With nearly 190,000 new cases, steepest hike seen globally in 24 hours: WHO

The latest rise to the overall case count is a significant increase from the 179,316 new positive tests reported on Saturday by the WHO.

The global COVID-19 case total has surged past 9.8 million after a single-day record of 189,077 cases were registered worldwide over the past 24 hours, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Sunday (local time).

"Today, we report a record number of new cases in the last 24 hours globally (189,077 cases), with several countries reporting their highest number of new cases in a 24-hour period," the WHO said in its daily statistical bulletin.

The latest rise to the overall case count is a significant increase from the 179,316 new positive tests reported on Saturday by the WHO.

ALSO READ: Maharashtra not to lift lockdown on July 1, to ease curbs gradually: Uddhav

The bulk of the new cases were reported in Brazil and the United States, which confirmed 46,860 and 44,458 new positive tests over the past 24 hours, respectively. A further 19,906 new cases were also reported in India over the past day.

The WHO confirmed on Sunday that 4,612 people died from complications related to the coronavirus disease over the past 24 hours, a drop of 2,254 compared to the corresponding rise to the death toll on Saturday.

Earlier in the day, the US-based Johns Hopkins University, whose Coronavirus Response Centre also tallies COVID-19 figures, reported that the global case count has already surpassed 10 million.

Why controversy over digital services tax could create a new trade war

The OECD does recognise the need to reform international tax rules for taxation of digital businesses but so far hasn't arrived at a consensus on the scope and manner of taxation.

As the world stares at a looming recession, “Big Tech” businesses are thriving globally. E-commerce, subscriptions, and distributed business infrastructure have emerged as major revenue drivers. This has led more countries (Brazil, Spain, Czech Republic) and the European Union (EU) to consider and charter a domestic path towards digital taxation, as a source to augment the languishing fiscal revenues. These are popularly known as Digital Service Taxes (DSTs).

As most Big Tech businesses are headquartered in the United States (US), as a measure of countering growing “protectionism”, the US has decided to investigate the DSTs adopted or under consideration by 9 countries, including India, and the EU. These investigations will be undertaken under the US Trade Code, which empowers the US Trade Representative (USTR) to respond to actions of other trading partners that are perceived to be unfair or discriminatory.

ALSO READ: US to probe India's digital tax; it's non-discriminatory, says New Delhi

In India’s context, it contemplates an inquiry into the recently enacted Equalisation Levy (EL) on non-resident e-commerce companies. The origin of the EL dates back to 2016, when India enacted a 6 per cent EL (EL 1.0). It was confined in its scope to transactions relating to online advertisements or provision of digital advertising space by non-residents to Indian residents.

Recently, in March 2020, surprisingly, the scope of EL was expanded (EL 2.0). The provisions of EL 2.0 are broad and can potentially affect all ‘online’ transactions undertaken by e-commerce entities with Indian consumers. It is charged at the rate of 2 per cent on the consideration received by e-commerce entities for inter alia online sale of goods and/ or services. The levy announced in late March is made applicable from 1 April itself, leaving businesses with very little time for planning and implementation. The EL provisions are unilateral and are unlikely to be eligible for a credit in the home country.

Is India really in a better position to trim Covid than others? Facts, data

Things are still worrisome, as the country has reported more than 200 deaths in 24 hours for three consecutive days now.

With more than 92,000 cases, India ranks fourth on the list of countries with highest active cases. No doubt, with 1.1 million plus cases, the US tops the tally.

The country has reported more than 8,000 new cases in the last 24 hours, taking the country’s official to 1.98 lakh. 

Maharashtra alone accounts for 70,013 cases.

Speaking of recovery rate, even as the number of active cases rises, the ratio of death and recovery among the outcome of closed cases is improving slowly.

Let me explain this how. Until mid-April, two out of 10 closed cases resulted in deaths.

 But by the end of May, this came down to roughly 10 per cent, or one in every 10 closed cases.

So far, 95,527 people have been treated successfully.

H&M halts leather purchases from Brazil due to Amazon wildfires

Sweden-based H&M follows VF Corp, owner of shoe and clothing brands including Timberland, Vans and North Face, which made a similar announcement last week in response to the fires.

Business Standard : H&M, the world's second-biggest fashion retailer, said on Thursday it had stopped purchasing leather from Brazil for the time being due to environmental concerns highlighted by Amazon wildfires.

Sweden-based H&M follows VF Corp, owner of shoe and clothing brands including Timberland, Vans and North Face, which made a similar announcement last week in response to the fires.

Thousands of fires tearing through the Amazon have spawned an international crisis for Brazil, with public protests and world leaders voicing concern that the government of Jair Bolsonaro is doing too little to protect the world's largest tropical rainforest.

Fears have been growing in Brazil that companies would step back from the country amid adverse publicity surrounding the burning forest and the prospect of international sanctions.

"Due to the severe fires in the Brazilian part of the Amazon rainforest, and the connections to cattle production, we have decided to place a temporary ban on leather from Brazil," H&M said in an emailed statement.

"The ban will be active until there are credible assurance systems in place to verify that the leather does not contribute to environmental harm in the Amazon," it said.

Brazil's space research agency INPE says a surge this year in fires is the worst since 2010.

An H&M spokeswoman said the vast majority of the group's leather originates from Europe and only a very small part from Brazil.

According to the Center for the Brazilian Tanning Industry, the main leather trade group in Brazil, the country exported $1.44 billion of bovine leather in 2018. Its largest export markets were the United States, China and Italy.

Walmart to pay $282 mn for violating anti-corruption rules in 4 countries

According to the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), these violations were conducted by Walmart's third-party intermediaries who made payments to foreign government officials.

International retail giant Walmart Thursday agreed to pay over $282 to various US bodies to settle charges of violating anti-corruption regulations while conducting its business in India, China, Brazil and Mexico.

According to the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), these violations were conducted by Walmart's third-party intermediaries who made payments to foreign government officials without reasonable assurances that they complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or FCPA.

SEC has charged Walmart with violating FCPA by failing to operate a sufficient anti-corruption compliance programme for more than a decade as the retailer experienced rapid international growth.

Walmart agreed to pay more than $144 million to settle the SEC's charges and approximately $138 million to resolve parallel criminal charges by the Department of Justice for a combined total of more than $282 million, SEC said.

"Walmart valued international growth and cost-cutting over compliance," said Charles Cain, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's FCPA Unit.

"The company could have avoided many of these problems, but instead Walmart repeatedly failed to take red flags seriously and delayed the implementation of appropriate internal accounting controls," he said.

Walmart consented to the SEC's order finding that it violated the books and records and internal accounting controls provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

According to the SEC's order, Walmart failed to sufficiently investigate or mitigate certain anti-corruption risks and allowed subsidiaries in Brazil, China, India, and Mexico to employ third-party intermediaries who made payments to foreign government officials without reasonable assurances that they complied with the FCPA.

The SEC's order details several instances when Walmart planned to implement proper compliance and training only to put those plans on hold or otherwise allow deficient internal accounting controls to persist even in the face of red flags and corruption allegations.

Business Standard

Fighting drug-resistant TB: What India can learn from S Africa's success

If India follows new World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines released in August 2018 and reiterated on December 21, 2018, other drug-resistant TB patients will not have to struggle similarly.

In July 2017, 40-year-old Noludwe Mabandlela, a single mother of two, collapsed at home. This ended up saving her life. The ambulance that responded took Mabandlela to the nearest government community health centre, where she was diagnosed with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). As the name suggests, first-line drugs such as rifampicin used to treat the more common, drug-sensitive TB don’t work on MDR-TB, from which patients have an increased risk of death and from which they take two years to recover, compared to six months in conventional TB.

Forty-year-old Noludwe Mabandlela, a single mother of two, received new TB drugs bedaquiline and delamanid for multi drug-resistant TB and, a year later, now hopes to make a full recovery. Here, she shows a photo of herself before she contracted MDR-TB.

Until then, an ailing Mabandlela--who lives in Khayelitsha, South Africa’s largest township, or informal settlement, 30 km southeast of Cape Town--had been going to a private hospital, where she was not tested for TB. Government health staff started Mabandlela on MDR-TB treatment, which included taking injectable drugs for six months. She developed side-effects from the drugs, including numbness in her feet, hearing loss and kidney impairment.

Mabandlela was then put on bedaquiline--the first new TB drug developed in nearly 40 years--through the South African department of health’s National TB Control Programme (NTCP). Since 2015, South Africa had started making the drug available in the NTCP for patients with extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB)--the most severe form of MDR-TB--and for patients like Mabandlela who developed severe side-effects from MDR-TB drugs.

Mabandlela also received another new TB drug delamanid from international humanitarian aid organisation Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), in November 2017. These new drugs are still not commonly accessible--just over 24,000 of the world’s 558,000 MDR-TB patients have received bedaquiline till August 2018, and only 2,020 have received delamanid.

Mabandlela, HIV-positive and a cancer survivor, had almost given up hope as she lay hospitalised for a month. Now, over a year since her treatment began, she hopes to make a full recovery. Her story is a beacon of hope for MDR-TB patients globally.

Till 2014, almost one in two MDR-TB patients in South Africa were not successfully treated, according to a retrospective study of 19,000 patients published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal in July 2018. Two out of 10 MDR-TB patients in the country died during the 18- to 24-month long treatment, the study found.

Business Standard