Tag: Region Americas

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…

(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…

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…

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…

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,…

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A group of Chinese citizens living and working in Florida sued the state Monday over a new law that bans Chinese nationals from purchasing property in large swaths of the state. The law applies to land near military installations and other “critical infrastructure” and also affects citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. But Chinese citizens face the harshest restrictions. The law “will codify and expand housing discrimination against people of Asian descent…

Residents across parts of the northwestern United States are under air quality alerts this weekend after smoke from a spate of Canadian wildfires drifted south across the border. Thick plumes of smoke from blazes in the Canadian province of Alberta crossed into multiple states including Montana, Colorado, Idaho and Utah. But a Pacific cold front moving into the area toward the end of the weekend was expected to bring rain and wind that could push the smoke away. Officials in…

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…

The international community will not fall in line with the pro-Western rules pushed by the G7 and not allow the US-led group to dominate world affairs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.  “China will never accept the so-called rules imposed by the few. The international community does not and will not accept the G7-dominated Western rules that seek to divide the world based on ideologies and values,” the statement read. The Foreign Ministry went on to…