The South Korean government continues to investigate Terraform Labs, the firm behind the Terra Network as well as Luna Classic (LUNC), previously known as Terra (LUNA), and TerraUSD (UST) tokens, by reportedly summoning subpoenas to employees.
South Korean authorities have reportedly summoned all employees at Terraform Labs as part of a full-scale investigation of the collapse of UST and LUNC, the local news agency JTBC reported on Saturday.
According to the report, the probe is conducted by the joint financial and securities crime investigation team of the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office. The authorities are looking into the case to check for signs of intentional price manipulation and whether the tokens went through proper listing procedures.
The investigators also reportedly alleged that the Terra token’s mechanism was faulty in the first place, as stablecoin UST is not pegged to a stable collateral or profit model. “At a certain point in time, there is no other way but to collapse because it cannot handle interest payments and fluctuations in value,” the authorities reportedly said.
As previously reported, Terra investors filed a class-action suit against Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon and co-founder Shin Hyun-seun in mid-May, demanding a record of user accounts, marketing materials and UST-related communications. The investors reportedly lost up to $44 million worth of deposited funds after LUNC tanked 99% and UST lost its 1:1 peg value to the United States dollar.
According to some reports, Terraform Labs dissolved its South Korean branch days before the LUNC and UST collapse, with some speculating that Kwon closed the local division to evade taxes. South Korea’s national tax agency eventually slapped Terraform Labs and its co-founder with a $78 million penalty for tax evasion.
The news comes amid Terraform Labs on May 28 relaunching Terra’s new chain, Terra 2.0, aiming to revive the crashed Terra ecosystem. Major crypto exchanges including Binance and FTX said that they were working closely with the Terra team to support the upcoming airdrop to help affected users. The new LUNA token plummeted 70% shortly after going live, with many investors dumping on Terra 2.0.
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed at the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meeting mid-May.
by Thalif Deen (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, May 30 (IPS) – The four-month-old Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has triggered a hefty increase in military spending among Western nations and a rise in humanitarian and military assistance to the beleaguered country, is now threatening to undermine the flow of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to the world’s poorer nations.
In an advance warning of the upcoming cuts, the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told a recent meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC): “As Chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, I am deeply troubled over recent decisions and proposals to markedly cut Official Development Assistance (ODA) to service the impacts of the war in Ukraine on refugees”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was equally concerned about the impending reductions, has urged donor nations to reconsider making cuts that will affect the world’s most vulnerable.
The people who benefit from the work of the UN system need additional and more predictable funding, he added. “Contributions to key UN agencies, funds and programmes, working with people on the ground, are facing steep proposed reductions. Cuts to development and the United Nations mean scaling back support at a time when demand for support to meet the deepening development needs has reached an all-time high”.
He said ODA is more necessary than ever, and called upon all countries to demonstrate solidarity, invest in resilience, and prevent the current crisis from escalating further.
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed at the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meeting mid-May.
At a meeting in mid-May, the Group of Seven – comprising some of world’s biggest economies — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and the US, plus the European Union– agreed to provide nearly $20 billion to support Ukraine and bolster its war-ravaged economy.
Separately the US has pledged over $40 billion in economic, humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion last February.
The widespread fear is that the collective $60 billion assistance to Ukraine may result in corresponding reductions in ODA.
Bhumika Muchhala, senior advocate on global economic governance at the Third World Network, told IPS cuts to ODA at a time of a convergence of crises in the Global South is extremely concerning.
She said the pandemic is still ongoing, and health and economic recovery need immediate funds. Food security is being threatened by global supply disruptions, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, creating urgent crises of malnutrition, hunger and even famine.
She also pointed out that climate change is creating catastrophes every day, from fatal heat waves to floods and droughts, while both existing climate financing as well as ODA commitments still remain unfulfilled by rich countries.
“Underpinning these crises is the surge in gender inequality, as women absorb the shocks and costs of global inequalities”.
“Making matters worse, a large number of developing countries are in debt distress or experiencing debt crisis, leading to another era of austerity that is already arresting the achievement of SDGs, resulting in a retrogression of poverty reduction that has taken many decades of hard-won economic and social development to achieve”. said Muchhala.
In light of the fact that every crisis in the South will ripple through the world economy with adverse effects for all, “rich countries have a collective duty to fulfill existing ODA commitments, as well as climate financing commitments and efforts to create genuine fiscal space for developing countries through equitable debt restructuring, international tax cooperation to eradicate illicit financial flows, and needs-based issuances of Special Drawing Rights,” she declared.
The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), comprising some of the world’s richest nations, has been providing development assistance since the 1960s.
According to OECD, ODA is defined as “government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries”.
The DAC adopted ODA as the “gold standard” of foreign aid in 1969 and it remains the main source of financing for development aid.
“Yet, 13 countries cut ODA, and the sum remains insufficient for the vast needs of developing countries”.
But according to OECD, ODA rose to an all-time high of $178.9 billion in 2021, up 4.4% in real terms from 2020 as developed countries stepped up to help developing countries grappling with the COVID-19 crisis, according to the latest available figures.
This figure included $ 6.3 billion spent on providing COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries, equivalent to 3.5% of total ODA. Excluding ODA for donated COVID-19 vaccines, ODA was up 0.6% in real terms from 2020.
The 2021 ODA total is equivalent to 0.33% of DAC donors’ combined gross national income (GNI) and still below the UN target of 0.7% ODA to GNI.
Meanwhile, in a new report released May 24, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) warned of the direct and indirect impacts of the war in Ukraine on the African continent, which could further stall the continent’s development trajectory already significantly jeopardized by the COVID-19 crisis.
This report, entitled “The Impact of the War in Ukraine on Sustainable Development in Africa”, reinforces findings of the Global Crisis Response Group (GCRG) that the war in Ukraine is pushing the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the aspirations of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 further out of reach, and provides key recommendations for actions that need to be taken immediately, to avert further crises in Africa.
“Africa is facing a double crisis with the combined effects of the war in Ukraine and of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with strategic partnerships, the crisis also presented the opportunity to rechart Africa’s development trajectory, breaking away from a dependency cycle” said Achim Steiner, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and UNDP Administrator.
“Now is a critical time for action. It is time to intensify efforts and reframe development finance, strengthen resilience in African economies, and foster economic transformation as a key driver for change in Africa.”
According to the report, some of the direct impacts of the crisis in Africa include trade disruption, food and fuel price spikes, macroeconomic instability, and security challenges. African countries are particularly affected due to their heavy reliance on imports from Russia and Ukraine.
The current hike in prices for food and fuel directly affects the entire continent, including the biggest economies, as food and fuel account for over one-third of the consumer price index in most African countries, (Nigeria 57 per cent, Egypt 60 per cent, Ghana 54 per cent, and Cameroon 42 per cent).
In 2020, African countries imported $4.0 billion worth of agricultural products from Russia, 90 per cent of which was wheat.
Daniel D. Bradlow, SARCHI Professor of International Development Law and African Economic Relations at the University of Pretoria told IPS: “I think the UNDP statement gives a good summary of the situation”.
“The impact of the war in Ukraine is having a devastating impact on Africa. If it continues it is likely to lead to hunger, increased poverty and serious debt crises across the continent,” he added.
“If the Western countries really wanted African support for the war in Ukraine, they should have taken steps to shield Africa and other parts of the Global South from the impacts of a European war. Instead, they are redirecting aid that could have gone to Africa to Ukraine and are cutting their aid budgets”.
He pointed out that the support that is being offered through the IFIs and others are likely to be in the form of loans rather than grants.
“This means that at the end of the day, the Western states are making African states pay for a conflict in Europe that suits their political agendas.”
In a statement last April, Jeroen Kwakkenbos, EU aid expert at Oxfam said donors have thrown out the rule book by counting vaccine donations in aid budgets.
“Over 350 million vaccine doses came from hoarded stocks, some of which, were donated far too close to their expiry date. Many more were donated without essential equipment such as syringes making them almost useless. Including these ‘donations’ in aid budgets inflates aid. It is merely donors patting themselves on the back for a job that may have cost lives,” he noted
“The war in Ukraine poses a risk to future aid budgets. Aid is already being pulled from countries like Syria to fund the reception of Ukrainian refugees in Europe.”
“We are left with the bizarre situation where European countries could become the largest recipients of their own aid. Instead of cherry-picking humanitarian crises, donor governments need to boost aid budgets to meet the challenges of today.”
16. Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton, who play love interests Nancy and Jonathan, began dating in 2016, but have mostly kept their relationship private.
“That’s something important to me—with my family, with my friends, I really like to keep it for me,” Dyer told Refinery 29 in 2019, though she did admit, “It’s an interesting thing to work with somebody who you go home with. It’s always really fun.”
17. Believe it or not, two fan-favorite characters were not supposed to make it out of seaso one alive, including Joe Keery’s well-coiffed Steve Harrington, who was initially scripted to be the bad boyfriend before the actor was cast.
“We love Joe. We fell in love with him during the making of season one, which is why we ended up writing that arc for him where he’s helping to save the day with Jonathan [Charlie Heaton] and Nancy,” Ross told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “Steve was supposed to be this jocky douchebag, and Joe was so much more than that.”
18. Also slated to perish was Eleven. Yes, really.
“Eleven was going to sacrifice herself to save the day,” Ross said in the 2018 book Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down. “That was always the end game. But once we realized that the show was potentially going to go on longer than one season, we needed to leave it more up in the air, because deep down we knew the show just wouldn’t really work without Eleven. And at that point, we knew how special Millie was. If there was going to be more Stranger Things, Eleven had to come back.”
Realme C30 has been making the rounds at various certification sites prior to its launch, including the Bureau of Indian Standard (BIS). Now, two notable tipsters have suggested what we could expect from this smartphone when it eventually arrives in India. This rumoured handset has been tipped to feature a 5,000mAh battery with support for 10W charging. Realme is expected to target the entry-level smartphone segment with the Realme C30. It is likely to offer up to 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
Realme C30 pricing (expected)
According to the post shared by tipster Mukul Sharma (@stufflistings) on Twitter, the Realme C30 could arrive with 2GB RAM + 32GB storage and 3GB RAM + 32GB storage configurations. It is expected to come in Bamboo Green, Denim Black, and Lake Blue colours. Tipster Paras Guglani (@passionategeekz) has further added that this Realme smartphone could be priced around Rs. 7,000.
Realme C30 specifications (expected)
The Realme C30 could feature a 6.6-inch full-HD+ display. It is likely to pack a Unisoc chipset under the hood. In terms of cameras, this smartphone is supposed to have a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel selfie shooter on the front. As previously mentioned, it is expected to be fitted with a 5,000mAh battery with support for 10W fast charging. Furthermore, this smartphone is supposed to be 8.48mm thin and weigh 181g.
Previous reports have suggested that it would boot Android Go Edition out of the box. It is believed to support 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity.
To recap, Realme had previously launched the Realme C31 in India in March this year. The C31 is yet another affordable smartphone that had a launch price of Rs. 9,999. This handset has a 6.5-inch HD+ display. It is powered by a Unisoc T612 SoC. For optics, it sports a 13-megapixel triple rear camera setup and a 5-megapixel selfie shooter. It also houses a long-lasting 5,000mAh battery.
In this VladTV clip, former NBA star guard Gilbert Arenas shares his thoughts on the incident in which Dave Chappelle was attacked on stage during the “Netflix is a Joke” festival.
This prompts a discussion about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. To that, Gilbert Arenas emphatically states that he believes the whole thing was staged because Smith and Rock were friends who have worked together in the past.
As the interview continues, Arenas continues to make his case that the ordeal was fake by outlining components of the occurrence that didn’t make sense to him:
Black and Asian communities in America today are often portrayed as in conflict with each other. But we have a long history of organizing with each other, too. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Asian Americans working as immigrant laborers in the United States were often subjected to racial violence. That experience of discrimination created solidarity with the Black community.
In 1869, Frederick Douglass spoke out against restrictions on Chinese immigration. Yuri Kochiyama, a friend and ally of Malcolm X, cradled his bleeding head when he was assassinated in 1965. Jesse Jackson took time away from his presidential bid to protest the killing of Vincent Chin in 1982. These stories of loss, struggle, change and hope are the most powerful tools we have to understand one another and bridge what divides us.
The Asian civil rights movement was inspired in part by the Black civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. It was around this time that the model minority myth emerged, portraying Asian and Pacific Islander Americans as mostly hard-working, well educated and healthy, the artist and activist Betty Yu explained. “The model minority stereotype falsely depicts Asians as a wealthy Ivy League-educated monolith while completely ignoring the economic inequalities that exist to this day,” she said.
As Americans reckon with racial injustice, police brutality and a spike in anti-Asian attacks, we have an opportunity to relearn our shared history and build on that solidarity.
I was living in Taiwan when George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground under a police officer’s knee. I coped by helping to coordinate the Black Lives Matter March in Taipei. It was important to me to stand up for myself and my community and close the metaphorical distance between me and my home.
In New York City, Jeanie Jay Park, the lead organizer of Warriors in the Garden, a collective of nonviolent activists and the founder of Sanitation Nation, a nonprofit youth solidarity collective, was among the thousands marching on the Brooklyn Bridge that summer when a group of young boys approached her and yelled, “Your people killed my people.” They were talking about an officer of Hmong descent who stood by while Mr. Floyd was murdered.
“I understood their reaction,” she said. She has since worked to build intersectional solidarity between Black and Asian communities. Coalition building requires having uncomfortable conversations with not just ourselves but also our families in order to dismantle generational colorism and anti-Black sentiment that exists in many Asian cultures, Ms. Park said.
Nupol Kiazolu, the founder of We Protect Us, believes that practicing love, education and patience is the key to fostering unity between Black and Asian communities. “We must be willing to listen to each other with open minds, ears and hearts,” she said.
Wendy Wang immigrated to the United States in the 1990s. She worked in restaurants around the city, until she was eventually able to open her own restaurant. She’s faced obstacles in the community — someone once shot her husband in the face with a BB gun — but over time she’s built strong relationships with the loyal customers she serves.
I come from a family of immigrants, too. My mother is from Vietnam, and my father is from Nigeria. They met and fell in love in Texas, but their families didn’t approve of their union. As a result, my siblings and I didn’t have a relationship with our extended family or with our cultures, for that matter.
Navigating a mix of identities at times felt complicated. When I’d watch my father’s interactions with law enforcement, I surmised that perhaps one part of my identity could be safer than the other. But the rise in anti-Asian violence has shattered that illusion and reminded me that the shields we hide behind can be dangerously thin.
Social media has been a powerful tool for organizing, but it can also push us into echo chambers. Chelsea Miller, a co-founder of Freedom March NYC and a social impact strategist, believes that challenging rhetorics that divide our communities is a critical step forward. “The reality is, we are all connected,” she said.
I am still striving, and struggling, to carry the weight of being both Black and Asian in this uncertain moment. I feel the push and pull of both sides, but I’m learning to lean into the liminal spaces where my intersectional identity sits. I see that there is nuance, beauty and complexity to be found in that messy middle. Belonging can happen in connections and contradictions and in bridging and breaking. Being in between can be painful but also powerful.
An Rong Xu is a photographer, filmmaker and artist. Leslie Nguyen-Okwu is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book “American Hyphen.”
Unwithered by the ongoing bear market, Bitcoin’s (BTC) underlying architecture continues to outperform itself — further securing, decentralizing and speeding up the impenetrable peer-to-peer network. The same holds true for the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN).
The Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity attained an all-time high of 3915.776 BTC as evidenced by data from Bitcoin Visuals, displaying a commitment to the cause of improving BTC transaction speeds and reducing fees over the layer-2 protocol.
Cumulative Bitcoin capacity across all channels. Source: BitcoinVisuals node
The Bitcoin LN was first implemented into the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018 to address Bitcoin’s infamous scalability issues and has ever since been able to maintain an upward trajectory in terms of expanding its capacity.
The climb, however, saw a temporary disruption on April 18, when the LN capacity dropped by 7.7% — from 3687.051 to 3402.273 BTC in a matter of a week. Showcasing network resilience, the drop was accompanied by a quick recovery back to 3718.351 BTC by May 2.
Bitcoin Lightning Network statistics. Source: 1ml
Moreover, statistics data from 1ml shows that all other aspects of the Bitcoin Lightning Network continue to grow parallel to Bitcoin’s global adoption drive.
A Redditor’s data-driven prediction hints at a major disruption that will see the crypto industry move away from bridging between L1 blockchains toward L2s. As explained by the OP:
“L2 adoption is happening now, even if it is slow and in bursts. Behind the scenes, L2’s are improving reliability, decreasing fees, and increasing accessibility. L2’s are still building and improving, and that’s fantastic.”
As Cointelegraph previously reported, L2 scaling solutions take advantage of L1’s security and process multiple transactions into a single package.
Realme had announced that it will soon hold the GT Neo 3 series launch event and that the three in the GT Neo 3 also stands for three models and not just third-generation. Now, the Chinese company has confirmed that one of the three upcoming models, Realme GT Neo 3T, will launch on June 7. The smartphone has been tipped to launch in India next month with a Snapdragon 870 SoC. It is expected to be the successor to the GT Neo 2T that was launched in China in October last year.
The Chinese smartphone brand, Realme, has announced in a tweet that the company will launch the Realme GT Neo 3T at its upcoming GT Neo 3 series launch event. Realme Indonesia has confirmed a June 7 launch date via Twitter for the smartphone.
Earlier, the company had tweeted that in the near future the company will hold the GT Neo 3 series launch event. The company also said that there will be three models of the smartphone.
Realme GT Neo 3T is the first model that the company has confirmed of the three that will launch at the event. The company had also teased the model 4 hours before the confirmation.
Realme GT Neo 3T specifications (expected)
According to a report, the Realme GT Neo 3T will come with a 6.5-inch touchscreen and 256GB of internal memory. The smartphone is expected to get a 64-megapixel primary camera and a 16-megapixel selfie camera. The smartphone was also spotted on the Geekbench benchmarking website. The listing showed that the smartphone will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC with a 1 + 3 + 4 core configuration and Adreno 650 GPU. Based on the details, it is expected to get the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 SoC. The smartphone is also expected to get an 8GB RAM variant and Android 12 with Realme UI 3.0 on top. It is said to be the successor to the Realme GT Neo 2T that was launched in China in October 2021.
Realme GT Neo 3T has been tipped to launch in June 2022 in India, but the company is yet to confirm official launch dates of the model in the country. The company has also not provided any details regarding the price of the device.
MAKASSAR, Indonesia — Three days after a cargo boat sank in the Makassar Strait in South Sulawesi province, 10 more survivors were located, including the captain and other crew.
Of the total 42 people on board, 31 have been rescued since search and rescue operations began Saturday, said Djunaidi, the head of the provincial search and rescue agency. Like many Indonesians, Djunaidi goes by only one name.
The KM Ladang Pertiwi 02 sank in bad weather Friday afternoon. The boat left Thursday from a seaport in Makassar heading to Kalmas Island in Pangkep Regency, South Sulawesi Province, with stops along its route to visit some islands in Makassar Strait.
The 10 survivors rescued Monday morning by a local fisherman were taken to their home at Pamantauan Island, located in Makassar Strait.
“They are safe and in good condition,” Djunaidi said.
The sunken vessel was initially said to be a passenger ferry, but Djunaidi later clarified that it was a cargo boat carrying construction materials. Thirty-six passengers had asked for a ride on the boat with its six crew members. The search and rescue team is looking for the 11 remaining passengers, officials said.
Ferry tragedies are common in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, where ferries are often used as transport and safety regulations can lapse.
In 2018, an overcrowded ferry with about 200 people on board sank in a deep volcanic crater lake in North Sumatra province, killing 167 people.
In one of the country’s worst recorded disasters, an overcrowded passenger ship sank in February 1999 with 332 people aboard. There were only 20 survivors.
A $100,000 tournament hosted by Dr Disrespect had Twitch streamers following some absurd rules to not mention him as he was previously banned from the platform.
Full Squad Gaming’s Jake Lucky shared a recap of these Twitch community guidelines that were posted in-house by the organizer of the event, BoomTV.
“It is prohibited to use your channel to knowingly feature or advertise a suspended user,” the message reads. “We understand that there may be instances where suspended users may appear on your stream due to circumstances beyond your control, such as through third-party gaming tournaments, but we expect that you make a good faith effort to remove them from your broadcast, mute them, or otherwise limit their interactions with your stream.”
The message then shared a “few helpful tips to navigate this tournament if you are a Twitch streamer:”
Use “Hot Shot Duo Drop featuring Fortnite” to refer to the event.
User other Names for DrDisrespect, example the “two-time”, “Blockbuster video game champion.”
Hide images, videos and streams of DrDisrespect from your stream.
Mute DrDisrespect in game.
Be mindful of showing the tournament/bracket page on stream.
As previously mentioned, this is a recap of sorts of the Twitch community guidelines for Suspension Evasion.
Every IGN Call of Duty Review
“In addition, it is prohibited to use your channel to knowingly feature or advertise a suspended user,” the guidelines say. “We understand that there may be instances where suspended users may appear on your stream due to circumstances beyond your control, such as through third-party gaming tournaments, but we expect that you make a good faith effort to remove them from your broadcast, mute them, or otherwise limit their interactions with your stream.”
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