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Greece's Parliament Poised To Vote On Austerity Measures

Greece’s parliament is expected to approve the controversial austerity measures struck Monday with the country’s creditors, but opposition to the agreement is tearing apart the ruling left-wing Syriza party.

Joanna Kakissis, who is reporting for NPR from Athens, tells our Newscast unit that Syriza was elected six months ago to end austerity. She says:

“[M]ore than half of the leftist party’s central committee signed a statement slamming the deal signed by their leader, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis compared the deal to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which crushed Weimar Germany and helped fuel World War II.”

“These negotiations failed because the creditors refused the only issue that would put Greece on a viable path again,” Varoufakis said, “the issue of debt relief.”

Tsipras maintains that though the deal signed Monday was flawed, the alternative, an exit from the eurozone, was worse.

Parliament is expected to vote tonight on the agreement.

Debt relief for Greece was the focus of a study released Tuesday by the International Monetary Fund, one of Greece’s creditors, which called the country’s debt burden “highly unsustainable.” The fund said it would not support the new bailout unless the agreement reduced the country’s debt burden.

That position puts the Washington-based IMF in conflict with Greece’s other creditors — the eurozone and the European Central Bank. The New York Times notes:

“The deal announced Monday morning stated that the creditors would not forgive any Greek debt and offered only a general assurance of further discussions about reducing annual debt payments by stretching out payment periods or reducing interest rates.

“The fund’s decision to go public with its stance suggested that the draft agreement would be only the starting point for further negotiations about the sustainability of Greece’s debt and the willingness of its lenders to recognize they might not get all their money back.”

Greece owes its creditors about $330 billion, according to the Times, an amount that has been estimated to be 177 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

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Walmart Challenges Amazon 'Prime Day' With Rival Sale

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It might be the middle of July, but retailers are staging a Black Friday style event on Wednesday. At midnight, Amazon will offer its Prime members — people who pay $99 a year — thousands of items at discounted prices for one day. But Walmart is punching back.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

It may be mid-July, but there’s a Black Friday-style sales event tomorrow. At midnight Pacific Time, Amazon is putting thousands of items on discount for one day – but only for its Prime members, the people who pay $99 a year for perks like free shipping. And as NPR’s Jason Margolis reports, Wal-Mart is punching back.

JASON MARGOLIS, BYLINE: The idea started innocently enough, a birthday party of sorts.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: On July 15, which is the eve of Amazon’s 20th birthday, we’re introducing Prime Day, a one-day global shopping event offering Prime members more deals than Black Friday.

MARGOLIS: Wal-Mart quickly countered, offering its own online sale with the tagline, low prices – no admission fee. In a blog post, Wal-Mart’s CEO, Fernando Madeira, said, the idea of asking customers to pay extra in order to save money just doesn’t add up for us.

Amazon Prime’s vice president, Greg Greeley, came back in an email, the idea of charging your in-store customers more than your online customers doesn’t add up for us.

So in this battle of the retail heavyweights, who emerges as today’s winner? Stephen Beck is a managing partner with the consulting firm cg42.

STEPHEN BECK: I think what Wal-Mart did was a typical miscalculation by an older, slower competitor. So Amazon decided to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and Wal-Mart decided to make it a bigger deal by also celebrating its 20th anniversary.

MARGOLIS: Celebrating Amazon’s birthday, that is.

OK. How about a second referee? Brian Yarbrough, a consumer research analyst with the company Edward Jones says, no question – Amazon knocked down Wal-Mart this week. He says Wal-Mart is grasping at straws.

BRIAN YARBROUGH: One-hundred percent. I definitely think it is a confused message when you go back and look at what they’ve been doing over the last few months.

MARGOLIS: He says this because Wal-Mart is offering its own version of Prime – a $50 online membership. Yarbrough says that undercuts its message today that you shouldn’t have to pay a premium to get an online deal.

YARBROUGH: It’s funny because the management team, they’ve talked about how, well, we’re going to get away from gimmicky sales, it’s all going to be about every day low price, et cetera, and here we are…

MARGOLIS: Promoting a gimmicky sale. Ultimately, Wal-Mart’s counterpunch boils down to one thing, says Greg Maloney, the CEO of the retail division of JLL.

GREG MALONEY: The real question is, are they going to be able to lure new customers, or will they be able to lure Amazon customers over to their site or to their store? And being just a value retailer, I don’t think that’s possible to get all those shoppers.

MARGOLIS: And what about Wal-Mart shoppers? What do they think of all of this? We went to the Wal-Mart in Secaucus, N.J. and spoke with shoppers there. None were paying attention to the tit-for-tat online membership fees. Shoppers like Vanessa Thompson are only paying attention to one thing.

VANESSA THOMPSON: I go wherever the deals are.

MARGOLIS: She shops at both Amazon Prime and Wal-Mart, and she’s delighted they’re having a price war for her benefit. Jason Margolis, NPR News.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

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New Student Loans For A New For-Profit Education Sector

President Obama tours the Louisville-based tech company Indatus with Indatus president Philip Hawkins, left.

President Obama tours the Louisville-based tech company Indatus with Indatus president Philip Hawkins, left. Carolyn Kaster/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Carolyn Kaster/AP

Coder Bootcamps. Accelerated Learning Programs. New Economy Skills Training.

Whatever you call them, these new players in higher education are multiplying. The intensive programs say they can teach job-ready skills in technology, design and related fields. In record time.

In three or four months of really long days, students with little prior experience are getting up to speed in the latest programming languages with Hack Reactor, General Assembly or Dev Bootcamp. Typically, the cost is $10,000 to $20,000.

Schools like Dev Bootcamp is promise to teach students how to write code in two or three months and help them get hired as web developers, often within days or weeks of graduation.

Schools like Dev Bootcamp is promise to teach students how to write code in two or three months and help them get hired as web developers, often within days or weeks of graduation. Jeff Chiu/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Jeff Chiu/AP

The sector predicts 16,000 graduates this year, compared with 48,700 bachelor’s degree recipients in computer science. Many go on to six-figure jobs in the software industry.

One fan of these programs is President Obama. In March, the White House announced the TechHire initiative to help communities recognize, and hire, bootcamp graduates in order to close the famous “skills gap.”

“There’s a lot more we can do together to make sure that more Americans benefit from a 21st century economy,” Obama said to the nation’s mayors. “Folks can get the skills they need in newer, streamlined, faster training programs.”

These programs are also notable for what they’re not. They’re not publicly funded. They’re not traditionally accredited. That means they can’t offer federally subsidized student loans or Pell Grants.

So what if you want to quit your dead-end job and move to the East Bay or Silicon Alley to crush code? You could tap your savings or put it on credit cards. That favors those with family or personal resources.

Perhaps as a result, enrollment in the bootcamps is predominantly male, white, and people with some prior college experience.

As of the past year or so, another option has emerged. You can now finance your bootcamp education through a startup student lender such as Skills Fund, Pave or Earnest.

Students learning to code at General Assembly in New York City.

Students learning to code at General Assembly in New York City. Courtesy of General Assembly hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of General Assembly

“Most of our programs have guaranteed financing,” says Shawn Drost, a cofounder of Hack Reactor. “We ship the private lenders our sheets of graduates and defaulters and they end up charging like 10 percent interest, and students pay it back within in a year.” He says about half his students take advantage of these private loans. General Assembly says it’s 15 to 20 percent.

A new company, Affirm, has just this week entered the bootcamp lending business. It says it will lend to riskier bootcamp borrowers at annual interest rates up to 20 percent.

“It’s progressive underwriting,” says VP Brad Selby, who previously worked at Paypal (Affirm CEO Max Levchin, a Paypal founder, is well known in the tech scene). “We want to approve more people.”

Affirm looks at publicly available information, including LinkedIn profiles, to assess risk. They also check applicants’ bank account usage, with permission.

Yet another Silicon Valley lender, Upstart, offers one of the more controversial takes on student financing: what is called a human capital contract. Students at a data science bootcamp program called Metis can apply for funds in exchange for a percentage of their future income.

All this educational and financial innovation is coming at an interesting moment. The for-profit college sector as a whole has been facing government crackdowns, lawsuits, and declining enrollment.

One of the biggest recurring accusations made against companies like Corinthian Colleges has been of predatory lending — that they pushed students to borrow private loans, often directly from the college itself, and that students had little hope of repaying the money either because the graduation rate or the market value of the degree was so low.

At the same time, for-profit colleges have been heavily dependent on federal student aid, so much so that the government created the 90-10 rule, specifying that at least 10 percent of their revenue had to come from some other source besides student loans and Pell Grants.

The perception right now is that the bootcamps are providing a much better deal for students than the typical for-profit program. Both the educators, like Drost, and the lenders, like Selby, like to use the financial term ROI — return on investment.

The accelerated programs report graduation and job placement rates above 90 percent. Of course, these are no more independently verified than similar numbers reported over the past decade by for-profit colleges and technical schools.

And here’s where it really gets interesting. The old players are starting to move into the new market. In 2014, Kaplan Inc., the owners of Kaplan University, purchased Dev Bootcamp and cofounded Metis. And just this month, the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, has invested in bootcamp program called the Iron Yard, based in South Carolina.

Perhaps coincidentally, just as these legacy companies move into the bootcamp world, the Department of Education has signaled its willingness to make traditional student aid available to short-term programs.

The most likely way this could happen, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education and several sources, would be through partnerships with accredited colleges. The Department of Education is holding a meeting this month with some industry players.

In the meantime, some bootcamp founders are sounding a note of caution. While they like the idea of broadening access, they’re nervous about the details.

“We’re really proud of the fact that this industry we’ve helped build is getting this attention and focus,” says Jake Schwartz, the cofounder of General Assembly. “We just want to make sure that we’re very careful in how we roll out this process of getting the government involved.”

Citing some of the persistent problems in for-profit colleges that are dependent on subsidies, he adds, “This industry is still nascent and I don’t want it to become a gold rush land grab for government money. That’s the worst that could happen.”

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Here’s what happened in e-commerce this week

Happy Weekend! E-Commerce Weekender is a collection of our favorite e-commerce news of the week from BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s paid research service. DESKTOP COMMERCE DIMINISHES AS MOBILE GAINS POPULARITY:  Mobile devices are quickly gaining popularity as…


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Tired Of Greek Reruns? Understandable, But A New Season Is Beginning

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras speaks with reporters after meeting with eurozone leaders in Brussels on Monday. The leaders reached a tentative agreement on a bailout program that provides cash in exchange for changes in the way the Greek government operates.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras speaks with reporters after meeting with eurozone leaders in Brussels on Monday. The leaders reached a tentative agreement on a bailout program that provides cash in exchange for changes in the way the Greek government operates. Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP

Is news coverage of Greece wearing you down? Too many deals and deadlines?

It’s no wonder. The “Greek debt crisis” has been in progress for nearly six years, making it easy to assume that we’re seeing just another crazy episode in a long-running drama.

But European leaders are saying this time it really is different. Here’s why:

After a marathon summit that ran into Monday morning, eurozone leaders stood united, agreeing to bail out a deeply indebted Greece for a third time. But this time, the money will come only if very tough conditions are met.

“This was high drama: 17 hours of uninterrupted negotiations of 19 leaders,” Germany’s U.S. ambassador, Peter Wittig, told NPR. “This was a critical moment.”

“In the end, the leaders agreed and came to a compromise,” he said. “And this is the important conclusion: They are paving the way for new aid for Greece — with conditions, with strings attached.”

Wittig said that in the past, Europeans provided bailout money, but without requiring Greece to change the practices that had led to fiscal trouble. For example, the Greek government does a very poor job of collecting taxes.

Europe To Greece: Change Now

Now, Europeans are demanding that their Greek neighbors change — by Wednesday — to get more help. Germany and other European nations will provide up to $96 billion in emergency funding over the next three years to allow Greece to keep making payments to creditors and get its fiscal house in order.

But that will happen only if lawmakers in Athens agree on Wednesday to overhaul the country’s expensive pension system and reform the value-added tax system to boost revenues.

Parliament also must agree to selling off Greek utilities and some land, and weakening the power of labor unions, among other concessions.

Only after such changes are approved will the bailout parties, which include the International Monetary Fund and euro member states, work out the final agreement for keeping Greece out of default and inside the eurozone.

That plan would include debt relief in the form of longer periods to repay loans.

Wittig said the first two bailouts “didn’t succeed the way we wanted them to succeed because there was a lack of implementation on the Greek side,” he said. Going forward, Europeans first must have “confidence that the recipient of this aid is implementing what is needed.”

It’s Up To Greek Lawmakers

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is trying to unite lawmakers behind this last-ditch effort. The world’s major stock markets rose on hopes Monday that he will succeed.

IHS Global Insight Senior Economist Diego Iscaro predicts that Tsipras will indeed get the legislature’s cooperation because Greece’s economic suffering has become so severe. Without Parliament’s acquiescence to the bailout terms, the Greek banking system may soon start to collapse, deepening the economic depression.

With agreement, Greece’s short term prospects will improve.

But the long term will still be a question mark because there remains “the very real prospect of Greece being unable to meet the targets demanded by its lenders” over time, Iscaro said.

What would happen then is anyone’s guess. But for now, the country has a shot at reopening its banks and restarting its economy. And that’s different.

“Those were really tough negotiations, but in the end this was a very important achievement,” Wittig said.

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Follow #RaceOnTech, Explore Diversity In Tech And Science

Follow the #RaceOnTech hashtag on Twitter to participate in a conversation about diversity in STEM fields.

Follow the #RaceOnTech hashtag on Twitter to participate in a conversation about diversity in STEM fields. Mary McLain/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Mary McLain/NPR

Silicon Valley admits it has a diversity problem. Companies from Google to Facebook to Twitter have reported that a majority of their employees are white males.

This spring, after a nationwide social media callout and with the help of NPR member stations, we received nearly 200 nominations for diverse innovators who are breaking new ground in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. We picked 14 finalists from around the country to feature as part of the #RaceOnTech series on radio and on social media.

Beginning today, a dozen innovators will live-tweet a day in their lives, using the hashtag #RaceOnTech. Follow @NPRAllTech as NPR’s Davar Ardalan moderates and curates conversations with rising stars and tech and science leaders from Nashville to New Orleans to New York. During the next four days, influencers in the tech and science fields will offer insights and share their own stories.

Join the conversation, share your story or ask your burning question using #RaceOnTech. See the full schedule below.

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Nintendo Chief Satoru Iwata Dies At 55

Satoru Iwata, seen here at a press conference in Tokyo in 2009, helped lead Nintendo back to ascendancy in the early 2000s.

Satoru Iwata, seen here at a press conference in Tokyo in 2009, helped lead Nintendo back to ascendancy in the early 2000s. Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images

Satoru Iwata, the president and CEO of Nintendo for more than a decade, has died at the age of 55.

“Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth,” the video game company announced Sunday night in a very brief statement.

Iwata assumed the mantle of chief executive at Nintendo in 2002, replacing Hiroshi Yamauchi and becoming only the fourth president in the company’s 125-year history — and the first outside the Yamauchi family to serve in that role.

But Iwata’s relationship with the company began much earlier, when he started at HAL Laboratory, a video game developer closely associated with Nintendo. As Wired reports:

Iwata was a rarity in the gaming industry: a corporate president whose background was in game programming. He joined the Tokyo-based developer HAL Laboratory fresh out of college in the early 80s, and immediately began working as a programmer, helping to create classic games like Balloon Fight and the Kirby’s Dream Land series for Nintendo.

Since taking the top spot at Nintendo, Iwata’s fortunes with the company had been somewhat up and down. He oversaw not only the disappointment of the underwhelming GameCube system, but also the development and release of the handheld Nintendo DS and the Wii console, both of which have been partly credited with leading a turnaround of sorts at the company in the 2000s.

Iwata’s health had suffered in the past two years, NBC News reports:

Iwata had undergone surgery in June 2014 to remove a growth on his bile duct, causing him to miss the company’s annual shareholders meeting. In a statement to shareholders at the time, Iwata said his doctors were confident that they had detected the growth early and that he had no symptoms from the growth.

Iwata had returned to his duties in October of last year. Despite signs of recovery then, Iwata recently missed this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, an important annual conference in the video game industry.

Nintendo has not yet announced a successor for Iwata.

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