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1.Bharti Airtel-backed OneWeb gets regulatory OK to launch satcom services in India
OneWeb India on Tuesday obtained the necessary authorisations from IN-SPACe to launch Eutelsat OneWeb’s commercial satellite broadband services in India. OneWeb India is the first organisation to receive this authorisation.
IN-SPACe is the agency of the Government of India responsible for regulating space activities and granting authorisation for conducting space activities in the country. This authorisation means Eutelsat OneWeb can launch commercial connectivity services as soon as spectrum allocation is granted by the government.
2.Apple hopes to produce iPhones worth ₹1 lakh crore ($12 billion) in India in the year ending March 2024, up from ₹60,000 crore in the previous year, per The Economic Times.
Around 70% of iPhones produced in India are exported. So far, Apple has exported 40,000 crore ($5 billion) worth of iPhones in the April to October period this fiscal.
3.The Open AI saga continues to unfurl
For those who came late, the New York Times has a good summary:
“OpenAI’s board fired its chief executive, Sam Altman, in a surprise on Friday. The board’s explanation — that Altman had not been completely candid with them — was vague and opaque.
We still don’t know exactly what happened between Altman and the board. But OpenAI’s unusual governance structure — it is run by a nonprofit board that controls a for-profit subsidiary and can vote to replace its leaders — allowed the board to fire Altman without explaining itself.
What was the coup about?
The coup was led by Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, who had butted heads with Altman. Sutskever wants the company to prioritize safety and was worried that Altman was more focused on growth.
Sutskever is among a faction of A.I. experts who are fearful that A.I. may soon surpass human abilities and become a threat to our survival. Several of OpenAI’s board members have ties to effective altruism, a philosophical movement that has made preventing these threats a top priority. Altman has concerns about A.I. risks, too. But he has also expressed optimism that A.I. will be good for society, and a desire to make progress more quickly. That may have put him at odds with the safety-minded board members, whose job is to see that powerful A.I. is developed responsibly.
What’s happened since the coup?
Over the weekend, it looked as though Altman might return to OpenAI, under the condition that major changes were made to the board. That didn’t happen. Instead, late on Sunday night, the board affirmed its decision, writing in a memo to employees that Altman’s “behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board’s ability to effectively supervise the company in the manner it was mandated to do.”
The board then appointed Emmett Shear — the former chief executive of Twitch, a livestreaming company — to be OpenAI’s second interim C.E.O. in just a few days. (Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, had been given the job, only to lose it after signaling her support for Altman.)
In response, Microsoft — OpenAI’s biggest investor and a major strategic partner — offered to give Altman and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, a job running a new A.I. lab. Nearly all of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter threatening to quit and go work for the new Microsoft team, unless the start-up’s board resigned and brought back Altman and Brockman.
In another surprise twist, Sutskever then had second thoughts. He wrote in a post on X on Monday that he deeply regretted having taken part in the ouster and that he had “never intended to harm OpenAI.” He also signed the letter pledging to follow Altman and Brockman to Microsoft unless the board reversed its decision.
Corporate infighting is not new. But what makes the OpenAI story stand out is the stakes. OpenAI is no ordinary company. It built ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing tech products of all time, and it employs many of the top A.I. researchers.
The company is also unusually ambitious and saw its role as building a digital superintelligence that would eventually become more powerful than humans. In addition, Altman was a well-liked leader and a figurehead for the A.I. industry, making the board’s decision to oust him even more of a mystery.
In a larger sense, what’s happening at OpenAI is a proxy for one of the biggest fights in the global economy today: how to control increasingly powerful A.I. tools, and whether large companies can be trusted to develop them responsibly.
To get a nuanced understanding on the crisis listen to Derek Thompson of Atlantic’s podcast Plain English in which has discussion with Karen Hao, Charlie Warzel and Ross Andersen, all writers at the Atlantic.
3. E-bikes are reducing global climate emissions more than electric vehicles.
There are roughly 20 million electric cars on the road worldwide, but 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers. Analysis by BloombergNEF estimated that the growth of e-bikes had already reduced oil demand by a million barrels a day — around 1% of total use, and four times the impact of EVs so far.
The real value of e-bikes, The Conversation reported, is in short-hop journeys: 60% of U.S. car trips are under 10 kilometers. E-bikes, with their smaller footprint and energy demand, are ideal for those journeys.
4.UN Climate Report
A United Nations report released yesterday warns Earth is on track to surpass a critical global warming threshold within the next decade. Global average temperatures are predicted to warm by nearly 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels of roughly 13.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase targeted in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
The annual report finds global greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by 42% to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030; otherwise, Earth's average temperature is expected to rise between 2.5 degrees Celsius and 2.9 degrees Celsius. China and the US are the top two emitters of greenhouse gases.
The findings come amid record-setting global temperatures, with preliminary data suggesting Earth's global average surface temperature last week briefly passed 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The report also comes ahead of an annual UN climate change summit next week, known as COP28, when diplomats from nearly 200 countries will gather in Dubai.
5.Inside Hamas’s sprawling financial empire, reports The Economist
Viewed from one of Istanbul’s glitziest restaurants, the Bosporus looks sublime. The venue is a favoured haunt of mandarins, businessmen, minor celebrities—and Hamas’s financiers. A man on whom America has imposed sanctions for funding the Islamist group describes his various board seats. “It’s ridiculous,” he says, of America’s accusation, but eventually admits, “now, if you’re asking what our employees do with their own money, why would I know?”
Hamas has three sources of power: its physical force inside Gaza, the reach of its ideas and its income. Since Hamas’s attacks on October 7th, Israel has killed more than 12,000 Palestinians in Gaza in seeking to wreck the first. But Israel’s declared goal of destroying Hamas for good requires its financial base to be dismantled, too. Very little of this sits in Gaza at all. Instead, it is overseas in friendly countries. Furnished with money-launderers, mining companies and much else, Hamas’s financial empire is reckoned to bring in more than $1bn a year. Having been painstakingly crafted to avoid Western sanctions, it may be out of reach for Israel and its allies.
Hamas’s income pays for everything from schoolteachers’ salaries to missiles. Around $360m each year comes from import taxes on goods brought into Gaza from the West Bank or Egypt. This is the easiest source of cash for Israel to strangle. After withdrawing from the strip in 2005, it strictly limited the movement of goods and people across the border. Now it stops even most basic necessities from getting in.
A much larger income stream, though, comes from abroad. Israeli officials reckon this amounts to around $750m per year, making it the main source of funding for Hamas’s current stockpile of arms and fuel. Some comes from friendly governments, the biggest of which is Iran. America reckons that the ayatollahs provide $100m to Palestinian Islamist groups, mainly in military aid. The task for Hamas’s financiers is to move this money around without falling prey to America’s sanctions. In the past month alone, American officials have imposed three rounds of restrictions on people and companies for funding Hamas.
Dodging American sanctions requires some ingenuity. Millions of dollars flow to Hamas through crypto markets. “You’d be surprised how much of the market’s activity comes back to [Hamas],” says Firuze Segzin, an economist at Bilkent University in Turkey. America’s treasury department says Hamas has smuggled more than $20m through Redin, a currency exchange crammed among tourist shops deep in Istanbul’s run-down Fatih neighbourhood.
But the lion’s share of Hamas’s money—at least $500m a year, say Israeli officials—comes from its investments, some of which are firms registered in countries across the Middle East. These are run by professionals from Hamas’s investment office and employ its members. American officials say the firms donate to charities which in turn funnel funds to Hamas; Turkish officials say profits are sometimes taken directly. Untangling these revenue streams is tricky for Western regulators. One such firm built the Afra Mall, Sudan’s first shopping mall, while another mines near Khartoum, its capital. A third built skyscrapers in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Many of these companies boast of their business deals, but deny affiliation with Hamas.
Can any revenue streams remaining to Hamas be choked off? That depends on the countries through which they flow. Since 1989, when Israel arrested a handful of Hamas’s top brass in Gaza and the West Bank, its bankers have lived abroad. Over time, though, geopolitical shifts have forced them to keep moving. Hamas abandoned its first financial hub, Amman, after Jordan’s ties to America grew too close.
Today, while Hamas’s politicians favour Doha, the capital of Qatar, and its companies range from Algeria and Sudan to the uae, its financiers live in Istanbul. Zaher Jabarin, accused by Israel of running Hamas’s finances (which he denies), is based there, as are several other individuals under sanctions by America for funding the organisation. Eager to gain regional influence by supporting the Palestinian cause, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, offers shelter. Israel says that the Turkish government hands out passports (which it denies) and lets Hamas keep an office in the country.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s banking system helps Hamas dodge American sanctions by conducting complex transactions across the world. A booming, lightly regulated crypto market helps. Many of Turkey’s biggest banks, including Kuveyt Turk, have been accused by Israel and America of knowingly storing Hamas’s cash. Some murmur that Mr Erdogan quietly approves. In 2021 the Financial Action Task Force, a g7 watchdog, placed Turkey on its “grey list” of countries doing too little to freeze terrorists’ assets.
No one benefits more than Hamas’s businessmen. The Turkish government’s tacit approval “opens doors and makes things smooth in business”, says one of the group’s finance employees. Trend GYO, an Istanbul-listed firm that has been placed under sanctions by America for funnelling funds to Hamas, won an official contract to build Istanbul Commerce University. Construction companies, which feature heavily in Hamas’s portfolio, can quietly swallow huge lumps of cash, and regularly receive large loans. All this allows Turkish officials to say that they are not directly lining Hamas’s pockets.
So far, Hamas seems financially bulletproof. Israel has inflicted little harm on either its income or savings; Turkey’s banks have been unco-operative. America’s numerous sanctions are less effective if their targets can keep cash outside its banking system. And Hamas hides its companies well. “Every time you think you’ve got a big fish, it changes its name,” despairs one ex-Treasury official.
In fact, the risk is that Hamas’s finances will improve. As Israel steps up its attacks on Gaza, Western governments may blanch at the humanitarian horror. Countries with pro-Palestinian populations may make it even easier for Hamas to earn money. For months, rumours have circulated that some civil servants in Mr Erdogan’s economic ministry are co-ordinating with Hamas’s finance office.
For Israel, Hamas growing richer despite the war would be a disaster. With its wealth and financial roots intact, it—or a similar organisation—may well flourish after the destruction. Gazans, meanwhile, have been plunged into tragedy so that Israel can destroy a group whose money and power are safely ensconced elsewhere. Compare their plight to the picture in Istanbul: eating lobster and gazing at the Bosphorus.