AVIATION
FAA to maintain airports
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Friday it would be able to keep in service 149 small airport control towers and avoid worker furloughs after the US Congress reinstated funding lost in the “sequester” cuts. US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement that the April 27 action by Congress to reverse the sudden, severe cuts for the aviation regulator would avoid service cuts that threatened to tie up airlines and airports heading into the summer vacation season. The April 27 legislation “will allow the FAA to transfer sufficient funds to end employee furloughs and keep the 149 low-activity contract towers originally slated for closure in June open for the remainder of fiscal year 2013,” LaHood said.
EMPLOYMENT
Workers demand pay raise
Hundreds of fast-food employees in Detroit walked off the job on Friday, temporarily shuttering a handful of outlets as part of a growing US worker movement that is demanding higher wages for flipping burgers and operating fryers. The protests in the city marked an expansion in organized actions by fast-food workers from ubiquitous chains owned by McDonald’s Corp, Burger King Worldwide and KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut parent Yum Brands Inc. Fast-food workers, who already have taken to the streets in New York, Chicago and St Louis, are seeking to roughly double their hourly pay to US$15 per hour from around minimum wage, which in Michigan is US$7.40 per hour. Organizers said more than 400 people turned out for the Detroit event, the most to date.
CYPRUS
Banking restrictions eased
Authorities have dropped controls on money transfers and withdrawals for international clients of four foreign banks with branches or subsidiaries in the bailed-out country. The Finance Ministry said in a statement on Friday that the exemption extends to the nation’s branches of Lebanon’s BLOM Bank, the Lebanese and Gulf Bank, Russia’s OJSC Promsvyazbank and Russian Commercial Bank.
However, limits which include a daily withdrawal cap of 300 euros still apply to the banks’ domestic clients. The nation imposed the limits in March to prevent a bank run after it agreed on a 23 billion euro (US$30 billion) bailout deal with its euro partners and the IMF. The deal’s terms demand that large depositors in the country’s two biggest banks take substantial losses on their savings.
SPAIN
Banks seize 40,000 homes
Banks seized nearly 40,000 homes last year due to unpaid mortgages, official data showed on Friday, as a sharp economic downturn and record unemployment took its toll. A total of 39,167 homes were seized last year, the Bank of Spain said in a bulletin based on a survey of lenders which approve over 85 percent of mortgages in the country. It is the first time the central bank has published figures on the number of homes seized by banks. Over half of the primary dwellings seized last year, or 18,325, were handed over voluntarily while in 14,165 cases lenders had to go to court to gain control of the property. Under the country’s law most people still have to pay off their mortgage debt even after eviction.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day