80 із цих олігархів, пише «Проєкт», зараз перебувають під санкціями, але лише 14 із них потрапили під обмеження всіх союзниківУкраїни
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До державного бюджету України надійшов грант в розмірі 1,25 млрд доларів від США через Цільовий фонд донорів Світового банку, повідомила у понеділок пресслужба Міністерства фінансів України.

«В 2023 році Україна вже отримала 8,45 млрд доларів США грантових коштів прямої бюджетної підтримки від США. Від початку повномасштабної війни до держбюджету України вже надійшло 20,4 млрд доларів грантових коштів від Сполучених Штатів», – йдеться в повідомленні.

Залучене грантове фінансування, кажуть в Мінфіні, спрямують на відшкодування видатків держбюджету, зокрема, на оплату праці працівників державних органів та виплат ВПО, особам з інвалідністю, малозабезпеченим сім’ям, виплату житлово-комунальних субсидій тощо.

«Безповоротна фінансова допомога від Сполучених Штатів є надзвичайно важливим елементом у підтримці держбюджету України під час опору повномасштабній агресії РФ. Черговий грант допоможе уряду України відшкодувати пріоритетні видатки соціальної та гуманітарної сфери», – прокоментував міністр фінансів Сергій Марченко.

Міністерство фінансів запевняє, що за використанням прямої бюджетної підтримки уряду США в Україні постійно діє моніторинг і перевірки за узгодженими процедурами.

 
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У Сумах станом на ранок понеділка 13 людей перебувають у гуртожитку після евакуації через удар російськими силами по місту, їм надано тимчасове місце проживання. Про це заявив міський голова Сум Олександр Лисенко в ефірі Радіо Свобода (проєкт «Свобода.Ранок»).

«Думаю, що сьогодні-завтра вони повернуться у свої квартири. Тому що ми швидко виконуємо ремонтні роботи. І намагаємось швидко відновити перебування у квартирах», – сказав Лисенко.

За його словами, місцева влада продовжує відновлювати постраждале внаслідок російської атаки житло.

«Ми займаємось облаштуванням можливості продовжувати життя в квартирах людей, які були евакуйовані вночі. Саме в ту ніч трагічну вони були евакуйовані до рідних, але ми також вивозили людей в гуртожитки. І зараз займаємось тим, що вставляємо вікна. В семи будинках повилітали вікна. Є два гуртожитки. Відстань, де повилітали вікна, щоб ви розуміли, до 700 метрів. Тобто поруч, які знаходяться будинки, вони всі постраждали», – зазначив міський голова Сум.

У ніч на неділю російські війська завдали ракетного удару по навчальному закладу в Сумах. Двоє людей загинули і двадцятеро – постраждали.

 
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The Teamsters said on Sunday that the union was served a notice that Yellow Corp. is ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy. 

“Yellow has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement. 

Yellow did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment. 

Earlier in the day, The Wall Street Journal reported about the closure of the trucking firm’s operations which cited notices sent to customers and employees. Last week, WSJ also reported that the company has laid off a large number of workers. 

Earlier this month Yellow averted a threatened strike by 22,000 Teamsters-represented workers, saying the company will pay the more than $50 million it owed in worker benefits and pension accruals. 

The company said on Thursday it is exploring opportunities to divest its third-party logistics company Yellow Logistics Inc. and is engaged with multiple interested parties. 

Its customers include large retailers like Walmart WMT.N and Home Depot, manufacturers and Uber Freight, some of which have paused cargo shipments to the company for fear those goods could be lost or stranded if the carrier went bankrupt. 

In 2020, the Donald Trump-led government rescued the company with a $700 million pandemic relief loan in exchange for a 30% stake. 
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At the entrance to Missouri prisons, large signs plead for help: “NOW HIRING” … “GREAT PAY & BENEFITS.”

No experience is necessary. Anyone 18 and older can apply. Long hours are guaranteed.

Though the assertion of “great pay” for prison guards would have seemed dubious in the past, a series of state pay raises prompted by widespread vacancies has finally made a difference. The Missouri Department of Corrections set a record for new applicants last month.

“After we got our raise, we started seeing people come out of the woodwork, people that hadn’t worked in a while,” said Maj. Albin Narvaez, chief of custody at the Fulton Reception and Diagnostic Center, where new prisoners are housed and evaluated.

Public employers across the U.S. have faced similar struggles to fill jobs, leading to one of the largest surges in state government pay raises in 15 years. Many cities, counties and school districts also are hiking wages to try to retain and attract workers amid aggressive competition from private sector employers.

The wage war comes as governments and taxpayers feel the consequences of empty positions.

In Kansas City, Missouri, a shortage of 911 operators doubled the average hold times for people calling in emergencies. In one Florida county, some schoolchildren frequently arrived late as a lack of bus drivers delayed routes. In Arkansas, abused and neglected kids remained longer in foster care because of a caseworker shortage. In various cities and states, vacancies on road crews meant cracks and potholes took longer to fix than many motorists might like.

“A lot of the jobs we’re talking about are hard jobs,” said Leslie Scott Parker, executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives.

Lingering vacancies “eventually affects service to the public or response times to needs,” she added.

Workforce shortages worsened across all sorts of jobs due to a wave of retirements and resignations that began during the pandemic. Many businesses, from restaurants to hospitals, responded nimbly with higher wages and incentives to attract employees. But governments by nature are slower to act, requiring pay raises to go through a legislative process that can take months to complete — and then can take months more to kick in.

Meanwhile, vacancies mounted.

In Georgia, state employee turnover hit a high of 25% in 2022. Thousands of workers left the Department of Corrections, pushing its vacancy rate to around 50%. The state began a series of pay raises. This year, all state employees and teachers got at least a $2,000 raise, with corrections officers getting $4,000 and state troopers $6,000.

The Georgia Department of Corrections used an ad agency to bolster recruitment and held an average of 125 job fairs a month. It’s starting to pay off. In the first week of July, the department received 318 correctional officer applications — nearly double the weekly norm, said department Public Affairs Director Joan Heath.

Almost 1 in 4 positions — more than 2,500 jobs — were empty in the Missouri Department of Corrections late last year, which was twice the pre-pandemic vacancy rate in 2019.

Missouri gave state workers a 7.5% pay raise in 2022. This spring, Gov. Mike Parson signed an emergency spending bill with an additional 8.7% raise, plus an extra $2 an hour for people working evening and night shifts at prisons, mental health facilities and other institutions. The vacancy rate for entry level corrections officers now is declining, and the average number of applications for all state positions is up 18% since the start of last year.

At the Fulton prison, where staff shortages have led to a standard 52-hour work week, newly hired employees can earn around $60,000 annually — an amount roughly equal to the state’s median household income. The prison also is proposing to provide free child care to correctional officers willing to work nights.

If prison staffing is too low, “it can get dangerous” for both inmates and guards, Narvaez said.

Public safety concerns also have arisen in Kansas City, where a country music fan attacked before a concert last month waited four minutes for a 911 call to be answered and an hour for an ambulance to arrive. About one-quarter of 911 call center positions are vacant — “a huge factor” in the longer wait times to answer calls, said Tamara Bazzle, assistant manager of the communications unit for the Kansas City Police Department.

In Biddeford, Maine, a 15-person roster of 911 dispatchers dipped to just eight employees in July as people quit a “pressure cooker job” for less stress or better pay elsewhere, Police Chief JoAnne Fisk said. The city is now offering fully certified dispatchers $41 an hour to help plug the gaps on a part-time basis — $10 an hour more than comparable new workers normally would earn.

This month, Biddeford also launched a $2,000 bonus for city employees who refer others who get jobs. That comes a year after Biddeford adopted a four-day work week with paid lunch periods to try to make jobs more appealing, said City Manager Jim Bennett.

To attract workers, other governments have dropped college degree requirements and spiced up drab job descriptions.

Nationally, the turnover rate in state and local governments is twice the average of the previous two decades, according federal labor statistics.

Uncompetitive wages were the most common reason for leaving cited in exit interviews, according to a survey of 249 state and local government human resource managers conducted by MissionSquare Research Institute, a Washington, D.C. -based nonprofit. The hardest positions to fill included police and corrections officers, doctors, nurses, engineers and jobs requiring commercial driver’s licenses.

Along Florida’s east coast, the Brevard County transit system and school district have been competing for bus drivers. On days when drivers are lacking, the transit system has cut the frequency of bus stops on some routes. The school system, meanwhile, has asked some bus drivers to run a second route after dropping children off at school, often resulting in the second busload arriving late.

Since 2022, the county has twice raised bus driver wages to a current rate of $17.47 an hour. The school board recently countered with a $5 increase to a minimum $20 an hour for the upcoming school year. The goal is to hire enough drivers to regularly get kids to class on time, said school system communications director Russell Bruhn.

In Arkansas, the goal is to get foster kids into permanent homes in less than a year. But during the first three months of this year, the state met that target for just 32% of foster children — well below the national standard of over 40%. More than one-fifth of the roughly 1,400 positions in the Arkansas Division of Children and Family Services are vacant.

Many new employees leave in less than two years because of heavy caseloads and the “very difficult, emotionally tolling work,” Mischa Martin, the Department of Human Services’ deputy secretary of youth and families, told lawmakers last month.

“If we had a knowledgeable, experienced workforce,” she said, “they would be able to work cases in a better way to get kids home quicker.”
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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said Saturday that Sri Lanka is a key partner in a Tokyo-led initiative aimed at building security and economic cooperation around the Indo-Pacific but also at countering an increasingly assertive China.

Sri Lanka, strategically located in the Indian Ocean, is integral to realizing a free and open Indo-Pacific, Hayashi said. He was speaking after a meeting with his Sri Lankan counterpart, Ali Sabry, in the capital, Colombo.

The initiative, announced by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in March includes Japan’s assistance to emerging economies, support for maritime security, a provision of coast guard patrol boats and equipment and other infrastructure cooperation.

Last year Sri Lanka, which owed $51 billion in foreign debt, became the first Asia-Pacific country since the late 1990s to default, sparking an economic crisis.

While Japan is Sri Lanka’s largest creditor, about 10% of its debt is held by China, which lent Colombo billions to build seaports, airports and power plants as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. In March, China agreed to offer Sri Lanka a two-year moratorium on loan repayments.

Hayashi said that he conveyed expectations for further progress in Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring process. He welcomed Sri Lanka’s efforts under an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, which includes anti-corruption measures and transparency in the policy-making process.

Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Sabry said that he, along with Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, invited Japan to resume investment projects already in the pipeline and to consider fresh investments in sectors such as power generation, ports and highways, and dedicated investment zones, as well as in the green and digital economy.

Over many decades, Japan became one of Sri Lanka’s key donors, carrying out key projects under concessionary terms. However, relations between the two countries came under strain after Wickremesinghe’s predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, unilaterally scrapped a Japan-funded light railway project following his election in 2019.

Sri Lanka’s Cabinet has already approved a proposal to restart the railway project.

Rajapaksa was forced to resign in July 2022 amid angry public protests over the country’s worsening economic crisis.
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NIAMEY, Niger — The European Union has cut off financial support to Niger, and the United States has threatened to do the same after military leaders this week announced they had overthrown the democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum.

Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world, receiving close to $2 billion a year in official development assistance, according to the World Bank.

It is also a key security partner of Western countries such as France and the United States, which use it as a base for their efforts to contain an Islamist insurgency in West and Central Africa’s Sahel region. Previously seen as the most stable country among several unstable neighbors, Niger is the world’s seventh-biggest producer of uranium.

Niger’s foreign allies so far have refused to recognize the new military government led by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, previously head of the presidential guard, who officers declared head of state on Friday.

Bazoum has not been heard from since early Thursday when he was confined within the presidential palace, although the European Union, France and others say they still recognize him as the legitimate president.

“In addition to the immediate cessation of budget support, all cooperation actions in the domain of security are suspended indefinitely with immediate effect,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement.

Niger is a key partner of the European Union in helping curb the flow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. The EU also has a small number of troops in Niger for a military training mission.

The EU allocated $554 million from its budget to improve governance, education and sustainable growth in Niger over 2021-2024, according to its website.

The United States has two military bases in Niger with some 1,100 soldiers, and it also provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the country in security and development aid.

“The very significant assistance that we have in place for people in Niger is clearly in jeopardy,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. U.S. support depends on the continuation of democratic governance, he said.

The United Nations said the coup has not affected its deliveries of humanitarian aid.

It is unclear how much support the military junta has among Niger’s population. Some crowds came out in support of Bazoum on Wednesday, but the following day coup supporters were demonstrating in the streets.

The Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, will hold an emergency summit in Nigeria on Sunday to discuss the situation.

After an emergency meeting on Friday, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council issued a statement demanding the military return to their barracks and restore constitutional order within 15 days. It did not say what would happen after that.
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