The Saturn Herald

£107m aid for sub-standard Pakistan schools

School construction works on nine out of ten schools in Pakistan, a £107m project funded by the UK’s Department for International Development are not fit for purpose leaving 115, 000 children in makeshift classrooms. Internal Dfid documents reveal that new renovated facilities at 1, 277 of the 1, 389 schools covered by the programme…

France’s threatens to halt Mercosur trade pact

France have threatened to halt on of the world’s biggest trade deals with the support of other EU nations, unless Brazil does more to fight forest fires in the Amazon. Emmanuel Macron vowed to oppose ratification of a trade pact between the EU and South America’s Mercosur bloc and said “ Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro had…

TSYS glitch outage hit RBS, Nationwide and Tesco

RBS, Nationwide and Tesco have been hit by an information technology failure at US payments company TSYS that left customers left unable to pay their credit card bills or access their accounts. The disruption highlight a challenging time for banks which are under pressure to improve their resilience to IT problems but often rely on…

Fungus Panama TR$ threaten Bananas

The Colombian Agriculture and Fishing Institute (ICA) has confirmed the arrival of Panama TR4 disease, a soil-dwelling fungus that has devastated plantations in South-East Asia over the past 30 years. Now it threatens Cavendish banana which accounts for half of global production and 95 per cent of the world’s exports. The ICA has declared a…

Anti-ageing start-up raises $100m

Juvenescence is a biotech start-up seeking to increase human longevity, has closed a $100m funding round after its Series B financing, the UK-based company has been valued at £413.54m (US $500), and is lining up for a stock market listing next year. Jim Mellon, the investor who chairs Juvenescence, has influenced other billionaires to buy…

Victor Li seizes on weak pound to snap up Greene King in £4.6bn deal

Victor Li Tzar Kuoi, the Hong Kong billionaire and son of the LI Ka-Shing acquired Greene King in the midst of weak pound to strike a £4.6bn deal for the UK’s biggest listed pubs and brewery group. CK Asset Holdings, the property investment firm founded by Li Ka-Shing (91) and run by Victor, his son,…

Seizer of Iranian tanker Grace1: Gibraltar reject US legal request

The British Overseas Territory’s justice ministry said yesterday that it was “unable to seek” a court order to provide the “restraining assistance required by the US”. Gibraltar has formally rejected a US legal request to seize the Iranian tanker that has been at the center of a stand-off between Iran and the West. The Grace1…

Does Beethoven makes his audience political?

In 1824, Beethoven, at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony the Viennese gave the performance five standing ovations. Only the Austrian emperor ( who got three) enjoyed this but fearful of subversion, a panicked police commissioner had to shush them into silence. Last month, the same symphony’s “Ode to Joy” theme drifted from the floor…

Exodus crisis facing Catholic Church

The Second Vatican Council opened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. With the prophecy that “a new day is dawning on Church, bathing her in radiant splendor” The identity of the Catholic media, about strict adherence to the church’s teachings, especially on marriage and sexual morals or is it a more liberal approach,…

Unsocial digital life

Ji Tolentino is The New Yorker’s professional millennial journalist, in an era of malleable truth and widespread political delusion, who writes both contemporary and classical from social media to the gig economy, enhanced the pages of the old magazine with Zeitgeist animated essays, reports from the trenches of today’s gender wars. Her new book Trick…