Category: World News

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Walmart’s Indian e-commerce retailer Flipkart raises $3.6 billion

Walmart's Indian e-commerce store Flipkart raises $3.6 billion

Workers unload rice bags at a grocery store known as Kirana in Bengaluru, India on Monday June 21, 2021. D.

Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart said Monday it had raised $ 3.6 billion in fresh funds from global investors including sovereign wealth funds, private equity and its parent company Walmart.

The new round of funding was led by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Walmart. It also included investments from sovereign wealth funds such as Qatar Investment Authority, Khazanah Nasional Berhad from Malaysia and DisruptAD, the venture arm of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, ADQ.

Other donors included Tencent from China, Franklin Templeton and Tiger Global.

“This investment by leading global investors reflects the promise of digital commerce in India and their belief in Flipkart’s ability to maximize that potential for everyone involved,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart, in a statement.

He said the company will focus on helping millions of Indian small and medium-sized businesses grow, including small family-owned grocery stores known as kiranas, and plans to continue investing in new categories and domestic technology.

SoftBank’s return

Japan-based SoftBank had previously sold its Flipkart stake to Walmart in 2018, and their return comes at a time when the Indian company is reportedly considering potential stock exchange options. Flipkart said it now has a valuation of $ 37.6 billion.

SoftBank has supported other Indian tech startups, such as digital payments company Paytm, budget hotel room start-up Oyo and ride-sharing company Ola.

“SoftBank’s re-investment in Flipkart is driven by our experience and the belief of the company’s management team to continue serving the needs of Indian consumers for decades to come,” said Lydia Jett, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement.

India’s e-commerce potential

Most of the retail business in India takes place in brick and mortar stores, but the online the potential remains enormous: India has one of the fastest growing and largest internet populations in the world.

In recent years, a combination of reforms, a push toward digitization, and last year’s coronavirus pandemic – and subsequent national and regional lockdowns – has shifted some of the transactions online.

In the last three months of 2020, India’s e-commerce sector grew 36% in volume and 30% in value year-over-year, according to a joint report by Unicommerce and Kearney.

The personal care, beauty and wellness category grew 95% year-over-year, while consumer goods and health care grew 46%. According to the report, most of the incremental growth was driven by sharp spikes in e-commerce volume and value in India’s tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

Flipkart’s competitors include US e-commerce giant Amazon, which has invested billions of dollars in the Indian market, as well as local names like JioMart, Reliance Industries’ online grocery delivery app.

For its part, the Indian government reportedly proposed new draft e-commerce rules in June that are expected to affect Flipkart and Amazon India.

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Florida-Primarily based Physician Arrested in Haiti President’s Assassination

Hong Kong Website Doxxing Police Gets Blocked, Raising Censorship Fears

A Haitian-born doctor based in Florida has been arrested as a “central” suspect in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and the national police chief suggested at a Sunday news conference that he believes the suspect was plotting to become president.

The doctor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 63, is now the third Haitian-born suspect with U.S. ties to be arrested.

The Haitian national police chief, Léon Charles, painted Mr. Sanon as a key figure behind the president’s assassination.

“He arrived by private plane in June with political objectives and contacted a private security firm to recruit the people who committed this act,” the police chief said. The firm, he said, was a Venezuelan security company based in the United States called CTU.

“The initial mission that was given to these assailants was to protect the individual named Emmanuel Sanon, but afterwards the mission changed,” Mr. Charles said, implying that Mr. Sanon had meant to install himself as president.

As evidence, Mr. Charles said that Mr. Sanon was the person one of the Colombians contacted after being arrested. During a raid of his home, the authorities said, the police found a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency cap, a box of cartridges, two vehicles, six pistol holsters, about 20 boxes of bullets, 24 unused shooting targets and four license plates from the Dominican Republic.

A YouTube video recorded in 2011 titled “Dr. Christian Sanon — Leadership for Haiti” appears to present Mr. Sanon as a potential leader of the country. In it, the speaker denounces the leaders of Haiti as corrupt plunderers of its resources.

“With me in power, you are going to have to tell me: ‘What are you doing with my uranium?’” the speaker says. “‘What are you going to do with the oil that we have in the country? What are you going to do with the gold?’”

The night of Mr. Moïse’s death, people who appeared to be arriving to assassinate him shouted that they were part of a D.E.A. operation, according to videos filmed from nearby buildings and synchronized by The New York Times.

Two Americans arrested last week have said that they were not in the room when the president was killed and that they had worked only as translators for the hit squad, according to a Haitian judge who interviewed them. They met with other participants at an upscale hotel in the Pétionville suburb of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, to plan the attack.

The goal was not to kill the president, the two Americans told the judge, but to bring him to the national palace. On Sunday, Mr. Charles said one of the assailants had been given a warrant to arrest the president.

One of the Americans was identified as James J. Solages, 35, who lived in South Florida and previously worked as a security guard at the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. The other was identified as Joseph Vincent, 55.

Other suspects include 18 Colombian men, most of them former soldiers, and three Haitians.

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Richard Branson reaches house on Virgin Galactic flight

Richard Branson reaches space on Virgin Galactic flight

After nearly 17 years of development and over a billion dollars invested in Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson achieved his dream and reached space.

From the cabin of the spaceship, Branson spoke of space flight as “the complete experience of a lifetime”.

“This is the moment I dreamed of as a child, and to be honest, nothing can prepare you for a view of Earth from space,” said Branson after landing.

The company’s VSS Unity spacecraft launched over the New Mexico skies on Sunday, with two pilots driving the vehicle with the billionaire founder and three Virgin Galactic employees. VSS Unity – after it was released over 40,000 feet by a carrier aircraft called the VMS Eve – ignited its rocket motor and accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound as it ascended to the edge of space.

Sir Richard Branson stands on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in front of the trading of Virgin Galactic (SPCE) in New York, USA, 28 October 2019.

Richard Branson Virgin Galactic IPO NYSE

VSS Unity then performed a slow backflip in weightlessness as the Virgin Galactic crew were weightless and floating around the cabin of the spaceship. The spacecraft reached an altitude of 86.1 kilometers (53.5 miles or approximately 282,000 feet).

The vehicle then glided back through the atmosphere to land on the runway of Spaceport America where it had previously taken off.

VSS Unity will be released from the carrier aircraft VMS Eve during the launch of its third space flight on May 22, 2021.

Virgo galactic

The pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci flew with Unity. Sitting next to Branson in the spacecraft’s cabin are chief ronaut trainer Beth Moses, chief operations engineer Colin Bennett, and vice president for government affairs Sirisha Bandla. Both Mackay and Masucci have previously flown into space, as have Moses and pilots CJ Sturckow and Mark Stucky.

The US officially regards pilots who have flown more than 50 miles (or approximately 262,000 feet) as astronauts.

VSS Unity is designed for up to six passengers together with the two pilots. The company has approximately 600 reservations for tickets for future flights, which sell for prices between $ 200,000 and $ 250,000 each.

“We’re here to make space more accessible to everyone,” said Branson after the flight. “The mission statement that I wrote in my spacesuit was to make the dream of space travel come true for my grandchildren … and for many people living today, for everyone.”

The space goals

This was Virgin Galactic’s fourth spaceflight to date, the second this year, and the first with more than one passenger.

In addition to flying Branson, spaceflight had other goals as Virgin Galactic is still testing its spacecraft system, with the goal of entering commercial service in early 2022.

The four crew members test the spacecraft’s cabin and the training program Virgin Galactic has developed to ensure customers are properly prepared for the experience. In addition, Bandla will test running a research experiment while doing an exercise with plants in test tubes for the University of Florida.

Sunday’s space flight is one of three Virgin Galactic still needs to complete development, and two more are expected this year.

A competition for others

Shortly after the spaceflight landed, Branson announced that Virgin Galactic had partnered with sweepstakes company Omaze to offer a chance for two seats on “one of the first Virgin Galactic commercial spaceflights” early next year.

“You have a chance to go into space,” said Branson.

The competition requires a donation that goes to a nonprofit organization called Space For Humanity. The billionaire added that he will put on his “Willy Wonka hat” to give the winners a tour of Spaceport America.

“It’s a way of just trying to attract a lot of people who otherwise couldn’t afford to go into space,” said Branson.

Branson’s trip

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, front center, gathers with Virgin Galactic employees in front of the new SpaceShip Two VSS Unity following a new aircraft roll-out ceremony at Mojave Air and Space Port on February 19, 2016 in Mojave, California .

Ricky Carioti | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Branson has dreamed of going into space since watching the Apollo moon landing and founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 to fly private passengers into space. He started the company to buy spaceships built by aerospace designer Burt Rutans Scaled Composites.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo system emerged from Branson’s contract with Scaled Composites. However, the spacecraft’s development had several setbacks, including a rocket engine explosion on the ground in 2007 that killed three Scaled Composite employees, and the 2014 crash of the first SpaceShipTwo, VSS Enterprise, in which the co-pilot of Virgin Galactic, Michael Alsbury, was killed and injured pilot Peter Siebold.

The company then built VSS Unity, which is equipped with additional safety measures to prevent future accidents. Virgin Galactic began testing Unity in 2016 and first reached space in December 2018. In addition, Virgin Galactic rolled the next spacecraft in its fleet earlier this year, VSS Imagine, which is the first of its next-generation SpaceShip III vehicle class.

Last month, Virgin Galactic received a license extension from the US Federal Aviation Administration that allows the company to fly passengers on future space flights. The company completed a 29-element verification and validation program for the FAA and reached the last two regulatory milestones with its most recent space test in May.

Branson wasn’t previously expected to fly on Sunday’s space flight, as Virgin Galactic leadership said the company planned to fly the founder on his penultimate test flight. But after billionaire Jeff Bezos announced that he would be flying on July 20 on his company’s Blue Origin company’s first passenger flight, Virgin Galactic changed its flight schedule – with the aim of flying Branson nine days before Bezos.

Sunday’s flight, which takes off from Bezos or Elon Musk, means Branson will be the first of the multi-billion dollar space company founders to drive his own spaceship.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin compete in suborbital space tourism, with both companies’ spaceships taking passengers to the edge of space for a few minutes to soar in weightlessness. An orbital flight, such as with Musks SpaceX, costs tens of millions of dollars and typically spends several days or weeks in space.

Branson’s company believes there is a market that can accommodate up to 2 million people on suborbital space flights with prices between $ 250,000 and $ 500,000, with the market expanding as costs drop.

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Asia Grapples With Delta-Pushed Outbreaks

Asia Grapples With Delta-Driven Outbreaks

Indonesia has reported almost twice as many coronavirus cases as the US in the past few days. Malaysia’s per capita number of cases is roughly on par with Brazil and Iran. And the recent increases in Covid in Japan and South Korea have led to strict new restrictions on movement there from Monday.

Across the Asia-Pacific region, the Delta variant is causing new outbreaks in locations where transmission was previously kept relatively low but the rate of vaccination was too slow to contain recent outbreaks. One result is that everyday activities will be restricted again, just like in the fearful early days of the pandemic – even as the West returns to normal.

Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, is a case in point. His government once hoped that its archipelagic geography and young population would save it from a debilitating eruption. But only about 13 percent of its 270 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and Delta’s rise is marginalizing its healthcare system, forcing some patients to hunt for oxygen.

On July 3, the government closed mosques, schools, shopping centers and sports facilities on two of Indonesia’s largest islands for two weeks. But the daily average of new cases – more than 33,000 on Sunday – has continued to rise. Officials said Friday they would extend the same emergency rules to other islands.

Intensive care units in and around the capital Jakarta are at full capacity, doctors who have received the vaccine from the Chinese company Sinovac have fallen ill or died. The government has announced that it will give a third dose of the Moderna vaccine to around 1.5 million health workers starting this week.

In other Southeast Asian countries, too, the percentages of the population who even got a shot are in the single- or low-double-digit range. And as variant infections multiply, some are experiencing their worst outbreaks yet.

In Myanmar, where health workers went on strike to protest the military coup in February, cases are skyrocketing and schools were closed until July 23. People in several Malaysian cities are rubbing themselves under strict lockdowns as the country reports the highest per capita fall in the region. Vietnam is restricting freedom of movement in its two major cities and is trying to import vaccines. And at Thailand’s largest international airport, a terminal is being converted into a field hospital.

Richer countries in the region have more resources to fight the virus. But they too are vulnerable because they have made little progress in their vaccination campaigns. In Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, less than one in three people has had an injection, according to a New York Times tracker.

New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, reported the largest daily increase in cases this year on Sunday, as well as Australia’s first coronavirus-related death this year, a woman in her 90s. Sydney, the state capital, has already been on lockdown and authorities have warned it could be extended beyond July 17 when it expires.

South Korea reported 1,378 new cases on Saturday, the third day record in a row. The government plans to increase the restrictions in the capital Seoul and some neighboring regions to the highest level from Monday. Schools are closing, bars and nightclubs are closing, and no more than two people are allowed to meet in public after 6 p.m.

And in Japan, the fourth state of emergency will come into effect in Tokyo on Monday, less than two weeks before the start of the Summer Olympics. Restaurants, department stores and other businesses are being asked to close early, and the organizers of the Summer Games have announced that they will be banning viewers from most events in and around Tokyo. A ceremony marking the arrival of the Olympic torch in town was held in an almost empty park late last week.

On Saturday, Fukushima Prefecture said it would also exclude spectators from Olympic events due to the rising number of cases, reversing a position announced two days earlier by Olympic organizers.

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Crackdown on Didi and firms prefer it may value China as a lot as $45 trillion by 2030

Crackdown on Didi and companies like it could cost China as much as $45 trillion by 2030

A navigation map on the app of Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi is seen on a mobile phone in front of the app logo displayed in this illustration picture taken July 1, 2021.

Florence Lo | Reuters

This was a clarifying week for global investors — or for anyone concerned about authoritarian capitalism — of just how much the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be willing to pay to ensure its dominance.

The answer, according to a rough calculation from a new partnership formed by the Rhodium Group and the Atlantic Council, is as much as $45 trillion in new capital flows into and out of China by 2030, if the party were willing to pursue serious reform. It’s an immeasurable loss of economic dynamism.

Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwards

Graph courtesy of the Rhodium Group and Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center’s China Pathfinder Project

What is clear is that Chinese President Xi Jinping, during this month’s celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the CCP, has sent an unmistakable message at home and abroad of who is in charge.

Chinese domestic companies, particularly of the tech and data-rich variety, will be more likely to shun Western capital markets and adhere to party preferences. Foreign investors, only too happy to accept risk for the long-proven upside of Chinese stocks, now must factor in a growing risk premium as Xi tightens the screws.

“Wall Street must now acknowledge that the risk of investing in these companies can’t be known, much less disclosed,” writes Josh Rogin in the Washington Post. “Therefore, U.S. investors shouldn’t be trusting their futures to China Inc.”

The story that triggered this week’s stir was the $4.4 billion U.S. initial public offering (IPO) of the world’s largest ride-hailing and food delivery service, Didi. The ripples could be long-lasting and far-reaching for the lucrative relations between China and Wall Street. Dealogic shows that Chinese companies have raised $26 billion from new U.S. listings in 2020 and 2021.

Until this week, the greatest concern for investors was that new US accounting rules would stymie that flow. It is now more likely to be Chinese regulators themselves who plug the spigot.

The facts are that Didi Global began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on June 30, auspiciously one day ahead of the CCP centennial celebration.

One early hint of trouble was that the company played down the blockbuster listing. Not only did company officials resist the usual routine of ringing the opening bell. They went further by instructing their employees not to call attention to the event on social networks.

Still, Didi’s shares rose 16% on the second day of trading, setting the company’s market value at nearly $80 billion.     

But by July 2, Chinese regulators put Didi under cybersecurity review, banned it from accepting new users, and then, in the next days, went even further by instructing app stores to stop offering Didi’s app.

Credit all of that to a mixture of increasingly authoritarian politics, regulatory concerns over data privacy and U.S. markets, and the continual expanding of fronts in the U.S.-Chinese contest.

The cost to investors by Friday was a drop to only 67% of the stock’s original value. If that’s as far as the downside goes and if the regulatory retaliation against Didi stops where it is, this week could still be dubbed a win by Didi executives.

The more serious matter is the wider chilling effect, coming in the context of a series of stalled or reversed Chinese economic and marketization reforms.

The latest came on Thursday, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the Cyberspace Administration of China, which reports to Xi, would police all overseas market listings.

On that same day, Chinese medical data firm LinkDoc became the first Chinese company to ditch its IPO after the Didi news. Expect more Chinese companies to shelve planned listings and for many others to remove them from consideration.

For all the billions of lost investment capital this could bring over the short term, the larger cost is one that could be measured in trillions of dollars of endangered potential as Xi consistently backs away from the market liberalizations he once appeared to champion.

The story could not be more clearly written than through the accompanying chart from Rhodium and the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. From 2000 to 2018, China’s economic growth shook the world as it expanded its share of the global gross domestic product (GDP) from 4% to 16%. China enjoyed similar growth in goods exports and imports.

Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwards

Graph courtesy of the Rhodium Group and Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center’s China Pathfinder Project

At the same time, however, China’s inward portfolio investment grew from near zero to just 2% of the global total while its outward portfolio investment grew from near zero to only 1%. This is not just unachieved potential from the past — it is now also the deeply endangered potential for the future that could equal the estimate $45 trillion through 2030.

In a must-read analysis of the Chinese economy in Foreign Affairs, Atlantic Council nonresident senior fellow Daniel Rosen, who is also a Rhodium Group founding partner, argues that China under Xi has repeatedly attempted to reform the Chinese economy, only to pull back. The accompanying chart provides a useful overview of what has become habit.

Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwards

Graph courtesy of the Rhodium Group and Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center’s China Pathfinder Project

“The consequences of that failure are clear,” Rosen writes. Since Xi took control, total debt has risen to at least 276% of GDP from 225%. It now takes 10 yuan of new credit, up from six, to create one yuan of growth. GDP growth fell to 6% in the year ahead of the pandemic from 9.6%.

Writes Rosen: “At some point, China’s leaders must confront this tradeoff: [S]ustainable economic efficiency and political omnipotence do not go hand in hand.”

Conventional wisdom has it that the West was naïve to think that China’s economic growth and modernization, which the West so enthusiastically supported, would eventually bring with it political liberalization. Now the conventional wisdom is that China has shown it can be brutally authoritarian and economically dynamic simultaneously.

What’s probably more true is that Xi may soon face the contradictions between his simultaneous desire for economic dynamism and increased authoritarian control. History shows he cannot have both, but for the moment, Xi appears willing to risk the dynamism in favor of the control.

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Warmth Wave Unfold Fireplace That Erased Lytton, British Columbia

Heat Wave Spread Fire That Erased Lytton, British Columbia

TORONTO — Something strange was happening to the acacia trees in Lytton, British Columbia.

The small town in Western Canada had seen three days of extreme heat that each broke national temperature records by June 30, rising to 121 degrees. That morning at the Lytton Chinese History Museum, Lorna Fandrich noticed the green leaves dropping off the trees surrounding the building, she said, apparently unable to tolerate the heat.

Hours later, Lytton was on fire. A village of fewer than 300 people, nestled among mountain ranges, and prone to hot summers, the town was consumed by flames that destroyed 90 percent of it, killed two and injured several others, the authorities said.

Investigators are probing whether local rail traffic is responsible for starting the fire, which was exacerbated by the heat, amid temperatures that climate researchers say would virtually not be possible without human-caused global warming.

On Friday, when a path was finally cleared of downed power lines, bricks and other debris to make way for five buses taking residents to tour the town, the village was almost unrecognizable, the residents said.

Mounds of warped metal and disfigured wood poked out of gutted buildings. Whatever brick walls remained were often scarred by black scorch marks.

Matilda and Peter Brown saw that their house has been destroyed, leaving just the skeleton of a traditional Indigenous hut used to air dry salmon.

“That was our home,” Ms. Brown said through tears. “That was our sanctuary. Right now we have no place.”

The extreme heat wave that blasted through much of the Pacific Northwest at the end of June spurred widespread wildfires, a drastic spike in heat-related deaths and environmental devastation that wiped out millions of coastal wildlife.

Lytton was hit particularly hard, with temperatures ranging between 116 and 121 degrees. The fire left displaced residents and neighboring Indigenous communities wondering what could be salvaged among the ashes.

“Where many buildings stood is now simply charred earth,” the village of Lytton said in a July 6 statement.

Mr. Brown, who is from the Lytton First Nation, lost one of the family’s heirloom cedar baskets and some personal documents, stowed away in a gun safe.

Ms. Brown is a member of the Ts’kw’aylaxw First Nation, near the neighboring town of Lillooet, where she was leading an addiction counseling group at the time of the fire. She said she is taking time away from work to tend to this “nightmare.”

“I don’t want to be a wounded healer,” she added.

A dramatic scene unfolded June 30 when “someone banged on the office windows after hours” to alert town staff members of the fire, the village statement said. The mayor ordered a complete evacuation, while volunteer firefighters attempted to tame the roaring blaze in dry conditions that allowed it to tear through the town.

At the height of the heat wave, more than 90 crew members flew to British Columbia to help the wildfire service, battling flames over thousands of acres in challenging conditions for overheating equipment. Sudden deaths also rose sharply due to the heat. Emergency responders attended 777 that were reported to the provincial coroner’s office between June 25 and July 1, more than three times the number in the same period last year.

The heat wave in Canada presented an additional public health concern, as authorities were still grappling with the challenge of the coronavirus and Canadians just beginning to enjoy some of the pleasures of summer as restrictions ease.

Gordon Murray, president of the Two Rivers Farmers Market in Lytton, said feelings of grief, sorrow, anger and frustration aboard his bus on Friday were “overwhelming.”

More disconcerting still was just how localized the fire was, he said. He and his partner have been living in Lytton for about a decade, and could see their chimney and white fireplace from their vantage point on the bus. They also lost a cat to the fire.

“That was one of the strange things about it, is that the town is erased,” Mr. Murray said. “Literally, there’s an occasional chimney stack as a kind of exclamation point to the fact that the town is completely gone.”

Ten animal welfare workers were allowed behind the evacuation perimeter on July 8 to carry out a pet and livestock rescue. Forty-one animals were saved and were being assessed before they could be reunited with their owners, said Lorie Chortyk, a spokeswoman at the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Ms. Fandrich, the museum owner, opted not to join the tour, “because it’ll be very emotional, and I think we’ll just wait until they let us go down on an individual basis,” she said.

Though she is not of Chinese heritage herself, she opened the museum in 2017, modeled after a traditional temple that once existed on that land to recognize the contributions and history of Chinese workers in British Columbia. It housed more than 1,600 artifacts, books and archives — all lost in the fire. The town’s history museum also burned down.

“We’ve lost two of the core parts of our history,” Ms. Fandrich said. “So that’s all gone.”

The nearby homes of her two sons were razed. Her daughter’s coffee shop was also destroyed.

The severity of the fires that scorched close to 1.7 million acres in Canada reported by its natural resources agency, occurred with temperatures that surpassed what researchers had ever seen in previous heat waves, according to a recent analysis by a team of international climate researchers.

On the province’s Salish Sea coast, Christopher Harley, a marine biologist and professor at the University of British Columbia, has been surveying the heat wave’s toll on the shoreline, estimating it to be in the billions. On a beach site visit Friday, he said the crunch of dead mussels beneath his feet was a bleak reminder of the devastation to wildlife.

“You start adding in the clams and the barnacles and the sea stars and the snails,” he said. “The true number, whatever it is, is going to be almost incomprehensible.”

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G-20 monetary leaders agree to maneuver ahead on plan for a world tax crackdown

G-20 financial leaders agree to move forward on plan for an international tax crackdown

Italian carabinieri guard St. Mark’s Square, the day before the meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers in Venice on July 8, 2021.

ANDREAS SOLARO | AFP | Getty Images

The group of 20 major economies’ financiers said they had agreed on a “more stable and fairer international tax architecture,” according to a communique from Saturday’s meeting.

The G-20 is a forum for the governments and central bank governors of 20 major economies. At a meeting of the group’s finance ministers and central bank governors, leaders endorsed components of a tax plan, including multinational corporate profits redistribution and a global minimum tax, after “many years of discussion and building on the progress made over the past year.” They write.

The group aims to see national leaders adopt the plan at a G-20 summit in October.

According to Reuters, the pact would set a minimum global corporate tax of at least 15% to prevent multinational companies from shopping at the lowest tax rate. The deal would also change the way companies like Amazon and Alphabets Google are taxed, based in part on where they sell products and services rather than where their headquarters are located.

Reuters reported that Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had confirmed that all G-20 economies were on board the pact. Meanwhile, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said a handful of smaller countries are still against it, including low-tax countries like Ireland and Hungary, but are being encouraged to join by October.

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‘Mom, When Will You Come?’: The Covid Orphans of India

‘Mother, When Will You Come?’: The Covid Orphans of India

When Shawez, who had given up his studies to work with his father, returned home without his parents, the landlord had locked them out, saying he would give them the key only after the rent was paid. His uncle borrowed money to cover some of the debt so that Shawez and his siblings could collect their belongings.

Shawez’s younger sister, Kahkashan, 9, has been hit the hardest. Nearly every day, she picks up the phone and dials her mother, talking to her as if she were on the other end.

“Mother, when will you come? I miss you,” she says.

“My only dream is to educate my siblings,” Shawez said. “My mother would call me when I would be out for work and ask, ‘Son, it is getting late. When will you come home?’ Now no one will call me anymore,” he said.

In Pattapur, Sonali, too, feels as if she has lost her most powerful protector.

In a thick diary, on the page next to the one on which she has noted the dates of her parents’ deaths, Sonali jotted a poem dedicated to her mother.

On a recent day, she read it aloud to her siblings.

Undergoing the ups and downs of life, our mother brings us up.

Our mother is the tallest in this world, she is the one who can keep us well.

This world is barren without mother, this world is not the same place without her.

Mother bears the pain on our behalf, but we fail to bear the pain on mother’s behalf.

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‘Black Widow’ nabs $13.2 million in field workplace gross sales Thursday

Disney to debut 'Black Widow,' 'Cruella' in theaters and Disney+

Scarlett Johansson plays Natasha Romanoff, AKA Black Widow, in Marvel’s “Black Widow”.

Disney | wonder

“Black Widow” sold $ 13.2 million in preview tickets Thursday, raising the box office bar of the pandemic era.

The Marvel movie is expected to gross between $ 80 million and $ 110 million in box office revenue this weekend.

Universal’s “F9” grossed $ 7.1 million in its Thursday previews last month and $ 70 million on its debut weekend. Both were records for a film released in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The revenue for “Black Widow” on Thursday is equal to the $ 15.4 million raised from “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and the $ 14.5 million raised from “Thor: Ragnarok” . Both films were released in 2017. “Spider-Man” grossed $ 117 million on its three-day opening weekend and “Thor: Ragnarok,” according to Comscore, $ 123 million.

The strong preview numbers – coupled with pre-sales of tickets that keep pace with several Marvel films released before the pandemic – suggest fans will see this feature hit the big screen, despite it being available at Disney + for US $ 30 Dollar is available.

“This is the weekend Marvel fans have been waiting for, and their enthusiasm is reflected in Thursday’s preview figures, which point to what may well be the best pandemic-era opening weekend for Black Widow,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “Despite its availability on Disney +, ‘Black Widow’ is undeniably a big screen event and once again proves the essence of the cinematic experience.”

The number of cinemas open to the public is still below the level of 2019. Before the weekend, around 81% of the cinemas will sell tickets, reports Comscore.

Regardless, Black Widow is headed for the biggest opening of the pandemic, and the industry is likely to see the highest total weekend box office gross since March 2020. This will be a massive step up from the $ 901,000 domestic box office made during the same weekend last year.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Universal Studios and CNBC.

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Educators’ Unions Reward C.D.C. Faculties Steerage However Acknowledge Challenges

Educators’ Unions Praise C.D.C. Schools Guidance But Acknowledge Challenges

The two largest U.S. unions representing educators on Friday approved the new federal guidelines calling for schools to be fully reopened, while allowing children under 12 who are not eligible for vaccination to go ahead face further challenges.

The new recommendations, issued on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, come after students, teachers and parents experienced a disruptive school year marked by changing guides, school closings and hastily implemented distance learning plans to contain the coronavirus .

Education has been a focus since the pandemic broke out when many teachers and families feared in-person tuition. But distance learning has proven to be an inadequate substitute for many parents and students, and virtually all major counties are planning to reopen full-time schools this fall – though they have yet to convince some reluctant parents to return their children.

Education Minister Miguel Cardona said in a statement Friday that “our top priority is to ensure that our nation’s students can safely study in person in their schools and classrooms.”

The new CDC guidelines will help educators achieve this goal, union leaders said.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Alliance, the country’s largest teachers’ union, said in a statement the guidelines are an “important roadmap to reducing the risk of Covid-19 in schools.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who has already pushed for schools to fully reopen this fall, said in her own statement that “The guidelines affirm two truths: that students learn better in the classroom and that vaccines are ours the best bet is to stop the spread of this virus. “

The new recommendations call for vaccinating as many people as possible, wearing masks for the unvaccinated in schools, a meter spacing between students and the superposition of various preventive tactics.

“For educators across the country, this guide sets a lower limit, not an upper limit; it builds on the evidence we have about the transmission of Covid and reminds us that we need to remain committed to other containment strategies, “said Ms. Weingarten, adding that” we address the growing concern about the Delta variant as well The evolving science around Covid share transmission among young people making it mandatory for school districts to be committed to both vaccinations and these safety protocols. “

Studies suggest that vaccines against the Delta variant remain effective.

The new guidelines also suggest that districts base their approaches on local conditions rather than general regulations, an approach that Ms. Pringle welcomed.

“It is important that we listen to the special needs of all of our schools and the communities they serve,” said Ms. Pringle. “We as a country have a responsibility to cope with the disproportionate burden that colored communities suffered during this pandemic, which has contributed to families reluctance or reluctance to allow their children to return to face-to-face education.”

Schools proved far safer than many had thought during the pandemic, and in general, serious illness and child deaths were rare. Young children are also less likely to transmit the virus to others than teenagers and adults.

Meisha Porter, the chancellor of New York Schools, the largest school system in the country, reiterated the plan to bring students back to full-time face-to-face classes in September.

“Science shows that our rigorous, multi-faceted approach has made our schools the safest places to be, and we are reviewing CDC guidelines with our health professionals,” Porter said in a statement.

However, no vaccines have been federally approved for children under the age of 12, and children have made up a larger proportion of cases over the course of the pandemic, although there are far fewer cases overall than during the winter peak.

Scientists are concerned about an inflammatory syndrome that can appear in children weeks after contracting the virus, even those who were asymptomatic with the infection, and some children experience persistent symptoms often known as long covid.

The highly communicable delta variant is spreading rapidly in areas with low vaccination rates – the CDC estimates that it is now the predominant variant in the United States.

Expert opinion on the new guidelines was mixed.

Dr. Benjamin Linas, an infectious disease specialist at Boston University, called the proposals “scientifically sound and just right”.

“For the first time, I really think they hit it in the nose,” he said.

Emily Oster, Brown University economist and parenting book author who entered the controversial school reopening debate last year and used data to argue that children should return to school in person, said they were generally comfortable with the framework of the Agency was satisfied, which it said gave the districts a roadmap for reopening without being overly prescriptive.

Despite pushing for even more relaxed leadership – for example, the complete abolition of the three-foot rule – she said the new recommendations give districts important flexibility.

“This is in some ways the most positive I have about your advice,” said Dr. Easter.

But Jennifer B. Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, feared the debate among local officials about the best security protocols could prove “crippling”.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the decision on what action to take has “always been the responsibility of the local school district.”

The coverage is from Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Emily Anthes and Sarah Mervosh.