India’s Reliance Agrees to Build $2 Billion Petrochemical Plant in UAE – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and Reliance are looking to turn hydrocarbons into products that will help them tap consumer demand for plastics.
– The collaboration will see the establishment of a joint venture at Ta’ziz, the chemicals and industrial complex under development at Ruwais.
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BlackRock-Led Group Wins $15.5 Billion Saudi Aramco Pipeline Deal – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– The consortium will buy a 49% stake in a new entity that holds 20-year leasing rights over pipelines carrying Saudi Aramco’s gas across the country.
– The deal, announced by Aramco on Monday, is part of Saudi Arabia’s drive to sell assets and use the money to fund new industries from artificial intelligence to electric vehicles, while also increasing output of both oil and gas.
– Bloomberg reported last month that BlackRock was among the firms that bid for the gas pipelines. Others included EIG, Italian infrastructure firm Snam SpA and China’s state-backed Silk Road Fund Co.
– Expectations that the world can move quickly to renewable sources of energy are “deeply flawed,” Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday in Houston.
– Doing otherwise will lead to “energy insecurity, rampant inflation, and social unrest if prices become intolerably high,” he said.
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UAE Royal Visits Iran, Marking Highest-Level Engagement in Decade – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, UAE’s national security adviser, issued the invitation to Ebrahim Raisi during a meeting in Tehran on Monday, according to Iran’s official president’s website.
– Tahnoon said the UAE wanted to develop trade and investment but he gave no details and it wasn’t clear how that would tally with U.S. secondary sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
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Living at AlJurf
Find Out More About Living at AlJurf
AlJurf Gardens harnesses nature’s raw beauty and combines it with refined heritage-inspired architecture and contemporary design to present a sanctuary of wellness and calm.
Throughout the villa spaces, the refined and controlled raw beauty of nature is repeated in different scales, to showcase its exquisiteness across every typology of homes, gardens and courtyards.
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Could a One-Shot Coronavirus Vaccine Protect You From All Variants? – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– What Wang found astonished him. After getting the Covid shot, the SARS patients had developed something akin to super-antibodies, which blocked both SARS viruses and a multitude of other coronaviruses
– The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August, offered one of the strongest bodies of evidence that a universal coronavirus vaccine is possible.
– At his 13th-floor lab a few kilometres from Singapore’s central business district, Wang is working on a prototype vaccine that could generate the same type of wide-ranging immune response he saw in the Covid-vaccinated SARS survivors.
– Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a global nonprofit based in Oslo. CEPI plans to spend $200 million to develop broad-acting coronavirus vaccines over the next five years.
– A broad-acting vaccine could provide a ready-to-use weapon against threats such as omicron, which has far more mutations than any previously identified variant and which researchers and governments are scrambling to understand and to develop boosters for.
– Given the plethora of bat coronaviruses lurking in nature, there’s every reason to expect more Covid-like epidemics.
– More than a dozen academic teams, along with a handful of biotech companies, are working on the problem. Labs at Duke and a few other U.S. universities have already created prototypes demonstrating potent cross-virus immune responses in animals, including against SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and some related bat coronaviruses.
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Billionaire’s Bet on Pfizer Vaccine for China Fails to Pay Off – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– Chinese billionaire Guo Guangchang’s drugmaker appeared to have scored a big win: A partnership with Germany’s BioNTech SE, which went on to produce with Pfizer Inc. one of the world’s most successful vaccines against the coronavirus.
– Yet almost a year later, the shot is yet to be approved in mainland China, and in recent weeks Beijing has thrown its heft behind a homegrown mRNA vaccine, allowing China’s Walvax Biotechnology Co. to test its own experimental shot as a booster.
– The delayed approval is the latest sign of how vulnerable Chinese tycoons — and their foreign partners — are to Beijing’s political dictats.
– Zhao Bing, a senior analyst who oversees healthcare research at China Renaissance Securities HK Ltd. said “How much market share can Fosun grab? I don’t know, but it’s certainly not looking optimistic.”
– The uncertainty is a blow to the ambitions of Guo, 54, who in recent years has increasingly made health care a key area of focus for his conglomerate.
– China doesn’t have an mRNA vaccine right now. When it does, it’d better be a domestic one, so that it shows the country is just as capable of pulling it off,” said Mia He, senior healthcare analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
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Why People Are Quitting Jobs and Protesting Work Life From the U.S. to China – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– The Great Resignation has U.S. workers quitting their jobs in record numbers—more than 24 million did so from April to September this year—and many are staying out of the labor force. Germany, Japan, and other wealthy nations are seeing shades of the same trend.
– China’s “lie-flat” movement, jump-started by a social media post from which it got its name, is also about opting out. It’s a reaction against a system in which a gruelling “996” work schedule—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—is common in industries like technology.
– Some see the lie-flat phenomenon as a warning of impending Japan-style stagnation—one that’s arrived unexpectedly early in the economy’s development. Others argue it’s more of the 1960s-style counterculture movements that cropped up in the U.S. and parts of western Europe, with ordinary people seeking a lower-pressure society that’s more focused on personal development.
– Xiang Biao, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. “But we can make a connection. It’s about how the economy has become overheated and unsustainable, both in an environmental sense and in a mental sense.”
– Almost half of the world’s workers are considering quitting, according to a Microsoft Corp. survey. About 4 in 10 millennial and Gen Z respondents say they’d leave their job if asked to come back to the office full time.
– “Many internet industries have reached a stage where there is no explosive growth,” Jack says. “But all the heavy work is still here. All the stress is still here. You lose hope.”
– In the U.S. and Europe, the formation of a large middle class was key to the rise of 1960s counterculture and, later, the so-called slacker generation of the ’90s.
– Although the Great Resignation is often thought of as a youth movement, at least one study shows employees from age 30 to 45 are also quitting at high rates.
– The vast number of people quitting their jobs in the U.S. and Europe is a sign of a structural, psychological shift, according to Qualtrics’s Granger.
– The Communist Party is trying to defuse the lie-flat phenomenon by promising continued upward mobility, with plans to double the size of the middle-income segment of the population by 2035.
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