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International News

London must ‘seize the moment’ to maintain global leadership amid COVID-19 pandemic:Report

Britain accounted for nearly a third of financial activity in the European Union, which it left last January, and will no longer have to comply with its rules after Dec. 31.

New Financial said in its study “Beyond Brexit,” supported by Barclays bank, that leaving the EU would be a seismic change and involve significant disruption for the banking and finance industry’s relations with the bloc.

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U.S. says Google breakup may be needed to end violations of antitrust law

The federal government’s complaint against Alphabet Inc’s GOOGL.O, which alleges that Google acted unlawfully to maintain its position in search and search advertising on the internet, was joined by 11 states.
The government said Google has nearly 90% of all general search engine queries in the United States and almost 95% of searches on mobile.
The lawsuit marks the first time the U.S. has cracked down on a major tech company since it sued Microsoft Corp MSFT.O for anti-competitive practices in 1998.
The European Union fined Google $1.7 billion in 2019 for stopping websites from using Google’s rivals to find advertisers, $2.6 billion in 2017 for favoring its own shopping business in search, and $4.9 billion in 2018 for blocking rivals on its wireless Android operating system.

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Global coronavirus cases surpass the 40 million milestone

Since the pandemic started, over 1.1 million people have died due to COVID-19, with the global fatality rate hovering around 2.8% of the total cases.

An official at the World Health Organization has said the global death toll from COVID-19 could double to 2 million before a successful vaccine is widely used and could be even higher without concerted action to curb the pandemic.
The United States, India, and Brazil remain the worst affected countries in the world. COVID-19 cases in North, Central, and South America represent about 47.27% or nearly half of global cases.

Around 247 cases are seen per 10,000 people in the United States. For India and Brazil, those numbers stand at 55 cases and 248 cases per 10,000 people respectivel

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China’s economic recovery quickens as consumption returns

Policymakers globally are pinning their hopes on a robust recovery in China to help restart demand as economies struggle with heavy lockdowns and a second wave of coronavirus infections.China has partially emerged from a record slump caused by coronavirus shutdowns in the first months of the year.The world’s second-largest economy grew 0.7% in the first nine months from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

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Airlines’ coronavirus safety analysis challenged by expert

Airlines and planemakers are anxious to restart international travel, even as a second wave of infections and restrictions take hold in many countries.

“With only 44 identified potential cases of flight-related transmission among 1.2 billion travellers, that’s one case for every 27 million,” IATA medical adviser Dr David Powell said in a news release, echoed in comments during the event.

IATA said its findings “align with the low numbers reported in a recently published peer-reviewed study by Freedman and Wilder-Smith”.

But Freedman, who co-authored the paper in the Journal of Travel Medicine with Dr Annelies Wilder-Smith of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said he took issue with IATA’s risk calculation because the reported count bore no direct relation to the unknown real number of infections.

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Bank of England says company disclosures on climate risks will be mandatory

“Disclosing your plans can improve your credit rating, broaden your investor base, reduce your cost of finance, and economize on the fixed costs of meeting increasingly vocal investor requests for information,” the BoE’s executive director for markets, Andrew Hauser, told an Investment Association online event on Friday.

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British Airways hit with UK data watchdog’s biggest-ever fine

Other major cyber incidents in the recent past include another London-listed airline, easyJet EZJ.L, which earlier this year said hackers had accessed the email and travel details of around 9 million customers.

U.S. hotel operator Marriott International MAR.O in March suffered its second data incident in less than two years, with information of about 5.2 million its hotel guests suffering a breach.

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