OTTAWA (Reuters) -- Canada reached agreement for a new wage deal with a union representing 120,000 federal workers, the union said on Monday, bringing an end to the country’s largest public sector strike that had crippled services from tax returns to immigration. While the 120,000 Treasury Board employees were set to return to work, more than 35,000 revenue agency workers striking since April 19 were expected to continue into Monday, the union, which represents both groups, said in a statement. “Strike action continues across the country for 35,000 members at Canada Revenue Agency,” the union said, adding that talks would resume with a new mandate for a fair contract. Their key outstanding concerns include fair wages, the right to work remotely, and the role of seniority in layoffs. The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) union, which had been in collective bargaining for a new contract since 2021, ramped up pressure on the government last month by calling for the rare wide-ranging strike.

 

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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – U.S. financial authorities have taken possession of California’s troubled First Republic Bank, which will be acquired by JPMorgan Chase, government regulators announced Monday in the latest banking failure. First Republic had failed to come up with a workable rescue plan and last week disclosed that it had lost more than $100 billion in deposits in the first quarter, causing its shares to plummet. The federal government stepped in with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said (FDIC), an agency in charge of guaranteeing bank deposits, and the U.S. Treasury approaching six banks last week to gauge their interest in buying First Republic assets, a source told AFP last week on condition of anonymity. With its assets standing at $233 billion at the end of March, First Republic would be the second largest bank to fall in U.S. history -- excluding investment banks, like Lehman Brothers -- after Washington Mutual’s bankruptcy in 2008.

 

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LOS ANGELES (AFP) -- Hollywood faced a cliffhanger moment Monday as talks to avert a potentially catastrophic strike by thousands of TV and movie writers remained unresolved just hours before a crunch deadline. Major studios and networks including Disney and Netflix are locked in talks with the powerful Writers Guild of America (WGA), which has threatened to order a walkout just after midnight Tuesday unless a new deal is agreed. The last time talks failed, in 2007, Hollywood writers laid down their pens and keyboards for 100 days, costing the Los Angeles entertainment industry around $2 billion. This time, the two sides are clashing as writers demand higher pay and a greater share of profits from the boom in streaming, while studios say they must cut costs due to economic pressures.

 

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BRASÍLIA (AFP) -- Brazilian authorities were investigating the death of an Indigenous man who they say was shot by miners illegally encroaching on territory belonging to the Yanomami people. The incident, which occurred Saturday in the northern state of Roraima, also left two people injured, according to the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI). According to the G1 news outlet, the person who died was a 36-year-old man who had been shot in the head. Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in February launched a police and military operation to force out thousands of miners illegally occupying protected reserves belonging to the Indigenous Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest along the border with Venezuela, where gold prospectors are accused of sparking a humanitarian crisis. Yanomami leaders say some 20,000 clandestine miners have invaded their territory, killing Indigenous people, sexually abusing women and adolescents, and contaminating rivers with the mercury they use to separate gold from sediment.  Last week, the government decreed six new Indigenous reserves, including a vast Amazon territory, after a freeze in such expansion under leftist Lula’s far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. 

 

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ASUNCION (AFP) -- Paraguayans elected a president from the rightwing Colorado Party, in power for nearly eight decades, rejecting a center-left challenger who had railed against institutional corruption. Economist and former finance minister Santiago Pena, 44, won the election with more than 42 percent of votes cast, results showed with 90 percent of ballots counted. Sixty-year-old challenger Efrain Alegre of the Concertacion center-left coalition garnered 27.5 percent despite having had a narrow lead in opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s vote. The Colorado Party has governed almost continually since 1947 -- through a dictatorship and since the return of democracy in 1989, but has been tainted by corruption claims. 

 

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BANGKOK (Reuters) -- Thailand’s leading prime ministerial candidate, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, gave birth on Monday to a baby boy two weeks before elections in which she hopes to return to power the populist movement her father and aunt led before army coups ousted them. Paetongtarn, 36, announced the birth on her official Facebook and Instagram accounts with a photo of the newborn. Paetongtarn, who goes by the nickname Ung Ing, has been first or second in polls for voters’ favorite prime ministerial candidate throughout the campaign for the May 14 election, trading places with Pita Limjaroenrat of the progressive opposition Move Forward Party. Recent polls showing opposition parties with big leads could spell trouble for incumbent Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who first came to power in a 2014 coup that ousted an elected government that had been led by Paetongtarn’s aunt, Yingluck Shinawatra. Paetongtarn’s father and Yingluck’s brother, former telecommunications tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra was himself toppled in a 2006 military coup. Both Thaksin and Yingluck live in self-imposed exile to avoid prison convictions their allies say were designed to prevent their political comebacks.