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Boston Globe
14 hours ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Toys are getting pricier as tariffs kick in
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up ENERGY Advertisement Head of electric grid overseer ISO New England to retire Gordon van Welie is stepping down from ISO New England. Photo courtesy of ISO New England ISO New England chief executive Gordon van Welie is retiring on Jan. 1 after 24 years running the organization that oversees the region's electricity grid and wholesale power markets. The board of the Holyoke-based nonprofit is promoting its chief operating officer, Vamsi Chadalavada, to take over after van Welie retires. He'll oversee a staff of around 700 people and a budget of about $300 million. The organization is funded by fees from buyers and sellers in the wholesale electricity markets, as well as from companies that use regional transmission services. Van Welie first joined ISO New England in 2000 as its chief operating officer, not long after the organization was formed following the restructuring of New England's wholesale electricity markets. He has been an outspoken advocate for ensuring the grid system remains reliable even when under duress at times of extreme heat or cold, and in particular for improving coordination between the electric and natural gas industries toward that end. Van Welie, who is 63, said that while the electricity supply and demand outlook remains relatively stable for the next several years, there are changes afoot, including a new capacity market design at ISO, that make it an appropriate time to step aside and let a new leader take over. — JON CHESTO Advertisement HEALTH CARE Dr. Oz pushes drug middlemen to end rebates before Washington acts Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz spoke during a news conference to discuss health insurance at the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington, D.C., on June 23. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images Prescription drug middlemen should end the complicated system of drug rebates before the government steps in to change it, Medicare and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz said Tuesday. The remarks signal the Trump administration may revive attempts to eliminate the payments drugmakers send to pharmacy benefit managers after prescriptions are filled. In his first term in 2019, President Trump considered regulations that would have eliminated that system, but officials abandoned them before they went into effect. 'There's a possibility that we have a window now where the three big PBMs might actually consider doing away with the rebate-slash-kickback system,' Oz told a meeting hosted by Transparency-Rx, a coalition of smaller PBMs committed to more open pricing. The three largest companies in the industry, CVS Health Corp., UnitedHealth Group, and Cigna Group, handle about 80 percent of US prescriptions. Drug middlemen extract discounts from drugmakers in order to secure insurance coverage for medications. Drugmakers claim that pressure to give rebates to PBMs drives drug prices higher, while PBMs say they don't have control over setting drug prices. Oz suggested regulators and lawmakers could revamp the system 'fairly expeditiously, because there's a motivated group of people who want to do that.' Before the Trump administration regulates or Congress writes laws, Oz said it might be worth giving PBMs 'one last chance to fix it on their own.' Congress has considered bipartisan changes to how PBMs are paid in recent years, but none has become law yet. — BLOOMBERG NEWS Advertisement ECONOMY Powell reiterates Fed's wait-and-see approach before cutting rates The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C. Ting Shen/Bloomberg Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, reaffirmed his view that the central bank can afford to be patient before cutting interest rates amid uncertainty about how President Trump's policies will impact the economy, despite a growing divide among officials about when and by how much to lower borrowing costs. Powell, who testified before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, said that the Fed was in no rush to take any policy action given that the labor market remains solid, inflation is still elevated, and price pressures appear poised to intensify as a result of Trump's tariffs. 'For the time being, we are well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy before considering any adjustments to our policy stance,' Powell said, echoing a similar message sent last week after the Fed voted to hold rates steady for a fourth straight meeting. 'It's just a question about being prudent and careful,' he added during one exchange with a lawmaker. 'We don't see weakness in the labor market. If we did, that would change things.' He later told another lawmaker that if price pressures related to tariffs end up being less pronounced than feared, 'that'll matter for our policy.' — NEW YORK TIMES Advertisement ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Anthropic wins ruling on AI training in copyright lawsuit but must face trial on pirated books Claude, Anthropic's chatbot, accessed on a phone. JACKIE MOLLOY/NYT In a test case for the artificial intelligence industry, a federal judge has ruled that AI company Anthropic didn't break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books. But the company is still on the hook and must now go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online 'shadow libraries' of pirated copies. US District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in a ruling filed late Monday that the AI system's distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as 'fair use' under US copyright law because it was 'quintessentially transformative.' 'Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's (AI large language models) trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,' Alsup wrote. But while dismissing a key claim made by the group of authors who sued the company for copyright infringement last year, Alsup also said Anthropic must still go to trial in December over its alleged theft of their works. 'Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library,' Alsup wrote. — ASSOCIATED PRESS AVIATION US strikes on Iran add to global travel disruptions and flight cancellations An Emirates Boeing 777 at the gate at Dubai International Airport. Jon Gambrell/Associated Press The US entry into Israel's war with Iran caused travel disruptions to pile up globally this week — with flight cancellations continuing Tuesday, even after President Trump claimed a cease-fire was 'in effect.' Following unprecedented bombings ordered by Trump on three Iranian nuclear and military sites over the weekend, Iran on Monday launched a limited missile attack on US forces at Qatar's Al Udeid Air Base. Qatar, which was quick to condemn the attack, had temporarily closed its airspace just over an hour earlier. Airports and skies throughout the region have been on edge since Israel began the deadly war on June 13 — with a surprise barrage of attacks on Iran, which responded with its own missile and drone strikes. And in the days following the escalatory US strikes, more and more carriers canceled flights, particularly in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which sit just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. After a cease-fire was announced between Israel and Iran, some of those disruptions eased. But the truce appeared to be on shaky ground Tuesday, with Trump accusing both countries of violating the agreement — and many airlines have halted select routes through the middle of the week, citing safety concerns. — ASSOCIATED PRESS Advertisement
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New England grid operator tells Congress offshore wind critical to future power reliability
Turbines from Dominion Energy's wind project off Virginia Beach. (Photo by Sarah Vogelsong/Virginia Mercury) The head of New England's energy grid will underscore the importance of offshore wind for the future of the region's power supply during a congressional subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, emphasizing the impact of President Donald Trump administration's early action to halt such efforts. Thanks to new approaches in transmission system planning and better tools for quantifying risks in a quickly changing system, the short term outlook for New England's energy market and reliability is 'generally favorable,' said Gordon Van Welie, president and chief executive officer of the Independent System Operator of New England, known as ISO-NE. But, Van Welie also warned of 'serious challenges' ahead. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order for a temporary halt in new or renewed offshore wind leases in all areas of the outer continental shelf. It also included a review of the federal government's leasing and permitting process for existing wind projects. While Maine Republicans have formally praised the action, even asking the president to go further by stopping all current offshore wind development, Van Welie said those actions have created uncertainty for the region's energy future. 'The region, and the ISO, are counting on the addition of large quantities of offshore wind to maintain resource and energy adequacy,' Van Welie told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy during the discussion on grid reliability. Offshore wind has been seen as a reliable and abundant source of domestic energy, Van Welie said. Maine alone is aiming to develop 3,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine by 2040. Van Welie said the region will need these new resources to meet growing electricity demand, so it is important to have a policy and regulatory framework that will allow those resources to come online. Additionally, the on-again, off-again tariffs Trump has imposed on Canada could affect both the price and availability of power in New England. Though it is unclear how the additional tax would apply to electricity, Van Welie said there could be reliability issues if electricity were to stop coming into the region from Canada. The Natural Resources Council of Maine said Van Welie's comments reinforce how essential offshore wind is for New England's energy future. 'The strong, consistent winds off our coast will provide the large amount of energy we'll need to power the future, while generating thousands of new jobs, protecting wildlife, and stimulating economic development up and down the coast,' said NRCM Climate and Clean Energy Director Jack Shapiro. As Maine has set clean energy and climate goals, developing offshore wind as a power source has been at the crux of meeting those ambitions. The Governor's Energy Office recently released a technical report showing that while it is possible to meet the state's goal of 100% clean energy by 2040, wind and solar are key components of meeting increased electrification demands from plug-in cars and heating options. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
