YCLOAK

In a change from chocolates and fizzy drinks, the French are starting to offer fresh oysters from vending machines in the hope of selling more of the delicacy outside business hours.

One pioneer is Tony Berthelot, an oyster farmer whose automatic dispenser of live oysters on the Ile de Re island off France’s western coast offers a range of quantities, types and sizes 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

French oyster farmers are following in the footsteps of other producers of fresh food who once manned stalls along roadsides for long hours but now uses machines.

“We can come at midnight if we want, if we have a craving for oysters. It’s excellent; they’re really fresh,” Christel Petinon, a 45-year-old client vacationing on the island, told Reuters.

The Ile de Re’s refrigerated dispenser, one of the first and with glass panels so customers can see what they are buying, is broadly similar to those that offer snacks and drinks at railway stations and office buildings worldwide.

Customers use their bank card for access, opening the door of their choice from a range of carton sizes and oyster types.

Berthelot, 30 years an oyster breeder, sees it as an extra source of revenue rather than an alternative to normal points of sale like food markets, fishmongers and supermarkets.

“We felt as though we were losing lots of sales when we are closed,” he said.

“There was a cost involved when buying this machine, of course, but we’re paying it back in installments … And today, in theory, we can say that the calculations are correct and it’s working.”

Selling oysters from a machine bets on more than just open-mindedness among consumers. Live mollusks not kept cool enough or stored too long out of seawater can cause food poisoning when opened.

The Berthelots say the machine has an appeal to a younger generation accustomed to buying on the internet and unperturbed by the absence of a shopkeeper.
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Nigeria will legalize illegal mini refineries in the Niger Delta oil hub by the end of the year and supply them with crude at a reasonable price, the presidency said Thursday, fulfilling a demand from community leaders.

On Monday, Niger Delta leaders threatened to pull out of peace talks with the government unless their demands were met by Nov. 1.

“The Federal Government has started the process of replacing illegal refineries in the region with modular ones,” the presidency said in a statement as Acting President Yemi Osinbajo met Niger Delta community leaders in Abuja.

Each of the Niger Delta states would receive two modular refineries to start up in the fourth quarter, the statement said.

Swampland poverty

The government has been in talks with community leaders since last year to end militant attacks on oil production facilities, which cut the OPEC member’s output by 700,000 barrels a day for several months last year.

But a military crackdown on thousands of illegal refineries in the southern swamps, which process crude oil stolen from oil majors and state oil firm NNPC, has raised tensions.

The refineries process stolen crude in makeshift pipes and metal tanks hidden in oil-soaked clearings deep in the southern swampland’s thick bush land.

Working on other demands

The Niger Delta leaders had presented President Muhammadu Buhari a list of 16 demands last November to drag the southern swampland out of poverty. The militants then halted attacks to give the talks a chance.

The presidency said it was also discussing with oil majors to move their regional headquarters to the Niger Delta, another demand from communities complaining they do not benefit from the crude in their region.

Osinbajo was appointed by Buhari to head Nigeria while Buhari is on medical leave in Britain for an undisclosed ailment.

Oil exports are now set to exceed 2 million barrels per day (bpd) in August, the highest in 17 months, up from just more than 1 million bpd at certain points last year, thanks to a steady decline in attacks on pipelines. 

 
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Under a best-case scenario, a newly negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would not be implemented before the end of next year or the start of 2019, Mexico’s economy minister said Thursday.

Among other issues, NAFTA talks would focus on how to provide more certainty in dispute resolutions, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said in a radio interview.

“According to the possible calendars of approval, the best of the scenarios that we could have … would be the start of implementation almost at the end of 2018 or the start of 2019,” Guajardo said.

Mexico has set out the goals of prioritizing free access for goods and services, greater labor market integration and a strengthening of energy security.

Last week, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said during a visit to Mexico that he hoped farm business with Mexico would not suffer due to President Donald Trump’s drive to get a better deal for manufacturers.

Speaking in Japan on Thursday, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said the best way to calm Trump’s worries about commerce with Mexico were through more trade, not less.

Videgaray said negotiators would need to be careful not to tweak trade rules on sourcing components too much or they could risk driving up the costs of goods like electronics.

“The important thing that we are not going to do is hurt the region’s competitivity, and much less the region’s consumers,” Videgaray said, according to a transcript.
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Women in the United States are starting bushiness at one and a half times the rate of their male peers. Effective entrepreneurship could help cut the economic gap between women and men, which the World Economic Forum says could otherwise take decades to close around the globe.  As VOA’s Jim Randle reports, experts say more than one-third of U.S. businesses are headed by women and they expect that percentage to grow.
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U.S. President Donald Trump may soon attempt to increase pressure on China to change its trade practices and do more to stop North Korea’s weapons programs.  

Reports in the financial press say President Trump may sign an order as soon as Friday to start an investigation of Chinese demands that foreign companies share technology secrets in exchange for access to the massive Chinese market.  That investigation could, eventually, lead to higher tariffs on Chinese-made products headed for the U.S. market, which is the world’s largest. Trade experts warn the action might violate U.S. commitments under the World Trade Organization.  

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recently wrote that China’s trade practices, including forced technology transfer, are unfair, hurt U.S. exports, and contribute to a $347 billion deficit in the trade in goods between the United States and China.

As a presidential candidate, Trump harshly criticized China approach to commerce.  He has also said has said China, which is North Korea’s neighbor and major trading partner, could do far more to stop Pyongyang’s efforts to improve nuclear weapons and missiles.  U.S. experts warn that North Korean missile and bomb tests show that nation is a growing threat to the United States.

Trump’s tough stance on trade issues helped him win votes from working class voters who believe they have lost jobs due to unfair foreign competition.  His approach was a break with the traditional Republican pro-trade and pro-business stance.  Earlier this week, Trump’s Democratic party opponents accused Trump of talking tough about trade issues but failing to take effective action.

 
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Avon’s CEO will leave the company in March as the struggling beauty products maker continues a turnaround campaign.

Sheri McCoy has led the company for five years and sits on the board, but there has been some external pressure from activist investors for a change in leadership.

Avon said Thursday that it has hired an executive search firm to help find McCoy’s successor.

“The platform is in place for a new CEO to continue accelerating the pace of change and take Avon to sustainable profitable growth,” McCoy said in a company release.

Barrington Capital Group had been pushing for significant action at Avon since 2015, when it sent a letter saying that, “significant, immediate changes in leadership and strategic direction are needed.”

In March 2016 Avon announced that it was cutting 2,500 jobs and moving its headquarters from New York to the U.K.

Avon Products Inc. launched a three-year transformation plan last year and so far it has sold its North American business to private investment firm Cerberus Capital Management and realized $180 million in cost savings. But those efforts have been arduous.

The company on Thursday said it had swung to a loss of $45.5 million in the second quarter. It had an adjusted loss of 3 cents per share on revenue of $1.4 billion. Analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research predicted earnings of 6 cents per share on revenue of $1.44 billion.

Shares fell slightly in premarket trading.
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Deaths in U.S. coal mines this year have surged ahead of last year’s, and federal safety officials say workers who are new to a mine have been especially vulnerable to fatal accidents.

But the nation’s coal miner’s union says the mine safety agency isn’t taking the right approach to fixing the problem.

Ten coal miners have died on the job so far this year, compared to a record low of eight deaths last year.

The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration is responding to the uptick in deaths with a summer initiative, sending officials to observe and train miners new to a particular mine on safer working habits. The push comes during a transition for the agency, amid signals from President Donald Trump that he intends to ease the industry’s regulatory burden.

Federal inspectors powerless

The miner’s union, the United Mine Workers of America, says the agency initiative falls short. It notes federal inspectors who conduct such training visits are barred from punishing the mine if they spot any safety violations.

“To take away the inspector’s right to issue a violation takes away the one and only enforcement power the inspector and the agency has,” UAW president Cecil Roberts wrote in a recent letter to the federal agency.

Patricia Silvey, a deputy assistant secretary at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, or MSHA, said eight of the coal miners who died this year had less than a year’s experience at the mine where they worked.

“We found from the stats that category of miners were more prone to have an accident,” Silvey said in an interview with The Associated Press before the 10th death occurred at mine in Pennsylvania on July 25.

New miners die in accidents

Silvey pointed to a death last May at West Virginia’s Pinnacle Mine where a miner riding a trolley rose up and struck his head on the mine roof. She said the fatality could have been due to the miner’s unfamiliarity with the mine. The miner had worked there nine weeks, according to an accident report. And in the most recent death, a miner less than two weeks into the job at a mine in eastern Pennsylvania was run over by a bulldozer July 25.

Five of the 10 coal mining deaths this year have occurred in West Virginia, and two more in Kentucky. Alabama, Montana and Pennsylvania each had one coal mining death. Nine of the miners killed this year had several years’ experience working at other mines.

The mine safety agency’s injury numbers show that workers who were new to a mine had more than double the injuries. Going back to October 2015, miners who worked at a specific mine less than a year suffered 903 injuries, compared to 418 for miners working at a mine one to two years.

Training for miners

The mine safety agency says it will visit mines and “offer suggestions” on training miners who have been at a mine less than a year. Silvey said the union is correct that inspectors won’t be writing safety violations, but that the initiative “has in no way undermined our regular inspection program.”

The miner’s union said the federal agency should not expect safety suggestions to carry the same weight as citations and fines.

“To believe that an operator will comply with the law on their own free will is contrary to historical experience and naive on MSHA’s part,” the letter said.

Strong enforcement

A former MSHA official said the agency would be “tying the hands” of inspectors if they don’t allow them to write citations on the training visits.

“The record low fatal injury rate among coal miners in recent years is because of strong enforcement of the law,” said Celeste Monforton, who served on a governor-appointed panel that investigated West Virginia’s 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster that killed 29 miners. There were 12 coal mining deaths in 2015 and 16 in 2014.

“It would be a disgrace to see that trend reversed,” she said.

Phil Smith, a spokesman for the miner’s union, said the union’s safety department met recently with MSHA on the dispute, but MSHA maintained it has the authority to conduct observation visits without enforcement.

Safety boss’ position vacant

The mine safety agency’s top position has been vacant since former Assistant Secretary of Labor Joe Main left in January. Main, a former miner’s union official, focused on eliminating hazards at troubled mines by increasing aggressive inspections after West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch explosion. Main declined to comment.

Silvey said a vacancy at the mine safety agency’s top position hasn’t hindered their efforts. She said she knew of no timetable for hiring a new assistant secretary of Labor to oversee the mine safety agency.

“I know one thing, it’s a presidential appointment,” she said.
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Three top Democratic senators, in a rare show of bipartisanship, on Wednesday urged U.S. President Donald Trump to stand up to China as he prepares to launch an inquiry into Beijing’s intellectual property and trade practices in coming days.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer pressed the Republican president to skip the investigation and go straight to trade action against China.

“We should certainly go after them,” said Schumer in a statement. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio also urged Trump to rein in China.

Tensions between Washington and Beijing have escalated in recent months as Trump has pressed China to cut steel production to ease global oversupply and rein in North Korea’s missile program.

Sources familiar with the current discussions said Trump was expected to issue a presidential memorandum in coming days, citing Chinese theft of intellectual property as a problem. The European Union, Japan, Germany and Canada have all expressed concern over China’s behavior on intellectual property theft.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer would then initiate an investigation under the Trade Act of 1974’s Section 301, which allows the president to unilaterally impose tariffs or other trade restrictions to protect U.S. industries, the sources said.

It is unclear whether such a probe would result in trade sanctions against China, which Beijing would almost certainly challenge before the World Trade Organization.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement to Reuters that China “opposes unilateral actions and trade protectionism in any form.”

Leverage for talks

U.S. Section 301 investigations have not led to trade sanctions since the WTO was launched in 1995. In the 1980s, Section 301 tariffs were levied against Japanese motorcycles, steel and other products.

“This could merely be leverage for bilateral negotiations,” James Bacchus, a former WTO chief judge and USTR official, said of a China intellectual property probe.

Some trade lawyers said that WTO does not have jurisdiction over investment rules — such as China’s requirements that foreign companies transfer technology to their joint venture partners — allowing sanctions to proceed outside the WTO’s dispute settlement system.

But Bacchus argued the United States has an obligation to turn first to the Geneva-based institution to resolve trade disputes, adding: “There is an obligation in WTO to enforce intellectual property rights that is not fully explored.”

Lighthizer and Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, have complained the WTO is slow to resolve disputes and biased against the United States.

The threat comes at a time when Trump has become increasingly frustrated with the level of support from Beijing to pressure Pyongyang to give up its nuclear and missile program.

Trump has said in the past that China would get better treatment on trade with the United States if it acted more forcefully against Pyongyang. Beijing has said its influence on North Korea is limited.

China also says trade between the two nations benefits both sides, and that Beijing is willing to improve trade ties.

A senior Chinese official said Monday that there was no link between North Korea’s nuclear program and China-U.S. trade.

Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to Lighthizer urging action to stop China from pressuring U.S. tech companies into giving up intellectual property rights.

Wyden’s state of Oregon is home to several companies that could make a case regarding intellectual property rights and China, including Nike and FLIR Systems.
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average set a sixth-straight record Wednesday, closing above 22,000 for the first time, but experts point out that whatever goes up must always come down.

The Dow closed up a fraction at 22,016.

Healthy earnings reports from computer technology giant Apple, the world’s largest publicly traded company, and airplane manufacturer Boeing were major contributors to the Dow hitting another major milestone.

The Dow Jones is an index of 30 major companies from a variety retail, manufacturing and service industries. It has been used as a gauge of the health of the U.S. stock market for more than 100 years.

The Dow is up 11 percent so far this year and all of Wall Street has been in what is known as a “bull market” for several years.

It has been buoyed, in part, by better-than-expected corporate earnings and expectations brought on by the pro-business Trump White House.

But some analysts say they cannot see a lot of room for the Dow to go much higher.

They say that while they expect more positive earnings reports, Congress’ inaction on President Trump’s proposed tax cuts could take some wind out of investor optimism.

Plus, they point out that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index of just 30 companies, which they say is sometimes a narrow gauge of overall investor confidence.

Some other world markets have outperformed the New York Stock Exchange so far this year, such as the Dow Jones China 88 Index, the eurozone’s Euro Stoxx Index and the Sao Paulo Bovespa Index in Brazil.
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India, one of the world’s largest markets for pharmaceuticals, is drawing up its first set of marketing rules for drugmakers, restricting gifts and trips offered to doctors and pharmacists to 1,000 rupees ($15), according to a draft proposal seen by Reuters.

Such rules are common overseas, but are not set in stone in India, where campaigners have long demanded a crackdown on unethical selling practices that include gifts ranging from electrical appliances to foreign trips to woo physicians and pharmacists into prescribing and stocking specific medicines.

The country has voluntary marketing guidelines for drugmakers, but critics say they are ineffective.

“In India, corruption and bribery of doctors is widespread,” said Samiran Nundy, a leading gastrointestinal surgeon. “I’ve seen a range of ways in which this works, from presents to doctors to paying for them to attend conferences.”

“It’s great that marketing rules are coming into place,” he added. “I hope that these will be enforced.”

Besides limiting marketing spending, the draft proposal — drawn up by the Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP) and under review of India’s law ministry — also forbids drugmakers from making false claims on the curative abilities and efficacy of drugs.

An official at the DoP declined to comment on the draft’s specifics, but confirmed to Reuters that the order was under review, though the implementation date for the rules is not set.

The draft says a failure to abide by the rules would result in a marketing ban on a drugmaker for up to a year or more, depending on the degree of the violation. It would also lead to confiscation of all packs of the company’s highest-selling drug brands, which would then be given away to government hospitals.

Companies would also be able to turn a marketing suspension order into a fine, according to the proposal, by paying penalties of between 500,000 rupees ($7,800) and 100 million rupees ($1.56 million), depending on the order’s severity.

Trial samples

The rules limit the number of free samples a company can offer a doctor to full treatment courses for three patients.

But they don’t specify that only new medicine samples can be given away for free, noted Amitava Guha, national co-covener of the health care-focused civil society group Jan Swasthya Abhiyan.

“If this is applicable to all medicines of a company, there will be no change in the present situation,” he said, calling it a major loophole that the companies could exploit.

He also said the marketing ban penalty was vague as it did not specify if it would bar the company from marketing all, or specific, products. The penalty would be “meaningless” for a single product, as drug company salesmen market in private meetings so there is no material evidence, Guha said.

The Indian Pharmaceutical Association (IPA), a lobby group of India’s largest drugmakers, said it supports mandatory rules for curbing undesirable marketing practices, but they should be transparent, easy to implement and unambiguous.

This “should not be reduced to yet another ‘Inspector Raj,'” IPA Secretary General D.G. Shah said, adding that rules should also address the need for doctors’ continuing medical education.

“Someone has to take responsibility of keeping doctors up to date with the latest advances in the field of medicines.”

The draft rules allow drugmakers to sponsor trips for doctors, pharmacists and relatives to attend seminars, medical conferences or scientific meetings, so long as the companies maintain a record of the minutes, expenses and agenda.

Mandatory code

In a letter last year, Tapan Sen, a member of India’s upper house of parliament, urged the government to act on drafting a mandatory code on the marketing of pharmaceuticals, citing irregular practices by several companies.

Indian media reported that the letter said the country’s largest drugmaker, Sun Pharma, Abbott India and privately-held Macleods Pharmaceuticals were among drugmakers found to have sent doctors on “pleasure trips.”

Abbott said at the time that it had a strict policy against providing gifts and other incentives to doctors, while Macleods refuted the allegations.

Sun told Reuters it organizes “continuous medical education” programs to educate doctors, not promote its products, and these are compliant with the voluntary marketing guidelines set by the government in 2015.

The current draft says companies will be allowed to organize screening camps or awareness campaigns at public health centers, but it bars advertising by stealth and mandates that doctors involved in such events be paid commensurate to their average daily income.

To ensure implementation of the rules, an Ethics Compliance Officer of the rank of joint secretary to the Indian government would be appointed.

Pharmaceutical marketing practices have long been a subject of controversy globally. In India, where health insurance is scarce and many rely on pharmacists for medical advice, critics say sketchy practices have led to over-prescription of strong cocktail drugs, causing drug-resistance.

GlaxoSmithKline was battered by a bribery scandal in China that landed it with a record $490 million fine in 2014.

It went on to slash the number of sales reps and overhaul its business globally, stopping sales-based incentives for drug reps and reducing paid junkets for doctors.
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