Bulgarians vote in 4th election Dhaka Bangladesh Nazrul Islam Mirpur 1012 Covid News 2023
Thousands came out to downtown Montreal streets this Saturday to again protest the Iran regime's harsh crackdown on protests happening across the country.
Dozens have been killed in the protests, sparked after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died last month after being detained by morality police who stopped her for not properly wearing her hijab.
Taichung Commercial Bank of Taiwan said on Friday it had agreed to buy California-based American Continental Bank for approximately $82 million as part of an effort to expand into the U.S. market.
American Continental Bank mainly serves Chinese-American communities in the City of Industry and surrounding communities in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties. It has branches in City of Industry, Alhambra, Chino Hills and Arcadia in California, as well as in Bellevue, Washington. The bank also has loan production offices Fremont, California, and Carrollton, Texas.
Residents on the small resort island of Polillo are accustomed to severe weather – their island sits in the northeastern Philippines, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean where storms typically gather strength and turn into typhoons.
But even they were stunned by the intensity of Typhoon Noru, known locally as Typhoon Karding, that turned from a typhoon into a super typhoon in just six hours before hitting the region earlier this week.
“We’re used to typhoons because we’re located where storms usually land,” said Armiel Azas Azul, 36, who owns the Sugod Beach and Food Park on the island, a bistro under palm trees where guests drink coconut juice in tiny thatched huts.
“But everything is very unpredictable,” he said. “And (Noru) came very fast.”
The Philippines sees an average of 20 tropical storms each year, and while Noru didn’t inflict as much damage or loss of life as other typhoons in recent years, it stood out because it gained strength so quickly.
Experts say rapidly developing typhoons are set to become much more common as the climate crisis fuels extreme weather events, and at the same time it will become harder to predict which storms will intensify and where they will track.
“The challenge is accurately forecasting the intensity and how fast the categories may change, for example from just a low-pressure area intensifying into a tropical cyclone,” said Lourdes Tibig, a meteorologist and climatologist with the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities.
The same happened in the United States last week when Hurricane Ian turned from a Category 1 storm into a powerful Category 4 hurricane before making landfall along the southwestern coast of Florida on Wednesday.
Such rapid intensification, as it’s known in meteorological terms, creates challenges for residents, authorities and local emergency workers, including those in the Philippines, who increasingly have no choice but to prepare for the worst.
"We are excited to be entering the Los Angeles, Washington, and Texas markets and intend to open new branches in the United States,” President David Jia said in a statement.
Taichung Commercial Bank’s move comes amid heightened military tension between mainland China and Taiwan this year. Taiwan is home to many of the world’s largest technology companies, and Washington has encouraged Taiwan’s chip industry to invest in the U.S.; among them, GlobalWafers, a maker of semiconductor wafers, this year announced plans to build a $5 billion facility in Texas, and MediaTek, which competes with Qualcomm, will open a design center at Purdue University. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, one of the world’s largest chip makers, is already building a facility in Arizona.
"We are here for them," said Banafsheh Cheraghi, one of the Iranians who organized the protest.
"They are there not only resisting the Iran regime, but also fighting back. I would feel useless if I were not here today supporting them and echoing their voices."
Large crowds carrying Iranian flags chanted for the liberation of women in the country, marching from the gates of McGill University all the way to Jeanne Mance Park.
SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgarians vote in their fourth national election in less than two years on Sunday, with little hope for a stable government emerging because of deep division within the political elite over how to tackle entrenched corruption.
Prolonged political turmoil threatens to undermine the country's ambitions to join the euro zone in 2024 amid double-digit inflation and steep energy prices, and could lead to a softening of Sofia's stance on the Russian war in Ukraine.
Voting starts at 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) and ends at 8 p.m. (1700 GMT). Exit polls will be released after the ballots close, with first partial official results expected in the early hours of Monday.
Opinion polls suggest that up to eight political parties may enter the next parliament, with the centre-right GERB party of former long-serving premier Boyko Borissov, 63, leading with about 25%-26% of the vote.
Just as last year, Borissov, who has pledged to bring stability and be "stronger than the chaos", is widely expected to struggle to find coalition partners among his major rivals who accuse him of allowing graft to fester during his decade-long rule that ended in 2021.
The We Continue the Change (PP) party of reformist premier Kiril Petkov, whose coalition cabinet collapsed in June, is running second on 16-17% in opinion polls.
Failure to forge a functioning cabinet would leave the rule of the European Union and NATO-member state to a caretaker administration appointed by Russia-friendly President Rumen Radev.
NEW SNAP POLLS OR TECHNOCRAT CABINET
However, analysts say political parties, aware of economic risks from the war in Ukraine, a difficult winter ahead and voters' frustration of political instability, might put their differences behind them and opt for a technocrat government.
"Producing a government will be difficult and will require serious compromises," said Daniel Smilov, political analyst with Centre for Liberal Strategies.
The idea sounded simple enough: The countries would pay only cut-rate prices for Russian oil. That would deprive Putin of money to keep prosecuting his war in Ukraine, but also ensure that oil continued to flow out of Russia and helped to keep global prices low.
A month later, the Group of Seven, representing some of the world’s leading economies, is still figuring out how to execute the plan — a far more complex task than it might seem at first blush — and the Dec. 5 deadline to marshal participants is fast approaching.
In the meantime, the war grinds on. The Kremlin is mobilizing 300,000 more troops to join the invasion of Ukraine and Putin has annexed four Ukrainian regions after Kremlin-orchestrated referendums that the West denounced as shams.
Political Cartoons
And while the U.S. and European countries have levied thousands of financial and diplomatic sanctions on Russia, including recently announced penalties, Treasury leaders say a price cap on oil could deliver the most effective blow to Russia’s economy, undermining its greatest revenue source.
Pushed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the price cap plan is testing the bounds of statecraft and capitalism. Yellen made her reputation as a Federal Reserve chair who helped steer the U.S. into the longest expansion in its history. Now she’s trying to use global energy markets as a vise to stop a war and keep oil prices from rushing upward this winter.
Yellen and her team at Treasury have been lobbying their international counterparts on the price cap since at least May. The U.S. has already blocked Russian oil imports, which were small to begin with.
“This is an entirely new way to use financial measures against a global bully,” Elizabeth Rosenberg, Treasury’s head of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, said at a recent congressional hearing.
“A price cap coalition requires unprecedented coordination with international partners, as well as close partnership with global maritime industries, and exceptional resolve in the face of hostile Russian bluster and threats, including the risk that Russia may seek to retaliate," Rosenberg said.
The risks of this new form of economic warfare are immense to the global oil supply. If it fails or Russia retaliates by stopping the export of oil, then energy prices worldwide could skyrocket. U.S. consumers could feel the ramifications in another spike in gasoline prices.
If no candidate wins more than half of the votes, excluding blank and spoiled ballots, the top two finishers go to an Oct. 30 run-off, prolonging the tense campaign season.
Bolsonaro has threatened to contest the result of the vote, after making baseless allegations of fraud, accusing electoral authorities of plotting against him and suggesting the military should conduct a parallel tally, which they declined to do.
So Till’s violent murder is heard, but not seen. “Where the camera focuses is its own act of resistance. So I was very intentional about who we see and when,” she said. “As a black person, I didn’t want to recreate it, I didn’t want to shoot it, I didn’t want to watch it, and I wanted to take care of audiences who were watching it, particularly black audiences.”
“And I really wanted to begin and end this this film with joy and love. Because in addition to this film being about Mamie’s story and her journey, this was also a love story between Mamie and her child,” played by Danielle Deadwyler and Jalyn Hall. They were happily living in Chicago and Mamie tried, but wasn’t able, to prepare Emmett for toxic Southern racism as he happily prepared for a trip down to visit cousins. “You have to be small,” she warns her high-spirited teenager, who crouches down and laughs, “Like this?”
Mamie held Emmett’s funeral with an open casket, his brutalized body shocking the country into a reckoning. Awash in grief and resistant at first, she gradually accepts the role thrust upon her by her son’s death — a crusader for social justice.
Deadwyler, who has a son almost 13, understood that conflict and captured it. “It’s a resistance to wanting to do this thing, because you don’t want to do this thing, because you want what was before… Wanting to fight, and wanting to have what you can no longer have.”
Whoopi Goldberg plays Emmett’s grandmother Alma, “This is the story I’ve heard all my life. This is the year I was born. You listen to people talk and they throw the name [Emmett Till] around,” she said. “Nobody knowns his story. We know pictures. We’ve seen pictures in magazines. But suddenly there is life and breath in this family, and they are moving and alive.”
Investing in shares is a tough task at the best of times. The stock market’s continual ebb and flow between joy and despair means that investors can frequently find themselves on the wrong side of consensus views for extended periods.
The deal amounts to an unusual gesture of goodwill by Maduro as the socialist leader looks to rebuild relations with the U.S. after vanquishing most of his domestic opponents.
“I can’t believe it,” Cristina Vadell, the daughter of Tomeu Vadell, one of the freed Americans, said when contacted by The Associated Press on Saturday. Holding back tears of joy on her 31st birthday, she said: “This is the best birthday present ever. I’m just so happy.”
A senior Biden administration official said the U.S. and Venezuela had explored a range of options, but that it became clear that “one particular step” — the release of the two Maduro family members — was essential in getting a deal done. The official said the deal required a “painful decision” but the administration’s willingness to make it showed its commitment to bringing home American citizens held abroad.
The administration in the last six months has struck similar deals with Russia and more recently the Taliban. But the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the administration, said it “remains extraordinarily rare that a choice like this is made.”
The transfer took place Saturday in an unspecified country between the U.S. and Venezuela after the men in the deal arrived from their respective locations in separate planes, the Biden administration said.
“These individuals will soon be reunited with their families and back in the arms of their loved ones where they belong,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “Today, after years of being wrongfully detained in Venezuela, we are bringing home” the seven men, whom the president cited by name. “We celebrate that seven families will be whole once more.”
However, today’s investment climate is particularly challenging. Risks such as the war in Ukraine, a cost of living crisis, Covid lockdowns in China, high inflation and rising interest rates make it exceptionally difficult to determine how stock markets will perform over the coming months.
Some investors may decide to hold defensive stocks that are insulated from an increasingly downbeat economic outlook. Others may feel that the economic tide will turn and that growth stocks are therefore appealing.
In Questor’s view, investors do not necessarily face a binary choice between safety and growth. Indeed, some companies, such as the FTSE 100 pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, offer the best of both.
WASHINGTON — President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, will travel to Puerto Rico on Monday to survey damage to the island from Hurricane Fiona and will go on Wednesday to Florida, where Hurricane Ian left parts of the state in ruins, the White House announced on Saturday night.
White House officials did not provide details of the president’s visits to the sites of the two natural disasters. But Mr. Biden had said in the past several days that he expected to travel to both places to reassure residents that the federal government will help in their recoveries.
“In addition to what we’re doing for Florida and South Carolina, we remain focused on recovery efforts in Puerto Rico as well,” Mr. Biden said Friday at the White House. “We’re going to stay with and stay at it as long it takes.”
The president’s visit to Florida will be the first since he and Ron DeSantis, the state’s governor, have spent months clashing over transgender rights, abortion, immigration and other issues that are at the center of congressional elections next month. Mr. DeSantis has said that the storm, which made landfall on the state’s Gulf Coast as a powerful Category 4, will go down in history as one of the strongest to hit Florida because of the catastrophic flooding that wiped away whole towns and killed dozens.
“This is what the culmination of systemic racism looks like. It goes out in ripples, and it touches everybody. And the whole point of all of this is we’ve seen it, we know. We saw George Floyd. We saw Trayvon Martin. Children and young men. Middle aged men. Men. People.”
Mamie Till-Mobley passed away in 2003. Some of the Till’s extended family were in attendance at the Lincoln Center premiere, so were other grieving mothers: Lezley McSpadden-Head, mother of Michael Brown, the 18-year- old shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014 by a white police office; Kadiatou Diallo, mother of Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean student shot and killed by New York City police officers in 1999; and Marian Tolan, mother of Robert Tolan, shot by police in Bellaire, Texas in 2008.
Chukwu’s film Clemency won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. She wrote Till with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, who accumulated a bulk of research for his award winning 2005 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.
Till was produced by Keith Beauchamp, Barbara Broccoli, Whoopi Goldberg, Thomas Levine, Michael Reilly and Frederick Zollo. Broccoli told Deadline this week that “the film will open people’s eyes.”
The film, from MGM’s Orion pictures, will be released theatrically by UAR on October 14
A decisive victory by Lula on Sunday could reduce the odds of a tumultuous transition. Critics of Bolsonaro say another month of his attacks on the democratic process could spur social unrest like the 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.
Bolsonaro says he will respect the election result if voting is "clean and transparent," without defining any criteria.
Brazilians are also voting on Sunday for all 513 members of the lower chamber of Congress, a third of the 81 members of the Senate and state governors and legislatures.
“I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know exactly what Russia will do here. There are a lot of different options,” Ben Harris, Treasury’s assistant secretary for economic policy, said during a recent Brookings Institution presentation. He added: "The price cap provides an opportunity for a bit of a release valve and the hope that these Russian barrels will find the market, but at a reduced price.”
The Dec. 5 deadline for setting the price for discounted oil comes just before a year-end wider European embargo on seaborne Russian crude oil and a complete ban on shipping insurance designed to prevent Russian oil from reaching non-European buyers. The embargo and insurance ban could eliminate up to 4 million barrels a day from the world’s daily supply of petroleum, a loss of roughly 4%.
Treasury’s hope is that the price cap kicks in first and allows some of that oil to keep flowing via exceptions to the embargo and the insurance ban, albeit at prices lower than market rates.
While Treasury officials and leading economists express confidence that the plan will work — and already is working — some oil analysts are wary of trying to implement it before winter, in a global economy already scarred by supply shocks, and a Europe facing fast-rising inflation.
The unknowns are too many, they say.
anic at an Indonesian soccer match after police fired tear gas to stop brawls left 129 dead, mostly trampled to death, police said Sunday.
Several fights between supporters of the two rival soccer teams were reported inside the Kanjuruhan Stadium in East Java province's Malang city after the Indonesian Premier League game ended with Persebaya Surabaya beating Arema Malang 3-2.
The brawls that broke out just after the game ended late night Saturday prompted riot police to fire tear gas, which caused panic among supporters, said East Java Police Chief Nico Afinta.
Hundreds of people ran to an exit gate in an effort to avoid the tear gas. Some suffocated in the chaos and others were trampled, killing 34 almost instantly.
More than 300 were rushed to nearby hospitals to treat injuries but many died on the way and during treatment, Afinta said.
He said the death toll is likely still increasing, since many of about 180 injured victims' conditions were deteriorating.
The Indonesian top league, BRI Liga 1, has suspended games for a week following the match, and an investigation had been launched, the Football Association of Indonesia (PSSI) said.
There have been previous outbreaks of trouble at matches in Indonesia, with a strong rivalry between clubs sometimes leading to violence among supporters.
Among global stadium disasters, 97 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death in Britain in April 1989, when an overcrowded and fenced-in enclosure collapsed at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield.
Indonesia is to host the FIFA under-20 World Cup in May and June next year. They are also one of three countries bidding to stage next year's Asian Cup, the continent's equivalent of the Euros, after China pulled out as hosts.
“The wildcard factor to me is what the Russians do, because the Russians have made abundantly clear that they do not want to play along with price caps,” said Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
“We should prepare ourselves at least,” she said, “that they may withhold oil.”
Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citi Group, said at the Brookings Institution recently: “It’s an experiment that’s never been done in world history. I think it is a poor judgment call to do this at this time.”
Oil is the Kremlin’s main pillar of financial revenue and has kept the Russian economy afloat so far in the war despite export bans, sanctions and the freezing of central bank assets that began with the February invasion.
Before the war, Russia exported roughly 5 million barrels of oil per day as one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. That figure — accounting for roughly 9% of the world’s crude exports — has largely been unchanged despite all the sanctions.
Russia has vowed to take retaliatory measures to offset the impact of the price cap. Last week, Kommersant, a Russian business newspaper, reported that the Kremlin is considering raising $50 billion in additional revenue from taxes on exported energy, in response to the plan.
Analysts are hopeful the Russians are bluffing. Deutsche Bank recently assigned a “low probability” to Russia stopping its exports and cut its forecast for the price of crude by 10%. The German bank cited the U.S. Treasury’s announcement that India could have flexibility to buy from non-EU providers if it doesn’t join the price cap coalition, among other factors.