The Economist

British children used to play conkers in the autumn when the horse-chestnut trees started to drop their shiny brown nuts. They would select a suitable chestnut, drill a hole in it and thread it onto a string, then swing their conker at that of an opponent until one of them broke. But the game has fallen out of favour. Children spend less time outdoors and rarely have access to chestnut trees. Besides, many schools have banned conkers games, worried that they might cause injuries or trigger nut allergies.

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Nepali restaurants in Finland have become so popular in the past 20 years that in many places they have started replacing Indian diners in Helsinki and other cities. It now looks like there was a dark side to this success: four Nepalis restauranteurs in Finland have been found guilty of human trafficking, discrimination and tax evasion.

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Citigroup reveals that female employees earn 29% less than men do. For its U.S. workforce, people of color earn 7% less than their white colleagues

• Bank is first in U.S. to publish ‘unadjusted’ gender pay gap
•  ‘We should obviously be at 100 percent parity,’ bank says

Citigroup Inc. offered an uncharacteristically blunt assessment of the pay gap between men and women in its global workforce Wednesday, revealing that female employees earn 29 percent less than men do.

The disclosure — a comparison of median total compensation — offers a more complete picture of pay, compared with the figures Citigroup and other big banks released last year under pressure from shareholders in the U.S. and regulators in the U.K.

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Over 50 Nepalis have invested in offshore companies, exploiting secretive tax regimes and breaking Nepal’s law which bars investment in foreign countries, an investigation by the Centre for Investigative Journalism has found.

The report ‘Nepal Leaks 2019: Illegal Wealth Watch,’ based on an analysis of over 3,000 financial and court documents and interviews with over 70 individuals, was published Wednesday night.

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All New York City kindergarteners and first graders will receive prescription eyeglasses if they need them starting next school year, Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to announce Thursday during his annual State of the City address.

The program already exists in 224 so-called “community schools” across the city, which get additional social services designed to combat the effects of poverty and other out-of-school factors that can interfere with student learning. Last year, about 26,000 glasses were distributed through the initiative.

Officials anticipate the expansion will involve 140,000 vision screenings and 33,000 new pairs of eyeglasses. The program is offered in partnership with Warby Parker, which will cover the cost of the eyeglasses themselves, and is expected to cost $6 million, one-third of which will come from private fundraising.

https://chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2019/01/10/free-eyeglasses-new-york-city-schools/..MORE

India continued to remain the top receiver of remittances in 2017, getting funds of $69 billion, according to the World Bank. The previous two years had registered a dampening of outbound remittance flows from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries due to policies discouraging the recruitment of foreign workers…

…Here is a break up of remittances Indians sent back home:

The average volume per each remittance for a blue-collar worker is $400, whereas it hovers between $1,500 & 2,000 for a white-collar worker

1. UAE
   Remittance: $13.8 billion
   Population of Overseas Indians: 2.8 million
   Per capita annual remittance: Rs 3.4 lakh
2. USA ( White-collar remitters from western countries such as the US, remit money infrequently, depending on when they get good exchange rates)
   Remittance: $11.7 billion
   Population of Overseas Indians: 4.5 million
   Per capita annual remittance: Rs 1.8 lakh

8. Nepal
Remittance: $3 billion
Population of Overseas Indians: 0.6 million
Per capita annual remittance: Rs 3.4 lakh

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Facing an acute labor shortage, the country needs immigrants, and plenty of them.

Even as politicians in the U.S. and Europe rage about foreigners supposedly swamping their shores, one of the world’s most insular countries — Japan — is on the verge of passing what might be its most sweeping immigration reform to date. Welcome as this would be, the plan isn’t sweeping enough.

A bill approved by the lower house of the Diet would open Japan’s doors to two types of foreign workers. Lower-skilled laborers in 14 sectors would for the first time be able to apply for five-year visas after demonstrating a good command of Japanese. And highly skilled workers would be eligible for work visas that can be renewed indefinitely, could bring their families with them, and could apply for permanent residency after 10 years. The government aims to push the bill through the upper house before the current session ends.

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Nowadays ‘liquid biopsies,’ the notion of detecting cancer using only a blood test to detect minute amounts of circulating tumor are fairly well-known. But what if not even a blood test was needed to detect cancer, merely a few lungfuls of air?

A new clinical trial in the U.K. is aiming to find out whether this might indeed be possible.

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1. United Kingdom (GDP: $2.6 trillion)
2. Sweden (GDP: $536 billion)
3. Hong Kong (GDP: $341 billion)
4. Netherlands (GDP: $832 billion)
5. New Zealand (GDP: $201 billion)
6. Canada (GDP: $1.7 trillion)
7. Denmark (GDP: $326 billion)
8. Singapore (GDP: $324 billion)
9. Australia (GDP: $1.4 trillion)
10. Switzerland (GDP: $679 billion)

17. United States (GDP: $19.5 trillion)

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