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US ends aid to Palestinian refugee agency (Lead)
Washington, Sep 1 (IANS) US President Donald Trump’s administration has decided to end all funding to the UN agency tasked with supporting Palestinian refugees and call for a large reduction in the number of Palestinians considered to be refugees.
A formal announcement with respect to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is expected in the next few weeks, a senior administration official told CNN late Friday.
The State Department on Friday described the agency as “irredeemably flawed” and that the US administration has “carefully reviewed” the issue and “will not make additional contributions to UNRWA”.
The US has for long been the biggest individual donor to UNRWA, established by the UN General Assembly in 1949 to take care of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
It donated more than $350 million to the agency in 2017.
The official told CNN that the decision was made at a meeting between Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a White House senior adviser and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but that US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley had also been pushing for the move.
UNRWA offers educational, health and social services across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to registered Palestinian refugees.
The agency educates about 500,000 children in nearly 700 schools and its doctors see more than 9 million patients in nearly 150 primary health clinics every year.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the move was an “assault” against his people, the BBC reported.
A spokesman for UNRWA, Chris Gunness, slammed the US move in a series of tweets.
“We reject in the strongest possible terms the criticism that UNRWA’s schools, health centres, and emergency assistance programmes are ‘irredeemably flawed’,” he wrote.
Friday’s announcement comes after the US said in January that it would withhold $65 million, from an initial instalment of $125 million it was expected to hand over to UNRWA at the start of the year.
Washington said it wanted UNRWA to reform and believed other countries should increase the amounts they contributed to the agency.
–IANS
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International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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