Tesla has slashed prices of its Model 3 and Model Y.

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• Tesla has slashed the prices of its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in recent weeks.
• Several buyers who ordered vehicles before the price cuts vented their frustration to Insider.
• One said she was pressured to take delivery of her Model Y the day before prices were slashed.

Tesla buyers are venting their frustration about missing out on big price cuts announced by the company in recent weeks, with one saying they felt “cheated,” and another, “taken advantage of.”

Forty people contacted Insider to express their dissatisfaction about missing out on Model 3 and Model Y price reductions, following a story Saturday by this publication about a buyer who secured a discount on his pending order.

Aaron Brewer, from Oahu, Hawaii, placed an order at a Honolulu dealership on December 7 for a Model 3 after Tesla reduced the price of that car, and the Model Y, by $3,750. He said a sales representative told him Tesla “almost never discounts anything.”

Later in December, Tesla deepened the discount on both models, to $7,500, and two weeks into 2023 it cut prices further.

Brewer said it was “really painful for that euphoric feeling of being so happy with the car to be taken away and replaced with a sense of being taken advantage of” to the tune of “several thousand dollars.”

Insider has viewed emails confirming Brewer’s order and those of other people quoted in this story.

Deborah Martin, from Los Alamitos, California, said she ordered her seven-seater Model Y Long Range in early January to benefit from the electric-vehicle federal tax credit of $7,500, and was told to expect delivery between January 12 and March.

“I was told by the dealership that if I didn’t take delivery by January 12, the car would be given to the next person on the list,” she said.

She paid $76,440 for the vehicle, which included the Enhanced Autopilot system. The same configuration she ordered is now priced at $65,630, she said: “So within 24 hours, not including tax, I lost $10,810.”

A buyer who didn’t want to be named for privacy reasons paid $69,000 for a Model Y and took delivery on October 1 after waiting for a year. Following the recent price cuts, the car now starts at $52,990, down from its previous base price of $65,990.

“It feels like you have been cheated and robbed,” the buyer said. “It feels like we are helpless. It doesn’t seem fair to a hardworking family with two kids to rob them of their six months’ savings.”

Many of the people who reached out to Insider said they’d attempted to contact Tesla representatives through the company’s app or on Twitter. Some said they’d even reached out directly to Musk.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment from Insider.

Swiss soften line on arms exports to Ukraine.

The world must help Ukraine to stop Russia’s genocidal war before the latter’s fascism and aggression spread and are copied by other nations.

Russia has masterminded and organized the effort to destabilize Sweden on religious grounds. The operation aims to hamper Sweden’s NATO integration plans, escalate relations with Muslim countries, and create grounds for the acts of terror on the part of Islam followers who arrived in Sweden as refugees.

Therefore the Kremlin also attempts to provoke riots and violence with the subsequent higher risk of international terrorist organizations intensifying their operations in Sweden (a secondary goal). 

On January 21, 2023 leader of the Hard Line partly Rasmus Paludan publically burned the Quran outside Türkiye’s embassy in Stockholm. According to the Swedish TV channel SVT, it was a local journalist, Chang Johannes Frick, who proposed that Paludan burn the Quran. He also guaranteed that any damage that the Hard Line leader may sustain in respect to the stunt will be covered. 

Russian military intelligence has likely exploited unsuspecting Paludan with the mediation of Chang Johannes Frick, who, according to multiple signs, is a GRU asset recruited for psyops. The location – the area outside Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm – was chosen specifically as the act targeted Ankara. The operation was held ahead of the scheduled visit to Sweden of Turkey’s defense minister. In 2023, the elections will be held in Türkiye, while incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is competing with the Arab world for influence on Muslims worldwide. To Sweden’s move to apply for NATO membership following Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine Türkiye responded with a demand to extradite representatives of Kurdish forces and suspects in the 2016 coup d’état case. At the same time, Stockholm’s accession aspirations became a matter of concern for Moscow. As a result, the Kremlin plotted an operation aiming to escalate contradictions between Türkiye and Sweden amid the upcoming elections in Ankara, realizing that an attack on a religious symbol of Islam can’t be ignored during an ongoing campaign.

It is not a coincidence that the riots occur against the backdrop of reports that Sweden could join NATO and at a time when Moscow has voiced threats to Stockholm over its chosen course of action. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has said that, “if Sweden and Finland join NATO, this could lead to “negative implications” for peace in northern Europe.

Chang Johannes Frick (until 1995 – Chang Georg Lindberg) owns a Nyheter idag online newspaper and hosts a show on SD Riks TV channel (which is financed by the Sweden Democrats party). There are numerous signs indicating that the man covertly cooperates with and is affiliated with Russia’s GRU military intelligence. This connection raises no doubts as he previously worked for more than a year for Russia’s state-owned news agency RT/Russia Today as a “freelancer with regular tasks” for Ruptly, which is RT’s subsidiary.  Affiliated with the Russian defense ministry and military intelligence, RT took up an active role in the coordinated efforts to compromise the international inquiry into the downing of MH17 in 2014. 

RT and Sputnik’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan also  cooperates with the Russian defense ministry and military intelligence. It is important to bear in mind that at the dawn of Simonyan’s career in journalism, she was a war correspondent covering the war in Chechnya. This indirectly confirms her ties with the GRU. The defense ministry in 2005 even awarded her a medal. Then, in 2008, she covered the Russian military campaign aimed to seal control of the South Ossetia.

RT actively engaged her in their psyops on foreign soil. In his articles, Frick justified Russia’s Crimea grab and war crimes in Syria, as well as praised the Putin regime, while systematically criticizing the US and NATO. These narratives are fully in line with the content of most GRU psyops run abroad.

•        Since 2012, he has been a partner of Polina Urvantseva, a Russian national born in Chelyabinsk in July 1989. Handling foreign assets with the help of young Russian women is one of the classic practices preached by Russian intelligence since the Cold War times.

•        In 2017, Chang Frick covered a visit to Russia of a lawmaker with the ultra-right party Sweden Democrats, Pavel Gamov, who has Russian roots. According to The New York Times, in 2018, Russia helped the Sweden Democrats achieve a record-breaking success in parliamentary elections by fueling anti-migrant moods and promoting across social media the websites affiliated with nationalists.

In 2018, Nyheter idag, unlike most Western  media platforms, covered Russian elections in a positive light. Today, Frick’s outlet focused on circulating anti-Turkish rhetoric across Sweden (Turkey’s involvement in the killing of Kurds in Syria, oil deals with the Islamic State, granting asylum to Islamic terrorists, blackmailing Europe with refugees, and Erdogan’s involvement in the 2015 refugee crisis), provoking Turkey to stand up against Sweden’s appeal to join NATO. It is highly likely that the content spun by the outlet reflects the tasks set by Moscow depending on the relevant agenda.

According to our estimates, Russia chose Paludan for the stunt due to the fact that he had already taken part in burning the Quran in Denmark, Germany, and France, as well as demonstrations of the prophet’s image, which is severely banned in Islam. 

Paludan is a Danish politician, founder of the far-right anti-Islamist political party Stram Kurs (“Hard Line”), which demands a ban on practicing Islam in the country and the deportation from Denmark of all migrants earlier granted asylum. Frick’s testimony claiming he stands behind Paludan’s stunt indicates attempts to minimize repercussions for Paludan as an act of promised damage compensation for the executioner.

Thus, the scenario was likely chosen of an active measure through an act religious provocation. Earlier, similar measures eventually fueled mass riots and even terrorist acts, as in the case of the Charlie Hebdo HQ in France. Paludan’s far-right ideology and anti-migrant policies totally fit the Kremlin in running intelligence operations within the wide framework of the anti-migrant movement across Europe, which Moscow has been generously cultivating since 2015.

Paludan has long gained notoriety for his anti-migrant protests and Quran-burning acts in districts populated by ethnic minorities. The Danish court even found him guilty of racism and slander. 

However, the choice of Stockholm and the Turkish embassy goes beyond Paludan’s modus operandi in his anti-Islamic efforts. Therefore it is highly likely that his anti-Islamic activity was exploited by third parties to achieve political goals.On January 24, Zvezda, a media outlet run by the Russian defense ministry, posted an article covering Paludan’s stunt, putting an emphasis on the worsening of relations between Sweden and Türkiye.

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Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said on Wednesday it was investigating an outage, which left thousands of users in India unable to access the website’s multiple services including Teams and Outlook.

Downdetector.com, which tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, showed there were more than 3,700 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft Teams in India.

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After much ‘dithering’, Berlin could finally be about to send heavy Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

Jacinda Ardern is likely to require an unprecedented level of security for a former New Zealand prime minister given the extent of the abuse and threats she faced while in office.

Ongoing police protection for retired leaders is unusual in the South Pacific nation, where politicians are able to revert to life as a private citizen once they retire. But Ardern, who announced her shock departure last week, was the target of some of the darkest and most extreme online abuse, according to research by the University of Auckland.

Read More: What Jacinda Ardern Could Do Next

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“The vitriol is, quite frankly, off the charts,” said Paul Buchanan, a former intelligence and defense policy analyst who was a consultant to US security agencies. “The threats to her will not go away simply because she steps down. Some of these people are capable of taking violent action against her.”

Buchanan believes New Zealand’s Diplomatic Protection Service, a specialized arm of the police responsible for security, will assess the risk to Ardern and her family and provide 24-hour security for the foreseeable future.

Chris Hipkins, who formally succeeded Ardern as prime minister Wednesday in Wellington, has declined to comment on security arrangements for the former leader while describing some of the treatment she received as “abhorrent.”

Read More: Jacinda Ardern Led With Her Heart. That’s One Reason She’s Leaving Now

University of Auckland researchers analyzed posts from online platforms including Gab, 4chan, Telegram, Reddit and 8kun dating back to 2019 that mentioned Ardern and six other high profile male and female officials from across the New Zealand political spectrum.

Ardern was found to have faced between 50 and 90 times more online vitriol than any of the others. She was mentioned in more than 18,000 posts, with 5,438 classified as strongly negative, angry, sexually explicit or toxic. The research also found the abusive messages increased in the second half of last year.

“I draw the conclusion that misogyny was a key part of it,” said Chris Wilson, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Auckland. Ardern attracted backlash for being a left-wing woman in power who “symbolically or otherwise was taking a number of steps to undermine structures of patriarchy, racial hierarchies and structures within society,” he said.

Kate Hannah, director and founder of independent research group The Disinformation Project, said the genesis of the abuse directed at Ardern was her response to the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack in which 51 people were killed when a gunman opened fire on Muslim worshipers at two mosques.

Read More: How Will Jacinda Ardern Use the World’s Attention?

“Her swift intervention in the banning of the assault rifles and the iconic visual imagery of her wearing hijab had a lot of power internationally in both the mainstream media and in online discourses,” Hannah said. “That’s when we first started seeing rhetoric.”

Both Hipkins and former prime minister Helen Clark have in recent days called out the misogyny and hatred directed at Ardern. But Ardern herself has said the abuse didn’t play a role in her decision to stand down.

“I would hate for anyone to view my departure as a negative commentary on New Zealand,” she told reporters on Tuesday. “I have experienced such love, compassion, empathy and kindness when I’ve been in this job. That has been my predominant experience.”

Hindenburg Research said on Wednesday it held short positions in India’s Adani Group, accusing the conglomerate of improper extensive use of entities set up in offshore tax havens and expressing concern about high debt levels.

The report, which comes days ahead of a $2.5 billion share offering by flagship firm Adani Enterprises (ADEL.NS), sent shares in Adani group firms sliding.

Hindenburg, a well known U.S. short-seller, said key listed companies in the group controlled by billionaire Gautam Adani had “substantial debt” which has put the entire group on a “precarious financial footing”.

It also said that seven Adani listed companies have an 85% downside on a fundamental basis due to what it called “sky-high valuations”.

An Adani spokesperson did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment on the report, which Hindenburg said was based on research that involved speaking with dozens of individuals, including former Adani Group executives as well as a review of documents.

Hindenburg said it held its short positions through U.S.-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivative instruments.

Adani has repeatedly dismissed debt concerns. Adani Chief Financial Officer Jugeshinder Singh told media on Jan. 21 “Nobody has raised debt concerns to us. No single investor has.”

In the wake of the Hindenburg report, Adani Ports And Special Economic Zone (APSE.NS) slid 7.3% to its lowest level since early July, while Adani Enterprises dropped 3.7% to a near three-month low.

Adani-owned cement firms ACC (ACC.NS) and Ambuja Cements (ABUJ.NS) fell 6.7% and 9.7% respectively.

Hindenburg’s report said that five of seven key listed Adani companies have reported current ratios – a measure of liquid assets minus near-term liabilities – below 1. This, the short-seller said, suggested “a heightened short-term liquidity risk.”

Adani Group’s total gross debt in the financial year ending March 31, 2022, rose 40% to 2.2 trillion rupees.

Refinitiv data shows that debt at all the Adani Group’s seven key listed Adani companies exceeds equity, with debt at Adani Green Energy Ltd (ADNA.NS) exceeding equity by more than 2,000%.

CreditSights, part of the Fitch Group, described the group last September as “overleveraged” and said it had concerns over its debt. While the report later corrected some calculation errors, CreditSights said it maintained its concerns over leverage.

Hindenburg is known for shorting electric truck maker Nikola Corp (NKLA.O) and Twitter though it later reversed its position in Twitter.

Shares in Adani Enterprises surged 125% in 2022, while other group companies, including power and gas units, rose more than 100%.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a press conference following the tripartite meeting on January 11, 2023 in Lviv, Ukraine.

Stanislav Ivanov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

• Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired a slew of senior officials on Tuesday.
• Some of Ukraine’s top civil servants are facing accusations of bribery and taking lavish vacations.
• Zelenskyy has since pledged to take a zero-tolerance approach to corruption in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired at least nine top officials on Tuesday as his government battles claims of bribery and officials splurging on lavish lifestyles during the war.

Four deputy ministers and five regional governors were sacked by Ukraine’s cabinet on Tuesday, according to the Telegram channel of Oleg Nemchinov, the secretary of the cabinet of ministers.

Ukraine’s deputy prosecutor general, Oleksiy Symonenko, also announced his resignation on the same day, the BBC reported.

The wave of dismissals and resignations comes as some of Ukraine’s top leaders were accused of buying military food at inflated prices and taking luxury holidays as their countrymen fight Russia’s invasion.

In December, Symonenko went on holiday to Spain using a Mercedes owned by a prominent Ukrainian businessman, The Guardian reported.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s border guard was also maligned for partying in Paris as the war continued in eastern Ukraine, per Bloomberg.

In response, Zelenskyy on Sunday vowed to stamp out longstanding corruption within Ukraine’s leadership. 

Ukraine would see “no return to the way things used to be,” he said in a video address, adding that the coming week would be the “time of appropriate decisions.”

“Of course, now the main focus is the issue of defense, this is the issue of foreign policy, this is the issue of war,” he said. “But this does not mean that I do not see and hear what is being said in society at various levels, both at the central level and in the regions.”

On Monday, Zelenskyy banned officials from traveling abroad until the end of the war, except for when performing government duties.

“If they want to rest now, they will rest outside the civil service,” he said.

Another sacked official, former Deputy Defense Minister Vyacheslav Shapovalov, resigned after Ukrainian newspapers reported that he had purchased food for the military at prices inflated two or three times higher than in grocery stores.

Shapovalov spent $360 million for the food, Ukrainian newspaper ZN UA reported.

The country’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, said the inflated prices were due to a contractor mixing up data in a “technical error,” claiming the reports of corruption were manipulating the facts.

Meanwhile, the defense ministry said Shapovalov denied the corruption claims, but asked to be fired to maintain public trust in the government.

Zelenskyy’s press office and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.