TheChek News Flow

This can’t go on much longer, can it? In the past, the nation has had do-nothing Presidencies, and scandal-ridden Presidencies, and failed Presidencies, but until Donald J. Trump came along there hasn’t been a truly embarrassing Presidency. Trump himself looks out of place (that squinty-eyed frown, meant to bespeak firmness, or serious purpose, doesn’t succeed), and it’s easy to understand why he looks that way. He’s living a bachelor’s life in an unfamiliar house, in a so-so neighborhood far from his home town, surrounded by strangers who have been hired to protect him but cut him off from any sort of real privacy. His daughter Ivanka is close by, in the Kalorama neighborhood, but she has her own life to live, and her own problems—most recently, Nordstrom’s decision to stop carrying her fashion brand. His wife, Melania, is two hundred miles away, in Trump Tower; for the time being, according to the family’s public statements, she’s there to look after her son, Barron, who’s finishing the school year in familiar surroundings.

Life in midtown Manhattan was good for a fellow like Trump, who was recognized everywhere and regarded even by his detractors more as a cartoon than a threat. He could enjoy the city’s pleasures, which included dining at San Pietro, a favorite restaurant. (Page Six’s Emily Smith recently reported that Donald Trump, Jr., may have been sending San Pietro-cooked meals to his father, but carry-out is never a match for the original.) For someone like Trump, Washington cannot be the most exciting place to live, and won’t be unless he begins to thrive in the company of world leaders who don’t speak English, and philosophers like Paul D. Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who could probably go on for hours about, say, how a medical savings account offers tax relief for low-income workers who are about to lose their affordable health insurance. Then there are the briefings and hours of meetings and piles of memoranda, but having to read more than a page, or too many bullet points, is said to test the limits of Trump’s attention—and the camera demands the image of stern attention. That, at least, seems to be one of his core beliefs.

After little more than three weeks, Trump’s behavior is no more erratic than it used to be, but in the context of the Presidency it seems so. This year’s “Saturday Night Live” season has been very funny, but the most startling moment was not a sketch but a depiction of something real: Trump’s obsessive tweeting, four years ago, about the end of the relationship between Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. It’s been fascinating to watch him change policies in the twinkling of a tweet, as with his briefly confrontational China policy, inaugurated in December with a telephone call to Taiwan’s leader, and then reversed; or to witness his cobra-like lunges at newfound enemies, including the Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, who revealed that Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, had told him that he found the President’s attacks on the courts “demoralizing.” Trump just can’t seem to stop himself. Three months after the election, which he won, he’s still talking about those mythical fraudulent voters, and still calling Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” When he again alleged voter fraud recently, in a room filled with senators, it got awkward; one attendee told Politico that “an uncomfortable silence” filled the room.

Those uncomfortable silences accompany chatter about Trump’s state of mind, which is abetted by talk from a leaky White House and even from a Trump doctor, Harold Bornstein, who may have crossed a doctor-patient confidentiality line when he told the Times that Trump has been taking the drug finasteride, to preserve his unique haircut. Writing in the Washington Post, Daniel Marchalik, a urologist at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, discussed what he called “potentially life-changing and irreversible side effects that may be associated with these medications,” and which may include sexual, physical, and psychological changes, pretty much none of them good. It’s hard to dismiss all of this.

CBS’s Scott Pelley recently began his evening broadcast in a way that no evening news in this nation has ever begun: “It has been a busy day for Presidential statements divorced from reality.” He went on to give several now familiar examples, such as Trump’s insistence, contrary to all available evidence, that the press hasn’t reported on a number of terrorist attacks, or that opinion polls showing high levels of Trumpian disapproval are “fake news.” Perhaps there is some causal link between Trump’s distance from the recognizable world and his bodily distance from what once were the landmarks of his life, apart from brief treks to Mar-a-Lago. With Trump living inside what Harry Truman called “the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations” (although Truman, for most of his Presidency, lived in the cozier Blair House), and not inclined to drop by the Situation Room when an anti-terror Navy SEAL mission in Yemen was about to go terribly wrong, it’s hard not to wonder where this Presidency will go next. The mood inside the gates is said to be distressed. “Really hard to overstate level of misery radiating from several members of White House staff over last few days,” the Times’ Maggie Haberman recently tweeted. Outside, those who worry about all this are worrying less about policies—even those that are regarded with revulsion—but, rather, about how much longer someone who controls the power to destroy the world will be able to control himself.

GM's information policy is also delicate because Neumann has been working on a different future project for the car manufacturer for months. The boss wants Opel 2030 to a pure electric brand remodel, manager magazin (12 o'clock release date 17 February from Thursday, 16 February reported in its latest issue here can be accessed online ).

GM CEO Mary Barra and Opel's Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Dan Ammann, are coming to Rüsselsheim today to inform the top management about the discussions with PSA. The corporations confirm negotiations for a deepened cooperation. The sale of Opels to PSA is one of the discussed scenarios .

Opel's chief executive Neumann has developed the alternative electro strategy in the past months together with the Management Board. Neumann wants to build the new Opel on the new electroplatform of the GM Group. The first of the battery-powered models is currently on the market. In the spring, at the latest in May, the GM Executive Board is supposed to decide on the electrical plan. That's how it promised the leadership in Detroit, says it in Rüsselsheim. GM CEO Mary Barra has been promoting the development of electric cars for years. What chances the electric plan of the Opel management in view of the negotiations of the GM top with Peugeot stock chart show now still is unclear.

The Neumann Plan is a break-out scenario in the company and an opportunity to ensure the survival of the brand. GM has not earned any profit in Europe for more than 15 years. In 2016 the operating loss was 257 million dollars. The prospects for 2017 are also gloomy, reports manager magazin.

Against this backdrop, Neumann sees the risk that Opel will not be able to invest sufficiently in the medium term with the simultaneous development of cars with combustion engines and electric drives, the company says. Therefore, he wanted to focus the brand completely at an early stage on the drive of the future. As from 2030, no more burners should be offered. The development should therefore be stopped earlier. Neumann had even split up into an Old and a New Opel, reports manager magazin. The models would be the current giants Eon and RWE, who have both recently shared.

German politicians were caught unawares by French automaker PSA’s talks to buy General Motors' European operations, and aren’t happy about it. They know a deal may put German jobs at risk.

The possible sale of General Motors’ European operations to France’s PSA Group has hit resistance in Germany, where the government and union leaders voiced strong criticism within hours of the surprise talks becoming public.

News broke on Tuesday that GM was in talks with PSA, the maker of Peugeot and Citroen cars, on a possible sale of its German and British units, Opel and Vauxhall, which would create Europe’s second largest carmaker after Volkswagen.

Economics Minister Brigitte Zypries said it was “unacceptable” that the talks were taking place without the knowledge of the regional government of Hesse where Opel is based or the company’s employee representatives. She said the federal government hadn’t been informed either.

The talks have sparked fears of job cuts in Germany and Ms. Zypries called on GM to preserve Opel’s development center at the Rüsselsheim plant in Hesse.

PSA Chief Executive Carlos Tavares is keen to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel and Opel labor representatives in the near future to explain the French carmaker plans to form an alliance with Opel, newspaper Bild reported, citing company insiders.

Engineering union IG Metall and Opel’s works council called the talks an “unprecedented breach of all German and European co-determination rights.”

“PSA isn’t using the full capacity of its plants in France so it’s difficult to understand why it should create additional capacity by purchasing Opel.”

Thomas Baudouin, PSA works council

The governor of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, said: “It’s relatively irrelevant whether the owner is based in the U.S. or in France. All that matters is what happens here.”

Opel’s main problem is the relatively low capacity utilization of its factories, estimated at 65 percent, well below the industry average of 70 percent.

“This doesn’t bode well for the German plants,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, head of the German CAR Institute at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Opel already had to introduce short-time working at its plants in Rüsselsheim and Eisenach at the end of last year and had to offer substantial discounts to boost sales in the competitive European market, he said, adding that a takeover would cast doubt on the future of the plants in Kaiserslautern and Eisenach.

The future of the development center in Rüsselsheim was also looking uncertain. “Opel hardly does any pre-series development there, it mainly does preparations for series production,” said Mr. Dudenhöffer. Besides, the development of diesel engines was becoming less relevant, and the French were already strong in that field anyway, he added.

A further problem is that PSA and Opel are direct competitors in many markets, especially in the SUV segment where the merged group would have many models of the same price and technical standard.

“To raise synergies one would have to put as many models as possible on a common technical platform,” said Stefan Bratzel, head of the Center of Automotive Management at FHDW University in Bergisch-Gladbach. For that to pay off, PSA would need a lot of patience, he said.

In terms of regional sales, however, PSA and Opel could make a good fit, some analysts said, because PSA is strong in southern Europe while Opel and Vauxhall have strong market shares in Germany and the UK respectively.

Opel and PSA – Factories and number of employees

In light of Britain’s impending exit from the E.U., PSA may be particularly interested in the Vauxhall plants because in a post-Brexit Europe, local production in Britain would render the automaker less vulnerable to currency swings and possible tariffs.

Opel recently announced it will relocate production of its small cars Adam and Corsa from Eisenach to its plant in Saragoza, Spain, with the next model generation. In return, production of the Mokka SUV is to be based in Eisenach. It’s unclear whether that will still be the case if the deal goes through. Job guarantees for Opel’s German plants expired in 2016.

The French government said on Tuesday it supported the talks if they don’t affect jobs in France. With just two months to go to the presidential election, a company deal on such a scale is bound to be politically sensitive.

The Socialist-run government, which owns 14 percent of PSA, will likely be pressuring PSA to rule out French job losses.

“PSA isn’t using the full capacity of its plants in France so it’s difficult to understand why it should create additional capacity by purchasing Opel,” said Thomas Baudouin of PSA’s works council. PSA last year shifted some production from France to Slovakia where it has its most modern and profitable plant.

Consultancy Evercore ISI said it’s difficult to value GM’s European business because it has been struggling for years to make money. It said it wasn’t unrealistic to assume that GM may even pay to rid itself of the units.

Evercore estimates that at best, GM could get a price of $1 billion, provided that PSA doesn’t take on the units’ pension liabilities.

20th Century Fox CEO Stacey Snider says studio allure still exists.

The battle over original video content — particularly original video content targeted at Hollywood’s big movie houses — is intense. The arrival of Netflix and Amazon into the fray has only heightened the competition.

But even though Netflix and Amazon are spending big to get their hands on films, the big studios still have some pull, said Stacey Snider, CEO of 20th Century Fox, who spoke Tuesday at the Code Media conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, Calif.

Snider specifically mentioned two movies 20th Century Fox locked down at Sundance this year, “Step” and “Patti Cake$,” which she claims they acquired for less than what competitors were offering.

“There is, when it comes to those films, a curated, hand-carried approach to market that comes with years and year of experience,” Snider explained. “That’s not to say that it can’t be modeled, but the people that have been doing it with such incredible success ... speak an artist’s language that’s important to speak.”

In other words, it sounds like big studios still have the marketing chops that new competitors haven’t figured out. At least Snider believes so.

Big studios with big parent companies, like 20th Century Fox, also have the resources to bring a film beyond the big screen. Snider says her team will pitch ideas like turning a film into a TV series or a Broadway play when talking to filmmakers looking for a studio.

“There’s no area that we’re not in,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you want to play in that sandbox?”

The Financial Times reports that TCI (The Children Investment Fund) has written to the French AMF asking for Safran shareholders to be given a chance to vote on the Safran-Zodiac deal before the tender offer is initiated. TCI also wrote to the Safran chairman to call on dropping the offer. TCI criticises the strategic rationale of the deal, its price and the “questionable synergies”. TCI also raises the issue of preferential treatment between Zodiac shareholders and family shareholders. TCI recommends instead that Safran use the cash to buy back shares.

Interest from Cairn Energy and several other potential buyers could put pressure on shipping and oil group A.P. Moller-Maersk, after talks with DONG Energy to buy the oil and gas assets stalled at the end of last year. The two Danish firms had failed to agree on a price.

Final bids for the assets, which could be worth around $2 billion, are due by the end of February, the sources said.

Cairn Energy and DONG Energy declined to comment.

Cairn has 22 licenses in Norway, including two operating licenses, and 15 licences in Britain including one as operator, according to the company's website. Cairn also has some international projects, for example in Africa.

Several other potential bidders have emerged, although it was unclear whether they had or would bid for the assets. They include chemicals giant Ineos, private equity firm EIG Global Energy Partners, and oil and gas firm DEA, controlled by Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman, the sources said.

DONG Energy said in November it would quit the oil and gas business to focus solely on offshore wind power.

One source said Maersk remained "in the picture" for the assets, but it was unclear whether the company still considered bidding.

Bringing together the two Danish companies' oil and gas divisions is still seen by many in the industry as a natural fit.

Maersk declined to comment.

DONG produced 89,000 barrels of oil and gas per day last year, down from 115,000 barrels daily in 2015. Its main producing assets include Ormen Lange in Norway, Syd Arne in Denmark and the Laggan-Tormore field in the United Kingdom.

Agreeing on a price has proven difficult, in part due to disagreements over who should pay for the decommissioning of some assets.

There is also uncertainty over an arbitration case between DONG Energy and a consortium of Technip and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering over who bears responsibility for construction errors concerning an offshore platform for the idled Hejre field.