World

From shoes and sweaters to car parts and coffee, Vietnam’s strict and lengthy coronavirus lockdown has sparked product shortages among worldwide brands such as Nike and Gap, which have grown increasingly dependent on the Southeast Asian nation’s manufacturers. The snarl-ups at Vietnam’s factories are part of a broader crisis around the world that is causing a surge in inflation and raising concerns about the pace of recovery in the global economy. At a fabric mill east of Hanoi, Claudia Anselmi — the Italian director of Hung Yen Knitting & Dyeing, a key cog in the supply chain of several European and U.S. clothing giants — worries daily if the factory can keep its lights on. Its output plunged by 50% when Vietnam’s latest devastating coronavirus wave first struck in spring, and it faces...

SHANGHAI: Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi said on Monday (Sep 27) it is engaging a third-party expert to assess claims from Lithuania's government that its phones carry a censoring feature. "While we dispute the characterisation of certain findings, we are engaging an independent third-party expert to assess the points raised in the report," a Xiaomi spokesperson said in a statement. The announcement comes after Lithuania's defence ministry urged consumers to throw away Chinese phones last week, following a report published by Lithuania's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) alleging that Xiaomi phones have built-in censorship capabilities. Xiaomi said at the time that its device "does not censor communications to or from its users". Xiaomi did not specify which third-party organisati...

NEW DELHI :India's antitrust watchdog on Friday imposed a penalty of US$102 million on Heineken-controlled beer giant United Breweries and US$16 million on the local unit of Denmark's Carlsberg in a case related to cartelisation of beer prices in the country. The order comes after a long-drawn investigation that in 2018 saw Competition Commission of India (CCI) raiding the offices of the brewers. The raids happened after rival Anheuser Busch InBev told the watchdog it had detected an industry cartel in India after it acquired operations of SABMiller Plc. A detailed CCI investigation, reported by Reuters last year, found that the companies collectively strategised in seeking price increases in several states, forging a cartel. In a final order published Friday, the CCI announced penaltie...

The islands of Southeast Asia are reopening to visitors — one small step at a time. The region is home to countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, that kept Covid rates low throughout 2020. That changed with the arrival of the delta variant, which forced many Southeast Asian nations to contend with big outbreaks for the first time. Plans to reopen popular hotspots such as Phuket and Bali were put on hold. Singapore, too, recorded a spike in cases and kept its borders largely sealed to tourists. Until now. Thailand Many Southeast nations are cautiously opening to travelers. One appears to be throwing its doors wide open. Thailand pioneered Southeast Asia's tourism reopening on July 1 with its first-of-a-kind "sandbox" scheme. Thailand announced this week plans to reopen its pop...

LONDON : Royal Dutch Shell plans to start producing low-carbon jet fuel at scale by 2025, in an attempt to encourage the world's airlines to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Aviation, accounting for 3per cent of the world's carbon emissions, is considered one of the toughest sectors to tackle due to a lack of alternative technologies to jet fueled-engines. Shell, one of the world's largest oil traders, said it aims to produce 2 million tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2025, a ten-fold increase from today's total global output. Produced from waste cooking oil, plants and animal fats, SAF could cut up to 80per cent of aviation emissions, Shell said. Shell, which at present only supplies SAF produced by others, including Finnish refiner Neste, said on Monday it wants green jet...

The Fed got a read on the real estate market as monetary policymakers are beginning their two-day September meeting Tuesday morning. August housing starts increased a better-than-expected 3.9% to an annual rate of nearly 1.62 million units compared to a revised 6.2% decline in July. Building permits in August rose 6% to nearly 1.73 million. Economists had seen a 2.1% drop. The July increase was revised slightly lower to 2.2%. Central bankers will put that data into the mix as they consider when to start tapering their massive Covid-era bond purchases. Hotter inflation , which Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees as temporary, will be weighed against a recovering economy. However, a big disappointment in August job growth could keep the Fed at bay a little longer. Central bankers release their p...

Zoom In Icon Arrows pointing outwards About $90.1 million has mistakenly gone out to users of popular decentralized finance, or DeFi, staking protocol Compound, after an upgrade gone epically wrong. Now, the founder is making a plea — and issuing a few threats — to incentivize the voluntary return of the platform's crypto tokens. "If you received a large, incorrect amount of COMP from the Compound protocol error: Please return it," Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Labs, tweeted late Thursday. "Keep 10% as a white-hat. Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed," continued the tweet. The price of Compound's native token, comp, initially plunged nearly 13% in a day on news of the bug, but it's since gained back ground. Whether reward recipients choose...

NEW DELHI: Rich nations need to commit much more than US$100 billion to help poor countries fight climate change due to their high historical share of emissions, India's chief economic adviser said on Thursday (Sep 30), ahead of a UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). Wealthy nations are under ever-greater pressure to deliver on an unmet pledge, made in 2009, to send US$100 billion a year to help finance an adequate response by developing countries to rising global temperatures as the world prepares for COP26. "This US$100 billion that the advanced economies are talking about actually for innovation in climate finance, you know, it's a drop in the ocean," KV Subramanian told Reuters. "I think their commitment needs to be much greater." Even though India has not yet committed to a net-z...

ST. LOUIS : When night fell, a clerk at a bustling 24-hour MotoMart flipped a switch from behind the counter. Electromagnetic locks sealed the doorway. A window sign, now illuminated in red, warned “facial recognition technology in use” and directed customers to “look up at the camera.” On this recent weeknight, a woman who wanted cigarettes was locked out. Confused at first, she quickly realized that she needed to remove her medical mask. After her unobstructed facial image was scanned into a store computer, then screened against the company’s photo archives of previous customers convicted of store-related crimes, the doors clicked open. Just a few miles away, across the Missouri state line in Illinois, such screening is against the law under the toughest privacy laws in the country. P...

WASHINGTON: Spending less on food. Drawing down on retirement savings. Dropping out of the workforce altogether. Last year, the United States massively expanded unemployment aid as COVID-19 broke out. But in the coming days those benefits will end, forcing millions of jobless Americans - some of whom haven't worked for the entire pandemic - to make hard choices about how they will get by in an economy newly menaced by the Delta variant. "I have no idea how we would survive, just on my daughter's income," said Deborah Lee, an unemployed phlebotomist in Arizona who is recovering from a COVID-19 outbreak that affected her daughter and two of her three granddaughters. The government-funded programmes that increased weekly payments and gave aid to the long-term unemployed and freelancers wer...