Chinese lock down city after spike in Covid-19
China ordered a lockdown of the nine million residents of the north-eastern city of Changchun amid a new spike in Covid-19 cases.
Residents are required to remain home, with one family member permitted to venture out to buy food and other necessities every two days.
All residents must undergo three rounds of mass testing, while non-essential businesses have been closed and transport links suspended.
China reported another 397 cases of local transmission nationwide yesterday, 98 of them in Jilin province that surrounds Changchun, a centre of the country’s auto industry.
In the entire province, cases have exceeded 1,100 since the latest outbreak first struck late last week.
Just two cases were reported within Changchun itself yesterday , bringing its total to 78 in recent days. Authorities have repeatedly pledged to lock down any community where one or more cases are found under China’s “zero tolerance” approach to the pandemic.
Another 93 cases were confirmed in the nearby city of Jilin that bears the same name as the surrounding province. Authorities have already ordered a partial lockdown in the city and severed travel links with other cities.
Brussels: The EU has threatened to crack down on an agreement between Google and Facebook parent Meta for online display advertising services, saying yesterday that the deal may breach the bloc’s rules on fair competition.
The EU’S competition watchdog opened an investigation into a 2018 pact involving the participation of Meta’s audience network in Google’s open bidding programme.
The European Commission said the deal may be part of an effort to exclude ad tech services that compete with Google’s open bidding, which would harm publishers and consumers.
“If confirmed by our investigation, this would restrict and distort competition in the already concentrated ad tech market, to the detriment of rival ad serving technologies, publishers and ultimately consumers,” competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said on Friday.
Mexico City: Drug cartels in Mexico are increasingly turning to the internet, bitcoin and e-commerce to launder money and sell drugs, according to a report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The report of the International Narcotics Control Board said the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel are using small, online purchases of bitcoin to avoid moneylaundering controls. The report said Mexican cartels are believed to launder about $25 billion a year in the country.
After splitting drug proceeds into small payments to avoid controls, the cartels “then use those accounts to buy a series of small amounts of bitcoin online, obscuring the origin of the money and allowing them to pay associates elsewhere in the world”, the report said.
It added that “both Mexican and Colombian organised criminal groups are increasing their use of virtual currency because of the anonymity and speed of transactions”.