Iceland has the coronavirus pandemic better under control than most other countries. In an interview, Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir explains the next important steps for her country.

The number of coronavirus cases is slowly sinking in Italy, but the country is now facing the next phase of a serious crisis: how to kickstart an economy that has been at a standstill for weeks.

The first coronavirus infection in the United States was confirmed in Seattle 100 days ago. A team of DER SPIEGEL reporters has documented what has happened since, following a dozen people as they struggle to come to terms with the health catastrophe.

After the Allies defeated Germany and ended World War II in Europe in summer 1945, peace finally prevailed on the Continent. The Germans were beaten, desperate and ashamed, but also ready to get back to normal life following the trauma. By DER SPIEGEL Staff

Kim Sang-jo, Chairman of the Fair Trade Commission, said, "Our commission will soon announce plans to stop the practice of large companies using technology of small enterprises without proper compensation." He held a press conference on August 13 at the Sejong government complex in relation to his agency's bid to root out unfair practices in the retail industry and said, "The biggest obstacle for small- and medium-sized enterprises for their further development is the uneven relationship with...

The Moon Jae-in government has decided to pay 100,000 won (US$88) a month per child younger than 5 years beginning in July next year. The basic pension payment of 200,000 won currently given to low-income (lower 70% of income scale) senior citizens older than 65 years will be increased to 250,000 won from April next year.  The additional expenses for these two items will be 13.4 trillion won for children's allowance and 29.5 trillion won for senior citizen pension payments for the next...

Samsung Engineering said on August 16 that it won two petrochemical power generation projects worth 550 billion won jointly with PTT Public Company Ltd., a Thai state-run oil company. This has been less than a week since the Korean company announced a large-scale oil refinery building project in Oman worth more than 1 trillion won. The project calls for building a petrochemical plant and an electricity generation plant in Rayong, Thailand's largest industrial city 150 kilometers southeast of ...

Hyundai Merchant Marine is pushing forward with a plan to attract an investment of up to 1 trillion won from BlackRock, the world's largest asset management firm. According to investment banking industry and shipping industry sources on August 20, the company is currently in talks with BlackRock to bring in an investment of 600 billion won to 1 trillion won. The investment will be made in the form of BlackRock taking part in a capital increase by Hyundai. Once the deal is successful, the equi...

Samsung Electronics said on August 20 that its Samsung Pay service has surpassed the 10-trillion-won milestone in payment volume within two years since launch. Introduced in August 2015, Samsung Pay exceeded the 1-trillion-won level in August last year. Since that time on, the service volume quadrupled for one year's time. An official with Samsung Electronics said, "The volume of out online transactions has taken off since last year, accounting for 30 percent of the total online transactions....

The household debt balance has rapidly increased to approach 1,400 trillion won (US$1.24 trillion) as of the end of June this year. It is estimated the balance may have surpassed the 1,400-trillion-won level by mid-August. As the amount of household debt reaches 90 percent of the gross domestic products (1,637 trillion won at the end of last year), economists began warning the high debt level may pose an obstacle to further growth.According to the Bank of Korea on August 23, the balance of house...

This year's tourism balance of payments is estimated to surpass US$15 billion. This is up more than 40 percent of $10.8 billion recorded in 2007 in the wake of the global financial crisis. According to the Bank of Korea, the tourism balance of payments in the month of June this year was a deficit of $1.39 billion. The cumulative deficit for the first six months of the year has been $7.74 billion, the second all-time highest after the second half of 2007. Last year, the tourism spending by K...

The volume of welfare budget set aside by local governments has surpassed the 50-trillion-won level for the first time in history to 53 trillion won (US$46.9 billion). This is 59 percent higher than what it was five years ago. According to the 2017 Statistical Yearbook published by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on September 4, the aggregate welfare budget of local government for the first six months of the year was 52,601.4 billion won, up 6.2 percent (3,081.7 billion won) from the ...

As international coal prices are on the rise, Hanwha Chemical's prospect is getting brighter. That's because the Korean company uses naphtha to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC) while its rivals in China are largely based on coal, which will make it more price competitive vis-a-vis the Chinese chemical producers. According to Korea Resources Corp. and chemical industry sources on September 10, the freight-on-board (FOB) price of bituminous coal out of the Chinese port of Qinhuangdao was US$95....

The Daesan petrochemical industrial zone in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, will transform into an advanced chemical industrial complex. The nation's major petrochemical companies may invest up to 10 trillion won in this area. On September 14, S-Oil, Lotte Chemical, Hanwha Total, South Chungcheong provincial government, and Seosan city gathered in Lotte World Tower and signed a memorandum to create a Daesan specialized industrial complex. Currently the area is home to large petrochemical ...

Private-sector power generators are complaining mightily about the government's pressure on them to switch coal-fired power plants they are building into ones based on liquefied natural gas. That's largely because the government is mum about the sunk cost and other costs to retrofit the plants estimated to be as high as 2.6 trillion won. According to private-sector power generation industry sources on September 17, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy requested to POSCO Energy, SK Gas,...

International oil prices have hit a record high in seven months as they went up over US$50 a barrel. The domestic oil refining sector raised its hopes of improving their profitability in the third quarter after suffering poor results for two consecutive quarters. The spot price for Dubai crude as compiled by the Korea National Oil Corp. was $53.64 a barrel on September 16, up by 7 cents from the previous day. This is the highest level since February this year when the figure was $54.39. ...

Chief executives of the nation's leading companies like Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and LG Display have made a request to the government to relieve the problem of labor shortage in the area of semiconductor and display. Kwon Oh-hyun, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, said on September 18 in a discussion session held in Kensington Hotel in Seoul's Yoido presided over by Minister of Trade, Industry, and Energy Baek Woon-gyu, "Skilled workers are in short supply in fast-growing industries...

As the government pronounced illegal on the practice of companies relying on subcontract workers for a long time such as the cases in Paris Baguette and Mando-Hella, the whole industry in shock. This is not just restricted to manufacturers but is spread to services and the food franchise industry as well. The corporate sector expected on September 24 that companies like Tous Les Jours, Samsung Electronics service centers, and LG U+ will likely face the same problem any time soon after the Min...

As Korea and China are set to improve their relationship that was rocked by the controversy over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system, Korea's tourism and duty-free shopping industries are raising their hopes of better days.The tourism industry believes that the Chinese government's group tour ban to Korea would be relaxed soon. A travel agency in Hebei posted an Internet ad recently for a group tour program to Korea in November at the price of 1,4...

China’s securitisation has been developing rapidly. To date, China’s securitisation market is already the largest in Asia and second largest in the world. Our structured finance partner Kingsley Ong (who is also the Secretary-General of ...

With increasing numbers of working parents comes a sharper focus on employer support for childcare arrangements.  On 6 April 2005, the Government is to introduce new tax incentives in relation to childcare arrangements which are intended t...

After nine years pursuing her claim against her employer, Michelle Alabaster walked away with an award of just £204.53.  However, the impact of the decisions of the ECJ, and now the Court of Appeal in the maternity pay case of Ala...

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Employers, the leasing industry, professional advisers and many government departments including the DTI, were taken by surprise when withdrawal of the tax relief on computers supplied to employees was announced in the recent Budget. Numerous re...

December to April is bonus season. According to the latest annual report from the Office for National Statistics, bonuses for UK staff have reached a record £19 billion, a rise of £2.5 billion since last year. The forthcoming months will...

In a somewhat timely judgment, bearing in mind the May bank holidays, the Court of Session (the Scottish Court of Appeal) has clarified that it is not necessarily unlawful for an employer to not provide alternative leave days for part-time workers w...

Good and bad news Yesterday, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced some changes to the Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) legislation, which will impact on those companies operating EMI and those proposing to do so. The good news Under the cu...

Many employers offer flexible benefits packages to their workforce. But the Age Discrimination Regulations have cast a shadow over some schemes, leaving employers and providers unsure as to how benefits such as private medical insurance should be ac...

Gordon Brown has announced that the Government plans to introduce legislation giving new rights to agency workers and working parents in the next parliamentary session.  In addition, all workers are to be given the right to ask for time off wor...

The Government has today announced that from next April, the right to request flexible working will be extended to all parents of children aged up to 16 years. It is estimated that an additional 4.5 million parents will benefit from the right. Sinc...

If you have not yet responded to the Eversheds survey as to the likely impact of the changes to agency worker rights upon your business and would like to do so by 13 June, please click here.   Main body The topics of equal rights for age...

After what has already proved a busy week for employment law news, the Government has published its consultation response to the second round of consultation on Agency Worker Regulations, which closed in December last year. The...

VAT treatment of vouchers provided to employees under salary sacrifice You will no doubt have been made aware of the recent CJEU (formerly European Court of Justice) ruling in AstraZeneca. The case involved AstraZeneca and the retail vouchers that ...

Armenian parliamentarians from opposing parties exchanged blows amid a disagreement over the government’s economic response to the coronavirus crisis. 

Six Pakistani security personnel, including an officer, were killed in a roadside bomb attack near the South Asian nation’s border with Iran.

Farmers in Afghanistan are growing poppies in government-controlled areas, insisting that there are no real economic alternatives to cultivating the flowers for the opium trade. It's estimated that Afghanistan's poppy fields are the source for much of the world's illegal heroin supply.

By RNZ The cost of mandatory quarantine on both sides of the Tasman means a New Zealander living in Brisbane will not be reunited with his dying mother in Auckland.A close friend of the man - both of whom RNZ has agreed not...

A "mass of surfers" have converged on one of Wellington's most popular surf beaches.A Wellington local, who wanted to be known only as Brendan, said he was in the area for work when he decided to stop and see what was happening...

A man involved in a $2.5 million meth bust in Hawke's Bay has had his three and a half year prison sentence dropped to 12 months of home detention.Uriah Whetu Monty Wirihana received a prison sentence of three years and seven months...

The Warehouse is advising customers on its website deliveries could take up to two weeks to arrive.It said while it was trying to get through orders as quickly as possible, because of the high number of orders it was struggling...

Close contacts of Covid-infected people are now being checked on every day to ensure compliance and see if they have developed any symptoms, Health Minister David Clark says.But an app to complement contact-tracing work was still...

A stray kitten climbed into the engine of a car in Otara, south Auckland, and ended up hitching a ride all the way to West Harbour, in west Auckland, where it was rescued and adopted by a loving family.It was early on Saturday morning...

A man has been taken to hospital after a he was hurt by a bull in Southland this afternoon.St John Ambulance tweeted that they had been called to Riversdale, 30 kilometres north-west of Gore, just after 4pm."Two vehicles attended...

One Lotto ticket's now worth $1 million - winning Division One in tonight's draw.The winning ticket was bought online by a Waikato player.That was this evening's biggest winnerStrike Four will be worth $800,000 and Powerball...

Masaajidyada ku yaal Jarmalka ayaa dib loogu furi doona albaabada si ay ugu cibaadeysantaan dadka Muslimiinta ah, arrintan ayaa imaanaysa ka dib go’aan ka soo baxay dawladda oo lagu fududeynayo xannibaadda Jarmalka lagu soo rogey kadib Fayraska Korona. Masaajida ku yaal dalka ayaa si tartiib tartiib ah dib loogu furi doona iyadoo la raacayo tilmaamaha […]

The post Muslimiinta Jarmalka oo isu diyaarinaya dib u furitaanka Masaajidda appeared first on Horseed Media • Somali News.