The Marine Minerals Administration is monitoring offshore oil and gas operators in the Gulf of America as they evacuate platforms and rigs in response to the storm. The Marine Minerals Administration team will work with offshore operators and other state and federal agencies until operations return to normal, and the storm is no longer a threat to Gulf of America oil and gas activities.

Based on data from offshore operator reports submitted as of 11:00 a.m. CDT today, personnel have been evacuated from a total of 129 production platforms, 34.77% of the 371 manned platforms in the Gulf of America. Production platforms are the offshore structures from which oil and natural gas are produced and transported to shore. Unlike drilling rigs, which typically move from location to location, production facilities remain in the same location throughout a project’s duration.

Personnel have been evacuated from 8 non-dynamically positioned rig(s), equivalent to 72.73% of the 11 rigs of this type currently operating in the Gulf. Rigs can include several types of offshore drilling facilities including jack up rigs, platform rigs, all submersibles, and moored semisubmersibles.

(Continue Reading – BSEE)

European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič said Friday that China has agreed to halve its exports of hybrid cars to the bloc.

Europe has called on China to voluntarily reduce hybrid car exports into the continent, but authorities in Beijing had reportedly slapped down the request, according to the Financial Times.

The widening trade surplus between the EU and China has been a point of contention, with Germany and France previously having called on Brussels to develop a “last-resort” trade instrument to address imbalances.

Sefčovič said Friday that the final decision would still need Brussels’ approval. Overall, he cast the two days of talks with China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing as a positive first step, following a summer of rising tensions between China and the EU.

(Continue Reading – CNBC)

Dear President Tharman, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends: it is a delight to be back in Singapore, on my way to Thailand, this year’s host of the IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings. Singapore is a showcase of integration in regional and global value chains—and of the benefits it brings.

Next week, finance ministers and central bank governors of the IMF’s 191 member countries will come together to assess the direction of the world economy at a time of high uncertainty and rapid change.

It is vital that they do, and Thailand is just the right host to have—another open and dynamic country at the heart of a vibrant region. Since Thailand last hosted our Annual Meetings 35 years ago, in 1991, Asia-Pacific’s share of global GDP has gone up from 25 percent to 43 percent.

(Continue Reading – IMF)

President Donald Trump responded to being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize for a second straight year by amplifying a post from his former impeachment lawyer calling the new laureate, the South African jurist and former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, “an unabashed hater of America and Israel” who “has never done a thing to foster peace.”

The post, written by David Schoen — who defended Trump in his 2021 Senate impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 attack — went up on Truth Social at 7:58 a.m. Friday, within hours of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s announcement in Oslo, and was reposted by the president to his 10 million followers shortly afterward.

“Today the Nobel Committee shamed itself beyond repair and demeaned the once great Nobel Peace Prize by giving it to the UN’s Navi Pillay,” Schoen wrote. “Pillay is an unabashed hater of America and Israel. In her position she celebrated terrorists and rewarded Hamas. She conducted a phony ‘investigation’ claiming to find that Israel committed genocide and urging prosecution. She has no credibility in any normal sphere and has never done a thing to foster peace. Just the opposite. But what could be expected from a committee that previously gave the once coveted peace prize to Yasser Arafat?”

(Continue Reading – Independent)