Chicago’s new police union head has warned that officers who kneel in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters could be kicked out of the union. John Catanzara, who was appointed to lead the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police last month, labelled officers who kneeled alongside protesters as “ridiculous”.
In comments made to Fox32 on Thursday, the police union boss argued that protesters were calling on authorities across the US to defund and abolish police departments following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody on 25 May.
“I don’t believe it’s the time or place to be doing that,” said Mr Catanzara. “If you kneel, you’ll be risking being brought up on charges and thrown out of the lodge. Specifically, this weekend,” he continued. “This was about defunding and abolishing the police officers. And you’re going to take a knee for that? It’s ridiculous.”
Those comments come as police across the US have been seen in the kneeling position, otherwise known as ‘taking the knee’, with crowds demonstrating against systemic racism and police violence. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot soon criticised the union head’s “unfortunate comments”, and said she was “not going to dignify them with any further response.”
According to Fox32, members dismissed from the union would lose contractual benefits and protections but would be able to continue working as a cop in Chicago. Mr Catanzara was condemned in 2017 after he posed with a sign that supported President Donald Trump and gun rights, whilst in uniform, in a photo posted on Facebook. He compared his actions to those officers who have knelt with demonstrators and said only politics separated them.
“Well that’s a political stance. I want to see what happens on the department level,” said Mr Catanzara. “I’m going to guess nothing because the mayor supports this kind of stuff”.
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Vaccine Development Nothing Without Manufacturing
BioNTech (ADR NASDAQ: BNTX) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) are among the front-runners in the closely watched COVID-19 vaccine race, and as they simultaneously work through development and scale up manufacturing, BioNTech has scored a €100 million financing agreement to help fund production in Europe.
The European Investment Bank signed a debt financing deal with BioNTech—to be completed in two €50 million tranches—as the biotech advances its Pfizer-partnered COVID-19 vaccine program, BNT162. The partners entered human testing in Germany back in April, followed by a U.S. study that launched in early May. The funding will be contingent on the program reaching certain milestones.
The funds will help with ongoing development and with BioNTech’s efforts to scale up for production in Europe. The biotech already operates three mRNA factories in Germany, and it has been working to add capacity for its COVID-19 vaccine program.
The BNT162 program is testing four mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 so the partners can zero in on the most promising options. The companies inked their COVID-19 vaccine tie-up back in March.
In April, the companies unveiled plans to produce “millions” of doses this year and potentially “hundreds of millions” in 2021. At the time, Cantor Fitzgerald analysts wrote that the team could begin producing doses “at risk” to be in a position to distribute as quickly as possible if and when they win approvals.
BioNTech is focusing on production in Europe, and Pfizer has selected three U.S. sites—and one in Belgium—for its mRNA vaccine manufacturing. Those sites are in Michigan, Massachusetts and Missouri as well as Puurs, Belgium. Pfizer has said it plans to select other sites as well.
JPMorgan Flips on Bitcoin
JPMorgan, one of Wall Street’s biggest banks and up until recently an outspoken bitcoin critic, has changed its tune on the world’s number one cryptocurrency.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon who once branded bitcoin a “fraud,” has said bitcoin is looking “mostly positive” and cryptocurrencies more broadly have “longevity as an asset class.”
“Though the [bitcoin] bubble collapsed as dramatically as it inflated, bitcoin has rarely traded below the cost of production, including the very disorderly conditions that prevailed in March,” said JPMorgan analysts in a report. Bitcoin briefly crashed to under $4,000 per bitcoin in March, losing over half of its value in under month as the spreading coronavirus pandemic sent panic through global markets.
Bitcoin bounced back quicker than most other assets, however, recovering almost all of its corona-crash losses by the end of April. Equity markets have also now almost entirely returned to pre-coronavirus highs, boosted by unprecedented central bank stimulus led by multi-trillion dollar measures from the U.S. Federal Reserve.
While JPMorgan found the bitcoin price has recently begun to trade inline with riskier assets like equities, bitcoin has consistently maintained a price above its production costs. However, the net cost of bitcoin mining has changed recently, with the number of bitcoin rewarded to those that maintain the bitcoin network cut by half in May—dropping from 12.5 bitcoin to 6.25.
Ahead of the May halving, the cost of mining one bitcoin was put at around $7,000 by crypto-focused research firm TradeBlock. The bitcoin price has climbed since its third halving though it’s failed to hold onto gains above $10,000 despite repeatedly moving above the psychological line.
Earlier this month, JPMorgan signed established U.S. bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini as customers after a lengthy vetting period and it’s emerged JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been hosting secret meetings with Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong since 2018.
Berkeley To Study EV Parking Preferences
Eight electric vehicle chargers are headed to the UC Berkeley campus to help researchers understand the charging preferences of electric car drivers. “What we hope to more deeply understand is behavior around electric vehicle charging,” Moura said. “What do people value when they’re charging their electric vehicles?”
There are currently two SlrpEV charging stations at the SunPower office in San Jose and on the UC San Diego campus, and UC Berkeley will be the third location, according to the SlrpEV website. According to Moura, the chargers will offer two options for charging electric cars as part of the experiment. The first, MAX, charges the vehicle as quickly as possible. The second option, FLEX, has the user input the time they want to leave and the level of charge they want. It then proceeds to efficiently fulfill that charge when the electric grid has less traffic, thus reducing emissions.
The SlrpEV team hopes to find out what electric vehicle drivers’ value most by offering different types of charging and varied prices. Parking spots in Berkeley are hard to come by, which leads Seamus Wilmot, UC Berkeley director of Parking and Transportation, to believe that some people may not be willing to give up the SlrpEV spots once they are done charging their vehicles. Moura echoed this sentiment by citing a comment from a research participant: “We don’t live in a charging desert; we live in a parking desert.”
In addition to electric vehicles pretending to “faux-charge,” as Moura calls it, the spots run the risk of being taken by nonelectric, gasoline-powered vehicles. Moura said researchers have faced this issue, which he calls “ICE-ing” in reference to the internal combustion engines of the nonelectric cars, at the UCSD charging station. A parking authority can issue a ticket if alerted of a vehicle in an electric charging spot that is not actually charging, regardless of whether or not it is an electric car, although Moura said the research team may look into “softer” ways to dissuade this behavior, such as an email alert.
Walking Off the Pandemic
Yves Hanoulle has been working from home throughout Belgium’s coronavirus lockdown, but he has still managed to walk about 1,500 km by pacing through each day on a treadmill installed under his desk.
“I’ve calculated that since the lockdown for COVID-19 I’ve actually done 27,000 steps a day for three months now,” said Hanoulle, 48, an IT teams coach who lives in the town of Ghent.
Hanoulle said he walks at around 2.3 km an hour for eight hours while working each day and sometimes turns the speed up in the evening to read a book, clocking up more than 20 km and almost double that distance on one strenuous day.
“I read … that sitting is the new smoking and that we humans are not really made for sitting all the time,” he told Reuters as he walked on the treadmill belt and worked on computers perched on an elevated desk.
“And so when I started doing this I immediately noticed in myself that I feel a lot more fitter and that it’s much easier to focus.”