Author: 5amResearch

(Brussels) – European governments risk relying too much on voluntary audit and certification initiatives to protect rights in European Union minerals supply chains, Human Rights Watch said in a question-and-answer document released today. EU laws, including the draft Critical Raw Minerals Act released in March 2023, need to recognize that compliance with voluntary standards is no substitute for rigorous regulatory scrutiny and enforcement. Audit and certifications initiatives purport to assess and certify companies’ respect for human rights and the environment…

Most of us wouldn’t argue that private companies can’t run their businesses the way they prefer. The gold standard has been the right to refuse service to anyone — something that covers everything from refusing paper checks from certain customers to booting people off social media services for refusing to stop behaving like inveterate assholes. When private companies do things, they rarely mess with constitutional protections. There are guardrails in place to prevent discrimination against minorities and other historically oppressed…

SINGAPORE – Financial institutions are required to alert the police and the financial regulator if they suspect that a transaction could be related to a crime, although there is no threshold set for when they must flag these activities. They are also required to step up their measures to manage the higher risks of money laundering and terrorism financing posed by customers such as wealthy individuals, said a Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) spokesman on Tuesday. MAS said financial institutions…

By Harun Maruf  The United States military has confirmed conducting a new airstrike against al-Shabab militants in the Middle Juba region of southern Somalia. The airstrike took place in Jilib town on Saturday in collaboration with the Somali federal government, according to a press statement released Monday by the U.S. Africa Command known as AFRICOM. “The command’s initial assessment is that no civilians were injured or killed,” the statement said. The AFRICOM statement did not say whether any of the…

ZURICH – Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court has received 230 claims against the country’s financial regulator Finma after it wrote off the value of Credit Suisse’s AT1 bonds, the court said on Tuesday. The claims related to 2,500 individual parties, a court spokesman told Reuters. The court in the north-eastern Swiss city of St Gallen, declined to say whether the time limit for filing further claims had expired or the amount of compensation claimed. The bond holders have sued Finma after…

A wave of uncertainty swept across India’s already unstable aviation sector as Go First, a once thriving private airline owned by the Wadia Group, announced a halt to its operations, making it the 11th airline to cease its services in the last decade. The budget airline opted for voluntary insolvency resolution proceedings before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), delivering a significant jolt to the industry. The primary reason for this drastic move lies in the alleged failure of US-based…

Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a pension fund-led lawsuit that accused the bank of defrauding shareholders by misleading them over the progress it was making to rectify a slew of scandals. The Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension & Relief Fund and the state of Rhode Island were among the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in June 2020 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The…

First Citizens BancShares Inc, which acquired Silicon Valley Bank following its collapse, sued HSBC Holdings PLC on Monday, accusing it of poaching more than 40 of the failed bank’s employees in order to launch its own U.S. venture banking business. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court says HSBC violated federal law by hiring away the workers so it could gain access to Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) trade secrets including information about clients in the tech and healthcare sectors….

Epstein’s old emails and calendar contain plenty of information to raise eyebrows about some of the most wealthy and well-known socialites. One of the biggest names in Epstein’s rolodex is the prolific philanthropist and megabillionaire Bill Gates. No longer just known for his computer programming savvy and lectures on greenhouse gases, Mr. Gates’ personal acquaintances are starting to peek through thanks to the investigative work of the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jeffrey Epstein allegedly had…

LONDON – Meta on Monday was fined a record 1.2 billion euros (S$1.75 billion) and ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States, in a major ruling against the social media giant for violating European Union (EU) data protection rules. The penalty, which eclipses a 746 million euro EU fine previously doled out to Amazon.com, was announced by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission. It is potentially one of the most consequential in the five…

WASHINGTON — The Air Force is focused on avoiding the mistakes that plagued past programs like the F-35, as the service officially kicks off its effort to build a sixth-generation fighter, Secretary Frank Kendall said Monday. That includes ensuring the Air Force has access to all the sustainment data it needs from the contractor building the Next Generation Air Dominance platform, Kendall told reporters at a breakfast roundtable hosted by the Defense Writers Group. “We’re not going to repeat the,…

Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu has accused Sweden of meddling in his country’s elections as the vote for a new president heads into a runoff next Sunday. Soylu, a member of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party, accused election monitors from Sweden’s Oy ve Otesi (Vote and Beyond) of putting pressure on voters at polling places. “The Swedish state is funding this Oy ve Otesi association. Sending it money, but why? To interfere in the election in Turkiye. It is so obvious and clear,” the minister told a campaign rally in Istanbul, as quoted by the Aydinlik newspaper. Soylu is known for his harsh criticism of the West. He accused the United States on Wednesday of trying to influence the election, which will see Erdogan and his opposition challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, face off in the second round on May 28. END OF CONTENT

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that Russian forces weren’t occupying Bakhmut, casting doubt on Moscow’s insistence that the eastern Ukrainian city had fallen. Responding to a reporter’s question about the status of the city at the Group of Seven summit in Japan, Zelenskyy said: “Bakhmut is not occupied by the Russian Federation as of today.” “We are not throwing people (away) to die,” Zelenskyy said in Ukrainian through an interpreter. “People are the treasure. I clearly…

Adam Kovacevich is the CEO and founder of a center-left tech industry coalition called Chamber of Progress and has worked at the intersection of tech and politics for 20 years, leading public policy at Google and Lime and serving as a Democratic Hill aide. When the Biden administration proposed new protections earlier this month to prevent law enforcement from demanding reproductive healthcare data from companies, they took a critical first step in protecting our personal data. But there remains a…

Source: Saudi Press Agency Jeddah, May 21, 2023, SPA — The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States of America announce that on May 20, 2023, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces signed an Agreement on a Short-Term Ceasefire and Humanitarian Arrangements. The short-term ceasefire, which enters into force 48 hours after the signing of the Agreement, shall remain in effect for seven days and may be extended with the…

A suburban man whose federal life sentence was commuted by then-President Obama in 2015 has been charged with three counts of attempted murder in connection with a recent shooting on Interstate 57. Alton Mills, 54, of Evergreen Park, is being held without bond at the Cook County Jail, Illinois State Police said in a news release on Friday. Mills was arrested for a shooting that occurred on Sunday near the I-57 northbound entrance ramp from 147th Street in Posen, according…