Bloomberg South Sudan’s main electricity provider will stop supplying power to the national grid after the government failed to allocate the foreign exchange it needs for operations. The Ezra Construction and Development Group supplies 33 megawatts to the Juba Electric Distribution, for which it is paid in foreign exchange. The government is contractually obliged to allocate Jedco hard currency as ...

In much of the world, the sight of a mob storming the United States Capitol to keep their leader in office was met not just with horror but with, let’s face it, schadenfreude. Finally! The US, which has for decades lectured other democracies about their imperfections and failures, had an anti-democratic moment of its own. Some in India responded in ...

The British and the French form “un couple infernal.” The two nations coexist in close geographical proximity and are bound together by a long history of affection and aversion. The aversion part is more widely noticed than the mutual respect. A 1980s TV sketch, featuring the comic Rowan Atkinson, showed him wearing a black beret and striped Maillot top and ...

As big tech companies have become more entrenched in our lives, the rise of remote work has made their employees more disposable. So it’s no surprise that the pandemic has catalysed new efforts to unionise tech workers. Last week, a group of Google employees announced the formation of an Alphabet Workers Union in partnership with the Communications Workers of America. ...

Last year was painful for many. Along with those who lost loved ones to Covid-19, perhaps no one felt that pain more than the essential worker, the low-income single parent, the isolated, the marginalised. Often they were the same person. Whether Black and poor in a densely populated city, or White and secluded in a rural area, large numbers of ...

Bloomberg The crash of Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 is another blight on Indonesia’s already poor aviation safety record. The country has had several incidents linked to safety issues in the past, including poor maintenance, pilot training, communications or mechanical failures and air-traffic control problems. It’s the worst place in Asia to take an airplane, with 104 accidents and 2,353 related ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s government plans to create urgent legislation to formalise the use of virus contact-tracing data in investigations of serious crimes. Legislation will be introduced in the next sitting of parliament in February to limit the use of the data to probes of seven categories of serious crimes, the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office said in a statement. Those ...

Bloomberg An online car hailing platform of DiDi Chuxing was fined 340,000 yuan ($53,000) for failing to implement the government’s requirements on coronavirus prevention, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport said at a briefing on Sunday. Didi’s drivers were fined a combined 1.07 million yuan for failing to sterilise cars, wear masks or failing to refuse passengers with no masks, ...

Bloomberg Global demand for Chinese goods has been so strong recently it’s creating a shortage of containers and driving up shipping costs, potentially impeding the nation’s exports in coming months. Exports have been on a tear since July last year, fuelled by pandemic-related purchases like medical masks and work-at-home equipment, including computers. Imports haven’t been growing at nearly the same ...

Bloomberg Vedanta Resources launched an open offer for a 10% stake in its India unit, two months after a failed delisting attempt for Vedanta Ltd. The London-based parent of Mumbai-listed Vedanta Ltd will buy as many as 371.75 million shares, comprising 10% of the outstanding equity of the Indian unit, according to an exchange filing. The open offer, which will ...