PayPal Holdings Inc said on Wednesday it plans to allow users to withdraw cryptocurrency to third party wallets. The San Jose, California-based company, which opened its platform to digital currencies last October, at present does not let users move cryptocurrency holdings off its platform. The news was earlier reported by Coindesk, citing comments from Jose Fernandez da Ponte, who leads PayPal’s blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies business unit. By Niket Nishant

Don’t let the rocket hatch hit you where the good lord split you, Jeff Bezos!

That’s the message from the 10,000 — and counting — haters who’ve signed a petition calling for the billionaire Amazon.com founder and former CEO to be denied re-entry to Earth following his upcoming space launch on July 20, according to Change.org.

Bezos, the world’s second richest man with a net worth of approximately $186 billion, “is actually Lex Luthor,” the petition alleges. “He’s actually an evil overlord hellbent on global domination. We’ve known this for years.”

The author of the petition also claims that Bezos, 57, has “worked with the Epsteins and the Knights Templar, as well as the Free Masons to gain control over the whole world.”

“Meanwhile our government stands by and lets it happen,” they conclude. “This may be our last chance before they enable the 5G microchips and perform a mass takeover.” . . .

Amazon.com Inc.’s planned new Africa headquarters in Cape Town is to draw demonstrations Wednesday as indigenous people protest its construction on a heritage site.

A march will take place between a central museum and a statue of 17th-century colonialist Jan van Riebeeck in opposition to the project, which was announced in April as part of a 4 billion-rand ($291 million) mixed-use development on the outskirts of the South African parliamentary capital.

While the City of Cape Town — which approved the site — has said the move will create thousands of jobs and give a boost to the Covid-19-ravaged economy, the plan quickly drew criticism from members of the Khoisan people, the original settlers on the land. There are now 50,000 objections from various parties, according to Tauriq Jenkins of the Goringhaicona Khoena Council, a Khoi traditional group.

Opposition is based on “environmental and heritage grounds,” he said, citing the floodplain location and the site of early battles between his people and Portuguese settlers more than 500 years ago. . . .

[ Bloomberg ]

WASHINGTON—A U.S. senator on June 10 slammed American companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., and Nike Inc. for turning a blind eye to allegations of forced labor in China, arguing they are making American consumers complicit in Beijing’s repressive policies.

Speaking at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on China’s repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang region, Republican Senator Marco Rubio said many U.S. companies had not woken up to the fact that they were “profiting” from the Chinese government’s abuses.

“For far too long companies like Nike and Apple and Amazon and Coca-Cola were using forced labor. They were benefiting from forced labor or sourcing from suppliers that were suspected of using forced labor,” Rubio said. “These companies, sadly, were making all of us complicit in these crimes.” . . .

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.

The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.

We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth for people their age. From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value of their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period. . . .

A tax deal between the world’s richest countries brings global governments a step closer to clawing back some power from technology giants that have used century-old regimes to build up wealth eclipsing the economies of most nations.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing appeared to censor images of the protester who stood in front of a Chinese tank during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

A Bing Images search of “tank man” yielded no results and a prompt for the user to check their spelling as of Friday afternoon. However, an identical search on Google Images produced hundreds of results including many of the iconic moment.

The famous “tank man” photo was taken on June 5, 1989, one day after the 1989 massacre in which Chinese troops fired indiscriminately upon civilians demonstrating against the government, killing hundreds. The photo showed a Chinese protester, who has since become known as “tank man,” standing in front of a procession of Chinese tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square.

“I’d love to hear [Microsoft President Brad Smith’s] explanation on this,” Shane Huntley, the director of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, tweeted on Friday. “I know Microsoft censor for the [Chinese Communist Party] in China, but this search is from the US.”

Other users noted that the “tank man” image search yielded no results in the U.K. as well. “This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this,” a Microsoft spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

An images search of “Tiananmen Square” in Bing produced scenic photos of the plaza while the same search produced pictures of the 1989 protests in Google Images as of Friday afternoon. However, a search conducted by the DCNF of “Tiananmen Square massacre” on Bing Images yielded a few photos of the protest.

Bing is the third-largest search engine in China behind the Chinese-owned websites Baidu and Sogou, according to Statista. China has blocked a variety of American websites including Google from operating within its borders, but Bing isn’t among those sites, Business Insider reported in 2019.

Microsoft has reportedly censored content for years at the behest of the Chinese government. The company has complied with the government’s authoritarian rules, which ban content that mentions the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan being its own sovereign nation and the Dalai Lama on both Bing and LinkedIn, according to Wired, The Guardian and Business Insider.

Bing was briefly blocked from the Chinese internet in 2019 for “illegal content” before Microsoft resolved the issue, CNN reported.

Friday marked the 32nd anniversary of the massacre.

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Thomas Catenacci is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Microsoft Blocks Images of Tiananmen Square Protests on Massacre Anniversary appeared first on The Georgia Star News.

ABUJA—Nigeria said on Friday it had indefinitely suspended Twitter’s activities, two days after the social media giant removed a post from President Muhammadu Buhari that threatened to punish regional secessionists.

Information Minister Lai Mohammed said the government had acted because of “the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence”.

Mohammed did not spell out what form the suspension would take or give more details on the undermining activities. His ministry also announced Twitter’s suspension on Twitter. . . .