Business
IMF recognises scale of disaster as country battles floods | The Express Tribune
KAMALIA:
Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said on Sunday that Pakistan has been in close contact with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the global lender has shown understanding on the ongoing crisis, triggered by the recent floods.
During a visit to Kamalia tehsil in Toba Tek Singh, one of the worst-hit areas, the minister said, the government is prioritising and preferring to use domestic resources before seeking additional funds. “The whole world is watching the difficulties being faced by the Pakistani people,” he remarked.
Aurangzeb noted that infrastructure, including roads, bridges, and houses, had been badly damaged. He added, it would be inappropriate to send electricity bills to residents in disaster-hit zones at this stage.
Expressing gratitude, saying that the loss of life in Toba Tek Singh remained minimal, the minister prayed for the floodwaters to recede quickly so that farmers could begin planting the next crop. “We will rebuild the infrastructure and restore it to its original condition,” he assured.
Aurangzeb also praised the scale of the ongoing relief operation, calling it unprecedented in the country’s history. He extended special thanks to the Pakistan Army for their role in rescue and relief activities.
Earlier on Friday, the IMF expressed concern and deep sorrow over the loss of lives in Pakistan’s recent devastating floods and announced that its second economic review mission would also assess the disaster’s impact on the economy, as well as the financial requirements for the recovery and reconstruction.
According to sources, the IMF team will evaluate whether Pakistan’s fiscal policies and emergency measures are sufficient to deal with the crisis.
TOKYO: Japanese carmaker Honda Motor will make India a global manufacturing hub for its upcoming electric, Honda 0 α (alpha), whose prototype was unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show.The car has been developed for the Indian and Japanese markets, apart from other Asian countries. Its India debut will be in fiscal 2026-27. Honda Motor Co president and global CEO Toshihiro Mibe said the launch will further the company’s goal to achieve carbon neutrality and zero traffic collision fatalities worldwide by 2050.Honda 0 α (alpha) will be manufactured at Honda’s plant in Alwar, Rajasthan. Honda also launched other electric prototypes, including a green saloon. Honda India MD and CEO Takashi Nakajima said India is one of the top three markets for the company globally in terms of corporate focus and investments. Speaking on the eve of Honda’s new car launch at the Japan Mobility Show, Nakajima said, “Our top management has decided to focus on India among the three key markets for Honda’s future growth alongside the US and Japan.” Nakajima acknowledged that while Honda’s business scale in India is still low compared to the US or Japan, its future ambitions are substantial.He admitted that expanding the product line-up in India will take several years, but hinted at imminent progress. “India is one of the most promising and exciting markets in the world today. Our two-wheeler business is already very big, and now we aim to pursue strong growth in our four-wheel business by building both brand and volumes.” On ethanol blending, Nakajima said that while the higher ratio of ethanol posed challenges, Honda’s engineers were up to it. (The writer is in Tokyo at the invitation of Honda Motor Co.)
The titans of the technology sector are ramping up their spending on artificial intelligence, as they rush to reap the benefits of an AI boom that has pushed stocks to record highs.
Earnings reports from Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft on Wednesday reaffirmed the colossal amounts of money these firms are shelling out for everything from data centres to chips, even as questions swirl about returns on the investments.
Meta said its capital expenditures for 2025 will be between $70bn (£53bn) to $72bn, up from an earlier estimate of $66bn to $72bn.
Its spending growth in 2026 is poised to be “notably larger” than this year, the company said. Meta is seeking to compete with companies like OpenAI.
On a call with analysts, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg defended the firm’s investments, saying he saw big opportunities ahead driven by AI, both in terms of new products and for honing its current business selling ads and feeding people content.
“The right thing to do is accelerate this,” he said, adding later: “We are sort of perennially operating the family of apps and ads business in a compute-starved state at this point.”
Google and YouTube owner Alphabet similarly raised its forecast for this year to $91bn to $93bn, up from an earlier outlook of $85bn in the summer, in the latest sign of its increasingly lofty spending goals,
That estimate is nearly double the capital expenditures that the company reported for 2024.
Microsoft’s capital expenditures in the quarter through to 30 September, including on data centres, totalled $34.9bn, the company reported on Wednesday – a larger spending figure than analysts had expected, and up from $24 billion in the previous quarter.
“We continue to increase our investments in AI across both capital and talent to meet the massive opportunity ahead,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said.
Azure, the firm’s cloud computing unit, and Microsoft’s other AI products have a “real-world impact”, Mr Nadella said.
Exuberance among investors about massive AI spending has helped all three tech firms outperform the broader S&P 500 index.
But Wall Street is also focused on whether these firms’ investments are starting to yield tangible returns.
The two things holding up the US economy in the last several months have been consumers and AI-related business investments, said Aditya Bhave, senior US economist at Bank of America.
“To the extent that the latter remains strong, it’s a bullish signal for GDP growth,” he said.
Imran Rahman-Jones,Technology reporter and
Lily Jamali,North America Technology correspondent
Getty ImagesWebsites for Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft returned to service late on Wednesday after experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites around the world over several hours.
Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365 saw delays with Outlook among other services, but by 21:00GMT, many websites that went down were once again accessible after the company restored a prior update.
The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services” at 16:00 GMT.
It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.
Amazon said AWS was operating normally.
Other sites that were impacted in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile phone operator O2 – while in the US, people reported issues accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
The M&S website remained unavailable late on Wednesday even after many others returned online.
Microsoft said business Microsoft 365 customers experienced problems.
Some web pages on Microsoft also directed users to an error notifications that read “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”
The tech giant resorted to posting updates to a thread on X after some users reported they could not access the service status page.
While NatWest’s website was temporarily impacted, the bank’s mobile banking, web chat, and telephone customer services remained available during the outage.
Meanwhile, business at the Scottish Parliament was suspended because of technical issues with the parliament’s online voting system.
The outage prompted a postponement of debate over land reform legislation that could allow Scotland to intervene in private sales and require large estates to be broken up.
A senior Scottish Parliament source told BBC News they believed the problems were related to the Microsoft outage.
Azure’s crucial role online
Exactly how much of the internet was impacted is unclear, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at around 20% of the global cloud market.
The firm said it believed the outage was a result of “an inadvertent configuration change”.
In other words, a behind-the-scenes system was changed, with unintended consequences.
The concentration of cloud services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google means an outage like this “can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”
Recent outages have laid bare the fragility of the modern-day internet, according to engineering professor Gregory Falco of Cornell University.
“When we think of Azure or AWS, we think of a monolithic piece of technology infrastructure but the reality is that it’s thousands if not tens of thousands of little pieces of a puzzle that are all interwoven together,” said Mr Falco.
He noted that some of those pieces are managed by the companies themselves while others are overseen by third parties such as CrowdStrike, which last year deployed a software update that affected more than eight million computers run on Microsoft systems.
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