US Army/Spc. Jessica Scott

• The US is aiming to increase production of a key artillery shell used by Ukraine.
• The hope is to manufacture 90,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition by 2025.
• The US currently makes just over 14,000 rounds per month.

The United States is planning to dramatically ramp up production of a key artillery round that Ukraine has used to beat back Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Under the latest proposal, the US aims to within two years produce up to 90,000 rounds 155mm of ammunition every month, The Times reported, citing a US Army report.

That’s more than double the goal detailed just last month by Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, who told reporters the goal was to manufacture “20,000 rounds a month” by this spring and 40,000 by 2025.

The increase comes after some US officials have expressed concern that US aid to Ukraine has depleted the country’s stockpile of the ammunition. Last summer, one defense official told The Wall Street Journal that the country’s supply of 155mm rounds was “uncomfortably low” and “not at the level we would like to go into combat.”

As of January 18, the US had already committed to providing Ukraine with at least 160 M777 Howitzers and just under 1.1 million of the 155mm artillery rounds they use. But it is burning through them fast.

Currently, the US produces just over 14,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition every month. As The Washington Post reported last month, Ukrainian forces have previously fired that many rounds in the span of 48 hours.

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

Contributor/Getty Images

• Indian authorities are investigating the mysterious death of a Russian lawmaker.
• Russian sausage magnate Pavel Antov died in India in late December and was a longtime Putin ally.
• In June, he spoke out against the war in Ukraine. Indian authorities are now investigating.

Indian authorities have provided new details about a Putin-linked Russian lawmaker and sausage company owner who mysteriously fell to his death from an Indian hotel where his travel companion died just two days prior.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Indian police have discovered new details about the pair of deaths in late December. Russian lawmaker Pavel Antov died in Rayagada, India, two days after his friend, Vladimir Bydanov.

The pair had been traveling through the jungle and drinking heavily, sources told The Journal. But their deaths add to a growing list of executives and military officers linked to Putin who have died privately, and at times suspiciously, during the course of the war in Ukraine.

Antov, who was a member of the ruling United Russia party, a sausage company owner, and the chairman of the agriculture and environment committee in Vladimir, Russia, had been critical of Putin ahead of his death in December. In June, the BBC reported that Antov shared a Whatsapp message criticizing the war in Ukraine, which he later deleted.

“It’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror,” the message said. He later backtracked on social media and offered his support for Putin.

Months later, Antov and Bydanov traveled to India to visit jungle areas in the eastern Odisha state of the country, according to The Journal. Indian investigators told The Journal that the trip was marked by binge drinking, which began during their plane rides into the country and continued as they visited rural areas.

“If they don’t stop drinking they’re going to kill themselves,” driver Natabar Mohanty said that he thought to himself during the trip, according to The Journal. So far, Indian investigators have said that there was no foul play.

Bydanov, who shared a room with Antov, died of a heart attack on Antov’s birthday. His body was cremated the next day and Antov was visibly affected by his friend’s loss, The Journal reported.

Two days after his friend’s death, a hotel staff member saw Antov — who had stopped eating food and drinking water in his grief — punching the air and heading to the roof of the hotel.

The staff member rushed to alert the lobby, The Journal reported. When hotel staff reached the roof, they saw Antov’s lifeless body at the side of the three-story building.

Indian investigators are working on recreating Antov’s fall with a dummy fitted to his dimensions to figure out whether he threw himself, was pushed, or fell accidentally — and whether he was still alive at the time of his fall.

The bodies of both men were cremated before their remains were sent back to Russia, according to The Journal. Manish Tewari, an Indian parliamentarian, questioned why the men were not buried, per The Journal.

Though no foul play has been reported, the deaths come amid a hardening of relations between India and Russia.

Antov is at least the 19th Russian executive who has mysteriously perished throughout the course of the war, according to The Journal. Russian energy oligarch Ravil Maganov, 67, died after falling from a hospital window in September. His company had released a statement expressing “deepest concerns” about the Ukraine war.

During the same month, another Russian executive with ties to Putin mysteriously fell off of his boat to his death, and in October, a senior military official was found dead in what was officially ruled a “suicide,” a cause of death that was deemed suspicious by people close to him.

Tesla

• Tesla is pouring additional resources into its Nevada battery factory as it looks to ramp up production. 
• The company’s $3.6B investment will add 3,000 jobs and 4 million square feet to its manufacturing footprint.
• Elon Musk has set a goal for Tesla to deliver 20 million cars annually by 2030.

Tesla is pouring more resources into its Nevada Gigafactory, according to a company announcement. 

The EV maker said Tuesday it plans to invest $3.6 billion, add 3,000 additional jobs, and build two factories at Tesla’s facility just outside Sparks, Nevada.

The new factories will build battery cells for light-duty vehicles and Tesla’s Semi truck, which began making deliveries early last month after years of delay. 

According to a tweet by the company, Tesla’s additional investment will add 4 million square feet to the Nevada factory’s manufacturing footprint.

The company has plans for the factory to be the largest building in the world, though as of now, it’s only about 30% complete, according to CNBC.

Tesla’s Gigafactories, which are located in Texas, Shanghai, Berlin, and Nevada, build batteries for the company’s electric vehicles. 

The massive investment comes as EV competition in the US heats up as traditional automakers add more electric vehicles to their lineups. 

To compete, Elon Musk’s company has begun offering steep discounts for some of its cars: prices of the company’s Model 3 and Model Y have been slashed by as much as 20%, according to a calculation by Reuters. 

The company has said it needs to ramp up production in order to meet Musk’s goal of delivering 20 million cars per year by 2030. In 2022, Tesla delivered 1.31 million vehicles, a 40% increase from the year before. 

The United States was expected to announce as soon as Wednesday that it will send heavy tanks to Ukraine, and Germany has decided to do the same, sources said, a reversal that Kyiv has said would reshape its war with Russia.

Hours before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy turned 45 on Wednesday, he pressed allies to move forward with providing his forces with more than five to 15 modern tanks.

“Discussions must be concluded with decisions,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. “Decisions on real strengthening of our defence against terrorists. Allies have the required number of tanks.”

Just days after arguing against granting Kyiv’s requests, Washington was ready to start a process that would eventually send M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Tuesday. A third official said the U.S. commitment could total about 30 tanks delivered over the coming months.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had decided to send Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries such as Poland to do so as well, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Spiegel magazine, which first reported the news, said Germany was planning to supply at least one company of Leopard 2 A6 tanks, which usually comprises 14 tanks. Other allies, in Scandinavia for example, intend to go along with Germany in supplying their Leopard tanks to Kyiv, the magazine reported.

While there was no official confirmation from Berlin or Washington, officials in Kyiv hailed what they said was a potential gamechanger on the battlefield in a war that is now 11 months old – even if the rumoured tank numbers fell short of their hopes.

“A few hundred tanks for our tank crews …. This is what is going to become a real punching fist of democracy,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskiy’s administration, wrote on Telegram.

Kyiv has pleaded for months for Western tanks that it says would give its forces the firepower and mobility to break through Russian defensive lines and recapture occupied territory in the east and south. Germany has held back, wary of moves that could cause Moscow to escalate.

Front lines in the war, which stretch more than 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) through eastern and southern Ukraine, have been largely frozen for two months despite heavy losses on both sides. Russia and Ukraine are both widely believed to be planning new offensives.

Zelenskiy said on Tuesday night that Russia was intensifying its push toward Bakhmut, an industrial town in eastern Ukraine that has been the focus of intense fighting. “They want to increase the pressure on a larger scale,” he said.

Whether to supply Ukraine with significant numbers of heavy modern battle tanks has dominated discussions among Kyiv’s Western allies in recent days.

The Kremlin has said supplying tanks to Ukraine would not help and that the West would regret its “delusion” that Kyiv could win on the battlefield.

Berlin has been pivotal because the German-made Leopards, fielded by some 20 armies around the world, are widely seen as the best option. The tanks are available in large numbers and easy to deploy and maintain.

While the U.S. Abrams tank is considered less suitable due to its heavy fuel consumption and difficulty to maintain, a U.S. move to send them to Ukraine could make it easier for Germany – which has called for a united front among Ukraine’s allies – to allow the supply of Leopards.

Russian President Vladimir Putin casts the “special military operation” that began when his troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 last year as a defensive and existential battle against an aggressive and arrogant West.

Ukraine and the West call Russia’s actions an unprovoked land grab to subdue a fellow former Soviet republic that Moscow regards as an artificial state.

Separately on Tuesday, Ukraine dismissed more than a dozen senior officials as part of an anti-corruption drive made more critical by the need to keep its Western backers onside.

The European Union, which offered Ukraine the status of candidate member last June, welcomed the development.

Among Ukrainian officials who resigned or were dismissed were the governors of the Kyiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the latter three frontline provinces. Kyiv and Sumy were major battlefields earlier in the war.

Some, though not all, of the officials who left had been linked to corruption allegations.

Ukraine has a history of graft and shaky governance, and is under international pressure to show it can be a reliable steward of billions of dollars in Western aid.

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Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) posted results on Tuesday that showed some strength in the face of a weak economy, buttressed by a cloud business that hit Wall Street targets for the end of 2022, but it may miss expectations in the current quarter.

The relatively stable outlook helped assuage fears that the lucrative cloud segment for big tech companies could be hit hard as customers look to cut spending, and cloud revenue in the fiscal second quarter reported on Tuesday made up for some weakness in the PC unit.

“The small miss on Microsoft’s cloud earnings forecast is likely just a reflection of the new economic reality that businesses are facing and not a harbinger of something worse,” said Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research.

Microsoft joined other big tech companies in turning to layoffs to ride out harder times, announcing last week it was cutting over 10,000 jobs. It posted fiscal second-quarter earnings exceeding Wall Street’s estimate.

It forecast third-quarter revenue in its so-called intelligent cloud business would be $21.7 billion to $22 billion, just below the analyst average forecast of $22.14 billion, according to Refinitiv. In the second quarter revenue from that segment beat expectations slightly at $21.5 billion.

The cloud business is under the spotlight again following the viral success of chatbot ChatGPT, which answers general questions in plain language using artificial intelligence. The bot is a creation of startup OpenAI, in which Microsoft is investing heavily and which requires intense cloud computing services.

“There’s a variety of ways that we can bring that technology either in specific offerings or to improve existing offerings,” said Brett Iversen, Microsoft’s head of investor relations, referring to OpenAI. He said revenue from OpenAI-related businesses would show up in revenue for Microsoft’s cloud service Azure in the future.

During the earnings call, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said it was too early to separate out AI contribution from the Azure cloud workloads.

Azure cloud product revenue in the second quarter rose 31%, in line with estimates compiled by Visible Alpha. It has steadily grabbed market share from leader Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Azure ended 2022 with 30% share in the cloud computing market, up from 20% in 2018, according to estimates from BofA Global Research. AWS dropped to 55% from 71% during the same period.

Microsoft’s revenue rose 2% to $52.7 billion in the three months ended Dec. 31, compared with the average analyst estimate of $52.94 billion, according to Refinitiv IBES. Net income fell 12% to $16.4 billion, but adjusted income of $2.32 per share topped Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $2.29, according to Refinitiv calculations.

Sales at Microsoft’s More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows, devices and search revenue, declined 19% to $14.2 billion as the PC market continued to shrink. The company expects that revenue to drop to $11.9 billion to $12.3 billion in the current fiscal third quarter.

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It appears that Donald Trump’s fake declaration of running in the 2024 presidential election is becoming a headache. This is because Trump can’t find enough people to support his fake candidacy. Over and over, he tries. Over and over, he fails. It’s one nightmare after another.

The latest crisis to hit the Trump “campaign” is South Carolina. Trump is planning a little party there. How sweet. Unfortunately most of the people around him are being party poopers. This is because they do not want to attend this “party,” which promises to be yet another trump shitshow.

It is being reported that only two Republicans have signed on so far. One of them is Henry Mc.Master governor of the state. The other is Lindsey Graham. Sigh. That’s not a surprise. Where the traitor roams, his faithful puppy follows, the good dog that he is.

But what of everybody else? Well — the Washington Post says that the Trump team is “pleading” and begging for republicans to show up. But so far no go. That is likely because they understand that the person they’d be showing up for is an idiot.

So the Trump campaign is coming up empty so far. Many want to wait and see who else in the Republican Party declares before deciding whom to throw their support to. And reportedly, many evangelicals are tired of Trump and want to look elsewhere for their candidate of 2024.

I wonder how long it will be until a rant about the South Carolina evangelicals makes its way to truth social. The truth isn’t pretty, but the Trump team must see it. Nobody wants him. Not democrats or republicans. He has finally begun bleeding support, and it ain’t a pretty picture.

So what will Trump do? I don’t think he will cancel this little party. Perhaps the team will round up a few more people, but right now, it seems all the begging and pleading in the world is not moving anyone.

The post Donald Trump’s 2024 “campaign” is falling apart already appeared first on Palmer Report.

Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday withdrew a proposal to reunite News Corp (NWSA.O) and Fox Corp as the company is also exploring a sale of Move Inc, which operates the Realtor.com website, to CoStar Group, according to a regulatory filing and sources familiar with the process.

Three sources familiar with the matter said News Corp was in talks to sell its stake in Move to CoStar for about $3 billion.

Several top shareholders had publicly said they opposed the proposed Fox-News Corp combination, and on Tuesday News Corp said in a statement that it was “not optimal for shareholders of News Corp and Fox at this time.”

The deal would have recombined the media empire Murdoch split nearly a decade ago.

News Corp confirmed the talks to sell Move to CoStar after Reuters reported it on Tuesday, adding that there is no guarantee the discussions will lead to a transaction.

A spokesperson for CoStar said the company “continuously evaluates M&A opportunities across a broad range of companies to maximize shareholder value” and does not comment on “market rumors or speculation.”

No offer was exchanged between News Corp and Fox Corp before merger deliberations were abandoned, according to sources familiar with the process, who said pushback from News Corp shareholders played a role in those plans being scrapped.

A rally in News Corp shares in recent weeks meant that Fox would have had to pay a significant premium for the merger to be agreed, something that the Murdochs did not believe they could justify to shareholders, people familiar with the matter said.

While Fox’s stock is down 5%, News Corp shares are up 25% since the talks between the two companies were first announced on Oct. 14. News Corp currently has a market capitalization of about $11 billion, while Fox is valued at a shade over $17 billion.

Murdoch proposed reuniting his media empire last fall, arguing that together the publishing and entertainment companies he split apart in 2013 would give the combined company greater scale in news, live sports and information, sources said.

Several people close to the Murdochs viewed the attempt to combine the media companies as driven by the 91-year-old Murdoch’s succession planning to consolidate power behind his son and Fox head Lachlan Murdoch, a notion the company described as “absurd” in November.

Some of News Corp’s larger shareholders, including Independent Franchise Partners and T. Rowe Price (TROW.O) balked at the idea.

Rupert Murdoch and his family trust control about 40% of News Corp and Fox. Had a deal been reached, they would have abstained from voting their shares when each company sought shareholder approval for the merger, because of the potential conflict of interest. This made securing the backing of other major shareholders a prerequisite to the deal going through.

Activist investment firm Irenic Capital, which was among the first to say that the proposed reunion would likely undervalue News Corp, on Tuesday applauded the decision to not move forward.

“This is the right decision,” Irenic’s chief investment officer Adam Katz said. “Looking ahead, News Corp has an opportunity to create substantial value for its owners.”

News Corp agreed to buy Move in 2014 for $950 million to diversify its digital real estate business which, at the time, was primarily in Australia.

Since then, News Corp investors had been calling on the company to spin off its digital real estate assets. Irenic also publicly urged News Corp to sell its Dow Jones media properties.

On a slide-deck presentation in November, Irenic estimated News Corp’s 80% stake in Move was worth $1.4 billion on $2.47 per share.

In a letter to News Corp employees on Tuesday, News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said: “In my note to you in October, I said the Special Committee assessment would have no impact on our current operations; that was indeed the case, and remains so following today’s announcement.”

The United States was expected to announce as soon as Wednesday that it will send heavy tanks to Ukraine, and Germany has decided to do the same, sources said, a reversal that Kyiv has said would reshape its war with Russia.

Hours before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy turned 45 on Wednesday, he pressed allies to move forward with providing his forces with more than five to 15 modern tanks.

“Discussions must be concluded with decisions,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. “Decisions on real strengthening of our defence against terrorists. Allies have the required number of tanks.”

Just days after arguing against granting Kyiv’s requests, Washington was ready to start a process that would eventually send M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Tuesday. A third official said the U.S. commitment could total about 30 tanks delivered over the coming months.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had decided to send Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries such as Poland to do so as well, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Spiegel magazine, which first reported the news, said Germany was planning to supply at least one company of Leopard 2 A6 tanks, which usually comprises 14 tanks. Other allies, in Scandinavia for example, intend to go along with Germany in supplying their Leopard tanks to Kyiv, the magazine reported.

While there was no official confirmation from Berlin or Washington, officials in Kyiv hailed what they said was a potential gamechanger on the battlefield in a war that is now 11 months old – even if the rumoured tank numbers fell short of their hopes.

“A few hundred tanks for our tank crews …. This is what is going to become a real punching fist of democracy,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskiy’s administration, wrote on Telegram.

Kyiv has pleaded for months for Western tanks that it says would give its forces the firepower and mobility to break through Russian defensive lines and recapture occupied territory in the east and south. Germany has held back, wary of moves that could cause Moscow to escalate.

Front lines in the war, which stretch more than 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) through eastern and southern Ukraine, have been largely frozen for two months despite heavy losses on both sides. Russia and Ukraine are both widely believed to be planning new offensives.

Zelenskiy said on Tuesday night that Russia was intensifying its push toward Bakhmut, an industrial town in eastern Ukraine that has been the focus of intense fighting. “They want to increase the pressure on a larger scale,” he said.

Whether to supply Ukraine with significant numbers of heavy modern battle tanks has dominated discussions among Kyiv’s Western allies in recent days.

The Kremlin has said supplying tanks to Ukraine would not help and that the West would regret its “delusion” that Kyiv could win on the battlefield.

Berlin has been pivotal because the German-made Leopards, fielded by some 20 armies around the world, are widely seen as the best option. The tanks are available in large numbers and easy to deploy and maintain.

While the U.S. Abrams tank is considered less suitable due to its heavy fuel consumption and difficulty to maintain, a U.S. move to send them to Ukraine could make it easier for Germany – which has called for a united front among Ukraine’s allies – to allow the supply of Leopards.

Russian President Vladimir Putin casts the “special military operation” that began when his troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 last year as a defensive and existential battle against an aggressive and arrogant West.

Ukraine and the West call Russia’s actions an unprovoked land grab to subdue a fellow former Soviet republic that Moscow regards as an artificial state.

Separately on Tuesday, Ukraine dismissed more than a dozen senior officials as part of an anti-corruption drive made more critical by the need to keep its Western backers onside.

The European Union, which offered Ukraine the status of candidate member last June, welcomed the development.

Among Ukrainian officials who resigned or were dismissed were the governors of the Kyiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the latter three frontline provinces. Kyiv and Sumy were major battlefields earlier in the war.

Some, though not all, of the officials who left had been linked to corruption allegations.

Ukraine has a history of graft and shaky governance, and is under international pressure to show it can be a reliable steward of billions of dollars in Western aid.

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