Alcoa warns Trump's aluminum tariff could cost 100,000 US jobs
Feb 25 (Reuters) - Aluminum giant Alcoa (AA.N), opens new tab said on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to impose a tariff on aluminum imports, opens new tab could cost about 100,000 jobs across the United States.
"We view (tariffs) as bad for the U.S.," Bill Oplinger, CEO of the Pittsburgh-based company, told the BMO Global Metals & Mining Conference in Florida. Oplinger's remarks were webcast.
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Wales Online
an hour ago
- Wales Online
He left the country after a £50m money-laundering case. Now he has new life in sun
He left the country after a £50m money-laundering case. Now he has new life in sun The money laundering sparked a stranger-than-fiction chain of events involving a lottery winner, student houses and a bomb plot Half Moon Bay, an Auckland suburb where businessman Gregory Candy-Wallace appears to be based A man who ran companies that a court found laundered vast sums of money in Wales and England appears to have started a new life thousands of miles away. New Zealand authorities are "assessing" whether Gregory Candy-Wallace should be disqualified from managing businesses in the country after we informed them he had been operating there. It comes after the 64-year-old Brit settled a legal claim in the UK last year over his having controlled a network of firms that defrauded the taxman, HMRC, of tens of millions of pounds. There was due to be a civil trial at the High Court in London but the National Crime Agency (NCA) reached a settlement with Candy-Wallace and his companies last June, recovering assets worth £5.8m — a fraction of the more than £50m diverted from the taxman. A judge later said the money recovered was "the proceeds of crime". Now WalesOnline can reveal Candy-Wallace — a water polo enthusiast from Sussex whose companies used addresses in Cardiff for the money-laundering scheme — has more recent ventures in Auckland, where he is a majority shareholder in two companies and owns 49% of a third. We obtained court documents from the UK court case listing Candy-Wallace's address as a detached five-bedroom house in a wealthy coastal suburb of Auckland, with an outdoor pool and picturesque views onto the yacht-dotted Half Moon Bay. The home is valued at around £900,000. The Auckland-based firms are FM Group Ltd, which bills itself as a chemical wholesaler; ACM Environmental Services Ltd, an "environmental consultancy service"; and the curiously named 846361 Ltd, which says it is in the business of waterproofing buildings. Article continues below Candy-Wallace was previously a director of another Auckland company, Amoeba Investments Ltd, which classed itself as being in the "rental of residential property" industry. The firm owned a four-bedroom semi-detached house in Yorkshire, England, which the NCA applied for permission to seize before reaching a settlement. Who is Gregory Candy-Wallace? Candy-Wallace does not appear to be active on social media and — barring coverage of his court case — there is little trace of him on the internet. What can be found is mostly tied to his fondness for water polo, from refereeing in the Sussex league in 2013 to winning a tournament in Guam the same year and playing for a club in Dubai in 2022. Members of Sussex's water polo community told us they were puzzled when Candy-Wallace suddenly "disappeared" from the local scene a few years ago without explanation. Records show Candy-Wallace has been linked to civil tax fraud cases in the UK for two decades. One of his companies, described as a former "CD pressing business", was found to be "connected with fraud" as far back as 2006 in the form of invalid invoices. Another civil case dated back to 2005 when firms owned by Candy-Wallace were found to be linked to the "fraudulent evasion" of VAT by what the judge referred to as "the Malaga cell" of an illicit contra-trading network. WalesOnline's interest in his activities was first sparked last year when we investigated a network of "dormant companies" in Wales and England. There was little online to indicate what these firms actually did, beyond brief descriptions on Companies House such as "combined office administrative service activities" and "payroll services". One director, Damien Paton, was said to be a French national born in 1994. But elsewhere on Companies House his year of birth was given as 1960. In both records he was registered to a French address that was not a real place. Another of the directors was Candy-Wallace. One of the addresses used by the network was in Cranbrook Street, in Cardiff's student heartland of Cathays (Image: Conor Gogarty ) When we scanned through the many companies, a cluster of 12 stuck out. All were based at the same terraced house in Cranbrook Street in Cathays, the student heartland of Cardiff. It turned out the home was being used as a fake address for money-laundering. Landlord Nasser Nazemi told us the home started to be bombarded with letters from Companies House in 2017 after businesses had been registered there despite having no connection to the property. "The cheek of it," said Mr Nazemi. "We had to involve a solicitor to protect ourselves and it ended up costing us about £600 in legal fees." The firms in the money-laundering network were controlled by Candy-Wallace, according to the NCA, which said the "organised crime group" diverted away more than £50m of 'pay as you earn' and national insurance payments by "offering outsourcing services to third-party companies but then failing to pay the appropriate sums to HMRC". The funds were initially moved through a complex network of UK bank accounts before mostly ending up in Hong Kong and Taiwan accounts. Why wasn't he prosecuted? After last year's money-laundering settlement, we raised questions over the NCA's decision not to bring a criminal case against Candy-Wallace, particularly given that only a small portion of the £50m was recovered — on top of his decades-long links to tax fraud. As the NCA's own barrister James Laddie KC put it, the money-laundering ring was a 'deliberate and organised' fraud that featured 'inducements to secure clients'. Mr Laddie also said the settlement was a 'formal acknowledgement' that the funds were the proceeds of crime. Mr Justice Julian Knowles also described the funds in this way and said the network was part of "unlawful" payroll and money-laundering schemes. People are regularly imprisoned for fraud involving comparatively tiny sums of money. When we asked the NCA why it would not be bringing criminal proceedings, its spokeswoman said: "Civil recovery investigations are an efficient way to reclaim funds that have been acquired through unlawful conduct, and are not dependent on a criminal conviction." Jonathan Nuttall (Image: Press Association ) There was a criminal prosecution of one person involved in the network, but not for money-laundering. In 2023 one of Candy-Wallace's associates, Jonathan Nuttall, was jailed for eight years and two months after being found guilty of orchestrating a bomb plot against NCA lawyers. Nuttall had conspired to plant two explosives in London's legal district after becoming upset at the prospect of losing his stately home in Hampshire as assets were being seized in the civil case. The 51-year-old's wife, Amanda Nuttall — who once won £2.4m from her first lottery ticket — agreed to pay £1.4m and give up the stately home as part of the recent settlement. New Zealand Companies Office is now "assessing" Candy-Wallace's involvement in the Auckland firms. Its investigations team manager Vanessa Cook told us it is looking into whether his past conduct should disqualify him from directing or managing companies in New Zealand. Candy-Wallace and the Auckland companies were approached for comment. The only response we received was from a construction business whose email address was listed as a point of contact for one of Candy-Wallace's companies. The building firm said: "I don't know Mr Candy-Wallace, haven't had any dealings with him, and haven't seen him before." In the UK, registering sham addresses on Companies House has been a longstanding avenue for fraud. There is no requirement for those setting up a company to prove its legitimacy — and for those who actually live at the address, the fraud can ruin their credit rating due to the activity linked to their home. Article continues below The mass-registering of "burner companies" allows gangs to open UK bank accounts for money-laundering. However, later this year ID verification is finally due to become a requirement to start a company — after more than a decade of the system being abused — though experts have warned the scale of change needed will take time. If you know of a story we should be investigating, email us at
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Europeans seek 'digital sovereignty' as US tech firms embrace Trump
BERLIN, June 21 (Reuters) - At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their phones of the influence of U.S. tech firms. Since Donald Trump's inauguration, the queue for their services has grown. Interest in European-based digital services has jumped in recent months, data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows. More people are looking for e-mail, messaging and even search providers outside the United States. The first months of Trump's second presidency have shaken some Europeans' confidence in their long-time ally, after he signalled his country would step back from its role in Europe's security and then launched a trade war. "It's about the concentration of power in U.S. firms," said Topio's founder Michael Wirths, as his colleague installed on a customer's phone a version of the Android operating system without hooks into the Google ecosystem. Wirths said the type of people coming to the stall had changed: "Before, it was people who knew a lot about data privacy. Now it's people who are politically aware and feel exposed." Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab chief Elon Musk, who also owns social media company X, was a leading adviser to the U.S. president before the two fell out, while the bosses of Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Google-owner Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab took prominent spots at Trump's inauguration in January. Days before Trump took office, outgoing president Joe Biden had warned of an oligarchic "tech industrial complex" threatening democracy. Berlin-based search engine Ecosia says it has benefited from some customers' desire to avoid U.S. counterparts like Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab Bing or Google, which dominates web searches and is also the world's biggest email provider. "The worse it gets, the better it is for us," founder Christian Kroll said of Ecosia, whose sales pitch is that it spends its profits on environmental projects. Similarweb data shows the number of queries directed to Ecosia, opens new tab from the European Union has risen 27% year-on-year and the company says it has 1% of the German search engine market. But its 122 million visits from the 27 EU countries in February were dwarfed by 10.3 billion visits to Google, whose parent Alphabet made revenues of about $100 billion from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2024 - nearly a third of its $350 billion global turnover. Non-profit Ecosia earned 3.2 million euros ($3.65 million) in April, of which 770,000 euros was spent on planting 1.1 million trees. Google declined to comment for this story. Reuters could not determine whether major U.S. tech companies have lost any market share to local rivals in Europe. The search for alternative providers accompanies a debate in Europe about "digital sovereignty" - the idea that reliance on companies from an increasingly isolationist United States is a threat to Europe's economy and security. "Ordinary people, the kind of people who would never have thought it was important they were using an American service are saying, 'hang on!'," said UK-based internet regulation expert Maria Farrell. "My hairdresser was asking me what she should switch to." Use in Europe of Swiss-based ProtonMail rose 11.7% year-on-year to March compared to a year ago, according to Similarweb, while use of Alphabet's Gmail, which has some 70% of the global email market, slipped 1.9%. ProtonMail, which offers both free and paid-for services, said it had seen an increase in users from Europe since Trump's re-election, though it declined to give a number. "My household is definitely disengaging," said British software engineer Ken Tindell, citing weak U.S. data privacy protections as one factor. Trump's vice president JD Vance shocked European leaders in February by accusing them - at a conference usually known for displays of transatlantic unity - of censoring free speech and failing to control immigration. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened visa bans for people who "censor" speech by Americans, including on social media, and suggested the policy could target foreign officials regulating U.S. tech companies. U.S. social media companies like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta have said the European Union's Digital Services Act amounts to censorship of their platforms. EU officials say the Act will make the online environment safer by compelling tech giants to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. Greg Nojeim, director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Europeans' concerns about the U.S. government accessing their data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified. Not only does U.S. law permit the government to search devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure of data that Europeans outside the U.S. store or transmit through U.S. communications service providers, Nojeim said. Germany's new government is itself making efforts to reduce exposure to U.S. tech, committing in its coalition agreement to make more use of open-source data formats and locally-based cloud infrastructure. Regional governments have gone further - in conservative-run Schleswig-Holstein, on the Danish border, all IT used by the public administration must run on open-source software. Berlin has also paid for Ukraine to access a satellite-internet network operated by France's Eutelsat ( opens new tab instead of Musk's Starlink. But with modern life driven by technology, "completely divorcing U.S. tech in a very fundamental way is, I would say, possibly not possible," said Bill Budington of U.S. digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everything from push notifications to the content delivery networks powering many websites and how internet traffic is routed relies largely on U.S. companies and infrastructure, Budington noted. Both Ecosia and French-based search engine Qwant depend in part on search results provided by Google and Microsoft's Bing, while Ecosia runs on cloud platforms, some hosted by the very same tech giants it promises an escape from. Nevertheless, a group on messaging board Reddit called BuyFromEU has 211,000 members. "Just cancelled my Dropbox and will switch to Proton Drive," read one post. Mastodon, a decentralised social media service developed by German programmer Eugen Rochko, enjoyed a rush of new users two years ago when Musk bought Twitter, later renamed X. But it remains a niche service. Signal, a messaging app run by a U.S. nonprofit foundation, has also seen a surge in installations from Europe. Similarweb's data showed a 7% month-on-month increase in Signal usage in March, while use of Meta's WhatsApp was static. Meta declined to comment for this story. Signal did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment. But this kind of conscious self-organising is unlikely on its own to make a dent in Silicon Valley's European dominance, digital rights activist Robin Berjon told Reuters. "The market is too captured," he said. "Regulation is needed as well."
NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
Health care has been a job market bright spot, but Trump's budget bill looms over the industry
Proposed cuts to health insurance programs in the budget bill being pushed through Congress by President Donald Trump could put hundreds of thousands of health care jobs at risk — jeopardizing one of the few notably strong areas of the U.S. job market. Congressional Republicans are advancing a budget plan that would cause nearly 8 million people on Medicaid to lose their health insurance coverage, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, with an additional 2 million people to lose coverage through the Affordable Care Act if Congress remains on track to let health insurance tax subsidies expire at the end of the year. Less funding for Medicaid and fewer people with health insurance would mean a drop-off in doctor's office visits, prescription refills and medical procedures — and, as a result, fewer workers needed to support those types of services. It could lead to the loss of nearly 500,000 health care jobs over the next decade, according to an analysis by George Washington University and the Commonwealth Fund. The expiration of the ACA tax subsidies, which were enacted in 2021, would result in the loss of an additional 140,000 jobs, a separate analysis from George Washington University found. 'Hospitals will close, health centers will close, pharmacies in some parts of the country will close because they will lose revenue,' said Leighton Ku, director for the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University, who worked on the analyses. 'There are going to be job losses, and we're talking about middle class jobs being lost.' That would be a blow to one of the strongest, steadiest areas of the job market in recent years. Health care accounted for nearly half of the jobs added in the U.S. in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last year, around half of the 2.2 million jobs added to the economy were in health care-related sectors, according to an analysis by S&P Global. That has helped offset job cuts and stagnant growth in other sectors of the labor market, like retail and manufacturing. 'Right now, a lot of what is driving these positive headline numbers and bolstering the labor market is the health care sector,' said Allison Shrivastava, an economist with job listing site 'It's something that has been a constant. The health care sector has been a pretty big mainstay as the rest of the labor market has cooled.' The health insurance provisions are part of a broader spending bill that has passed the House and is currently making its way through the Senate. The legislation, which Republicans have dubbed the " Big Beautiful Bill Act," would cut around $800 billion from Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled, in order to help offset some of the $4 trillion in tax cut extensions in the bill for individuals and corporations. A version of the bill currently in the Senate, which plans to start voting on the legislation next week, would go even further in reducing spending on Medicaid, by including a provision to limit states' use of taxes on hospitals and other health care providers that help states fund their share of the Medicaid program. The cuts would take a particular toll on health care providers in rural areas, where patients are more likely to be insured through Medicaid than those in metro areas. Researchers at Georgetown University found that 40% of children in small and rural towns receive their health insurance from Medicaid. Already, one-third of all rural hospitals in the country are at risk of closing because of financial difficulties, according to a report this month from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Also at risk are Community Health Centers, which employ more than 300,000 workers and receive a portion of their funding from the federal government. Those centers, which serve at least 32 million mostly lower-income patients a year, get about 40% of their revenue from Medicaid. 'Our health centers operate on razor-thin margins, so any kind of disruption in payments or reimbursements, even for a short time, can have a significant impact,' said Joe Dunn, chief policy officer for the National Association of Community Health Centers. 'About 40% of health centers are in rural America, and oftentimes they are the only primary care in that community. We have health centers in towns of a few hundred people, and there may not be any other kind of health care network there.' Absent any policy changes from Congress, the health care sector had appeared to be on track for continued growth — and largely isolated from wider concerns about tariffs and an economic slowdown. The number of job postings for doctors and surgeons on are about 90% higher than their pre-pandemic levels, listings for home health aides are up 46%, and openings for nurses are up 16%, Shrivastava said. Health care job postings on represent 27% of all active job listings and health care postings are beginning to make up a larger share of new job postings, according to data from ZipRecruiter. A loss of that hiring momentum from funding cuts would leave one less positive driver for the job market. 'Right now, the labor market as a whole is arguably in a stagnant position,' said Shrivastava. 'People are not wanting to leave their jobs, they're nervous about whether or not they'll be able to find another job, and companies aren't really looking to hire. Health care has been the exception to that.'
