Bloomberg An isolated gold mine in Western Australia plans to become the first in the country to get its power from combined wind and solar generation on site, as projects increasingly look to co-locate the two technologies as a way to overcome intermittent renewable power. Stage one of the hybrid renewable project at Gold Fields Ltd’s Agnew mine, located nearly ...

Bloomberg Sweeping changes to Mexico’s clean energy regulations by president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s administration has sparked a legal backlash from the industry. In October, Mexico’s energy ministry said it would grant older, government-run projects the same energy certificates — known as CELs — as the new projects the certificates were designed to support. Now, clean energy companies representing 14 ...

Bloomberg The US Senate unanimously passed a bill aimed at supporting protesters in Hong Kong and warning China against a violent suppression of the demonstrations — drawing a rebuke from Beijing. China reiterated on Wednesday a threat to impose unspecified retaliation if the bill became law and urged the US to stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs. Separately, the city’s ...

Bloomberg Sri Lanka’s prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has decided to resign, state-run Daily News reported, days after his party’s candidate lost the country’s bitterly contested presidential poll and allowing newly-elected president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to choose a replacement. The Daily News didn’t say whether Wickremesinghe, who leads the United National Party and the ruling coalition, took the decision in order to ...

Bloomberg Ethiopia’s ethnic Sidama began voting in a referendum on whether to create a new regional state, the first of what’s expected to be a series of demands for more autonomy. The plebiscite will test whether the Horn of Africa nation can hold a general election scheduled for next year peacefully. The outcome will provide an indication of whether the ...

Bloomberg A court in Thailand disqualified from parliament a key opposition leader who had criticised the royalist establishment’s grip on power. The Constitutional Court found Future Forward leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit guilty of breaking rules meant to prevent politicians from owning shares in media firms. The court also barred him from being a member of parliament. He’d been suspended pending the ...

Bloomberg French president Emmanuel Macron’s government unveiled an emergency funding plan for ailing hospitals in an effort to calm protests from doctors and healthcare workers as the country braces for strikes over pension reform. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said the government will raise the budget for hospitals by 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) over the next three years, starting with ...

Bloomberg For the longest time, Angela Merkel was Germany and under her the center-right Christian Democrats were the dominant political force in the European Union. Today the party is a shambles and its new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), can’t seem to straighten it out. Just last month, the CDU suffered a historic beating in the eastern region of Thuringia. Mike ...

“Everyone seems to agree … that these companies are fundamentally different … [and] the old rules of capitalism simply do not apply to them” —Economist Thomas Philippon, author of “The Great Reversal:How America Gave Up on Free Markets” The public face of American capitalism is Big Tech. Its constituent firms — Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, to name a few ...

The Trump administration has developed a way to make pollution sound appealing. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a plan to relax regulations to allow Americans to be exposed to more dirty air. But the agency has dressed it up to look like it’s just advocating the use of stronger, more transparent science. The policy, sometimes called the ...