Mint Lite Newsletter: Today's Top News, Views, Opinions & Talking Points to Start Your Day this- 15-01-2021

Business News/ Daily Newsletter 15 Jan 2021

GOOD MORNING!

15 Jan 2021

Mint Lite Newsletter

Stories, views, opinions and talking points that matter, from around the world

Musician takes on Uganda president

A 38-YEAR-OLD pop star is challenging one of Africa’s longest serving leaders in Uganda’s hotly contested election. Robert Kyagulanyi, known by his stage name Bobi Wine, says he represents the country’s younger generation, while Yoweri Museveni says he is standing for stability, reports BBC. The campaign has been marred by serious violence, which has seen dozens of people killed. The government has ordered a block on all social media. President Museveni says this was because Facebook had banned several accounts which backed his ruling party. Ugandan police say they will deploy officers on rooftops on election day. President Museveni is seeking his sixth elected term in office after 35 years in power. Campaigning had been banned in the capital Kampala, and several other districts. The opposition says this is because it is popular in those areas, but the government says it was to prevent the spread of covid-19.

From reformer to wrecker

MATTEO RENZI, who as prime minister once enthused Italians and foreign observers with his promises of reform, is now among the country’s most unpopular figures, his name almost a byword for disloyalty and ruthless political manoeuvres , reports Reuters. Renzi pulled his tiny centrist party Italia Viva from the coalition, unseating prime minister Giuseppe Conte’s government and throwing Italy into political chaos in the midst of a resurgent coronavirus emergency. His reason for doing so is hard to pinpoint. His original complaint was over Conte’s plans for spending billions of euros promised by the European Union to relaunch the battered economy. Italy’s draft “recovery plan” offered too little for the health service, culture, and infrastructure, Renzi said, and it was to be overseen by a group of unelected experts which he argued was an insult to parliament.

Trust ebbs in post-covid world

TRUST IN governments, business chiefs and media is crumbling amid a perceived mishandling by leaders of the coronavirus pandemic and a widespread feeling among ordinary citizens that they are being misled, a global survey has found. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which for two decades has polled thousands of people on their trust in core institutions, found 57% of people believe government leaders, business chiefs and journalists are spreading falsehoods or exaggerations. Governments, which in a previous survey conducted early in the pandemic saw a bounce in their trust ratings from public who wanted them to prioritize saving lives over the economy, saw sharp losses in trust levels as the year progressed.

Prison for South Korea’s ex-prez

SOUTH KOREA’S Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a 20-year prison term for former President Park Geun-hye over bribery and other crimes as it wrapped up a historic corruption case, reports PTI. The ruling means Park, who was ousted from office and arrested in 2017, potentially serves a combined 22 years behind bars, following a separate conviction for illegally meddling in her party’s candidate nominations ahead of parliamentary elections in 2016. But the finalizing of her prison term also makes her eligible for a special presidential pardon, a looming possibility as the country’s deeply-split electorate approaches the presidential election in March next year. Park was convicted of colluding with her long-time confidante, Choi Soon-sil, to take millions of dollars in bribes and extortion from some of the country’s largest business groups, including Samsung, while she was in office from 2013 to 2016.

Artistic masterstrokes from history

ARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVE discovered the world’s oldest known animal cave painting in Indonesia—a wild pig—believed to have been drawn 45,500 years ago. According to BBC, painted using dark red ochre pigment, the life-sized picture of the Sulawesi warty pig appears to be part of a narrative scene. The picture was found in the Leang Tedongnge cave in a remote valley on the island of Sulawesi. It provides the earliest evidence of human settlement of the region. “The people who made it were fully modern, they were just like us, they had all of the capacity and the tools to do any painting that they liked,” said Maxime Aubert, the co-author of the report published in Science Advances journal. A dating specialist, Aubert had identified a calcite deposit that had formed on top of the painting, and used Uranium-series isotope dating to determine that the deposit was 45,500 years old.

Curated by Mint editors . Write to us at businessoflife@livemint.com