Category: Corruption

HONG KONG – Fierce competition for new mortgage customers is driving banks in Hong Kong to offer the highest cash rebates in nearly two decades.

The deals – offered as a percentage of the principal loan amount – ramped up from about 1.3 per cent last year to as much as 2.6 per cent currently, the highest in over 17 years, according to Centaline Mortgage Broker data.

Banks such as HSBC Holdings and Bank of China (Hong Kong) are using the incentive as a way to draw in clients, while property transactions remain subdued in the city’s real estate market that’s still reeling from an exodus of residents last year amid its zero Covid policy. Lenders are also getting squeezed as a cap on lending rates in the city crimps margins.

There may be more “Chinese police stations” operating in Canada, the Public Safety Minister told a Canadian TV station on Sunday, months after police said they were investigating whether two community centers in Montreal were being used to intimidate or harass Canadians of Chinese origin.

“I am confident that the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] have taken concrete action to disrupt any foreign interference in relationship to those so-called police stations, and that if new police stations are popping up and so on, that they will continue to take decisive action going forward,” Marco Mendicino told CTV’s Question Period in an interview.

WASHINGTON – Google, a unit of Alphabet, has agreed to pay US$8 million (S$10.7 million) to settle claims it used deceptive advertisements to promote the Pixel 4 smartphone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Friday.

The search and advertising giant, which also makes Android smartphone software and owns YouTube, has been scrutinised for antitrust and consumer protection infractions by both the federal government and state attorneys general. The federal government has filed two antitrust lawsuits.

In this instance, Paxton’s office alleged that Google hired radio announcers to give testimonials about the Pixel 4 even though the company had refused to allow them to use one of the phones.

“If Google is going to advertise in Texas, their statements better be true,” Paxton said in a statement. “In this case, the company made statements that were blatantly false, and our settlement holds Google accountable for lying to Texans for financial gain.”

A former Virginia Department of Corrections employee donated hundreds of execution documents, including these photographs, to the Library of Virginia more than a decade ago. NPR is now exclusively publishing a selection of the documents. Library of Virginia, Chiara Eisner and Monika Evstatieva/NPR Library of Virginia, Chiara Eisner and Monika Evstatieva/NPR   In January, NPR aired excerpts from four tapes recorded behind the scenes during Virginia executions. It was only the second time in history that audio from inside an…

TOKYO – Japan’s SoftBank Group reported an annual net loss of 970 billion yen (S$9.6 billion) for the year ended March 31, with the Vision Fund unit posting a quarterly investment loss due to weakness in tech valuations.

Chief executive Masayoshi Son’s attempt to bestride the tech investing industry has suffered a series of high-profile reversals after outsized bets through SoftBank’s first Vision Fund turned sour and investments made at bubbly valuations via a smaller second fund slumped.

With key architects of that strategy having left, Mr Son has focused on shoring up the balance sheet, cutting his stake in e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and stepping back from trademark presentations to focus on the listing of chip designer Arm.

United States to provide $1.2 billion in new military aid to Ukraine, including air defenses and ammunition. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says it is “only a matter of time before we can restore a sustainable and just peace for our part of Europe, for Ukraine.” Agence France-Presse journalist Arman Soldin was killed by rocket fire in eastern Ukraine where journalists were with a group of Ukrainian soldiers. The U.S. said Wednesday that for the first time it has sent an…

WASHINGTON (AP) — California Sen. Dianne Feinstein returned to the Senate on Wednesday after a two-and-a-half-month absence due to illness, giving majority Democrats a much-needed final vote as they seek to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominees and raise the nation’s debt ceiling in the coming weeks. Looking noticeably thinner and frail, Feinstein is using a wheelchair to get around the Capitol as she continues to recover from a case of shingles. She missed the Senate’s first votes on Wednesday morning…

LONDON – Britain is set to formally blacklist Russia’s mercenary force Wagner group as a terrorist organisation to increase pressure on Russia, The Times newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Wagner mercenaries have spearheaded Russia’s months-long assault on Bakhmut in the industrial Donbas region.

After two months of building a legal case, proscription or a formal blacklisting of the group was “imminent” and likely to be enacted within weeks, the newspaper reported citing a government source.

Construction workers build along State Road 836 in 2018 in Miami. HB 1191 would compel the Florida Transportation Department to study using phosphogypsum in paving projects. Roads in Florida could soon include phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — under a bill lawmakers have sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Conservation groups are urging DeSantis to veto the bill, saying phosphogypsum would hurt water quality and put road construction crews at a higher risk of cancer. Here’s…

WASHINGTON – A Federal Reserve report warned that banks’ concerns about slower growth could lead them to make fewer loans, accelerating an economic downturn, and highlighted commercial real estate as an area of heightened risk that will draw more scrutiny from bank examiners.

The US central bank’s financial stability report released on Monday is the first since four regional lenders collapsed. The episodes prompted weeks of wild trading in bank stocks and forced regulators to take a series of extraordinary steps that included backstopping all depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

A new leak found that Iran concealed weapons within earthquake aid to Syria to target U.S. troops, The Washington Post reported. A new leak of U.S. documents that circulated on the online platform Discord and obtained by The Post appear to show that Iran hid military equipment in aid shipments to Syria after the region was hit by an earthquake in February. According to the leaked assessment, the military equipment hidden in shipments included small arms, ammunition and drones. The…

A maintenance contractor’s error, and lack of adequate oversight by the Navy, led to the spill of 1,300 gallons of toxic fire suppressant at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage site near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, on Nov. 29, 2022. Military investigators found that the contractor improperly installed an air vacuum valve on the system that carries Aqueous Film Forming Foam, used to suppress fires caused by flammable liquids, just inside the underground facility’s Adit 6 tunnel in April…

Source: Iran Press TV Saturday, 06 May 2023 4:26 PM The United States is preparing an express weapons delivery for Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), despite Bejing’s repeated warnings to Washington against arming the self-ruled island, which China considers a part of its territory. The administration of US President Joe Biden will use the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) to expedite the arms shipment to Taiwan, Bloomberg reported. In a report on Friday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg said the…

Mr Karimi was among the first celebrities who vehemently criticised the deadly crackdown on the protests which erupted in September. The footballer, known as the Maradona of Asia, lived in the UAE at the time.

The protests were sparked by the death in custody of a Kurdish Iranian woman. Mahsa Amini, 22, died after allegedly being beaten by morality police who arrested her for what they said was her failure to wear her headscarf properly.

The protests spread nationwide, but have been violently suppressed. Human rights groups say security forces have killed at least 530 protesters – including around 70 children – since the protests began.

One of the documents seen by BBC Persian says Mr Karimi “was invited [to Iran] by our agent nine times and has received serious warnings”.

UN chief Antonio Guterres addresses envoys during talks on Afghanistan in Qatar on May 2, 2023 The UN reaffirmed its “commitment to stay” in Afghanistan on Friday, in a review assessing its operations in the country in light of the Taliban banning women from working for the world body. The United Nations announced on April 4 that the Taliban had barred Afghan women from employment in UN offices countrywide, a prohibition that had previously only affected NGOs but spared the…

Content moderators under Sama, Meta’s content review sub-contractor in Africa, earlier today picketed at the company’s headquarters in Kenya demanding April salary, while urging it to observe the court orders that barred it from conducting mass layoffs. The demonstrations came after Sama, in an email, instructed moderators to clear with the company by May 11, a move the employees say is against the existing court orders. The 184 moderators sued Sama for allegedly laying them off unlawfully, after it wound down…