by Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati & Ugo Panizza -- FT.com (Financial times) Daily Digest -- Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati are on the law faculties at New York University and the University of Virginia, respectively. Ugo Panizza is a professor of economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Lebanon’s debt crisis is a slow moving train wreck. For three years it has been unable to implement reforms necessary for an IMF program — including a requirement to make progress in debt negotiations with private creditors. And when it does move ahead with creditor talks, it faces a heightened risk of holdouts.

Lebanon’s holdout risk derives from its confusing choice to not use Aggregated Collective Action Clauses, or CACs. These clauses, created to ameliorate the problem of holdout creditors, were widely adopted by sovereign debtors starting roughly a decade ago. The innovation allows a debtor to conduct a single aggregated vote across all of its bonds that will be binding, even for dissenters. Holdouts would be deterred, it was thought, because the size of the position needed to hold out would be large. But rather than adopting Aggregated CACs, Lebanon stuck with its old non-aggregated clauses.  The end result: Lebanon’s international bonds require the approval of 75 per cent of the holders, in principal amount, for each bond series before key terms can be modified. Those single-series CACs, combined with the fact that Lebanon’s foreign currency bonds are trading at less than ten cents on the dollar, are blood in the water for specialist distressed-debt sharks (see here, here, here and here). But maybe not. Buried in the typical sovereign bond contract is a “manifest error” clause. This section doesn’t get much attention because it covers technical corrections; matters so minor that the debtor and the agents can fix them without approval from the creditors.

To protect against its misuse, the manifest error clause normally comes with two conditions:

1) The changes may not adversely affect the interests of any creditor.

2) The fiscal agent/trustee has to approve the change. Having a trustee who is agent for the bondholders, as opposed to a fiscal agent, is better for the creditors, but that’s not relevant here as we will see.

by Story by hchowdhury@insider.com (Hasan Chowdhury) -- Tech firms are pretty obsessed with AI right now. But if their leaders aren't obsessed enough, they could see invaluable workers walk right out the door to work for those who are. In other words, AI is posing a bit of a brain-drain problem – and tech CEOs will need to act fast or risk losing their very best talent. Here's the latest example: Elon Musk, who announced his new company xAI on Wednesday – part of his mission to take on OpenAI, DeepMind and Google – managed to poach a bunch of workers from his AI arch-rivals to establish his founding team. Among the 12 men making up the new company are some of the most sought-after AI talent from rival firms: Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss and Guodong Zhang of Google-owned DeepMind, Yuhuai Wu, Zihang Dai and Christian Szegedy of Google, Kyle Kosic of OpenAI.

What's notable is just how many of those workers come from Google and DeepMind, which made a drastic move in April to create a combined entity willing to put aside internal schisms in the face of the common threat that is ChatGPT. The search giant has been in a bit of panic since the launch of ChatGPT in November, rushing to release rival chatbot Bard just two months afterwards amid fears OpenAI's chatbot could pose an existential threat to its core business. But there has been a sense that Google is lagging well behind OpenAI, which has had a boost to its generative AI capabilities thanks to the backing (and billions of dollars) of Microsoft. First impressions count, after all, and the first impressions haven't been in Google's favor. It's part of the reason why several talented workers got up and left the search giant and headed towards Silicon Valley's land of milk and honey, OpenAI. Even before ChatGPT's launch, Google workers seemed fed up and decided to jump ship to OpenAI to help launch ChatGPT.

By arabnews.com — LONDON: Judge Rosine Hujaili, counselor at the Court of Appeal in Beirut, issued on Tuesday a ruling sentencing journalist …

Al Arabiya — A video showing a worker at a daycare center in Lebanon hitting a toddler and an infant drew anger …