TheChek News Flow

Trump’s reversal had sparked a buying spree from Chinese tech firms, who ordered a total of 700,000 H20 in the subsequent weeks, The Information reported last week.

Semi-finished chips—the individual processor dies ready for the final packaging step—are now piling up at Amkor, creating uncertainty about their future. Samsung also received notices from Nvidia that H20 chip production has been suspended, said one of the two people cited above.

UK green power surges with record approvals for new renewable energy capacity

Rise in planning permission for projects reflects growing momentum behind Labour government’s clean power push

A record amount of renewable energy capacity has been granted planning permission in the second quarter of this year, in a sign of the growing momentum behind the UK government’s push for clean power.

More than 16.1 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity spread across 323 projects was given permission to start building during the quarter, according to Financial Times analysis of government data published on Wednesday. The figure for capacity represents a 195 per cent rise on the same quarter last year.

The figures will be welcomed by the government, which wants 95 per cent of Britain’s power generation to be carbon-free by 2030, to meet a flagship Labour party manifesto pledge. However, the speed of grid connections remains an obstacle to projects getting built, as are legal challenges by local opponents of the projects.

Since taking office, ministers have tried to make planning processes faster and less complicated, following complaints from developers that bureaucracy was holding back development.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is considering reforms that would make it harder for developments to be blocked on environmental concerns, in a sign of how seriously the government is trying to overhaul the system.

Days after taking office, Ed Miliband, energy secretary, granted planning permission for several solar farms, in a big boost to the clean power target.

SSE, one of the UK’s largest offshore wind developers, won approval last month from the Scottish government for its vast Berwick Bank project off the Scottish coast.

The record planning approvals come alongside a surge in planning applications from developers of large-scale batteries to help balance out electricity supplies, and supply power regardless of the weather.

More than 100 planning applications for battery energy storage systems were filed in the UK between April and June 2025, covering a combined 8.4GW of capacity. That is more than twice as much as in the same quarter last year.

To meet its 95 per cent clean power goal, the government estimates Britain will need about 23-27GW of battery storage by 2030, up from about 6GW now. Over the year to June, applications were submitted for 30GW across 400 schemes.

Energy minister Michael Shanks told the FT that “electricity storage is vital for us to be able to utilise cheap renewable energy when we need it most”.

He said the increase in battery projects was “a welcome sign that industry supports our plans and will help to cut our reliance on fossil fuels, deliver energy security and bring down energy bills for good”.

Developers of battery storage have been attracted to Britain by the structure of its energy markets and the growth of wind and solar power, according to investors and analysts. The energy system operator has tried to change its processes to resolve complaints from battery developers that they were being overlooked.

The cost of batteries has also fallen over the past few years owing to imports from China.

“A more renewables-heavy system means more opportunities for arbitrage, and cheap batteries mean a plethora of investors who want to get onboard,” said Adam Bell of Stonehaven.

Many developers also see battery projects as easier to get through the planning process than solar or wind, said Liam Kelly, chief operating officer of Qair, which has built several battery projects mostly located alongside renewable energy sources.

“They’re low-hanging fruit . . . The visual impact everyone gets upset about is lower,” he said.

Battery facilities buy and sell wholesale power and are also paid by the system operator to maintain the grid’s stability.

Average annual battery energy-storage revenues quadrupled to £92,000 per megawatt of capacity in January 2025 compared with 2024, driven by grid stabilising services, according to analysis by Cornwall Insight.

Meta takes down Facebook group of 32,000 members that had been active for 6 years

Meta has shut down an Italian Facebook group where men exchanged intimate photos of their wives without their knowledge, after users reported it to the authorities sparking a public outcry.

The group called Mia Moglie❤❤❤, meaning “my wife”, started in 2019 without any restrictions for users to join, reaching 32,000 members this year and exchanging hundreds of photos and sexist comments.

The scandal has exposed deep gender tensions in Italy, where women are the main victims of online hate, particularly targeting their physical appearance, according to Vox, a non-profit monitoring online discourse.

The rightwing government led by Giorgia Meloni is facing growing pressure from opposition lawmakers. The Five Star Movement said it was asking the government to take action against “an unacceptable patriarchal mentality that reduces women to objects and instruments of possession”.

Roberta Mori from the Democratic Party said this was not an isolated incident, but “another example of structural digital violence rooted in the same patriarchal culture of domination” encountered in France in the case of Gisèle Pelicot, who was raped for years by her husband and his male friends.

Mori called for a “united front between institutions, regulatory authorities, civil society, and digital platforms to stop rape culture at all times, including when it manifests itself online”.

The Italian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bianca Bellucci, a women’s rights activist, said the case was “the n-th manifestation of a patriarchal society that treats women as objects to possess and exchange”.

Meta on Wednesday said it shut down the group “for violating our Adult Sexual Exploitation policies’’.

“We do not allow content that threatens or promotes sexual violence, sexual assault or sexual exploitation on our platforms,” the company added.

Feminist influencer Carolina Capria publicly denounced Mia Moglie❤❤❤ on Tuesday in an Instagram post that quickly went viral, prompting other users to report the Facebook group to the authorities.

Capria told the Financial Times that men posting images of their partners’ bodies without their consent amounted to a “virtual gang rape”.

Italy’s Postal Police, the digital law enforcement authority handling such cases, has received some 2,800 complaints — some of which came from alleged victims, the agency told the FT on Thursday.

‘’We have received an incredibly high number of complaints, it has never happened before’’, said Barbara Strappato, deputy director of the Postal Police. “There was no authorisation whatsoever for the use of the intimate images.’’

Italian authorities said they did not know exactly for how long men had been using it to exchange explicit pictures. But the fact that the group remained active for six years despite Meta’s explicit ban on sexually exploitative imagery raises questions about its ability to enforce rules.

Meta earlier this year relaxed some of its content moderation policies to placate the Trump administration, despite calls from civil rights groups to more closely police content.

Marisa Marraffino, a lawyer specialised in online criminal cases, said members of the Mia Moglie❤❤❤ group who shared intimate photos, or commented on them, could face criminal charges punishable with up to six years in prison.

Potential offences include the illegal sharing of intimate images — or revenge porn — privacy violations, aggravated defamation, and child pornography, Marraffino said.

Under Italian law, women have six months to press charges against potential revenge porn perpetrators, she said, adding that it “may result in a maxi trial involving thousands of families”.

Azruddin Mohamed, a flamboyant scion sanctioned by the U.S., aims to become president in next month’s elections

GEORGETOWN, Guyana—Azruddin Mohamed spent years amassing a collection of Ferraris and Bugattis while racing his dune buggies through rugged back roads here on South America’s northwest coast and posting pictures of himself making donations to far-flung indigenous communities.

Now the 38-year-old scion of an influential gold-trading clan is directing his fortune toward a wild-card bid for president. U.S. and Guyanese officials warn it could imperil billions in investment and strain relations with the Trump administration.

Portrait of Mohamed from his campaign Facebook page.

A portrait of Mohamed from his campaign’s Facebook page.

Mohamed’s makeover began last year, after the U.S. sanctioned him along with his father and their businesses for alleged tax evasion, graft and gold smuggling. He says he is being unfairly persecuted. In a rare interview, Mohamed told The Wall Street Journal he was running to root out corruption and government mismanagement while uniting a former British colony still sorely divided between those who trace their lineage to Africa and those whose ancestors came from India.

Senior Guyanese government officials in particular see him as a political threat for his flashy persona and charity work, Mohamed said. Among other things, Guyanese authorities have accused him of avoiding a large tax bill by under-declaring the value of a Lamborghini Aventador sports car he imported from the U.S. by around $600,000.

“The public, the people would call me president. Then they [Guyanese officials] got upset about it—very petty,” he said, sitting beside his father at their office, which houses a mosque upstairs. “The people want a fresh movement with no alignment.”

Guyana has a population of around 800,000 people and in some ways is more closely aligned with the island nations of the Caribbean than the South American mainland. But it punches above its weight, especially after new oil fields off its coast began fueling what is now the world’s fastest-growing economy. Exxon Mobil’s offshore oil project, operated in a consortium with China’s Cnooc and incoming partner Chevron, said on Aug. 8 that it had launched a fourth production vessel that would bring Guyana’s output to 900,000 barrels a day, making it one of the world’s largest crude exporters in per capita terms.

A construction boom powered by an influx of Venezuelan migrant laborers is under way onshore. Roads traveled by horse-drawn buggies are being paved, and a new bridge is going up to replace the old floating span. The economy has expanded fivefold since commercial oil production began.

Now Mohamed’s campaign for the presidential elections on Sept. 1 is unnerving his former friends in government here—his family was a major donor to President Irfaan Ali’s first campaign in 2020—as well as U.S. officials, who say electing him would jeopardize bilateral relations, repel investors and derail Guyana’s economic transformation.

Mohamed, usually a man of few words, has never held public office. He says he is running to better administer the country’s oil windfall, which Rystad Energy, an Olso-based consulting firm, estimates could mean $110 billion in state revenue over the next 10 years.

Mohamed’s father, Nazar Mohamed, 72 years old, said he started his business in the 1980s by exporting gold to New York in his suitcase. He expanded his trading firm into a conglomerate that owned mines, currency exchange houses and a mall while donating to politicians and the country’s Muslim community. The U.S. Treasury in June 2024 blacklisted the family and three of their companies for allegedly bribing a government official to falsify customs declarations and evading at least $50 million in taxes on the export of more than 10 metric tons of gold between 2019 and 2023.

Nazar Mohamed, who acknowledges evading some taxes but says he is willing to pay them back, spent years working in Guyana’s burgeoning energy industry before the sanctions. He stored equipment at his waterfront properties, he said, before oil companies deployed them to offshore projects. They rented his residential complexes to house oil workers brought in to build the industry from scratch.

The Mohameds agreed to build a port with two other Guyanese companies and Exxon. Schreiner Parker, head of emerging markets at Rystad, said he was shocked to see the Mohameds as partners in the 2022 port project. Their foray into the energy industry, he said, brought fresh scrutiny into the family’s alleged involvement in smuggling and its links to Guyana’s political elite.

“This may be an Icarus story where they may have flown a little too close to the sun and now we’re seeing their wings are melting,” Parker said.

Exxon declined to comment.

Nervous about potential sanctions, Nazar Mohamed said he withdrew from the port project in October 2023 for the sake of partners who worried his family’s involvement could paralyze it. When the sanctions hit, he said he was devastated. He has now largely withdrawn from the public eye.

His son, however, chose to step into the political limelight, founding a new party to challenge President Ali while communicating frequently on Facebook with his 400,000 followers, an audience larger than those of the government’s social-media accounts and the country’s established parties.

“Always be ready for survival,” he said in one post last year after the U.S. sanctioned him. “Some people suddenly change. Today you are important to them, tomorrow you’re nothing to them. That’s the reality of life.”

President Ali said in an interview that Mohamed risks damaging Guyana’s international credibility. “It’s almost an election about our national security,” he said. “It’s about putting our financial system at risk, and that is what voters need to take into consideration.”

Ali, who like the Mohameds is a member of the Indian Muslim community, said he had been close to the family because of its previous support for his party. “But that does not say that we don’t have a responsibility for our country,” Ali said. “We do not tolerate gold smuggling or any form of illegal activity.”

There is little public polling data, but analysts say Mohamed’s party is unlikely to secure the 33 seats it needs to hold a majority in the 65-member Parliament. But even winning a few legislative seats could require the next government to ally with him to form a majority. In 2020, Ali took office with a one-seat majority.

“Mohamed is a game changer,” said Christopher Ram, a lawyer and government transparency advocate in Guyana. “He can do some damage here.”

The younger Mohamed in May founded a party called We Invest in Nationhood, or WIN. He has visited indigenous hamlets in the gold-rich hinterland, trying to gain support in regions where in the past he had donated money to build houses and paid for residents’ healthcare.

That same month, Guyanese authorities leveled fresh charges against Mohamed, alleging he avoided a hefty tax bill by declaring the purchase price of a Lamborghini Aventador he imported from the U.S. at $75,000, though it is valued at nearly $700,000. Guyanese prosecutors said they acted on receipts provided by the U.S. government, drawing allegations from Mohamed’s campaign of election meddling by the Trump administration, which U.S. officials deny.

Government officials say Mohamed’s gambit is a cynical effort to gain political clout and shield his family from criminal prosecution.

“He’s trying to save his ass,” Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo told supporters at a rally this month. The tax bill the Mohameds skipped out on, Jagdeo said, could pay for 50,000 homes for the poor.

The move comes shortly after Maziar Mike Doustdar took the reins

Novo Nordisk NOVO.B 1.14%increase; green up pointing triangle said it paused hiring in noncritical business areas, as the Danish drugmaker seeks to tighten cost controls amid challenges in the obesity-drug market.

The move comes shortly after Maziar Mike Doustdar took the reins and at a time the company behind blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy is looking to fend off competition from knockoff versions of its medicines and from rival Eli Lilly.

The pharmaceutical giant went on a hiring spree that almost doubled the size of its workforce over the last five years as it raced to catch up with soaring demand for its obesity and diabetes drugs. However, the company’s fortunes turned as its grip on the market for weight-loss medicines came under threat and investors grew skeptical about the potential of the next drugs in its pipeline.

Novo Nordisk implemented a hiring freeze in areas that aren’t critical for the business, a spokeswoman said Wednesday. This followed hiring restrictions in certain areas already in place, she added.

The company is still hiring in areas including manufacturing, sales, clinical development and finance, according to its website.

The company employed more than 78,000 people as of the end of June, according to its most recent earnings report. This marks an 80% increase compared with five years ago, as the company embarked on a postpandemic hiring binge. From 2014 to 2019, the company’s workforce had grown by roughly 5%.

Doustdar, a longtime company insider, took up the chief executive role on Aug. 7, a week after Novo Nordisk cut its outlook for the second time this year blaming competition from copycat versions of its weight-loss and diabetes drugs that held back sales growth.

Novo Nordisk Chair Helge Lund had singled out that driving greater efficiency across the company would be one of Doustdar’s priorities when his appointment was announced.

Challenges in the obesity market and research-and-development setbacks took a toll on Novo Nordisk’s share price and forced a surprise ousting of Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen as CEO. The company was until recently Europe’s most valuable public company, but it lost about 60% of its market capitalization over the past year and now trails European pharmaceutical peers Novartis, Roche and AstraZeneca by that metric.

“Two years ago, we were alone. Now everyone wants to play in obesity and diabetes,” Doustdar said in a presentation video released by Novo Nordisk. “This means we need to move faster, focus harder on what we do best, be precise about where we invest.”

A parasitic fungus is littering gardens, basements and sheds with the crusty white corpses of spiders, drawing ‘The Last of Us’ comparisons

Spiders are being transformed, and killed, by a parasitic fungus. CABI

An old storm drain in Minneapolis. A damp cottage in Ontario. Underneath a house in New Zealand. In everyday encounters around the globe, people are getting a fright by a Halloween-worthy sight: the eight-legged undead.

A parasitic fungus is creating zombie spiders. It slowly consumes the arachnids, eventually leaving only their crusty white corpses, ready for discovery.

“I’m not scared of any spiders,” said Anna Baddams, who collected black widows with her friends when she was young. “But these ones freaked me out.”

Baddams found hundreds of the spiders in her shed in Southampton, England, in January. They seemed to be breeding like rabbits. The creatures were almost see-through. Their legs had bobbles on them.

“I couldn’t sleep for weeks,” the 54-year-old recalled in July. “I still don’t open my windows in case they crawl in.”

The fungus was discovered in 2021, during the filming of the BBC’s “Winterwatch” series. An infected spider was spotted on the ceiling of an abandoned gunpowder store in Northern Ireland. The fungus was identified as a new species, and is now named for beloved British naturalist David Attenborough.

Gibellula attenboroughii has since been found lurking in spiders around the globe.

“It consumes the host’s body from the inside out,” said João Araújo, a mycologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Spores drill through the spider until they reach the organs. Researchers say it’s hard to tell how long the spiders stay alive once infected, but some suggest it could be up to three weeks.

While it works, the fungus manipulates the behavior of its host, often making the spider hyper active and causing it to move away from its usual habitat. Spiders found in caves might migrate when infected to more open areas, such as the underside of leaves, where the fungus has a higher likelihood of releasing more spores.

Landscaper Gareth Jenkins was lifting the deck in a London garden earlier this year when he noticed what looked like a big ball of cotton wool hanging below. On closer inspection, he saw the first sign it was something considerably more hair-raising: a lot of legs.

Zombie spiders were clumped in groups. They looked like they had been frozen in icicles. “Their legs were curled up in a horrible crow position as if they were going to jump on my face,” Jenkins said.

He had never seen anything like it in his 20 years of landscaping.

“Maybe don’t tell the kids,” he told the homeowner, who was so terrified that she refused to step outside until the spiders were out of sight.

Still, he had good news: “I’ve been assured it can’t pass on to humans,” said Jenkins. “It’s not like ‘The Last of Us’…just yet.”

Scientists say there’s no chance of Gibellula attenboroughii cosplaying the videogame-turned-hit-HBO-series, in which a fungus mutates to infect humans, transforming them into aggressive, mind-controlled, zombielike creatures, ushering in a global apocalypse.

“Infecting humans would require many, many millions of years of genetic modifications,” said Araújo.

Simon Butenko, a 22-year-old programmer, was used to finding toads in his parents’ wine cellar in Anapa, Russia. It was always damp. Encountering zombie spiders—which he first mistook for moldy berries—was another matter.

“What was especially creepy was that these spiders were hanging at head height,” he said.

Not everyone is spooked by ghostly spiders with spiraled tentacles.

“I am always looking for strange things in nature,” said Ben Mitchell, an amateur naturalist and photographer who takes an interest in everything from encrusted lichens to unusual ferns.

He found his first zombie spider in a Scottish woodland in July 2024. “I saw this amazing candyfloss thing stuck to the underside of a leaf,” he said. “It had a membrane of threads around it holding it in place, and all I could see of the spider was its toes sticking out.”

He picked up the leaf, wrapped it up and took it home to take photos.

Spiders aren’t the only insects falling prey to deadly fungi. Ants infected with Ophiocordyceps are manipulated into biting down on leaves, known as the “death grip.” When cicadas become infected by Massospora cicadina, their abdomen falls apart over time until just the head and thorax remain. They are still able to fly, dropping spores and infecting other cicadas—earning the nickname “flying salt shakers of death.”

“It’s like what we see on TV, where the viruses that infect zombies cause their host to bite other people to spread the disease,” said William Beckerson, a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

For Baddams, in Southampton, those “Last of Us” comparisons feel acutely unsettling. She still hasn’t been anywhere near her shed.

“They told me they’re all cleaned out, but there could always be one or two lurking.”