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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Former U.S. President Donald Trump cast himself as a master of “The Art of the Deal,” but his old buddy, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may be taking over that title.

Last week, López Obrador pressured a U.S. gravel company into agreeing to operate a tourist resort and cruise ship dock at a quarry it owns on the Caribbean coast.

The Alabama-based aggregates company Vulcan Materials — once known as Birmingham Slag Co. — has no experience at doing either, and would just like to continue mining gravel.

But López Obrador has used pressure and threats in a bid to get private and foreign companies to shore up his infrastructure plans and pet projects — state-run ports, terminals and rail lines that could become white elephants unless the private sector boosts them with real traffic.

For a leader once depicted as a leftist, López Obrador is in fact more of a populist and nationalist, and is quite conservative on some social issues. And he and Trump share an essentially transactional view of politics: two old-style bosses who like making deals.

On Monday, López Obrador became one of the few foreign leaders to say he genuinely liked Trump.

“We understood each other, and it was good for both countries,” López Obrador said of Trump’s time in office.

The examples of López Obrador’s pressure are many.

In 2020, he called a referendum that stopped a partly built, $1.5 billion U.S.-owned brewery in the border city of Mexicali, which had received all the needed permits but brought complaints from some residents that it would use too much water.

The Victor, N.Y.-based Constellation Brands, the company that brews Corona beer, wanted to be on the border in order to export Corona to the U.S. market. But López Obrador has a long-range goal of promoting investment in southern Mexico. That’s the region where he grew up, and where poverty is greater and water is more plentiful.

So last week, López Obrador said the governor of the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, who belongs to the president’s Morena party, smoothed the way with all necessary permits for Constellation to build a brewery there.

Some say the president may be scaring off foreign investment with such heavy-handed tactics.

“The critics and the pundits are complaining … because he chases away investments. He doesn’t give a damn,” said Federico Estevez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “That’s what they haven’t understood. He’s not after growth. He’s not after investment. He’s not a normal politician.”

In March, López Obrador issued an ultimatum to the U.S. energy company Sempra saying it had one month to sign an agreement to build a liquified natural gas export terminal in the Pacific coast port of Salina Cruz. Industry insiders say the project isn’t attractive for foreign investors, since it involves building pipelines to the port.

López Obrador has renovated the port as part of a plan to revive a 150-year-old dream of a rail line linking ports on the Pacific to the Gulf over Mexico’s narrow Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he desperately needs commercial customers for the ports. Sempra hasn’t yet responded to the demand.

Similar thinking — and practices — went into the president’s most surprising deal yet, the tentative agreement with Vulcan Materials to run a resort and port.

Vulcan wound up with a series of crushed-limestone quarries on Mexico’s Caribbean coast near the resort of Playa del Carmen in the 1990s, when the area wasn’t as popular as it now.

Vulcan would like to keep exporting gravel, but its export permits have been blocked since late 2018, leading the company to file a trade dispute arbitration case under NAFTA, which has yet to be resolved.

The quarries are near XCaret, a lagoon that private investors turned into a high-end theme park that charges $100 a day in admission. The Mexican president loves state-owned businesses and hates pricey private ones.

One of Vulcan’s gravel quarries was dug out to below the water table, and it filled with turquoise water. López Obrador wants to turn it into an artificial swimming and snorkeling lagoon.

His other pet project in the area is the Maya Train, a 950-mile (1,500- kilometer) rail line that will run in a rough loop around the Yucatan peninsula, connecting Caribbean coast resorts with archaeological sites inland.

Controversially, and with no environmental studies, the president decided to cut down a swath of low jungle between Cancun and Tulum, near the quarries, to build the train line.

The project needs huge amounts of gravel spread between rail ties to stabilize them, and it needs a seaport to get rails, cars and other train-building materials into the jungle.

Vulcan Materials has crushed limestone and it has a deep-water port, Punta Venado, that it uses to export shiploads of gravel to Florida for road projects. López Obrador also wants Vulcan to operate a cruise ship dock just across from Cozumel — the world’s busiest port of call for cruise ships.

So the president offered “a deal” to the company — run a water park and a cruise ship dock, or the government will shut down the quarries. And he threatened further action.

“I am waiting for an answer to the offer we made to them, because otherwise, we will take legal action,” Lopez Obrador said April 19, sounding a lot like Trump.

On Monday, Vulcan Materials issued a statement saying it had told Mexican officials “of its openness to supply construction materials needed for the construction of the Maya Train and other infrastructure projects and to make port capacity available for transfer of train-related construction materials.”

The company said it also told the government it was open to developing “a large-scale ecotourism project — suggested by the Government of Mexico — on land owned by the Company, as long as the Company can continue supplying its customers.”

Vulcan added that it is “also prepared to explore an expansion of the Punta Venado maritime terminal to receive passenger, freight and naval vessels in the coming years.”

A person privy to disputes with private firms during this administration, but not authorized to be quoted by name, said López Obrador often seeks to pile rhetorical pressure on companies, but doesn’t really appear to step over the line.

“You get the rhetoric, but you don’t get the strongarm,” said the insider. “It’s a lot more bark than bite.”

“One company was asked to do something they didn’t want to do, and they started getting calls from government agencies, saying we’ve been asked to review every contract we have with you … but nothing was cancelled,” he said. “Is that pressure? Sure, but is it illegal?”

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Three days before Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter, the world’s richest man tweeted a photo of Bill Gates and used a crude sexual term to make fun of his belly.

Playful, aggressive and often juvenile, Musk’s past tweets show how he has used social media to craft his public image as a brash billionaire unafraid to offend. They may also reveal clues as to how Musk will govern the platform he hopes to own.

“Look at the feed: It’s all over the place. It’s erratic. At times it’s pretty extreme,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University professor who studies social media and who recently assigned Musk’s tweets as reading material for their students. “It paints him as some sort of rebel leader who will take control of the public square to save it. That is a myth he has constructed.”

Musk joined Twitter in 2010 and now has more than 85 million followers — the seventh most of any account and the highest for any business leader. He had mused about buying the site before he agreed on Monday to pay $44 billion for Twitter, which he said he hopes to turn into a haven where all speech is allowed.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk uses his Twitter account to make business announcements and promote his enterprises. He muses about technology and trade, but has also posted jokes about women’s breasts and once compared Canada’s prime minister to Hitler. He regularly weighs in on global events, as he did in March 2020 when he tweeted that “The coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”

He’s also used the account to punch back at critics, such as when he called a diver working to rescue boys trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo,” short for pedophile. The diver had previously criticized Musk’s proposal to use a sub to rescue the boys. Musk, who won a defamation suit filed by the diver, later said he never intended “pedo” to be interpreted as “pedophile.”

A few years ago, after software engineer Cher Scarlett criticized Musk’s handling of the cave incident, the tech billionaire fired back and she was soon being harassed by dozens of Musk’s online fans. He later deleted the posts, but not before Scarlett had to lock down her account because she was receiving so many hateful messages.

“It’s ironic to me that somebody who claims they want to buy Twitter to protect free speech has such thin skin,” she said. “He’s a very smart man, and when he replies to people that criticize him, he knows what he’s doing. To me that’s not championing free speech, it’s weaponizing free speech, and I think that’s what he’ll do owning this platform.”

Nineteen-year-old Jack Sweeney got Musk’s attention when he created an automated Twitter account that tracked the movements of Musk’s jet. Musk responded by offering Sweeney $5,000 to pull the account. When Sweeney refused, Musk blocked him on Twitter.

Sweeney said he’s worried he may get kicked off the site entirely if Musk’s takeover is approved. But he said he likes Musk’s free speech absolutism, and hopes he sees it through.

“He’ll make it more open, and I think that’s a good thing,” Sweeney said.

Musk’s use of Twitter has also led to problems for his own companies. In one August 2018 tweet, for instance, Musk asserted that he had the funding to take Tesla private for $420 a share, although a court has ruled that it wasn’t true. That led to an SEC investigation that Musk is still fighting.

More recently, Musk appeared to have violated SEC rules that required him to disclose that he’d acquired a 5% stake in Twitter; instead he waited until he had more than 9%. Experts say these issues aren’t likely to affect his Twitter acquisition.

Last year another federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, ordered Musk to delete a tweet that officials said illegally threatened to cut stock options for Tesla employees who joined the United Auto Workers union.

Those tweets helped cement Musk’s reputation as a brash outsider, a workingman’s billionaire, Grygiel said. But that doesn’t mean he is equipped to run a social media platform with more than 200 million users, the professor added.

“Maybe he wants to burn it down,” Grygiel said. “I don’t know. But I do know that it shows that no one person should have this kind of power.”

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By Nick Carey

GAYDON, England (Reuters) -After decades of ups and downs, British carmaker Aston Martin Lagonda is charting a more efficient and profitable way forward, leaning on technology from shareholder Mercedes-Benz to make the costly leap to electric vehicles (EVs).

Less than two years after billionaire Lawrence Stroll drove to the rescue of James Bond’s car brand of choice, Aston Martin has undergone a manufacturing makeover to lift margins and help it become more like rival Ferrari.

Stroll, Aston Martin’s largest shareholder and executive chairman, who is also an avid fan of Ferrari, says after vehicle sales jumped 82% in 2021 the carmaker’s transformation to long-term profitability is well under way, with new cars coming and funding secured through 2025.

But analysts say Aston Martin, which has gone bust seven times since it was founded in 1913 and has flirted with death as often as Agent 007, is still burning through piles of cash. Some question its ability to generate Ferrari-like sales to fund the vast cost of electrification.

“It’s precarious and it is possible for this company to go bust,” said Redburn equity research analyst Charles Coldicott. “I don’t think it’s a controversial thing to say even though Aston wouldn’t like to hear it.”

Asked to comment on perceptions of a shaky future, an Aston Martin spokesman reiterated Stroll’s view that the carmaker is well on the way to long-term profitability and that it has adequate access to cash.

On a tour of the carmaker’s Gaydon factory, Tobias Moers, formerly head of Mercedes’ high-performance AMG brand and Aston Martin chief executive since August 2020, rattles off a list of moves including cutting one of two assembly lines and bringing more bespoke items like seats in-house.

Perhaps the biggest shift has been to focus on higher-value customer-driven and customized orders – a big part of Ferrari’s success – rather than over-producing and churning out sports cars wholesale, which then had to be discounted.

“When I came in, the company was manufacturing-dominated instead of engineering-led, which for an auto luxury business is insane,” Moers said. “In a company this size, you need maximum flexibility and agility.”

Moers has cut Aston Martin’s inventory to 600 sports cars from 2,000 – its cars sell for an average of around 150,000 pounds ($195,750) – and customized orders now account for 50% of sales versus 6% when he joined the firm.

At that point, the carmaker was in trouble after a disastrous 2018 public listing.

Stroll says with its new vehicles the company is targeting a gross profit margin per vehicle of at least 40% and in some cases 50%. Analysts put Ferrari’s figure at over 55%.

By 2025, Aston Martin aims to sell 10,000 cars annually – nearly 40% more than in 2021 – close to Ferrari’s production.

Stroll says Aston Martin will benefit from a deal made with Mercedes-Benz in October 2020 where it gets access to the German carmaker’s latest engines and EV technology.

Under that deal, Mercedes now owns almost 12% of Aston Martin, which will increase to 20% in 2023. The German luxury automaker has been relatively tight-lipped about plans for its stake in Aston Martin.

“It was really important for a company of this size, particularly with electrification coming … to have a big brother,” Stroll said. “So I did a really transformational deal with Mercedes-Benz in order to get their electric architecture.”

Aston Martin plans to launch its first fully electric car in 2025.

‘SAMPLE SIZE ONE’

Carmakers have focused on outsourcing for decades, but increased customization has Aston Martin reversing that trend, said CEO Moers.

Allowing customers to select their leather, stitching and other internal flourishes has led to a 20% increase in options, boosting the sales price.

But offering 30 different leather qualities and colours means 900 variations. As each car is individual, it is cheaper to do more in-house – for instance, Aston Martin plans to make its own steering wheels again.

“Variation at Mercedes-Benz was a nightmare, we wanted to cut it down and cut it down,” Moers said. “But here, this is our purpose.”

“Our sample size is one.”

Aston Martin has closed its paint shop at Gaydon and paints most cars at its sport-utility vehicle plant in Wales – saving 1,000 pounds per car by cutting the immense costs of two paint shops.

But Aston Martin will hand-paint any unique colour customers desire, for an additional cost.

Aston Martin has also started delivering the limited edition Valkyrie, a street-legal version of a Formula One car announced by the company’s previous management that starts at 2 million pounds.

But the Valkyrie has been immensely expensive to develop, so will not be repeated as Aston Martin focuses instead on profitable sports cars.

“There is no business case for this,” Moers said.

‘MERCEDES WILL BE THE BASE’

Before going electric, Aston Martin is launching a number of combustion engine models, including its powerful V12 Vantage sports car and a new SUV.

In 2023 the carmaker plans its first mid-engine sports car – where the engine sits behind the driver providing better weight distribution for performance – joining Ferrari, McLaren Automotive and Lamborghini.

For Aston Martin and its peers, going electric is especially tricky because the appeal of luxury sports cars is based on the feel of a powerful internal combustion engine.

“More of the people that are our customers today, who are more petrol heads, want to see, feel, hear and smell a combustion engine for a long time,” Stroll said.

But for going electric, “Mercedes will be the base of whatever we do,” he said.

Redbush’s Coldicott said Aston Martin lacks Ferrari’s broader appeal and likely cannot sustain the annual production of 10,000 units needed for long-term investments in new vehicles. As the company expects to burn through almost 125 million pounds this year, Coldicott said Aston Martin has limited time.

“If you put a gun to my head, I would say my base case is Mercedes will acquire the business,” he said. “I don’t know at what price, but I imagine it will be significantly lower than today’s price.”

Mercedes spokesman Tobias Just said in an email the German carmaker is “very happy with our existing cooperation with Aston Martin.”

He declined to comment on the German carmaker’s future plans for its Aston Martin stake if the British carmaker’s turnaround stalls.

Jefferies analyst Philippe Houchois said while Aston Martin has aspired for many years to be more like Ferrari, its current management has consistently done the right thing, moving its brand upmarket “by underproducing and moving towards more content and more customization.”

“They’re now walking the talk at Aston Martin,” Houchois said. “But it’s a question of how long it takes and if they have the financing to back that up.”

($1 = 0.7663 pound)

(Reporting by Nick Carey in Gaydon, England; Additional reporting by Victoria Waldersee in Berlin and Giulio Piovaccari in MilanEditing by Matthew Lewis)

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By Nilanjana Basu and Mike Stone

-Aerospace and defense firm Raytheon Technologies Corp lowered its full-year revenue forecast on Tuesday, hurt by the cessation of its activities in Russia.

Shares were flat in pre-market trading at $99.50.

Russia has been hit by Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, leading to a large number of U.S. companies severing ties with Moscow, and the aviation industry is among the sectors severely impacted.

Raytheon’s Chief Financial Officer Neil Mitchill told Reuters that lowering the 2022 revenue guidance by $750 million “was strictly related to direct and indirect sales that are no longer allowed because of the global sanctions imposed on Russia.”

Raytheon expects full-year revenue to be between $67.75 billion and $68.75 billion, lower than its previous forecast of $68.5 billion to $69.5 billion.

About three quarters of that lost $750 million revenue was direct sales of commercial equipment to Russia, Mitchill said, and the remainder was engine parts that would have been sold principally by Pratt & Whitney Canada.

However, the company said revenue rose 3% to $15.72 billion in the quarter, driven by a recovery in air travel demand, which boosted sales of its aerospace products and services.

Raytheon posted a net income of $1.08 billion, or 72 cents per share, in the quarter ended March 31, compared with $753 million, or 50 cents per share, last year.

(Reporting by Nilanjana Basu in Bengaluru; Editing by Amy Caren Daniel and Chizu Nomiyama)

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SHENZHEN, China (Reuters) -Huawei Technologies has identified helping businesses to use 5G technology, cloud computing and to improve their energy efficiency as ways to bolster the company in the face of mounting challenges, its rotating chairman said on Tuesday.

In 2019 the U.S. Trump Administration put Huawei on an export blacklist, putting its once mighty handset business under immense pressure. The United States says Huawei is a security risk, which the company has denied.

Rotating chairman Ken Hu said on Tuesday the company faced an even more daunting year than in 2021 as geopolitics, the COVID-19 pandemic, rising commodity prices and fluctuating exchange rates add to the sanctioned-hit company’s difficulties.

Addressing Huawei’s annual analyst summit on Tuesday, Hu echoed comments the company made a year ago that developing new and more resilient business areas was essential to survival.

“We know in our hearts, Huawei still faces a lot of challenges and we need to redouble our efforts,” he said, citing 5G, cloud computing and energy efficiency as growth areas for Huawei.

“Huawei has been unfairly suppressed and sanctioned and we can’t source some advanced components,” he added.

Huawei’s revenue fell 29% last year to 636.8 billion yuan ($97.36 billion), while net profit rose 76% to 113.7 billion yuan, buoyed by the sale of budget smartphone unit Honor.

The company is under scrutiny over whether it plans to stay in Russia, as many Western firms have pulled out following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine that began on Feb. 24.

It has also faced internal pressure, as two of its British board members resigned in March after it did not condemn the war. The company did not take any questions on Russia on Tuesday.

($1 = 6.5409 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by David Kirton, Editing by Louise Heavens and Barbara Lewis)

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By Bernadette Christina

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesian government officials told palm oil companies on Monday that an export ban announced late last week would cover shipments of refined, bleached, deodorized (RBD) palm olein but not crude palm oil, two industry sources told Reuters.

Officials at the trade ministry and coordinating ministry of economic affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Traders were caught by surprise by Friday’s announcement by President Joko Widodo that Indonesia, the world’s biggest palm oil producer, was halting exports of the edible oil from April 28, to ensure domestic food product availability.

Though an exemption of crude palm oil from the export curbs will be positive for global markets, the majority of Indonesia’s palm exports are in the form of processed oils and remain affected by the ban.

Global edible oil supplies were already choked by adverse weather and Russia’s invasion of major crop producer Ukraine, and now global consumers have no option but to pay top dollar for supplies at a time when global food inflation has soared to a record high.

Malaysian benchmark crude palm futures fell 2.09% after news that ban only cover RBD olein, having jumped nearly 7% to their highest in six weeks.

“The massive short covering fizzled out after hearing news that the ban only encompasses olein both bulk and packed from Indonesia,” said Paramalingam Supramaniam, director at Selangor-based brokerage Pelindung Bestari.

He said there were still concerns that crude palm oil would also be added to the list of banned products as it is raw material for RBD palm olein.

According to Refinitiv Eikon, Indonesia exported an average of roughly 620,000 tonnes per month of RBD in 2021, compared to an average of around 100,000 tonnes of crude palm oil. Top destinations included India and Pakistan and Spain.

The government’s move to control stubbornly high cooking oil prices caused a slump in shares of its biggest palm oil companies on Monday, while the rupiah headed currency falls in Asia. Dollar-denominated bonds issued by Indonesia’s government fell more than 1 cent to their lowest since the Spring 2020 COVID market rout.

According to data from Indonesia’s palm oil association (GAPKI) exports of processed CPO in 2021 stood at 25.7 million tonnes, or 75% of total exports of palm products. CPO exports were 2.74 million tonnes in 2021, or 7.98% of the shipments.

In January and February this year, processed CPO exports were 3.38 million tonnes or 79% of exports, while CPO exports were 90,000 tonnes, 2% of the total shipped.

Global prices of crude palm oil, which Indonesia uses for cooking oil, have surged to historic highs this year amid rising demand and weak output from top producers Indonesia and Malaysia, plus a move by Indonesia to restrict palm oil exports in January that was lifted in March.

(Reporting by Bernadette Christina Munthe; Additional reporting by Mei Mei Chu in Kuala Lumpur; Writing by Gayatri Suroyo and Martin Petty; Editing by Louise Heavens)

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(Reuters) -Videogame publisher Activision Blizzard Inc missed estimates for first-quarter adjusted sales on Monday, hurt by low demand for its latest title “Call of Duty: Vanguard”.

Activision’s performance has taken a hit from lower premium sales for “Call of Duty: Vanguard” and weaker engagement in “Call of Duty: Warzone”, with a return to pre-pandemic habits pressing gamers to spend less time on their consoles.

The company, which is being taken over by Microsoft Corp, has also been facing backlash over its response to allegations of internal sexual harassment and discrimination against female employees.

The Santa Monica, California-based company’s quarterly adjusted sales stood at $1.48 billion, compared with analysts’ estimates of $1.80 billion, according to Refinitiv IBES data.

Net income for the quarter ended March 31 fell to $395 million, or 50 cents per share, from $619 million, or 79 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, Activision earned 64 cents per share.

(Reporting by Tiyashi Datta and Richard Rohan Francis in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ‘ deepening feud with Walt Disney World is testing the limits of his combative leadership style while sending an unmistakable message to his rivals that virtually nothing is off limits as he plots his political future.

The 43-year-old Republican has repeatedly demonstrated an acute willingness to fight over the course of his decadelong political career. He has turned against former aides and rejected the GOP Legislature’s rewrite of congressional maps, forcing lawmakers to accept a version more to his liking, though voting rights group have sued. And he’s leaned into simmering tensions with Donald Trump, which is notable for someone seeking to lead a party where loyalty to the former president is a requirement.

But DeSantis’ decision to punish Disney World, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and one of Florida’s biggest private employers, took his fighter mentality to a new level. In retribution for Disney’s criticism of a new state law condemned by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” DeSantis signed legislation on Friday stripping the theme park of a decades-old special agreement that allowed it to govern itself.

To critics, including some in his own party, such a raw exercise of power suggests DeSantis is operating with a sense of invincibility that could come back to haunt him. Others see an ambitious politician emboldened by strong support in his state and a mountain of campaign cash grabbing an opportunity to further stoke the nation’s culture wars, turning himself into a hero among Republican voters in the process.

“When you listen to Ron DeSantis, it’s righteous indignation: ‘Here’s why you’re wrong and here’s why I’m right,”” said Florida Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a former state GOP chairman. “And it is that righteous indignation and that willingness to fight back that endears people to Ron DeSantis’ message. As long as he keeps on showing that he’s willing to fight, people are going to continue to keep flocking to him.”

DeSantis is up for reelection in November. But in the wake of his scrape with Disney, he will introduce himself to a key group of presidential primary voters this coming week when he campaigns for Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt. The appearance marks his first of the year in a state featured prominently on the presidential calendar, although DeSantis aides insist it is simply a trip to help out a longtime friend.

Disney drew DeSantis’ wrath for opposing a new state law that bars instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. The DeSantis-backed bill has been condemned by LGBTQ activists nationwide as homophobic, although the measure, like others dealing with transgender athletes and racial history in schools, has emerged as a core piece of the GOP’s political strategy.

The Disney legislation, which does not take effect until June 2023, could cause massive economic fallout for the company, the surrounding communities and the millions who visit the Orlando amusement park every year.

There are risks to DeSantis’ embrace of the legislation, particularly if his antagonism towards Disney threatens the GOP’s standing with independents and women, who could play crucial roles in the fall campaign. Jenna Ellis, a former Trump administration attorney, called the DeSantis-backed legislation “vengeful.”

Democrats who are facing a tough election year are eager to highlight DeSantis’ moves as a way to portray the GOP as a party of extremists. In an interview, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison described DeSantis’ attack on Disney as a continuation of a “divisive agenda” geared toward booking interviews on conservative media at the expense of his constituents.

“The people of Florida deserve a governor whose first priority is them, not his own political ambition,” Harrison said.

President Joe Biden said at party fundraiser this past week in Oregon that this “is not your father’s Republican Party.”

“I respect conservatives,” Biden said at a DNC fundraiser in Seattle on Thursday. “There’s nothing conservative about deciding you’re going to throw Disney out of its present posture because … you think we should be not be able to say, ‘gay.’”

In a statement, DeSantis’ spokesperson Taryn Fenske, called the governor a “principled and driven leader who accomplishes exactly what he says he will do.”

Indeed, DeSantis’ friends and foes in the GOP agree that his crackdown on Disney is a major political victory among Republican base voters already enamored by his pushback against pandemic-related public health measures over the past two years. They suggest it also taps into a growing Republican embrace of anti-corporate populism and parental control of education that resonates with a wider swath of voters.

Republicans pollsters have been privately testing DeSantis’ political strength beyond Florida for several months, finding that the only Republican consistently with more support than DeSantis among GOP voters is Trump himself. At the same time, DeSantis is sitting on more than $100 million in campaign funds.

“He’s a very smart guy in what he’s doing and how he’s doing it,” Republican strategist David Urban, a close Trump ally, said of DeSantis.

Those close to the Florida governor say there is one message above all to take away from the Disney fight: that DeSantis, one of the few high-profile Republicans who has not ruled out running against Trump in a 2024 presidential primary, is not afraid of anybody, anything or any fight.

Tensions between the two men have been building for months.

In a Washington Post interview last month, Trump took credit for DeSantis rise. And last weekend, longtime Trump loyalist Roger Stone released a video clip in which Stone calls DeSantis an expletive while greeting Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club.

So far, Florida voters seem to be on DeSantis’ side.

Nearly 6 in 10 Florida voters approved of DeSantis’ job performance in a February poll conducted by the University of North Florida. The poll also asked registered Republicans about a hypothetical presidential primary between Trump and DeSantis. The result? Trump and DeSantis were statistically tied.

Brian Ballard, a Florida lobbyist and a major Republican fundraiser, said DeSantis has “a combination of popularity and instincts” that is shaping the modern-day GOP.

“No other elected official, maybe in the country, has the Republican base support that Ron DeSantis has. So he’s incredibly powerful, not only a powerful politician, but a powerful government leader,” Ballard said. “The guy really has the reins of power in his hands.”

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Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.

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By Aditya Kalra and Swati Bhat

MUMBAI (Reuters) -India’s top retailer Reliance on Saturday called off its $3.4 billion deal with Future Group, saying it “cannot be implemented” after Future’s secured creditors rejected it.

The deal was at the centre of legal battles since 2020 after Future’s partner Amazon.com Inc legally blocked it, citing violation of certain contracts. Future denied any wrongdoing.

In a stock exchange filing on Saturday, Reliance said the deal now cannot go through as “the secured creditors of FRL (Future Retail) have voted against” it.

Future Retail and Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Future’s secured lenders on Friday rejected the deal, and the company, once India’s second-largest retailer with more than 1,500 outlets, now faces the prospect of a bankruptcy process.

Future’s fall is “an unfortunate event”, one of the sources with direct knowledge of the dispute said on Saturday.

Amazon had obtained legal injunctions that stalled Future’s deal with Reliance, sparking a series of legal battles in various forums, including an arbitration panel in Singapore.

In February, Reliance stunned the retail industry by suddenly seizing control of hundreds of Future stores, citing non-payment of rent, after assuming many of the leases held by cash-strapped Future.

That spooked bankers, some of whom have already initiated debt recovery proceedings against Future.

(Reporting by Swati Bhat and Aditya Kalra; editing by Jason Neely)

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SHANGHAI/MILAN (Reuters) -Luxury sports car maker Ferrari will recall 2,222 cars in China due to a potential fault in its braking systems, China’s market regulator said in a statement on Friday.

The recall covers the 458 Italia, 458 Speciale, 458 Speciale A, 458 Spider, 488 GTB and 488 Spider series models, the State Administration for Market Regulation said, and is for cars imported between March 2010 and March 2019.

The recall will begin on May 30.

A source close to the matter said that the recall is part of a wider action Ferrari is undertaking globally over the same issue for models produced over the period, which also saw the carmaker agreeing to a recall campaign in the United States in November last year.

In the car industry, recalls and their timings are normally decided by each individual national authority after issues emerge or are flagged by the constructor.

Ferrari said that, after investigating the matter together with its supplier Bosch, they had identified the cause of the defect in affected vehicles in a brake reservoir fluid cap that may not vent properly, thereby potentially creating a vacuum inside the brake fluid reservoir.

“The safety and wellbeing of our clients is our priority. We operate according to stringent safety and security guidelines to ensure the right systems and procedures are in place at all times” Ferrari said.

Based on data available on the company’s website, which date back until 2014 when it was still part of Fiat group, Ferrari has sold a total of around 5,400 cars in its ‘Greater China’ region, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, between 2014 and last year.

By 1145 GMT Milan-listed shares in Ferrari were down 3.1%, underperforming a 1.7% fall for Italy’s blue chip index.

(Reporting by Zhang Yan, Brenda Goh in Shanghai and Giulio Piovaccari in Milan; editing by John Stonestreet and Keith Weir)

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