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LONDON — Major oil producers on Thursday agreed to continue raising output moderately despite pressure from the United States and other big consumer nations to open up the taps much more decisively amid soaring prices.

The 13 members of the OrganiSation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and their 10 allies said in a statement that they reconfirmed "the decision to adjust upward the monthly overall production by 0.4 [million barrels per day] for the month of December 2021".

The powerful producers led by Saudi Arabia and Russia in the so-called OPEC+ grouping gathered for less than two hours in their regular monthly meeting via videoconference.

Analysts had widely expected the grouping to re-affirm a decision in July to modestly step up production after slashing it steeply last year as the pandemic hit global markets.

The decision aimed "to ensure a stable and a balanced oil market, the efficient and secure supply to consumers," the statement said.

The OPEC+ nations also pledged "to continue to adopt a proactive and transparent approach which has provided stability to oil markets."

With prices for the benchmark WTI contract reaching $85 last week, the highest since 2014, US President Joe Biden appealed on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rome over the weekend to OPEC to pump more.

"The idea that Russia and Saudi Arabia and other major producers are not going to pump more oil so people can have gasoline to get to and from work, for example, is not right," he said.

Other oil-consuming nations, such as India and Japan, have also called for more output to lower prices.

'Operating on limit' 

OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo last week reiterated "the need to remain cautious and attentive to an ever-evolving market situation," according to a statement.

While higher prices benefit producers in the form of increased revenues -- particularly after the lean period of the coronavirus pandemic -- there are concerns that they could stifle the fragile economic recovery and thus demand for oil.

There have also been question marks recently over the ability of OPEC+ members to drastically boost output.

"The consensus amongst investors is that OPEC+ will resist calls to speed up the pace of production increases because lots of the members are already operating on the limit of their production capacity," Ricardo Evangelista of ActivTrades said ahead of the meeting.

Contrary to the normal trend of OPEC countries exceeding their production quotas, in recent months most member states have stuck to them or in some cases even fallen short.

This suggests that the group may not be able to rapidly increase production in the short term despite it having a current theoretical reserve of more than four million barrels per day in the ground.

The next OPEC+ meeting is set for December 2.



BRASÍLIA — Brazil opened an international tender Thursday to build one of the world's biggest 5G data networks, seeking $9 billion in investment for Latin America's largest economy.

The sprawling South American country is looking to leverage so-called fifth-generation mobile technology to accelerate the development of its industrial and agribusiness sectors -- as well as bring super-fast internet to the cell phones of its 213 million people.

The tender is for the right to build and operate four "blocks" of the frequency spectrum for 20 years, as well as a separate network reserved for government communications.

Bidding for the latter will exclude Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, the target of US espionage accusations that have put Brazil in a bind, forcing it to navigate the tumultuous tech standoff between the world's two biggest powers -- which are also its two largest trading partners.

Fifteen companies have registered to bid, the biggest of which already have operations in Brazil including Telecom Italia's local subsidiary Tim; Spanish group Telefonica's Brazilian unit; and Claro, owned by Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim's America Movil.

"It is one of the largest 5G tenders in the world. The potential is enormous," industry specialist Christian Perrone of the Technology and Society Institute in Rio de Janeiro told AFP.

President Jair Bolsonaro's government is seeking total investments of 50 billion reais ($9 billion): 40 billion reais to build the 5G network -- one of Latin America's first -- and 10 billion reais that it will pocket for frequency rights.

5G technology requires four to 10 times as many antennas as 4G.

The bidding terms require winning companies to roll out service in Brasilia and the 26 state capitals by August 2022. Other cities of more than 30,000 people can expect service between 2025 and 2028.

GLASGOW — Focus at the COP26 summit turned on Wednesday to how the world will pay for its ambitions to quit fossil fuels and help vulnerable nations survive climate change, as campaigners expressed scepticism over promises of billions from financiers and governments.

After a world leaders' summit yielded a landmark deal slashing methane emissions, negotiators are now tasked with keeping alive the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5ºC.

But a simmering diplomatic spat between the United States, China and Russia over their climate action ambitions showed the fragile nature of talks aimed at averting disastrous global heating.

With funding crucial for turning climate pledges into reality, a financial coalition representing trillions in private capital made net-zero pledges on Wednesday.

COP26 president Alok Sharma said there was "big momentum" from the private sector.

But he acknowledged that governments of wealthy nations failed to honour a key pledge to help poorer nations green their energy grids and respond to increasingly extreme drought and flooding.

He told the conference it was "regrettable" that the decade-old vow to provide $100 billion annually had not been delivered by 2020 as promised and would likely not be met until 2023.

Delays in the funding have reopened tensions between vulnerable nations, often the least responsible for emissions, and polluting richer countries.

"Climate finance in 2021 is as volatile as the strengthening storms that rip through the fabric of our economy year in year out," Fiji's Economy Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum told the conference, adding it was still unclear in what form the money would come in.

"How many years until we wake up and realise that we have built a system that actually destroys the planet by design," he said, slamming continuing subsidies for fossil fuels.

Net zero? 

But former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney told the conference the global financial system "has been transformed to deliver net zero".

With billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg, he is spearheading an initiative by a group of 450 banks, insurers and pension funds with $130 trillion in assets to help countries achieve carbon neutrality.

Carney said the Glasgow Financial Alliance would help the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 "at the latest".

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the conference mobilising private capital was "essential".

"No amount of public financing alone will be sufficient to meet the demands of the climate crisis," she warned.

But campaign groups reacted with scepticism, pointing out that funds involved were still investing heavily in oil and gas.

"The commitments they have made are so full of loopholes, that there is plenty of space for some of the worst financiers of the worst polluters on the planet," said Kenneth Haar of the Corporate Europe Observatory.

'Long way to go' 

And on the streets of Glasgow, Extinction Rebellion and other activists responded to the COP26 finance-themed day with a protest against "Greenwashing".

"There's been too many words, not enough action," said one protester, Janet, dressed in a hard hat and high visibility jacket emblazoned with the slogan "build back greener".

Delegations will spend the coming days thrashing out details of the Paris Agreement rulebook, including rules governing carbon markets and a unified "stock take" on emissions cutting plans.

Although organisers say they want COP26 to keep the 1.5ºC heating limit within reach, the UN says the most up-to-date climate pledges put Earth on course to warm 2.7ºC.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told parliament on Wednesday that negotiations "have a long way to go".

"Whether we can summon the collective wisdom and will to save ourselves from an avoidable disaster still hangs in the balance," he said.

'Destroy consensus' 

On Tuesday leaders committed to lower their emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — by at least 30 per cent this decade.

Experts said the pledge could have a significant impact on short-term heating.

But a two-day world leaders' summit ended with barbed comments from the two largest emitters, the United States and China.

US President Joe Biden criticised counterpart Xi Jinping for skipping the summit, after China declined to sign the methane pledge.

"It just is a gigantic issue and they walked away," Biden said before leaving Glasgow.

He said the same was true of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is also missing the talks.

But China and Russia pushed back on that assessment.

And in a sign the acrimony could sour negotiations, China's Special Climate Envoy Xie Zhenhua told reporters late Tuesday he did not support shifting the temperature warming goal to 1.5ºC, from a less ambitious Paris cap of "well below" 2ºC.

"If we are to only focus on 1.5ºC, it means we are destroying this consensus between all parties," Xie said.

BEIJING — US Internet services company Yahoo said on Tuesday it has pulled out of mainland China, becoming the latest tech firm to withdraw as a crackdown by Beijing on the industry gathers pace.

The move comes just days after American gaming giant Epic said it will shut its popular game "Fortnite" following the imposition of strict curbs on the world's biggest gaming market.

Beijing has embarked on a wide-ranging regulatory clampdown on a number of industries in a drive to tighten its control of the economy, with tech firms taking the brunt.

The push has seen a number of US-based companies withdraw major products from China in recent weeks, with Microsoft in October announcing the closure of its career-oriented social network LinkedIn.

"In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," Yahoo said in a statement e-mailed to AFP.

"Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open Internet. We thank our users for their support."

Google shut down its search engine in China in 2010.

Reports in 2018 of a plan by Google executives to explore reopening a site in China sparked a backlash from rights groups and Google employees warning that a censored search engine would set a "dangerous precedent".

Yahoo China was launched in 1999, when the company was among the world's most important Internet firms.

Its presence in the country has shrunk in recent years, with Yahoo shutting down its Chinese mail service in 2013.

Yahoo's latest statement echoes Microsoft's complaint in October that it faced an increasingly "challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements".

Gaming clampdown 

China's crackdown has also hit the video gaming sector, with officials in late August saying they wanted to curb addiction by announcing drastic cuts to the amount of time children can spend playing online.

On Sunday gaming giant Epic said it had pulled the plug on "Fortnite", saying it will shut down the Chinese version of the massively popular game on November 15.

The action-packed shooter and world-building game is one of the most popular in the world, boasting more than 350 million users.

"Fortnite China's Beta test has reached an end, and the servers will be closed soon," a statement from the firm said.

"On November 15 at 11am, we will turn off game servers, and players will no longer be able to log in."

The move brings an end to a long-running test of Epic's version of "Fortnite" specifically created for the Chinese market, where content is policed for excessive violence.

The Chinese test version was released in 2018, but "Fortnite" never received the government's green light to be formally launched and monetised as approvals for new games slowed.

Daniel Ahmad, senior video game analyst at Niko Partners, said fighting games such as "Fortnite" had faced tighter approval requirements in recent years.

"We believe the lack of approval is the main reason why Tencent and Epic decided to close the game at this point," Ahmad said, despite the developers making numerous changes to tone down the bloodier aspects of the game.

In September, scores of Chinese video game makers including Tencent vowed to better police their products for "politically harmful" content and enforce curbs on underage players, as they looked to fall in line with government demands.

The 213 gaming firms promised in a joint statement to ban content that was "politically harmful, historically nihilistic, dirty and pornographic, bloody and terrifying".

Epic's announcement was met with sadness from fans in China, who took to social media to mourn the loss of the game.

"I'm genuinely crying so hard — I was just playing with my boyfriend and was really looking forward to what was coming next," one Weibo user wrote. "This is just so sudden."

LISBON — Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is set to open Lisbon's Web Summit on Monday evening, putting more pressure on the company as tens of thousands arrive for the tech world's first mass gathering since the pandemic struck.

Organisers of one of the world's largest technology conferences, which was called off last year due to COVID-19, have hailed the fact that its return is taking place in a country with one of the world's highest vaccination rates.

With some 40,000 attendees flying in to Portugal from worldwide — all of them required to show proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test — Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave said there was huge excitement, as well as caution.

"There's that very strange euphoria that probably happened at the start of the roaring twenties. People are coming out of an apocalyptic pandemic," Cosgrave told AFP.

The Web Summit's capacity has been cut from 70,000 to allow for greater social distancing, with masks required throughout the Altice Arena and one-way systems in place for an event which runs through Thursday.

Haugen, the former Facebook engineer who leaked a trove of damaging internal documents, tops the bill at a conference that will also see executives from some 70 tech unicorns — start-ups valued at over $1 billion — take to the stage.

The future of Facebook, the world's biggest social media platform, is set to provide a key talking point as the company struggles to move on from the scandal.

The "Facebook Papers" have unleashed a torrent of negative media reports in recent weeks, showing that company executives knew of their sites' potential for harm on numerous fronts.

These include spiralling concerns over the spread of hate speech on Facebook in developing countries, and worries over Instagram's impact on teens' mental health.

Haugen, who is due on stage some time after 1700 GMT, has testified before US and UK lawmakers, but this will mark her first appearance before a wider public.

Metaverse 'hype'? 

Top Facebook executives attending the Web Summit, including vice president Nick Clegg, will meanwhile be keen to move the conversation on to the company's much-discussed "Meta" rebrand.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that Facebook's parent company is changing its name, as he shifts his focus to creating the "metaverse", a futuristic vision of the internet that would involve heavy use of virtual reality.

"Within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, post hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers," Zuckerberg told a launch event that showed him exploring psychedelic-looking virtual worlds.

The metaverse would blur the physical world with the digital one, making online experiences — like chatting with a friend, or attending a concert — feel face-to-face.

While critics have derided the rebrand as an attempt to distract attention from Facebook's troubles, Silicon Valley enthusiasts nonetheless believe the metaverse could indeed represent the next great leap in the evolution of the internet.

Various events are themed around the metaverse at this year's Web Summit.

"I think some of the discussion will be, 'how much of it is hype and how much of it is real?'" Cosgrave said.

Beyond the metaverse, major themes of the Web Summit include the extent to which technology can help to mitigate climate change — a timely issue given that the conference coincides with the COP26 global climate negotiations in Scotland.

By Ana Fernandez
Agence France-Presse

NEW YORK — "A colleague needs help to recover his bicycle!" says a message in the WhatsApp group of the Delivery Boys United, a team of food delivery workers in New York who are organising to defend themselves following attacks and thefts.

Vicente Carrasco, a 39-year-old from Mexico, formed the group in March after he was assaulted. They aim to protect themselves and their electric bikes, which cost around $3,000 and, along with their phones, are their livelihoods.

Every night after a long day riding around the Big Apple, Carrasco and other "deliveristas", mostly men, meet under the Queensboro Bridge on the Manhattan side of the East River where they wait to come to the aid of any colleague in trouble.

"If there is a bicycle stolen with GPS we follow it," he tells AFP, stressing they never go alone.

"When there are many of us, we will always try to get it back. We don't want to risk our lives too much. You don't know if people are armed. We do what we can do."

There have been several reports of attacks on delivery personnel in New York this year. In October a 51-year-old rider was stabbed to death and had his e-bike stolen in Chinatown.

In April, a deliverista was shot dead in a Harlem. That same month, another on his scooter was hit by a vehicle in Queens.

Eric Adams, expected to be elected New York's next mayor on Tuesday, has pledged to make the city's streets safer should he take office in January.

For now, Carrasco's group is working alongside three other organisations that bring together more than 1,000 delivery riders across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

"This is my way of life," says another organiser Jose Rodrigo Nevares, whose friend was killed during a theft of his bicycle.

"With my bike, I feed my family, I pay my rent. I can't just leave it so someone takes it away," he adds.

There are roughly 65,000 deliveristas in New York, according to official figures.

With their frustration building over how police have handled cases, Carrasco and the other groups decided to take safety into their own hands.

"We did this because when you call the police when you've been robbed, they never arrive," he says. "We organise ourselves to be able to defend ourselves, to be faster."

For its part the New York Police Department says its "Operation Identification" helps recover registered stolen bicycles, and that NYPD duly investigates such crimes.

"The NYPD takes these crimes very seriously and will exhaust all leads available in order to catch those responsible," spokesman Sergeant Edward Riley tells AFP.

Some 80 per cent of the deliveristas are undocumented immigrants, according to rights groups, meaning they are often reluctant to contact police.

Nevares, who became a deliveryman after losing his waiter job during the COVID-19 pandemic, says that reluctance is "out of fear, because you know that you are going to get into trouble".

'Not violent' 

While Carrasco's group sometimes recovers stolen bikes on their own, the operations have raised safety concerns.

"Our fear is that someone will end up injured," says Ligia Guallpa, from the Labour Justice project, who has been fighting for years to improve conditions for undocumented workers.

Many who support the workers distance themselves from the self-defence groups.

But Carrasco dismisses suggestions that the men are vigilantes.

"We are not violent," he states.

Food delivery workers — many of whom are of Latino, African or Asian origin — average $2,345 a month, below the hourly $15 minimum wage in New York's service sector.

They receive no social security, no health insurance and no overtime. Nor do they have a right to unionise.

Guallpa calls the working conditions "inhumane".

Only from next year will they be allowed to use the restrooms of restaurants where they collect food, after a campaign by Guallpa's organisation.

Revenue from food delivery apps has surged more than 200 per cent over the past five years, with profits skyrocketing during the lockdown.

It's been a win-win for the apps, which earn fees from customers and restaurants while having no commitments to the freelance deliveristas, according to a 2020 survey conducted by the Labor Justice Project and Cornell University.

Activists say it's time to give the riders the same protections as other workers.

Almost half of the survey's 500 respondents said they had had an accident, including being run over, while working — and three quarters of those paid their medical expenses themselves.

Fifty-four per cent of respondents had their bicycles stolen — and one third of them had been victims of assault during the robbery.

"We have to change the system, otherwise we are not changing the root problem," says Guallpa.

RIYADH — Saudi Aramco's earnings rose 158 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter on higher oil prices and volumes sold as the global economy recovered, it said on Sunday.

Aramco's profits surge comes as world leaders prepare for the UN's COP26 climate summit starting in Glasgow later on Sunday, a key meeting in the battle against global warming.

Aramco's net income was $30.4 billion in the third quarter, up from $11.8 billion in Q3 last year, with free cash flow more than doubling to $28.7 billion. Shareholders will receive $18.8 billion in dividends.

The profits are the biggest since Aramco listed on the Saudi stock exchange in December 2019, before suffering a 44.4 per cent slump in 2020.

"The increase in net income was primarily the result of higher crude oil prices and volumes sold," the Saudi oil giant said in its earnings statement.

It also cited "stronger refining and chemicals margins in Q3, which were underpinned by rebounding global energy demand and increased economic activity in key markets".

The latest rise comes after profits nearly quadrupled in Q2 as the world economy bounced back from the COVID crisis, lifting demand and pushing oil prices back above $80 a barrel.

"Some headwinds still exist for the global economy, partly due to supply chain bottlenecks, but we are optimistic that energy demand will remain healthy for the foreseeable future," Aramco Chief Executive Amin Nasser said.

Nasser claimed that Aramco will "build on our track record of low-cost and low-carbon intensity performance" after announcing last week that it intends to achieve net zero carbon emissions in its operations by 2050.

The carbon-neutrality pledge by Aramco, the world's biggest oil producer, was met by scepticism by environmentalists as it excludes emissions from the company's products.

Saudi Arabia, one of the world's biggest polluters as well as the top oil exporter, has also pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2060.

Earlier this month Aramco announced that it planned to raise oil production to a maximum sustainable capacity of 13 million barrels a day by 2027.

In the latest statement, Aramco said its total hydrocarbon production was the equivalent of 12.9 million barrels a day, including 9.5 million barrels of crude.

It said it also has a 30 per cent stake in the 1.5 gigawatt Sudair solar plant, which will be one of the biggest in the region and will start producing in the second half of 2022.

Aramco added that it has expanded an investment programme partly focused on sustainability and would be "targeting new opportunities to achieve carbon footprint reduction".