#and even worse is customer service calls based outside of the u.s. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

newstfionline · 4 years ago

Text

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Global defense spending (Foreign Policy) Global defense spending increased in 2020, despite a sharp downturn in the global economy, according to an annual report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Overall spending reached nearly $2 trillion, a 2.6 percent increase from the 2019 figure. Defense budgets in the Middle East fell by 6.5 percent, helped by a 10 percent cut by Saudi Arabia. The five biggest spenders—the United States, China, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom—all increased their defense spending in 2020.

Canadians avoiding hotel quarantines for air travellers fuel taxi boom on U.S. border (Reuters) U.S. taxi and limousine services are seeing a boom in business from customers seeking to enter Canada by land to avoid a restriction on international travel that applies only to air traffic. While both Canadian land and air travellers are required to take a test within three days of departure, and again on arrival, only those flying to Canada must spend up to three days of the country’s 14-day required quarantine period in a hotel. That has led to a surge of calls for taxi and limousine services from Canadians who fly through U.S. airports in states like New York and then cross over the land border. A taxi trip across the border can cost around $200 or $250 compared with a three-day hotel stay of more than C$1,200 ($961), Canadian travel insurance broker Martin Firestone said. With the Canada-U.S. land border mostly closed for more than a year due to the pandemic, and overall tourism down, the recent surge in business has come as a relief to some struggling taxi operators. Some Canadians ask to be driven home, while others take rides to the border, cross on foot and get another ride in Canada, drivers said.

Armed Groups Step Into Venezuela as Lawlessness Grows (NYT) They bring drinking water to residents in the arid scrublands, teach farming workshops and offer medical checkups. They mediate land disputes, fine cattle rustlers, settle divorces, investigate crimes and punish thieves. They’re not police officers, civil servants or members of the Venezuela government, which has all but disappeared from this impoverished part of the country. Quite the opposite: They belong to one of Latin America’s most notorious rebel groups, considered terrorists by the United States and the European Union for carrying out bombings and kidnappings over decades of violence. Venezuela’s economic collapse has so thoroughly gutted the country that insurgents have embedded themselves across large stretches of its territory, seizing upon the nation’s undoing to establish mini-states of their own. And far from fleeing in fear or demanding to be rescued by the authorities, many residents here in Venezuela’s borderlands—hungry, hunted by local drug gangs and long complaining of being abandoned by their government—have welcomed the terrorist group for the kind of protection and basic services the state is failing to provide. The insurgents “are the ones who brought stability here,” said Ober Hernández, an Indigenous leader on the Guajira peninsula next to Colombia. “They brought peace.”

Peru’s election (Foreign Policy) Left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo is heavily favored by Peru’s electorate ahead of the country’s June 6 presidential runoff, according to a recent poll; 41.5 percent of respondents backed Castillo in the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos survey, with his challenger Keiko Fujimori receiving only 21.5 percent support. Decisions surrounding the economy seemed to drive support for Castillo, with more than half of those expressing support for him saying they would support a total change to the country’s economic system. There is still a chance that the vote could be competitive: 34.7 percent of those surveyed wanted neither candidate or were undecided.

E.U. Set to Let Vaccinated U.S. Tourists Visit This Summer (NYT) American tourists who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 will be able to visit the European Union over the summer, the head of the bloc’s executive body said in an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, more than a year after shutting down nonessential travel from most countries to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The fast pace of vaccination in the United States, and advanced talks between authorities there and the European Union over how to make vaccine certificates acceptable as proof of immunity for visitors, will enable the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to recommend a switch in policy that could see trans-Atlantic leisure travel restored. “The Americans, as far as I can see, use European Medicines Agency-approved vaccines,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said Sunday in an interview with The Times in Brussels. “This will enable free movement and the travel to the European Union. She added that resumption of travel would depend “on the epidemiological situation, but the situation is improving in the United States, as it is, hopefully, also improving in the European Union.”

Italy’s Problem With School Dropouts Goes From Bad to Worse in Pandemic (NYT) Even before the pandemic, Italy had among the worst dropout rates in the European Union, and the southern city of Naples was particularly troubled by high numbers. When the coronavirus hit, Italy shuttered its schools more than just about all the other European Union member states, with especially long closures in the Naples region, pushing students out in even higher numbers. While it is too early for reliable statistics, principals, advocates and social workers say they have seen a sharp increase in the number of students falling out of the system. The impact on an entire generation may be one of the pandemic’s lasting tolls. Italy closed its schools—fully or in part—for 35 weeks in the first year of the pandemic—three times longer than France, and more than Spain or Germany. And experts say that by doing so, the country, which has Europe’s oldest population and was already lagging behind in critical educational indicators, has risked leaving behind its youth, its greatest and rarest resource for a strong post-pandemic recovery.

Virus ‘swallowing’ people in India; crematoriums overwhelmed (AP) With life-saving oxygen in short supply, families are left on their own to ferry people sick with COVID-19 from hospital to hospital in search of treatment as India is engulfed in a devastating surge of infections. Too often, their efforts end in mourning. On social media and in television footage, desperate relatives plead for oxygen outside hospitals or weep in the street for loved ones who died waiting for treatment. For the fourth straight day, India on Sunday set a global daily record of new coronavirus infections, spurred by an insidious new variant that emerged here. The surge has undermined the government’s premature claims of victory over the pandemic. The unfolding crisis is most visceral in India’s overwhelmed graveyards and crematoriums, and in heartbreaking images of gasping patients dying on their way to hospitals due to lack of oxygen. Burial grounds in the capital New Delhi are running out of space. Bright, glowing funeral pyres light up the night sky in other badly hit cities.

In leaked audio, Iran’s foreign minister laments interference by Revolutionary Guards (Washington Post) In leaked audio recordings made public Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister complained about interference by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran’s diplomatic affairs, including efforts to undermine the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. The audio, which was released by the London-based Iran International news channel, came from a three-hour interview with the foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, that the channel said was conducted in March. Taken together, Zarif’s unvarnished comments and the fact the audio had leaked, highlighted the sharpening public rivalries within Iran’s political circles, as Tehran engages with global powers in a fresh attempt to revive the nuclear deal, and as Iranian elections approach. The leaked conversation was the latest salvo in what has become an increasingly caustic domestic Iranian debate over the nuclear deal, pitting “pragmatists” represented by Rouhani against a conservative camp wary of any engagement with the West. The factional fights are not a secret in Iran, which hosts political debates that are more expansive and vigorous than most countries in the Middle East.

#headlines #news

3 notes · View notes

quakerjoe · 4 years ago

Link

The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.

Already under fire for recent policy changes at the USPS that mail carriers from within and outside critics have denounced as a sabotage effort to undermine the Postal Service broadly as well as disrupt efforts to carry out mail-in voting for November’s election amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the moves unveiled late Friday were viewed as an overt assault on democracy and a calculated opportunity to boost Republican’s long-held dream of undercutting or privatizing the government-run mail service while also boosting their election prospects in the process.

“Another Friday night massacre by this administration—and this time dealing another devastating blow to our postal service,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) “The American people deserve answers and we’re going to keep fighting for them.”

Scanlon was among more than 80 congressional lawmakers who sent a letter to DeJoy earlier in the day expressing “deep concerns” about operational changes he has made for mail carriers that have delayed deliveries and lowered standards.

“It is vital that the U.S. Postal Service not reduce mail delivery times, which could harm rural communities, seniors, small businesses, and millions of Americans who rely on the mail for critical letters and packages,” the letter stated. “Eliminating overtime and directing postal workers to leave mail on the floor of postal facilities will erode confidence in the Postal Service and drive customers away, resulting in even worse financial conditions in the future.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among those who signed the letter and also called for DeJoy’s efforts to be investigated by the Inspector General of the USPS. Since 2016 alone, DeJoy has donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and candidates. In 2020, prior to his appointment as Postmaster General by the GOP-controlled board of governors, DeJoy had already given approximately $360,000 to a Super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection.

As the Post notes in its reporting, the reshuffling of top managers and executives—as well as a hiring freeze and push for early retirements—”worried postal analysts, who say the tone of DeJoy’s first eight weeks and his restructuring have recast the nation’s mail service as a for-profit arm of the government, rather than an essential service.”

In a video posted to Twitter, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oreg.) characterized DeJoy as a “political crony” of the president’s and also denounced the brazen efforts now on display as a “Friday Night Massacre” scenario:

Appearing Friday afternoon on Capitol Hill, DeJoy brushed off accusations that he is acting as a political bag man for Trump. “While I certainly have a good relationship with the president of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the president or anyone else in the administration is wholly off-base,” DeJoy said.

But outside critics like Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics and a fierce critic of Trump’s behavior as president, said the latest move should be seen as nothing less than a direct effort by DeJoy to exploit his authority at the Postal Service to further the president’s political interests and reelection prospects.

According to Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal commentator and podcast host, “Congressional Democrats need to do something about this” immediately.

“If we wait until October/November, it’ll be too late,” said Cohen. “Trump is actively sabotaging the election under our noses—this isn’t theoretical, it’s happening RIGHT NOW.” Cohen said this situation should be treated like a “fucking five-alarm fire” and said action must be taken by both lawmakers and the U.S. public without delay.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee which has oversight for the USPS, said what DeJoy is trying to pass off as simple organizational restructuring is actually “a Trojan Horse” designed to destroy one of the nation’s most trusted and valued institutions from within.

Connolly on Friday night called it, “Deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election—an election that hinges on mail-in ballots.”

30 notes · View notes

xxladylovexx · 5 years ago

Link

The calls for action were mounting. It was mid-June, and the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which saw thousands of migrant children separated from their parents, was producing waves of outrage. By the end of the month, hundreds of protests were planned in towns and cities across the country. As the plans moved forward, others took notice.

In the days leading up to the protests, a private intelligence company that works with the Department of Homeland Security was monitoring the activity on the ground. Documents shared with The Intercept by the American Immigration Council, obtained through a freedom of information request, show that LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, a Virginia-based firm, gathered information on more than 600 demonstrations across the country, information that was then shared with DHS and state-level law enforcement agencies.

Tracking Facebook accounts affiliated with the protests and disseminating the intelligence to law enforcement fusion centers nationwide, the operation drilled down on physical locations where demonstrations were planned: a high school in Sebring, Florida; a church in Carbondale, Illinois; the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City; a Denny’s in Carlsbad, California; and “the old Kmart parking lot” in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. All were logged by street address and the time of the planned demonstrations.

A “Threat Analyst” in Reston, Virginia, sent the finished intelligence to a “LookingGlass Shared Services” address on June 28, two days before the protests were set to begin.

“LookingGlass has compiled a spreadsheet for State Fusion Centers detailing over 600 planned ‘Family Separation Day Protests’ across the US on June 30,” the analyst’s email read. “These originated from Cyber Threat Center (CTC) and are broken out by City and State; they provide physical location and the Facebook event ID.”

The following morning, the headquarters of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis disseminated the information to its staff, which was later circulated among Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel.

In a statement, LookingGlass Chief Marketing Officer Joy Nemitz told The Intercept, “As a matter of company policy and confidentiality, we do not comment on matters pertaining to clients or work performed and refer all queries to the company in question.” A DHS official, speaking on background, described the information LookingGlass collected as “unsolicited.”

“The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) works with federal partners, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and state and local law enforcement through the National Network of Fusion Centers to assess threats and analyze trends in activity,” the official said in an email. “In this particular instance, a private sector entity shared unsolicited information it collected through publicly available channels with DHS I&A on protests that were scheduled to take place near Federal facilities. Throughout the summer of 2018, the Department was at a heightened state of security due to ongoing protests outside of Federal facilities and physical threats to DHS employees which did result in a least one arrest.”

The official added: “When DHS I&A receives this type of information, we are required to share it consistent with DHS policy to ensure stakeholders have appropriate situational awareness regarding personnel, facilities, suspicious activities, emerging threats, incidents, operations, and operational capabilities affecting the Department or the Homeland Security Enterprise.”

Jess Morales Rocketto, co-chair of Families Belong Together and a lead organizer of last year’s protests, condemned the monitoring of the demonstrations. “Those protests represented the best of democracy,” she told The Intercept. “It’s especially concerning given that these protests were basically thousands of moms and their kids, thousands of families, and that the Trump administration’s response to that was to put them on a watch list.”

The emails confirming the protest surveillance were released in an ongoing freedom of information battle that the American Immigration Council, or AIC — in collaboration with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in Need of Defense, Women’s Refugee Commission, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP — is waging to pry documents surrounding family separation from the government.

“We’ve been getting them in drips,” Emily Creighton, deputy legal director at the AIC, said of the documents beginning to surface as a result of the litigation. “We have been told in litigation that ICE, DHS, and CBP have hundreds of thousands of responsive records.”

For immigration attorneys working with families directly impacted by the administration’s “zero tolerance” regime, news of protests being monitored makes an ugly situation even worse.

“The public rightly expressed outrage when they learned of the Trump administration’s shocking policy of ripping children away from their parents,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in a lawsuit challenging family separation, told The Intercept. “They’ll again be outraged to learn that, rather than focusing resources on reuniting these families, the administration was instead spying on them for expressing themselves.”

Intel for Profit

As an operation, LookingGlass Cyber Solutions appears to fit squarely in the larger universe of for-profit intelligence providers pitching services to law enforcement in a post-9/11 world.

In 2015, the company acquired Cyveillance, “a leader in open-source threat intelligence” that, according to the firm’s website, “delivers an open source intelligence-led approach to security through continuous, comprehensive monitoring and analysis of millions of online data sources to protect client information, infrastructure, and employees from physical and online threats.” Records indicate that Cyveillance previously provided contract work for the U.S. State Department.

In a jargon-heavy brochure, LookingGlass describes its “DHS Cybersecurity Shared Services Program for State Fusion Centers” as a combination of services and platforms designed to provide “insight and technical indicators to support a range of activities from high-level situational awareness to actionable recourse.” The company touts the expertise of its analysts and their ability to provide “deep-dive analysis, technical indicators, and situational awareness reporting,” while highlighting the role of its Cyber Threat Center as “an aggregator of global news, social media, and physical security events aligned to an organization’s area of interest.”

“CTC can be configured to provide analysts with cyber news matching topics of relevance and physical incident alerts in user-defined proximity ranges around a given point on the map,” the company reports. “Since global events can have impacts at local levels, analysts utilizing CTC will benefit from the data collection breadth of global sources from the surface web and Deep and Dark Web.”

Stood up in the wake of the September 11 attacks as another node in the war on terror, the fusion centers that companies like LookingGlass cater to have long been the target of criticism.

In a withering 2012 report, congressional investigators found that “DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” The report was particularly hard on DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — the office that saw fit to distribute LookingGlass’s monitoring of family separation protests.

“This document shows that DHS accepts and distributes surveillance of protest activity on social media, including to fusion centers, which have a track record of monitoring innocent and constitutionally protected conduct,” Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept, after reviewing LookingGlass’s work product.

“It also demonstrates the reach of surveillance contractors and the products they’re peddling,” Handeyside added. “We need to know a lot more about these products and how the government is using them.”

Targeting Critics of the President

In the last two years, law enforcement agencies executing the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have cracked down on critics of the president’s policies.

#trump #facebook #surveillance #government #aclu #national security #immigration #detention centers #free speech #fusion centers #science #tech #big brother #spying #watch list #homeland security #politics #news #intel

1 note · View note

averybuck91 · 4 years ago

Text

home insurance billings

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :car4insure.xyz

home insurance billings

home insurance billings can vary based on the insurance company covering you, and also based on the policy you buy, as well as the state where you live, how long you lived in and where you frequent the place where you have lived and the property values. What makes you a homeowner, even in the most favorable environment, as many states may have a high number of homeowners insurance companies looking to cover your property, and homeowners insurance is one of the more basic types of protection available. An independent, professional insurance agent, working with you to determine the best solution for you, will help you make the best insurance decision. When you’re trying to buy a new car, you may be asked a number of questions to buy what s called a second-, though, third-party “policy”. The primary thing to ask is: do I have Second, Third. home insurance billings, for example. There may be additional insurance costs associated with an open-ended policy, and you may incur the cost of your insurance premiums as well. This can add up to significant coverage in some cases, so making sure you are prepared is key. An agent is available 24/7 to help you shop around, and it is crucial to be well versed on your state s financial requirements. Many local governments also have their own unique insurance programs for local residents, and these programs make it much easier for residents to compare and get the best deal. While purchasing the right insurance coverage is important for your home and loved ones, you can also get financial protection for your personal loans and other assets in the event of disasters. Find out about the different types of insurance available to you by reviewing this helpful guide to understanding how homeowners insurance protects you—and your home. Your agent will take care of the financial responsibilities and assistance in purchasing and working with an insurance policy—so you do have the information on. home insurance billings, we want to make sure you are well-informed on what you are eligible for. We offer professional liability insurance to protect you and your company, whether you are a homeowner, a first-time employee, or are still working to build a complete background on yourself for your company. We work and know what kind of insurance plan to provide you with—and even how it might help you. The first step we will be making is to contact your insurance agent and find out how you could get into a great new life: This will enable you to continue your life insurance policy and to be covered while you are still alive to take care of it if you lose. It may not be easy to get into a life-changing medical situation if your health is not properly protected. To make sure you are covered to make sure you don’t have to be left uninsured while you are still alive, you should have the right life insurance with a strong health rating to ensure you get the exact coverage.

Business Insurance

Business Insurance, LLC is a licensed service mark of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Home Office: One Nationwide Plaza, Columbus, OH. Nationwide, the Nationwide N and Eagle and other marks displayed on this page are service marks of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, unless otherwise disclosed. ©2020. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. If you are considering moving quickly and buying a car insurance policy, your first step should be to compare car insurance quotes on Compare.com. You can do this on Compare.com, where we take care of the search process. Most drivers in Michigan can expect to pay between $5,980 and $829 to see their rates through Compare.com. For the most affordable quote, we are going to cover the state’s minimum requirements (required) and full auto insurance. When it comes to choosing the best quote, you should start with a comparison site like comparison car insurance quotes. In the table below you can see how much Michigan car insurance.

Compare Montana’s top insurance companies

Compare Montana’s top insurance companies in terms of customer service and pricing. It’s got a great car insurance rating and offers lots of discounts like: Most importantly, they’ve had solid customer service and are an affordable choice for any type of car insurance policy you may need. As a general rule, insurance companies don’t like paying a lot for car insurance. They think you’re not taking care of your bills when they’re paid with assets. In addition, most states have minimum liability limits for the amount of coverage you buy. If you need more coverage for more financial protection, you’ll get worse coverage, because the insurer can increase the value of your assets. In some states, it can be more than that. If you drive an older or less pricey car and there’s a high likelihood of an accident, you can probably afford to get higher protection to maintain it. It’s an issue most drivers don’t think about. If they see.

Home Insurance Add-Ons That Will Further Protect You

Home Insurance Add-Ons That Will Further Protect You and Your Vehicle If you’re looking for an insurance solution that doesn’t stop at just the minimum coverage, there are also some that include additional coverages and rider add-on. If you have a basic idea as to what the policies cover, you can work with an insurance advisor who could help you determine the balance between your deductible and premium. The table will allow you to see which insurance provider offers the minimum limits for additional coverages and rider add-ons. The extra coverage that you will get may extend beyond the minimum levels, so it’s important to weigh your options to assess what coverage is right for you. If your business area has an unusual amount of accidents or any other unusual conditions, you’d want to make sure you have the proper amount of insurance. It’s essential to take note of all your insurance company s website and contact them if you need any assistance choosing a comprehensive policy. If you purchase your policy in advance, you.

28. GEICO Insurance

28. GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. has partnered with to provide insurance products. When you click Continue you will be taken to their website, which is not owned or operated by GEICO. GEICO has no control over their privacy practices and assumes no responsibility in connection with your use of their website. Any information that you directly provide is subject to the privacy posted on their website. Call or log in to your current , , or policy to review your policy and contact a customer service agent to discuss your jewelry insurance options. Insurance premiums reflect the level of risk a person will face while driving while calculating car insurance quotes, with certain factors including the type of car, and driving history that are just as critical to a prospective customer. The cost of your car insurance will depend on your personal situation such as where you live, where you work, and where you live. The most important factor that insurance companies consider is the cost of the vehicle you will be insuring. You will want to compare.

AdVictoria Hayes - State Farm Insurance Agent

AdVictoria Hayes - State Farm Insurance Agent - Licensed Agent- Registered Broker- Registered Agent- Certified Insurance is the most competitive insurance agency in New York. We are an Independent agency that has been there for them and their families, helping them prepare for the big things that come by the job. The more we focus on providing the right protection on your automobile for a business of this size and scale, the more we can make a claim. If you need more protection, you may want to consider us for . One of the most surprising aspects of a car insurance policy is the cost. Car insurance rates change so much depending upon your driving history, so it’s important to familiarize yourself with the different factors involved with insurance. With so many factors taken into account, you’ll save an average of $859 per year on car insurance..

17. Ron Sanchez - State Farm Insurance Agent

17. Ron Sanchez - State Farm Insurance Agent The State Farm Agent and Director of Insurance and State Farm Insurance is a team of passionate team members that understand the importance of being a responsible, informed consumer. Their services have proven effective during our five year search for our top life insurance options. Our team members have the time to provide you with the most efficient insurance quotes based on your unique personality and your objectives that you are interested in. The State Farm Group has over $22 billion in total assets available. They are a highly valued partner of the State Farm family and insurance company family. With The State Farm Group, you’re looking for an insurance agency that will make your a priority. All of these dependents are considered at least eighteen years of age and who live outside of the U.S. If your dependent child lives outside the country, the child can get your life insurance. If your dependents live far away, it’s a different story. Parents, especially children, may also be.

AdAAA Insurance

AdAAA Insurance Bar - provides car insurance for a wide range of drivers, including those with low credit or low incomes. The insurer also offers policies for drivers aged between 21 and 65 to build a history of safe driving. Auto Club of SoCal is another big player in the insurance market with a small regional presence. Auto Club also has discounts to save customers that use its mobile app to manage their policy. Geico is known for its competitive rates, while Farmers is known for its discounts that extend across the board. For example, drivers who receive a discount may be eligible for a car insurance discount for the following types of vehicle: Geico Insurance Tips - is one of the most popular auto insurance rates among consumers and their family members. The insurer has strong financial ratings, excellent customer service and is a strong option for consumers who are looking for additional financial protection in the event they need to file a claim. Additionally, Geico offers discounts to save drivers when filing a claim. Additionally, Ge.

AdGEICO Insurance

AdGEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. is a holding company representing many insurance companies. In return, you get paid by the insurance company, but you are still responsible for claims. You should look elsewhere if you don’t qualify for a high-risk auto insurance policy. These companies charge higher rates for drivers with less experience and lower financial stability when compared to other auto insurance options. Some states require drivers to take a high-risk vehicle assessment. Some insurers do this for a variety of reasons and a specific assessment is known as a quality assessment. Quality tests allow your insurer to assess how well your car is performing, is reasonably built, and has adequate safety and financial reviews. It’s also important for a high-risk auto insurance policy to consider a variety of features, including: If you are a high-risk driver, there are other ways to get a low-cost insurance policy. The general advice would be to look for vehicle companies that specialize in drivers with less or no experience. This will.

AdRandy Glover - State Farm Insurance Agent

AdRandy Glover - State Farm Insurance Agent Rating 20-years All 50+ 100+ 30+ 100+ .

AdEd K Smith - State Farm Insurance

AdEd K Smith - State Farm Insurance Agency, Inc. (854) 597-2323, 714-340-2587, 1 (537) 616-1601 2 1 (711) 526-2543 Approved drivers are not obligated to give their cars some type of vehicle insurance policy, so the liability portion will cover the damages you caused and you’re liable to pay. If you have one who does not have car insurance, you can expect higher rates when you have an uncle driving, which could increase your rates. In some states, they’ll even be forced to carry more in coverage. These are not the same as driving under the influence, but in many states they won’t have to buy their car insurance, so if you are driving under the influence they will be covered. So your rates will be higher in this area. If.

0 notes

hoganleslie93 · 4 years ago

Text

no insurance michigan

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :car4insurance.xyz

no insurance michigan

no insurance michigan has, but I can tell you how it was covered. If your business gets into your area, you might have to get your money, but if it does you can avoid being hit by a stranger and you may be able to recover your lost money by filing a car insurance claim first (in your area.) However, it is important to remember that most of what you do is just a phone call away. So make sure that all of your options are covered by your insurance company when this happens. For all of the car insurance coverage in Montana, your rates will be based on your driving history, the level of coverage you purchase, and your monthly car insurance. It may also depend on the company you work with. You can start an insurance policy for as low as $3.50 a month! You can also compare rates from many top insurance companies in one place to save and avoid going without insurance! Montana has the . The state has average rates that is well outside the nation’s. no insurance michigan? Please . We understand your concerns. We will be happy to help you with this important transition. If you have specific questions, please call us at (916) 577-0560 and have a good day. The only way to make sure that your son is safe is to make a home inspection of the house and make sure they are properly secured. It’s also always best to make sure your son is taken care of if he’s not in any accidents or come into any school of abuse or alcohol. If your son has a few injuries or even if he has more than one, then you can go to the family law office to file the personal injury lawsuit to try this. A lot of people think that the family law works best for people who do not have any assets that can support themselves financially or are responsible in case of medical or emotional injuries. The question now is: what can be done? A few things. no insurance michigan is a good life insurance company. They won t insure an adult. You should be able to get the life insurance policy through them, without your consent, without the risk. However, they don t offer a free policy. If you need life insurance, you may want to consider them more than your parents do. Their company has a strong relationship with the people in the family. The majority of people in the United States know just who to trust, but the number of people not in that same group is higher. The best thing for life insurance is to have the best life for your family. A good policy for adults under 50 may be called “no insurance michigan” because of the very large medical insurance company. Although you can get a free life insurance policy for you, it would still be very nice to have coverage from an independent, non-standard company. If you have a few extra years of working for your job, it might be necessary to purchase . The best coverage.

What is Michigan proof of insurance?

What is Michigan proof of insurance? It may seem like that, but when you’re at fault in an accident, the driver’s insurance pays for your property damage or medical expenses, and their liability policy will pay them. This makes sense, unless it’s a $100,000 lawsuit against the at-fault driver. When you’re on the other side of the law, the other driver’s insurance has to pay for all of the damages. This doesn’t just apply if the other driver’s insurance is paying your damages. If you’re sued for bodily injury and property damage in an at-fault accident, your car insurance will probably still be responsible for the medical bills for others involved, and your car insurance will usually cover the remainder of the damages. In some states, however, this could mean paying for lost wages as well as expenses for an attorney who will help represent you in court. That’s why it’s important.

Does the Michigan Secretary of State accept electronic proof of insurance?

Does the Michigan Secretary of State accept electronic proof of insurance? Call us at to make changes to your life insurance policy. Helpful life insurance agents, who can assist you in servicing your policy, are just a phone call away. For all other policies, call or log in to your current , , or policy to review your policy and contact a customer service agent to discuss your jewelry insurance options. Purchased Mexico auto insurance before? With just a few clicks you can your insurance policy is with to find policy service options and contact information. You could be saving up to 50% or more on your car insurance! We offer car insurance on all lines! Contact the Georgia Department of Insurance for other information about your Georgia policy. Our Georgia car insurance is more than just car insurance: We also offer homeowners insurance and identity theft monitoring at no cost. Georgia is a no-fault state. This means the insurance company pays your damages regardless of fault, no matter who was at fault in the accident..

Recommended Michigan Car Insurance Options

Recommended Michigan Car Insurance Options - Best Rates As you can see below, State Farm consistently holds its popularity, as it consistently tops the charts for all of the top auto insurance companies throughout the U.S. and markets. You could count on State Farm to be the top auto insurance company nationwide for affordable rates, and it has been featured on many sites for a very large variety of advertising. State Farm stands out for its excellent coverage rates compared to the rest of the pack for car insurance. You’ve heard good things about it because it has always been in the top tier for auto insurance. However, there are other reasons why the company might be a better option than what you are looking for. The company can be found in several key areas of U.S. markets, as well as the following: Largest Car Insurance Companies in the U.S USAA – The largest auto insurance company in the U.S has been featured on multiple sites. The following is a list of.

Insurance Requirements

Insurance Requirements for Motorists: $100,000 bodily injury liability per person $300,000 bodily injury liability per accident $50,000 property damage liability per accident Bodily injury liability coverage protects drivers if their health or safety is threatened. The minimum limits required for BIL and PDL car insurance in California are: $100,000 bodily injury liability per person $300,000 bodily injury liability per accident $50,000 property damage liability per accident Collision coverage protects drivers if their car is damaged in an accident with another vehicle. The minimum limits required in California are: $100,000 per person $300,000 per accident $50,000 per accident Here are the in California based on averaged sample rates for four driver profiles that included varied gender,.

Michigan SR-22 Insurance Documents

Michigan SR-22 Insurance Documents are required to be filed after an arrest for driving without insurance or DUI. Suspensions will follow a DUI and generally every 3 - 5 years. Your insurer’s rate calculator at the top of this page will provide the average rate for every driver based on many factors, including your driving history, vehicle model, annual mileage, and so forth. If you have more than the minimum coverage, you might need to purchase a much worse policy to protect both its business and your assets. An insurance company with an anti-theft system usually will charge a better rate. For instance, with a standard full or hybrid vehicle, a driver who has coverage with $500 bodily injury per person is more than three to five times more likely to need insurance than someone with a cheap full or Hybrid vehicle. An at-fault accident can leave you with medical bills, property damage, lost earnings, and possibly even your income if the other driver’s insurance isn’t enough to cover their expenses.

What damages can be recovered in a Michigan uninsured motorist claim?

What damages can be recovered in a Michigan uninsured motorist claim? Uninsured motorist coverage helps pay for costs associated with a car accident that you or your passengers are responsible for. As an added expense, Michigan uninsured motorist coverage may also cover you if the at fault driver has insurance and fails to carry proper coverage, such as comprehensive or collision insurance. Michigan insurance laws require you to notify the department of motor vehicles that your car is being driven at certain times, or for specific time. You must notify the department at least 45 days in advance of your vehicle being registered. You must have at least the minimum necessary insurance in Michigan, and you must provide a signed statement showing how much you paid for insurance and how much you will owe on the date. Failure to do so can result in the suspension of your license and registration and possible impounding of your vehicle. Your insurance company is required by law to notify the department of motor vehicles when your vehicle is registered, and Michigan auto insurance laws govern when and where registered vehicles are kept. If an insured driver is tracked.

Retain a Lawyer for Help with Michigan Uninsured Motorist Accident Claim

Retain a Lawyer for Help with Michigan Uninsured Motorist Accident Claim: The law allows you to hire a lawyer if you suffer from a loss in financial strength, or you can help with the cost of a car accident. Under the Uninsured Motorist Act or “Uninsured Motorist Assurance Act” you, the driver, or at least any person driving, is liable for the cost of injury that occurs due to any negligence or accident by you for injuries done to oneself or others.” Insurance coverage through an agency (non-profit or private agency) or licensed insurance agency is a type of car insurance that is not typically covered by comprehensive or collision coverage, and thus you might have to hire a lawyer to fight a rate lawsuit. In this post, you will learn everything you need to know about how Michigan Uninsured Motorist Assurance Act works, and whether anyone who uses the insurance works against you. There are plenty of examples when someone can use the unlicensed insurance to save money and get you back on.

Legal Options After a Collision with a Driver Lacking Insurance

Legal Options After a Collision with a Driver Lacking Insurance This article is designed to explain how the basic insurance needs of a driver are different from those typical for drivers at the time of wreck. Also, we will discuss the insurance rates for a driver at the time of the collision. Although the price is the lowest with full coverage, full coverage car insurance can leave a little to be desired, as it requires you to have at least liability insurance when you are at the time of the collision. So, it’s the minimum possible insurance coverage that you must have. The best way that you can ensure that your bill is not more expensive than other bills that are in the same location, especially if you have accident insurance. If you’re looking for the cheapest car insurance in Arkansas, shopping around is critical. Pricing from a handful of insurance companies is best the first time around, but you can learn a.

Do I need an attorney to handle an uninsured motorist claim?

Do I need an attorney to handle an uninsured motorist claim? Insurance is more than just property and liability, which can often be a tricky situation. If the other driver isn t insured, you’ll end up being responsible for a huge bill. For states with a high number of uninsured drivers, it s common for drivers to be given much lower rates for the first few months to make sure their policy is in compliance and then the consequences can be serious. Your attorney can help you navigate these changes, and as far as to what exactly to do if you file an uninsured motorist claim. The insurance companies know you can make a claim in a lot of ways. They know that having car insurance can be costly, and they re less likely to raise their rates to avoid it. If you don t have insurance, you’re not going to have anyone s business. I am a business owner, self employed, and a personal injury attorney for more than 20 years. I have a policy with The Independent Casualty Insurance Group (IIG), which.

How to get Michigan proof of insurance for a car?

How to get Michigan proof of insurance for a car? If you have a car loan through an employer or a bank, you may be familiar with the basic coverage that goes with this type of auto insurance; for example, the minimum coverage requirements may be higher than what you would pay with minimum liability coverage. A Michigan state law requires drivers to carry the minimum amount of state-mandated auto insurance coverage. You are required to have liability coverage in the amount of $25,000 for the sole purpose of damage, injuries, destruction or destruction to others on the coverage. Most states will require you to carry additional coverage such as uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage. This is also known as personal injury protection or PIP insurance in the form of limits of liability coverage. There are a number of other types of coverage that you can purchase to meet this requirement. One of your main goals for owning or driving a vehicle is to ensure that that you are covered in the event of an accident. However, there are a number of factors that affect your car insurance.

0 notes

anctilbrayen · 4 years ago

Text

federated national insurance company am best rating

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :insurefreequotes.top

federated national insurance company am best rating

federated national insurance company am best rating and you don t need to take anything away, you may be one of the best looking if you re having trouble without a license. One reason the state may require you to carry car insurance is that you will make a percentage of your income — often $1,000 — tax-free. That means if you own a car and drive it frequently and don t have insurance or want to be liable for such repairs, you can get your car used for that cost. Or, you can use it for things that other people do. Some states also require liability insurance on your car. This coverage can be used to shield or partially cover the cost of property damage, such as a broken windshield, if you own it. This coverage is called coverage #1. The rest is information at which company you use and in which company you pay (you d be best off to find out by checking out your state s. federated national insurance company am best rating you can use, I am not happy with this company. I am happy with its customer service, I find my insurance plans are for my son if a i have been with this company for 2 years my last two years insurance and i live with my parents i was worried if they could bill me or give me to another company and i am in good health so i find them. I have paid $1200 for that policy and this was 2 days after my policy was due to going online and was told it was a mistake to pay on my old policy which was just $20. I did not buy this insurance. I am currently considering it not having coverage on my policy, I was in my car last week, and then the insurance co did not pay for my son s car at all and I was stopped and at the car was hit by someone other than myself. When i was with the insurance co I had just given her my car with insurance. Now i was about 4 minutes into a. federated national insurance company am best rating rating, and its financial situation it s not listed as such. Other that it’s a reputable company and it s got excellent financial strength and stability it s got a very competitive competitive car insurance. I will definitely use for my new parents coverage. Thanks, I am a very satisfied customer. I bought and was paying my car insurance through my car insurance company then paid for a plan that expired. I was really pissed off about that decision and I was even worse. When I read the reviews in the reviews, I was even more pissed off. So I called them and spoke to a number of the owners who actually use the insurance, and I was able to find out about a company that wasn t exactly helpful, and I was hoping that they had a more objective perspective. But I was wondering if that is the case – for sure, they don t know who they are – and if they can t be trusted. So I went online and checked out an insurance company who was a bit.

Home Insurance Add-Ons That Will Further Protect You

Home Insurance Add-Ons That Will Further Protect You from Insurance Claims Claims You Have Accurately Claimed On Your Auto Loan? Or how about the insurance that you ve been paying on your car loan already. The insurance that your credit card company has paid in the interest. That insurance may also come in handy to repair a broken out window. If you decide to have a deductible on your auto loan, your deductible can be as high as $10,000 and as low as $50,000 and thus less on your loan. And if you are unable to find affordable auto insurance, or you re on the outside looking in if your loan is to the car that it was worth, you can get it. Here are just a few of those terms and their meanings: How did your credit card company s letter codes come into play? Well, they don t usually come to any cost, but the amount (or the deductible) your credit card company has paid will be much higher. And it s not all about saving money, though.

Top 2 Cheapest Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida

Top 2 Cheapest Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida These companies have the highest financial ratings from A.M. Best, which is the third highest possible rating out of eight insurance companies in Florida. Homeowners insurance is a bit more complicated than many people realize, and finding a provider that does offer good coverage, at prices that are reasonable, is a challenge. The companies we researched for discounts in Tampa featured high marks from A.M. Best, which means that many Tampa residents will be able to save money in the long run because of low prices. We evaluated the companies based on their customer rating and experience, financial stability, and coverage to determine the best providers. To compare home insurance companies across the board, we then calculated a Reviews.com score based on the following: All insurance products advertised on are underwritten by insurance carriers that have partnered with , LLC. HomeInsurance.com, LLC may receive compensation from an insurer or other intermediary in connection with your engagement with the website. All decisions regarding any insurance products,.

Average Cost of Homeowners Insurance in Florida

Average Cost of Homeowners Insurance in Florida So how does Florida home insurance compare to the national average? Weather, weather damage and the likelihood of home-based crime are just a few of the factors that go into calculating homeowners insurance rates. So it’s smart to get several quotes from different providers and compare the overall cost. To do this, you can use the tool below or call . With a standard insurance company, you pay for your home insurance policy in cash, usually in an envelope or over the phone. Your insurance agent or representative will ask you a series of payment and coverage details. The envelope typically lists the coverage limits you ll need to meet. Packages include liability, property damage, personal belongings and additional homeowners and renters insurance. There are multiple coverage types. FL homeowners pay as little as $100 per year for their insurance — which is $6 per month for an HO-3 policy. However, many homeowners will outpace the national average by as much as $1,500 annually just to get their.

The 4 Best Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida

The 4 Best Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida A of the Best Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida is to help you. We have evaluated the best home insurance companies in Florida, and we are going to provide you with the most cost effective coverage. We understand there are plenty of home insurance providers that will provide coverage and provide plenty of savings and other perks. They offer discounts for being homeowners by 10%, having a home with fire (or a fire hydrant) and a security system. Home insurance companies usually charge these discounts to avoid any possible rate hike when you switch out the old homeowner insurance policy. The cheapest home insurance for a single premium is often the cheapest homeowners insurance in Florida for a 30-year-old single premium, and the insurance company is the one that offers the discounted premium for the same coverage. However, the discount could be lower if the insured is the new homeowner. The biggest value saving feature of a homeowner is in their claim history. It’s one to three years and is important to make sure you keep.

Cost of Homeowners Insurance by Age of Home

Cost of Homeowners Insurance by Age of Homeowners Insurance Rate by Age of Homeownership at Homeowners Type Average Annual Premium Annual Total Premium Annual Premium - $0 $400 -$250 -12.5% $1,424 $150 4% $1,890 $240 -12.9% $1,890 $240 -12.9% $1,890 $240 -12.9% $1,890 $240 -12.9% Over $1 Million $2 million $2 million $3 Million $1 million $2 million $3 Million $1 million $3 Million $1 million U.S. Residents $1,000,000 $8,.

Top 3 Most Expensive Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida

Top 3 Most Expensive Homeowners Insurance Companies in Florida The most expensive companies in the Sunshine State are as follows: State Farm: $1,868 per year. Florida Farm Bureau: $1,896 per year. Geico: $2,052 per year. Allstate: $2,081 per year. In several states and the District of Columbia, Allstate charges significantly higher annual premiums for homes with less than $200,000 in replacement value ($2,050 for an insured home). The average difference between the most expensive and least costly homeowners insurance companies is more than $3,000, which is the annual average difference between the most expensive and the cheapest insurers in the state. How much homeowners insurance is necessary in Florida? The minimum Florida homeowners insurance coverage is $991 per year. More expensive companies may not be included in the above-mentioned list, so check out the prices below. StateInsurance.com* Alfa Insurance Am.

Compare Florida’s top insurance companies

Compare Florida’s top insurance companies at savings. To get discounted rates, use a car to get a quote. If you are a driver who has stopped by the average car insurance provider, this would prove to be a more efficient method. Using multiple apps and websites, it’s easy to get a better estimate of how much you can save. Many of these companies are highly regarded and receive high financial scores. When comparing car insurance companies, insurers look for ways to reduce the amount of risk a client presents. A high credit score will help insurers find low rates and lower rates. It will also help them understand your driving history and budget to help reduce overall costs. Car insurance companies look for ways to raise their rates over time to make up for the reduced risk present in drivers with good credit. It’s also their way of ensuring that they don’t raise their premiums too high. One way to do this is by upgrading your car’s quality of life. Car insurance companies believe that by upgrading.

Homeowners Insurance FAQ

Homeowners Insurance FAQs Why is home insurance so expensive in South Dakota? South Dakota’s average home price of $1,184 isn’t very close to the national average. Home insurance costs will vary from person to person based on the amount of property coverage you need, along with ZIP codes and crime rates in the area. But prices can be fixed by considering the risk profile of a specific homeowner. For instance, a home in a densely populated area with a high crime rate would have lower-than-average premiums because it is walk-up residential. Those with houses of some crime or similar value would also pay more if they were responsible for flooding or a sudden home windstorm. The lowest home insurance premiums shown in this picture are offered by the highest insurers. What is the difference between a standard home insurance policy and an earthquake insurance quote? An earthquake insurance policy would be better than a home insurance quote because of the lower claims you would file and the increased.

The Cheapest Homeowner Insurance Companies in Florida

The Cheapest Homeowner Insurance Companies in Florida Florida has a fairly standard homeowners insurance market. Many homeowners simply choose this type, as companies decide how much risk they want to provide—or simply don’t want to risk losing the coverage to some extent to the policyholder. Companies set a minimum rate based on risk, and they will never increase their rates on anything, so it is critical to get quotes that will accurately reflect your risks as a homeowner. There are many insurance agencies out there that can do this for you. If you can think of something that works well for you, don’t forget to get quotes for it. This will help you find a good deal first, and a great rate for you. The Best Homeowners Insurance for Every Citizen in the State The cost of homeowners insurance depends on some factors. A few things will take into account, most notably: Age of Homeowners The cost of homeowners insurance in Florida is slightly higher for older homes. But.

0 notes

sinrau · 4 years ago

Link

Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “ Friday Night Massacre” for the U.S. Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy—a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General—had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers.

According to the Washington Post:

The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

According to Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal commentator and podcast host, “Congressional Democrats need to do something about this” immediately.

Connolly on Friday night called it, “Deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election—an election that hinges on mail-in ballots.”

Enjoy good journalism?

… then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has cut advertising rates in half, and we need your help. Like you, we here at Raw Story believe in the power of progressive journalism. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we’ve expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and legal efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. And unlike other news outlets, we’ve decided to make our original content free. But we need your support to do what we do.

Raw Story is independent. Unhinged from corporate overlords, we fight to ensure no one is forgotten.

We need your support in this difficult time. Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Invest with us. Make a one-time contribution to Raw Story Investigates, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click to donate by check.

… then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has cut advertising rates in half, and we need your help. Like you, we believe in the power of progressive journalism — and we’re investing in investigative reporting as other publications give it the ax. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we’ve expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. We need your support to do what we do.

Raw Story is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Invest with us in the future. Make a one-time contribution to Raw Story Investigates, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you.

‘Friday Night Massacre’ at US Postal Service as Postmaster General—a major Trump donor—ousts top officials #web #website #copied #toread #highlight #link #news #read #blog #wordpresspost #posts #breaking news# #Sinrau #Nothiah #Sinrau29 #read #wordpress

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

day0one · 4 years ago

Link

'Friday Night Massacre' At US Postal Service As Postmaster General Ousts Top Officials

"America is in a dead sprint to authoritarianism. The man is pulling out all the stops to prevent the citizens of this country from holding a legitimate election in which he might face removal from office." -

Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a "Friday Night Massacre" for the U.S. Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy—a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General—had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers.

According to the Washington Post:

The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

Already under fire for recent policy changes at the USPS that mail carriers from within and outside critics have denounced as a sabotage effort to undermine the Postal Service broadly as well as disrupt efforts to carry out mail-in voting for November's election amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the moves unveiled late Friday were viewed as an overt assault on democracy and a calculated opportunity to boost Republicans' long-held dream of undercutting or privatizing the government-run mail service while also boosting their election prospects in the process.

"Another Friday night massacre by this administration—and this time dealing another devastating blow to our postal service," said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) "The American people deserve answers and we're going to keep fighting for them."

Scanlon was among more than 80 congressional lawmakers who sent a letter to DeJoy earlier in the day expressing "deep concerns" about operational changes he has made for mail carriers that have delayed deliveries and lowered standards.

"It is vital that the U.S. Postal Service not reduce mail delivery times, which could harm rural communities, seniors, small businesses, and millions of Americans who rely on the mail for critical letters and packages," the letter stated. "Eliminating overtime and directing postal workers to leave mail on the floor of postal facilities will erode confidence in the Postal Service and drive customers away, resulting in even worse financial conditions in the future."

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, warned what occurred Friday is designed to weak the Postal Service, slow vote-by-mail, and disrupt the 2020 Census.

"We are sounding an alarm regarding personnel changes, policy shifts and service disruptions happening inside the U.S. Postal Service on Louis DeJoy's watch," Clarke said in a statement. "The postal service lies at the heart of our democracy and is critical to the success of an unprecedented vote-by-mail system that is needed for a fair and effective 2020 election season. The postal service helps ensure that our nation's most vulnerable communities are receiving medications and resources during the pandemic. It is also critical to the efforts to achieve a full and accurate 2020 Census."

Clarke said the administration's intentions are clear: "DeJoy, a Trump donor with no experience inside the postal service, has been installed to cause chaos and disruption at a time when the timely delivery of mail could not be more critical."

As Common Dreams reported earlier Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among those who signed the letter and also called for DeJoy's efforts to be investigated by the Inspector General of the USPS. Since 2016 alone, DeJoy has donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and candidates. In 2020, prior to his appointment as Postmaster General by the GOP-controlled board of governors, DeJoy had already given approximately $360,000 to a Super PAC supporting Trump's reelection.

As the Post notes in its reporting, the reshuffling of top managers and executives—as well as a hiring freeze and push for early retirements—"worried postal analysts, who say the tone of DeJoy's first eight weeks and his restructuring have recast the nation's mail service as a for-profit arm of the government, rather than an essential service.

"In a video posted to Twitter, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oreg.) characterized DeJoy as a "political crony" of the president's and also denounced the brazen efforts now on display as a "Friday Night Massacre" scenario:

Appearing Friday afternoon on Capitol Hill, DeJoy brushed off accusations that he is acting as a political bag man for Trump. "While I certainly have a good relationship with the president of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the president or anyone else in the administration is wholly off-base," DeJoy said.

But outside critics like Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics and a fierce critic of Trump's behavior as president, said the latest move should be seen as nothing less than a direct effort by DeJoy to exploit his authority at the Postal Service to further the president's political interests and reelection prospects.

According to Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal commentator and podcast host, "Congressional Democrats need to do something about this" immediately.

"If we wait until October/November, it'll be too late," said Cohen. "Trump is actively sabotaging the election under our noses—this isn't theoretical, it's happening RIGHT NOW." Cohen said this situation should be treated like a "fucking five-alarm fire" and said action must be taken by both lawmakers and the U.S. public without delay.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee which has oversight for the USPS, said what DeJoy is trying to pass off as simple organizational restructuring is actually "a Trojan Horse" designed to destroy one of the nation's most trusted and valued institutions from within.

Connolly on Friday night called it, "Deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election—an election that hinges on mail-in ballots."

0 notes

gizedcom · 4 years ago

Text

Coronavirus: What’s happening around the world on Saturday

The latest:

Canada has 109,995 coronavirus infections, including 96,819 recoveries, 8,882 deaths.

Wearing a mask is mandatory in Quebec as of Saturday.

How close are we to a vaccine for COVID-19?

Ottawa’s wage subsidy program to be expanded, extended to December.

Statistics Canada plans ‘contactless’ census for 2021.

Parts of Australia back in lockdown amid COVID-19 surge.

Global coronavirus infections pass 14 million, total deaths pass 600,000.

EU negotiations stretch into the night over budget, coronavirus fund

As of Saturday, masks are mandatory in indoor public spaces across Quebec. The new measure is kicking in as the province witnesses a slow but steady increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.

“It’s better to wear a mask than to be confined at home,” Premier François Legault said as he made the announcement last Monday. “It’s not fun wearing a mask, but it’s essential.”

The new directive, which applies to people aged 12 and older, coincided with tens of thousands of Quebecers spanning out on vacation with the beginning of the traditional two-week construction holiday.

The regulation applies to everyone 12 and older, although Legault said even children as young as two could be encouraged to wear a mask — either a certified medical face covering or a handcrafted one, as long as it covers the nose and mouth.

Quebec is the first province to mandate face-covering, despite criticism from some who say the government shouldn’t have a blanket policy when most regions outside Montreal weren’t deeply affected by COVID-19.

But Quebec’s director of public health said with the possibility of a second wave of the virus, all Quebecers should get in the habit of wearing masks.

Businesses will be expected to enforce the new rules and are subject to fines of between $400 and $6,000 if their customers are caught violating the directive.

That’s rankled small- and medium-sized business owners. A group of 13 associations representing the majority of those businesses called on the burden to be shifted to their delinquent clients.

WATCH | Quebec’s new mandatory mask rule is in effect:

As of Saturday, Quebecers aged 12 and over will have to wear a medical mask or one handcrafted by cloth in all indoor public spaces. 1:48

“We do think that asking people to wear masks in indoor, closed public spaces is fine. We prefer that rather than having to go into a second confinement and having to close our businesses again,” said Gopinath Jeyabalaratnam, a senior policy analyst at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

“Where we are having some trouble is that we have to play police, we have to be the enforcer of this measure.”

WATCH | Labour lawyer cautions enforcing mask policies is likely to cause some conflict:

Andrew Monkhouse says companies need to plan for difficult customers with clear policies and training for employees to help reduce tension. 5:26

What’s happening with coronavirus in Canada

As of 4 p.m. ET on Saturday, Canada had 111,001 coronavirus infections. Provinces and territories listed 96,912 of those as recovered or resolved. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 8,881, lower than Friday because Ontario retracted a reported death.

Ontario added 166 new cases on Saturday for a total of 37,440. The province also logged 132 new recoveries for a total of 33,294.

Many parts of Ontario moved to the next phase of the province’s COVID-19 recovery plan on Friday.

Stage 3 of the reopening effort took effect across 24 out of 34 public health units, though the jurisdictions that will keep operating under Stage 2 rules are among the busiest in the province. Stage 3 rules allow restaurants to resume indoor service, and businesses such as bars, gyms and theatres can start welcoming patrons again.

The latest rules for the province limit indoor gatherings to a maximum of 50 people, while as many as 100 people are allowed to congregate outdoors. The rules don’t yet apply in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas, Niagara Region and Windsor-Essex, all of which are still trying to reduce the numbers of local COVID-19 cases.

Quebec added 158 new cases on Saturday for a total of 57,300, including 50,027 recoveries. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador logged no new infections on Saturday.

WATCH | Provinces to get $19B for ‘safe restart’ of cities:

The federal government has reached a $19-billion agreement with the provinces and territories for a “safe restart” of cities. The money will go toward funding child care, transit and purchasing personal protective equipment for front-line workers. 1:54

In Edmonton, an outbreak at Misericordia Community Hospital continues to grow. The hospital now has 53 cases, including 17 that emerged after the institution closed its doors last week when it declared a full facility outbreak. Seven deaths have been linked to the outbreak.

The hospital stopped admitting new patients last week. All services including the emergency department remain closed.

Here’s what’s happening around the world

Millions more children in the United States learned Friday that they’re unlikely to return to classrooms full time in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic as death tolls reached new highs.

It came as many U.S. states — particularly in the Sunbelt — struggled to cope with the surge, and governments worldwide tried to control fresh outbreaks. In a sign of how the virus is galloping around the globe, the World Health Organization reported a record increase in global coronavirus cases on Saturday, with the total rising by 259,848 in 24 hours.

In the U.S., teams of military medics were deployed in Texas and California to help hospitals deluged by coronavirus patients. The two most populous states each reported roughly 10,000 new cases and some of their highest death counts since the pandemic began.

In Texas, Dr. Alison Haddock of the Baylor College of Medicine said the current situation is worse than after Hurricane Harvey, which swamped Houston with floodwaters in 2017. The state reported a new daily record for virus deaths on Friday and more than 10,000 confirmed cases for the fourth consecutive day.

“I’ve never seen anything like this COVID surge,” said Haddock, who has worked in emergency rooms since 2007. “We’re doing our best, but we’re not an ICU.”

Patients are waiting “hours and hours” to get admitted, she said, and the least sick people are lying in beds in halls to make room for most seriously ill.

Big numbers in Florida, Arizona and other states are also helping to drive the U.S. resurgence that’s forcing states to rethink the school year.

Texas gave public schools permission to stay closed for more than five million students well into the fall. Under the guidelines, schools can hold online-only instruction for up to the first eight weeks, potentially pushing a return to campus in some cities until November.

In Florida, Miami-area authorities began stepping up enforcement of a mask requirement. Code and fire inspectors have authority to issue tickets of up to $100 for individuals and $500 for businesses not complying with guidelines to wear masks and practise physical distancing. Police already had that power.

At least half of all states have adopted requirements for wearing face coverings.

WATCH | Fauci calls on leaders to be ‘forceful’ on mask-wearing:

Top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci says state and local leaders should be as forceful as possible on wearing masks to prevent spreading the deadly coronavirus, as the state of Georgia and its major cities tussle over masks. 0:38

But in Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has banned cities and counties from requiring face coverings. He sued Atlanta late Thursday to prevent it from defying his order, and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said she was prepared to go to court to maintain the requirement.

Globally, confirmed cases surpassed 14 million, according to a tally from Johns Hopkins University, and COVID-19 deaths neared 600,000. WHO reported a single-day record of new infections: over 237,000. Experts believe that the true numbers are even higher.

India’s total confirmed cases surpassed one million Friday, the third-highest in the world — behind the U.S. and Brazil — and its death toll reached more than 25,000. That followed an announcement Thursday that Brazil’s confirmed cases exceeded two million, including 76,000 deaths.

Health workers wait to screen people for COVID-19 symptoms at a temple in Mumbai, India, on Saturday. India crossed one million coronavirus cases on Friday, third only to the United States and Brazil, prompting concerns about its readiness to confront an inevitable surge that could overwhelm hospitals and test the country’s feeble health-care system. (Rafiq Maqbool/The Associated Press)

The surge in India — where experts believe the vast majority of cases are still being missed — drove home concerns over the readiness of some countries to cope with outbreaks that could test feeble health-care systems.

In sub-Saharan Africa, which already had the world’s greatest shortage of medical personnel, nearly 10,000 health workers in 40 countries have been infected, WHO said.

South Africa on Saturday could join the U.S., Brazil, India and Russia as the most badly hit countries as its cases near 350,000. Current case trends show it will surpass Peru.

That comes as the world marks Mandela Day, remembering South Africa’s first Black president and his legacy of fighting inequality. The country, however, remains the world’s most unequal, and health officials have warned that the pandemic will lay that bare.

On Friday, UN officials urged wealthy countries to do more to help developing nations respond to the pandemic. “COVID-19 and the associated global recession are about to wreak havoc in fragile and low-income countries,” Mark Lowcock, a senior official with the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said.

WATCH | Wealthy nations must increase aid to poor countries, UN official says:

Developing countries face ‘a series of human tragedies more brutal than the virus itself’ from the economic impact of the pandemic, says senior UN official. 0:38

He was speaking at a WHO briefing in Geneva, where he unveiled the UN’s third version since March of its Global Humanitarian Response Plan, now estimated to cost $10.3 billion US, to prevent “multiple cascading crises” related to the coronavirus.

He said the pandemic could push up to 100 million people back into poverty this year and urged wealthy countries to fund the response plan.

European Union leaders are searching for compromises on Saturday as a summit to reach a deal on an unprecedented 1.85 trillion euro ($2.1 trillion US) EU budget and coronavirus recovery fund enters its second day with tensions running high. A full day and night of discussions by the 27 leaders on Friday only added to the irritations over how the huge sums should be spent and what strings should be attached. The atmosphere “was grumpier this evening than this afternoon,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told Dutch reporters after Friday’s marathon talks. “This is going to take a while, I think.”

Employees pack N95 face masks for children at a factory near Changodar, India, on Friday. (Sam Panthaky/AFP via Getty Images)

In China, the number of confirmed cases in a new coronavirus outbreak in the country’s far west has risen to 17. The National Health Commission said Saturday that 16 more cases were identified in the previous 24 hours in the Xinjiang region, on top of a first case. As of Friday, mainland China had 83,644 confirmed coronavirus cases, the health authority said. The COVID-19 death toll remained at 4,634.

South Korea has reported 39 newly confirmed infections of COVID-19, most of them cases imported from abroad. The figures brought the national caseload to 13,711, including 294 deaths. Authorities said at least 28 cases were tied to overseas arrivals. Eighteen others came from the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, which had been at the centre of a virus resurgence that began in late May as restrictions eased.

Health-care providers gather inside a work area protected by a sheet of plastic at the Eurnekian Ezeiza Hospital on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Tuesday. (Natacha Pisarenko/The Associated Press)

Brazil on Friday reported 2,046,328 confirmed cases, up from 2,012,151 the day before, when it crossed the two-million mark. Total deaths rose to 77,851 from 76,688, according to the Health Ministry.

Britain said on Saturday it was pausing its daily update of the death toll from the coronavirus in the United Kingdom after the government ordered a review into the calculation of the data over concern numbers might have been exaggerated. Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday said he hopes the country will be “able to review the outstanding restrictions and allow a more significant return to normality from November at the earliest, possibly in time for Christmas.”

He also offered employers “more discretion” in bringing their employees back to work, starting in August.

WATCH | British PM hoping for ‘significant return to normality’ by Christmas:

As Britain continues to ease coronavirus lockdown measures, Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he’s eyeing a return to near normality by the end of the year. 0:44

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Saturday delayed the opening of parliament for several weeks as the new coronavirus continued spreading through the country’s two most populous states. Australia’s Victoria state saw a marked drop in new COVID-19 infections — from Friday’s record high of 428 to 217. The Health Department said Saturday that two more people in the state, a man and a woman both in their 80s, had died, raising the state’s death toll to 34 and Australia’s national total to 118.

WATCH | Australian PM says situation in Victoria ‘very concerning’:

While hopeful the lockdown will help lower the number of COVID-19 cases in the state of Victoria, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison remains concerned about the situation. 0:29

Iran’s president on Saturday estimated as many as 25 million Iranians could have been infected with the coronavirus since the outbreak’s beginning, as he urged the public to take the pandemic seriously, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Saturday. Hassan Rouhani cited a new Iranian Health Ministry study in offering the unprecedentedly high numbers. Rouhani also said about 30 million to 35 million Iranians will be infected to the virus in the coming months.

WATCH | COVID-19 research targeted by hackers:

Marcus Kolga, senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says Russia may be deploying hackers to try to steal a potential COVID-19 vaccine for its own citizens, as well hinder Western countries’ efforts to develop one. 1:21

France will enforce mask-wearing in enclosed public spaces, including banks, shops and indoor markets, from July 20, Health Minister Olivier Veran said on Saturday, as part of efforts to curb a resurgence of COVID-19 across the country.

The government has accelerated plans to make it compulsory to wear masks after a series of indicators have suggested the virus could be gaining momentum, especially in areas in western and southern France that had been relatively spared during the height of the outbreak between March and May.

Credit: Source link

The post Coronavirus: What’s happening around the world on Saturday appeared first on GIZED - Breaking News Worldwide.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2OEUylO via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

un-enfant-immature · 4 years ago

Text

Apple doubles down on its right to profit from other businesses

Apple this week is getting publicly dragged for digging in its heels over its right to take a cut of subscription-based transactions that flow through its App Store. Almost unbelievably, it’s doing so so in the middle of antitrust investigations both in the E.U. and the U.S. — the latter which CEO Tim Cook may decide to skip— in which lawmakers will attempt to determine if Apple abuses its market position and power to disadvantage its competitors.

This is not a new complaint, but one that came to a head this week over Apple’s decision to reject app updates from Basecamp’s newly launched subscription-based email app called “Hey.”

Hey offers a $99-per-year subscription for access to its nouveau email service that works across web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android, but not via standard email protocols. The Hey iOS app was initially approved by Apple, but then put on pause — meaning Basecamp couldn’t submit any updates or bug fixes until it added an option for users to subscribe to Hey’s service through an in-app purchase.

This decision on Apple’s part was met with shock, horror and outrage by Basecamp co-founder and Chief Technology Officer David Heinemeier Hansson and, to some extent, the broader iOS developer community.

Wow. I'm literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll REMOVE THE APP.

— DHH (@dhh) June 16, 2020

Heinemeier Hansson has been a vocal opponent to Apple’s policies well before the launch of Hey. He testified before Congress as part of a series of hearings over online platforms and market power. Last year, he called out Apple Card for discriminatory practices. Of all people for Apple to antagonize amid multiple antitrust probes — and the week before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference — this was certainly a bold choice.

In a series of tweets, Heinemeier Hansson made the case as to why Apple’s reasoning made no sense.

Arguably, the whole debacle served as a nice bit of high-profile marketing for a brand-new app that would have otherwise flown under the radar. But, nonetheless, his larger points appear correct: Apple’s policies are confusing, inconsistently applied, and anti-competitive.

Here's the rejection letter. I love how they frame their shakedown as "offer customers the option". Not a single mention of the fact that Apple will take 15-30% of our business through this. THIS IS ALL JUST FOR THE CONSUMER GOOD, YOU SEE. pic.twitter.com/rzQbsfCHvs

— DHH (@dhh) June 16, 2020

For starters, Basecamp’s new email app Hey competes with Apple’s built-in Mail app. That means it already has to convince users to forgo the iPhone’s free email experience for its differentiated one. And when it does acquire a user, Apple wants it to hand over a commission no matter if the new user discovered the app for the first time on the App Store or somewhere else. (Like a TechCrunch article!)

Apple argues its policies around the use of in-app purchases are not new. In fact, they’ve been in place since the first set of App Store Review Guidelines were published in September 2010, the company told TechCrunch when questioned about its decision.

The section around in-app purchases was relocated to 3.X from 11.X in 2016, but today states that multi-platform apps can allow access to subscriptions provided elsewhere so long as in-app purchases are also offered with the iOS app. The rules also state that developers can’t directly or indirectly tell iOS users how to make a purchase outside the app. (Hey has a Help screen that says you can’t sign up in the app and “we know that’s a pain.”) The rules also say you can’t discourage the use of in-app purchases.

In other words, Apple seems to argue, Basecamp should have known better.

That argument would hold up if Apple enforced its rules uniformly, but it does not.

As Apple observer John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out, Apple makes a distinction between business services and consumer apps when enforcing in-app purchase policies. This has to do with how business software is often paid for — by the company, not the end user, as a report by Protocol first noted. That’s why Basecamp’s flagship service for businesses can be offered in the App Store without a subscription sign-up, but its consumer app Hey cannot.

That’s a confusing distinction to make — and one not documented by Apple’s rules — as the line between software meant for business versus consumer use has long since been blurred. In fact, that blurring comes about, in part, because of the democratized access to business-grade software made possible through platforms like the Apple App Store.

Business apps aren’t the only exception Apple makes.

Apple also carves out exceptions for a type of apps it broadly refers to as “reader” apps, even though they aren’t necessarily about parsing the printed word.

This set does include reading apps — like magazines, newspapers, and books. And it’s why the Kindle app lets you read your ebooks, but doesn’t tell you how to buy more or offer a way to do so in the app. The group has also expanded to include audio, music, video, access to professional databases, VoIP, cloud storage, and other approved services, like classroom management apps.

Not surprisingly, this group of apps where Apple permits the companies to forgo the in-app purchase option (so long as they never ever mention how else to subscribe) are also among those with a direct competitor to an Apple paid service.

For example, Spotify, which competes with Apple Music, is considered a “reader” app. The group also includes rivals to Apple TV+, iCloud, Podcasts, Classroom, Books, and others.

Spotify has been among the most vocal about how Apple’s policy negatively impacts its business. Last year, it filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the E.U. That investigation is now underway which Spotify says is great news for consumers.

“Apple’s anticompetitive behavior has intentionally disadvantaged competitors, created an unlevel playing field, and deprived consumers of meaningful choice for far too long,” Spotify’s statement read. “We welcome the European Commission’s decision to formally investigate Apple, and hope they’ll act with urgency to ensure fair competition on the iOS platform for all participants in the digital economy,” it added.

But for the most part, only larger companies have been willing to stand up to Apple publicly on this front.

Among these is Fortnite maker Epic Games, which wants to sell software through its own iOS app. Its CEO, Tim Sweeney, said he wants all iOS developers to have the option to process payments directly and install software from any source, and won’t seek out any “special deal just for ourselves.”

Here Apple speaks of a level playing field. To me, this means: All iOS developers are free to process payments directly, all users are free to install software from any source. In this endeavor, Epic won’t seek nor accept a special deal just for ourselves.https://t.co/A4sT1eMKMm

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) June 17, 2020

More recently, ebook seller Kobo added its voice to growing list of anticompetitive complaints, saying it can’t fairly compete against Apple Books when it has to share 30% of revenue from purchases with Apple. (The company, like many others, currently sells only from its website to avoid this fee.)

Tinder parent Match has also released a lengthy statement against Apple’s in-app purchase policy, saying it’s “acutely aware of [Apple’s] power over us.” Match also said it’s unfair how only digital service providers have to share revenue with Apple when others — like ride-share apps and social networking apps — do not.

But many developers bite their tongue and play along with Apple’s rules out of fear. Stratechery founder Ben Thompson posted to Twitter on Tuesday how he’s hearing from a number of developers who claim Apple is refusing to update their app until they add an in-app purchase option for their SaaS (software as a service) business. It’s unclear, given these developers didn’t go on record, how many of their apps had been mistakenly approved by App Store reviewers in the first place.

Of course, the line between Apple enforcing an existing policy it’s been lax on and a change in direction around enforcement of App Store policies has always been a gray area at best. (Remember how all of a sudden Amazon’s Prime Video app could rent and sell movies once Apple had its own Apple TV+ app it wanted to distribute on Fire TV? And Apple said that fell under an existing policy — one that magically now included permission for Amazon?)

In a third exception, Apple also turns a blind eye towards companies that incentivize users to pay for access to their upgraded features outside the App Store. For example, Google sells its YouTube Premium service for $11.99 per month via the web, but for $15.99 per month on the App Store to account for Apple’s commission. Apple allows this, despite its rule about about companies that discourage the use of in-app purchases. (Apparently, giving users a way to save nearly $50 per year by shopping outside the App Store doesn’t count as “discouraging” an in-app purchase?)

The solution to this whole matter is tricky, of course.

As much as developers want to sell directly to consumers without sharing a cut with Apple, it would be wrong to say that apps don’t benefit from Apple’s distribution platform. Would iOS apps ever have found as large an audience if they were all side-loaded bits of software instead of being organized, ranked, curated and featured in a built-in App Store?

Plus, consumers want the convenience of making easy purchases inside an app with a payment card they keep on file. Amazon proved consumer demand for this with 1-click checkout, which allowed it to capture massive ecommerce market share over the years. In other words, take away the option to make purchases directly in iOS apps via Apple Pay and prepare for a consumer backlash.

A better compromise would be a reduction in the cut that Apple takes. Today, Apple currently charges a 30% commission on subscriptions in year 1 which drops to 15% in year 2. These commissions are often for apps that have built sizable brands without Apple’s help — Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, Hulu, Netflix, Tinder, Fortnite, etc. These apps don’t need the App Store to be “discovered” by users or curated into “must” lists by App Store editors, they simply need to serve their existing users who happen to carry an iPhone.

Apple may deserve to stick its hand in the pot to some extent for making apps easy to find, install and pay for, but it’s getting much harder to argue that 30% is the right price for such a system.

#TechCrunch

0 notes

magzoso-tech · 5 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/remembering-the-startups-we-lost-in-2019/

Remembering the startups we lost in 2019

All manner of startups fail for all manner of reasons. But there’s one constant: this is an incredibly difficult business. Launching a successful company isn’t just a matter of drive and finding the right people (though both, clearly, are important). Doing well in this business requires the stars to align perfectly on a billion different things.

A cursory look at this year’s batch of companies doesn’t find any story quite as spectacular as last year’s big Theranos flameout, which gave us a best-selling book, documentary, podcast series and upcoming Adam McKay/Jennifer Lawrence film. Some, like MoviePass, however, may have come close.

And for every Theranos, there are dozens of stories of hardworking founders with promising products that simply couldn’t make it to the finish line. There’s also room for debate about what is and isn’t a startup. For our purposes, we’re focusing here on independent startups, not digital initiatives from larger companies — though in at least one case, the startup was acquired by a larger company before shutting down.

So without further ado, here are some of the biggest and most fascinating startups that closed up shop in 2019.

Anki (2010 – 2019)

Total raised: $182 million

In 2013, a promising young hardware startup showcased a new generation of slot cars onstage at the World Wide Developer Conference keynote. It was quite an honor for a young company. Apple was clearly impressed with how Overdrive pushed the limits of what could be done on the iPhone.

Three years later, Anki released Cozmo. The plucky little robot was the result of large investment, including the hiring of ex-Pixar and Dreamworks animators brought on board to craft a high range of emotions in the robot’s eyes. In late 2018, the company launched the similar but adult-focused Vector robot. By April 2019, Anki had shut its doors, in spite of selling 1.5 million robots and “hundreds of thousands” of Cozmo models.

Chariot (2014 – 2019)

Total raised: $3 million, acquired by Ford in 2017

Chariot was a shuttle startup hoping to reinvent mass transit with a fleet of vans for commuters. The routes, supposedly, were determined based on a “crowdsourced” vote.

After acquiring the service two years ago, Ford shut it down at the beginning of 2019. The company didn’t offer many details, except to say that “in today’s mobility landscape, the wants and needs of customers and cities are changing rapidly.”

Daqri (2010 – 2019)

Total raised: $132 million

Daqri, another high-flying, heavily funded AR headset business, shut its doors around September and completed an asset sale. The company is one of many in the sector that failed to succeed in its efforts to court enterprise customers, as well as in its efforts to compete with Magic Leap, Microsoft and others.

Daqri was, at one point, speaking with a large private equity firm about financing ahead of a potential IPO, but as the technical realities facing other AR companies came to light, the firm backed out and the deal crumbled, according to earlier TechCrunch reporting. Sadly, Daqri wasn’t the only AR business to crumble this year.

HomeShare

Total raised: $4.7 million

HomeShare tried to deal with the challenge of rapidly rising housing costs by matching roommates who shared apartments split into “micro-rooms.” The company said that as of March, it had about 1,000 active residents.

As part of the shutdown, HomeShare said residents would not be getting back the deposits for their partitions — but they would be able to keep the divider or sell it.

Jibo (2012 – 2018/19)

Total raised: $72.7 million

Between Anki and Jibo, you could say it was a tough year for consumer social robots. But then, there’s never been a great year for the category. Not yet, at least. Like the sad death of the original Aibo before it, Jibo’s end was punctuated by the incredibly depressing nature of watching an adorable robot friend draw its final breath. Jibo did just that in April, telling consumers, “I want to say I’ve really enjoyed our time together. Thank you very, very much for having me around.”

Jibo technically died in late-2018, but we’re making an exception due to the dramatic nature of its demise. The end came in spite of a successful crowdfunding campaign and a healthy amount of venture capital raised. In spite of it all, the startup was forced to lay off most of its staff and then, ultimately, send Jibo upstate to live on the robo-farm.

MoviePass (2011 – 2019)

Total raised: $68.7 million, acquired by Helios and Matheson in 2017

Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Holy hell. Where to even start with this one? When we were putting this list together, one TechCruncher remarked that he swore MoviePass shut down years ago. That’s because (not unlike some current political events), the ticket subscription service’s magnificent train wreck of a demise appeared to unfold over the course of several years, in excruciating slow motion. We wrote a lot about it. A lot, a lot.

In fact, there seemed to be a new disaster every week, as the company hemorrhaged money, limited its service, experience outages, borrowed even more money, was forced to enter a kind of zombie state and had a massive data breech. Oh, and then there was the John Gotti movie it financed that was arguably even worse. By the end of it all, MoviePass’ ultimate demise almost felt like an act of mercy.

Munchery (2010 – 2019)

Total raised: $125 million

One of the first startup scandals of 2019 involved a once well-known meal delivery startup, Munchery. After the business emailed its customers notifying them of its imminent shutdown, its vendors came forward with a slew of accusations. Namely, the food delivery startup took advantage of them in its final hours, knowingly allowing them to continue making deliveries it couldn’t pay for.

The company’s sudden demise sparked a debate around accountability. While the CEO and its venture capital investors stayed largely silent, its vendors cried out for an explanation and even protested outside the offices of Sherpa Capital, one of Munchery’s backers, in search of answers and payments.

Nomiku (2012 – 2019)

Total raised: $145,000

One of the most recent additions to this list, Bay Area-based food startup Nomiku called it quits earlier this month. The company helped pioneer the consumer sous vide category, only to see the market flooded by competing devices. In multiple successful Kickstarter campaigns totaling $1.3 million, backing from Samsung Ventures and an attempted pivot into meal plans, the startup just couldn’t survive.

“The total climate for food tech is different than it used to be,” CEO Lisa Fetterman told TechCrunch. “There was a time when food tech and hardware were much more hot and viable. I think a company can survive a few hurdles, and a few challenges [ …] For me, it was the perfect storm of all these things.”

ODG (1999 – 2019)

Total raised: $58 million

A pioneer in the AR glasses space, news emerged of Osterhout Design Group’s (ODG) demise in the first few weeks of January. Only a couple of years ago, the company raised a $58 million financing — less than a year later, it had burned through its funding and couldn’t pay employees. By early 2018, ODG had lost half of its workforce as it sought loans to pay back employees. By early 2019, only a skeleton crew awaited a patent sale after acquisitions from several large tech companies, including Facebook and Magic Leap, fell through.

“I hope Magic Leap is a huge success. I want everyone in AR to be a huge success,” Osterhout said in an interview with TechCrunch in 2017. “[Augmented reality] is going to be transformative.”

Omni (2014 – 2019)

Total raised: $35.3 million

The startup began as a physical storage company, then tried to pivot after selling off its physical storage operations to competitor Clutter in May — it tried, unsuccessfully, to build a white-label software platform that would allow brick-and-mortar merchants to operate their own businesses for renting and selling products.

As part of the shutdown, roughly 10 Omni engineers were hired by Coinbase.

Scaled Inference (2014 – 2019)

Total raised: $17.6 million

Founded by former Googlers Olcan Sercinoglu and Dmitry Lepikhin, Scaled Inference made headlines in 2014 with a plan to build machine learning and artificial intelligence technology similar to what’s used internally by companies like Google, and making it available as a cloud service that can be used by anyone. The ambitions were grand and attracted investors like Felicis Ventures, Tencent and Khosla Ventures.

Unfortunately, the company was forced to call it quits recently. Former CEO Sercinoglu tells us the shutdown was a result of a lack of funding due to insufficient commercial traction. “We were working on various options until the last minute and retained the team as long as we could, but it did not work out. On the plus side, we were able to be transparent with the team throughout the process,” he said.

Sinemia (2015 – 2019)

Total raised: $1.9 million

It was a rough year for MoviePass-style movie ticket subscription services in general. Sinemia seemed at first to be a more sustainable competitor, but it was plagued by subscriber complaints and even lawsuits around app issues, hidden charges and policies for shuttering accounts.

In April, the company announced that it was ending U.S. operations. To be clear, it did not say that it was shutting down entirely (much of its staff was based in Turkey), but the company’s website has since gone offline. If Sinemia survives in some form, it has disappeared from view.

Unicorn Scooters (2018 – 2019)

Total raised: $150,000

Unicorn Scooters was one of the first fatalities of the electric scooter craze of 2018, though certainly not the last. As the story goes, the business spent way too much money on Facebook and Google ads; the startup quickly shut down with no money left over to issue refunds for more than 300 of its $699 scooters that had been ordered.

The not-so-aptly named Unicorn had completed the Y Combinator startup accelerator only a few months before it called it quits, likely making it one of the fastest YC grads to shutter post-graduation. “Unfortunately, the cost of the ads were just too expensive to build a sustainable business,” Unicorn’s CEO Nick Evans wrote, according to The Verge. “And as the weather continued to get colder throughout the US and more scooters from other companies came on to the market, it became harder and harder to sell Unicorns, leading to a higher cost for ads and fewer customers.”

Vreal (2015 – 2019)

Total raised: $15 million

via @VrealOfficial twitter

Vreal was an ambitious game-streaming platform that aimed to let VR users explore the worlds in which live-streamers were playing. Those users could walk around streamers as avatars, or they could explore on their own as passive observers while listening to the live-streamer blast their way through zombies.

“Unfortunately, the VR market never developed as quickly as we all had hoped, and we were definitely ahead of our time,” the company said in a blog post. “As a result, Vreal is shutting down operations and our wonderful team members are moving on to other opportunities.”

#Miscellaneous

0 notes

shaizstern · 5 years ago

Text

Article from WSJ: Everyone Hates Customer Service. This Is Why.

Technology lets companies see how badly they can treat consumers, right up until the moment they bolt

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN KUCZALA; PHOTOS: ISTOCK

By Sharon Terlep

In corporate parlance, it’s called the “breakpoint.” It’s how far customers can be pushed before their heads explode.

From long waits at the airport to rude store clerks to ineffective helplines, shoddy customer service is a universal frustration. Today, companies crunch data and use artificial intelligence to determine exactly how angry a customer has to be to bolt. Many are walking right up to that line.

Technologies can track how long a customer will wait for a human to answer the phone and how many ads they will tolerate. They can monitor the tone of a customer’s voice. Companies know what steps they must take to keep shoppers loyal—and which they can skip.

This knowledge has contributed to a decline in how customers are treated, say analysts, consultants and former executives. A smaller number make the counter case: that companies are using their better read to improve the customer experience.

“There is more data available on just how disgruntled someone can be,” said Megan Burns, CEO of consulting company Experience Enterprises.

Sally Robey reached her breakpoint with AT&T Inc. after six calls and a collective four hours on the phone with customer-service agents over the price of an unlimited phone plan. “It’s like they have a stranglehold on us,” said Ms. Robey, who had been an AT&T customer for 30 years when she decided she was done.

Sally Robey, in her home in Wilmette, Ill., says made six calls and spent four hours on the phone with customer-service agents over the price of an unlimited phone plan. PHOTOS: EVAN JENKINS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL(2)

Dogged by overage fees on her family’s seven-phone wireless plan, Ms. Robey, a mother of four from Wilmette, Ill., set out to get a plan with unlimited data. An AT&T cable subscriber and customer since 1988, she eventually got a better deal from Verizon CommunicationsInc. and returned to AT&T to see if it would match the rates. AT&T declined.

“I said, ‘This is ridiculous, you’re not doing anything to keep us,’” Ms. Robey said. The agent, she said, told her: “No, there’s nothing I can do.”

It was only when Ms. Robey was in the act of switching phone numbers to Verizon from AT&T that the wireless carrier buckled, she said.

“Then they were, like, ‘Oh, we want to keep you.’ ” She ended up staying because the company gave her what she wanted right before she was about to leave.

An AT&T spokeswoman declined to comment on Ms. Robey’s situation but said the company contacted her on the matter.

The telecom giant is among the companies employing artificial intelligence to gauge customers’ behavior patterns and personalities to pair them with customer-service agents.

“Matching the right agent to customers improves the likelihood of a positive outcome, measured by resolution rate and satisfaction scores,” an AT&T spokeswoman said. The company declined to comment further.

Some companies now equip call centers with software that analyzes a caller’s tone of voice and pace of speech to determine how upset the person is. Angrier callers get routed to agents skilled at de-escalating conflict, who are in turn warned in advance.

San Francisco-based cloud communications provider Dialpad Inc. transcribes call-center conversations in real time, sensing when a call is taking a turn for the worse. That can help prompt a manager to listen in, view the transcript and step in if necessary without having to ask customers to repeat themselves.

“Voice is the last offline data set,” said Dan O’Connell, chief strategy officer, who says analyzing the tone of calls can help business quickly address customer concerns.

Computing power and processing power have expanded exponentially, said John Birrer, chief of staff of Afiniti Inc., a company that makes call-center software. “That allows you to make a millisecond decision when a call comes in to decide in a sophisticated way how to handle the call,” he said.

Afiniti crunches data gleaned from consumers’ demographic profiles, credit scores and past interactions with a company to determine which customer-service agent is the best fit. An algorithm then matches the caller to the agent who has had the most success with that type of caller.

“Every agent has their own personality and every customer has their own personality,” said Mr. Birrer. “We try to pair people.” AT&T uses the company’s system.

The emergence of companies that sell their products directly to shoppers means more firms have data on exactly when, how and why consumers buy—or don’t buy—their products. Since they don’t use a middleman they can know, for instance, that two delayed shipments won’t cost the company business, but three will.

Online sellers don’t have to worry as much about driving customers away with ads that pop up during the checkout process because they know it takes a certain number until people actually cancel their purchase, according to an industry consultant who worked at a company that used such a system. Retailers track consumers’ clicks as they go through the ordering process, allowing them to discern how many ads can appear before shoppers bail.

When she was about to change companies, Ms. Robey says she got the deal she wanted. PHOTO: EVAN JENKINS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Just as data can be used to measure customers’ threshold for bad service, it also helps pinpoint which shoppers are most profitable and, therefore, worth the effort and expense to please.

“Companies have gotten good at figuring out what does and doesn’t move the needle and what things will increase sales and what will not increase sales,” said John Mitchell, president and managing principal of Applied Marketing Science, a customer-service consulting firm.

“Breakpoint” is an informal term used by some companies and consultants to describe the point at which consumers quit, whether it’s canceling a subscription service, no longer buying a product or switching to a rival company.

Matt Dixon, a longtime customer-service consultant, is now product chief at Tethr, an Austin-based company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer interactions.

Mr. Dixon said there is a disconnect between what companies think customers want and what they actually want. For instance, it’s most common for customer-service agents to have empathetic personalities, a sought-after trait in the field.

But in an analysis of how well customer-service agents perform, a personality type known as a “controller,” someone who is “outspoken and opinionated,” did far better, Mr. Dixon said. Yet only 2% of managers interviewed in the study said they would consider hiring such a person.

“People want to deal with someone who is smarter than they are and who will fix their problem,” he said.

Executives might not even have to solve the problem to put the customer at ease. A Harvard study of Twitter interactions from March 2015 to April 2016 found replying speedily to a complaining customer and making the response personal is an effective way to retain business, even if the company doesn’t resolve the issue.

The study examined more than 400,000 customer-service tweets involving airlines and wireless carriers in the U.S. Researchers contacted the posters and found consumers who engaged companies on Twitter were more likely to prefer the brand or pay more for it, even if their tweet was negative or neutral.

Dan Russo, a once-disgruntled Wells Fargo & Co. customer, has come to appreciate an efficient approach to customer service. He says that three years ago, he was unemployed when he incurred hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees, triggered because a direct-withdrawal for a gym membership, which he believed he had canceled, left his bank account short. That caused a handful of other small charges to bounce.

Furious because the purchases that bounced amounted to less than $20, he said he pleaded with a bank agent to remove the fees. He said he called at least seven times, going through different departments and supervisors.

Mr. Russo, a 36-year-old regional vice president for a construction company who lives in Costa Mesa, Calif., switched to an online bank—where, he said, “You call, the phone rings, and someone answers. No sub menu, no ‘hit option 9.’ ”—and has been pleased with his experience.

“I think these big banks know people will call in, get frustrated and hang up,” he said. “They know they can charge fees before someone leaves, and they know there’s a perception that it’s hard to change banks.”

A Wells Fargo spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Russo’s situation. The bank provides customers with a list of outside entities that make withdrawals to customers’ accounts to help them track recurring payments, he said. It also has added features to prevent overdraft fees, such as automatically sending an alert to online banking customers when their available balance drops to zero or below.

There is plenty to blame for the collective angst over poor customer service. Companies are bigger and employees more transient. Consumers have more avenues to shop and are therefore less loyal. The outsourcing wave of the 1990s and 2000s shifted legions of call centers to developing nations, where workers make little money, are disconnected from the companies they work for and often face language barriers.

Businesses have digitized basic customer-service functions, such as checking bank statements and making online returns. That means customers who connect with customer-service agents are generally those with the most complex problems. That leads to more difficult interactions.

Gutted customer-service operations are a lasting legacy of the financial crisis. More than 80% of companies pared customer-service or contact-center staff amid the recession, according to DMG, a West Orange, N.J.-based consulting firm.

“They just kept cutting and downsizing” during the financial crisis, said Richard Shapiro, founder and president of the Center for Client Retention in New Jersey. Customer-service departments and employees are generally the first and easiest cut companies make in difficult times. “If a general manager all of a sudden had a high profit we knew why: they cut their customer service department,” he said. “But a year later they would have problems.”

HappyOrNot Ltd. is a company that allows businesses to track customer satisfaction in stores and airports using red-and-green buttons and touch screens. Customers tap the devices—a green smiley face for happy, or red frowny face for not—to provide immediate feedback. Co-founder Ville Levaniemi calls the concept a “service panic button.”

Unhappy customers are by far more likely to reply, he said. The company needed to build heartier machines for airports to withstand angry punches to the red frown. Touch screens had to be programmed to recognize repeat entries by the same person trying to amplify their negative opinion.

“It’s kind of cathartic, it provides them a channel to vent their dissatisfaction,” he said.

Historians point to another factor in the erosion of customer service: communications technology. Automated call distributors, which routed calls to customer-service agents, furthered the ability of companies to deal with customers remotely and en masse, depersonalizing the relationship.

Continental Airlines was one of the first big companies to make broad use of call distributors using a system developed in the early 1970s.

Passengers waited to talk with customer service agents at Denver International Airport in June. Airlines were known for their customer service in the 1960s.PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES(2)

It is perhaps fitting that the industry which pioneered one of the most transformative technologies in customer service is also the one often linked to its declining standards.

Airlines in the 1950s and 1960s were known for doting flight attendants and perks such as fine dining and souvenirs for children. Delta Air Lines Inc. founder C.E. Woolman, who led the company in the 1930s and 1940s, would sometimes bring delayed passengers home for dinner and to sleep, said his daughter, Barbara Woolman Preston, according to the company’s website.

Deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s led to an explosion in competition. While the shift made commercial flying far more affordable, it also led to decades of cost cutting and increasingly limited service so loathed by current-day travelers.

The airline industry last year was near the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which rates industries based on customer surveys. Last year, airlines averaged 39th out of ACSI’s 46 benchmarked industries. In 2018, internet-service providers and subscription-television services were the lowest. Brewing companies scored highest.

While customer frustration is more palpable today, whether people are truly treated worse by companies now is a matter of debate among researchers, analysts and companies.

Ewan Duncan, a McKinsey & Co. senior partner who consults on customer service, is among those who say the perception—not the actual experience—has grown worse in recent years. The social-media echo chamber and the fact that live customer-service agents are tackling more complex problems gives the impression things are worse than they are, he said.

“When you’re sitting on a plane and don’t have a gate, you’re grumpy and you tweet it out,” Mr. Duncan said. “If you have a good experience, you thank somebody and that’s it.”

0 notes

damienfhdm590-blog · 5 years ago

Text

What Sports Can Teach Us About cbd öl

The recognition of clinical cannabis is soaring, and amid the many goods shoppers are seeking are CBD, or cannabis oils.

A wealth of selling content, weblogs and anecdotes declare that CBD oils can remedy no matter what ails you, even cancer. Although the restricted investigation does not suggest that cannabis oil should take the place of regular medication, aside from in two quite scarce sorts of epilepsy (and also then, It is really recommended only as a last-vacation resort cure). And, authorities warning that mainly https://cbdbro.ch because CBD oil and other cannabis-dependent products and solutions are not controlled or tested for protection by the government or any 3rd-party company, It can be tricky for customers to understand just what exactly they're having.

What on earth is CBD?

Simply put, cannabis oil would be the concentrated liquid extract of the cannabis plant, Cannabis sativa.

Just like other herbal extracts, the chemical substances in cannabis oils change depending on how the extract is manufactured and what chemical compounds have been inside the plant to start with.

Cannabis vegetation deliver A large number of compounds but the most effectively recognized belong to a class identified as cannabinoids. There are numerous cannabinoids but The 2 which have been most properly-known among the people are THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol).

THC is the principal psychoactive compound in cannabis and it is what persons are hunting for if they want a product that gives them a "superior." Compared with THC, CBD is not acknowledged to bring about psychoactive effects, and it is thus desirable to People who want to stay away from the superior but who believe you will find other benefits of CBD, stated Sara Ward, a pharmacologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. [Therapeutic Herb? Marijuana Could Treat These 5 Conditions]

CBD items that Will not include THC slide outside the house the scope from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Company's (DEA) Controlled Substances Act, which means CBD products and solutions are lawful to promote and consume as long as they do not have THC. Which is very likely one of The explanations why CBD merchandise, together with CBD oil, are getting to be a lot more socially suitable and progressively common. In 2016, Forbes claimed that CBD goods are predicted to generally be a $2.2 billion field by 2020.

How are CBD oils eaten?

The physiological consequences of cannabinoids can vary broadly from Individual to individual, and in addition depend upon how they're consumed. That lack of predictability is amongst the reasons why cannabis oil is usually a difficult candidate for producing right into a medication, Ward explained to Live Science.

"Two folks might consume a brownie [made with cannabis oil] and a single may absorb enormous quantities of cannabinoids and one other may not," Ward explained. "How much time it will take to work and how long it stays inside the method differs considerably."

It can be somewhat more uniform when the product or service is absorbed by using tobacco or vaping the oil, Ward reported. But, "you can find clear considerations about smoking cigarettes one thing." A 2007 critique printed inside the journal JAMA Interior Medication observed that cigarette smoking cannabis resulted in identical declines in respiratory technique well being as smoking tobacco. The same evaluation posted in 2014 during the American Journal of Cardiology identified that cannabis smoke inhalation can maximize the probability of heart attack or stroke. Neither overview analyzed the effects of vaping cannabis oil by yourself, so It is unclear if it's precisely the same health threats as smoking cigarettes other cannabis merchandise.

Why do people use cannabis oil?

Persons claim that cannabis oil may be used to take care of a wide array of disorders, even though evidence to back up these statements is usually missing. As an example, according to Medical News Now, folks use cannabis oil for disorders starting from ache to acne; some even assert the oil can cure ailments like Alzheimer's and cancer. (But again, there isn't a scientific evidence to aid these statements.)

An evaluation revealed in 2017 within the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology described how CBD may go to shield the hippocampus — the Section of the brain chargeable for several essential features, which include learning, memory and navigation — through times of pressure, and may also enable avert brain-mobile destruction that outcomes from schizophrenia. A different 2017 review posted within the journal Annals of Palliative Drugs summarized a handful of studies that advise cannabis oils containing THC or CBD, or each, may help with chronic discomfort administration, but the mechanism is unclear.

Cannabis remedy in those with sure varieties of epilepsy continues to be a lot more promising. The sole FDA-authorized cannabis-based mostly drug is Epidiolex, a CBD oral solution for treating two exceptional and serious types of epilepsy. A the latest medical trial identified that Epidiolex reduced convulsive seizures by fifty% in youngsters with Dravet syndrome, a variety of epilepsy, MedPage Today claimed.

CBD is actually a chemical extracted from the Cannabis plant.

CBD is a chemical extracted within the Cannabis plant.

Credit history: Shutterstock

Why health care industry experts are hesitant about CBD

It is important to know that the analysis Within this spot is in its infancy, partly for the reason that we haven't genuinely recognized Considerably about CBD until fairly lately," claimed Marcel Bonn-Miller, an adjunct assistant professor within the College of Pennsylvania Perelman Faculty of Medicine. He identified which the classification of cannabis to be a Schedule one drug with the DEA can make it tricky to get content to make use of in laboratory research. Timetable 1 medicine Possess a substantial likely for abuse, in accordance with the DEA, and are illegal underneath federal regulation.

For that reason classification, It really is challenging for researchers to have their arms on the drug. "That is not to say you can't get it done, but you'll find hoops you'll want to jump by which might be a soreness, which can prevent researchers from likely into this Area," Bonn-Miller explained. "Fairly Talking, It really is a little group of individuals during the U.S. that do investigate on cannabinoids in individuals."

Having said that, Bonn-Miller explained to Stay Science that he thinks cannabis analysis is to the upswing. "If we flash ahead 5 years I do think you will see more studies," he reported. All those scientific tests could expose more disorders that CBD can be beneficial for and might also expose that several of the reasons why men and women say they use CBD oil are usually not supported from the science but are alternatively a placebo effect. "And that is why we must do the studies," he said.

The Negative effects and threats associated with consuming cannabis-based mostly goods aren't clear, possibly, Bonn-Miller said. It's important to "ascertain cannabinoids which are valuable therapeutically although being familiar with and making use of cannabinoids which have been related to considerably less chance," he explained. A minimum of with CBD, he stated, it won't appear to provide the likely for dependancy. Which is unique from THC, that has been affiliated with dependancy, he explained, and detrimental Unwanted side effects, including acute stress.

What buyers need to know

The two Bonn-Miller and Ward anxiety that It really is around The customer to become nicely-educated about the fabric They are getting and the exploration that is around. "The businesses that happen to be making [cannabis oils] are providing a lot of promises about its use that aren't necessarily substantiated by any investigate," Bonn-Miller stated. So "I believe there ought to be, from a consumer standpoint, many vigilance," he extra.

As well as the goods to the shelf aren't all exactly the same, Ward said. "There is often lots of, many different versions, and in case you are serious about performing this for healthcare good reasons, you want to discover a trustworthy resource and do your investigate," she said. "Wherever does that oil come from, And exactly how self-assured can you be that you recognize the exact percentages of the different cannabinoids from the product or service?"

Bonn-Miller also defined that It is really very important to exhaust the traditional and recognized entrance-line therapies that are available in advance of trying to get out these goods. "CBD is not really a primary-line remedy for nearly anything," he reported. "You don’t want predicaments in which somebody states, 'I have cancer I'll forgo chemotherapy due to the fact I examine something about CBD or THC serving to with cancer.'" That's not a good suggestion, Bonn-Miller explained. "Don't just may be the science not there, however , you may finish up worse off."|/Though Many of us use cannabidiol to relieve suffering, more scientific investigate is needed To make certain it truly is Safe and sound. Comprehension cannabidiol might help get over the stigma connected to it.

A lot of people working experience Unwanted side effects when getting cannabidiol (CBD) and there are actually other factors to think about ahead of working with CBD oil for discomfort.

In the following paragraphs, we look at how CBD oil functions And the way folks can utilize it To alleviate Persistent suffering.

Outcomes

CBD oil in a very bottle, close to a wooden spoon stuffed with hemp seeds.

youtube

CBD oil is usually extracted from industrial hemp.

CBD is among in excess of a hundred and twenty compounds called cannabinoids.

Several plants consist of cannabinoids, but persons most often backlink them to cannabis.

Compared with other cannabinoids — like tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — CBD doesn't create a euphoric "superior" or psychoactive effect. It is because CBD doesn't have an affect on exactly the same receptors as THC.

The human system has an endocannabinoid technique (ECS) that gets and translates alerts from cannabinoids. It produces some cannabinoids of its personal, that happen to be identified as endocannabinoids. The ECS allows to regulate capabilities for example snooze, immune-method responses, and ache.

When THC enters your body, it generates a "higher" emotion by influencing the brain's endocannabinoid receptors. This activates the Mind's reward process, making enjoyment chemical substances which include dopamine.

Does CBD cause you to substantial?

CBD is a completely various compound from THC, and its effects are incredibly complex. It is far from psychoactive, meaning it doesn't produce a "large" or change an individual's point out of intellect, nevertheless it influences the body to work with its possess endocannabinoids extra efficiently.

In line with a person study posted to Neurotherapeutics, this is because CBD by itself does hardly any to the ECS. In its place, it activates or inhibits other compounds from the endocannabinoid program.

One example is, CBD stops your body from absorbing anandamide, a compound connected to regulating discomfort. So, enhanced levels of anandamide from the bloodstream might lower the quantity of discomfort anyone feels.

Cannabidiol can also Restrict inflammation from the Mind and nervous process, which may reward people today suffering from agony, insomnia, and sure immune-program responses.

What is CBD oil?

There are actually unique levels of compounds located in the all-natural hemp or cannabis plant. How persons breed the plant influences the CBD stages. Most CBD oil arises from industrial hemp, which normally has an increased CBD content material than marijuana.

Makers of CBD oil use various ways to extract the compound. The extract is then included to your carrier oil and identified as CBD oil.

CBD oil is available in many different strengths, and people use it in various methods. It's best to discuss CBD oil with a physician right before making use of it.

Advantages

People have utilized CBD customarily useful for A huge number of many years to deal with various types of suffering, however the medical Group have only not long ago started to check it again.

Here are several of your achievable benefits of CBD oil:

Arthritis discomfort

Aged man's hand, one particular hand Keeping the thumb of the other on account of arthritis ache.

CBD oil is well-known for easing pain connected to arthritis.

A research in the European Journal of Ache made use of an animal design to find out if CBD could assistance individuals with arthritis handle their discomfort. Scientists used a topical gel made up of CBD to rats with arthritis for 4 days.

Their researchers Observe an important drop in inflammation and indications of pain, without extra Unintended effects.

Folks applying CBD oil for arthritis might uncover relief from their suffering, but far more human reports must be accomplished to substantiate these conclusions.

Several sclerosis

A number of sclerosis (MS) is surely an autoimmune disorder that influences the whole physique in the nerves and Mind.

Muscle spasms are Probably the most frequent signs or symptoms of MS. These spasms is usually so terrific they lead to continuous discomfort in a lot of people.

A single report uncovered that quick-expression utilization of CBD oil could reduce the levels of spasticity someone feels. The outcomes are modest, but Many individuals claimed a reduction in signs and symptoms. A lot more research on individuals are needed to confirm these benefits.

Chronic suffering

A similar report researched CBD use for common Persistent suffering. Scientists compiled the effects of multiple systematic assessments masking dozens of trials and scientific studies. Their analysis concluded that there's significant proof that cannabis is a successful procedure for Serious soreness in Grownups.

A individual review within the Journal of Experimental Drugs supports these results. This investigate implies that making use of CBD can cut down soreness and inflammation.

The researchers also observed that subjects were being unlikely to develop up a tolerance to the effects of CBD, so they'd not will need to increase their dose regularly.

They famous that cannabinoids, including CBD, could present valuable new solutions for individuals with chronic ache.

Other takes advantage of

In The us, CBD oil has various legality throughout unique states and in a federal level, nonetheless it at present has a range of purposes and promising possibilities.

These incorporate:

smoking cessation and drug withdrawal

treating seizures and epilepsy

stress cure

decreasing a lot of the consequences of Alzheimer's, as shown by Original analysis

antipsychotic effects on individuals with schizophrenia

future programs in combating acne, sort one diabetes, and cancer

Though additional investigate is required to verify some takes advantage of of CBD oil, it is actually shaping up as being a likely promising and adaptable cure.

In June 2018, the U.S. Food items and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized one form of CBD for a therapy for people with two rare and unique sorts of epilepsy, particularly Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS) or Dravet syndrome (DS).

The brand title of this drug is Epidiolex.

Dosage

The FDA won't regulate CBD for many ailments. Due to this fact, dosages are at this time open to interpretation, and people should really deal with them with caution.

Anybody who wishes to employ CBD really should to start with talk to a health care provider about whether it is a good idea, and exactly how much to consider.

The FDA lately accepted a purified type of CBD for some kinds of epilepsy, Together with the brand name identify Epidiolex. When you are employing this medication, be sure you Adhere to the medical professional's assistance about doses.

Negative effects

Drained businessman at desk rubbing eyes, because of headache and exhaustion.

Achievable limited-phrase Uncomfortable side effects of working with CBD oil include fatigue and modifications in appetite.

Plenty of people tolerate CBD oil effectively, but there are numerous doable side effects.

According to an evaluation in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, the commonest Unwanted side effects incorporate:

tiredness

diarrhea

adjustments in hunger

body weight gain or fat loss

Also, using CBD oil with other medicines might make those medicines more or less powerful.

The overview also notes that experts have but to check some facets of CBD, for instance its lengthy-time period consequences on hormones. Additional extended-phrase studies are going to be beneficial in analyzing any side effects CBD has on the human body after a while.

People that are looking at making use of CBD oil need to focus on this with their Medical doctors. Physicians will want to observe the individual for virtually any changes and make adjustments appropriately.

The patient info leaflet for Epidiolex cautions that there is a danger of liver problems, lethargy, And maybe melancholy and thoughts of suicide, but these are genuine of other treatment options for epilepsy, way too.

CBD along with other cannabinoids may additionally put the person in danger for lung troubles.

One examine in Frontiers in Pharmacology, instructed cannabinoids' anti-inflammatory outcome may perhaps decrease inflammation an excessive amount of.

A substantial reduction in inflammation could diminish the lungs' protection system, expanding the chance of infection.

Other criteria

Almost all exploration on CBD oil and discomfort emanates from Grownup trials. Experts never advise CBD oil for use in young children, as There's minimal investigate on the effects of CBD oil on the Kid's developing brain.

Individuals must consult with a health care provider should they think a baby ought to use CBD oil for seizures.

CBD oil is also not suggested during pregnancy or although breast-feeding.

Takeaway

Whilst quite a few reports have proposed CBD oil is helpful for soreness, a lot more analysis is necessary, particularly in prolonged-expression research with human subjects.

On the other hand, CBD oil does clearly show plenty of potential for pain aid. Anecdotal evidence implies that it can be used that can help manage Persistent pain in many situations.

CBD oil is very promising due to its deficiency of intoxicating results and also a achievable decrease prospective for Unwanted side effects than a number of other agony medicines.

Men and women should really examine CBD oil with their health practitioner if they are thinking about making use of it for The very first time.

CBD oil is accessible for obtain on line.

#Cbd Öl

0 notes

turkiyeecom · 5 years ago

Text

Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar

Photo-Illustration: Jed Egan, Photos: Getty Images At least it’s not “GlobalCoin.” For months now, rumors, leaks, and speculation have held that Facebook’s newly developed cryptocurrency — the entrance of the most powerful private surveillance apparatus on the planet into a sector created by and for obsessively secretive cypherpunk libertarian cranks — would be called “GlobalCoin.” It felt a bit on the nose. (Was NewWorldOrderCoin already taken?) Instead, the coin will be called Libra … a reference to the currency system of history’s most famous conquering empire, Rome. I personally would have gone with “Facebucks.” Libra, which was finally, officially announced this morning, is expected to launch in 2020 with Calibra, a digital wallet for securely storing the currency that can be used as a stand-alone app or in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Previous reporting has suggested that Indian WhatsApp users will be first to have access to the cryptocurrency, for no- or low-fee money transfers, and Facebook has apparently, and uncharacteristically, been wooing regulators and central bankers around the world to smooth the coin’s landing. The Libra blockchain — that is, the shared ledger of all transactions made in Libra — will be maintained by a network of nodes, which verify transactions and store the continuously updated record. These nodes will be operated by outside companies (early partners seem to include Mastercard, PayPal, Uber, and Booking.com), each of which will reportedly pay $10 million for the privilege, and the money from these licensing fees, the Information reports, will be used to back Libra with a “basket of currencies and low-risk securities from various countries,” keeping its value stable. How, precisely, users will exchange Libra for physical currency remains to be seen, though the most likely option is that Facebook partners with a cryptocurrency exchange, and the Information reports that there are plans for “physical terminals similar to ATMs.” Facebook is insistent that Calibra will not share “account information or financial data” to it, or to third parties — but that the wallet will use Facebook data to “comply with the law, secure customers’ accounts, mitigate risk and prevent criminal activity.” What this means in practice is not precisely clear, except that Facebook wants to make sure you’re aware that your Libra account balance will not be used to help target you with ads on its main platform. The coin itself will be governed by an independent foundation, the Libra Association, consisting of representatives from Facebook, financial institutions, nonprofits, merchants, venture capitalists, and the companies running the nodes. Facebook is already working on creating its own private supreme court, after all; why wouldn’t it want its own private, independent central bank as well? This highly centralized structure is very different from that of “traditional” cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which spurn centralized authority and allow anyone to set up a node for free. And unlike Libra, whose value will be fixed to the aforementioned basket of currencies and securities, most cryptocurrencies don’t maintain fixed exchange rates — which is exactly what makes crypto such an exciting and volatile speculative market. Libra, by contrast, is intended to be boring because Facebook’s short-term plans for the currency are similarly boring or, at least, straightforward: Facebook wants to enter, and own, the cross-border payments market. If it is indeed launching in India, it’s not as part of a test run but because nearly $80 billion in remittances were sent to India in 2018; with more than 200 million Indian WhatsApp users already, the company is well-positioned to make its apps, and its currency, the method of choice for international money transfers to India — and, eventually, the world. But domination of the $689 billion global remittance economy is not actually Facebook’s end goal. In fact, it almost certainly won’t make much money directly from cross-border payments, since unlike its competition (payment systems like M-Pesa or remittance apps like PayPal’s Xoom), Facebook reportedly won’t charge transaction fees for peer-to-peer payments. That’s a very bad way to make money, but as Facebook knows well, it’s a very good way to entice new users into your network and, in turn, to convince stores, restaurants, and other businesses to set up to accept GlobalCoin in payment. This is the medium-term plan for Libra: To compete not just with money-transfer businesses but with credit-card companies, using cross-border payments as the beachhead for all payments everywhere. You receive a no-fee Libra payment from an expat family member, and then use that Libra to pay back a friend, who in turn uses the Libra to pay for a Chicken Maharaja Mac at the local McDonald’s. Facebook here is openly mimicking WeChat, which is both China’s largest social network and also the country’s ubiquitous payment app, an utterly dominant Facebook–WhatsApp–Apple Pay–Venmo–Seamless hybrid. It’s easy to see why Facebook might want this. There’s a familiar business model in merchant fees (though, if you’re levying payments in the currency that you yourself mint, “taxes” might be a better word), and payments fit much more naturally than advertisements in the privacy-focused, chat-based future that Mark Zuckerberg claims is coming for his company. But Facebook insists that its merchant fees would only be high enough to cover the cost of fraud risk. The real value of becoming the world’s ubiquitous payment app (outside of China, at any rate) goes beyond the revenue from merchant fees. Facebook’s biggest problem right now — the problem that lurks behind stagnant user growth in Europe and North America — is that it’s just not essential. Like any megaplatform, Facebook wants to be infrastructure: a service so important to daily life that most people have no choice but to use it. But Facebook in 2019 is increasingly easy for Americans and Europeans to quit without particular consequence, in a way that Google, say, isn’t. Libra could, if it takes off, change that. Payment infrastructure isn’t just (potentially) more lucrative than social infrastructure, it’s much less easy to replicate, either on the business side or on the consumer side. It’s pretty easy to quit Facebook, the app where you fight with your childhood neighbor about politics. It’s much more difficult to quit Facebook, the app you use to pay your rent. I imagine the widespread adoption of a digital currency on an aggressively centralized and privately surveilled blockchain tied to real-name ID is not really what the bitcoin faithful had in mind when they got into cryptocurrency in the first place. Even so, there’s some excitement about Libra among crypto nerds, who are hoping that Facebook’s backing will normalize cryptocurrency and entice the uninitiated into crypto culture. But the opposite seems more likely to me. Once you’ve got a usable digital currency, why would you want to “get into” other currencies? I use dollars every day, but don’t spend a lot of time buying up euro and yen. Still, it’s worth asking, at this point: Why a cryptocurrency at all? If the limit of Zuckerberg’s ambition is to be the Western WeChat, or the new Visa and American Express, why does Facebook feel like it needs a whole new means of exchange? It could partner with a global banking conglomerate to undercut rivals’ fees, and leverage its already enormous network to enter the payment sector, the way WeChat or, to a lesser extent, Apple has — all without having to build out an enormous, headache-inducing technical and regulatory apparatus. But since when has Zuckerberg limited his ambition to competing with mere companies? As far as I know, there’s only one other entity out there developing a blockchain-based digital currency for a billion-plus-member economy: China. The People’s Bank of China has been amassing blockchain and digital-currency patents as it develops its own cryptocurrency — loosely pegged to a basket of other currencies, just like Libra — which could help it more efficiently monitor and control capital flows. (So much for the decentralized, anarchist dream of cryptocurrency.) Facebook doesn’t want to compete with Mastercard, or even with Goldman Sachs. It wants to be the currency platform Mastercard operates on. Facebook’s payment product is a whole new currency because its long-term competition isn’t PayPal or Visa or even WeChat, but the renminbi, the euro, the yen, and the dollar. There’s long been a segment of crypto nerds for whom the ultimate goal of bitcoin is that it replace the dollar as the global reserve currency, held in mass quantities by monetary authorities and used as the dominant unit of account for international finance. But for most of its still fairly short life, bitcoin has been much too volatile, difficult to use, and unregulated for the idea of a global reserve cryptocurrency to be anything but a wild pipe dream. But what if — bear with me now — you had a stable cryptocurrency, created with regulator and institutional accession, and already in frictionless circulation among 2.3 billion people? Plenty of economists and central bankers have suggested that a supranational instrument might make for a better reserve currency than one printed by a national monetary authority. John Maynard Keynes’s proposed currency, the “Bancor,” is notable in that it might actually have a worse name than Libra, but it also seems to presage the ambition of Zuckerberg’s project — albeit as the product of an international system of cooperating sovereign governments, rather than as an app created by a Roman Empire–obsessed programmer. We’ve now entered the realm of wild, dystopian speculation, of course. Facebook has already tried and failed to build a sustainable proprietary payment system, called Facebook Credits, and there’s every chance that Libra could similarly fail. Even its short- and medium-term goals of entering and dominating payment sectors will be difficult to achieve — let alone the unprecedented idea of a corporation’s private digital currency being widely enough adopted and respected to be the foundation of a global reserve currency. But Facebook, right now, is being very open about its plans to remake the world’s financial systems. People may even welcome that: In the global banking industry, Facebook has probably found the one group of corporations less liked and less trusted than itself. But if you think Facebook is powerful now, just wait until it’s, essentially, the global federal reserve, overseeing a global currency over which it has not just monetary control but a visible, minable record of every transaction made. Maybe GlobalCoin would have been the right name after all. Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar 10 mins ago The Washington Post has the details on a horrific incident that may have tripped up Patrick Shanahan’s nomination In November 2011, Shanahan rushed to defend his then 17-year-old son, William Shanahan, in the days after the teenager brutally beat his mother. The attack had left Shanahan’s ex-wife unconscious in a pool of blood, her skull fractured and with internal injuries that required surgery, according to court and police records.Two weeks later, Shanahan sent his ex-wife’s brother a memo arguing that his son had acted in self-defense.“Use of a baseball bat in self-defense will likely be viewed as an imbalance of force,” Shanahan wrote. “However, Will’s mother harassed him for nearly three hours before the incident.”Details of the incidents have started to emerge in media reports about his nomination, including a USA Today report Tuesday about the punching incident in 2010.In an hour-long interview Monday night at his apartment in Virginia, Shanahan, who has been responding to questions from The Post about the incidents since January, said he wrote the memo in the hours after his son’s attack, before he knew the full extent of his ex-wife’s injuries. He said it was to prepare for his son’s initial court appearance and that he never intended for anyone other than his son’s attorneys to read it. 1:07 p.m. Trump dumps Shanahan Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who has done a wonderful job, has decided not to go forward with his confirmation process so that he can devote more time to his family….I thank Pat for his outstanding service and will be naming Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, to be the new Acting Secretary of Defense. I know Mark, and have no doubt he will do a fantastic job! —@realDonaldTrump 12:43 p.m.the national interest the national interest Leftists Have Turned Obama Into Mitt Romney By Jonathan Chait Obama has been accused of redistributing wealth upward and undercutting Elizabeth Warren’s attacks on business. Both claims are false. 12:18 p.m. What a mess Montana @GovernorBullock has qualified for the second Democratic debates in July, after the DNC confirms that the three CBS/YouGov polls count as qualifying polls.21 candidates have now qualified for the Detroit debates, triggering the tiebreaker rules. —@kendallkarson 11:40 a.m. The Orlando Sentinel does not seem enthused about Trump’s re-election campaign kickoff 11:33 a.m. Trump’s characteristic blunder gives immigrants and advocates time to prepare for whatever’s coming DHS is planning to target “families” as part of stepped up effort to deport undocumented immigrants, a senior admin official told me, in response to Trump’s tweet last night. But the official said there are “not a lot of happy faces” at DHS, as Trump revealed plans in the works. —@Acosta vision 2020 Amy Klobuchar Needs a Plan to Enact Her 137 Plans By Ed Kilgore The Minnesotan now has more specific plans than the wonky Elizabeth Warren. But she could use some priorities and a strategy for enacting legislation. paul manafort Paul Manafort Rescued From Rikers by Deputy Attorney General By Adam K. Raymond “Calling this highly unusual doesn’t even begin to capture” it, one legal expert tweeted. life in pixels Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar By Max Read Facebook just introduced Libra, a new cryptocurrency designed to blow up the global financial system. 10:41 a.m. The ship with the whimsical name is doing some serious work Boaty McBoatface’s maiden outing has made a major discovery about how climate change is causing rising sea levels. Scientists say that data collected from the yellow submarines’s first expedition will help them build more accurate predictions in order to combat the problem.The mission has uncovered a key process linking increasing Antarctic winds to higher sea temperatures, which in turn is fuelling increasing levels.Researchers found that the increasing winds are cooling water on the bottom of the ocean, forcing it to travel faster, creating turbulance as it mixed with warmer waters above. 10:08 a.m. Stocks are surging on this news Had a very good telephone conversation with President Xi of China. We will be having an extended meeting next week at the G-20 in Japan. Our respective teams will begin talks prior to our meeting. —@realDonaldTrump 9:41 a.m. Hopefully this will not be reminiscent of the 2011 quake TOKYO (AP) – Magnitude 6.8 earthquake hits off northwestern Japan, tsunami warning issued. —@carlquintanilla 8:56 a.m. Tonight’s rally will be even more of a spectacle than usual President Trump will announce his reelection campaign Tuesday in Orlando, where he will be greeted by a tailgate party as well as protesters and the orange “Baby Trump” balloon loved by his critics.Trump and Vice President Pence are making their 2020 candidacy official with a rally expected to pack a 20,000-seat arena, with thousands more outside. Supporters began lining up a day early, local news outlets said Monday.“The Fake News doesn’t report it, but Republican enthusiasm is at an all time high,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “Look what is going on in Orlando, Florida, right now! People have never seen anything like it (unless you play a guitar). Going to be wild - See you later!”Trump campaign spokesman Marc Lotter said Tuesday morning that the campaign had set up an “outdoor festival area” that will feature live bands before the event. 8:29 a.m. Trump the peacenik Facing twin challenges in the Persian Gulf, President Donald Trump said in an interview with TIME Monday that he might take military action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but cast doubt on going to war to protect international oil supplies.“I would certainly go over nuclear weapons,” the president said when asked what moves would lead him to consider going to war with Iran, “and I would keep the other a question mark.”Just hours earlier, Iran announced an escalation of its nuclear program, saying that within 10 days it will breach the limit on its stockpile of enriched uranium that was set under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.Last week, U.S. officials blamed Iran for attacks against Norwegian and Japanese oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Trump described those and other recent attacks attributed by administration officials to Iran as limited. “So far, it’s been very minor,” Trump told TIME. racism How Police Brutality Can Function as Terrorism By Zak Cheney-Rice These incidents, like Phoenix cops drawing guns on a young family, have psychological effects that mirror living under the threat of terrorism. 7:59 a.m. What kid is going to vape if they know it’ll keep them out of the National Honor Society?! So one small Nebraska school district is trying an aggressive new approach: Forcing students in grades seven through 12 to submit to random nicotine testing if they want to take part in extracurricular activities such as speech competitions and the National Honor Society.… Though teenagers and privacy-rights advocates might find it extreme, the new policy is legal thanks to a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oklahoma school district’s policy of randomly drug testing students who participate in “competitive” extracurricular activities ranging from cheerleading to choir. In 1997, the Supreme Court had determined that testing high school athletes for illegal drugs was constitutional.Fairbury Junior-Senior High School, where roughly 60 percent of the 387 students participate in after-school activities, has had a random drug-testing system for two years. Students and their parents are required to sign a consent form agreeing to the urinalysis tests, which are randomly assigned to 10 percent of the students in extracurriculars each month, the Journal Star reported. 7:52 a.m. Reinstating Obama’s environmental policies? Raising the minimum wage for federal contractors? Let’s not get too ambitious here Sen. Amy Klobuchar wants to reenter the Climate Paris Accords, raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 and require publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending over $10,000 to their shareholders — and that’s just three out of 137 ideas she wants to put forward in her first 100 days as president.On Tuesday, the Democratic presidential candidate released an exhaustive list of policy prescriptions — more than 137 bullet points, extending over 17 single-spaced pages — that she would prioritize in the first months of her administration. Klobuchar’s plans run from extending veterans’ benefits to their newborn babies to restoring the Clean Power Plan, a set of Obama-era environmental protections. 7:36 a.m. Steve Bullock doesn’t need the Democrats’ stinking debate. His campaign has town halls and unexpected profanity Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, after failing to qualify for the first Democratic presidential debates, announced on Tuesday morning that he would be participating in locally televised town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire on the days of the dueling events next week.Bullock will appear June 26 on Iowa’s WHO-TV with Dave Price, and June 27 on New Hampshire’s WMUR with Adam Sexton. The appearances will be televised ahead of the debates in Miami rather than concurrently.Bullock and his campaign have been hustling to turn his debate-outcast status into an advantage, with a round of free media coverage prompted by his willingness to attack the Democratic National Committee for its rules on polling and donor thresholds.“DNC is saying Governor Bullock doesn’t qualify for the debates. That’s horses**t,” one Montana voter said in a campaign web ad released last Friday. 7:20 a.m. New York narrowly passes law that gives undocumented driver’s licenses The New York State Senate approved a bill on Monday to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, a deeply polarizing issue that had splintered Democrats and stirred a backlash among Republicans in New York and beyond, who have already vowed to highlight it during next year’s elections.The vote, together with the Assembly’s passage last week, thrust New York into the center of the explosive national debate over immigration. It would reverse a nearly 20-year-old ban and end years of political paralysis on the issue.It also signaled the strength of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which for months had pressed moderate legislators to support the bill despite concerns about alienating swing voters, especially among first-term Democrats who flipped seats on Long Island and helped their party win a majority last year. mueller report This Summer’s Hot Beach Read: The Mueller Report By Mark Walsh With more than 300,000 copies sold, the damning document is a certified publishing sensation. migrant crisis Trump Announces ‘Removal’ of ‘Millions of Illegal Aliens’ Starting Next Week By Matt Stieb Trump announced by tweet that ICE will begin removing “millions of illegal aliens,” surprising officials who didn’t know he would broadcast the plan. 6/17/2019last night on late night last night on late night Jon Stewart Stops by Late Show to Yell at Mitch McConnell Over 9/11 Survivors By Halle Kiefer If we’re being honest, Jon Stewart does seem “bent out of shape” about the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. 6/17/2019 As of April, Bernie Sanders was leading Democrats with $20,688,027 Per pool report from Biden’s NYC fundraiser tonight, Biden told donors his campaign had 360,000 donors with an average contribution of $55. If correct, that math comes out to about $19.8 million since he joined the race on April 25. pic.twitter.com/0vxhsGd3Z1 —@myhlee politics Mitch McConnell Calls Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico ‘Full-Bore Socialism’ By Matt Stieb The quote is certainly consistent with Mitch McConnell’s block-anything-blue legacy, but not all Republicans agree with their leader in the Senate. 6/17/2019intelligencer chats intelligencer chats How Worried Should We Be About Escalation With Iran? By Benjamin Hart and Heather Hurlburt Intelligencer staffers discuss whether tit-for-tat provocations between the two countries will lead to something much scarier. 6/17/2019presidential pardons presidential pardons Supreme Court Won’t Stop States From Prosecuting Federal Defendants By Ed Kilgore By leaving an exception to double-jeopardy rules in place, the Court did not make it easier for Trump to keep people out of jail via pardons. Read More Read the full article

#breakingnews #Competition #Facebook #news

0 notes

cryptoquicknews-blog · 6 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/T35yGz

Crypto Is Tightening Up Its Anti-Money Laundering Game, While Banks Are Still Being Fined for Non-Compliance

This post was originally published here

In 2018, barely a month passed without an official at a financial institution or government department calling on crypto to clean up its act. In the last quarter of the year alone, the United States Department of the Treasury, the Canadian Parliament and the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service all urged or announced the introduction of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws for cryptocurrencies, and all of them based their moves on the (noticeably mistaken) presumption that cryptocurrencies are a primary haven for criminals, who use them either as a medium of exchange for illicit goods or as a means of hiding (i.e., laundering) the source of dirty money.

However, when the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) dished out a $10 million fine on Dec. 26 for failures to comply with AML legislation, this penalty didn’t actually go to a crypto exchange or crypto-related business. Instead, it went to Morgan Stanley, the 38th-biggest bank in the world (and the sixth-biggest in the U.S.). For anyone who’s ever noticed the sheer abundance of news stories about crypto’s apparent problem with money laundering, this may come as a shock, yet a deeper inspection of recent history reveals that the traditional financial world, in fact, has just as serious a problem with laundering as crypto, if not a more serious problem.

And what’s particularly interesting about the issue of money laundering is that, while the cryptocurrency industry is rapidly tightening up its own codes and conduct, the established financial industry still seems stuck on a plateau of underlying illegality, despite its vastly superior position and resources. Indeed, crypto exchanges are increasingly observing Know Your Customer (KYC) and AML regulations, while new trade bodies are being established with the aim of erecting self-regulatory guidelines for the crypto industry to follow. And in the industry’s zeal to become a fully legitimate and secure feature of the global economic landscape, it might just have a thing or two to teach the pre-existing banking sector.

Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, UBS and so on…

As reported by Reuters, FINRA slapped a $10 million fine on Morgan Stanley’s brokerage arm for long-standing failures in its AML reporting system. Between January 2011 and April 2016, Morgan Stanley’s automated monitoring system failed (for an undisclosed reason) to receive vital customer information and data from the bank’s other systems, thereby preventing it from being able to exhaustively track the movement of “tens of billions of dollars” (according to Reuters) in currency transfers and bank wires.

Making this lapse even worse for Morgan Stanley, FINRA learned that the bank became aware of deficiencies in its monitoring system as early as 2015, but didn’t actually begin taking action to address these issues until February 2017. FINRA also found that, between 2011 and 2013, Morgan Stanley had failed to “reasonably monitor” the transfer of 2.7 billion shares of penny stocks, something that needs to be done in order to ensure that the trading volumes of such stocks hadn’t been inflated. And tellingly, Morgan Stanley declined to contest both charges, with the bank simply stating, “We are pleased to have resolved this matter from several years ago.”

Such violations already present the non-crypto financial industry in a poor light, yet if there were any doubts that the non-crypto world isn’t at least as poor at AML compliance as the crypto world, numerous other episodes throughout 2018 would dispel it. For example, in November, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) levelled a 30.10 million rupee fine (about $420,000) on Deutsche Bank, which had failed to observe Indian KYC and AML regulations. Also in November, French bank Société Générale agreed to foot a hefty $95 million bill in order to settle charges that it had contravened U.S. AML regulations, a bill which comprised an even bigger charge of $1.34 billion for breaking U.S. trade sanctions against the likes of Cuba, Iran and Libya.

Moreover, in December, Latvia’s financial regulator levied a 1.2 million euro charge on BlueOrange Bank for AML noncompliance, while FINRA fined Swiss bank UBS $5 million for similar violations. And back in August, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, fined five financial institutions anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 each for falling foul of AML laws, including Ping An Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and the Bank of Communications.

Given that these fines were all imposed in the second half of 2018 alone, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the traditional financial industry has a serious problem with money laundering. And this is actually more than a suspicion, because a September report published by Ireland-based financial services company Fenergo revealed that, over the past 10 years, a massive $26 billion in fines had been taken from the world’s banks as a result of noncompliance with AML and KYC regulations. Commenting in the report, Fenergo’s director of global regulatory compliance, Laura Glynn, said that the problem isn’t restricted to specific countries or banks, but is global in scope:

“Up until now, the focus of regulators had been on the US and European markets. However, we are now witnessing regulators in Asia Pacific and the Middle East markets becoming more proactive in their supervisory efforts.”

Crypto and AML

In contrast to what would appear to be an endemic problem in the traditional financial industry, crypto’s relationship with AML legislation is tangibly less fraught. First of all, there have been far fewer cases of fines for AML and KYC violations, with crypto exchanges doing much less to attract the attention of authorities than major international banks. Apart from the $110 million civil finedemanded by FinCEN from Russian exchange BTC-e in July 2017, and the $700,000 charge also demanded by FinCEN from Ripple in May 2015, there have been no high-profile fines imposed on crypto exchanges and platforms as a result of AML noncompliance.

Of course, the rejoinder to this point is that crypto exchanges have spent most of their lives outside the jurisdiction of the regulators responsible for AML enforcement. However, what’s worth underlining here is that, since governments and financial regulators first began beating their chests about crypto and money laundering, exchanges and platforms have been racing to make themselves fully compliant with all applicable regulations.

For example, Coinbase has been a registered Money Services Business with FinCEN since 2013, meaning that it has been subject to AML guidelines for over five years now. And since it registered, most major exchanges operating in the U.S. have followed suit, including Bitstamp, CEX, Huobi US (HBUS), Bittrex, Poloniex, bitFlyer, itBit, Gemini, Gatecoin, Kraken and OKEx. Such registration goes to show that, contrary to any bad reputations crypto may have gained in the public arena, the industry is serious about being accepted as a legitimate sector of the economy.

This willingness to be accepted as law-abiding members of the global financial community is also evident in the number of self-regulatory bodies that have cropped up in recent months and years with the aim of creating AML standards (among other guidelines) for crypto. In February, Coinbase, eToro and other exchanges formed CryptoUK, a United Kingdom-based regulatory body that aims to lay down “the blueprint for what a future regulatory framework will look like,” according to its chairman, Iqbal Gandham. Part of this blueprint will involve Anti-Money Laundering norms, something which Japan’s Virtual Currency Exchange Association established in June for exchanges operating in Japan.

Such self-regulatory moves toward effective AML guidelines have also been witnessed elsewhere. The Korean Blockchain Association revealed its rules — including provisions for Anti-Money Laundering — in April, while the South African Reserve Bank announced in the same month that it would be launching a self-regulatory body to oversee the country’s crypto industry and to ensure that cryptocurrencies didn’t undermine financial stability and observance of financial laws (such as AML).

Given that crypto didn’t really explode onto the world stage until 2017, such developments highlight just how quickly and effectively the industry is moving toward regulation and legitimacy. And not only is it moving willingly toward greater compliance, but it’s also being helped along its way by governments and regulators, which are busy developing clear, often international frameworks which will help exchanges understand just where they stand in terms of the law. Most notably, November saw the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — a body which formulates AML regulations to be adopted globally — update its guidelines on cryptocurrencies. These were changed so as to require the FATF’s 35 member states to subject all transmitters of crypto to AML regulations, something which in turn would demand that such transmitters be licensed and/or monitored.

Distraction

Clearly, if the FATF’s members — which include the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Australia and Brazil — adopt such guidance within their own jurisdictions, then crypto exchanges would be required to strengthen their observance of AML standards even further. Seeing as how crypto has hardly been called out by regulators to the extent that big international banks have, it’s arguable that additional legislation and monitoring isn’t really necessary, although it will be an important step in reassuring the general public that cryptocurrencies aren’t the shady underworld that the mainstream media likes to paint them as being.

Indeed, it’s an interesting story in its own right as to why, when “reputable” banks like Morgan Stanley, UBS and Société Générale are being fined left, right and center, it’s the comparatively small cryptocurrency industry that’s attracting most of the world’s glare as an alleged sanctuary for rogues and criminals. In the face of such peccadillos as the forex scandal, the LIBOR scandal, the Russian Laundromat scandal, the PPI mis-selling scandal (among many others), the idea that crypto is a serious weak point in an otherwise impenetrable financial fortress is almost laughable and should be viewed with a healthy dose of scepticism.

One possible explanation for this, aside from an obvious fear-of-the-new, is that cryptocurrency serves as a convenient distraction away from the problems currently being experienced by the traditional financial sector. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, the financial services sector stands as the least-trusted industry internationally, with only 54 percent of the global public trusting it (compared to 75 percent and 70 percent for technology and education, for instance). This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the financial crisis of 2007-08 (and, in fact, trust was as low as 48 percent in 2014), so it’s fortunate that banks and financial institutions now have crypto to regularly denounce, so as to create the implied impression that the businesses they represent are somehow much better. However, given the speed with which crypto exchanges have taken to licensing and to self-regulation, and with which they’ve sought to demonstrate their compliance with AML legislation, it’s only a matter of time before the financial industry will have to look elsewhere for scapegoats.

–AltcoinToday.com

Photo via Shutterstock.

Source: Cointelegraph

loading…

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/T35yGz

#Uncategorized

0 notes