industry?
Trafigura is a “leading supplier of commodities, founded in 1993.” It posted a half-year net profit of US$1.5B, up from a US$2.8B full-year profit in 2024.
Nyrstar’s pitch relies on the strategic value of critical minerals it can capture through upgrades to Hobart and Port Pirie, as well as the maintenance of sovereign industrial capacity that depends on metals processing capabilities.
While aspiring to eventually become profitable, even Nyrstar’s own executives play down the possibility, with chief executive officer Richard Holtum saying earlier this year:
“Critical infrastructure and smelting capacity is a national security issue and therefore needs to probably have some sort of government ownership or significant government support for it because it is not competitive on an international basis comparing it to the Chinese smelters.”
According to Nyrstar, their facilities are the sole locations in Australia with the potential to capture the critical minerals associated with lead and zinc refining.
This means the failure of the smelters would be a big hit to the government’s Future Made in Australia plans. The policy aims to secure critical minerals supply chains for domestic and allied nations, while capturing a higher proportion of the revenue stemming from our natural resources by moving further up the value chain into processing.
However, given they are used in such small volumes, demand for critical minerals does not rival established mining exports such as Iron Ore.
And even if other countries are serious about diversifying their supply chains away from China (for which they will always have to neglect a cheaper product), there are other destinations than Australia. Even Australian mining companies are investing elsewhere. Rio Tinto and BHP’s latest rare earth investments are in South America, not Australia.
Australia has gained no concrete commitments from its allies regarding an appetite for our critical minerals and metals processing, and has so far failed to leverage supply in negotiations with the US over tariff exemptions and military spending.
With future demand far from certain, massive subsidies already being poured into Nyrstar, and market conditions unlikely to improve, the government may be making a significant gamble in continuing to support Nyrstar.
When will governments learn that picking winners is neither their role nor their forte?
BHP ordered to pay fair wages to contractors, while the FWC ignored the more serious issues of wage theft and providing justice to whistleblowers. Stephanie Tran with the story.
In a landmark decision this week, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) ruled against mining giant BHP, ordering the company to pay labour-hire workers the same wages and conditions as its directly employed staff. The decision applies to workers at three Queensland coal mines and is expected to cost the company approximately $66m per year. If extended across BHP’s entire coal operations, the cost of compliance could reach $1.3B annually.
While the ruling is being hailed as a major win for workers and the union movement behind the Albanese government’s “same job, same pay” laws, it fails to address a much larger, unresolved issue: the billions in wages stolen from coal miners over the past two decades.
“The recent Fair Work Commission decision may appear to be a long-overdue step toward correcting unlawful labour hire practices in the coal mining industry,” said former BHP labour-hire worker Simon Turner, “but in truth, it is a calculated cover-up.”
In 2015, Turner was injured at BHP’s Mount Arthur coal mine in the Hunter Valley. He has been fighting for compensation ever since.
“The Commission’s ruling acknowledges what workers have known and lived for over a decade: labour-hire firms like Chandler Macleod and WorkPac did not provide services. They simply supplied cheap, disposable labour to BHP-operated coal mines under the guise of ‘casual’ employment,” he said.
In February 2015, the CFMEU filed a Fair Work Commission case against Chandler Macleod for failing to fulfil the minimum requirements under the Black Coal Mining Industry Award 2010. The complaint stated that: “[Chandler Macleod] has in excess of 100 employees working at the Mt Arthur Coal Mine and they are depriving those employees of the conditions that should be afforded to full-time employees.”
On 13 April 2014, the CFMEU had an in person meeting with Chandler Macleod and agreed to settle the matter on the condition that:
“The CFMEU would agree to cease from any current and future actions and claims (in its own right or on behalf of members) directed towards ventilating and agitating its view that employees currently engaged by Chandler Macleod companies as casuals to perform black coal mining production work may be entitled to “leave and other entitlements” associated with permanent employment or that Chandler Macleod is not paying employees their “lawful terms and conditions”.
Subsequently, in June 2015, the FWC approved an Enterprise Agreement drafted by Chandler Macleod and negotiated and endorsed by the CFMEU.
The agreement allowed BHP to pay labour hire workers substantially less than the rates set by the Black Coal Award. Under that award, coal miners cannot legally be employed as casuals, and enterprise agreements must pass the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) to ensure workers aren’t worse off than under the relevant award.
The enterprise agreement did neither. The FWC later admitted that no BOOT assessment had been performed on the terms of the enterprise agreement.
“The truth is this,” Turner said,
The FWC greenlit and enabled the industrial fraud they now claim to condemn.
A discontinued class action
Turner was the lead applicant in a 2018 class action against BHP and Chandler Macleod, where another 1200 workers at that mine alone were entitled to compensation. It sought to recover millions in unpaid wages for coal miners wrongly classified as casuals. But the action was quietly discontinued in 2022 after Turner’s lawyers at Adero Law misled the court regarding who the true employer was in the proceedings.
The legal team stated that Turner was employed by Ready Workforce, a Chandler Macleod subsidiary, under a 2007 agreement. In reality, Turner was employed by Chandler Macleod under the Black Coal Award, which should have made him eligible for award coverage and entitlements. The error fatally undermined the case.
Turner alleges that his lawyers deliberately failed to submit a judgment that proved that his employer was Chandler Macleod. The judgment in question was a 2017 ruling concerning an adverse action claim by his colleague Lisa Zoppellaro. On the issue of whether Ready Workforce or Chandler Macleod employed Zoppellaro, the judge found that Chandler Macleod was, in fact, the employer.
“My original 2018 class action statement of claim proves I was right from the beginning,” Turner said. “My employment was not casual, and I was covered by the Black Coal Mining Industry Award. But the court was misled by my own lawyers, BHP and Chandler Macleod, who falsely claimed I was employed by Ready Workforce under a 2007 agreement that never applied. This deception robbed thousands of coal workers of backpay, compensation, and the possibility of civil penalties for those who committed industrial fraud.”
He is now in the process of filing a new claim in the Federal Court to reopen the case. “I lost my home, I lost everything. I’m in constant pain. My injuries have caused me not to be able to work again.”
No remedy
There is no clear pathway for workers to recover these historical losses. The new “same job, same pay” laws aim to prevent future exploitation but do nothing to rectify the past.
“It’s understandable for businesses to attempt to mitigate costs,” said BHP whistleblower James Joseph. “However, it needs to be done in an ethical way, in a legal way.
Over the years, BHP has become renowned for finding the most unethical loopholes to undercut workers.
“For a company that earns such gigantic profits, a lot of which go offshore in the form of expatriated dividends, it can be quite disappointing that Australian workers are being undercut like this.”
The underpayment isn’t isolated to one group or mine, according to Sam Stephens, who also worked at BHP’s Mt Arthur mine.
“Everyone is being underpaid,” he said. “All labour-hire workers engaged either as full-time or casuals have been underpaid. No one wants to admit that because then they’ll have to open up a can of worms.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel — including a full arms embargo — and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”, reports Al Jazeera.
Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”
Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war — now in its 22nd month — began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.
Al Jazeera’s Federica Marsi reports that Albanese’s latest document names 48 corporate actors, including United States tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. — Google’s parent company — and Amazon.
“[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely,” the report said.
“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation — they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.
In an expert opinion last year, Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.
“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.
Francesca Albanese v Israel’s lobby. Video: Al Jazeera
Military procurements Israel’s procurement of F-35 fighter jets is part of the world’s largest arms procurement programme, relying on at least 1600 companies across eight nations. It is led by US-based Lockheed Martin, but F-35 components are constructed globally.
Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A is listed as a main contributor in the military sector, while Japan’s FANUC Corporation provides robotic machinery for weapons production lines.
The tech sector, meanwhile, has enabled the collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, “supporting Israel’s discriminatory permit regime”, the report said.
Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon grant Israel “virtually government-wide access to their cloud and AI technologies”, enhancing its data processing and surveillance capacities.
The US tech company IBM has also been responsible for training military and intelligence personnel, as well as managing the central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) that stores the biometric data of Palestinians, the report said.
It found US software platform Palantir Technologies expanded its support to the Israeli military since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023.
The report said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the company provided automatic predictive policing technology used for automated decision-making in the battlefield, to process data and generate lists of targets including through artificial intelligence systems like “Lavender”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?”
Companies supporting Israel. Graphic: Al Jazeera/Creative CommonsOther companies identified in the report
The report also lists several companies developing civilian technologies that serve as “dual-use tools” for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.These include Caterpillar, Leonardo-owned Rada Electronic Industries, South Korea’s HD Hyundai and Sweden’s Volvo Group, which provide heavy machinery for home demolitions and the development of illegal settlements in the West Bank.Rental platforms Booking and Airbnb also aid illegal settlements by listing properties and hotel rooms in Israeli-occupied territory.
The report named the US’s Drummond Company and Switzerland’s Glencore as the primary suppliers of coal for electricity to Israel, originating primarily from Colombia.
In the agriculture sector, Chinese Bright Dairy & Food is a majority owner of Tnuva, Israel’s largest food conglomerate, which benefits from land seized from Palestinians in Israel’s illegal outposts.
Netafim, a company providing drip irrigation technology that is 80-percent owned by Mexico’s Orbia Advance Corporation, provides infrastructure to exploit water resources in the occupied West Bank.
Treasury bonds have also played a critical role in funding the ongoing war on Gaza, according to the report, with some of the world’s largest banks, including France’s BNP Paribas and the UK’s Barclays, listed as having stepped in to allow Israel to contain the interest rate premium despite a credit downgrade.
Which are the main investors behind these companies? The report identified US multinational investment companies BlackRock and Vanguard as the main investors behind several listed companies.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is listed as the second largest institutional investor in Palantir (8.6 percent), Microsoft (7.8 percent), Amazon (6.6 percent), Alphabet (6.6 percent) and IBM (8.6 per cent), and the third largest in Lockheed Martin (7.2 percent) and Caterpillar (7.5 percent).
Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, is the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar (9.8 percent), Chevron (8.9 percent) and Palantir (9.1 percent), and the second largest in Lockheed Martin (9.2 percent) and Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (2 percent).
New Zealand referrals to the International Criminal Court
Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa yesterday released a report saying that it was referring two New Zealand businessmen along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, to the International Criminal Court for investigation over alleged policies relating to Gaza.
The PSNA accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.
In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.
“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”
Which NZ politicians and business leaders have been referred by the PSNA to the ICC? Image: NZH screenshot APR
The UN has named dozens of multinationals in a report for profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Stephanie Tran reports.
A landmark United Nations report has named dozens of multinational corporations that are aiding and profiting from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, accusing them of complicity in war crimes and calling for urgent accountability.
Authored by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the report details the role of weapons manufacturers, tech firms, energy companies and financial institutions in sustaining an “economy of occupation turned genocidal.”
But the list of named companies is just the beginning. Albanese describes the report as “the tip of the iceberg,” noting that more than 1,000 corporate entities were investigated for their involvement in Israel’s war machinery.
At the centre of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza is a heavily militarised economy supported by Western weapons manufacturers.
U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin is identified as a central player, providing F-35 and F-16 fighter jets that have enabled Israel to drop an estimated 85,000 tonnes of bombs since October 2023. Their use has left more than 179,000 Palestinians dead or injured and destroyed vast swathes of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
According to the report, the F-35 program represents Israel’s largest-ever defence procurement project, involving over 1,650 companies.
Israel’s own arms manufacturers are also central to the genocide. Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, two of the country’s top weapons companies, are responsible for much of the surveillance, drone and targeting systems deployed in Gaza.
The report notes that Israel’s repeated military campaigns have made it a testing ground for emerging weapons technologies. These systems are later marketed as “battle-proven”.
Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein — whose award-winning book, podcast and film series The Palestine Laboratory exposes how Israel’s occupation has become a global model for repression — told Michael West Media:
“This landmark report goes to the heart of why Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine has lasted so long; the longest in modern times. Far too many corporations and individuals are making money from oppression. I’m honoured that the report frequently cites my work, The Palestine Laboratory, a book, podcast and film series that details how Israel’s occupation is a key model and inspiration for many around the world. Cutting off Israel’s financial lifeline is the only way that this abomination will end.”
Surveillance and Silicon Valley
The UN report devotes substantial attention to the role of Silicon Valley in enabling Israel’s high-tech war.
Palantir Technologies, the U.S. surveillance firm founded by Peter Thiel, expanded its support for the Israeli military after October 2023. The company has provided “automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.”
In January 2024, Palantir’s board met in Tel Aviv “in solidarity”. In April 2024, CEO Alex Karp dismissed concerns about civilian casualties by stating that Palantir had killed “mostly terrorists.”
Microsoft, operates its largest research centre outside the U.S. in Israel, and has been “integrating its systems and civilian tech across the Israeli military since 2003”. In October 2023, Microsoft’s Azure platform supported the Israeli military’s overloaded cloud systems. According to an Israeli colonel quoted in the report, “cloud tech is a weapon in every sense of the word.”
Amazon and Google, through their $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract, provide Israel with core cloud infrastructure for the military and government agencies.
IBM, which has operated in Israel since 1972, has operated the central database of the Population and Immigration Authority, “enabling collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting the discriminatory permit regime of Israel.”
Hewlett Packard (HP) “has long enabled the apartheid systems of Israel,” supplying technology to the military, prison system, and police.
NSO Group, infamous for its Pegasus spyware, is cited as a textbook case of “spyware diplomacy.” Founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, the company has licensed its tools to repressive governments worldwide and used them to surveil Palestinian activists, journalists, and human rights defenders.
Financing Occupation
The financial industry underpins much of the infrastructure of occupation and genocide. Israeli treasury bonds, underwritten by global banks such as Barclays and BNP Paribas, have provided critical financing to the Israeli government. Asset managers like Blackrock, Vanguard and Allianz’s PIMCO were among more than 400 investors from 36 countries to purchase these bonds.
Blackrock and Vanguard are also among the largest shareholders in Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, and Chevron. Their funds distribute these investments across global markets via ETFs and mutual funds, spreading complicity to millions of unwitting investors.
Energy and resources
Glencore and Drummond Company dominate coal exports to Israel, primarily from Colombia and South Africa. Even after Colombia announced a suspension of coal exports to Israel in 2024, shipments continued through subsidiaries.
Chevron, which supplies over 70% of Israel’s energy, paid $453 million in royalties and taxes to the Israeli government in 2023. The company profits from the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields and owns a stake in the East Mediterranean Gas pipeline, which passes through occupied Palestinian maritime territory.
BP, the British energy giant, expanded its presence in 2025 with new exploration licences in maritime zones off the Gaza coast, areas Israel occupies in violation of international law.
Machinery
Heavy machinery has long played a role in Israel’s occupation through the demolition of Palestinian homes and the construction of illegal settlements.
Caterpillar Inc. has supplied the Israeli military with bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes and infrastructure. Since October 2023, Caterpillar equipment has been used to “carry out mass demolitions – including of homes, mosques and life-sustaining infrastructure – raid hospitals and burying alive wounded Palestinians”. In 2025, the company signed another multi-million dollar contract with Israel.
Heavy machinery producers Volvo and HD Hyundai have also been linked to the destruction of Palestinian property. After October 2023, Israel increased the use of this equipment, leveling entire districts in Gaza, including Rafah and Jabalia. The Israeli military reportedly obscured the logos of the machinery during these operations.
Volvo is also tied to the settlement economy through its joint ownership of Merkavim, a bus manufacturer serving Israeli colonies.
Shipping, Tourism and Logistics
Multinational logistics firms are another key part of the war economy. A.P. Moller–Maersk, the Danish shipping conglomerate, is responsible for transporting weapons parts, military equipment, and raw materials to Israel. Since October 2023, the company has facilitated the continued flow of US-supplied arms.
Tourism platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com are profiting from the settlement project. Booking.com listings in the West Bank have increased from 26 in 2018 to 70 in 2023; Airbnb listings have grown from 139 in 2016 to 350 in 2025. These platforms promote illegal settlements while restricting Palestinian access to land and resources.
Calls for sanctions
Albanese’s report is a damning indictment, not only of Israel’s genocide in Gaza but of the global political and economic architecture that enables it. The evidence it presents leaves no ambiguity, multinational corporations are not peripheral actors but central to the machinery of occupation, apartheid and now genocide.
Albanese urged states to impose a full arms embargo on Israel, halt all trade and investment ties with companies implicated in violations of international law, and freeze the assets of individuals and entities facilitating human rights abuses.
She called on the International Criminal Court and national courts to investigate and prosecute corporate executives for their role in war crimes and for laundering the proceeds of genocide.
Francesca Albanese will be presenting her report to the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday 3 July at 10am Central European Time (6pm AEST). You can watch the livestream here.
Australia’s corporate regulator ASIC is prosecuting coal miner TerraCom’s directors over allegedly misleading statements to the ASX. Stephanie Tran reports.
The whistleblower in the TerraCom coal fraud case has expressed dismay that the corporate regulator has cut him out of proceedings and struck a deal directly with TerraCom, a deal which may conclude the investigation into Australia’s largest coal scandal without a probe into other coal corporations or any criminal charges.
It was the testimony of former executive and whistleblower Justin Williams which was regarded as the strongest evidence in the investigation, say sources close to the case.
There is a growing body of evidence that what happened at TerraCom and across Australia’s coal testing industry was not just spin. It was systemic fraud. And ASIC’s response appears to have barely scratched the surface.
A 2019 report by PwC, cited in ASIC’s originating process, examined 14 coal shipments involving TerraCom and found that in 12 cases, there were inconsistencies between the initial “Shipping Analysis Reports” and the later “Certificates of Analysis” or commercial invoices. In every one of those 12 cases, the changes favoured TerraCom financially.
The altered figures, which inflated the energy content or “Net Calorific Value” (NCV) of the coal, increased the total invoice value by more than $1.15 million across just those shipments. The total value of the shipments involved was approximately $81 million.
More damningly, PwC noted there was evidence of discussions between TerraCom and testing giant ALS between the issuing of the original and final certificates, raising concerns about potential coordination.
The report supported concerns raised by whistleblower Justin Williams, a former executive at TerraCom, who alleged the data had been deliberately manipulated at the company’s direction.
In a statement issued to the ASX in April 2020, ALS admitted that between 45% and 50% of coal quality certificates had been manually amended without justification by staff in several of its Australian laboratories over more than a decade.
The practice had been occurring for more than a decade, across multiple labs in Newcastle, Mackay, Gladstone, and Emerald. Although ALS stated there was no evidence of bribery or third-party payments, the company’s admission alone points to industrial-scale malpractice that directly benefited Australian coal exporters.
Criticism of ASIC’s approach intensified in May after the regulator announced it had dropped whistleblower Justin Williams from its legal proceedings and settled a portion of the case for $7.5m.
Williams, a former executive at TerraCom, was the first to raise concerns about the alleged manipulation of coal quality certificates. His allegations were later supported by findings in the PwC report and underpinned ASIC’s original case.
Williams expressed dismay at the regulator’s decision to exclude him.
“I am disappointed to have missed the opportunity to have my evidence tested in court,” Williams said. “I was their key witness, and they cut me out. ASIC’s decision-making is bizarre. They have harmed me and my right to compensation, and ultimately, they’ve harmed the industry.”
It seems that there are some rocks that should not be looked under.
No answers from police
Despite clear evidence of systemic data manipulation, there is no indication that ASIC or law enforcement agencies have pursued criminal charges over the falsification of coal testing data, either against TerraCom or other companies named in connection with similar practices.
On 5 June 2025, NSW Greens MP Cate Faehrmann put questions to the Legislative Council about whether the NSW Police were investigating the matter reported by ALS in 2020 under Section 316 of the NSW Crimes Act, and whether any victims, including foreign utilities companies, had been notified.
The answer, delivered on 30 June, was startling in its vagueness. The NSW Police Force claimed it could not provide information “without further details.” It is not clear whether the investigation remains open or whether any foreign companies impacted by the falsified data have even been contacted.
ASIC’s broader performance under scrutiny
The regulator’s handling of the TerraCom case comes amid growing national scrutiny of its broader enforcement record. In July 2024, the Senate Standing Committee on Economics released a scathing report, concluding that ASIC had “comprehensively failed to fulfil its regulatory remit.”
The report found that ASIC was ill-equipped to keep pace with the complexity and scope of Australia’s corporate sector. It described the agency as “overburdened,” with a remit that had “outgrown its abilities,” resulting in a system of corporate regulation that lacks effective enforcement.
Despite ASIC being granted significant investigative and enforcement powers, the committee found these were “frequently underutilised,” leading to enforcement outcomes that were often mild and out of step with the seriousness of alleged offences.
Independent economist John Adams has also criticised ASIC’s enforcement record. According to Adams, just 0.3 per cent of all complaints to ASIC result in any form of enforcement action.
“If you’re a white collar criminal in this country, you would feel fairly confident of actually being able to engage in white collar crime”, Adams told ABC News in 2022.
New York, June 30, 2025—Hong Kong, an international financial hub and once a beacon of free media, is now in the grip of a rapid decline in press freedom that threatens the city’s status as a global financial information center.
Three journalists told CPJ that investigative reporting on major economic events, a cornerstone of Hong Kong’s financial transparency, has nearly disappeared amid government pressure and the departure of major outlets.
The sharp decline in press freedom, the journalists said, is a direct result of the National Security Law. This law, enacted on June 30, 2020, was imposed directly by Beijing, bypassing Hong Kong’s local legislature, and included offenses for secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with foreign forces, with penalties ranging from a three years to life imprisonment.
In the five years since it was enacted, authorities have shut down media outlets and arrested several journalists, including Jimmy Lai, the founder of one of Hong Kong’s largest newspapers, the pro-democracy Apple Daily. Several major international news organizations have either relocated or downsized their operations in Hong Kong, leading to a decline in reporting on the city and its financial hub.
“Hong Kong’s economic boom happened because journalists could work without interference,” said a veteran reporter with 11 years’ experience in television, newspapers, and digital platforms in Hong Kong, who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.
While markets still function, at least three media professionals told CPJ that the erosion of press freedom — often overlooked — is a key factor behind Hong Kong’s fading financial appeal to market participants. One reporter described the media as “paralyzed.”
Another hastily passed security law enacted in March 2024 in Hong Kong further deepened fears that it would be used to suppress press freedom and prosecute journalists.
Jimmy Lai walks through the Stanley prison in Hong Kong in 2023. (Photo: AP/Louise Delmotte)
“There has never been an international financial center in history that operates with restrictions on information,” Simon Lee, an economic commentator and former assistant CEO of Next Digital Group, the parent company of Apple Daily, told CPJ.
Hong Kong long served as a base for reporting on China’s economy and power structures, said a former financial journalist on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns.
“Most Hong Kong-listed companies come from the mainland [China]. Foreign media used Hong Kong to observe China’s economic operations or wealth transfers,” the former financial journalist told CPJ. “Now the risks feel similar to reporting from inside China.”
Crackdowns, shutdowns, and an exodus of major media
Since the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020, at least eight media outlets have shut. These included Apple Daily, news and lifestyle magazine Next Magazine, both published by Lai’s Next Digital group, and the online outlet Stand News, after they were raided by authorities.
At least four other media organizations —Post852,DB channel,Citizen News, andFactWire — ceased operations voluntarily, citing concerns over the deteriorating political environment.
China had the world’shighest number of imprisoned journalists in CPJ’s latest prison census — 50 in total, including eight in Hong Kong.
The New York Timesmoved part of its newsroom to Seoul in 2020. In March 2024, Radio Free Asiaclosed its Hong Kong office, and in May, The Wall Street Journalrelocated its Asia headquarters to Singapore.
“With fewer foreign correspondents based in the city, there’s simply less reporting on Hong Kong,” the former financial journalist told CPJ. “As a result, the city’s economy may receive less objective attention on the global stage.”
The former financial journalist said that one of the biggest losses after the security law was the disappearance of Apple Daily. Unlike most local media, which focused on routine market updates, Apple Daily connected business to politics and mapped interest networks — an increasingly rare practice.
Copies of the last issue of Apple Daily arrive at a newspaper booth in Hong Kong on June 24, 2021. (Photo: AP/Vincent Yu)
Next Digital, through Apple Daily, built a reputation for investigative financial reporting. A former staff member told the BBC that the company once spent over 100,000 yuan (US$14,000) tracing dozens of property owners to uncover a developer’s hidden ties with a bank.
“From a financial news perspective, one of our biggest problems is losing Apple Daily,” the former financial journalist told CPJ.
Local business reporting also fades away
As Hong Kong’s financial hub reputation comes under question, stories on high unemployment rates, struggling small businesses, and store closures are increasingly out of sight.
“One direct effect is feeling increasingly unable to grasp what’s happening in the city; important information no longer seems easy to access,” Lee said. “Previously, competition among professional outlets encouraged source sharing and helped maintain a power balance. Now, one-way government-controlled information faces little resistance.”
Lee told CPJ that changes in Hong Kong’s media landscape are particularly evident in major financial events, pointing to the coverage of the 2024 sale of Li Ka-shing’s port assets, in which local outlets failed to question the deal’s structure, rationale, or political implications.
“Beijing called it a national security matter, and the other side of the story disappeared,” Lee told CPJ. “Many focus on the judicial system when discussing fairness, but true fairness also depends on the free flow of information … Without information freedom, public oversight fades, and the market’s system of checks and balances collapses.”
Lee also cited the case of Alvin Chau, a casino tycoon in Macao who was sentenced in 2023 to 18 years for illegal gambling. While foreign media uncovered his alleged links to oil smuggling operations to North Korea, local media offered little follow-up.
“These investigations and reports simply no longer exist,” Lee said.
Sources can’t speak freely
Two journalists told CPJ they have noticed increasing reluctance from interviewees.
During previous years of the Annual Budget Speech, Hong Kong’s yearly announcement of its public spending and economic plans, the media would host analysis shows with economists debating government spending and policies.
“We would ask about the fiscal surplus, support for the poor, and whether measures were targeted,” the veteran reporter told CPJ, adding that now, “only one professor is willing to speak openly.”
Lee told CPJ that the atmosphere of “not being allowed to criticize” the broader structure or government policy has also extended to the reporting on how financial markets operate.
Market participants should be free to take either optimistic or pessimistic views of the economic outlook, Lee told CPJ, adding that today in Hong Kong, it is discouraged to express pessimism, and even silently shifting toward defensive investment strategies or risk-averse behavior may be interpreted as making a political statement.
“It’s hard for any place with such high information costs to remain a global financial hub,” Lee said. “Because even pulling back on investment can send a signal. If investors are accused of intentionally dragging down the market just because they try to hedge or take a cautious view, they may decide it’s safer to avoid the market altogether.”
In response to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred CPJ to a statement that said the security law has enabled the city to “make a major transition from chaos to order” and “the business environment has continuously improved,” while press freedom is protected under the law.
Sparkies say the companies handling the smart meter rollout are pushing down wages to the point of putting lives at risk. Zacharias Szumer investigates.
Australia’s smart meter rollout could end in tragedy for workers or a member of the public unless standards and rates are lifted, industry insiders say. The industry is plagued by such poor rates that qualified electricians are stuck between cutting corners on safety or making a pittance, MWM has been told.
MWM has seen evidence that meter installers in NSW are sometimes making less than $100 per day, or half the minimum wage of $24.95 per hour.
While the rollout is basically finished in Victoria, other states and territories lag behind.
Smart Meter rollout status by state
State or Territory
Smart meters installed
Installation rate
ACT
93,344
40.27%
NSW
1,929,057
39.17%
QLD
1,285,299
42.63%
SA
488,325
46.49%
TAS
279,296
78.06%
VIC
3,247,638
99.12%
Nationwide
7,322,959
56.96%
Data source: Australian Energy Market Commission, 28 November 2024
The government wants every house in Australia to be fitted with a smart meter by 2030.
Over the past fortnight, MWM has talked to over ten electrical contractors working on the smart meter rollout. NSW-based contractor Mike* told MWM that electricians are promised that they’ll make between $700–$1000 a day installing smart meters.
MWM has also seen promotional material that promises, “Long-term term reliable work, no crawling under floors or in roof spaces and career growth opportunities.”
Given these promises, many sparkies get set up with the required company structure plus additional qualifications and equipment – something that “often exceeds” $10,000, Mike said, adding,
These substantial up-front costs can leave metering contractors feeling trapped in the role, despite the lower-than-expected income.
While contractors sometimes earned between $800-$1000 per day, such days were few and far between, he added. It was far more common to make less than $500, and that’s before you subtract costs like fuel, vehicle insurance and everything else.
MWM has seen evidence Mike was sometimes paid under $100 a day.
“The pay rates must be designed by an algorithm that’s been programmed to only factor the most favourable installation conditions they could have ever dreamt up,” Mike said, adding that business expenses “aren’t considered at all” in set rates,
The focus is solely on the time it takes to complete the job, without factoring in the true cost of running our businesses.
Another electrician, Sam, said he’d experienced multiple days of being paid $150-$300 before finally giving up and leaving the industry.
A noose around the neck
Most sparkies said the main cause of such days is the number of jobs that can’t be completed.
A range of factors can prevent meter installation, from old buildings with electrical faults to anti-smart meter residents who don’t let electricians into their properties. Payslips shown to MWM show that contractors are paid between $26 and $36 for attending jobs that can’t be completed.
This rate is fixed even though it may take well over an hour to reach a destination and discover the reason a job can’t be completed, several contractors told MWM.
Mike said:
These tactics are driving technicians to rush work under unsafe conditions that could lead to serious injury or death.
“I’ve spoken to a few techs that I’ve met while driving around, some tell me that they have heard that techs are skipping the initial testing procedure to speed up the job,” he added.
Another contractor, Pete*, said he was aware of several incidents that had already occurred.
“One guy turned on a circuit breaker that was originally off and became financially liable when the owner’s kitchen burnt down,” he said.
“One guy didn’t tighten any connections on the meter he installed, which could’ve led to a fatality or fire.”
Other contractors, while not sharing details of incidents, agreed with Mike’s sentiments, “The rates aren’t in line with the work required … [so] contractors are putting themselves at risk by skipping steps,” said Eric*.
“We’re in a rush … because the margins are so low, it’s easy to miss something. People do take shortcuts; I was taking shortcuts,” Sam* said, while Allen* said the low piece rates made it “financially unviable” for contractors to issue defect notices at every house where they found electrical faults.
The advertised earning rates just weren’t consistently achievable without burnout or corner-cutting, he said. In terms of getting the rollout completed safely and on time, “They’ve tied a noose around their necks.”
Give ’em an inch, they’ll take a meter
Like much of today’s economy, the metering industry is a vertically disaggregated beast. Here’s a little chart to illustrate the parts that are relevant here:
Retailers: The ones who send you your electricity bill. They don’t own the meters.
Metering providers: They own the meters and contracts with the retailers to install them.
Field service providers (FSPs): Paid by providers to recruit electricians to install smart meters.
Those are some pretty big players involved in the metering game.
Canadian multinational giant Brookfield has over a trillion dollars in assets. IFM Investors, owned by 28 Australian not-for-profit pension funds, has about $86 billion.
As Mike told MMW, “There’s a reason world-class asset managers own the meters,”
because nothing beats a captive customer base and predictable, growing margins.
Sham contracting
Electricians mainly deal with field service providers (FSPs), who employ them as contractors.
However, several contractors told MWM that the arrangements with FSPs verge on ‘sham contracting’.
MWM has seen evidence that independent contractors are not permitted to switch to a new FSP without either a month’s stand-down period or a letter from the previous FSP.
Multiple FSPs simultaneously introduced the stand-down period to ensure that contractors couldn’t jump between them to seek better wages, Mike said.
Another contractor, Andy*, said the contract’s electricians’ sign is “not worth the paper they are written on as job conditions, procedures, and rate schedules can get changed with a day’s notice and no negotiation”.
“If the work volume drops, then they will drop the rates, because they know the contractors are desperate to keep their roles,” he said, adding that in his eyes, FSPs were employing dirty money-making tactics.”
*All names have been anonymised to protect identities.
MWM contacted Skilltech and Service Stream for comment, but didn’t receive any response.
Retailer says ‘internationally recognised’ abuses take place in nations including Russia and Syria
The Co-op is to stop sourcing goods from Israel, Iran and 15 other countries where it says there are “internationally recognised” rights abuses and violations of international law.
The mutual, which operates about 2,300 grocery stores in the UK, has drawn up a list of about 100 products affected by the change, including Israeli carrots and mangos from Mali.
For the firsttime since 2021 — the start of the Biden administration — banks have ramped up their financing of fossil fuel projects, a changing tide that reflects the Trump White House’s close ties to and energetic support for Big Oil. That’s based on the annual “Banking on Climate Chaos”report, which analyzes the lending patterns of the 65 largest banks in the world, and some 2,730 firms with fossil fuel interests that they’ve lent to.
The report, published June 17 and authored by a group of eight environmental nonprofits, found that banks financed oil fields, pipelines, and coal mines to the tune of $869 billion in 2024 — up by $162 billion, or almost 25 percent, from 2023. Over the past eight years, the 65 banks profiled in the report financed almost $8 trillion in fossil fuel expansion.
Meanwhile, in 2024, the world passed the much-feared 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Trump again withdrew the U.S. from almost immediately after returning to office. Experts attribute the increase in many natural disasters to climate change; in the U.S. alone, 27 separate natural disasters in 2024 individually surpassed $1 billion in damages, with a cumulative 568 fatalities and $182.7 billion in costs.
But banks abandoned net-zero and climate-friendly pledges in droves last year, in addition to backing fossil fuels. “This year, banks have shown their true colors,” said Lucie Pinson, one of the co-authors of the report.
With President Trump’s pro-fossil fuel executive orders, even more commercial lenders ditched climate agreements in the first half of 2025. Sierra Club’s Jessye Waxman described the retreat as a “clear capitulation to political pressure.”
Overwhelmingly, the report found, both the banks financing fossil fuels and the companies they financed were U.S.-based. Four of the 5 top banks investing in fossil fuels were also U.S.-based.
Liquid natural gas is the fastest-growing fossil fuel in the world, and the U.S. is its largest exporter. When calculating the 20-year emissions footprint of both liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and coal, researchers have found that LNG has a 33 percent larger footprint than coal.
Climate impacts aside, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says that there’s no need for more LNG projects — and that the “glut” of projects will likely lead to higher gas prices for consumers in the long run, in addition to community impacts zeroed in on by the “Banking on Climate Chaos” report.
In Mozambique, for example, four active LNG projects have forced hundreds of families to relocate, with a Mozambican NGO receiving more than 1,000 complaints about compensation, resettlement, and housing from families forced to relocate. TotalEnergies, one of the project’s owners, helped fund a paramilitary to “ensure the security of Mozambique LNG project activities,” which investigations have found abused and killed residents. Fifteen separate banks finance the four projects, including a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase.
A 2024 report from theBullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice catalogued parallel harms to U.S. communities near natural gas projects, finding that predominantly low-income communities of color near such developments had higher rates of pollution, emissions, asthma, and cancer.
“Facilities [are] being sited in our most vulnerable communities and placing our most vulnerable populations at risk — while providing the lion’s share of economic benefits to more affluent populations and communities,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, the center’s head.
“I dream of a time when we don’t have to produce this report any more,” said Diogo Silva, one of its co-authors and a campaigner with the nonprofit BankTrack, “as we would finally be protecting present and future generations from catastrophic living conditions.”
For the first time ever, a lab-grown seafood company has met the United States Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for demonstrating the safety of a new cell-cultured product. Wildtype’s cultivated salmon is now for sale in Portland, Oregon.
This marks the first time that lab-grown seafood (also known as “cultivated seafood” or “cell-cultured seafood”) is available for sale anywhere in the world, according to the Good Food Institute, a think tank that advocates for alternative proteins — substitutes for conventional meat made without relying on industrial animal agriculture. It’s a major milestone for the emerging cultivated protein industry, which aims to deliver real meat and seafood at scale without replicating the environmental harms of large-scale livestock operations.
It’s also a sign that the Food and Drug Administration under the second Trump administration is allowing the regulatory process around lab-grown meat to continue without political interference, despite widespread Republican skepticism of the technology.
Wildtype, which manufactures sushi-grade salmon by cultivating fish cells under laboratory conditions, is the fourth cultivated protein company to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to sell its product in the U.S. The company first reached out to the FDA to discuss the safety of its cultivated salmon during the first Trump administration in 2019, said co-founder and CEO Justin Kolbeck, adding that Wildtype underwent eight rounds of questioning from the agency over the next six years. Kolbeck described the experience as “a science-driven, data-driven process” and said the team of regulators working with Wildtype stayed largely the same across the three presidential terms.
“Did it feel like a long time in the lifespan of an early-stage startup? Yes,” said Kolbeck. “But it is completely appropriate, in my opinion. And the reason is that this is a new way to make food. And I think consumers have a right to feel like our food authorities turned over every stone that they can think of.”
In a letter to the company, the FDA stated that it had “no questions” about Wildtype’s conclusion that its cell-cultivated salmon is “as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods.” However, the agency did add that if Wildtype’s manufacturing processes change, it should contact the FDA again for further consultation. The FDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Wildtype’s salmon is the first cultivated seafood ever available for sale. Wildtype
The company is now partnering with Kann, a Haitian restaurant in Portland helmed by the James Beard Award-winning chef Gregory Gourdet. The restaurant began serving Wildtype’s salmon weekly on Thursdays this month; in July, the fish will be on the menu full-time.
Kolbeck said that Kann sold out of all its cultivated salmon portions on the first night of service. “I don’t think people saw this as some crazy, wild new thing,” he said. Instead, it was “another option on the menu, which is ultimately what we’re working for. We want to provide consumers with another option for seafood.”
Consumers have an increasing number of choices for alternative proteins at grocery stores and restaurants — from plant-based burgers and chicken nuggets to faux meat made from fermented fungi. Like other alternative protein companies, cultivated protein brands often position their means of production as more sustainable than animal agriculture, the leading source of methane emissions in the U.S. But cultivated meat differs from other alternative proteins in that it’s not vegan; it is meat, just without the mass animal slaughter.
Even though federal regulators have approved only a handful of these products for sale, there has been growing political backlash to cultivated meat.
Last month, three states with Republican-led legislatures enacted bills banning or temporarily banning the sale of such products: Nebraska, Montana, and Indiana. They join three other states with similar bans: Mississippi, where a law prohibiting cultivated meat sales unanimously passed in both the state House and Senate earlier this year; Alabama; and Florida.
The governors of these states have framed these laws as necessary to protect consumers from “fake meat” (as the Nebraska governor’s office puts it) and ranchers from unfair competition in the marketplace. This posture casts doubt not just on the safety of cultivated foods, but also their legitimacy as meat. The Montana bill defines cultivated meat as “the concept of meat … rather than from a whole slaughtered animal.”
However, recent outcry from ranchers suggests these state officials do not speak for all agricultural producers and consumers; in Nebraska, for example, ranchers have welcomed competition from cultivated protein companies.
Madeleine Cohen, who heads the regulatory team at the Good Food Institute, argued these states are sacrificing a chance to create jobs and tax revenue. “There are a small number of states that have chosen to put political wins over consumer choice and over our general free market system,” said Cohen. “And they will now kind of be sitting on the sidelines, and they will miss out on economic opportunities.”
In May, three states with Republican-led legislatures enacted bills banning or temporarily banning the sale of cultivated proteins. Wildtype
But Kolbeck and other proponents argue that biotechnology is needed to meet the rising demand for meat and seafood without depleting the world’s natural resources. Both overfishing — which happens when wild fish are harvested at a rate faster than they can reproduce — and warming temperatures pose risks to global food security. Research has shown that climate change has already impacted fish and shellfish populations around the world. Fish farms are an increasingly common alternative to wild fisheries, but these energy-intensive operations can pollute waterways.
Kolbeck framed cultivated salmon as a way to reduce the food system’s impact on aquatic ecosystems, protecting them for “future generations so that people can continue to fish sustainably.”
“How do we take a little bit of pressure off of wild fish stocks and keep these places beautiful?” he said, referring to areas like Bristol Bay in Alaska, where the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery is located.
Suzi Gerber, head of the Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, or AMPS, a cultivated protein trade group, expressed optimism about the industry’s future. She noted that Trump recently released an executive order calling to boost U.S. seafood production.
“The timing is perfect,” said Gerber. “Wildtype and other seafood producing members of AMPS are very happy to answer this call and to ensure a bright future for American seafood alongside our agricultural colleagues in aquaculture, wild, and farmed fisheries.”
Eric Schulze, an independent consultant for cultivated meat companies and a former federal regulator, said that the FDA’s thumbs-up to Wildtype should put Americans’ mind at ease about cultivated meat.
“The U.S. produces some of the safest food in the world — conventional and cultivated — and this clearance only elevates food safety and enhances consumer choice,” said Schulze. “Everyone wins.”
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Purple Carrot
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