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 ZeroHedge by Tyler Durden Thu, 12/03/2020 - 15:05 The bad blood between president Trump and Facebook spilled over on Thursday afternoon, when the Trump administration sued Facebook, accusing it of illegally reserving high-paying jobs for immigrant workers it was sponsoring for permanent residence, rather than searching for available US residents who could fill the positions. While not directly an attack on Facebook's Section 230 protections, in a 17-page complaint filed Thursday, the DOJ took a different route, when its civil-rights division said Facebook inadequately advertised at least 2,600 positions between 2018 and 2019 that were filled by immigrants on H-1B high-skill visas when the company was applying to sponsor those workers for green cards. Companies sponsoring workers for employment-based green cards are required to show as part of the federal application process that they couldn’t find any qualified American workers to fill the job. The suit said Facebook didn’t advert...

 DYNASTYCROOKS Dated 04.12.2020 By Abhishek Banerjee Everything is wrong with the Indian economy. The New York Times certainly thinks so. See this article complete with the picture of manual laborers working the ground with the most primitive tools. In the foreground, a sad looking man carries what appears to be construction material on his head. Look more carefully. I’m sure the New York Times has managed to squeeze in the image of a snake charmer somewhere, along with that of an overcrowded train with passengers hanging from the sides and sitting on the roof. There has been a flood of articles in such years, with outlets such as The Economist, Bloomberg, Washington Post and others falling over each other to describe India’s doom. Look here, some guy called Andy Mukherjee is losing hope in India. And Bloomberg thinks he is important enough that we all need to know about his mood swings. Too late to the party, Andy. Collectively, The Economist, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine an...

 The Wire Dated 03.12.2020 By Devirupa Mitra While the Narcotics Control Bureau has been making high profile Bollywood arrests over cannabis possession, India has voted in favour of a highly divided resolution in the UN Commission for National Drugs to remove it from the category of most dangerous drugs. The voting record has not been officially revealed so far, but sources confirmed that India has voted along with 26 other countries to remove Cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, where it is listed alongside opioids like heroin – which are discouraged from even being used for medicinal purposes. The close margin of the vote – 27 to 25, with one abstention by Ukraine – made evident the polarisation among the 53 member states of the council on this proposal.  Explaining the division, a senior Indian diplomat told The Wire that it was largely on the lines of “First World versus developing and Islamic countries”. When seen through that perspec...

 Reuters Dated 03.12.2020 By  Drazen Jorgic GUADALAJARA (Reuters) - Early next year, a Chinese businessman named Gan Xianbing will be sentenced in a Chicago courtroom for laundering just over $530,000 in Mexican cartel drug money. Gan, 50, was convicted in February of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transfer business that whisked cartel cash from U.S. drug sales offshore. Gan has maintained his innocence; his lawyers say he was entrapped by U.S. authorities. The trial garnered few headlines and little of the public fascination reserved for kingpins of powerful narcotics syndicates that U.S. federal prosecutors said Gan served. Still, U.S. law enforcement officials told Reuters that Chinese "money brokers" such as Gan represent one of the most worrisome new threats in their war on drugs. They say small cells of Chinese criminals have upended the way narcotics cash is laundered and are displacing the Mexican and Colombian money men that have long dominate...

Hinudstan Times Date 03.12.2020 By Mallika Soni Private sector lender HDFC Bank on Thursday said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked it temporarily stop all launches of its upcoming digital business-generating activities and sourcing of new credit card customers after outage at its data centre which impacted operations last month. “RBI has issued an order dated December 2, 2020, to HDFC Bank Ltd with regard to certain incidents of outages in the internet banking/ mobile banking/ payment utilities of the bank over the past two years, including the recent outages in the bank’s internet banking and payment system on November 21, 2020, due to a power failure in the primary data centre,” HDFC Bank said in a regulatory filing. HDFC Bank said the RBI order “has advised the bank to temporarily stop all launches of the digital business-generating activities planned under its program Digital 2.0 and other proposed business generating IT applications and sourcing of new credit card customer...

 The Print Dated 03.12.2020 By Anirban Nag India’s central bank will likely keep interest rates unchanged for a third straight meeting as inflation stays stubbornly high and signs appear of growth beginning to return to Asia’s third-largest economy. The six-member Monetary Policy Committee is forecast to hold the benchmark repurchase rate at 4% Friday, according to all 30 economists surveyed by Bloomberg as of Thursday afternoon. A spike in consumer prices forced the panel to pause after cutting rates by 115 basis points this year, although it’s expected to conserve some ammunition to support growth by retaining an accommodative stance for the near future. “The RBI will be well served by not making changes to the repo rate or its accommodative stance,” said Pranjul Bhandari, chief India economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Mumbai. She expects the central bank to update its forecasts on inflation and growth, besides sharing its views on developments including a liquidity glut in the mo...

 The Print Dated 03.12.2020 By Sofia Costa China’s loosening of control over capital markets is being accompanied by tougher oversight of companies that previously faced little regulation. Under President Xi Jinping, authorities appear keen to push ahead with reforms to give markets greater sway. Such measures will encourage inflows while making the economy leaner and more efficient, thus strengthening the country against a more hostile world. But greater opening also makes it more likely investors will pile into a small number of very profitable companies, mostly in the private sector. Such clustering could create imbalances in the financial system, as well as make some companies too powerful.The conclusion for overseas funds: invest as much as you like, but beware. One result is much greater scrutiny of industries and firms that have grown dominant. Last month alone, Beijing canned Ant Group Co.’s share sale at the 11th hour, issued rules to root out monopolies in the internet se...

 Mint Dated 02.12.2020 By Prasid Banerjee Retail investors aged between 25 and 40 are spending millions on trading in  cryptocurrency  in India every day, according to two of the top exchanges in the country. According to the country’s largest crypto exchange, WazirX, the company saw 125% increase in user signups in the past six months, while its rival CoinDCX said it saw 85% growth in traders in the last quarter. According to Sumit Gupta, co-founder and CEO, CoinDCX, the platform sees $20-25 million worth of trading every day, about 75% of which comes from Indian investors. On the other hand, WazirX sees $19-26 million daily trading volumes, with 89% of the transactions coming from India. 70% of WazirX’s users are under 30 years of age, while most of CoinDCX’s users fall in the 25-40 year bracket. Spending can go from anywhere in the  ₹ 100-200 bracket to thousands and more. One can buy a crypto asset like Bitcoin on WazirX for as little as Rs148 right now. Experts ...

 Scroll.in Dated 02.12.2020 By Meenakshi Batra Nonprofits have long been a part of India’s development journey. More recently, during the Covid-19 lockdown, we saw this play out in real-time when nonprofits across the country  helped millions of Indians  cope with the humanitarian and financial crises that ensued. Despite this backdrop, the  current political environment  could not be more adverse for nonprofits operating in India. With a single stroke, the  recently passed  Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2020, has clipped the wings of thousands of mid-sized and small nonprofits, most of whom work on local and hyperlocal issues. The FCRA was introduced in 1976 to track and regulate foreign money coming into the country via nonprofits. Over the years, the law has become more stringent, hurting the work of nonprofits, instead of creating an enabling environment for strengthening them. With Covid-19, it is clear that we need nonprofits to be stron...