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Business

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Finance

‘Very strange, very sad’: Paraguay bank collapse fells a presidency and leaves millions broke

Santiago Peña charged over alleged role in crisis as prosecutors request he be placed in preventive custody Pedro Volpe had just woken up last Tuesday when he saw a message from a friend asking whether his bank account was down too. It was a day after payday, and Volpe, 50, a writer and lawyer, opened his banking app and panicked: he could not even see his balance. Continue reading...

The Guardian
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Finance

National Trust votes to seek banking partner more in tune with its environmental policies

Charity’s AGM decides overwhelmingly to begin tendering process amid criticism of Barclays’ fossil fuel investments The National Trust has voted overwhelmingly to seek a new banking partner in a significant victory for members who have long argued that its relationship with Barclays was at odds with its commitment to protecting the natural world. The resolution, passed at the charity’s annual general meeting on Saturday with the backing of its board of trustees, instructs the organisation to begin a competitive tendering process for its banking arrangements. Continue reading...

The Guardian
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Finance

A ‘customer success story’: leaked documents show Cisco doubled down on Israeli military deals during Gaza war

Tech giant leaped to shore up relationship even as company was roiled by worker protest over its role in the war A year into the war in Gaza, the networks of Israel’s military intelligence community were plagued with technical problems. There were major, multi-hour outages to their systems, and repeated crashes. Built-in debugging mechanisms failed. The problems, which started as intelligence operations were undergoing updates to digital infrastructure, became so persistent as to undermine the “confidence” of Israeli intelligence agencies in one of their top network providers: the multinationa

The Guardian
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Finance

Gotta buy ’em all: how Pokémon card collecting became race against scalpers

Fans trying to access latest releases are being priced out in a cut-throat market driven by crypto-like hype The runaway demand for Pokemon cards is because they are being hyped “like crypto”, according to one young fan who had spent the night queueing outside a London store to make sure he did not miss out on the latest card release. Before its 10am opening on Friday, the line outside the pop culture store Forbidden Planet in central London snaked past five others and, despite its strict sales policy, was probably “50/50” fans and resellers, said Kai, who had been there since 3am. Continue re

The Guardian
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Finance

Job cuts, lost customers and a £22bn debt pile: what has gone wrong at Virgin Media O2?

The company has lost 182,000 broadband and 644,000 mobile customers in two years and is operating in an increasingly competitive market competition Mike Fries may be totting up swingeing job cuts, a £22bn debt pile and the loss of hundreds of thousands of customers, but he appears to be putting a brave face on the situation. “In our minds, anyway, this is not a crisis,” the boss of the co-owner of Virgin Media O2 said this week. The UK telecoms company, which offers broadband, TV, landline and mobile services, had just announced £800m in cost savings, including potentially cutting up to a quar

The Guardian
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Finance

Trump may have lost but don’t bet Democrats can fix the economy

There’s not much they can do over the next couple of years to alleviate angry voters’ stress over prices It was the economy, again. Although Donald Trump largely ignored it, voters’ acute concerns over the rising cost of living fuelled a political upheaval for the ages that is likely to deliver the biggest swing toward Democrats since Watergate, granting them the largest House majority in nearly four decades alongside their biggest edge in the Senate since 2008. Still, having come to power promising to restore affordability, the new crop of Democrats are soon to discover that there is not much

The Guardian
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Finance

TikTok accused of helping to promote sex industry to girls

Researchers say popular performers covertly market OnlyFans content and tell followers about wealthy lifestyle TikTok is helping to promote and normalise the sex industry, allowing “sexfluencers” to post videos aimed at marketing pornographic content they have uploaded elsewhere on sites such as OnlyFans, a report indicates. After studying non-explicit content posted on TikTok over the course of a year by some of OnlyFans’ most popular young female performers, researchers said the women buried coded references to pornography in “girly lifestyle content” that showed them shopping, playing with

The Guardian
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