Author: ALJAZEERA

Islamabad, Pakistan – Cash-strapped Pakistan is poised to receive a $1.1bn loan tranche from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after a key meeting of the international lender’s executive board on Monday, even as economists have warned that the country needs deep reforms to reduce its dependence on overseas financial assistance. Late on Monday night, Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance and the IMF confirmed that the lender had approved the “immediate disbursement” of a $1.1bn tranche that completes a total loan of $3bn agreed to under a deal inked last year. But the approval came with firm words from the IMF. “To…

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Patna, Bihar – Sanjeev Kumar is 27 and jobless – a desperate situation compounded by his car salesman father’s imminent retirement in a few years. The business studies graduate from Patna, the capital of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, voted for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2019, hoping to land one of the millions of new jobs promised by the country’s governing party and its leader. Kumar took two exams for jobs in so-called Group D positions in the Indian Railways. This job category is the lowest in the hierarchy of public sector employment in…

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The International Court of Justice has ruled against issuing emergency measures over German arms sales to Israel as requested by Nicaragua, which had argued that there was a serious risk of genocide in Gaza amid Israel’s assault on the Palestinian territory. Nicaragua also demanded that Germany resume funding to the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, after Israel alleged that some of its employees were involved in the October 7 attacks that triggered the continuing fighting. The ICJ ruled against the request in a 15-1 vote. “The circumstances are not such as to require the exercise of its power…

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Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, was sentenced on Tuesday to four months in prison after pleading guilty to violating US money-laundering laws at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The sentence was imposed by United States District Judge Richard Jones in Seattle, who rejected prosecutors’ request that the 47-year-old Zhao serve a three-year term. Once considered the most powerful person in the cryptocurrency industry, Zhao, known as “CZ,” is the second major crypto boss to be sentenced to prison after Sam Bankman-Fried. In March, Bankman-Fried received 25 years behind bars for stealing eight billion dollars from customers of his now-bankrupt FTX exchange.…

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has renewed his promise that Israel will launch a ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza amid shaky ongoing truce talks to reach a ceasefire deal. Netanyahu on Tuesday said Israel will destroy Hamas’ battalions there “with or without a deal” to achieve “total victory” in the nearly seven-month war. Israel and Hamas are negotiating a potential ceasefire agreement and an exchange of hostages held by Palestinian groups in Gaza for prisoners held in Israeli jails. “The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question. We…

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“How many tennis balls can fit in a passenger plane?” Neeraj, a young economics graduate from the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), was given 15 minutes to solve this question during his interview rounds at Nation With Namo (NwN), one of the in-house political consultancies of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He got the calculation right and joined a small team of graduates from India’s top universities who were dispatched to the eastern state of Tripura to conduct surveys, collect and analyse voter data for elections that were due in February last year. Their job was to identify…

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The move comes after the UK said it would bring forward legislation to block such state-backed takeover deals in media.An Abu Dhabi-backed group planning to take over Britain’s Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has said it will withdraw after the UK government moved to block the deal. RedBird IMI, a joint venture between US firm RedBird Capital and Abu Dhabi’s International Media Investments, struck a 1.2 billion-pound ($1.5bn) deal with TMG’s previous owners, the Barclay family, in November. The agreement, which has faced opposition over its potential impact on free speech given Abu Dhabi’s press freedom record, saw RedBird IMI pay…

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South Korean tech giant reports $4.85bn profit during the first three months of 2024.Samsung Electronics has reported a nearly 10-fold jump in first-quarter operating profit amid the recovery of its key memory chip business. The tech giant, the flagship subsidiary of Samsung Group, South Korea’s largest family-controlled conglomerate, said that operating profit rose to 6.61 trillion won ($4.85bn) in the first three months of the year on the back of strong sales of its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone and higher prices for memory semiconductors. Overall revenue rose to 71.9 trillion won ($52 billion), an increase of nearly 13 percent. The…

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