Benzinga Before The Bell: More Amazon Workers Join Union Over Pay and Work Conditions, UK Inflation Highest In 40 Years, Sole Monkeypox Vaccine Maker Finds It Difficult To Meet Accelerating Demand And Other Top Financial Stories Wednesday, August 17

CNBC

BlackRock To Pledge A$1B In Australian Battery Storage Assets – Report

• A BlackRock, Inc BLK Real Assets fund looks to acquire Akaysha Energy, an Australian firm that develops battery storage and renewable energy projects.
• BlackRock aims to commit over A$1 billion (around $700 million) of capital “to support the build-out” of more than 1-gigawatt battery storage assets.
• BlackRock shared Akaysha’s plans to develop energy storage projects in a range of Asia-Pacific markets, including Japan and Taiwan, in the near term.

Amazon’s Pay, Work Condition Woes Come Into Limelight As More Workers Join Unions

• Amazon.com Inc AMZN workers have filed a petition for a proposed unit of 400 people to hold a union election at a company warehouse near Albany, New York, CNBC reports.
• The Amazon Labor Union affiliated group sought National Labor Relations Board’s permission to hold a vote at the ALB1 facility.

Reuters

UK Inflation Hits Double Digit, Highest In 40 Years

• U.K. inflation accelerated more than expected in July to the highest level in 40 years, intensifying a squeeze on consumers and adding to pressure for action from the government and Bank of England.
• The Office for National Statistics said that the Consumer Prices Index rose 10.1% in July from a year earlier after a 9.4% gain the month before.
• The reading was higher than expected by the Bank of England and private-sector economists. Economists’ forecasts in a Reuters poll for inflation were to rise to 9.8% in July.

China’s EVE To Provide BMW With Tesla-Like Cylindrical Batteries: Reuters

• China’s EVE Energy Co Ltd is planning to supply cylindrical batteries used in electric vehicles to Bayerische Motoren Werke AG BMWYY in Europe, Reuters reported.
• EVE’s contract with BMW will make the former the primary supplier of the battery cells for BMW’s new electric vehicle series expected to hit the market in 2025.
• BMW’s shift to cylindrical batteries from its current prismatic batteries follows Tesla, Inc’s TSLA decision to manufacture a larger-format 4680 cylindrical battery.

Boeing, Northrop Grumman Part Of White House-Backed Advanced Manufacturing Program

• Boeing Co BA and Northrop Grumman Corporation NOC will join a White House-Backed Advanced Manufacturing Program to assist smaller American manufacturers in using 3D printing and other cutting-edge production technology more often, reported Reuters.
• The program seeks to boost suppliers’ use of additive manufacturing (AM).
• The program, Additive Manufacturing Forward (AM Forward), is organized by the non-profit Applied Science & Technology Research Organization of America (ASTRO America).

US Expresses Concerns To India After Export Fuel Made From Russian Crude Reaches New York

• The U.S. has expressed concerns to India after export fuel made from Russian crude was sent to New York through high-seas transfers, according to a top Indian central banker, Reuters reported.
• Since the invasion of Ukraine, the western sanctions on Russia have prohibited imports of Russian-origin energy products, including crude oil, refined fuels, distillates, coal, and gas, to the States.
• “You know that there are sanctions against people who are buying Russian oil, and this was reported to us by the U.S. Treasury,” the Indian central bank’s Deputy Governor Michael Patra said at an event organized in the Indian state of Odisha on 75 years of independence.

Wall Street Journal

Google Wins Australia’s Top Court Verdict For Liability Over Slanderous Content

• Australia’s highest court relieved Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL Google of the liability of defamatory content accessible via a hyperlink in its search results, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• A lawyer named George Defteros alleged that a Google search of his name returned a hyperlink to and a snippet of a defamatory newspaper article.
• Lower courts found that the article implied Defteros had become a friend of criminal elements and considered Google a publisher of the article as the search result was crucial to communicating its contents to end users.

Bloomberg

Bankrupt Crypto Lender Celsius Takes Financing Requests Into Account

• Beleaguered crypto lending platform Celsius has received multiple offers of fresh cash to help fund its restructuring process, reported Bloomberg, citing the lawyer for the bankrupt crypto lender said Tuesday.
• According to the company’s latest Chapter 11 documents, negative liquidity is anticipated to exceed $34 million by October of the year. The firm anticipates generating a negative net cash flow of $137.2 million over the next three months.
• According to documents, Celsius has 80,850 mining rigs, of which 43,632 were in use, and mines about 14.2 BTC daily.

The Only Monkeypox Vaccine Maker Finds It Difficult To Meet Accelerating Demand

• Bavarian Nordic A/S BVNKF, the only company with an approved vaccine for monkeypox, said it’s no longer sure it can meet demand as cases continue to rise worldwide, Bloomberg reported.
• The company is now exploring the possibility of outsourcing some of the production to meet the increasing demand.
• “It’s a very dynamic market situation,” Rolf Sass Sorensen, a vice president at the firm, said by phone. “Demand keeps rising, and it’s no longer certain that we can continue to meet the demand we’re facing even with the upgrade of our existing manufacturing site in Denmark.”

Benzinga

Meta Aims To Avoid Political Controversy Ahead Of US Midterms

• Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc META opted to stick to the 2020 general election tactics for the U.S. midterms to handle political ads and fight misinformation, Bloomberg reports.
• Meta looks to follow a familiar playbook focusing on scouring misinformation about voting logistics and restricting any new political ads in the week before Election Day.
• Meta will remove posts that mislead people on where, when, and how to vote or that call for violence based on the voting or election outcome.

Apple, Tesla Suppliers Among Companies Needing To ‘Make Adjustments’ As Heatwave In China Hits Production

• After a record-setting heatwave in the Chinese lithium hub Sichuan province, authorities are rationing electricity supply to factories until Saturday, forcing major production giants to either halt production or “make adjustments.”
• Chinese state media reported that due to the heatwave, the temperatures in the province hovered above 40-42 degrees celsius (104-108 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past week, sending power demands soaring and increasing the demand for air conditioning.
• The electricity rationing has affected the production of many tech giants, including Apple Inc’s AAPL supplier BOE Technology Group Co Ltd. The company said it would “make adjustments” to its operations in Sichuan due to low supply in the region.

Sanofi Ends Development Of Breast Cancer Drug Amcenestrant After Trial Failure

• Sanofi SA SNY said it would stop further work on breast cancer drug amcenestrant, putting pressure on Sanofi to bolster its drug development pipeline as it grows increasingly dependent on its best-seller, eczema and asthma treatment Dupixent.
• A trial dubbed AMEERA-5, which was testing amcenestrant on women with newly-diagnosed advanced breast cancer was stopped early because an independent monitoring panel found no signs of it working.

Apple In Focus After Credit Suisse Upgrades Stock And Lifts Price Target By 21%

• Apple, Inc. AAPL shares are trading flat in the premarket session early Wednesday, despite receiving positive analyst action.
• The Apple Analyst: Credit Suisse analyst Shannon Cross, who recently joined the Swiss-based investment bank, upgraded Apple shares from Neutral to Outperform and raised the price target from $166 to $201, suggesting a roughly 16% upside from the current levels, according to Seeking Alpha.

Paris Hilton, Winklewoss Twins-Backed Startup Aims To Bring Extinct Woolly Mammoth Back To Life

• A startup, which counts Winklevoss Capital Management, Paris Hilton and public speaker Tony Robbins among its backers, is planning to bring back to life the long-extinct Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth.
• What Happened: Gemini Exchange co-founder and Bitcoin BTC/USD-bull Cameron Winklevoss said, “Amazing awaits,” on Twitter while sharing a Bloomberg piece on Dallas, Texas-based Colossal Biosciences, the startup bringing back the extinct animals.

Ethereum’s Proposed Hardfork ETHW Is Freezing Liquidity Pools: Here’s Why

• The team behind a proposed fork of the Ethereum ETH/USD blockchain to retain its Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining consensus has advised users to withdraw their ETH from DeFi protocols and decentralized exchanges (DEXes).
• What Happened: In a series of tweets on Tuesday, the EthereumPoW ETHW/USD core team said it was introducing a liquidity pool freezing technology to protect user funds.

Apple Watch And Macbooks To Be Made In Vietnam For 1st Time Ever

• Apple Inc’s AAPL Chinese suppliers Luxshare Precision Industry and Foxconn have started test production of Apple Watches in Vietnam, according to Nikkei Asia.
• As Apple looks to diversify its production away from China, the report citing sources familiar with the matter said the U.S. tech giant is in talks to make Watches and MacBooks in Vietnam for the first time.
• “AirPods, Apple Watch, HomePod and more ... Apple has big plans in Vietnam, apart from iPhone manufacturing,” a source with direct knowledge of the situation told the publication.

Dogecoin Sees $7.3M Liquidations In A Day As Price Surges 17%

• Dogecoin DOGE/USD surged 17% on Tuesday leading to high-value liquidations among traders of the meme coin.
• Data from CoinGlass revealed that over $7.3 million in DOGE was liquidated over the last 24 hours, making it the third most liquidated crypto asset after Bitcoin BTC/USD and Ethereum ETH/USD.

Elon Musk Says He’s ‘Buying Manchester United:’ Would It A Better Deal Than Acquiring Twitter?

• Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk jokingly said Tuesday he was buying the Manchester United Football Club, better known as Man United and some are of the view that such a deal would be more beneficial for the billionaire entrepreneur than going through with his deal to acquire Twitter Inc. TWTR.
• The billionaire said in a Twitter thread — in which he touched on his political affiliations — that he was buying the Old Trafford-based club that competes in the Premier League — the apex division of the English football league.

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