https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... gm-for-9bnTue 18 May 2021
Amazon is in talks to acquire MGM, the Hollywood studio behind the James Bond and Rocky franchises, for $9bn (£6.3bn) in the latest deal to secure “crown jewel” content in the global battle for streaming supremacy.
MGM, which put itself up for sale in December, is one of the few Hollywood studios with evergreen, must-watch franchises not to have been snapped up in the recent wave of huge mergers and acquisitions in the media industry.
The studio has explored a sale several times over the last few years. In January last year it held preliminary talks with Netflix and Apple, among others, but price proved to be a stumbling block.
The Democrats in Congress will probably fail to pass a federal $15 an hour minimum wage. Amazingly, this might end up not mattering that much. The drive for $15 has succeeded simply by resetting Americans’ idea of what a reasonable wage should be.
In an age of grassroots political campaigns, the Fight for $15 has been startlingly effective. It succeeded in getting a $15 minimum wage passed in Seattle, in California, and in a variety of other cities and states. Its message was simple, focused and — at least in the places where it has prevailed — reasonable.
In addition to having a catchy, alliterative slogan, Fight for $15 had some pretty decent economics on its side. The fact that “teenagers like cheeseburgers,” in the words of economist John Kennan, probably reduces the effect of minimum wage hikes on employment; the increased income from higher minimum wage feeds back into the economy, raising labor demand. And as economists have increasingly realized in recent years, minimum wage can help counteract employers’ power to hold wages below their efficient market value. It can still hurt employment, but the threshold for doing so is probably a lot higher than opponents worry.
At the national level, Fight for $15 hasn’t yet managed to chalk a win. The minimum-wage proposal was struck from President Joe Biden’s recent Covid-19 relief bill on the grounds that it wasn’t a fiscal measure and thus not eligible to be passed by budget reconciliation. Since reconciliation is the only way to get around the filibuster, that means that a federal $15 minimum wage has only a slim chance of passing during Biden’s presidency. Worries that $15 would go too far in low-cost areas will mean sufficient opposition at the federal level that we probably will not see this sort of bill pass soon — or if a wage hike does pass, expect something significantly less than $15.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/virgin-media- ... 11315.htmlThu, 20 May 2021
The £31 billion mega-merger between Virgin Media and O2 has been given the green light by regulators.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) waved through the deal following an in-depth investigation, concluding that concerns customers would see price hikes from the telecoms deal were unfounded.
Officials had provisionally cleared the deal last month and on Thursday confirmed the tie-up, which was first announced a year ago.
At the time the deal was announced, the companies said it would create a “full converged platform” for customers, and will mean an investment of £10 billion in the UK over the next five years.
A Phase 2 investigation found that the deal was unlikely to lead to any substantial lessening of competition for a number of reasons, it said.
I have a friend who lives on a farm and for years had connected to the Internet through a slow and prone-to-fail DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) link. He was okay living without Netflix, but as an attorney, he would have sorely liked to teleconference with clients, particularly after COVID-19 arrived. So he desperately needed a better Internet connection for his rural abode. Starlink, Elon Musk’s new satellite-based broadband service, fit the bill, so he signed up for its public beta test. Imagine how many people will follow in his footsteps when Starlink becomes fully operational.
The pandemic appears to have reversed the migration toward urban centers that has been going on since the start of the Industrial Revolution. People are now fleeing cities like San Francisco while rewriting the rules of office work. After all, why maintain expensive homes in or near a city when you can work from anywhere, via satellite?
The magnitude of the change that many people made over the last year cannot be overemphasized. Within hours of the planet effectively shutting down in mid-March 2020, many information-based businesses resumed operations, more or less unaffected. An entire population of office workers continued to carry out their daily tasks without skipping a beat. That is nothing less than miraculous. How could so many manage so painlessly to achieve this transformation?
Had the pandemic come along 30 years ago, the business world truly would have come to a stop as we withdrew into our homes. With very few personal computers around, fewer still with modems, and no Internet services to speak of, we would have struggled to connect with one another via landlines. Home schooling would have been conducted via mimeograph and mail drops. Office work would have been Xeroxed, carted home, and written out in pen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... wearing-inMon 24 May
In dramatic scenes in the Pacific country of Samoa, the government has refused to convene parliament and allow a transition of power, locking the prime minister-elect and her supporters out of the parliament building.
Samoa’s parliament was due to convene on Monday to swear in a new government, more than a month after a knife-edge election, which has been followed by legal challenges, the calling of a second vote, and intense constitutional manoeuvring.
The election was the most closely-fought in the country’s history and saw the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), which has ruled Samoa for 39 years, challenged by the insurgent Faatuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, which was founded in June 2020.
Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/s ... -same-day/The Supreme Court of the United States handed down two unanimous decisions Monday — making the total a whopping four 9-0 decisions in a week’s time.
The first opinion released by SCOTUS on this morning was United States v. Palomar-Santiago, an immigration decision authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in which the full court sided with the government and against the immigrant.
The unanimous court ruled against the Mexican national Refugio Palomar-Santiago, who was charged with criminal re-entry into the United States. Palomar-Santiago became a permanent U.S. resident in 1990, was deported in 1998, and was found living again in the U.S. in 2017. As a result of being found unlawfully on American soil, Palomar-Santiago was prosecuted for criminal re-entry.
...
Next, in Territory of Guam v. United States, the justices ruled in favor of Guam, allowing the island to pursue the collection of funding from the U.S. government to remediate environmental pollution on the island.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... antitrust/D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine on Tuesday brought an antitrust complaint against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant wields monopoly power that has resulted in higher prices for consumers.
Racine’s office accused the company of fixing prices through contract provisions with third-party sellers who peddle their products on its platform. The attorney general said that Amazon prevents sellers from offering their products at lower prices or on better terms on any other online platforms, including their own websites, and that that prohibition results in “artificially high” prices across e-commerce sales.
(Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs,” Racine (D) said in a statement. “It maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation, and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor.”
The suit follows years of Washington antitrust scrutiny of Amazon and comes as consumer advocates have called on the Biden administration to bring federal antitrust charges against the company. Biden recently nominated one of the company’s key critics, Lina Khan, to the Federal Trade Commission.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/tech/jef ... index.htmlNew York -- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will officially step down from his role as chief executive on July 5, he announced during the company's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday.
Bezos will hand the reins to Andy Jassy, who currently runs Amazon Web Services, after a nearly three-decade run leading the internet giant that made him one of the richest people in the world. Bezos will become Amazon's executive chair.
The company first announced the leadership change as part of its February earnings report, saying Jassy would take over during the fiscal third quarter. Amazon (AMZN) had not previously shared the precise date of the transition.
The timing is "sentimental," Bezos said — July 5 is the date Amazon was incorporated in 1994.
https://news.sky.com/story/global-tax-r ... t-12318276Thursday 27 May 2021
The biggest reforms to the global taxation system in a century are edging closer to reality, with the group of seven leading industrial economies now on the brink of agreeing to a global minimum corporate tax rate, insiders have told Sky News.
The unprecedented plans could mean the UK raises billions of pounds in taxes from tech giants and other big companies which have previously shifted profits around the world to avoid them.
G7 finance ministers are expected to agree to keep their business tax rates above a certain level - likely to be 15% - at next week's meeting in London, according to insiders close to the discussions.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/business-gov ... 464b7dbcd8WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican senators outlined a $928 billion infrastructure proposal Thursday that would tap unused coronavirus aid, a counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s more sweeping plan as the two sides struggle to negotiate a bipartisan compromise and remain far apart on how to pay for the massive spending.
The Republican offer would increase spending by $91 billion on roads and bridges, $48 billion on water resources and $25 billion on airports, according to a one-page summary released by the GOP negotiators. It also would provide for one-time increases in broadband investments, at $65 billion, and $22 billion on rail.
Republicans have rejected Biden’s proposed corporate tax increase to pay for new investments, and instead want to shift unspent COVID-19 relief dollars to help cover the costs, a nonstarter for many Democrats.
“It’s a serious effort to try to reach a bipartisan agreement,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the lead GOP negotiator.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito speaks at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 27, 2021, as from left, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., Sen. Barrasso, R-Wy. and Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., look on. Republican senators outlined a $928 billion infrastructure proposal Thursday, a counteroffer to President Joe Biden's more sweeping plan as the two sides struggle to negotiate a bipartisan compromise and remain far apart on how to pay for the massive spending. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... li=BBnb7KzThe Biden administration said Sunday that talks over a $1.7 trillion infrastructure package would need to show a “clear direction” toward agreement by the time Congress returns from recess in early June, signaling that Democrats might be preparing to go it alone on a broad plan to rebuild roads and bridges, expand broadband service and create programs to help care for the elderly and disabled Americans.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said President Biden and members of his team would continue negotiating privately this week and said the talks with Republican lawmakers were encouraging. But he identified the return of Congress on June 7 as when the talks would need to indicate an endpoint.
“I think we are getting pretty close to a fish-or-cut-bait moment,” Mr. Buttigieg said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Negotiations over the measure have stretched for weeks as lawmakers and the White House argue over the basic questions of what should be included, how large it should be and how to pay for it.
Read more: https://www.news.com.au/technology/envi ... 5953800b59Two dozen cities across China’s industrial heartland are rationing electricity.
Homes and businesses are having to cope with shutdowns and extreme heat.
And politically-motivated bans on Australian coal are to blame.
... snip ...
Attempts to punish Australia for advocating an international investigation into the origins of Covid-19 included restrictions on coal imports.
... snip ...
Lakes and dams in Taiwan are drying up. And that’s hurt more than just hydro-electric generation. Power stations and heavy industries – including silicon chip manufacturers – are struggling to get enough cooling water to stay operational.
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/557 ... n-overhaulSen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he will vote against a sweeping election reform overhaul bill, dubbed the For The People Act, putting the fate of the legislation in jeopardy in the evenly split Senate.
In an op-ed published early Sunday morning in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin, one of the Democratic caucus’s most conservative members, zeroed in on the partisan nature of the legislation, which has not attracted any Republican support.
“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening blinds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act," Manchin wrote.
“The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen,” he added.
Manchin also said he “will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” which a number of leading Democrats have suggested in order to pass election reform.
{snip}Chipotle raised its menu prices by about 3.5% to 4% to cover the cost of higher wages for employees, company Chief Financial Officer John Hartung said Tuesday.
"You take about a 4% price increase to cover the dollar cost of the extra labor," he told an analyst during a conference.
Chipotle announced in May that it would increase restaurant worker pay to an average of $15 per hour. The company said at the time that it was looking to hire 20,000 new employees ahead of the summer.
As restaurants prepare for a bustling summer, many are finding it difficult to staff up. And Chipotle's not the only chain trying to attract labor with higher wages. McDonald's said last month that it would hike pay for workers at its company-owned stores.
https://news.sky.com/story/murdochs-new ... e-12329345Friday 11 June 2021
Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper empire is weighing a bid for The Week, the news and current affairs magazine.
Sky News has learnt that News UK, publisher of The Sun and The Times, is among a number of parties which have expressed an interest in acquiring the weekly title from Dennis Publishing.
News UK's interest is at an early stage and will not necessarily translate into a formal offer for The Week, according to industry insiders.
If it does proceed with an offer, it would mark a strategic shift for News UK, which does not currently publish magazines other than those distributed as supplements in its national newspapers.
News UK is a division of News Corp, the New York-listed media conglomerate headed by Mr Murdoch and his son, Lachlan.
