Town Hall News

By Katie Paul NEW YORK (Reuters) – Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday revealed the company’s next generation mixed reality headset, the Quest 3, as the company braces for Apple to potentially reshape a nascent market that Meta has dominated so far. Priced starting at $499, the device will be 40% thinner than the company’s previous headset and feature color mixed reality, which combines augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) […]

WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said on Friday he would propose amendments to a law on undue Russian influence he signed this week, reacting to criticism that it could result in banning opposition politicians from public office. Duda signed earlier this week into law the bill proposed by the ruling party to let a panel investigate whether opposition parties allowed Poland to be unduly influenced by Russia. He said […]

By Luc Cohen and Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Thursday stopped short of approving Deutsche Bank AG’s $75 million settlement with women who said that Jeffrey Epstein abused them, and that the German bank facilitated the late financier’s sex trafficking. At a hearing in Manhattan federal court to consider preliminary approval of the settlement, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said he needed more specifics about who […]

By Brendan Pierson (Reuters) – A federal appeals court, in a decision unsealed Wednesday, upheld the dismissal of a whistleblower lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson as a sanction for the plaintiffs’ misuse of confidential records they obtained through related litigation. The lawsuit, which accused J&J’s DePuy Orthopaedics unit of defrauding the federal government by marketing defective hip implants, was dismissed in December 2021. J&J has denied wrongdoing. U.S. Magistrate Judge […]

(Reuters) – Chemical makers Chemours Co, DuPont de Nemours Inc and Corteva Inc said on Friday that the companies have reached a settlement regarding all PFAS-related drinking water claims in the United States. The companies said they would collectively establish and contribute a total of $1.19 billion to a settlement fund for PFAS, or “forever chemicals”, which have been used for decades in manufacturing nonstick coatings such as Teflon. PFAS […]

KARACHI, Pakistan (Reuters) – Pakistan has passed a special order to allow barter trade with Afghanistan, Iran, and Russia for certain goods, the Ministry of Commerce said on Friday. Pakistan is in the midst of a crippling economic crisis and has foreign exchange reserves to cover just a month of imports. The order, called the Business-to-business (B2B) Barter Trade Mechanism 2023, allows for the import of gas and petrol from […]

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan and like-minded countries must be united and maintain sanctions on Russia until it ends its aggression in Ukraine, Japan’s foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said on Friday. “Judging from the situation and especially what Russia is saying and doing, I think it’s important that the G7 and like-minded countries still remain united and continue severe sanctions against Russia,” Hayashi told a press conference. He said he hoped […]

By Nathan Layne LACONIA, New Hampshire (Reuters) – When Casey DeSantis took to a New Hampshire stage on Thursday to talk about her advocacy work and share anecdotes about the travails of raising small children, Lisa Teeman was among the women in attendance whose face lit up with a smile. “She is a very strong woman,” said Teeman, a 62-year-old retired IT professional who had come to hear Florida Governor […]

By Milana Vinn, Abigail Summerville and David Carnevali NEW YORK (Reuters) – Barclays Chief Executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan held a virtual town hall this week to address management changes that have led to about two dozen U.S. investment bankers fleeing in the last few weeks, people familiar with the matter said. The bankers have left for rivals including Citigroup Inc, UBS Group AG and Jefferies Financial Group Inc, Reuters has reported. […]