1 Brazil
president removed from office (BBC) Brazil's Senate has voted to remove
President Dilma Rousseff from office for manipulating the budget. It puts an
end to the 13 years in power of her left-wing Workers' Party. Ms Rousseff had
denied the charges.
Sixty-one senators voted in favour of her dismissal
and 20 against, meeting the two-thirds majority needed to remove her from the
presidency. Michel Temer has been sworn in as president and will serve out Ms
Rousseff's term until 1 January 2019.
The centre-right PMDB party politician had been
serving as acting president during the impeachment proceedings. During his
first cabinet meeting since the vote, Mr Temer said his inauguration marked a
"new era". He asked his ministers to "vigorously defend"
the government from accusations that Ms Rousseff's dismissal amounted to a coup
d'etat.
He also told ministers to work closely with the
Congress to revive the Brazilian economy. Mr Temer is travelling to China to
take part in a summit of the G-20 group of major economies. The dismissal of Ms
Rousseff has caused a rift between Brazil and three left-wing South American
governments that criticised the move.
Brazil and Venezuela recalled each other's
ambassadors. Brazilian envoys to Bolivia and Ecuador have also been ordered home.
Ms Rousseff lost the impeachment battle but won a separate Senate vote that had
sought to ban her from public office for eight years.
Ms Rousseff was suspended in May after the Senate
voted to go ahead with the impeachment process. She was accused of moving funds
between government budgets, which is illegal under Brazilian law. Her critics
said she was trying to plug deficit holes in popular social programmes to boost
her chances of being re-elected in 2014.
2 Data as the new oil for India’s Ambani (Khaleej
Times) At the vast open-plan headquarters of Indian telecoms start-up Jio,
billionaire oil tycoon Mukesh Ambani stands in short sleeves beneath a digital
tracker that logs every new subscriber to his service. The 59-year-old is
India’s richest man, and his Reliance Industries oil & gas group is the
country’s most profitable.
Now, though, he’s betting at least $20 billion on
building, from scratch, a national digital empire stretching from phones and
hardware to home entertainment and custom-made apps. The ambitious Jio project
could make Reliance the most comprehensive provider of telecom and internet
services across India — and give it unprecedented access to the country’s
untapped ‘big data’: how millions eat, shop and have fun.
“For Reliance... data is the new oil, and
intelligent data is the new petrol,” Ambani said in March, explaining his drive
to move closer to India’s consumers. Reliance has said little publicly about
Jio, and even less about the potential for wide-scale data mining in a country
where consumers have not, to date, made a big deal about online privacy. But
top executives are clear on the opportunity.
“It’s called Deep Packet Inspection, and what you
can do with the analytics of that is mind-boggling,” said a senior Reliance
executive, referring to a practice that digs into ‘packets’ of data created by
computers for efficiency, mining them for information. Jio is unlikely to
contribute significantly to Reliance profits anytime soon, but is hugely significant
for its future.
According to filings at the Commerce Ministry, Jio
has more than Rs325 billion ($4.9 billion) of long-term debt, and other
liabilities topping Rs580 billion, as of March. In addition, Reliance has spent
over Rs290 billion on Jio and is expected to invest more — all adding up to
more than what it has been spending on its core refining and petrochemicals
business.
Reliance says its oil business is pumping out cash,
and any investment in Jio has to be ambitious. Two-thirds of India’s 1.3
billion population are not online, and Jio hopes to capture 100 million users —
nearly half of India’s current smartphone users — within a year of launch.
3 Debt as a way of life (Suzanne Moore in The
Guardian) Many gamble, as they no longer save. Can’t save/won’t save. New
figures show that Britain’s “saving habits” are collapsing. This can be put
down to the record low in interest rates and the attempt to boost consumer
spending. Surely this is also to do with stagnating wages and a culture where
saving for many is just impossible.
One big difference is the acceptance of debt as a
way of life. Indeed, such contradictory messages about debt and spending are
pumped out that I am not surprised there is little interest in saving. It’s
still disappointing to take cash out of a machine that has “free withdrawals”
emblazoned over the top, to find that they’re not.
All of us, whatever our social class, have our own
bling. From superyachts to the little place in France, to the extraordinary
nails. The less you can change about your life, the more the small rewards
matter. Nails, spray tans and lash extensions are treats – mini-breaks from
reality. Someone else waits on you. Everyone else can see what you have spent.
The familiar whine – that people are not actually
poor because they possess a smartphone – is put into perspective by how near
the edge many are. People are poor when they have no savings, nothing to fall
back on. This has to be spelt out.
There is a general agreement among those who can
afford to do it that saving is a habit that all must learn. The crisis in
consumer confidence that the experts are talking of, though, is surely less
serious than this crisis in saving. If one must save to have a secure future
and that is beyond our means, the future looks poor.
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