Month: February 2018

Is that love in the air or french fries? White Castle, KFC and other fast-food restaurants are trying to lure sweethearts for Valentine’s Day. It’s an attempt to capture a bit of the $3.7 billion that the National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend on a night out for the holiday. Restaurant analyst John Gordon at Pacific Management Consulting Group says it appeals to people who don’t want to splurge on a pricier restaurant. And some customers enjoy it ironically. White Castle, which has been offering Valentine’s Day reservations for nearly 30 years, expects to surpass the 28,000 people it served last year. Diners at the chain known for its sliders get tableside service and can sip on its limited chocolate and strawberry smoothie. KFC is handing out scratch-and-sniff Valentine’s Day cards that give off a fried chicken aroma to diners who buy its $10 Chicken Share meals or a bucket full of Popcorn Nuggets. Panera Bread wants couples to get engaged at its cafes; those who do can win food for their weddings from the soup and bread chain. And Wingstop sold out of its $25 Valentine’s Day kit, which came with a gift card and a heart-shaped box to fill with chicken wings. The company says 1,000 of the kits were gone in 72 hours. …

The U.S. on Wednesday reported its biggest increase in consumer prices in a year, pushing stocks lower in early trading. The consumer price index, which follows the costs of household goods and services, advanced by a half percentage point in January, up from two-tenths of a point in December. The January increase pushed the year-over-year inflation rate up by 2.1 percent. It was the same 12-month rate recorded in December, increasing fears among investors that firming inflation, along with increasing wages paid to American workers, could lead policymakers at the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, to boost interest rates at a faster pace. The Labor Department said consumer prices, minus the volatile changes in food and energy costs, rose three-tenths of a percentage point in January, the largest increase since January 2017. Analysts had been expecting an increase of 0.2 percent. Stock indexes were lower at the start of Wednesday, with the key Dow Jones industrial average falling about a third of a percentage point after a string of recent days with massive swings between losses and gains. …

U.S. stock markets are set to open higher Wednesday as investors prepared for the government’s latest monthly inflation report. Markets in Europe also showed gains in early trading, while in Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng finished up more than 2 percent and Japan’s Nikkei finished down 0.4 percent. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will make public its Consumer Price Index for January with discussion of how prices for certain sectors changed from the prior month. The report comes after recent wild swings in U.S. stock markets driven by investor fears of high inflation and the possibility the Federal Reserve will move to raise interest rates. …

As a student, Leah Wangari imagined a glamorous life as a globe-trotting flight attendant, not toiling in dirt and manure.   Born and raised in Kenya’s skyscraper-filled capital, Nairobi, the 28-year-old said farming had been the last thing on her mind. The decision to drop agriculture classes haunted her later, when her efforts in agribusiness investing while running a fashion venture failed.   Clueless, she made her way to an unusual new reality TV show, the first of its kind in Africa. “Don’t Lose the Plot,” backed by the U.S. government, trains contestants from Kenya and neighboring Tanzania and gives them plots to cultivate, with a $10,000 prize for the most productive. The goal: Prove to young people that agriculture can be fun and profitable.   “Being in reality TV was like the best feeling ever, like a dream come true for me,” Wangari said. But she found it exhausting. As callouses built up on her hands, her friends made bets that she wouldn’t succeed.   “Don’t Lose the Plot” is aimed at inspiring youth in East Africa to pursue agribusiness entrepreneurship. Producers said the show wants to demystify the barriers to starting a small business and challenge the prejudices against farming-related careers, even as many youths flee rural areas for urban ones. “What we hope to achieve … is first to show people that you can make money out of farming, to change the age profile of farmers in Africa from 60 to the youth. And the next thing …

Brasilia – It is one of the most expensive areas in the Brazilian capital – and one of the most sacred. A plot in downtown Brasilia – known as Santuário dos Pajés or Shrine of the Shamans – is at the center of a conflict between indigenous people hoping to preserve their traditional way of life and developers eager to build an upmarket neighborhood. While property is often contested in Brazil, it is usually waged over remote jungles or distant mountains – vast swaths of land that can be mined or farmed for profit. This conflict centers on Brasilia’s urban power base. Just minutes from the National Congress, the Shrine of the Shamans – with its unpaved roads, forest and small houses – sits surrounded by lavish high rises. Indigenous residents say they feel cornered by the encroaching developers, with multiple interests fighting over the last undeveloped plot in Brasilia, a planned city known for its futuristic buildings designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. “The sanctuary has been an indigenous land for more than 40 years. We have been fighting for its demarcation,” indigenous leader Márcia Guajajara told the Thomson Reuters Foundation inside the Shrine. “When the developers arrived, we were already here. They think that money always wins,” she said. It is one of many such conflicts in Brazil, rich in land to be exploited and low on deeds and property records. For land demarcation is controversial in Brazil, despite safeguards in both the constitution and United Nations guidelines …

In her village of Komalia, the fog swirls so thick at 7 a.m. that Akansha Singh can see no more than 15 meters ahead. But the 20-year-old is already cycling to her workplace, nine kilometers away. Halfway there she stops for two hours at a computer training center, where she’s learning internet skills. Then she’s off again, and by 10 a.m. reaches the small garment manufacturing plant where she stitches women’s clothing for high-end brands on state-of-the-art electric sewing machines. Solar energy powers most of her day — the computer training center and the 25-woman garment factory run on solar mini-grid electricity — and clean power has given her personal choice as well, she said. If the mini-grid system had not been put in place, Singh — a recent college graduate without funds to pursue training as a teacher, the only job open to women in her village — would have had no alternative but to marry, she said. In fact, “I would already be married off,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Today, however, she earns 4,500 rupees ($70) a month working on solar-powered sewing machines. She uses part of that to pay 300 rupees ($4.70) a month for her computer education class — and is planning to start a computer training center closer to home. Like her, most of the women at the factory earn between 2,500 and 4,500 rupees ($39- $70) a month, which has helped their families eat better, get children to school and pay for …

Aimin Liu’s food delivery job is an exercise of muscle memory and physical endurance. He scans the Chinese kitchen’s receipts and addresses before placing his hands on the padded handlebars of his e-bike. Lifting his body, he is off — as fast as the bike will allow, against the sting of the winter wind. The goal is to deliver 30 to 40 orders a day, six days a week, across New York’s midtown and lower Manhattan, sometimes as far as 20 city blocks away. Liu has been doing this for almost as many years. “My legs are no good,” Liu tells VOA in Mandarin, rubbing his 59-year-old kneecaps. “Both of my feet hurt. I have arthritis on both sides.” If it weren’t for his electric motor-powered bicycle, Liu says he might collapse or deliver half the number of orders on any 12-hour shift — not an option in a low-wage profession that is dependent upon customer tips. But that is the dilemma faced by Liu and thousands of delivery workers, most of them Chinese immigrant workers in their 50s and 60s. The e-bike — which can typically reach speeds of 32 kilometers per hour — is legal to purchase and own, but illegal to operate on New York streets, thanks to conflicting federal and state regulations. Workers like Liu have a choice: Use an e-bike and risk confiscation by the New York Police Department (NYPD), along with a $500 ticket, or don’t use an e-bike and jeopardize a benchmark monthly …

Cuba’s commercial creditors have offered “very significant debt relief” in a proposal sent to cash-strapped Havana in late January, according to two advisers to the group, in a sign that holders of the defaulted debt are ready to ramp up the pressure. The communist-run island has seen its financial situation deteriorate in recent months following the deepening of Venezuela’s economic crisis, lower revenue from commodity and related exports, devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma and tightening of business and travel restrictions by the U.S. administration under President Donald Trump. In 2015, Cuba reached a debt deal with members of the Paris Club of creditor nations, but having not dealt with its defaulted commercial creditors in the London Club means the country is in effect shut out of international capital markets. “The committee reached out to Cuba in late January,” said Rodrigo Olivares-Caminal, coordinator of the creditor group and a law professor at London’s Queen Mary University. “We have made a good faith proposal to the government.” The creditor group holds obligations representing a face value of $1.4 billion worth of Cuban debt and is made up of three funds — Stancroft Trust Ltd, Adelante Exotic Debt Fund Ltd and CRF I Ltd — as well as one commercial bank. “We are trying to give the country another chance to reach an amicable understanding with creditors,” Olivares-Caminal told Reuters. “This would give them very beneficial terms to remedy their situation vis-a-vis capital markets.” While details of the proposal were confidential, it would convey “very …

Thomas Cook flew British tourists to Tunisia on Tuesday for the first time since an Islamist militant killed 30 Britons on one of the North African country’s beaches in 2015. Tourism provides much needed jobs and foreign currency in Tunisia, but it has struggled since the attack in the resort of Sousse killed 39 holidaymakers and an earlier one at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis left 21 dead. The sector accounts for about 8 percent of Tunisia’s gross domestic product and the attacks worsened an economic crisis started by the overthrow of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. The 2015 beach attack, which was claimed by Islamic State, prompted Britain to advise against all but essential travel to Tunisia, and major operators scrapped their tour holidays there. However, Britain’s Foreign Office softened its advice last year and Thomas Cook said all three of its flights to Tunisia’s Enfidha airport were full. It will fly there three times a week, allowing Britons to join German, French and Belgian holidaymakers who have been going for the last two years. TUI Group, the operator with whom the victims had traveled, said last month it too planned to offer holidays in Tunisia again, starting in May. “It’s amazing to come back to Tunisia with my husband. I’ll go to Sousse and I‘m not afraid,” a British tourist who have her name as Julia said. “Tunisia is obviously very secure. I want to spend a pleasant holiday again in the nice resort of Sousse.” …

Hackers stole more than 1 billion rubles ($17 million) from Russian banks using the Cobalt Strike security-testing tool in 2017, a central bank official said on Tuesday. Russia is under intense scrutiny over cyber crime following allegations hackers backed by Moscow have attacked targets in the United States and Europe, accusations the Kremlin has repeatedly denied. Russian authorities are now keen to show that Russia too is a frequent victim of cyber crime and that they are working hard to combat it. Central bank Deputy Governor Dmitry Skobelkin told an information security conference in the Russian city of Magnitogorsk that 21 “waves of attacks” using Cobalt Strike had been recorded in 2017. “More than 240 credit organizations were hit by the attacks, 11 of which were successful. The amount stolen was more than 1 billion rubles,” he said. Cobalt Strike is a security tool used to test the strength of an organization’s cyber defenses, but it has also been used by hackers to attack banks in Russia and Europe. A group known as Cobalt because of their use of the tool attacked cash machines in more than a dozen countries in 2016, using the malicious software to force the ATMs to spit out cash. Skobelkin said the Russian central bank had sent warnings to more than 400 organizations which were targeted by the Cobalt group last year. …

Valentine’s Day is probably the most romantic holiday. In the United States, with people sending 190 million Valentine’s Day cards and spending around $100 per person on gifts. Instead of going out for a restaurant dinner for the holiday, a new idea is taking hold. These days more couples are planning to do something together. Classes like painting and cooking are a popular. Mariia Prus checked out the options for couples at one of Washington’s fanciest hotels. …

U.S. prosecutors on Monday announced charges against five former Venezuelan officials accused of soliciting bribes in exchange for helping vendors win favorable treatment from state oil company PDVSA, the latest case to stem from a $1 billion graft probe. The indictment by the U.S. Justice Department was filed in federal court in Houston, Texas, and was made public after Spain on Friday extradited one of the former officials, Cesar Rincon, who was a general manager at PDVSA’s, procurement unit Bariven. Others charged included Nervis Villalobos, a former Venezuelan vice minister of energy; Rafael Reiter, who worked as PDVSA’s head of security and loss prevention; and Luis Carlos de Leon, a former official at a state-run electric company. Those three like Rincon were arrested in Spain in October at the request of U.S. authorities amid a foreign bribery investigation into the financially struggling PDVSA, or Petroleos de Venezuela SA. De Leon, Villalobos and Reiter remain in Spanish custody. The indictment also charged Alejandro Isturiz Chiesa, who was an assistant to Bariven’s president and remains at large. All five face conspiracy and money laundering charges. De Leon and Villalobos were also charged with conspiring to violate the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Fred Schwartz, a lawyer for Rincon, said he expected his 50-year-old client would plead not guilty when he is arraigned on March 6. Lawyers for the other defendants could not be immediately identified. The case flowed out of a U.S. investigation into what prosecutors have previously called a $1 billion …