Retailers are losing $100 billion a year from return fraud, bots and coupon stacking, study says | Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine | China tells its citizens to be on the lookout for spies | An Israeli-Saudi pact could upend the Middle East

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Retailers are losing $100 billion a year from return fraud, bots and coupon stacking, study says - CNBC

For the last three years, Robert has used a different email address to take advantage of a Black Friday Hulu promotion that most recently offered new customers a yearlong subscription for just $1.99 a month instead of the usual $7.99 monthly cost.

The social media manager has used similar tricks to score multiple first-time customer deals on sports betting websites and when buying Manga, a form of Japanese comics.Â

"I really don't have empathy for a major company. I genuinely just don't care," Robert, a 31-year-old who asked to be referred to by his first name only because of privacy reasons, said in an interview with CNBC from his home on Long Island, New York.Â

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Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine - Harvard Business Review

In our increasingly “squiggly” careers, where people change roles more frequently and fluidly and develop in different directions, the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn is vital for long-term success. It helps us increase our readiness for the opportunities that change presents and our resilience to the inevitable challenges we’ll experience along the way. Adaptive and proactive learners are highly prized assets for organizations, and investing in learning creates long-term dividends for our career development. Based on their experience designing and delivering career development training for over 50,000 people worldwide, the authors present several techniques and tools to help you make learning part of your day-to-day development.

Our capacity for learning is becoming the currency we trade on in our careers. Where we once went to work to learn to do a job, learning now is the job. Adaptive and proactive learners are highly prized assets for organizations, and when we invest in our learning, we create long-term dividends for our career development.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, shared that when assessing founders of potential investments, he looks for individuals who have an “infinite learning curve”: someone who is constantly learning, and quickly. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, echoed the importance of learning when he said, “The learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it all.”

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China tells its citizens to be on the lookout for spies - The Economist

A sea-cucumber farm is not an obvious target for spies. So when a group of foreigners turned up at one in north-east China last year, the owner, Mr Zhang, did not think much of it. According to state media, the guests received permission to install seawater-quality monitors. After they left, Mr Zhang noticed that the equipment was not working properly. It also had a mysterious, beeping antenna attached to it. So he called the authorities. They said it was transmitting strategic data on China’s oceans to “hostile powers”. The foreigners were found and arrested.

Stories like this, true or not, serve the purpose of China’s intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). It claims that the kind of espionage discovered by Mr Zhang is rampant—and ordinary Chinese must help to stop it. On August 1st the MSS joined WeChat, a popular messaging app, to implore “all of society” to look out for spies. This followed a comment by William Burns, the CIA director, that America had made progress in rebuilding its spy networks in China a decade after dozens of its sources were killed or disappeared.

The government is doing its part to increase public awareness. It has offered rewards of up to 500,000 yuan ($68,500) for reporting spies. In the city of Zhengzhou, warnings about foreign snoopers have been placed on the back of bus seats. Elsewhere officials are using leaflets, lectures and comic strips to get the message out. In the region of Xinjiang officials produced a short film depicting a spy disguised as an amateur photographer. The spy asks a taxi driver to take him to a military base. The alert driver takes him to the police.

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An Israeli-Saudi pact could upend the Middle East - The Economist

Muhammad bin salman does little to hide his relish at the prospect of a strategic pact between America, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In a rare television interview on September 20th, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and the country’s de facto ruler acknowledged with a smile that an agreement is on the cards. “Every day we get closer. It seems it’s for the first time real, serious.” A pact would, he said, be “the biggest historical deal since the Cold War.” On September 22nd Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, confirmed the trio of countries were “at the cusp” of a deal. It would, he said, be a “quantum leap”.

Formal diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia, the richest and arguably most influential Arab state, and Israel, the Jewish state which the kingdom has long ostracised, have been a long time coming. Since becoming crown prince in 2017, mbs, as Prince Muhammad is known, has held at least one secret meeting with Mr Netanyahu. Both countries have a shared rival in Iran and quietly do business deals. But in 2020 the Abraham accords were signed between Israel and several Arab states, without Saudi Arabia. Few expected Israel-Saudi ties to be formalised during the lifetime of the prince’s father, King Salman, who is of a generation for whom any relationship with Israel was unthinkable.

Yet the incentives to do a deal have sharpened. For the Saudis, the motivation is a new strategic alliance with America. The two countries have a security relationship but the kingdom wants a more formal defence pact, not least because Iran’s intensifying nuclear programme means it is now on the threshold of having nuclear weapons, upending the region’s security balance. The talks include the possibility of Saudi Arabia developing a civilian nuclear energy programme, with a uranium-enrichment facility run by Americans on Saudi soil, according to the Wall Street Journal, rather like Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, was originally American-run. While this effort would be civilian in nature, and America’s unspoken goal is to prevent a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, mbs says he reserves the right to pursue nuclear weapons if Iran crosses the threshold. “If they get one, we have to get one…but we don’t want to see that,” he said in his tv interview.

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