UnderpantsWeevil

Police opened fire on a subway platform in Brooklyn during a confrontation with an alleged fare-beater, striking the man cops said was armed with a knife, two straphangers caught in the fray, and one of the firing officers, NYPD officials said Sunday.

One of those two passengers hit by the cops' bullets, a 49-year-old man, was hospitalized in critical condition after he was hit struck in the head, according to the NYPD.

The two officers who opened fire were assigned to patrol the Sutter Avenue subway stop in the 73rd precinct when they spotted a man skip the station turnstile and walk through an open gate toward the train platform, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey explained at an evening press conference from Brookdale Hospital.

The contract between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists is due to expire at 11:59 pm PT on September 12. Without a new contract, the workers who build its planes in Washington state are set to start the first strike at the company in 16 years. And right now, the chances of a deal don’t look good, according to the head of the union local.

“We’re far apart is on all the main issues — wages, health care, retirement, time off,” Jon Holden, president of IAM District 751, told CNN this past week. “We continue to work through that, but it’s been a tough slog to get through.”

It’s just the latest in a series of serious and high-profile problems at a company that has dealt with fatal crashes traced to a design flaw in its best-selling jet, accusations that it put profits and production speed ahead of quality and safety, tanking aircraft sales, an agreement to plead guilty to criminal charges that it deceived regulators, and massive financial losses covered by soaring levels of debt.

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The company said that wages for IAM members have increased 60% over the last 10 years due to general wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments and incentive pay. But the union is still angry over the earlier concessions. It is also seeking improved time off and also better job guarantees so it won’t be faced once again with the threat of losing work to nonunion plants.

“We cannot go through another period where a year or two from now where our jobs are threatened,” Holden said,

Numerous unions, including the Teamsters at UPS and the United Auto Workers union at GM, Ford and Stellantis, won double-digit wage increases in recent union deals. But in those and many other cases, they were negotiating with companies making record profits and with plenty of resources to satisfy union demands.

By contrast, the problems at Boeing have resulted in $33.3 billion in core operating losses over the course of the last five years, forcing the company to go deeply into debt. It is in danger of having that debt downgraded to junk bond status, but Holden insists that the union still has leverage in these talks.

Deciding the equipment vendor is a dastardly Chinese threat, successive US governments have struck it with multiple sanctions that would have finished off a lesser company. Yet Huawei, after a difficult few years of shapeshifting, looks almost rejuvenated.

Its performance is entirely at odds with that of Ericsson and Nokia, its traditional rivals, and not what anyone would have expected a few years ago, when Donald Trump – orc leader, from Huawei's perspective – landed the first damaging blows. Last week, it reported a 34.3% year-over-year increase in revenues for the first six months of the year, to 417.5 billion Chinese yuan (US$53.1 billion), building on the 9.6% growth it reported for 2023. Defying expectations, profitability has rebounded. Huawei's net profit margin surged from just 5.5% in 2022 to 12.3% last year before hitting 13.2% for the recent first half.

The main purported goal of sanctions was to impede Huawei in the market for 5G network equipment, the stated fear being that its products could include Chinese government malware for surveillance or worse. Yet their main impact was on Huawei's handset business. Generating 54% of Huawei's revenues in 2020, it was cut off by US legislation from both Google software and cutting-edge chips, far more important to smartphones than they are to network products. Revenues halved in 2021 with the sale of Honor, a handicapped smartphone unit, and they fell another 12% in 2022.

But last year they rose 17% and a continued revival probably explains most of Huawei's sales growth so far this year. A new handset called the Mate 60 Pro has proven a big hit in China. Teardowns have horrified US hawks by apparently revealing 7-nanometer chips, presumed to have no longer been available to Huawei. The received wisdom was that a chipmaker would need a technology called extreme ultra-violet (EUV) lithography to produce them. ASML of the Netherlands enjoys an EUV monopoly and Dutch authorities have prohibited sales to Chinese foundries. Nor, thanks to US sanctions, can Huawei buy EUV-made chips from Taiwan's TSMC or South Korea's Samsung.

The workaround, say experts, has been an older technology called deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography combined with a technique called multiple patterning. It is thought to be inefficient, even unprofitable, producing much lower yields, the percentage of functional chips derived from a single wafer. When SMIC, the Chinese foundry used by Huawei, saw its gross margin shrivel 6.4 percentage points for the recent second quarter, to 13.9%, and its cost of sales spike 31.5%, to more than $1.6 billion, some analysts blamed efforts to produce 7-nanometer chips with DUV technology. Profitable or not, it seems to have worked.