19 July 2019
Question: According to MSN: Money, what is the most educated county in Virginia?
WHO ebola alert aims to provoke global reaction – Pg. 3
- The decision by the World Health Organization to declare the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo an international emergency is intended to boost the world’s response tot the outbreak, which continues to spread almost a year after the first victims were identified
- This was only the fifth time the WHO has declared a public health emergency of international concern, the most severe level of health crisis
- The WHO said the new category of alarm was merited because of the identify cation this week of the first confirmed Ebola case in the crowded city of Goma on the Rwandan border
- Currently, low stock levels of the vaccine mean a strategy has been adopted where only the contacts of a victim, and each contact’s contact, are vaccinated, rather larger groups of the population
Mnuchin says ‘work to be done’ on tech tax – Pg. 4
- G7 countries have agreed a compromise on how to change the international tax regime to ensure fair taxation of multi-nationals, including technology groups such as Google and Facebook….
- Tech businesses in particular are accused by many European governments of not paying fair levels of company tax in the countries where they operate because they can book profits in low-tax jurisdictions, unlike traditional companies with national headquarters and large numbers of local staff
- The US and France have been at loggerheads over France’s attempt to target big tech groups, most of them American, and the US administration is retaliating against a new French law that imposes a 3% turnover tax on tech groups
British Politics – Pg. 7
- For nearly 170 years, Britain’s civil servants have operated on the principles set out in 1854 by two Victorian statesmen – Stafford Northcote and CE Trevelyan. Under their system, the officials working across Whitehall are non-partisan, politically neutral and speak truth to power behind closed doors
- In the US and some other nations, civil servants come and go with each new administration under a so-called “spoils system”. By contrast, the Northcote-Trevelyan principles created a professional civil serve that is admitted throughout the world
- Brexit has generated an extraordinary workload across Whitehall, which needs to create new regulatory bodies, agree new trade treaties and help; pass reams of domestic legislation as well as prepare for no deal
Australia builder in $15bn Google housing deal – Pg. 14
- Lendlease, one of Australia’s biggest construction companies, has extended its relationship with Google after it signed a deal that would see tracks of land in California redeveloped into housing and office space
- …Google last month vowed to contribute $1bn over the next decade to help alleviate housing shortages, including redeveloping land it owns, amid complaints from activists that tech companies have made the area unaffordable and pushed out lower-paid workers
- The projects with Google in the Bay Area will include 15m sf of new “mixed-use” neighbourhoods featuring 15,000 homes, as well as office, retail and hospitality developments in San Jose, Sunnyvale and Mountain view
US casinos gamble on unlocking the value in real estate – Pg. 15
- Casino operators are increasingly splitting off the land on which their giant entertainment complexes sit, taking advantage of investors’ desperate hunt for income in a world of ultra-low interest rates to juice their share prices and pursue swashbuckling dealmaking
- Reits have been popular with investors because they pay out the bulk of their income in the form of dividends. They have long been a future of the financial landscape in the real estate sector – some of the largest publicly traded Reits own fast portfolios of shopping malls or office buildings – and their emergence in the gaming sector has wrought a revolution
- As investors demand has driven Reit valuations higher, and the vehicles have been hungry to buy more property, they have become a cheap source of M&A financing and fueled a dealmaking wave
Answer: Falls Church (42.5% Graduate or Professional degree)