News Headlines - 30 March 2019

▽SoftBank Said to Be Sidelined by Soccer Clubs in FIFA's New Cup - Bloomberg

SoftBank Group Corp. has been cut out of plans for a new, lucrative, 24-team soccer tournament after high-profile clubs voiced concern about the Japanese company’s share of the profit, according to people briefed on the matter.
SoftBank was previously set to act as a lead investor, along with an international consortium, in a $25 billion proposal for a new Club World Cup and an international tournament.
However, some clubs were concerned about the amount of profit the Japanese company might have made from the enterprise, said the people briefed on the revamped version, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

▽Lyft Is About to Flood San Francisco with Even More Millionaires | Vanity Fair

Lyft on Friday became the first ride-sharing company to go public, hitting the NASDAQ at an I.P.O. price of $72 per share before popping as much as 20 percent, valuing Lyft at nearly $30 billion. The public offering represents a windfall for venture-capital firms and private investors, who had sunk $4.9 billion into Lyft over the past five years. Rakuten, General Motors, Fidelity, and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to rake in billions.

▽Honda says 16th U.S. death confirmed in air bag rupture：The Asahi Shimbun

Honda Motor Co. said on Friday it had confirmed a 16th U.S. death has been tied to a faulty Takata air bag inflator.
The Japanese automaker said that after a joint inspection Friday with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration it had confirmed a faulty air bag inflator was to blame for a June 2018 death of a driver after the crash of a 2002 Honda Civic in Buckeye, Arizona.
The defect, which leads in rare instances to air bag inflators rupturing and sending metal fragments flying, has prompted the largest automotive recall in U.S. history and is tied to 14 U.S. deaths in Honda vehicles and two in Ford Motor Co. vehicles since 2009.

▽Comedian set to win first round of Ukraine presidential vote | Reuters

Ukrainians exhausted by five years of war and decades of official corruption look set to send a comedian with no political experience into a second round run-off against the incumbent when they vote in Sunday’s presidential election.
The favorite in Sunday’s first round vote is Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a political novice who plays a fictitious Ukrainian president in a popular TV series and who, in real life, has tapped into an anti-establishment mood among voters.
Many opinion polls put the serving president, Petro Poroshenko, in second place, a result that would set up a run-off between him and Zelenskiy next month, with a hard-to-predict final outcome.

▽Sigur Rós band members charged with tax evasion by Icelandic authorities | The Guardian

Members of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós have been charged with tax evasion, three years after local authorities launched a probe into the avant-garde rock band’s finances.
The indictment, issued by the district prosecutor on Thursday, accuses the musicians of submitting incorrect tax returns from 2011 to 2014, evading a total of 151m Icelandic krona (£945,000).