Tag: All Regions

BUDAPEST (Sputnik) – Hungary has signed an agreement with Qatar on the purchase of natural gas, the countries plan to develop economic cooperation, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said after talks with Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. “Over the past year, we have learned that Qatar is a country of key importance for Europe. The European economy has made up for a significant part of the missing Russian gas with LNG coming from here… We agreed…

Following widespread diversion of lifesaving food aid in Ethiopia last month, the World Food Programme (WFP) has strengthened safeguards and controls in a bid to prevent further misuse, the UN agency said on Tuesday. WFP had paused distributions in the restive Tigray region in the north after finding evidence of significant supplies on sale in local markets, and immediately launched an investigation. Over 20 million people are in dire need of food assistance in Ethiopia, where communities continue to be…

  Labor authorities have recognized that the mental illness suffered by an executive of the Japanese leg of Swiss watchmaker Swatch Group Ltd was caused by bullying at the hands of the branch’s president, constituting an industrial accident, the employee’s union said Wednesday. The executive, a Japanese woman in her 50s, claims she was relentlessly scolded by the president of Swatch Group (Japan) KK, a female foreign national, and subjected to power harassment, as workplace bullying is referred to in…

LONDON – Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Wednesday it had provisionally found five major global banks allegedly broke UK competition law by exchanging sensitive information on government bond trading activities in one-to-one online chats. In a statement, the watchdog alleged Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Canada each unlawfully shared information by participating in one or more one-to-one conversations in Bloomberg chatrooms between a small number of traders at varying times between 2009…

WASHINGTON – More than 100 members of the US Congress and the European Parliament on Tuesday called for the removal of an oil industry executive tapped to lead the next United Nations climate change conference. The choice of Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), to head December’s COP28 summit in Dubai has angered activists who fear it will hold back progress on reducing emissions. The lawmakers expressed “profound concern” over the appointment in…

NEW YORK – Martin Shkreli, the former pharmaceutical chief executive officer who served almost seven years in prison for securities fraud, is earning US$2,500 (S$3,370) a month consulting for a law firm and living with his sister in Queens, New York, according to the US Probation Office. Shkreli, 40, has had a mostly “positive adjustment” since being released from prison in 2022 and is currently employed by the Law Office of Christopher K. Johnston, according to a probation report filed…

(Washington, DC) – President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and legislators from his party have effectively paralyzed the country’s independent transparency and data protection agency by blocking nominations to fill vacant seats on its board, Human Rights Watch said today. The Senate should move swiftly to fill the three vacant seats. The National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Data Protection (INAI) is the independent agency charged with enforcing transparency and data protection rules in Mexico. It has played an…

(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…

Under the multi-year agreement, the two US companies will develop components for 5G devices that will be designed and manufactured in America. Apple says the deal is part of a plan it announced in 2021 to invest $430bn (£346bn) in the US economy. The move comes as a trade row centred on the technology industry intensifies between Washington and Beijing. The long-running dispute has seen the US impose a series of measures against China’s chip making industry and invest billions…

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….