Author: Buzzo

Belfast harbour is to invest £90m to upgrade its port to serve a wave of wind energy projects and cruise ships as part of a £300m investment plan.A new deepwater quay capable of supporting wind projects will be the largest part of an investment plan that also includes the construction of hundreds of homes at a site near the city centre.Belfast has previously hosted wind power installation companies. Between 2013 and 2018, Dong Energy, later renamed Ørsted, used it as a base to install windfarms in the Irish Sea. After those projects were installed, the area was given over to…

French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch. It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel and Bpifrance are complementing the round with some debt. The startup isn’t the only company operating in this space that could be described as instant financing for SMEs. French competitors include Silvr, Defacto, Unlimitd and Hero. The reason revenue-based financing has become a hot vertical…

NiluperNiluper and her three children in Turkey Niluper says she has been living in agony.A Uyghur refugee, she has spent the past decade hoping her husband would join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they now live.The family was detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing increasing repression in their hometown in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the children were allowed to leave Thailand a year later. But her husband remained in detention, along with 47 other Uyghur men.Niluper – not her real name – now fears she and her children may never see him again.Ten days ago,…

PoliticusUSA is now ad-free and supported by readers like you. To support our work, please consider becoming a subscriber.Trump’s pardons of the 1/6 insurrectionists, including those who committed acts of violence, were not surprising. Trump has been saying that he is going to pardon these people for years.However, Rachel Maddow pointed out that the pardons and clemencies are boring for a different reason.Maddow said: In authoritarian Hungary, Viktor Orban’s government pardoned a far right agitator who had set fire to the homes of Orban’s political rivals. In Turkey, Erdogan had pardoned the leader of a far right nationalist paramilitary group that…

Israeli President Isaac Herzog is praising Donald Trump on Inauguration Day, calling him a “true friend” of the country and thanking him for his efforts to secure the release of hostages from Hamas. “On behalf of the people of Israel, I send my heartfelt congratulations to you, President Donald Trump on your inauguration as the 47th POTUS,” Herzog wrote on X. “You are a true friend of Israel. Thank you for your unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and to building a better future for our region. A special thank you for your commitment to bringing all our hostages home,” he continued. “We wish…

President Donald Trump pulled the security clearances of more than 50 national security officials who said Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”A total of 51 former national security officials released a public letter in 2020 claiming that even though the laptop did not have “any evidence of Russian involvement,” it looked like a “Russian information operation.”The letter came after the New York Post reported they had emails showing Hunter Biden coordinated for Joe Biden to meet with a top executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma months before pressuring Ukrainian officials to oust a…

Dozens of Indonesian schoolchildren have suffered food poisoning after consuming free meals offered through a new flagship program of President Prabowo Subianto, his office has confirmed.Rolled out this month, Prabowo’s multi-billion dollar policy was a centrepiece of the former general’s election campaign, with a pledge to reach 82.9 million children and pregnant women out of the country’s population of 280 million by 2029.Prabowo has said the program will improve their quality of life and boost economic growth.But aside from the financial challenges and Herculean logistical effort required, the government is facing another issue with 40 students from a school in…

Interrogate the internet about the most ridiculous rules people have experienced at work, and the stories roll in. The lab assistant instructed to label the expiry dates on all chemical samples, who was reprimanded for not writing when a bottle of sand would go off (to comply, they put in a date 65m years hence). The accounting firm where only partners were allowed to have plants over a certain height. The company where employees were required to submit requests to maintenance if they wanted the height of their office chairs to be adjusted. The baroque limitations on how often people…

VaxaVaxa bathes microalgae in a pink-purple lightIn the shadow of Iceland’s largest geothermal power station, a large warehouse houses a hi-tech indoor farm of sorts that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.Under a strange pink-purple glow, illuminated panels buzz and cylindrical columns of water bubble away, as a futuristic crop of microalgae grows.It’s here that Iceland’s Vaxa Technologies has developed a system that harnesses energy and other resources from the nearby power plant, to cultivate these tiny aquatic organisms.“It’s a new way of thinking about food production,” says general manager, Kristinn Haflidason as he gives me a tour of the space-age…

President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all Jan. 6 defendants on Monday night, after promising at his inaugural parade to sign an executive order on the matter. Sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Trump signed off on releasing more than 1,500 charged with crimes stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol. The order requires the Federal Bureau of Prisons to act immediately on receipt of the pardons.”Tonight I’m going to be signing on the J6 hostages, pardons to get them out,” Trump said at the parade at Capital One Arena in Washington. “I’m going to…