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Adrian Mardell, the Jaguar Land Rover chief who steered the luxury car maker’s disastrous rebrand and new ad campaign, is out after after three years in charge. “Adrian Mardell has expressed his desire to retire from JLR after three years as CEO and 35 years with the company. His successor will be announced in due course,” the company owned by India’s Tata Motors said in a statement as reported by the Financial Times. The 64-year-old took on the role of interim boss of the iconic marque in late 2022 after his predecessor Thierry Bolloré resigned after just two years in...

An awful lot of people are making a very dangerous assumption about the COVID-19 jabs: that the manufacture of them is pristine. Everyone seems to tacitly accept that every vial of a given jab is perfect and identical to every other vial of the same thing and that it is delivered to the injection site in perfect condition. I don't think so.Bad batches?There are press reports of localized clusters of bad jab reactions, such as a huge spike in stillbirths in Scotland. See here and here. Scotland is not the only place. The U.S. has the same issues in some...

Workers at a plant in Baltimore manufacturing two coronavirus vaccines accidentally conflated the ingredients several weeks ago, contaminating up to 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and forcing regulators to delay authorization of the plant’s production lines. The plant is run by Emergent BioSolutions, a manufacturing partner to both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish company whose vaccine has yet to be authorized for use in the United States. Federal officials attributed the mistake to human error. The mix-up has delayed future shipments of Johnson & Johnson doses in the United States while the Food and Drug...

Data Leak Shows Regulators Had Major Concerns About Pfizer’s mRNA VaccineLeaked documents show that some early commercial batches of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine had lower than expected levels of intact mRNA, prompting wider questions about how to assess this novel vaccine platform.By Serena TinariAs it conducted its analysis of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in December, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was the victim of a cyberattack. More than 40 megabytes of classified information from the agency’s review were published on the dark web, and several journalists — including from The BMJ — and academics worldwide were sent copies of the leaks....

In December of 2020, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was allegedly the victim of a cyberattack as they were reviewing documents received from Pfizer regarding their mRNA COVID vaccine trials in preparation for issuing emergency use approval for the vaccine in Europe.More than 40 megabytes of classified information was allegedly published on the dark web, and sent to several journalists, including The BMJ which just published a review of the leaked documents last week.One of the key issues revealed in the leaked documents, according to The BMJ, was that European regulators had major concerns over unexpectedly low quantities of intact...

What could the consequences be if the love affair between China and Tesla begins to fade? That is a question U.S. investors may have to start asking themselves.Weeks ago, we wrote about how China was forcing a recall of Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles, indicating the first "bump in the road" between the company and the Chinese state. Then, on Christmas, Chinese company Pingwest released what can only be called a brutal expose about quality control and working conditions at Tesla's Shanghai factory.The article was titled "Giga-Sweatshop Meets Corporate Overlords: an Exclusive Look Into How Tesla China Runs...

The Communist thugs in charge of China have been trying to have it two ways on coronavirus: Playing the aggrieved victim of racism/biological-warfare/whatever, and acting like the international bigshot who, having solved the crisis at home, is now eager to help other nations around the world.Beijing's antics are making everything worse everywhere, this time in the Czech Republic. The Czech newspaper Irozhlas (I-Radio) reports that the bigshots in Beijing sent 150,000 coronavirus rapid testing kits to Czechia which return false results up to 80% of the time.Forgive the rough Google Translate results, but I don't speak Czech: "We checked...

"Results from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses were delayed Monday night as the state’s Democratic Party said it ran “quality checks” on the data."

Two years ago 16 track inspectors and five supervisors for the Washington, DC Metro Rail system were fired for repeatedly filing false reports on track conditions. The Metro and Amalgamated Transit Union appealed these firings. An arbitrator hired to hear the appeal ordered all the fired individuals to be reinstated. The basis for the reinstatement decision was the arbitrator’s finding that “filing false reports was the normal practice in the track inspection program. Each inspection report was essentially an exact copy of the previous report filed for that section of track. No new measurements of deteriorated conditions were ever noted....

Roof of Kim Jong-un's Jerry-Built Luxury Villa Caves In The roof of a luxury villa in Wonsan belonging to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has collapsed, apparently due to faulty construction. A comparison of a photo of the villa taken by South Korea's Arirang 3 satellite and an earlier image of the area on Google Earth shows a building in the compound with a collapsed roof. One U.S. satellite image expert who analyzes photos of the luxury villas and government buildings used by the North Korean elite said the building appears to be an aquarium that was built in 2011....

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

Two baby orang-utans and a lion cub have become the latest victims of China's contaminated milk crisis. The animals, at at Hangzhou Zoo near Shanghai, developed kidney stones after being fed milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.