Toys ‘R’ US plans to sell or close all of its US stores, potentially hitting 33,000 jobs, U.S. media reported Wednesday.

The debt-plagued retailer, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September, told employees that the retailer planned to file liquidation papers ahead of a Thursday court hearing, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post reported.

“We’re putting a for sale sign on everything,” CEO David Brandon said on a conference call with staff, according to the Journal.

Company officials did not immediately reply for a request for comment.

Started in 1948 amid the postwar US economic boom, Toys ‘R’ US has 881 stores in U.S. territories and nearly 65,000 employees globally, according to the company’s most recent press release last month.

The New Jersey-based company was saddled with debt following a leveraged buyout in 2005 by a consortium that included the KKR Group and Bain Capital.

Much like other retailers, Toys ‘R’ Us has also been bruised by competition from Amazon and other online retailers.

A weak holiday shopping season weighed on the company’s efforts to reorganize, analysts said.

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, blamed the company’s woes on poor leadership.

“As the competitive dynamics of the toy market intensified, management failed to respond and evolve. As such, the brand lost relevance, customers and ultimately sales,” Saunders said in a note Wednesday.

“The main tragedy of liquidation will be the extensive loss of jobs. In our view, those on the shop-floor have been badly let down by management and those doing financial deals.”

The company is exploring strategies for keeping the brand alive, including the sale of 200 U.S. stores that could be packaged with its Canadian business, CNBC and the Journal reported.

Brandon outlined this and other possibilities at the New Jersey meeting, CNBC reported. Brandon also told workers they have 60 more days of employment at the company.

In February, the company’s British business announced plans for an “orderly wind-down” of the company’s store portfolio. Toys ‘R’ Us employs 3,200 people at 100 stores in Britain.

 
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Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the “Panama Papers” scandal, said Wednesday that it was shutting down because of the damage to its business and reputation inflicted by role in the global tax evasion debacle.

The Panama Papers, which consist of millions of documents stolen from Mossack Fonseca and leaked to the media in April 2016, provoked a global scandal after showing how the rich and powerful used offshore corporations to evade taxes.

“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial circus and the unusual actions by certain Panamanian authorities have occasioned an irreversible damage that necessitates the obligatory ceasing of public operations at the end of the current month,” the firm said in a statement.

Mossack Fonseca said a skeleton staff would remain in order to comply with requests from authorities and other public and private groups.

Nonetheless, the law firm said it would continue “fighting for justice,” adding it would also continue to cooperate with authorities.

Last month, Panamanian prosecutors raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, seeking possible links to Brazilian engineering company Odebrecht. The Brazilian construction firm has admitted bribing officials in Panama and other countries to obtain contracts in the region between 2010 and 2014.

Ramon Fonseca, a partner at Mossack Fonseca, denied last month that his firm had a connection to Odebrecht, while accusing Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela of directly receiving money from Odebrecht, Latin America’s largest engineering company.

Varela has denied taking any money from Odebrecht.
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A bag of rice on a hungry family’s kitchen table could be the key to Nicolas Maduro retaining the support of poor Venezuelans in May’s presidential election.

For millions of Venezuelans suffering an unprecedented economic crisis, a monthly handout of a box of heavily-subsidized basic food supplies by Maduro’s unpopular government has offered a tenuous lifeline in their once-prosperous OPEC nation.

The 55-year-old successor to Hugo Chavez introduced the so-called CLAP boxes in 2016 in a signature policy of his rule, continuing the socialist government’s strategy of seeking public support with cash bonuses and other giveaways.

Now, running for re-election on May 20, Maduro says the CLAPs are his “most powerful weapon” to combat an “economic war” being waged by Washington, which brands him a “dictator” and has imposed sanctions.

Mariana, a single mother who lives in the poor hillside neighborhood of Petare in the capital Caracas, says the handouts will decide her vote.

“I and other women I know are going to vote for Maduro because he’s promising to keep giving CLAPs, which at least help fix some problems,” said the 30-year-old cook, who asked not to give her surname for fear of losing the benefit.

“When you earn minimum wage, which doesn’t cover exorbitant prices, the box helps.”

Maduro’s rule since 2013 has coincided with a deep recession caused by a plunge in global oil prices and failed state-led economic policies.

Yet the worse the economy gets, the more dependent some poor Venezuelans become on the state.

Life in the South American country’s poor ‘barrios’ revolves around the CLAP boxes. According to the government, six million families receive the benefit, from a population of around 30 million people.

Venezuelans, many of whom are undernourished, anxiously wait for their monthly delivery, and a thriving black market has sprung up to sell CLAP products.

The government sources almost all the CLAP goods from abroad, especially from Mexico, since Venezuela’s food production has shriveled and currency controls restrict private imports.

Critics, including Maduro’s main challenger for the May 20 vote, Henri Falcon, say the CLAPs are a cynical form of political patronage and are rife with corruption.

Erratic supply and control of distribution by government-affiliated groups have sown resentment among others.

“I can’t count on it. Sometimes it comes, sometimes not,” said Viviana Colmenares, 24, an unemployed mother of six struggling to get by in Petare.

“Instrument of the Revolution”

Stamped with the faces of Maduro and Chavez, the CLAP boxes usually contain rice, pasta, grains, cooking oil, powdered milk, canned tuna and other basic goods. Recipients pay 25,000 bolivars per box, or about $0.12 at the black market rate.

That is a godsend in a country where the minimum monthly wage is less than $2 at that rate – and would be swallowed up by two boxes of eggs or a small tin of powdered milk.

Inflation, at more than 4,000 percent annually according to opposition data, is pulverizing household income.

The administration of the CLAP — the Local Supply and Production Committees — does not hide its political motivation.

“The CLAPs are here to stay. They are an instrument of the revolution,” said Freddy Bernal, CLAP chief administrator.

“It has helped us stop a social explosion and enabled us to win elections and to keep winning them,” he told Reuters, referring to government victories in 2017 local polls.

Sometimes, though, the tactic backfires, as it did when promised free pork failed to arrive over Christmas, prompting street protests.

Maduro’s inability to halt rising hunger has jarred with the experience of many under Chavez, who won the presidency in 1998 and improved Venezuela’s social indicators with oil-fueled welfare policies.

Even though Maduro’s approval rating is only around 26 percent, according to one recent poll, his re-election looks likely as Venezuela’s opposition coalition is boycotting the vote on accusations it is rigged.

His most popular rivals are banned from standing and the election board favors the government.

Former state governor Falcon has broken with the coalition to stand. One survey by pollster Datanalisis in February showed that in a two-way race, he would defeat Maduro by 45.8 percent to 32.2 percent of likely voters.

Falcon’s critics counter that those numbers mean nothing in the face of electoral irregularities that could arbitrarily tip the balance in favor of Maduro.

Several other minor figures have registered for the single-round election, but have little chance of making an impact.

‘Can’t Depend on the Box’

Juan Luis Hernandez, a food specialist at the Central University of Venezuela, estimates the country generates just 44 percent of the basic food supplies it produced in 2008.

Meanwhile, food imports fell 67 percent between the start of 2016 and the end of 2017 as the crisis bit, he said.

Almost two-thirds of Venezuelans surveyed in a university study published in February said they had lost on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year. Eighty-seven percent were assessed to live in poverty.

The same study found that seven out of 10 Venezuelans had received CLAPs.

“They (the government) don’t care about the food issue, just about getting people something to eat while they get through the elections,” said Susana Raffalli, a consultant with charity Caritas.

Some Venezuelans fear they would be found out should they vote against Maduro and be punished by no longer receiving food bags.

Already handouts are far from guaranteed.

A dozen recipients told Reuters that often they arrived half-full and would only come every few months. Outside of the capital Caracas, delivery was even more sporadic.

“I can’t depend on the box, otherwise I would die from hunger,” said Yuni Perez, a 48-year-old rubbish collector and mother of three.

Perez, who lives in a ramshackle house made from breeze blocks and corrugated steel at the top of Petare, said a CLAP box provided her family with food for a week. Often they would receive one every two months.

When her family is short of food, she hunts for leftovers dumped on the side of Petare’s winding streets. She said she had found several newborn babies discarded in the gutter, which she attributed to mothers unable to face providing food for another child.

Another Petare resident, mother-of-three Yaneidy Guzman said she dropped from 68kg to 48kg last year, despite receiving the CLAP.

“At least for 10 days you don’t have to think about finding food,” the 32-year-old said of the handouts, her cheekbones protruding from her face.
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In one of the planet’s most northerly settlements, in a tiny Arctic town of about 2,000 people, Benjamin Vidmar’s domed greenhouse stands out like an alien structure in the snow-cloaked landscape.

This is where in summer the American chef grows tomatoes, onions, chilies and other vegetables, taking advantage of the season’s 24 hours of daily sunlight.

During winter’s four months of darkness, when temperatures can reach -30 Celsius (-22°F), Vidmar tends to microgreens – the leaves and shoots of young salad plants – and dozens of quails in two rooms beneath his home.

He is the sole supplier of locally-grown food in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen in the Svalbard archipelago. The North Pole is about 1,050 kilometers (650 miles) to the north; mainland Norway is about as far south.

Growing food in such conditions can be “mission impossible” but it is necessary, Vidmar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

He hopes to set an example for other remote towns in the region.

“We are so dependent on imports. Everything is by boat and plane,” said Vidmar, who comes from Cleveland, Ohio, and who has lived here for nearly a decade.

That makes the town vulnerable, he said. In 2010, stores in Longyearbyen stood empty after an Icelandic volcano erupted, bringing air transport to a halt. And the cost of imported food and its quality “is often disappointing.”

His company, Polar Permaculture, aims to produce enough food for the town and process all its organic and biological waste.

It sounds ambitious, but the firm, which received support from a government-funded body that helps startups, broke even last year, just two years in.

It was helped by the fact that he and his teenage son do not draw salaries, and Vidmar still cooks full-time at a school.

‘Crazy’ to Try

Vidmar’s produce now appears on many of Longyearbyen’s menus, including at Huset restaurant where intricate, multi-course Nordic tasting menus are served in stately surroundings.

Alongside reindeer steak and tartare of bearded seal is a delicate dish of quail egg with dill, red onions and anchovies on flatbread.

“We would not use quail eggs unless they were local so we designed a dish as soon as we got the opportunity to try them,” said Filip Gemzell, Huset’s head chef.

Vidmar first stepped foot in Svalbard in 2007 while working as a chef on a cruise ship. One of his first thoughts was, “How can people live here?,” but he was also intrigued.

“The sad part (in America) is you work so hard and you still have to worry about money. Then you come here and you have all this nature. No distraction, no huge shopping centers, no billboards saying, ‘buy, buy, buy.'”

A year later, he moved to the island and started working at restaurants and bars in Longyearbyen, a coal mining town turned tourist-and-research attraction.

He decided to grow his own food after becoming frustrated with the absence of fresh produce and the fact that a lack of treatment sites meant organic waste was dumped into the sea.

People thought he was “crazy” trying to grow food in the Arctic.

Initially he experimented with hydroponics – farming in water instead of soil – but that meant using fertilizer, which comes from the mainland. Eventually the city authorities gave him permission to bring in worms from Florida to do the job.

Now, whenever he or his son deliver a tray of microgreens to restaurants, they collect the previous tray and feed the soil to the worms, which break it down to produce natural fertilizer for bigger plants.

His next aim is to heat the greenhouse during winter using a biodigester – which generates energy from organic material – so he can use it all-year-round.

Sustainability

Vidmar also helps fourth- and ninth-grade students at Longyearbyen school to learn farming and sustainability. That has led older students to query the island’s supply chain, said teacher Lisa Dymbe Djonne.

“They question the transportation of food from the mainland to here and how expensive that is,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

“They’re going to interview some of the leaders … to figure out how much it costs for the island and if it is possible to grow our own food,” she added. “It’s a question a lot of people up here have.”

Eivind Uleberg, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Bioeconomy Research in Tromso in northern Norway, said that fitted a pattern of rising interest in locally produced food and sustainability in agriculture.

In a phone interview, Uleberg said that, although he was unaware of Vidmar’s undertaking, efforts to produce food locally in Norway were positive.

A short growing season and low temperatures are the main barriers to producing food in such latitudes, he said, but higher temperatures caused by climate change could help.

“There is definitely the potential to produce more vegetables and berries,” he said.

But there are also challenges, Uleberg added, including more rain in the autumn during harvest, and changing conditions in winter that could kill grasses crucial for animal feed.

For Vidmar, such obstacles and the unique conditions are the reason he is determined to produce “the freshest food possible.”

“We’re on a mission … to make this town very sustainable. Because if we can do it here, then what’s everybody else’s excuse?”
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On a patch of gravel that was once a nondescript bus stop in Kuala Lumpur’s old city, passersby can now find brightly-painted wooden pallets that double as seating and shelves stocked with free books for the taking. At least, for the time being.

The transformation is temporary, a monthlong demonstration to judge the public’s reaction to the idea of turning a slice of the sprawling Malaysian capital no bigger than a small hotel room into a permanent public space.

This try-it-before-you-buy-it approach is known as a pop-up.

Pop-ups have become popular in many cities, often the brainchild of local residents in an effort to improve their neighborhoods or turn derelict spaces into community hubs.

They include cycling activists who paint bike lanes without government approval to push for safer streets, retailers who launch temporary shops in repurposed shipping containers to revitalize flagging high streets or food trucks gathered in empty parking lots.

“We’ve found by working with cities sometimes they are a little bit wary about having to put a lot of investment into public spaces,” said Cecilia Anderson, who leads the public space program at UN-Habitat, the U.N.’s lead agency on urban issues.

“Sometimes it helps to do a small pop-up public space just to showcase on a temporary level what kinds of benefits it has for the city, the citizens, and that neighborhood.”

Public space has been shrinking in the world’s fast-growing cities, where almost 70 percent of the population is expected to live by 2050, compared to just over half today, according to U.N. estimates.

Experts say, however, it should be a paramount goal for city leaders as research shows inadequate, poorly designed or privatized public spaces generate exclusion and marginalization.

“Public space is really the backbone or the skeleton of the city,” Anderson told Reuters.

Highlighting its importance for social inclusion and well-being, public space was included as a target in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, with the aim to provide universal access to “safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces” by 2030.

‘Ultimate irony’

In Kuala Lumpur’s bustling historic center, local urban regeneration agency Think City installed a pop-up plaza along Petaling Street and three small green spaces, known as parklets.

They form a cluster of benches, plants, and overhead canvas for shade taking up the size of a parking spot along the busy street, as well as a mock microhousing unit in an existing park.

It also spruced up a laneway next to the agency’s headquarters with a mural and a chalkboard inviting ideas on how else to improve the neglected alley.

For Think City director Neil Khor, the pop-ups are an attempt to reignite flagging interest in public space among residents in the city of 6.5 million people.

“This is the ultimate irony — when I was growing up, we had more public space,” said Khor, whose organization works on community-based urban regeneration.

“Some time in the 1980s, we had this mall culture from the United States. Suddenly the public space is exactly inside the mall.”

What people want

While Kuala Lumpur’s extravagant malls never seem to lack for visitors, the pop-ups garnered mixed reviews, if they were noticed at all.

On two recent visits to the temporary public spaces, some of the parklets were empty, though one equipped with mobile phone chargers proved popular with a quartet of teenagers.

A parklet adorned with a chessboard sat vacant while next door, Bangladeshi migrants conducted a vibrant trade in fruits and vegetables on the sidewalk, their produce truck blocking a freshly painted bike lane.

The plaza bedecked with bookshelves drew several curious onlookers, who were invited to leave comments on what they would like to see in the space, and whether it should be made permanent.

Visitors asked for more seating, a drinking fountain, shade and a playground for children. Most respondents declared their enthusiasm for a permanent plaza.

“It’s wonderful, it looks good, it makes the place beautiful and lively. No complaints,” said paralegal John Ng, who stopped by after work.

“There should be more public spaces instead of tall buildings and cars,” he said, standing in the middle of the plaza.

Retiree Emily Tan, taking a break from a shopping trip in Chinatown, preferred to sit on permanent benches next to the pop-up and take in the view.

“This one they should develop as a park,” she said. “More plants, flowers, and let people sit down.”

Universal design

While officially-sanctioned pop-up public spaces can be found in cities around the world, the trend started in the developed world.

A San Francisco design firm invented the parklet, and New York City became a model for carving out small plazas from unused odds and ends on the city’s streets.

“These temporary approaches in the global north were meant to bring informality to cities that didn’t have them,” said Ethan Kent from New York-based non-profit Project for Public Spaces. “These were solutions meant to bring back that life to the streets.”

But as the concept and the designs that go with them have become universal, critics question whether pop-ups can work just everywhere.

“On the one hand, it looks like a free street library, where you’re encouraged to take a book you like,” said Emily Silverman, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“But the black base, cheerful colors, and especially the position in the middle of a street during an international conference, signal ‘don’t touch,'” said Silverman, referring to the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur last month.

She said in Jerusalem, free street libraries worked well in secular and middle-class professional areas, but they got vandalized in ultra-Orthodox areas, for fear they would help distribute otherwise forbidden books.

“The [pop-up’s] lure of ‘lighter, quicker, cheaper’ can encourage artificial importing, ignoring local context to just get stuff done,” she said.

Khor defended the overall initiative in Kuala Lumpur as a valuable social experiment.

He noted an impromptu badminton game in the alleyway, chess matches between migrants in the parklet, a tea shop that regularly waters the plants in the parklet, and crowds eager to explore a micro-housing prototype.

“I’m not saying these projects are perfect,” he said. “We wanted to show that urban regeneration is a process.”
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Behind the U.S. move to block Singapore-based Broadcom’s hostile bid for U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm lies a new global struggle for influence over next-generation communications technology — and fears that whoever takes the lead could exploit that advantage for economic gain, theft and espionage.

In the Broadcom-Qualcomm deal, the focus is on so-called “5G” wireless technology, which promises data speeds that rival those of landline broadband now. Its proponents insist that 5G, the next step up from the “4G” networks that now serve most smartphones, will become a critical part of the infrastructure powering everything from self-driving cars to the connected home.

5G remains in the early stages of development. Companies including Qualcomm, based in San Diego, and China’s Huawei have been investing heavily to stake their claim in the underlying technology. Such beachheads can be enormously valuable; control over basic technologies and their patents can yield huge fortunes in computer chips, software and related equipment.

“These transitions come along almost every decade or so,” said Jon Erensen, research director for semiconductors at research firm Gartner. “The government is being very careful to ensure the U.S. keeps its leadership role developing these standards.”

President Donald Trump said late Monday that a takeover of Qualcomm would imperil national security, effectively ending Broadcom’s $117 billion buyout bid. Broadcom said that it is studying the order and that it doesn’t believe it poses any national security threat to the U.S.

Higher stakes

It’s the second recent U.S. warning shot across the bow of foreign telecom makers. At a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in February, FBI Director Christopher Wray said any company “beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values” should not be able to “gain positions of power” inside U.S. telecommunications networks.

“That provides the capacity to exert pressure or control over our telecommunications infrastructure, it provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information and it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage,” he said.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House introduced a bill on Jan. 9 that would prohibit government purchases of telecoms equipment from Huawei Technologies and smaller rival ZTE, citing their ties to the Chinese military and backing from the ruling Communist Party. A few years earlier, a congressional panel recommended phone carriers avoid doing business with Huawei or ZTE.

The stakes are even higher in the 5G race. “Qualcomm/Broadcom is like the Fort Sumter of this technology battle,” said GBH Insights analyst Dan Ives, referring to the battle that kicked off the Civil War.

Although its name isn’t widely known outside the technology industry, San Diego-based Qualcomm is one of the world’s leading makers of the processors that power many smartphones and other mobile devices. Qualcomm also owns patents on key pieces of mobile technology that Apple and other manufacturers use in their products.

Compared to earlier generations of wireless technology, “we’re seeing China emerge and start to play a bigger role in the standards developing process,” Erensen said. Given a wave of consolidation in the telecom-equipment industry, fewer companies are involved “and the stakes are bigger,” he said.

National security

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, cited concerns about Broadcom’s penchant for cutting costs such as research spending. That could lead to Qualcomm losing its leadership in telecom standards, the committee wrote in a letter earlier in March.

Should that happen, Chinese companies such as Huawei, which the CFIUS has previously expressed concerns about, could take a larger, or even a dominant, role in setting 5G technology and standards and practices. That’s where national security concerns come in.

“Over time, that would mean U.S. government and U.S. technology companies could lose a trusted U.S. supplier that does not present the same national security counterintelligence risk that a Chinese supplier does,” said Brian Fleming, an attorney at Miller & Chevalier and former counsel at the Justice Department’s national security division.

Blocking the deal doesn’t eliminate Chinese influence on 5G development, of course. But it might slow it down, Fleming said: “They honestly believe they are helping to protect national security by doing this.”
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Sao Paulo investment firm SouthRock Capital has signed an agreement with Starbucks that gives it the right to develop and operate branches of the Seattle-based chain in Brazil, the companies said late on Monday.

With the agreement, whose value was not disclosed, all of Starbucks’ retail operations in Latin America are now wholly licensed rather than directly managed, the companies said.

SouthRock founder Ken Pope said in a statement the fund would eye expansion opportunities in new and existing markets.

Starbucks now has 113 stores across the populous states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

“With Starbucks, we see continued opportunities for growth in existing markets … as well as new markets like Brasilia and the South,” he said.

SouthRock, founded in 2015, also owns Brazil Airport Restaurants, which operates in the country’s biggest airports.

Shares in Starbucks opened up 0.5 percent but closed down 0.58 percent. The S&P 500 Index fell 0.64 percent.
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