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The Paradise Papers collection of documents is the first leak of record sizes that has ever appeared online. These reports were never to be seen by the eyes of most people. They expose the ways the elitist world takes advantage of tax havens to ward their fortune from additional bills.

Tax Heavens Protected Trillions of Dollars in Private Funds in 2015

On Sunday, German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung published sensitive data and shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The same organization was responsible for the publishing of the Panama Papers in 2016.

These so-called Paradise Papers consist of at least 13.4 million files. The extensive collection of financial materials originates mostly from the internal documents of international companies. Most of them concern organizations that are in charge of offshore accounts in the name of affluent investors. Some of them are Asiaciti Trust from Singapore and law company Appleby.

There are further details from other 19 corporate organizations that are under governmental administration included in this massive disclosure. All of them conduct business in offshore countries where taxes have meager rates.

The tax haven represents opportunities that foreign entities can take advantage of to tap into minimum tax liability. Generally speaking, the most famous locations are those nations with stable economics and politics.

Every two years, the financial secrecy index from the Tax Justice Network releases a new update. According to the 2015 issue, tax heavens harbored $21 to $34 trillion of private funds.

The Documents Make References to Influential Names at a Global Level

Such financial practices hang on the edge of the law. While individuals break no rule or regulation whenever they choose to transition their fortune offshore, there are some questions of ethics that they trigger. Some experts claim that this practice activates a shield of secrecy that is broad enough to hide irregular financial activities.

The leaked Paradise Papers contain data about famous politicians and public characters at a global level. U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, estate administrators of Queen Elizabeth II, proteges of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Nike, and Apple are just a few of the individuals and entities that appear in these files.

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In an announcement released on June 09, Softbank revealed that it would be acquiring Boston Dynamics, the Big Dog developer company. As part of the sales agreement, Softbank will also be buying Shaft, a somewhat more secretive robotics firm.

Schaft and Boston Dynamics Will Be Passing On To New Hands

Presently, both these two robotics companies are still part of the Alphabet group. They were acquired by the corporation, at the time still going just by Google, back in 2013.

Schaft’s acquisition was part of group purchase including six other acquisitions besides it. Similar to its purchase, Alphabet stated that it would not be disclosing the term of the sales deal. No information will be offered regarding the sale of Boston Dynamics either.

Both this and Schaft are players in the robotics market, but their presence in the area has been somewhat different. While Boston Dynamics’s creations have been raising surprise and even fear in some, Schaft was rather a quiet presence.

Boston Dynamics presented quite many creations and talked about its advances in animal-like robotics. One of its most famous robots is the “Big Dog”, and the more recently announced “Handle”, which can both walk and roll away.

Rumors had been flying around for quite some time that Alphabet was looking to sell these two robotics companies. Various names were vehiculated as being interested buyers, one of them being Toyota.

Both Softbank and Boston Dynamics released statements after the purchase was revealed.

“We at Boston Dynamics are excited to be part of SoftBank’s bold vision and its position creating the next technology revolution, and we share SoftBank’s belief that advances in technology should be for the benefit of humanity,” stated Marc Raibert.

He is the founder and CEO of Boston Dynamics. Raibert then continued by adding that the two companies will be looking to keep ‘pushing the boundaries’ of advanced robots. They will also be looking to develop them with a useful application in this “more connected” and “smarter” world.

The acquisition of the two robotics companies is still subjected to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. It still remains to be seen if further details about the transaction will be revealed.

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On Thursday, Facebook presented Hugo Barra as the new Head of its VR division. The news came just a few days after the later announced his decision to leave Xiaomi.

Facebook is considered the world’s most popular social networking platform. This is based on its number of active user accounts. Presently, the company has more than 1.80 billion active users.

Facebook is a for-profit corporation. Its main service is the social networking and online social media area. As the corporation started growing, it also got involved in various other domains.

Besides AI, VR is probably one of the most sought-after such areas. Back in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR. This later is a technology company. It was founded in 2012. Presently, it is based in Menlo Park, California, just as Facebook.

Since then, the two companies have released a series of products. The Facebook Oculus Gear or Lift are perhaps the best-known products. And now, the VR division will have a new head.

Hugo Barra will join the social media giant company. He will be Facebook’s Vice President of the Virtual Reality decision. The announcement came just a few days after Barra released a statement of his own.

Barra took to Facebook to express his decision to leave Xiaomi. This latter is one of the biggest smartphone producers in the world. Hugo Barra was in charge of the company’s expansion on the international market.

But Barra is not new to the technology area. Before joining Xiaomi, he was also part of Google. The computer scientists occupied a number of product management roles. He was also Vice President of the company. He spent 5 years as part of Google.

And the last 4 were spent with Xiaomi. In his announcement, Barra also stated when he will be leaving the company. The tech executive will remain with the company until the Chinese New Year. This will take place in February.

Following a rest period, Barra will then occupy his new Facebook position. As part of the VR division, he will be faced with quite a few challenges. The Oculus Gear and Rift products are well known on the market. But they are not dominant devices.

The VR sector is a young and competitive new area. Most products target the gaming segment. But Mark Zuckerberg is targeting its social features. According to the Facebook CEO, Hugo Barra will help achieve this goal.

Barra already has experience on building an operating system business. This was acquired thanks to his Google Android period. And he also knows how to build up a hardware brand. This later was acquired during the Xiaomi years. All this experience will now have to be focused on a new area. And a new product.

Facebook’s naming a new VR Head is not surprising. The company has been looking for a replacement since December. Back then, Facebook reduced Brendan Iribe’s role in the area. Iribe is the Oculus CEO.

Zuckerberg offered a few additional details. According to his Facebook post, Hugo Barra shares his belief. They both consider VR and AR to be future segments. They see them as being the potential future major computing platform.

Zuckerberg presented some of the technologies’ potential uses. They could help people experience new things. And it could further open up the gates of human creativity.

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Medium announced that it will be laying off some of its staff, more exactly one-third of it, as the company will be changing its direction.

Medium Corporation is the legal owner of Medium. This latter is an online publishing platform. It was launched back in August 2012. The platform was developed by Evan Williams.

Williams, who is also the company CEO, is also known for another of his project. He is one of the co-founders of Twitter, the popular microblogging platform.

Medium was designed so as to allow the publishing of longer documents and writings. It has set out to have a larger than 140-character maximum number. The platform hosts a varied collection of both amateur and professional publications.

It also has its own specialized publications. As such, it has, for example, online music and technology ones.

On Wednesday, the aforementioned Williams released a statement. This was published on the official Medium post. According to it, the website will be going through some major changes.

One of the first changes will target its employee numbers. The company will be laying off a part of its staff members.

An estimated one-third of its employees will be affected by the decision. More exactly, Medium will be renouncing to 50 members of its staff team.

The post also went to mention the most affected such areas. Layoffs will mostly affect business functions. For example, the sales and support areas. Most of the product and engineering teams will reportedly not be affected.

The downsizing will also target the company offices. As such, two of its bases will be closed down. Its Washington D.C. and New York offices, to be more exact. Some staff members will reportedly keep working remotely from the said locations.

Medium will also reportedly be changing its business model. The shift will come in the hopes of accomplishing its initial mission.

According to the release, the company feels that it is “falling short”. This will lead to a change in the platform’s business model. A new variant should help it finds its way back.

Williams outlined Medium’s initial goal. The website was reportedly supposed to be a new Internet media model.

As it is, the startup will be searching for new support methods. These should come help sustain Internet creators and writers.

The need for a change may have also been based on a former company decision. Back in October 2016, Medium introduced some new features. More exactly, it started sponsoring posts on its website.

It also started rolling out a series of native ad campaigns. Some have argued that these last features are not exactly the definition of following a new path.

In the blog post, Williams himself outlined a similar point. He stated that the Internet media has become quite ad-driven. This may not necessarily serve people, according to him.

As it is, Medium will be searching for a new path. This latter is as yet unknown. According to Williams, it might also take some time before it can become known.

He is reported to have stated it as being too soon as to say what this new road will look like. As such, the company will be shifting its attention and resources.

It will reportedly try to build a “transformational product”. This will specifically target people curious to find out more and learn about the world every day

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The definition of Brexit is merging the words Britain and exit and it was meant to decide whether the UK should stay or leave the European Union. The referendum allowed everyone of voting age to express their opinion and took place on Thursday, 23 June. Stay lost by 48 percent to 52 percent. 71.8 percent of the UK population voted which could be translated into more than 30 million individuals.

Brexit has not even begun to impact Britain, and the terms of exit are still unclear after the vote. Uncertainty surrounds the future of London’s status of a European business hub.

Just several months into his mayor of London job, Sadiq Khan, who is also a person sustaining Britain’s staying in the European Union, is developing plans to separate London-only work permit. His plan is to assure that Britain will still attract workers and they will still want to work here even after it leaves EU.

Londoners voted in some areas more than 75 percent for staying in the European Union according to surveys. The new mayor stated that he is doing all that is possible by talking to businesses, business leader and representatives to assure that London keeps its status of the greatest town in the world by keeping its innovation and talent.

One of the proposals is to give more power to unions and councils to decide which are the needed skills in different regions of the country. The visas could then be given based on the demand.

Since the referendum, Khan has mentioned that Britain should maintain entrance to the single market and that London must be represented during Brexit discussions. After the referendum results, Khan addressed the approximately one million immigrants and thanked them for their contribution. Moreover, with his #LondonIsOpen campaign, they tried to encourage visitors to choose London as a destination and also reassured investors of London’s stability.

The London-only work permit has arrived at a great time as one of the latest KPMG surveys showed that three-quarters of CEOs that live in Britain are considering a relocation of their business out of the United Kingdom post-Brexit. Moreover, France is taking action to attract companies from London by administering a fast registration method which is conducted in English.

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Children that surf the internet for Barbie, SpongeBob SquarePants, and other famous kids’ brands will no longer have their private information spied on by toy companies for marketing purposes. Companies could have gathered the children’s data as a deal between four organizations including Mattel and Viacom and New York’s top cop.

Eric Schneiderman who is the General Attorney of New York said that the businesses allowed third parties to access and use the information of children under the age of 13 without their parent’s consent. Schneiderman also mentioned that some of the biggest toy companies failed to defend the children’s privacy taking into consideration that under the Federal law kids are off-limits to the intrusive eyes of promoters.

The two-year probe of the companies which was the first of this sort in the United States involved sites for Nickelodeon brands and Viacom’s Nick Jr.,  Hot Wheels and Mattel’s Barbie. Moreover, Hasbro’s My Littlest Pet Shop, Nerf and Little Pony, and JumpStart’s Neopets, a virtual pet society acquired from Viacom in 2014 were also included. All of the companies will have to pay a penalty of $835,000, according to the arrangement. Penalties have been divided in $250,000 for Mattel,  $500,000 for Viacom and $85,000 for JumpStart.

According to the statement, Schneiderman began observing the companies when he saw that the websites utilized by the companies were using IP addresses or cookies which enable the recognition of a particular user across sites over time.

The technologies used by the corporations supported advertisers and marketers in targeting possible buyers.

A representative of Hasbro, Julie Duffy, mentioned that the Rhode Island-based company, Pawtucket, is highly committed to defending the secrecy of its site readers. They decided to entirely cooperate with the investigators and to implement stricter privacy security policy for their associates. Moreover, they want to establish new rules and engineering to scan the digital properties for widgets, cookies, or other credentials that may break their actual policy.

Schneiderman says that companies should conduct periodically scans to assure that third parties are not involved and that children’s personal information are protected on their websites.

Image source: Pixabay

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Uber’s settlement to allow self-driving cars on the roads of Pittsburgh this week has alarmed security experts who mentioned that the engineering is not nearly prepared for prime time.

Pennsylvania hasn’t yet established rules that would determine what would happen in the case of a collision or necessary legislation that would authorize the examination of self-driving automobiles.

Because Pittsburgh has more bridges than any other metropolis in the United States, researchers stated that the autonomous vehicles had been driven off bridges.

A previous administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and customer-protection advocate mentioned that passengers will be turned into guinea pigs and that more studies must be made before having customers in the vehicles.

Technologists believe that testing driverless cars on actual roads is necessary. While supporting their statement, scientists mentioned that more than 37,000 Americans die every year from car crashed which are caused by driver errors. Moreover, the self-driving car advocates considered that if corporations like Uber had to wait for governments to approve the necessary laws, the technology might never have happened.

The different views on technology revealed by Uber’s Pittsburgh plan have called into question the anxiety over how significant discovery should take place in America.

Although many companies like General Motors and Google are leading experiments of automatic cars on public streets, Uber is the first corporation to bring everyday passengers along for the journey.

The policy manager for Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation, Roger Cohen, said that Uber did not legally have to ask for the regulator’s approval before launching its product. He also mentioned that while not prohibiting it, the current law is silently permitting the action.

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, says that although the company did not exist five years ago, it is now a leader in engineering which hopes that one day, they will be capable of replacing human drivers with science and technology. Moreover, what makes the company unique, unlike Volvo and Google is that it partners with automotive producers, and that Pittsburgh could seize upon the manufacturing component.

What do you think about Uber’s new self-driving car project in Pittsburg? Please let us know in the comment section below.

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Unfortunately, for millions of Americans, their wage is a constant reminder of the economic collapse of the 2007-09 recession. Painfully slow wage increase has curbed economic improvement, with many employers receiving few if any raises. However, many signs show that this is starting to change.

The unemployment rates have pointed to more competition for workers, encouraging substantial additions in average hourly wages in recent months. Those pressures, augmented by the laws that provide minimum-wage increases in New York, California, and elsewhere, also are causing changes for the workers who require raises the most.

Some of the biggest companies like Starbucks, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and JPMorgan Chase began raising what they pay their lowest-level workers.

Business managers believe that a pay raise is a right thing to do. The additions would grow the hourly pay of customer service representatives, bank tellers,  and other similar employees to at least $12 an hour in next three years, from the present $10.15.

At a gathering in Virginia last month, Donald Trump stated that household earnings are more than $4,000 under their levels in the year 2000.

One of the factors that caused the decrease in the minimum wage is the lack of bargaining power generated by a decline in the share of private-sector unionized employees. Another reason could be the drop in higher-paying construction jobs. Organizations relocated more factories abroad due to the economic situation. The 2008 financial disaster and the worst economic decline since the Great Depression augmented those changes, further suffocating overall wage growth.

However, annual wage earnings have been consistently in that range since last autumn — they touched a 7-year high of 2.7 percent year-over-year in July — an addition from the moderate 2 percent during the first six years after the financial collapse.

The purchasing power of employees is encouraged by the annual inflation operating below 1 percent which accelerates wage growth.

Moreover, many middle-income jobs are being generated showing that wage gains are being covered more equally among the workforce. From 2013 to 2015, the U.S. supplemented about 2.3 million middle-income careers in fields such as construction, transportation, and education. During the same season, the economy generated about 1.5 million high-paying positions and about 1.6 million low-paying careers.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, mentioned that growing the minimum wage wouldn’t just put extra money in the pockets of low-income households, it also implies they will pay more at the businesses in their communities.

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