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| en:ecrit:articles-en [2025/07/22 07:58] – [Bald eagle's new status as the official US bird brings pride and hope to many Native Americans] natasha | en:ecrit:articles-en [2026/01/27 15:51] (current) – [English articles] natasha |
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| It's useful to read articles in English, even if you don't understand every word - it will help you increase your vocabulary and keep up to date with things happening in English-speaking countries! | It's useful to read articles in English, even if you don't understand every word - it will help you increase your vocabulary and keep up to date with things happening in English-speaking countries! |
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| //This page will be updated on **Mondays**. The first article is aimed at a B1 and upwards level and the second article is aimed at a B2 and upwards level // | //This page will ** not longer be updated**. We are working onf inding a solution. In the meantime time, you can use the archive to access older articles. The first article is aimed at a B1 and upwards level and the second article is aimed at a B2 and upwards level // |
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| ===== Rainbow armbands are dividing opinion at Euro 2025 ===== | ===== King Charles III leads Britain's Remembrance Sunday ceremony for war dead ===== |
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| By CIARÁN FAHEY AP Sports Writer | By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press |
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| Some captains are wearing them, some are not. | LONDON (AP) — King Charles III led Britain's annual ceremony of remembrance for the country's war dead on Sunday, under November sunshine and the shadow cast across Europe by the almost 4-year-old war in Ukraine. |
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| Rainbow armbands at the Women's European Championship are proving more divisive than perhaps intended for a symbol promoting tolerance and inclusion. | As Parliament's Big Ben bell tolled 11 a.m., thousands of military personnel, veterans and members of the public gathered in central London fell still for two minutes of silence, broken by a single artillery blast and Royal Marines buglers sounding "The Last Post." |
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| UEFA is giving team captains the option of wearing armbands with the bright colors of the rainbow flag or plain monocolored versions with the word "respect" when they play. | The 76-year-old king, dressed in the uniform of an army field marshal, laid a wreath of red paper poppies on a black background at the base of the Cenotaph war memorial. Erected over a century ago to honor the British and allied troops killed in World War I, it has become the focus of annual ceremonies for members of military and civilian services killed in that war and subsequent conflicts. |
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| "Standard yellow and blue armbands are provided to all teams and rainbow armbands are available upon request," UEFA told The Associated Press. | The national ceremony of remembrance is held every year on the nearest Sunday to the anniversary of the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. Similar memorial services are held in dozens of towns and cities across Britain and at U.K. military bases overseas. |
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| Both versions have been worn so far at the tournament in Switzerland, with the captains' choices facing scrutiny for the meaning behind their decisions. | A military band played as heir to the throne Prince William followed his father in laying a wreath on the simple Portland stone monument inscribed with the words "the glorious dead." |
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| **What it means** | Wreaths were also laid by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, other political leaders and diplomats from across the Commonwealth of Britain's former colonies. |
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| The rainbow armband is intended to show solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, while it also stands for diversity. | Queen Camilla, the Princess of Wales and other members of the royal family watched from their traditional place on a balcony of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. |
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| "UEFA is committed to making football a safe and welcoming environment for everybody, independent of who we love, our gender identification or gender expression," the governing body said before the women's Euro 2022, where it also gave team captains the option of wearing rainbow armbands. | Many of the wreaths were made of poppies, and most people in attendance wore paper poppies on their lapels. The scarlet flowers that bloomed on the muddy battlefields and makeshift graveyards of northern France and Belgium during World War I — made famous by the poem "In Flanders Fields" — have become a symbol of remembrance in Britain and other countries. |
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| UEFA faced criticism the year before when it nixed Munich's plans to illuminate its stadium in rainbow colors for Germany's game against Hungary during the men's European Championship. | Like many other NATO members, Britain has increased its defense spending since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Britain says it will spend 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035. |
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| The Germans wanted to protest to a law passed by Hungarian lawmakers the week before that prohibited sharing with minors any content portraying homosexuality or sex reassignment. | After the wreath-laying, some 10,000 military veterans with gleaming medals marched past the Cenotaph, accompanied by jaunty military music and applauded by well-wishers lining the sidewalks. Among them, in wheelchairs, were about 20 of the dwindling band of WWII veterans, the youngest of them 98 years old. |
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| **Who's wearing the rainbow armbands?** | Donald Poole, 101, who served in as a Royal Army Ordnance Corps explosives handler in the conflict that ended 80 years ago, said it was "a great honor to be able to pay tribute to the poor souls who have died in all conflicts. |
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| When Germany played France in their quarterfinal on Saturday, the German captain, Janina Minge, wore a rainbow armband while her French counterpart did not. | "I know how lucky I am to still be here thanks to all those who have fought and served, past and present," he said. "I also want to pay tribute to the civilian services who suffered during the Second World War, particularly the fire service, who saved so many lives during the Blitz — many of whom lost their own." |
| | ===== With pharaoh-like fanfare, Egypt unveils a huge new museum dedicated to its ancient civilization ===== |
| Switzerland captain Lia Wälti wore a rainbow armband in her team's quarterfinal against Spain the day before. Her opposite, Irene Paredes, did not. | |
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| Norway captain Ada Hegerberg wore a rainbow armband, as did Wales captain Angharad James, Iceland's Glódís Viggósdóttir, England's Leah Williamson and others. | |
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| England defender Lucy Bronze also wore a rainbow wristband during her team's quarterfinal win over Sweden, whose captain, Kosovare Asllani, also wore a rainbow armband. | |
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| Elena Linari became the first to wear a rainbow armband for Italy when she captained the side against Spain, but Cristiana Girelli wore a plain one when she returned for the quarterfinal against Norway. | |
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| **France chose 'respect' armband** | |
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| France captain Griedge Mbock Bathy suggested the rainbow armband's message is too restrictive because of its focus on LGBTQ+ rights. | |
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| "Highlighting a single issue also potentially excludes the others," she said. "We cannot champion a single cause through our diverse group because there are so many causes to defend." | |
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| Mbock said the France team is "so diverse that we cannot highlight just one cause. I think that the armband with the word 'respect' really represents what we want to convey as a message and that is the most important thing." | |
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| When told that nine of the 16 countries participating at Euro 2025 wear the rainbow armband, France coach Laurent Bonadei defended his team's choice not to. | |
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| "Our one has 'respect' written on it. Respect as a word gathers a lot of causes such as racism. I think the 'respect' one is really a nice one," Bonadei said. | |
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| **Controversy in Qatar** | |
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| Swedish player Nilla Fischer, the former Wolfsburg captain, was the first in Germany to wear the rainbow armband in the women's Bundesliga in 2017. She inspired others to follow suit, both in women's and men's sports. | |
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| Germany was a strong campaigner for rainbow armbands at the men's World Cup in Qatar in 2022. That developed into a showdown with FIFA over the compromise "One Love" campaign, which featured a rainbow-type heart design that was supposed to be a symbol against discrimination. It was still largely seen as a snub to the host nation, where homosexual acts are illegal and its treatment of migrant workers was a decade-long controversy. | |
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| FIFA banned the armbands and threatened to book team captains who wore them, leading the German players to cover their mouths for the team photo before their opening game, suggesting they were being silenced. | |
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| Germany's interior minister at the time, Nancy Faeser, who was also responsible for sports, wore a "One Love" armband in the stands beside FIFA president Gianni Infantino. | |
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| Qatari supporters later hit back by holding pictures of former Germany player Mesut Özil while covering their mouths during Germany's match against Spain. They were referring to the racist abuse in Germany of Özil, a German-born descendant of Turkish immigrants, who became a scapegoat for Germany's early World Cup exit in 2018. | |
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| Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann called for an end to political statements in 2024, saying they were too distracting for his players. The German men's team ultimately failed to deliver on the field. | |
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| AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer | |
| ===== The risks and rewards of tokenization as crypto heavyweights push for it ===== | |
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| By ALAN SUDERMAN AP Business Writer | |
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| As cryptocurrencies become more intertwined with the traditional financial system, industry heavyweights are racing for a long-sought goal of turning real-world assets into digital tokens. | |
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| "Tokenization is going to open the door to a massive trading revolution," said Vlad Tenev, the CEO of the trading platform Robinhood at a recent James Bond-themed tokenization launch event in the south of France. | |
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| Advocates say tokenization is the next leap forward in crypto and can help break down walls that have advantaged the wealthy and make trading cheaper, more transparent and more accessible for everyday investors. | |
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| But critics say tokenization threatens to undermine a century's worth of securities law and investor protections that have made the U.S. financial system the envy of the world. And Robinhood's push into tokenizing shares of private companies quickly faced pushback from one of the world's most popular startups. | |
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| **What is tokenization?** | |
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| The basic idea behind tokenization: Use blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies to create digital tokens as stand-ins for things like bonds, real estate or even fractional ownership of a piece of art and that can be traded like crypto by virtually anyone, anywhere at any time. | |
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| The massive growth of stablecoins, which are a type of cryptocurrency typically bought and sold for $1, has helped fuel the appetite to tokenize other financial assets, crypto venture capitalist Katie Haun said on a recent podcast. | By SAMY MAGDY Associated Press |
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| She said tokenization will upend investing in ways similar to how streamers radically changed how people watch television. | CAIRO (AP) — In an extravaganza of pharaonic imagery with a drone light show depicting ancient gods and pyramids in the sky, Egypt on Saturday inaugurated its long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, a megaproject aiming to give the country's millennia-old heritage a rich, modern display. |
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| "You used to have to sit there on a Thursday night and watch Seinfeld," Haun said. "You tune in at a specific time, you don't get to choose your program, you couldn't be watching a program like Squid Games from Korea. Netflix was market-expanding. In the same way, I think the tokenization of real-world assets will be market expanding." | Two decades in the making, the museum located near the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx is the centerpiece of the government's bid to boost Egypt's tourism industry and bring cash into the troubled economy. |
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| **Growing momentum** | At the elaborate grand opening ceremony, attended by a number of European and Arab royals and other presidents and prime ministers, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi sought to give the event an international scale. |
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| Robinhood began offering tokenized stock trading of major U.S. public companies for its European customers earlier this month and gave away tokens to some customers meant to represent shares in OpenAI and SpaceX, two highly valued private companies. | He called on attendees to "make this museum a platform for dialogue, a destination for knowledge, a forum for humanity, and a beacon for all who love life and believe in the value of humankind." |
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| Several other firms are diving in. Crypto exchange Kraken also allows customers outside the U.S. to trade tokenized stocks while Coinbase has petitioned regulators to open the market to its U.S. customers. Wall Street giants BlackRock and Franklin Templeton currently offer tokenized money market funds. McKinsey projects that tokenized assets could reach $2 trillion by 2030. | **A bid to join the ranks of the world's top museums** |
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| **Crypto's golden age** | The museum, known as GEM, is one of several megaprojects championed by el-Sissi since he took office in 2014, embarking on massive investments in infrastructure with the aim of reviving an economy weakened by decades of stagnation and battered by the unrest that followed the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. |
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| The push for tokenization comes at a heady time in crypto, an industry that's seen enormous growth from the creation and early development of bitcoin more than 15 years ago by libertarian-leaning computer enthusiasts to a growing acceptance in mainstream finance. | Egypt's pharaonic history has long made it a tourist magnet. But it has also long struggled to organize and display the sheer huge amount of artifacts — everything from tiny pieces of jewelry and colorful tomb murals to towering statues of pharaohs and animal-headed gods, with more as discoveries are constantly being made across the country. |
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| The world's most popular cryptocurrency is now regularly setting all-time highs — more than $123,000 on Monday — while other forms of crypto like stablecoins are exploding in use and the Trump administration has pledged to usher in what's been called the "golden age" for digital assets. | Touted as the world's biggest museum dedicated to a single ancient civilization, the new building, in contemporary style is a stark contrast. Its large, open halls give space for some 50,000 artifacts on display, along with virtual reality exhibits. It displays the entire collection of treasures from the tomb of the famed King Tutankhamun for the first time since its discovery in 1922. |
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| Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University, said the biggest winners in the push for tokenization could be a small handful of exchanges like Robinhood that see their trading volumes and influence spike. | The museum replaces the Egyptian Museum, housed in building more than a century old in downtown Cairo that — while elegant in its Neo-Classical style — had become antiquated and was often compared to a warehouse, overpacked with artifacts with little explanation. |
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| "Which is kind of ironic given the origins of crypto, which was to bypass intermediaries," Reiners said. | Construction on the $1 billion project began in 2005 under then-President Hosni Mubarak. But work was interrupted by turmoil surrounding the 2011 uprising that brought down the Egyptian strongman. Further delays ensued, and a planned grand opening over the summer had to be put off after the 12-day-long war between Israel and Iran erupted in June. |
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| **Trump bump** | GEM is expected to attract 5 million visitors annually, said Egypt's tourism and antiquities minister, Sherif Fathy. That would put it in the realm of the most popular museums in the world. In 2024, by comparison, Paris's Louvre brought in 8.7 million, the British Museum 6.5 million and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 5.7 million. |
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| Interest in tokenization has also gotten a boost thanks to the election of President Donald Trump, who has made enacting more crypto-friendly regulations a top priority of his administration and signed a new law regulating stablecoins on Friday. | **An elaborate opening ceremony** |
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| "Tokenization is an innovation and we at the SEC should be focused on how do we advance innovation at the marketplace," said Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins. | Saturday night's grand opening stoked the pharaoh-mania. |
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| **Is it legal?** | As an orchestra played fanfares, lines of actors dressed in ancient Egyptian garb arrayed around the museum, the pyramids and the Sphinx. Hundreds of drones created a light show in the sky, depicting well-known Egyptian gods like Isis and Osiris and the pyramids. |
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| Securities law can be complex and even defining what is a security can be a hotly debated question, particularly in crypto. The crypto exchange Binance pulled back offerings of tokenized securities in 2021 after German regulators raised questions about potential violations of that country's securities law. | El-Sissi posed with delegates from more than 70 countries, including members of the royal families from Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Jordan, Gulf Arab nations and Japan, and a number of European and regional presidents and prime ministers. It was a throwback to the grand opening of another megaproject in Egypt, the 1869 inauguration of the Suez Canal, when Egypt's rulers gathered a host of European royal families. |
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| Under Trump, the SEC has taken a much less expansive view than the previous administration and dropped or paused litigation against crypto companies that the agency had previously accused of violating securities law. | **Ramses the Great and King Tut** |
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| Hilary Allen, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law, said crypto companies have been emboldened by Trump's victory to be more aggressive in pushing what they can offer. | The museum boasts a towering, triangular glass façade imitating the nearby pyramids, with 24,000 square meters (258,000 square feet) of permanent exhibition space. |
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| "The most pressing risk is (tokenization) being used as a regulatory arbitrage play as a way of getting around the rules," she said. | It opens to a granite colossus of Ramses the Great, one of ancient Egypt's most powerful pharaohs who reigned for around 60 years, from 1279-1213 B.C., and is credited with expanding ancient Egypt's reach as far as modern Syria to the east and present-day Sudan to the south. The statue greets visitors once they step inside the museum's angular atrium. |
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| However, the SEC has struck a cautionary tone when it comes to tokens. Shortly after Robinhood's announcement, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has been an outspoken crypto supporter, issued a statement saying companies issuing tokenized stock should consider "their disclosure obligations" under federal law. | The museum's 12 main galleries, which opened last year, exhibit antiquities spanning from prehistoric times to the Roman era, organized by eras and by themes. |
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| "As powerful as blockchain technology is, it does not have magical abilities to transform the nature of the underlying asset," Peirce said. | Two halls that will be opened for the first time after Saturday are dedicated to the 5,000 artifacts from the collection of King Tutankhamun — a boy pharaoh who ruled from 1361-1352 B.C. The tomb was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 in the southern city of Luxor. The old Egyptian Museum did not have enough room to display the whole collection. |
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| **All eyes on private companies** | The collection includes the boy pharaoh's three funeral beds and six chariots, his golden throne, his gold-covered sarcophagus and his burial mask, made of gold, quartzite, lapis lazuli and colored glass. |
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| One of the most closely watched areas of tokenization involves private companies, which aren't subject to strict financial reporting requirements like publicly traded ones. | Zahi Hawass, Egypt's most renowned archaeologist and former minister of antiquities, said the Tutankhamun collection is the museum's masterpiece. |
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| Many hot startups are not going public as often as they used to and instead are increasingly relying on wealthy and institutional investors to raise large sums of money and stay private. | "Why this museum is so important, and everyone is waiting for the opening?" he told The Associated Press. "Because of Tutankhamun." |
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| That's unfair to the little guy, say advocates of tokenization. | **Boost to tourism and economy** |
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| "These are massive wealth generators for a very small group of rich, well-connected insiders who get access to these deals early," said Robinhood executive Johann Kerbrat. "Crypto has the power to solve this inequality." | Officials hope the museum will draw more tourists who will stay for longer periods and provide the foreign currency needed to shore up Egypt's battered economy. |
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| **"Please be careful"** | The government has also revamped the area around the museum and the nearby pyramids and the Sphinx. New highways were built, and a metro station is being constructed nearby. An airport, Sphinx International Airport, has also opened west of Cairo — 40 minutes from the museum. |
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| But Robinhood's giveaway of tokens meant to represent an investment in OpenAI immediately drew pushback from the company itself, which said it was not involved in Robinhood's plan and did not endorse it. | The tourism sector has suffered during years of political turmoil and violence following the 2011 uprising. In recent years, the sector has started to recover after the coronavirus pandemic and amid Russia's war on Ukraine — both countries are major sources of tourists visiting Egypt. |
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| "Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval—we did not approve any transfer," OpenAI said on social media. "Please be careful." | A record number of about 15.7 million tourists visited Egypt in 2024, contributing about 8% of the country's GDP, according to official figures. Fathy, the tourism minister, said about 18 million tourists are expected this year, with authorities hoping for 30 million visitors annually by 2032. |
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| Public companies have strict public reporting requirements about their financial health that private companies don't have to produce. Such reporting requirements have helped protect investors and give a legitimacy to the U.S. financial system, said Allen, who said the push for tokenized sales of shares in private companies is "eerily familiar" to how things played out before the creation of the SEC nearly a century ago. | This will translate into more jobs and pump foreign currency into the economy, said Walid el-Batouty, a tour guide. |
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| "Where we're headed is where we were in the 1920s," she said. "Door-to-door salesmen offering stocks and bonds, half of it had nothing behind it, people losing their life savings betting on stuff they didn't understand." | "It will be boost the economy of Egypt tremendously not just the hotels and the museum itself," he said. Whenever a tourist rides a cab or even just buys a bottle of water, "that is pumping money" into Egypt's coffers, he added. |
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| | Associated Press journalist Ahmed Hatem in Cairo contributed to this report. |
| ==== Article Archive ==== | ==== Article Archive ==== |
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