Mongolia gets new prime minister who pledged to address economic demands of protesters
Lawmakers approved former parliament speaker Zandanshatar Gombojav as Prime Minister by an overwhelming majority in a vote late Thursday night.
His election appeared to mark the end of several weeks of political uncertainty in a still-young democracy of 3.4 million people that is sandwiched between much larger China and Russia. The new leader faces multiple challenges including high inflation, a looming government budget deficit and fears of power shortages this winter.
Speaking ahead of the vote in parliament, Mr. Zandanshatar said this year's government spending needs to be reduced by about $640 million to avoid a significant revenue shortfall.
'Revision of the budget has become inevitable,' the former banker said, saying he would submit a revised budget to parliament next week.
Mr. Zandanshatar, 45, studied economics at university in Russia and was vice director of one of the largest commercial banks in Mongolia.
He was parliament speaker from 2020 to 2024 and was named head of the president's office after he lost his seat in an election last year. From 2014-16, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in California.
His predecessor, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai, resigned 10 days ago after losing a vote of confidence in parliament.
The protests against Oyun-Erdene's rule were sparked by reports of lavish spending by his son. Many Mongolians feel the nation's mineral wealth has benefited politicians and their business friends rather than the general population. The poverty rate remains high in the sparsely populated country.
Mr. Zandanshatar said he would ensure that economic growth is inclusive and reached all Mongolians. He promised to launch a tax reform to reduce the burden on the middle class and increase taxes on luxury consumption and those with ultra-high incomes.
He won election by a vote of 108 to 9 in the 126-member parliament. The other nine members were absent.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
2 days ago
- Time of India
Trump targets racial preferences in college admissions but leaves legacy and donor advantages untouched
President Donald Trump has launched an assertive campaign to reform college admissions, presenting it as a win for meritocracy. His policies focus on standardized test scores, academic achievement, and the elimination of racial considerations, portraying a vision of higher education driven solely by measurable performance. Yet, while race is under intense scrutiny, legacy admissions and donor-based advantages remain untouched, preserving a system that favors wealth and inherited privilege. Legacy admissions: The hidden advantage Legacy preferences, sometimes described as 'affirmative action for the wealthy,' grant children of alumni or major donors a significant edge in admissions. Despite efforts to remove racial factors from evaluations, hereditary advantages continue to disproportionately benefit affluent and predominantly white students, leaving meritocracy incomplete. Political and legislative momentum Lawmakers argue that focusing solely on race does not fully address inequities in higher education. Several states, including Virginia, Colorado, and California, have banned legacy admissions at public institutions. Yet elite private universities, including all Ivy League schools, continue to uphold the practice. Stanford University recently announced it would maintain legacy preferences, even withdrawing from California's state financial aid program rather than abandoning the policy. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like American Investor Warren Buffett Recommends: 5 Books For Turning Your Life Around Blinkist: Warren Buffett's Reading List Undo Merit over race, wealth intact Trump's executive actions and Justice Department guidance aim to enforce compliance with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against affirmative action, requiring universities to provide detailed admissions data. While the policies prohibit racial consideration, they make no mention of legacy or donor advantages. Critics argue this selective focus undermines the notion of merit, allowing inherited privilege to continue shaping opportunity. Public opinion and university practices Most Americans oppose legacy and donor preferences, according to a 2023 AP-NORC poll. Universities defend the practice as a means of building community and securing donations. Transparency, however, remains limited. While institutions report whether they consider legacy status, few disclose its impact on admissions. Among the nation's most selective universities, very few reveal how many students are admitted under legacy or donor preference policies. Meritocracy under scrutiny Trump positions his actions as essential to maintaining meritocracy and ensuring colleges recruit capable future professionals. However, experts caution that targeting race alone may have unintended consequences, potentially prompting institutions to limit minority enrollment to avoid government scrutiny. The reform campaign raises fundamental questions about fairness in admissions when wealth and ancestry continue to hold sway. The road ahead Trump's admissions initiative exposes the tension between merit, diversity, and tradition in higher education. By addressing racial considerations while leaving legacy privileges untouched, the policies challenge universities to reconcile fairness with entrenched advantages. Whether true meritocracy can flourish amid enduring wealth-based benefits remains uncertain, highlighting the complexity of reforming an institution long shaped by privilege. Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
Indian Express
4 days ago
- Indian Express
This Stanford graduate's startup wants to change how websites are built using AI
Planning to launch a startup? Thinking of expanding your cake-baking business and reaching new consumers? You need a website. Creating a website is a prerequisite for any business — it's like your second address, a digital identity that makes you visible on the internet. However, building a website often requires graphic designers to create the layout and programmers to write the code (HTML, CSS) to add pages, sub-pages, and features. And if you are starting out, this process can be a hassle, and expensive too. A Bengaluru-based startup wants to change that with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Founder Prakash Sanker said Launch helps anyone build a website using plain English prompts, transforming them into professional-grade websites and web apps, placing AI at the forefront of the technology's potential to disrupt existing website-building tools. 'If you are a fitness instructor and you want a website, you can come to my platform. You can say, 'I am a fitness instructor, I want to create a website to manage my clients, my sessions, and my payments,' and then, in a few minutes, we basically create an application for you that works,' Sanker told in an interview earlier this week. Sanker, who studied applied mathematics at Stanford University, said the idea behind the AI-based platform is to reduce the number of steps required to build web-based applications such as websites, web apps, and progressive web apps (PWAs) and make the process accessible to anyone looking to create a website of their own. 'You don't need any coding experience. You can just come in, enter a prompt in plain English, and the platform will respond and do the work,' he said. Before working on Launch, Sanker held roles at companies like Palantir, Splunk, and Remind in Silicon Valley. In 2017, he moved to India to become the CTO of Zelp, which later went public on the NSE and BSE. He then built a mental health startup, which he eventually shut down, and explored new business ideas. Sanker recalls being interested in applying large language models (LLMs) to cybersecurity, but later realised that the market in India wasn't ready. In 2022, he shifted his focus to website and app creation after recognising the greater mass-market potential and demand in that space. As artificial intelligence becomes more widely adopted across workplaces and within companies, Sanker sees greater potential for how AI can be used to build websites without requiring any prior knowledge or coding experience. 'I don't think people are just talking about it for no reason,' he said. 'I think they are talking about it because it's pretty cool technology that's enabling a lot of new workflows and new possibilities. What we are doing now was simply not possible two years ago: the large language models weren't good enough back then.' 'You can create a website using my platform in five to six minutes, whereas working with a programmer might take a few days. You no longer need to work with a programmer to actually build a product,' he said, highlighting the primary difference between what Launch is aiming to do and how websites are traditionally built. Sanker claimed building a website on Launch is easy. All you need to do is describe your app, and the AI generates your entire stack (backend, authentication, database, and UI) all automatically. You can test and iterate, then go live by deploying your app with a single click, complete with a real domain and real users. To build a website using Launch, users pay for 'prompts' — essentially, messages they send to describe or modify their website. For example, if someone wants to create a website for selling their artwork, that counts as one message. If they then request a change, like adjusting the button colour or layout, that counts as another message. Each prompt or message is equivalent to one interaction with the AI, which uses these inputs to generate code and build the site. The full-stack AI platform was launched in beta in April and went live in June. Sanker said he is seeing demand for the product from all over the world, not just India. 'I think websites are still relevant because the biggest screen people use is their phone, and they want to see and interact with things in a manual way. While AI agents will have their place, websites will remain highly relevant in the future. I believe there will be more websites tomorrow than there are today,' Sanker replied when asked if websites are still relevant in the AI age, amid predictions by experts that AI agents might replace websites and mobile apps. Although Sanker's platform is still new, he said he is working on integrations to make it easier for users to connect with various software applications. The current focus is on improving speed, allowing websites to be generated much faster. In addition, Sanker mentioned efforts to improve the reliability of the database, which is essential for building real, production-ready applications. Looking ahead, there are also plans to introduce human support. 'If users get stuck or aren't getting the results they expect, they can pay to get help from a real person,' he said. 'We will build a lot of internal tooling to make that possible and to scale that part of the business more easily,' Sanker added. The startup is currently bootstrapped, but Sanker may raise external capital soon to support its expansion. 'Our main goal is to enable the many entrepreneurs in India to build their own businesses quickly and establish a strong software presence. That's what motivates us every day, and that's where our focus really lies,' Sanker said
Time of India
11-08-2025
- Time of India
What happened when Mark Zuckerberg moved in next door
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills For decades, the Crescent Park neighbourhood of Palo Alto represented the dream of California lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors lived in charming homes under oak, redwood and magnolia trees. The houses, an eclectic mix including Craftsman homes and bungalows, were filled with families who became fast friends. The annual block parties heaved with people. Daily life was tranquil, and the soundtrack was one of children laughing as they rode their bicycles and played in one another's Mark Zuckerberg moved his arrival 14 years ago, Crescent Park's neighbourhood tranquility and even many of its actual neighbours have vanished. Residents hardly ever see the Facebook founder, now worth about $270 billion, but they feel his presence every has used Edgewood Drive and Hamilton Avenue like a Monopoly game board, spending more than $110 million to scoop up at least 11 houses. He has offered owners as much as $14.5 million, double or even triple what the homes are worth, and neighbours have seen one family after another of his properties sit empty in a notoriously crunched housing market. He has turned five of them into a compound with a main house for him; his wife, Priscilla Chan; and their three daughters, along with guest homes, lush gardens, a nearby pickleball court and a pool that can be covered with a hydrofloor. A seven-foot statue depicting Chan in a silver, flowing robe that Zuckerberg commissioned last year sits on the compound is encircled by a high row of hedges, and there is no such thing as knocking on the front door to borrow a cup of sugar. One of the unoccupied buildings is used for entertainment and as a staging ground for outdoor property has been used for the past few years as a private school for 14 children, even though that is not an allowable use of a house in the neighbourhood under city code. Six adults, including four teachers, worked there this past school the compound, Zuckerberg has added 7,000 square feet of space -- cavernous areas that his building permits refer to as basements, but that his neighbours call bunkers or even a billionaire's bat cave. The work has led to eight years of construction, filling the streets with massive equipment and a lot of has also brought intense levels of surveillance to the neighbourhood, including cameras positioned at his homes with views of his neighbours' property. He has a team of private security guards who sit in cars, filming some visitors and asking others what they are doing as they walk on public McLear, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan, said the couple tried hard to do right by their neighbours. Meta requires heavy security for its chief executive, he said, because of specific, credible threats. Cameras are not trained at neighbours, and they adjust them when asked, he family's staff provides neighbours with notice of potentially disruptive events and gives them a contact's phone number to report problems, he said. Staff members are reimbursed for ride shares to encourage them not to park their own cars in the neighbourhood."Mark, Priscilla and their children have made Palo Alto their home for more than a decade," McLear said. "They value being members of the community and have taken a number of steps above and beyond any local requirements to avoid disruption in the neighbourhood."Zuckerberg's expansion in Crescent Park was revealed through interviews with nine neighbours, seven of whom would not speak publicly for fear of retribution, as well as a review of building permits, affidavits, certificates of formation of limited liability companies, home deeds, recordings of local commission meetings, and emails between neighbours and city has laid claim to the neighbourhood as tech billionaires have made headlines for increasingly brazen shows of their wealth. Jeff Bezos launched his fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, and other women into space on a Blue Origin flight before taking over Venice, Italy, for the couple's wedding. Elon Musk has created a compound in Texas for his numerous children and their mothers, and Marc Benioff has been buying up a wide swath of the Big Island of few know firsthand the decade-long disruption, noise, surveillance and uncertainty one extremely rich person can create better than the neighbours in Crescent Park."No neighbourhood wants to be occupied," said Michael Kieschnick, whose home on Hamilton Avenue is bound on three sides by property owned by Zuckerberg. "But that's exactly what they've done. They've occupied our neighbourhood."Kieschnick and some of his neighbours are angry with Zuckerberg for taking over Crescent Park rather than building a compound in a nearby town with far more space, as other tech titans have done. Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley and Woodside are known for large, gated estates for wealthy people seeking space and they are also angry with the city of Palo Alto. In 2016, a key city board rejected Zuckerberg's application to build a compound, and he withdrew it. But the city then allowed him to create it anyway, just more slowly and piecemeal. The city has been told by neighbours for years that Zuckerberg is operating a private school in a house but has done little to address the other day, the Police Department provided signs to affix to trees, creating a long tow-away zone on the public road, blocking neighbours from parking their own cars there for five hours on a Wednesday evening. The reason, Kieschnick said he learned, was that Zuckerberg was hosting a backyard barbecue and the police had assigned its officer in charge of dignitaries to assist the neighbours, it feels as if city officials and police officers give extreme deference to Zuckerberg at the expense of everybody else."Billionaires everywhere are used to just making their own rules -- Zuckerberg and Chan are not unique, except that they're our neighbours," Kieschnick said. "But it's a mystery why the city has been so feckless."Kieschnick is a co-founder of a cellular phone company and now works as a green energy advocate. His phone company founded a political action committee to support candidates who fight climate said that Zuckerberg, through his staff, had offered to buy his house. But he said he loved his home of more than 30 years and was daunted by the thought of far, his answer has been has been on a big real estate buying and selling spree. In 2022, he sold his seven-bedroom home near Dolores Park in San Francisco for $31 million after creating a similar disruption with construction in that owns 2,300 acres on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he is building a compound with two mansions, tree houses connected by rope bridges and an underground shelter. He is building a third compound on the shores of Lake Tahoe and this year paid $23 million in cash for a 15,000-square-foot mansion in Washington, his home base has long been Palo Alto. His entry into Crescent Park began in 2011 when he purchased a 5,600-square-foot home on Edgewood Drive. The local heritage society says the house is the oldest one in Palo Alto. It sits just 3 miles from Meta headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo first, neighbours mostly shrugged. In Palo Alto, heavyweights in the tech industry have long been part of the landscape. Hewlett-Packard was founded in a garage about a mile away, and the seeds of Google sprouted nearby at Stanford. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, lived a quiet life in Palo neighbours grew concerned when Zuckerberg started purchasing more property. In 2012 and 2013, he spent more than $40 million buying four more houses that form an L-shape around his first resumed his spending spree in 2022, buying six more homes, including four in the past 15 months. The purchases fly under the radar because they are made with limited liability companies, each time with a different nature-themed name, such as Pine Burrow or Seed Breeze. Zuckerberg usually requires sellers to sign nondisclosure agreements, neighbours who are friendly with the sellers appetite for more Crescent Park property is so well known that in the three most recent home sales, the owners approached him offering to sell, his spokesperson said. Some of the homes are empty and need repairs, while others are housing extended family members of Zuckerberg and 2016, Zuckerberg asked Palo Alto for permission to demolish the four homes that border his main family house and rebuild them much smaller with big basements. City officials had approved it, but because it involved construction on three or more properties at once, the municipal code required that the project go before the Palo Alto Architectural Review Board Peter Baltay, a Palo Alto architect who was then a member of the review board, said he found the proposal odd, so he went to the site to see it in person before casting a vote. He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing."I said, 'I'm standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.' He said, 'Well, we'd appreciate it if you could move on,'" Baltay recalled. "I was pretty shocked by that. It's a public sidewalk!"Zuckerberg did not attend the meeting, but an architect, a builder and an arborist he had hired tried to convince the board that they were not removing single-family housing stock. The board did not buy during the meeting said he found it "a real shame" that four beautiful homes were being demolished so a wealthy person could have a giant estate complete with a movie theater in the middle of an already established board quashed the plan back then, but Zuckerberg moved ahead with it anyway -- just more slowly, one or two homes at a time, avoiding going back before the review city has approved 56 permits for Zuckerberg's properties, its online permit search system demolished three homes completely and built smaller ones in their place, and performed a major remodel on the fourth. He filled in pools, creating one large central garden. The permits show the work includes wine storage, a fountain, a guesthouse, courtyards, a pool house and a storage shed connected by a trellis, and a movable floor on the remaining pool to allow the water to be covered for safety reasons or Horrigan-Taylor, a spokesperson for the city of Palo Alto, said there was no preferential treatment in granting the permits, and the work was compliant with city code."The city does not regulate who can buy nearby or adjacent properties, whether on the open market or privately," she Stone , a member of the Palo Alto City Council who lives near Crescent Park, said the city has followed the letter of its own code but not the spirit in allowing Zuckerberg to take over a neighbourhood. Stone said he was working on legislation to address the problem."He's been finding loopholes around our local laws and zoning ordinances," Stone said of Zuckerberg. "We should never be a gated, gilded city on a hill where people don't know their neighbours."When Zuckerberg and Chan first made plans for their compound about 10 years ago, they held a meeting for roughly 20 neighbours in the kitchen of their Edgewood home. They presented their vision of the project and assured the neighbours they would provide off-site parking for workers and would not tear down any homes, recalled Kieschnick, who attended the of those promises were broken, he said. The couple's spokesperson said no such promises had been all, eight years of construction ensued. It has largely stopped over the past several months, but neighbours are still bitter and expect more to come. They said their driveways had been blocked, their tires flattened by construction debris and their car mirrors knocked off by said workers regularly parked cars and ate lunch in front of their homes. Zuckerberg, the workers told them, wanted the frontage of his home on Edgewood kept numerous trucks rumble in, delivering food, decorations and furniture for parties. Sometimes, the street is blocked for days, neighbours said. Those on Hamilton said their road was used as the compound's shipping and receiving dock, and parking time usually includes valet parking for partygoers in gowns and tuxedos, or costumes if the theme calls for them, neighbours said. The music is often loud, sometimes prompting complaints to the nonemergency police line. neighbours said they did not usually get a and Chan held their wedding at the property. In October, they held a disco party there, Zuckerberg in white pants and a gold chain and Chan in sequined gold pants and a one-shouldered top. "Disco queen wanted a party," Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram Smaller events, including those for Meta employees, neighbours said, take place more frequently. In late July, when police provided the free signs to affix to trees, three big, dark vans stopped in front of the compound. Scores of people, mostly young men in hoodies, filed out and into the compound. Security guards stood outside, eyeing Forgie, a retired lawyer who has lived in Crescent Park for 20 years, said he and his partner have long had an open-door policy for their neighbours, welcoming them over and giving gifts when people move in or have babies. None of that has worked on Zuckerberg."We tried to bring him into the fold," Forgie said. "It's been rebuffed every time."Kieschnick said when Zuckerberg bought the home next door, Zuckerberg's staff members informed him the wooden fence that separated the two homes -- and had a gate for children to scurry through -- did not meet Facebook standards. It has since been rebuilt twice, thicker and taller each time, he said the staff also installed security cameras in Zuckerberg's garden looking into his own garden. When he threatened to install cameras in his own yard looking into Zuckerberg's property, employees promptly took them staff has made some accommodations. The security guards now sit in quiet electric vehicles rather than in louder gas-powered cars. Zuckerberg does not attend the annual block parties, which are very small these days, but he did send an ice cream cart to the last his staff has sent gifts to neighbours when the racket has gotten particularly loud, including bottles of sparkling wine, chocolates and Krispy Kreme memorable gift delivery? Noise-cancelling headphones.
