U.S. Says Government Employee Blocked from Leaving China
The employee of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was 'made subject to an exit ban in China,' a spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy said Tuesday. 'We are tracking this case very closely and are engaged with Chinese officials to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.'
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News24
27 minutes ago
- News24
Myanmar junta air strike on ruby mine hub kills 13
A Myanmar junta air strike on Mogok killed 13 people, including civilians like a monk and a father and son. Civil war has raged since the 2021 military coup, with rebel forces seizing territory like Mogok, a ruby mining hub. The junta plans December elections but faces boycott and criticism as opposition groups call it a 'fraud' to maintain power. A Myanmar junta air strike on a rebel-occupied ruby mining hub killed 13 people on Saturday, according to a resident and a spokesperson for an armed opposition group. Civil war has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in a 2021 coup, sparking resistance from pro-democracy guerrillas who found common cause with long-active ethnic armed groups. Their scattered forces initially struggled to make headway, but a combined offensive starting in late 2023 seized swathes of territory, including the town of Mogok - the centre of the ruby trade. Myanmar is rich in precious stones and rare earth elements coveted by all factions and sold off, mostly to neighbouring China, to boost war chests. A junta spokesperson could not be reached for comment. However, a local who declined to be named for security reasons said the strike took place around 08:15 am (0145 GMT), killing seven instantly, with six dying later of their wounds. READ | Myanmar military offers new truce in bid to 'protect the towns and people's lives' He said among the dead were a Buddhist monk collecting alms and a father and son who were riding the same motorbike. "A car passing through the area was hit, too," he added. "Seven people were wounded, including the driver." A spokesperson for the Ta'ang National Liberation Army, which has occupied Mogok since last summer, matched that death toll but gave a figure of 14 wounded. "It was in the morning time when the airstrike hit a public area," said spokesperson Lway Yay Oo. There were a lot of people walking in the street; therefore, a lot of people were killed. The military was initially backfooted by the rebels' combined offensive but has enacted conscription to boost its ranks. Its troops recently retook several key settlements in central Myanmar, including the gold mining hub of Thabeikkyin, which it seized late last month after a year-long battle. The junta on Thursday ended the state of emergency it had declared after toppling the government of Aung San Suu Kyi more than four years ago, and has touted elections in December as an off-ramp for the conflict. However, with Suu Kyi still jailed, opposition groups, including ousted lawmakers, are boycotting the poll. A UN expert in June described the exercise as a "fraud" designed to legitimise the junta's continued rule.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Amazon CEO on Tariffs: ‘It's Impossible to Know What Will Happen'
The jury may be still out on the impact of tariffs on Amazon's business, but its customers kept spending throughout the second quarter. Rehashing some of the narrative from the company's first quarter earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that despite the tariffs, the e-commerce giant has not seen diminishing demand or meaningful price appreciation in the first half of the year. More from Sourcing Journal Study Shows American Fashion Firms Unilaterally Challenged by Trade Upheaval, Tariffs Resetting Asia's Apparel Map With a New World Sourcing Order Trump Announces Dozens of New Reciprocal Tariff Rates But Jassy left room for all outcomes for the remainder of the year. 'That could change in the second half,' Jassy said. 'There are a lot of things that we don't know.' Although Jassy said tariffs' effect on retail prices and consumption has often been 'wrong and misreported,' the CEO also acknowledged 'it's impossible to know what will happen,' particularly when it depletes pre-tariff inventory. Jassy was also wishy-washy on the ensuing costs from the tariffs, noting that the company is unsure at who's going to end up absorbing the higher expenses. He noted that with 2 million sellers on its marketplace, there is a range of differing strategies on whether to pass on the higher costs to consumers. The earnings call occurred hours before President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on several U.S. trade partners ahead of Friday's deadline to conjure up new trade agreements. Those tariff rates are expected to kick in Aug. 7. Higher tariffs on goods from China face an Aug. 12 deadline. More than 70 percent of Amazon sellers and brands say they source their products from China, according to a survey conducted last year by Amazon seller software platform Jungle Scout. The tariffs that have been embedded since April have not slowed down sales at the Big Tech firm. Amazon's second quarter showed strong growth, with net sales increasing 13 percent to $167.7 billion in the second quarter, up from $148 billion in the year-ago period. Net income increased to $18.2 billion in the second quarter, or $1.68 per diluted share, compared with $13.5 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share, in second quarter 2024. Jassy highlighted some wins across Amazon's logistics operation, particularly as the company continues to restructure its inbound fulfillment network of warehouses near major ports to cut ground transportation expenses. According to the CEO, Amazon increased the share of orders moving through direct lanes—where packages go straight from fulfillment to delivery without extra stops—by over 40 percent year-over-year. 'We've also reduced the average distance packages traveled by 12 percent and lowered handling touches per unit by nearly 15 percent,' Jassy said. 'We've made progress on order consolidation with more products positioned locally, we're able to pack more items into each box and send fewer packages per order. That has helped drive higher units per box and improved overall cost to serve.' On the delivery end, which includes the company's $4 billion commitment to expanding same-day services in 4,000 rural communities, Amazon delivered 30 percent more items same day or next day in the U.S. than during the same period of last year. The faster deliveries have helped push Amazon's third-party sellers to an all-time high of 62 percent of units sold in the quarter, according to Jassy. Amazon's recently unveiled generative AI model for its warehouse robotics, Deepfleet, also got some shine in the call. Jassy said the model improves robot travel efficiency by 10 percent. 'At our scale, it's a big deal. DeepFleet acts like a traffic management system to coordinate robots' movements to find optimal paths and reduce bottlenecks,' Jassy said. 'For customers, it means faster delivery times and lower costs.' Although the firm's second quarter was strong on the surface, investors were not too impressed with Amazon's overall results. Stock declined nearly 7 percent in after-hours trading Thursday, largely due to cash cow Amazon Web Services (AWS) underperforming competitors. Despite forecasting third-quarter sales ahead of Wall Street estimates, Amazon issued a soft operating profit guidance of $15.5 billion to $20.5 billion in the period ending in September, compared with an average analyst estimate of $19.4 billion. Sales are forecast to be $174 billion to $179.5 billion, the company said Thursday in a statement. Estimates, on average, were $173.2 billion. The third quarter will include statistics from Prime Day, which took place from July 8-11—the longest iteration of the event Amazon has held. Jassy said the four-day shopping extravaganza drove records across sales, number of items sold and number of Prime signups in the three weeks leading up to the event.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trump's Decision to Fire BLS Chief Echoes Putin's Strategies
U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018. Credit - Brendan Smialowski—Getty Images President Donald Trump's firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday afternoon just after she delivered a negative jobs report echoes the impulse of many leaders to shoot the messenger. Trump declared, 'I've had issues with the numbers for a long time. We're doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.' While Trump may or may not be friends with Vladimir Putin, he is clearly following the Russian President's HR staffing guidelines to eliminate lieutenants who bring bad news. As we've documented before, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has a long history of manipulating official economic statistics to please Putin, 'bending over backward to correct bad numbers and burying unflattering statistics' under the pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The reliability of official statistics from China has also been brought into question, leading analysts to rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. Even China's former Premier, the late Li Keqiang, reportedly confided that he didn't trust official GDP numbers. Read More: What to Know About the Jobs Report That Led Trump to Fire the Labor Statistics Chief Like other strongmen, Trump has repeatedly shown a pattern of manipulating data to suit his preferred narrative. Trump's surprise firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer has quickly caught the attention of technical market analysts and economists on both sides of the political spectrum. One side cheers the push to disrupt a slow, bureaucratic federal agency. The other side shouts in dismay over concerns about yet another example of Trump politicizing an apolitical institution. Both responses are warranted. The accuracy of BLS data has long been questioned as major revisions only come in months later. To their credit, the BLS, in addition to other statistical agencies, has publicly recognized a need to modernize its methodology. Unfortunately, though, the severity of job revisions has worsened since the COVID-19 era, with no successful program to address the issue. The downward revision on Friday of more than 250,000 jobs marked the most significant adjustment since the depths of the pandemic. However, Trump's accusations against the BLS of rigging the job numbers to make him and the Republican base look bad, and his subsequent firing of McEntarfer based on a belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, are yet another step closer to authoritarianism. Introducing his latest conspiracy theory, the President went even further by suggesting McEntarfer, whose career spans two decades across Republican and Democratic Administrations, rigged the numbers 'around the 2024 presidential election' in then-Vice President Kamala Harris' favor. Trump conveniently fails to mention that his definition of 'around' was back in August 2024. Recall, the 2024 presidential election was a full three months later in November. Revisions are not unusual behavior by the BLS. They are a critical part of the natural process for developing an accurate picture of the largest, most dynamic economy in the world. The average size of job revisions since 2003 is not insignificant at 51,000 jobs. And, despite what Trump may want Americans to believe, his tariff policies have created an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the U.S. economy, comparable only to that of 2020, with many economists expecting a recession to follow as a result. Bloomberg reporting has pointed to a possible connection between the severity of negative job revisions and recessionary economic environments. The BLS has also been subjected to DOGE-led hiring constraints and other resource rescissions. In addition, the Trump Administration's disbanding of the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March both eliminated one of the main engines for enhancing agency performance and, perhaps, in what should have been a concerning harbinger, abolished the canary in the data integrity coal mine. Complaints about BLS methods are legitimate, like the reliance on enumerators over scanner data, and deserve attention, but this is not how to fix it. Read More: What Trump's Win Means for the Economy This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. From crowd sizes to weather forecasts, vote counts to tariff formulas, Trump has discarded facts for fictions that play to his political favor. Trump doesn't just bend the truth—he twists the numbers until they resemble propaganda and then silences those who disagree. As CBS News titan Edward R. Murrow warned 65 years ago: 'To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.' Contact us at letters@
