Kia ora and welcome to your Tuesday morning recap of international business and political news.
First to Australia, where supermarket giant Coles has been accused of a “planned” campaign to mislead customers over price discounts, the ABC reported. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing Coles in a major Federal Court case.
ACCC legal counsel Garry Rich claimed the company had increased its prices for a short period before discounting them to a price that was actually more than, or the same as, the regular price. He said customers had been repeatedly deceived by the supermarket and the pricing was not "fair dinkum".
Officials from Ukraine are en route to Switzerland for another round of negotiations to end the ongoing war with Russia, Al Jazeera reported.
The latest talks follow two rounds of the United States-brokered negotiations held in the United Arab Emirates in January and early February. Russia and Ukraine had described both rounds of talks as constructive but failed to achieve any meaningful breakthrough.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hoped the trilateral talks in Geneva “will be serious, substantive” and “helpful for all of us”.
“But, honestly, sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things,” Zelensky said. “The Americans often return to the topic of concessions, and too often those concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, not Russia.”
Meanwhile, North Korea has built a new housing district in Pyongyang for families of soldiers killed while fighting with Russian forces in Ukraine. State media photos showed leader Kim Jong Un walking through the newly completed housing street.
About 6000 North Korean troops had been killed or injured in the conflict, the AP and AFP reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Chinese technology giant ByteDance has promised to curb a controversial artificial intelligence video-making tool, following threats of legal action from Disney.
Videos made using the latest version of Seedance had appeared online recently. But the trend had caused concern from several Hollywood studios about copyright infringement.
On Friday local time, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance accusing it of supplying Seedance with a "pirated library" of the studio's copyrighted characters, in a "virtual smash-and-grab" of intellectual property.
ByteDance told the BBC it respected intellectual property rights. "We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users."
In economic news, Japan’s economy grew just 0.1% in the December quarter, narrowly avoiding a technical recession. Economists had expected 0.4% expansion at the end of last year.
Private consumption drove the modest expansion, offsetting weakness in exports and public spending, according to Japan’s Cabinet Office, CNBC reported.
A worsening economic crisis in Cuba has caused an annual cigar festival in Havana to be suspended later this month. The festival had previously welcomed more than 1000 guests from around 80 countries, with attendees participating in auctions and touring tobacco plantations, CNBC said.
Premium Cuban cigars were globally recognised and considered of high economic importance as a key export and source of foreign currency.
Finally, YouTuber and wrestler Logan Paul has sold a very rare Pokémon trading card for a record-breaking US$16.5 million ($27.3m). He originally bought the Pikachu illustrator card for US$5.3m ($8.8m) in 2021, the BBC said.
Auction firm Goldin said the winning bidder was venture capitalist AJ Scaramucci, son of financier and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
