Free Republic

MOSCOW. May 12 (Interfax) - Indian refineries took advantage of the sharp discounts for Russian Urals, ESPO and Sokol grades, to buy substantial volumes via tender and spot purchases for delivery in May and June, the IEA report said. An estimated 25-30 million barrels were picked up, mostly through trading houses. They have also begun to negotiate longer-term contracts. Trading houses (Trafigura, Vitol) reportedly sold the crude to Indian refiners on a delivered basis, covering shipping and insurance costs, which resulted in a price paid by India's refiners that is higher than the quoted discounts for Russian spot crude sales....

The Hatch Foundation sadly announces the passing of Senator Orrin G. Hatch—the former President Pro Tempore of the United States Senate and the longest-serving Senator in Utah history (1977-2019).

U.S. employers say it's a hard time to find and keep talent. Workers are decamping at near-record rates, while millions of open jobs go unfilled. One reason for this labor crunch that has largely flown beneath the radar: Immigration to the U.S. is plummeting, a shift with potentially enormous long-term implications for the job market. In the middle of the last decade, the U.S. was adding about 1 million immigrants a year. But those numbers, which slowed down during the Trump administration, hit a brick wall when COVID-19 erupted in 2020.

Hundreds of two- and four-year colleges saw major student enrollment declines between 2020 and 2022. Enrollment in traditional undergraduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012. Ryan Lufkin, Senior Director for Instracture Canvas, says the pandemic turbocharged those enrollment losses. As result, higher education has been searching for a way to serve non-traditional students

Former President Trump endorsed Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) ahead of the November midterm elections in a statement on Friday. “Senator Mike Lee has done an outstanding job for the wonderful people of Utah. There is no greater voice for our Military, our Vets, Law and Order, or our Second Amendment, which is under total siege,” Trump stated. “He loves his State, and is by far the superior Senator there—not even a contest!” he added. The race is rated “solidly Republican” in the Cook Political Report’s 2022 Senate race ratings. Lee, facing off against independent Evan McMullin, has easily won...

US President Joe Biden will decide whether to apply or waive sanctions on India, one of America’s key partners, under the CAATSA law for its purchase of the S-400 missile defence system from Russia, a senior administration official has told lawmakers.

President Joe Biden and his deputies at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have dropped nearly all border protections for U.S. graduates, allowing a mass rush of Indian graduates to grab jobs from Fortune 500 companies, experts and foreign workers say. “They’ve opened up everything,” said Jay Palmer, a civil rights, human trafficking, and immigration rights activist, who works with many of the foreign visa workers who are exploited by their U.S. employers. He continued: “The administration has basically taken down all the checks and balances, and they opened the entire immigration platform for any [foreign gradaute] that wants to...

Senator Rubio Marco has slipped an amendment, without discussion, into the HR5421 COMPETES bill, now before the Senate, that completely destroys the multibillion dollar pet industry and ends efforts to protect precious species around the world. S626, entered into the Senate hopper last March, is one of 600 amendments to the COMPETES bill that will pass without discussion should the Senate approve this bill. Senator Schumer has assured us this will happen. 20 Republicans are on board with the fundamentals of this bill as passed last year in the Senate.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Labor announced that 20,000 H-2B visas will become available Friday, after exhausting the 33,000 visas set aside for the first half of the year before it even began. Citing record job growth, the agencies made the additional visas that were first announced in December available for domestic employers that are facing down or already experiencing irreparable harm if they can't secure additional temporary nonagricultural workers before March 31. The government also set aside 6,500 of the newly added visas for migrants from the so-called Northern Triangle countries El Salvador, Guatemala...

U.S. hospitals and staffing companies are extracting roughly 1,000 nurses each month from poor countries instead of recruiting and training Americans for the nursing jobs, say media reports. The New York Times newspaper described the extraction migration process on January 24: About 1,000 nurses are arriving in the United States each month from African nations, the Philippines and the Caribbean, said Sinead Carbery, president of O’Grady Peyton International, an international recruiting firm. While the United States has long drawn nurses from abroad, she said demand from American health care facilities is the highest she’s seen in three decades. There are...

A Silicon Valley tech giant is set to announce an investment of $20 billion for a chip factory in Columbus, Ohio, a locale strong on manufacturing with data centers for Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Intel's semiconductor factory would employ 3,000 workers in Licking County, in addition to thousands of construction workers and Intel suppliers locating to the area, a source told The Columbus Dispatch.

Ohio has landed what could become the biggest semiconductor operation on Earth. Chip giant Intel plans to officially announce Friday that it will invest $20 billion to build two computer chip plants in Jersey Township in Licking County in what will be Ohio's largest economic development project to date. State and local officials are set to gather in Newark this afternoon to celebrate the news.

Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to only 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1. Ten years ago, when I published How Civilizations Die, the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics. Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery....

Ministers are keen to ease immigration restrictions in a bid to make it easier for thousands of Indian citizens to live and work in the UK as part of forthcoming trade talks. The potential offer will be under discussion when the international trade secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, travels to Delhi this month, reports the Times. Relaxing immigration rules for Indian citizens is a key demand from Delhi. Trevelyan is said to have the backing of the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, who is keen to curb China’s growing influence in the region. However, they are likely to meet strong resistance from the...

The college class of 2020 entered one of the most hostile labor markets in recent history. During the first year of the Covid pandemic, employment decreased across the country. By many measures, college graduates fared best during this period, but as time passes, research is capturing just how difficult conditions are for young workers. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) recently analyzed the outcomes for 563,000 bachelor’s graduates across 337 colleges and universities and found that only 50.2% of the class of 2020 had full-time jobs with a traditional employer (meaning they are not working as a freelancer...

On Dec. 21 the Hindu nationalist government of the Indian state of Karnataka introduced harsh legislation intended to prevent conversions from Hinduism to other faiths. Alongside brazen attacks on Christian targets in several states and a Missionaries of Charity home in Gujarat state charged with “conversion,” the conversion issue has escalated with an anti-conversion bill presented Dec. 21 in the legislature of southern Karnataka state. “This is a Christmas whammy for us,” Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore, head of the Catholic Church in Karnataka, told the Register. “Wherever the BJP is in power, they are pushing this [anti-conversion] law to...

The CEO of New York-based online mortgage lender Better.com has sacked a total of 900 employees with immediate effect during a now-viral Zoom call. Better.com’s chief executive Vishal Garg has slammed the ex-workers for allegedly stealing from customers by not being productive. During the announcement of the mass firings in a Zoom call, Vishal Garg struck an unapologetic tone to the shock of the affected workers, a recording of which was later posted on various social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube.

The CEO of an online mortgage lender fired 900 of his employees in a brutal Zoom call - then slammed them for being so 'lazy' they effectively 'stole' from customers. Vishal Garg axed around nine per cent of Better.com's workforce last Wednesday - three weeks before Christmas - including its entire diversity, equity and inclusion team, which deals with complaints about racism and sexism in the workplace. Garg told them bluntly: 'This isn't news that you're going to want to hear...If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here...

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...

A cadre of moderate House Republicans saved President Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal from defeat on Friday after far-left Democrats rebelled against the legislation. 13 House Republicans, including never-Trump acolytes like Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joined with 215 Democrats to narrowly pass the bill. Given the narrow margin that Democrats control the House, Mr. Biden could only afford three defections.