अमेरिकी अखबार न्यूयॉर्क टाइम्स के अनुसार , दुबई स्थित व्हाइट सिटी वेंचर्स के संस्थापक शहल खान और हकीम ऑर्गेनाइजेशन के कामरान हकीम ने प्लाजा होटल की बहुलांश हिस्सेदारी 60 करोड़ डॉलर में खरीदने का सौदा किया है. इस सौदे के 25 जून को पूरा होने का अनुमान है.
सहारा समूह की अमेरिका में स्थित ऐतिहासिक होटल ‘ प्लाजा होटल ’ (फाइल फोटो)
बेहतर अनुभव के लिए अपनी सेटिंग्स में जाकर हाई मोड चुनें।
© 2017-18 Amar Ujala Publications Ltd.
“We’ve continued to add jobs routinely every month for so long, and the unemployment rate we have reached is amazing,” said Catherine Barrera, chief economist of the online job site ZipRecruiter. “This is the economy doing well.”
But the future has become clouded as President Trump continues to flirt with a trade war. The White House has offered little clarity about whether its newly imposed steel and aluminum tariffs will extend to allies like Mexico, Canada and the European Union, and it seems no closer to smoothing over economic tensions with China.
It is unlikely that Friday’s report will illuminate whether those moves will affect blue-collar hiring. Economists said it was too soon to tell how employers may change their staffing or expansion plans in response to the tariffs on Chinese goods, or to Beijing’s retaliation. But there are signs that companies that buy metals are feeling the effects already. The Institute for Supply Management said this week that manufacturing activity grew in April at its slowest pace since last July.
Uncertainty over the price of raw materials could prompt factories to cut back from their recent hiring spree. Manufacturers added 74,000 jobs in the first quarter, much more than in the same period last year.
The center of attention in Friday’s report will be your paycheck. Specifically, economists on Wall Street and policymakers in Washington are keen to see whether April will offer clearer evidence that wages are growing faster. The 2.7 percent year-over-year growth in hourly earnings in March was solid, but not spectacular.
Economists expect that low unemployment will lead to increasingly big pay bumps for workers as employers fight over a dwindling number of candidates. But this recovery has so far bucked that conventional wisdom. The change in hourly earnings varied from month to month last year, but hovered around 2.5 percent, barely keeping up with inflation.
If wage growth creeps toward 3 percent, it could signal a sea change, economists said. It could also prompt the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark interest rate more aggressively than it has signaled.
“Wage growth picking up would suggest the labor market is tightening and that the Fed could have to move more aggressively,” said Matthew Luzzetti, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank. Projections released at a Fed meeting this week suggested that officials were leaning toward a total of three rate increases this year. But strong wage growth could fan fears of an uptick in inflation, pushing them toward a fourth increase, Mr. Luzzetti said. “It means borrowing costs will be moving higher for typical consumers.”
The good times have been better for some than for others. Some Americans are still hesitating to enter the job market, perhaps bruised from the particularly harsh recession a decade ago.
“We have realized that there were even more workers on the sidelines than we previously thought,” said Martha Gimbel, an economist at Indeed.com, a job-search site. She pointed to data showing that more people are working part time, or have been unemployed for a long stretch, than in the last expansion. Ms. Gimbel said that her site had seen an increase in people searching for things like “background check” and “full time,” which could indicate that the economy’s strength is coaxing more people into the working world.
But for some groups, the market has been tougher. The unemployment rate for black workers, for example, has consistently hovered well above the rate for white workers, even as employers complain loudly about a labor shortage in sectors like construction and trucking. The job market has improved for black workers in recent years, but they still faced a jobless rate of 6.9 percent in April, compared with 3.6 percent for white workers.
“If that number were reversed — if black unemployment was under 4 percent and white unemployment was 6.9 percent — the country would be up in arms,” said Andre Perry of the Brookings Institution, whose research focuses on race and structural inequality. Differences in education or degrees don’t explain that gaping disparity, according to federal data.
Continue reading the main storyख़बर सुनें
उन्होंने कहा कि कश्मीर को दक्षिण एशिया के सबसे विस्फोटक क्षेत्रों में से एक होने के कारण स्पेशल फोकस के तौर पर अलग से दर्शाया गया है।
उन्होंने कहा कि ये नई बात नहीं है, पिछले साल भी छत्तीसगढ़, काबुल, श्रीलंका के कुछ हिस्सों, नेपाल और पाकिस्तान को भी इस तरह से दिखाया जा चुका है।
बृहस्पतिवार को विश्व प्रेस स्वतंत्रता दिवस के मौके पर यूनेस्को की रिपोर्ट ‘कठोर नीति और साहस- दक्षिण एशिया प्रेस स्वतंत्रता रिपोर्ट 2017-18’ के नाम से यहां पर यूनेस्को कार्यालय में रिलीज की गई।
According to the most recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), things are looking better (kind of) in the war-torn country: Civilian casualties are down, and over the course of the winter, the Taliban did not take any new provincial capitals.
“Afghan and international officials attributed this to the intensified air-strike campaign by Coalition and Afghan forces and more night raids by Afghan special forces,” reads the report.
It’s worth noting, though, those airstrikes also kill civilians with alarming regularity.
Also, winter is not combat fighting season in the country — hence the regular stream of attacks in cities throughout the colder months. Those types of attacks (suicide attacks anc car bombs) such as the horrific ones in April that targeted journalists and a voter registration center continue in the warm months, even as spring signals the start of fighting season.
If they make any gains remains to be seen, although the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that, according to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), President Donald Trump promised him that the United States is “getting the hell out of there,” which counters Defense Secretary James Mattis’s statement on U.S. commitments to Afghanistan’s security. (It seems the president made these assurances to Paul in exchange for the senator’s committee vote to confirm Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State.)
And this hardly marks a departure for this administration’s at times incoherent strategy in Afghanistan.
And while the Taliban have not captured more cities in the country’s 34 provinces, they still control very crucial border territories in Kunduz (where airstrikes targeting the Taliban hit a school instead) and Helmand.
In fact, according to the SIGAR report, the Afghan government controls (or influences, though it’s not clear exactly what that means) just over half the country’s 407 districts. Fifty-nine rest under Taliban control or influence, with the remaining ones — nearly a third of the country — are contested territory.
The Long War Journal (a project of the conservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies), however, notes that the data SIGAR used for this report is from the end of January 2018.
The Long War Journal gathers its own data, and in counting who controls what in Afghanistan until mid-April, it found that the government control 39 percent of the districts (159), the Taliban controls 9.5 percent (39 districts), with a whopping 49 percent (200 districts) being contested. (They could not determine who controlled the nine remaining districts).
Things might take a turn for the worst as there’s also a sharp decrease in the number of local security troops — down by nearly 11 percent — from 331,700 in January 2017 to roughly 296,400 in January of this year.
Quoting numbers from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the SIGAR report also highlights the fact that civilian deaths are down by nine percent.
زنده گی در #افغانستان pic.twitter.com/efV8xYJqt2
— Setayish (@setayish_tanha) May 2, 2018
This is the first time since 2012 that civilian casualties have decreased since 2012, which is significant, though far from any sort of comfort to Afghans who buried at least 3,438 of its own in 2017, including 861 children. As the tweet above shows, “life in Afghanistan” is by no means back to normal.
