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  Senior Labour figures accepted valuable gifts from Google in the days before abandoning a plan to tax digital giants more, openDemocracy can reveal. Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant (who is his wife), and Keir Starmer’s political director all attended Glastonbury festival in June as guests of YouTube, which is owned by Google. Including accommodation and ‘hospitality’, Reynolds estimates his Glastonbury package for two was worth £3,377 – significantly more than the cost of two regular tickets, which were £335 each. The next day, reports emerged that Labour had ditched its proposal to hike tax on digital businesses like Google. The Digital Services Tax, introduced in 2020, is a 2% levy on the UK income of online companies like search engines and social media platforms. In August last year, Reynolds and his shadow chancellor colleague Rachel Reeves had called for an increase in the tax to 10%, saying the income would be used t...

In January 2023, there were 63,177 deaths registered in England, 6,632 deaths (11.7%) above the January five-year average (2017 to 2019, 2021 and 2022). In January 2023, there were 4,230 deaths registered in Wales, 506 deaths (13.6%) above the January average. In January 2023, the leading cause of death in both England and Wales was dementia and Alzheimer's disease (13.0% and 11.3% of all deaths, in England and Wales respectively). In January 2023, the leading cause of excess death in England was influenza or pneumonia, at 1,802 excess deaths (59.2% above average). In January 2023, the leading cause of excess death in Wales was chronic lower respiratory diseases, at 95 excess deaths (40.8% above average).  

  Consumer Price Index (CPI)  data is due out this Tuesday. The Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) , i.e. the Fed, announces its latest decision on interest rates on Wednesday afternoon. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) : Over the weekend, the Treasury Department indicated that depositors will get their money back, but will let the bank itself fail. US Employment Report (for February) : The latest US employment report came out last Friday, and showed that the US economy is still strong (which is good and bad for all the obvious reasons to investors).

  e what others are saying about this topic:  Open on Linkedin Huge breakthrough for non-invasive glucose monitoring on Apple Watch Apple just made a huge breakthrough for non-invasive glucose monitoring on Apple Watch, and this will be their Next BIG Thing 🤯 The tech powerhouse reportedly has a moonshot-style project underway that dates back to the Steve Jobs era: noninvasive and continuous blood glucose monitoring🩸 Dubbed E5, this secret endeavor’s ultimate goal is to measure how much glucose is in someone’s body without needing to prick the skin for blood. After hitting major milestones recently, the company now believes it could eventually bring glucose monitoring to market as part of the Apple Watch ⌚️ The technology is still years away...

High Volatility is normally bad  This is perhaps the most important stock market chart in the world right now. It's ticker symbol VIX. It tracks stock market volatility. And as you can see in the chart above, volatility hasn't been this consistently high since the years following the 2008 crash. It's bad news for investors.

 Tipping getting out of hand In the 18th century, a tip was a gratuity given to a servant. The OED's earliest usage of tip involving waiters comes from 1825: "Sir Harry was liberal in his ‘tips’, and consequently a great favorite of Phillips (the waiter)." In this period, however, the word could also denote a bribe, as in this usage from 1819: "To take the tip is to receive a bribe in any shape."  People complaining about needless ‘back & forth credit card game’ at restaurants. Or pretend ignorance by coffee shop staff when the iPad spins around. Or the prevalence of POS software in new types of shops that  never requested tips before . “Okay, the screen is just gonna ask you a few questions.” ​ Uh-huh, right,, like we both don’t know what this is all about. That last point is the most salient. See, it used to be just a few types of businesses that expected tips. Restaurants, cab drivers, valet parking, housekeeping, etc. But now Americans are seeing prompts...

  The origins of the pink knickers tax The tariff gap originates from industry lobbying in the 1930s and ’40s,  according  to Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell. At the time, domestic producers were concerned about foreign competition for goods that required more labor-intensive production (women’s undies tend to have more intricate designs) and those targeting price-sensitive consumers. Zoom out:  The problem is bigger than just underwear. According to Gresser, apparel tariffs account for 75% of the total cost imposed on US consumers by import taxes, and two-thirds of that comes from women’s clothes. —SK

Help should stop at fighter jets  Good evening. Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Britain to provide Ukraine with fighter jets, as he made an impassioned speech to MPs and met the King at Buckingham Palace during a historic visit to London. Fighter jets would be a mistake and will cause issue with Russia and every other country.

  A Deere in satellites Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Photo: John Deere From soil to sky, the agricultural industry has largely embraced the digital revolution. Ag companies have integrated drones, machine learning, AI, and automation into their everyday operations, all with the aim of helping farmers save time, money, and labor. Look up:  Soon, you may be able to add satellites to the list. John Deere, which has previously debuted tech like self-driving tractors, crop-spraying drones, and weed-identifying sprayers, said in January that it was “finalizing a satellite partner” in an effort to create geospatial maps to help analyze crop growth and bring connectivity to remote and rural farmers. The push to connect farmers comes as Deere looks to digitize its revenue sources—last year, it set a  goal to get 10% of its revenue  from software subscription fees by 2030. The company currently offers its customers free connectivity services through its  JDLink ...

 Pee Power Toilets By installing 'pee power' toilets - urinal installations that convert urine into electricity for lighting - at one of the world's most famous music festivals of course. image from https://www.powerful-thinking.org.uk/pee-power-uwe-project-glastonbury-festival/ For 5 years, between 2015 and 2019, University of the West of England partnered with the Glastonbury Festival to provide the toilets that powered the internal lighting, nearby phone charging station and illuminated information panels. As well the engagement with thousands of festival visitors, the initiative made major news channels and generated significant awareness about the challenges of global sanitisation and UWE's innovative research.

  Destinations London Olympia !  Doors Open Until Sunday 5.30pm... We've had a brilliant couple of days at  Destinations London Olympia !  If you've not visited us yet, catch some of our show highlights in our video, or browse the not-to-be-missed features below!

  Fine Art: The Bubble That Never Pops The artists are hand-picked, and the buyers and sellers hand-picked.  This is so that the art price can be inflated over time with an urgency.

  Women need to be more interested in money, finance, and how to make the most of it for now, the near now, and the future

M2 (a broad-based money supply measure) shrinkage A growing economy needs a growing money supply to keep this from happening, not unlike how the aforementioned 12-year-old becoming a teenager needs ever-larger shoe sizes. If a 16-year-old tried to make do with his 12-year-old shoe size, his feet would hurt and eventually it wouldn’t work at all. On top of that, a routine expansion of the money supply is necessary to keep prices stable, or otherwise rising in a gentle and predictable manner. This dovetails with human behavior in terms of wage expectations. If an economy grows while the money supply does not, wage levels have to fall, and people understandably hate that. It's easy to give an employee a raise and justifiable to keep an employee's pay the same, but almost no employer says, “Guess what, we're reducing your pay this year by 10% to account for deflationary trends.” At any rate, those factors help explain why, in normal times, an expanding economy and a reasonably ...

AI Training Systems compute usage Prior to Lambda, Stephen was the first engineering hire at Perceptio, a machine learning company acquired by Apple that created facial recognition networks that ran locally on mobile phone GPUs.

Do we need more Police training? Members of SCORPION, criminal justice author Radley Balko  writes in The New York Times , were trained with a mere “three days of PowerPoint presentations, one day of criminal apprehension instruction and one day at the firing range.” It has been popular among many writers this week to point out that the US requires more training hours of a cosmetologist than a police officer, as well as  far fewer hours in comparison to police officers in other English-speaking countries . Pushing for better training is something that you can be involved in at the local level.

London was at a standstill  

  The Audiobook Market Has Two Clear Leaders Spotify wants to corner the market for audio and is making it easy to create for new publishers.   Amazon’s ‘Audible’  is winning over audiobook fans in a big way. Over the past 90 days, Audible mentions are exceeding all audiobook services in our coverage.  Consumers like the platform’s growing selection of audiobooks and podcasts. Originals like “The Decision: Overcoming Today’s BS for Tomorrow’s Success” written and narrated by Kevin Hart are big differentiators. Spotify Audiobooks  is also becoming a formidable challenger to Audible. (More on that below.) Both platforms make up 90% of audiobook demand mentions combined. Spotify’s Audiobook Strategy is Spot On   Unlike Apple, Spotify is showing that getting a late start in the audiobook market doesn’t close the book on success.  The company has already amassed a large portion of audiobook consumption mentions, and its product is very new.

Very slow to remove Nadhim from Toxic Government  © Reuters. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Monday he had acted "pretty decisively" by sacking Conservative Party chair Nadhim Zahawi over his personal tax affairs, moving to quell criticism that he had acted too slowly. In the latest scandal to involve one of his ministers and just months after he entered Downing Street promising to lead with "integrity, professionalism and accountability", Sunak has protested his innocence about Zahawi's tax affairs.

  Corporate Buybacks Slowing to a Crawl in 2023 Buybacks had already started to slow in 2022 before the law went into place.  According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, buybacks reached $981.6 billion over the 12 months through September 2022. By comparison, buybacks had reached a record $1.005 trillion posted for the 12 months through the June 2022 period. Source: Yardeni Research Buybacks started to slow in Q2 of last year when interest rates started to rise. With rates poised to increase three more times this year, it’s hard to see how and why companies would ramp up buybacks in this environment.   Analysts continue to expect aggressive buybacks to reduce exposure to declining earnings in the year ahead. Come March, they anticipate that Apple will INCREASE its buyback program. That’s a huge bet, and something that I think could surprise the downside. This year's focus is heavily on the Fed’s balance sheet reductions and rate hikes. But one of the stories remains the ...