The Ultimate Job Seeker’s Guide to LinkedIn - TIME

The Ultimate Job Seeker’s Guide to LinkedIn Posted: 13 Jul 2016 03:00 AM PDT As of June 2016, the unemployment rate sits at 4.9% — roughly where it was ten years ago today. But in the decade since, much has changed. The Great Recession took the economy on a wild ride, making job seekers clutch their resumes close to their chests. The “Gig Economy” came into being, and many who were once employed in their career of choice found new jobs as drivers, errand runners, and temps of all stripes. And of course the process of finding jobs changed radically, too. The dominance of big job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder is no more. Now the most sought-after gigs go to people who know people. This is where the LinkedIn comes in. Born in 2002 in co-founder Reid Hoffman’s living room, the social network is now the de facto career destination on the web. Neither a job board, company review website, nor an online gossip mill, LinkedIn is the go-to portal for professional networking, offering a variety of tools toward that end. Job seekers (both active and passive) who once regarded every turn of phrase on their CV as a competitive secret now post their job experience online with pride. LinkedIn currently has 433 million members from more than 200 countries. According to comScore, the site’s age demographics are the most balanced in all of social media. As of late 2014, 35% of its users were between 18-34 years old, 40% were 35-54, and 25% were age 55 and over. It’s also a user base that’s consistently growing — two people join LinkedIn per second, with recent college graduates representing the bulk of the site’s new members. But why are they coming? That is the big question behind the popularity and utility of LinkedIn. With cash-strapped employers offering fewer benefits and people feeling simultaneously overworked and under-employed, the loyalty that once shored up the workforce has eroded. Now workers make lateral move after lateral move like a real-world Frogger, occasionally leaping up another level in their professional life. And to move up — or over — they need to have connections. That’s where LinkedIn comes in. Here’s what you need to know to master it. The LinkedIn Homepage After you sign up for LinkedIn and build your profile (more on that below), the LinkedIn homepage serves as the starting point for your business-oriented online dealings. Structured like the infinitely scrolling news feeds of Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn’s interface is designed for interaction. It wants you to give virtual high-fives and pats on the back to your colleagues and contacts — and to help you connect you with even more of them. At the top of the homepage in black is the navigation bar, which serves as the launch pad for many interactions on the site. The search window takes up a lot of space on this strip. That’s because LinkedIn wants its users to seek out former (and future) colleagues, companies, and other organizations. The advanced search link next to the search windows lets users further tap the vast amounts of professional data that people plug into this social network. On a related note, this user data is what makes LinkedIn so valuable, both professionally and financially. In fact, partly because of this vast trove of professional information, Microsoft recently purchased LinkedIn for about $26 billion, one of the largest technology acquisitions ever. But back to the navigation bar. On the top right you’ll also find icons (with alert badges) for messages from other users, notifications from LinkedIn, and connection invitations. If you’re an active LinkedIn user, clearing the alerts on these three icons can be a Sisyphean task — especially because the social network will throw some suggestions in them to keep your account whirring. If you’re an “inbox zero” type, you might want to unsubscribe from that philosophy while using this site. And finally, in the right corner of the navigation bar is the account and settings icon. This is where you can adjust things like privacy preferences, languages, and account types. LinkedIn is free to use, but it also offers a “premium” version for $30 per month. That may seem like a steep rate, but it’s a popular offering — the social network raked in $532 million in LinkedIn Premium fees in 2015 alone. Below the navigation bar is the dashboard, a not-so-subtle prompt by the company for users to plug more information into their personal page. Within this panel you’ll see how many connections you have, as well as a link to information about how many people have viewed your profile recently. Yes, unlike Facebook and Twitter, on this social network you can see who has been scoping you out — well, some of them. For a complete list, you’ll need to subscribe to LinkedIn Premium. (Now you can see why so many people pay up.)  Below the dashboard are the usual social media tools, which let users add content to the site’s feed, including status updates, photos, and posts. On LinkedIn, status updates and posts are distinctly different pieces of information. A status update is a good way to say whatever is on your mind, or to share links that you think your professional contacts would find interesting. Posts are articles that you can publish on LinkedIn. Clicking on “publish a post” opens a text editing page that lets users add rich media including images, videos, presentations, tweets, and even podcasts to your LinkedIn feed. It’s a very good professional publishing tool. Once you create and share these updates, images, or other media, they all go into that infinite scroll that your contacts see on their LinkedIn homepages. Finally, in the right-hand column of the LinkedIn homepage is the “keep in touch” box. A horizontally scrolling carousel of your contacts, this is LinkedIn’s way of encouraging interaction among its users. The idea is that liking a recent update or sending a quick message to a former colleague can be a great way to get you two working together again. Hey, it can’t hurt, right? Your LinkedIn Profile The secret to getting the most out of your LinkedIn experience is straightforward: you’ve got to put your best effort into making a rich and vibrant LinkedIn profile. If you don’t believe me, take recruiters’ word for it. According to a 2014 survey by recruiting platform Jobvite, 93% of hiring managers look at people’s social profiles before deciding to hire them. So set all your Facebook posts to private, delete any inadvisable tweets, and let LinkedIn be your face to the professional world. The first step in doing that actually involves your face — make sure to post a profile picture on your account. According to LinkedIn, people are 14 times more likely to open a profile with a photo attached to it. As for what makes a good profile picture (should you smile or not?), there are different schools of thought. Recruiters spend lots of time looking at LinkedIn and have excellent advice for crafting attention-getting profiles.  Beyond the photo, there’s still much to be done in crafting an effective LinkedIn profile. Just as important as including a profile photo and your name is writing a headline for your profile. Found just below your name on your profile, the headline — along with your current job title — is one of few bits of information shown when your profile is found by LinkedIn’s search engine, so make it a good one. Just make sure not to repeat your job title there. Instead, use the headline like a newspaper editor would: to grab a person’s attention and compel him or her to read on. One way to do this is to write your headline (and as much of your profile as possible) around keywords specific to the job you want (not necessarily the job you’ve got). To do this, pull up a job listing you may be interested in, note the important terms, and then weave them into your profile, starting with the headline. So, for instance, you may feel like you’re just a lowly staff accountant, but in the headline, you become a “Experienced Corporate Accountant With Experience Handling Millions in Billables.” Lo and behold, lowly no more. Next on the profile is the summary panel. Similar to the “objectives” area at the top of a resume, this is where LinkedIn users can write a brief blurb about who they are and what they do. But unlike on a resume, this spot is a good place to get creative and let your personality show. In other words, feel free to write in the first person here (it comes across as friendly and engaging) and go ahead and mix in personal and volunteer passions to paint a full, vivid portrait of who you really are. The idea is to give people more reasons to interact with you online, and eventually — hopefully — in person, too. Another major element of your LinkedIn Profile is the experience panel. This is more or less your resume, repackaged for the web. And don’t just stop with your current gig — fill this out as far back as it’s applicable. Profiles are 12 times more likely to be viewed if they list more than one job, says LinkedIn. But don’t make it difficult on yourself. Feel free to copy and paste as well as elaborate or curtail the keystrokes you’ve already painstakingly pecked out for your resume. But again, mind the tip above about keywords. If you want to be the person that people find on LinkedIn, you need to promote yourself as the person they are looking for. And if you’re good at your job (or even if you aren’t), don’t hesitate to brag. Listing your various skills is another way to get eyeballs coming your way. As easy as clicking a box, listing your skills will prompt your contacts to endorse your talents. And these endorsements look great to hiring managers when they check out your profile. Rather than cramming everything onto an 8.5×11-inch page, LinkedIn lets its users go much further in promoting themselves, especially through the other various sections that the profile allows. Beyond the typical resume section headers for education, outside activities, and awards the site lets users include other important information like test scores, advice for contacting, and even causes you care about. And the more information that you include on your profile, the more likely it is to be served up in other users’ search results. So grab that keyboard and start writing. Making Connections A connection, LinkedIn’s version of Facebook’s friends and Twitters followers, is what happens when two people on LinkedIn acknowledge they know each other in some capacity. And this makes an important difference between LinkedIn and those other sites — you don’t have to agree with or like your LinkedIn connections, since they aren’t your friends or followers. You merely need to know them. (And really, that’s not even an official requirement.) Connections are important to LinkedIn for the reasons they are important in the physical world: The more you have, the more opportunities become available to you. For example, say you work in sales and want to sell your wares to someone at Acme Corp. Searching for Acme Corp. on LinkedIn, you discover that you don’t know anyone who works there. But you do know someone who knows someone who works there (what LinkedIn calls a “second degree” connection). And now you can ask your connection for an introduction to that person. So, it pays to know people. As involved as the profile-making process on LinkedIn can be, all that effort pays off when you start making connections. For instance, if you told LinkedIn you went to a particular school, it will use that information to help you find fellow classmates. Likewise, if you worked at a certain company for a period of time, LinkedIn will cross-reference its database to help you connect with co-workers from your tenure there. So, the more information you give LinkedIn, the more connections it can help you make. Another way to bulk up on your connections is to simply click the “grow your network” link on the LinkedIn homepage. LinkedIn has an impressive suggestion engine that mines lots of online data to figure out the people you are interacting with. To do this, LinkedIn documents who you search for online and even in your email. Is it creepy? It sure can be. But the service is also free — and of course you know that nothing is truly free. (Note: There are ways to minimize the data you share with LinkedIn, but they also reduce the service’s effectiveness. To access these, select the “privacy” link on the account and settings icon on the righthand side of the navigation bar.) Other ways to make more connections on LinkedIn is to be active on the site. Posting frequent status updates and commenting or liking others will circulate your name on other peoples’ LinkedIn feeds, potentially helping your profile to catch their eye. Likewise, publishing posts on LinkedIn will circulate content with your name attached to it, helping to promote you as a thought leader in your line of work. You can also bolster your LinkedIn network by joining groups there. A way for users to share news and have discussion with other users who aren’t necessarily connections, LinkedIn’s groups feature is an excellent way to do some old fashioned networking on a newfangled social network. However, there is a minor challenge in using this feature: You have to find quality groups. As with many new social media features, people rushed to make groups, and then, in many cases, users didn’t follow. But active groups can be a great way to make connections that you might otherwise miss. The Future of Work When Microsoft announced its plans to acquire LinkedIn, it said its goals were to “accelerate the growth of LinkedIn as well as Microsoft 365.” That means that the LinkedIn we see today most likely will not be the same as the LinkedIn of tomorrow. But then again, nothing successful ever stands pat in the business world. And neither do ambitious LinkedIn users. There are many more features to LinkedIn than were mentioned in this guide. But the ones mentioned here serve as a solid foundation for getting the most out of your experience on the professional social network. But to use it right, you need to use it frequently, and in that, LinkedIn can be a bit of a rat race. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. But if you can’t work hard at improving yourself professionally, what does that say about the effort you put in on the job?

6 Things Recruiters Look For in Your LinkedIn Profile - TIME Business

6 Things Recruiters Look For in Your LinkedIn Profile

Posted: 13 Jul 2016 03:00 AM PDT

The saying, as it goes, is that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Most people in the job market barely even get a first chance. 

According to an eye-tracking study by The Ladders, recruiters spend six seconds on average looking at a resume. LinkedIn profiles get even less time. According to Heather Whaley, a principal with Hunt Executive Search, these six things stand out when scanning through profiles to fill positions:

1. Are You Smiling In Your Photo? 

Though it’s not mandatory for your profile photo, a smile will help more than it hurts. “I definitely recommend smiling in a photo,” says Whaley. Flashing some teeth can make you seem more approachable, and that, after all, is the name of the job hunting game. 

But don’t worry about getting professional headshots done, she says. Whaley’s own profile photo was taken using an iPhone while on a date a couple years ago. But it’s key that you still look like your image. “Don’t use a military photo from 15 years ago,” she says.

2. Write a Meaningful Headline

In many ways, the profile’s headline is its most important element, because it’s the one piece of information, other than your photo and current position, that shows up on LinkedIn searches. 

“It should say something about who you are professionally,” says Whaley. That means it shouldn’t say “actively seeking opportunities,” even if you are. Instead, it should say something like “an experienced warehouse manager in the beverage industry.”

3. Treat Your Career History Like a Resume, Sort Of

Whaley points out that LinkedIn is actually not a job hunting or recruiting site — it’s a professional networking site. So, not only should you not worry about being there, you should also populate it with your most current job history. That said, keep in mind that it’s a public forum, so if there’s information in your CV that should remain private (like how much revenue a department you managed brought in), simply leave it out. 

Also unlike your resume, you don’t have to sweat over formatting very much. And if you’re unsure of how to word your profile or if you should even be on the site, just look up your boss. Whaley almost guarantees he or she is on there.

4. Who Are Your Connections?

Who you connect with on LinkedIn can be a challenging thing to wrap your head around. On the one hand, users may be reluctant to connect with people that they hardly know (or don’t regard well) because they feel that their professional reputation is tied to it. On the other hand, the more connections you make on LinkedIn, the more opportunities may flow your way. 

Whaley looks at people’s connections on the site for a couple of reasons. “I would never discredit somebody because they don’t have any shared connections of mine, but there is an instant level of confirmation or comfort when I see that we share a first- second- or third-degree connection,” she says. “If I know that they are in my circle of connections . . . that tells me that if I really cared to, I could check them out.” Also though, if she does share connections with a person, it’s a great icebreaker when striking up a conversation, either online or in person.

5. Keep Your Education Up to Date

Here’s a behind-the-scenes LinkedIn hack that worth taking note of. When searching for perspective job candidates on LinkedIn, recruiters can ask the site’s search engine to only return results of people with certain educational degrees. So if you typically lop off that M.A. in Art History, you might want to put it (or any other educational information) back in. Otherwise you risk losing out.

6. Endorsements Versus Recommendations

There are two ways that people can praise your work on LinkedIn. Endorsements are quick hits, something that LinkedIn prompts users to do on the site. Whaley says endorsements tend to have more weight in filling the lower- and mid-level jobs, because HR generalists are using LinkedIn exclusively to fill open positions. It’s easier to find people with the necessary skills when they’ve been endorsed for them.

Recommendations, meanwhile, take a little more initiative to attain — either someone will write one for you because they are so impressed with your work, or they’ll write one for you because you asked them to (and hopefully they were also still impressed with your work). Because recommendations take more effort, they carry more weight with recruiters, says Whaley. “A recommendation is synonymous with a reference,” she says.

This Company Just Became the Biggest IPO of 2016 - Fortune

This Company Just Became the Biggest IPO of 2016

Posted: 14 Jul 2016 01:52 PM PDT

Call it a big fish in a small pond: With 2016 on track to record the fewest U.S. IPOs since the Great Recession, Line Corp. is officially the biggest of the bunch. The Japanese messaging app maker began trading Thursday after raising $1.14 billion in its highly anticipated IPO earlier this week, making Line the biggest company to go public on a U.S. stock exchange so far this year.
Line stock, which is listed under the ticker symbol “LN,” surged as much as 36% in its debut—one of the best first-day performances of this year’s IPOs. The stock was up nearly 26% near market close.

There have only been 43 U.S. IPOs, including Line, so far in 2016, 59% fewer than there were at this time last year, according to Renaissance Capital. In total, the 2016 deals have raised only $7.4 billion, down 60% from the same period in 2015. Jitters about the economy and a rocky stock market scared off many companies from going public earlier this year. For the first time in years, not a single tech company held a U.S. IPO in the first quarter of this year. There were no tech IPOs in the first quarter of this year, with many potential candidates waiting to see the outcome of the U.K.’s Brexit vote in June. Now, as U.S. stocks are hitting new record highs, more private companies may decide to brave the public markets.
Line is the third billion-dollar IPO in the U.S. in 2016, according to Dealogic. The others include MGM Growth Properties, a casino real estate company that went public in April, and US Foods Holding, a food service distributor that raised more than $1 billion in May.
Worldwide, Line is the largest IPO of a technology company since First Data FDC 2.30% went public in October in a $2.8 billion deal. But among all industries, there were three IPOs larger than Line’s on foreign stock exchanges to date in 2016, including Dong Energy, a Danish utility that last month raised the equivalent of $2.6 billion in Copenhagen; China Zheshang Bank, which raised $1.7 billion in Hong Kong in March; and Dutch insurer ASR Nederland, which raised $1.2 billion in June.
There are several other major upcoming IPOs in the U.S., but none as big as Line. Tomorrow, AdvancePierre Foods Holding, a ready-made sandwich producer, is expected to begin trading after an IPO that seeks to raise nearly $460 million, potentially cracking the top 10 offerings this year. And next week Patheon, a drug development services company, aims to go public in an IPO that could raise almost $719 million, which would put it among the top five deals.
Shares of Line will also trade on the Tokyo stock exchange starting Friday.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Turkish president to crush opponents & purge military after failed coup - Independent

A striking feature of the failed military coup in Turkey is that President Erdogan and his government did not know that there was an extensive conspiracy within the armed forces aiming to seize power.
It was widely assumed that the era of military coups in Turkey was over and the army has recently had good relations with Mr Erdogan.
It may only have been a faction within the military, but it was able to strike in multiple places in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere, even detaining the Turkish chief-of-staff Gen Hulusi Akar for several hours until he was freed by anti-coup troops.

    His headquarters in Ankara were still being reportedly held by pro-coup forces on Saturday morning.
At the height of the coup, tanks closed the bridges over the Bosphorus and members of parliament in Ankara were hiding in the cellars of their assembly building in Ankara as it came under fire.
Pro-coup helicopters were strafing the intelligence headquarters and one was shot down by an F-16. The government was eager to declare that the coup had been smashed, but there are still signs of official nervousness with Turkish airspace around Istanbul being closed, opened and then closed again.
The coup was never likely to succeed once it had lost the advantage of surprise, which it did fairly rapidly as news spread of what had happened.
The plotters failed to eliminate, detain or isolate President Erdogan who was on holiday in Marmaris from which he was able to use a reporter’s phone to communicate with a television studio and call for people to take to the streets in opposition to the coup.
He followed this up by flying to Ataturk Istanbul airport, where he was well placed to show that he was still in command.

What to Know About This Year’s Biggest-Yet Tech IPO - TIME

What to Know About This Year’s Biggest-Yet Tech IPO

Posted: 14 Jul 2016 01:06 PM PDT

Line, the company behind one of Asia’s most popular messaging apps, completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday. Trading opened at $42 per share under the ticker LN, making it the largest tech IPO Wall Street has seen so far this year.
While Line has become a major force in the messaging space since its debut in 2011, the name is likely unfamiliar to many outside of Asia. Here’s an overview of Line and some key facts about the company.
Who’s Using It
Line has 218.4 million monthly active users, the company said in its most recent earnings report. Most of those users are based in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, although the company says it’s also seeing growth in the Middle East. By comparison, Facebook Messenger has more than 900 million monthly active users, while popular Chinese messenger WeChat has more than 700 million and WhatsApp boasts 1 billion.

Stickers 
Stickers and games are an important part of the Line experience and the company’s business model. The Tokyo-based corporation earns more than $270 million from selling packs of stickers, according to CNBC. Line has called stickers — which come in themed packs featuring characters — the “main pillar” of its communications business. More recently, apps like Facebook Messenger and Apple’s iMessage have followed suit by incorporating stickers into their services.
Apps and Services
Line’s platform reaches far beyond basic messaging and calling. The company operates its own mobile wallet service called Line Pay, as well as a news service called Line News, which allows media outlets to create accounts to distribute content. It has also experimented with grocery delivery in Thailand and launched an Uber-like ride hailing service in Tokyo. Content also accounts for a chunk of Line’s popularity, with the company’s mobile games racking up a cumulative 628 million downloads, according to CNBC. Line also operates its own music and video streaming services.
How it Started
Line was created to provide communication during the aftermath of the natural disasters that struck Japan in 2011. Employees of NHN Japan, which runs the country’s Naver search engine, created Line after a tsunami and earthquake disrupted phone service. Line eventually became a unit of the company and reached 50 million users in just over one year, according to Reuters. By comparison, it took Facebook more than three years to hit 58 million users.

Terrorist truck attack killed 84 so far in Nice, France - Financial Times

At least 84 people have died after a truck driver ploughed into a crowd celebrating France’s national holiday in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday.
“France has been struck on the day of her national holiday — July 14, Bastille day — the symbol of liberty, because human rights are denied by fanatics and France is clearly their target,” François Hollande, the French president, said in an address to the nation.
“The terrorist nature of this attack cannot be denied,” he added, saying that all of France was “under the threat of Islamist terrorism”.
Dead and injured victims were scattered along 2km of the Promenade des Anglais seafront, local officials said, estimating that another 100 were injured at the Bastille day celebrations. Mr Hollande said the dead included several children and as many as 20 of the injured were in critical condition.
Mr Hollande extended for three months the state of emergency that was imposed after November’s Isis-inspired attacks on Paris and had been due to end on July 26. France would step up its strikes in Syria and Iraq, he said. “We will continue to hit those who threaten us.”

The truck was loaded with grenades and guns, according to Christian Estrosi, president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region and mayor of Nice until last month.

“The driver was behaving in a manner that by all evidence was structured and premeditated,” he told a press conference. He said the attack happened at 10.30pm local time.
“This is the worst tragedy in the history of Nice,” Mr Estrosi wrote on Twitter.
The French interior ministry confirmed that the driver had been shot and killed but denied early reports of a hostage crisis.
The driver had driven at high speed into the mass of spectators on the Mediterranean city’s seaside walkway, Sebastien Humbert, a regional sub-prefect, told France Info radio.
Mr Hollande did not reveal the identity of the driver, saying investigators needed to establish whether he had any accomplices. The president, who had been in Avignon in the south of France at the time of the attack, was flown to Paris.
Mr Hollande said he would fly to Nice after a meeting with his defence council on Friday. Bernard Cazeneuve, interior minister, arrived in Nice on Thursday night to help co-ordinate the response.
In a statement, US President Barack Obama condemned “what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack” and said he had directed his team to offer French officials “any assistance that they may need to investigate this attack and bring those responsible to justice”.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, said: “We will never allow terrorists to undermine the egalitarian and democratic values that underpin our very way of life. This cowardly attack only strengthens our commitment to our alliance and to defeating terrorism around the world.”

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, postponed the planned announcement of his vice-presidential running mate at an event on Friday in Manhattan “in light of the horrible attack in Nice, France”.
In response to the news from Nice, he expressed his prayers and condolences and tweeted: “Another horrific attack, this time in Nice, France. Many dead and injured. When will we learn? It is only getting worse.”
In depth

The attack came eight months after Isis militants killed 130 people in Paris, the bloodiest in a number of attacks in France and Belgium in the past two years. On Sunday, France had breathed a sigh of relief as the month-long Euro 2016 football tournament it hosted ended without an attack.
Hours before the attack Mr Hollande had said the state of emergency imposed in November would not be extended beyond July 26.
“We can’t extend the state of emergency indefinitely, it would make no sense. That would mean we’re no longer a republic with the rule of law applied in all circumstances,” he had told journalists in a traditional Bastille day interview.
Mr Estrosi had warned in the past of the risk of Islamist attacks in the region, following the Isis bloodshed in Paris and Brussels.
Officials were cautious about accounts from bystanders that the lone man driving the truck had also opened fire. Police called on people not to propagate rumours that were hampering their work.
One woman told France Info that she and others had fled in terror: “The lorry came zigzagging along the street. We ran into a hotel and hid in the toilets with lots of people.”
The Negresco hotel on the Promenade was turned into a makeshift hospital for the wounded.
Another woman told the station she was sheltering in a restaurant on the promenade with about 200 people, where things had calmed down about two hours after the incident.
Nice Matin, a regional newspaper, published a photograph of a damaged, long-distance delivery truck, which it said was riddled with bullets, and images of emergency services treating the many injured.
Damien Allemand, the paper’s correspondent, was quoted as saying: “People are running. It’s panic. He rode up on to the Prom and piled into the crowd . . . There are people covered in blood. There must be many injured.”
Social media carried images of people lying apparently lifeless in pools of blood and video of panicked people running through the streets to the sound of gunfire.
US government agencies have received regular reports of Isis threats to attack France and those threats are regarded as current, a US security official said. However, two US officials said they had no information at this point about whether militants were involved in the Nice incident.

Philip Hammond appointed as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer - Independent

Philip Hammond has been appointed as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Mr Hammond previously served as Foreign Secretary and is Theresa May’s first Cabinet appointment as Prime Minister.
He replaces George Osborne, who resigned from the Government, a Downing Street spokesperson said.

Mr Hammond served in the Conservatives’ Treasury team while in opposition, where he gained a reputation as the party's "axeman" with a perchant for making public spending cuts.
In government he swung his axe at the Ministry of Defence, helping to bear down on the department's financial pressures.
He has since taken a number of other Cabinet level roles while the party has been in government.
The minister also served as Transport Secretary under David Cameron.
He is now Britain's chief finance minister, in charge of economic policy and spending.
Ms May has ruled out holding an emergency Budget in the wake of her appointment as PM.

Mr Hammond served in the Conservatives’ Treasury team while in opposition, where he gained a reputation as the party's "axeman" with a perchant for making public spending cuts.
In government he swung his axe at the Ministry of Defence, helping to bear down on the department's financial pressures.
He has since taken a number of other Cabinet level roles while the party has been in government.
The minister also served as Transport Secretary under David Cameron.
He is now Britain's chief finance minister, in charge of economic policy and spending.
Ms May has ruled out holding an emergency Budget in the wake of her appointment as PM.

She has said any changes in economic course will be made in the scheduled Autumn Statement later this year.
Ms May is unveiling her first Cabinet after being appointed Prime Minister by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace earlier this evening.
The first four top jobs are expected to be unveiled this evening, with the rest of the front bench due to be announced over the next few days.
She has pledged to create a fairer economy and create a government that works in the interests of "ordinary people" rather than the "privileged few".

Boris Johnson appointed as UK foreign secretary - Independent

More than anything, as you might imagine, we're consumed by a sense of embarrassment.
We never really expected Johnson to bounce back from political ignominy eight years ago to become mayor of London, let alone lead us out of the European Union and now inexplicably be bought back in from the cold as foreign secretary.
He's a man John Oliver quipped has the "the look and the economic insight of Bam-Bam from The Flintstones", and he's not exactly renowned for his diplomatic candour, either.
Johnson has insulted almost as many of you over the years as Prince Philip.
As far as world leaders go, in the not-so-distant past he's accused Barack Obama of having an "ancestral dislike" of the UK because he's half-Kenyan, praised Bashir al-Assad, and written a poem in which he called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a goat wankerer.
He almost prematurely announced a trade deal when visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, has said Africans have "watermelon smiles", rugby tackled a Japanese 10-year-old, and is fond of coming out with inglorious generalisations about women.
Theresa May herself said last week that she has every faith in Johnson as a foreign negotiator. After all, when he was mayor of London, he came back with three almost new water cannons from Germany, she joked.

We can only assume that our new PM must have her reasons. (The obvious one being that if he's off gallivanting abroad, at least we don't have to deal with him.)
The only solace to be taken from this appointment is the fact that Johnson might actually hate the job. Endless meetings and long haul flights - not to mention regular visits to Brussels - sounds a bit like punishment to us.
But: that doesn't change the fact that we are basically making him your problem as well as ours now. And for that we are truly, sincerely, sorry.
We don't really have anything else to say that will make this better. But hey, at least he's not prime minister.
Yet.

Donald Trump's birtherism attack on Obama - New York Times

Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.




Donald J. Trump in 2011 in Portsmouth, N.H., on the same day that President Obama released his long-form birth certificate after pressure from people like Mr. Trump.
Credit
Cheryl Senter for The New York Times
Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.


“The appeal of the birther issue was, ‘I’m going to take this guy on, and I’m going to beat him,’” said Sam Nunberg, who was one of Mr. Trump’s advisers during that period but was fired from his current campaign. “It was a great niche and wedge issue.”
And starting in March 2011, when he first began to test the idea that a reality television star with no political experience could mount a campaign for the presidency, Mr. Trump could not stop talking about it.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked on ABC’s “The View.” “I want to see his birth certificate,” he told Fox News’s “On the Record.” And on NBC’s “Today Show,” he declared, “I’m starting to think that he was not born here.”
The more Mr. Trump questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Obama’s presidency, the better he performed in the early polls of the 2012 Republican field, springing from fifth place to a virtual tie for first.
That frenzied period culminated six weeks after it began in a surreal televised split screen between Mr. Trump and the White House briefing room, where aides released an image of the president’s birth certificate proving he was born in Honolulu and Mr. Obama directly addressed the issue.
It was a remarkable moment that Mr. Trump celebrated as a political victory.
Then Mr. Trump did something decidedly un-Trump-like: He dropped the issue and rarely spoke of it publicly again.
According to people apprised of the conversations, people close to him had been worried about the negative attention. Officials at NBC had also been concerned that he was alienating the large black audience of his hit show, “The Apprentice.”



Indeed, damage had already been done. Some black leaders denounced him, with Jesse Jackson accusing Mr. Trump of appealing to the president’s detractors with “coded and covert rhetoric for stirring up racial fears.”
Several days later, Mr. Obama relished his own chance to belittle Mr. Trump with a string of taunts at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as Mr. Trump, seated in the audience, grew increasingly stone-faced. “But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” he said to laughter. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing?”
Mr. Trump, who declined to be interviewed about the subject, was not the first to question Mr. Obama’s birthplace. The narrative that Mr. Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother American, might not meet the requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen” first arose during his 2008 bid.
Mr. Obama’s aides initially decided it was better to ignore the questions; addressing them, they reasoned, would just given them credibility.
Continue reading the main story


And Mr. Trump, too, at first seemed uncertain about just how much skepticism to express over the president’s place of birth. “The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him,” he said in a March 2011 interview. “The whole thing is very strange.”
Yet, quickly, the world took notice. One headline referred to Mr. Trump going “Birther Lite.” Another said he was a “Teeny Bit Birther.” And MSNBC’s “Hardball” replayed the comments, with the intro: “Let’s listen to how he joins the birthers.”
If Mr. Trump was offering a political trial balloon, he appeared to like the results. He started making the rounds, offering interviews on the topic and stoking public interest in the birther claims.

Mr. Trump was egged on by one key adviser — Roger J. Stone Jr., a dapper dresser and political operative known for mischief and mayhem. Mr. Stone said that he did not plant the idea with Mr. Trump, but that once Mr. Trump came to him with it, he extolled what he saw as the political upside.
“He was suspicious about it, or at least interested in it,” Mr. Stone said. Among Republican base voters, he added, “many of them believe the president is foreign-born, and Trump has an ability to interject any idea that is outside of the mainstream into the mainstream.”
A Gallup poll from that period showed that only 38 percent of Americans surveyed believed that Mr. Obama was “definitely” born in the United States. That number rose to 47 percent after Mr. Obama released his long-form birth certificate.
Mr. Trump also continued to reach out to Mr. Farah, founder of WorldNetDaily, a conservative website, as well as to Jerome Corsi, another conservative writer and author of “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to Be President.” (The book came out shortly after Mr. Obama released his birth certificate, but shot to the top of Amazon.com’s best sellers before it was even officially published.)
“He was looking for affirmation that he was on the right track,” Mr. Farah said. “He was looking for a smoking gun kind of sound bite that would resonate with people.”
But what most impressed Mr. Farah was just how many hours Mr. Trump was willing to devote to the question. “This was a busy guy, this was a multibillionaire, and I was surprised that he was willing to spend that kind of time on it,” he said.
Mr. Farah also stressed to Mr. Trump that the issue was one of “transparency,” and Mr. Trump began using the phrase.


Document: Obama’s Long-Form Birth Certificate
“He started saying ‘transparency,’” said Mr. Nunberg, Mr. Trump’s former adviser. “It’s code for, ‘This guy is the Manchurian candidate.’”
Mr. Trump also said repeatedly that he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to unearth information about Mr. Obama’s birth records. “They cannot believe what they are finding,” Mr. Trump told ABC’s “The View.”
But as the issue exploded, people close to Mr. Trump were growing nervous.
Some people in Mr. Trump’s orbit were discomfited by the line of attack, which had already been examined and rejected by many conservative news outlets. Among them was an informal political adviser, Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster, who cautioned that if he did run, he would need to beat Mr. Obama “on the merits.”
Even executives at NBC, which aired “The Apprentice,” privately called on him to tone down his remarks, fearing he would hurt ratings at a time when more than a million African-Americans tuned in every Thursday night, according to a former executive with knowledge of the discussions, speaking anonymously to share candid conversations.
The White House, too, had growing concerns. Once reserved to the fringe, the issue had now begun popping up at town-hall-style events around the country.
The turning point came in mid-April 2011, when the president delivered a major speech on the budget, only to find his remarks obscured by questions about his birth certificate.
“It was basically a message blocker that was preventing us from talking about the issues we needed to talk about because the press was chasing Donald Trump around for the next crazy thing he was going to say,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director then.

The White House counsel dispatched someone to Hawaii to find the president’s original long-form birth certificate from 1961. (Years before, the president had released the “short form,” an official computer-generated document that contains the information from the original.) With the document finally in hand, aides quickly scheduled a news conference.
They worried that having Mr. Obama himself release his birth certificate from the White House briefing room would undermine the dignity of the office. So they first passed out copies to reporters, and then had the president deliver remarks, in which he warned the nation about getting distracted by “sideshows and carnival barkers.”
Then, almost as quickly as it began, the controversy subsided. And several weeks later, Mr. Trump decided not to seek the Republican nomination. Though he continued to do well in polls, he seemed to be more focused on his reality television pursuits.
Now, Mr. Trump almost assiduously refuses to discuss the topic, which, according to several people close to him, was always more about political performance art than ideology.
“I don’t talk about that anymore,” Mr. Trump told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews after a Republican debate last year.
Raising questions about the president’s birth certificate — and even threatening to send a team of investigators to Hawaii — had served its purpose, raising Mr. Trump’s political profile and, whether he knew it or not at the time, providing him with the rudimentary foundation upon which he built his 2016 campaign.
He even skirted close to birther innuendo after the massacre in Orlando, Fla., last month, calling into “Fox & Friends” to insinuate that Mr. Obama might sympathize with Islamic extremists. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Mr. Trump said.
But for all of his fascination with the president’s birth certificate, Mr. Trump apparently never dispatched investigators or made much of an effort to find the documents.
Dr. Alvin Onaka, the Hawaii state registrar who handled queries about Mr. Obama, said recently through a spokeswoman that he had no evidence or recollection of Mr. Trump or any of his representatives ever requesting the records from the Hawaii State Department of Health.
Michael M. Grynbaum and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.
A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Trump’s ‘Birther’ Claims Helped to Stir Presidential Bid. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe

European Economist Warns U.K. Pound Could Fall to Parity With Dollar - Financial Times

European Economist Warns U.K. Pound Could Fall to Parity With Dollar

Posted: 07 Jul 2016 08:21 AM PDT

A leading economist warned that the pound sterling could slump to the same value as the dollar if lawmakers cannot quickly establish a post-Brexit financial arrangement that involves free trade with the European Union.
Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser to insurance company Allianz, told Reuters that lawmakers need to come up with a sound Plan B — and they need to do it fast. He made the comments as sterling fell to $1.28 on Wednesday, its lowest point in 30 years. It had been $1.50 on June 23, the day of the referendum.
“After the Brexit referendum, the U.K. has to urgently get its political act together,” El-Erian told Reuters, “‘Plan B’ depends on the politicians in London and across the Channel, but so far they have not stepped up to their economic governance responsibilities.”
International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde also discussed the dangers of not moving ahead swiftly in the talks with Brussels.
“Do we have a forecast and scenario with prolonged uncertainty, total lack of clarity, no triggering of Article 50, things staying in limbo for a long period of time?” Lagarde said to theFinancial Times. “No. We don’t have that. We doubt that it would be sustainable politically, geopolitically.”

Donald Trump-Style Protectionism Could Hurt World Economy, IMF Chief Says - TIME

Donald Trump-Style Protectionism Could Hurt World Economy, IMF Chief Says Posted: 07 Jul 2016 10:16 AM PDT Donald Trump’s anti-trade policies and isolationist attitude could have dangerous consequences for the global economy, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned in an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday. The International Monetary Fund chief said that new trade barriers between countries could add to concerns in the wake of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union last month. Trump has said he wants to get rid of U.S. trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, and has suggested tariffs on goods from Mexico and China. “I think it would be quite disastrous, actually. Well I don’t think I should say disastrous because that is an excessive word and I should refrain from excessive words. But it would certainly have a negative impact on global growth,” Lagarde told the Financial Times. Other world leaders criticized Trump’s behavior and his policy suggestions throughout the Republican primary season, but since the New York businessman became his party’s presumptive nominee, many foreign politicians have become more cautious. Lagarde, who is just beginning her second five-year term as head of the IMF, was careful to avoid naming Trump or singling out any specific politician. She did say that policies that go against globalization could create economic problems like those caused by the start of World War I. “I hope it is not a 1914 moment and I hope that we can be informed by history to actually address the negative impact of globalization in order to leverage the benefits that it can deliver. Because it has historically delivered massive benefits and it can continue to do so,” Lagarde said. She did not want to comment on the specifics of the U.S. election but did add that “waves of protectionism” had preceded other wars and that protectionism “hurts growth, hurts inclusion and hurts people.” Trump has taken to using the phrase “America First” and gave his support for Britain’s decision to leave the EU, which many have seen as another sign that he would push forward with similarly isolationist policies.

UK property fund suspended - first victim of Brexit - Economist

Safe as office blocks
British property funds suspend redemptions
Jul 9th 2016




THE first concrete signs of post-Brexit financial stress in Britain emerged this week. The asset-management arm of Standard Life, an insurer, suspended redemptions from its £2.9 billion ($3.8 billion) British property fund. It was followed by a flurry of rivals: Aviva, Canada Life, Columbia Threadneedle, Henderson and M&G. Another fund, run by Aberdeen, said it would apply a 17% discount to redemptions.
The decisions highlighted the mismatch between the open-ended nature of such funds—allowing retail investors to buy and sell on a daily basis—and the illiquid assets they hold: office blocks and shopping centres. But the announcements also reflected the shock to the property market caused by the Brexit vote. London has attracted lots of businesses both because of its perceived openness and because it provides an English-speaking base for doing business in the EU; the vote has caused a reassessment of its attractiveness as a corporate home.

According to the Financial Times, German and Spanish buyers pulled out of £650m-worth of property deals in the week after the referendum. Russell Chaplin of Aberdeen says many deals had a “Brexit clause” allowing purchasers to walk away if Britain voted to leave. This has happened to Aberdeen’s property fund in two cases: one buyer abandoned a purchase altogether while another asked for a discount, which has not been accepted.
Mutual property funds tend to have monthly valuations (conducted by outsiders) to determine the “fair value” of their assets. Given the uncertainties after the referendum, valuers thought it prudent to apply a discount and fund-management groups took their advice. Henderson reduced its fair-value estimate by 4%, M&G by 4.5%, and Standard Life by 5%.
The funds keep some liquid assets on hand in order to meet the kind of redemptions they face in normal circumstances; as of May 31st, Standard Life had 13% of its assets in this form. Some of these liquid assets will be stakes in big property companies like British Land and Land Securities, so the big falls in their share prices (see chart) may in part be a contagion effect from funds meeting redemption requests.
There may be other knock-on effects. In a report on financial stability published on July 5th, the Bank of England worried that forced sales of assets by property funds may exacerbate the market’s weakness; it has eased capital requirements for banks to encourage lending.
Problems have been growing for a while. The central bank said that foreign capital inflows into British property fell by almost 50% in the first quarter, perhaps as investors waited for the Brexit vote to be resolved. The purchasing managers’ index for the construction industry fell in June to its lowest level since 2009.
Mike Prew of Jefferies, an investment bank, has been predicting a commercial-property downturn since last year. Two areas stand out. Central London has been on a building spree, with 26m square feet of offices currently being added (or refurbished) in a market with around 200m square feet of space. Mr Prew thinks 100,000 jobs in London are at risk of moving to the EU—enough to free up 10m square feet. Office rents could fall by as much as 18% in central London, he warns.
The second problem area is retail premises, to which the Standard Life fund was heavily exposed (its five biggest tenants were all retailers). High-street shops have been squeezed by the rise of the internet; BHS, a department-store chain, recently went under. If the economy does slow in the wake of the referendum, retailers’ troubles will intensify.
Comparisons with the financial crisis of 2007-08 are inevitable; that too saw property-fund suspensions in its early stages. But they should not be overdone. For a start, open-ended property funds do not borrow and own only around 5% of British commercial property. Few investors are likely to have devoted a large part of their savings to this asset; they will have known that they might lose money. The systemic risk is limited.
Furthermore, with interest rates near zero and ten-year bond yields below 1%, property funds still offer a decent income; even in London, prime rental yields are 4-4.5%. Vacancies are below the historical average, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, an estate agent. A big sell-off would surely attract some bargain-hunters.
Still, fund suspensions are not a good sign. At the very least, they should make regulators question whether open-ended funds are suitable for property investing. There is nothing liquid about bricks.
Economist.com/blogs/buttonwood

Airbus 380 is running out of buyers - Bloomberg

Since its commercial introduction in 2007, the Airbus A380 has brought a long-lost sense of glamour back to travel. Its first-class cabins feature private showers and buttery leather armchairs. It sports in-flight lounges where bartenders mix bespoke cocktails. A broad staircase reminiscent of a 1920s ocean liner links the two decks. Financially speaking, it’s a disaster of similarly grand proportions.
An initial flood of interest from airlines has turned into a slow drip, and Airbus is leaning heavily on one customer, Emirates, for sales. Not a single U.S. carrier has bought one, and Japanese airlines, among the biggest cheerleaders for huge planes, have taken just a handful. Airbus has delivered 193 A380s—early on it predicted airlines would buy 1,200 supersize planes over two decades—and has only 126 in its order book, to be built over the next five years or so. Worse, many orders appear squishy, because airlines are shifting away from superjumbos. As the aviation world starts gathering on July 11 for the Farnborough International Airshow in England, where carriers often announce big orders, there’s little indication any A380 contract will be unveiled.
Airbus concedes its timing was off with the A380, which lists for $433 million but almost always sells at a discount. The financial crisis hit just as production was picking up in 2008, and soaring oil prices made airlines reluctant to buy the four-engine behemoth. The company only last year managed to start breaking even on production, and it’s acknowledged it will never recoup the €25 billion ($32 billion) it spent on development. Zafar Khan, an analyst at Société Générale, says the concern is that if production slips far below 30 planes a year, the program could fall back into the red. “The crying happens when it’s losing money,” Khan says.

Axing the A380 outright is hard to do. Besides the embarrassment of admitting defeat on the program, Airbus would need to write off factories across Europe and redeploy thousands of workers. Airlines would see the resale value of their A380s plummet, and the plane’s demise would leave airports worldwide questioning the wisdom of facilities constructed to accommodate it; Dubai, for instance, built a dedicated terminal for the A380.

Airbus says 10 years is too short a time to determine its fate. While Chief Executive Officer Thomas Enders said in December the company would assess the plane’s future “in cold blood,” sales chief John Leahy has pledged to continue the program. “The A380 is here to stay,” he says. “We are maintaining, innovating, and investing in it.”
With its short snout and upper deck crouching above the cockpit, the A380 can’t match the distinctive profile of Boeing’s humpbacked 747. Nonetheless, the A380 has largely sucked the life out of Boeing’s jumbo—perhaps the biggest Airbus success with its plane. Since 2012, when Boeing started deliveries of the latest passenger version, the 747-8, it has done far worse than the Airbus double-decker, with just 40 sold and 11 more on order.
Four-engine planes have become a tough sell because of their high fuel consumption. Airbus in 2011 scrapped the A340, its other four-engine model, as carriers gravitated to smaller, more economical widebodies such as the Airbus A330 or Boeing 777; and adding more fuel-efficient engines to the A380, an upgrade Airbus has pulled off for smaller planes, remains risky with so few orders coming in. Although the A380 is popular with passengers for its spacious interior and smooth flight, carriers find it tough to fill in turbulent economic times. Malaysia Airlines learned this the hard way when, in the wake of a pair of fatal crashes involving other aircraft, it couldn’t draw enough traffic to fill the half-dozen A380s it had bought. The airline is trying to offload two of them but can’t find buyers.

Lately, Airbus has seen a hemorrhaging of contracts that once seemed solid. In the past two years, three A380 customers have dropped their orders because of financial difficulties or shifts in strategy. Leasing company Amedeo three years ago announced plans to buy 20 A380s, but it’s failed to find a single airline willing to lease them and has delayed deliveries. The plane’s biggest fan by far is Emirates, with 81 flying and an additional 61 reserved, which adds up to 45 percent of the A380s Airbus has delivered or has on order. The carrier is fretting about the jumbo’s future. “I think the size of the plane scares most of the airline world,” says Emirates President Tim Clark.

The A380 was a prestige-fueled project for Airbus and the European governments that backed the program. The company had been successful with its A320 single-aisle jet introduced in the 1980s, but it wanted a bigger piece of the lucrative long-range market. With the managers who hatched the plan two decades ago long gone, the ardor has abated, says Richard Aboulafia, a longtime critic of the plane and vice president of aviation consultant Teal Group. “Nobody seems to want this plane other than Emirates,” he says. “The A380 might just make it until 2020, but even that’s almost optimistic at this point.”

The bottom line: A decade after the Airbus A380’s debut, its future is in doubt as airlines shift to more efficient planes.

Why EU is important for UK's trade ? - Independent

The latest trade figures published this morning emphasise the UK’s reliance on the European Union as a destination for our goods exports – underlining the pressure on the Government to secure a favourable post-Brexit trade arrangement with the rest of the EU.

According to the Office for National Statistics total goods exports in May were £23.7bn. Of those, £11.4bn (48.4 per cent) went to the European Union. Goods exports worth £12.2bn (51.6 per cent) went to the rest of the world.

The share of UK goods exports going to the EU has been trending downwards for the past 15 years as the rest of the world has grown at a faster pace than Europe – yet the share going to the Continent seems to have stabilised at about 45-48 per cent since 2014.

Still reliant on Europe

With the EU the UK had a trade in goods deficit (exports minus imports) of £7.3bn in May and a deficit with the rest of the world of £2.5bn. 

READ MORE

Consumer confidence plunges at fastest in two decades after Brexit

Pro-Brexit politicians argue the UK’s chronic goods trade deficit with the EU will put pressure on the EU to do a rapid trade deal, since we are a major sales market for their goods and they will want to safeguard their own exporters’ interests.

Yet some pro-Brexit economists argue the UK should not bother with a trade deal to lift EU tariffs for the UK and simply, unilaterally, abolish all the tariffs on UK imports from anywhere in the world, something that would push down the prices of UK imports but would likely have a devastating impact on many of our manufacturing exporters.

What about services?

The ONS does not report monthly on services exports. But in the first quarter of 2016 it estimates UK services exports to the EU were  £23.5bn. For 2015 as a whole, services exports to the EU were worth £88.9bn – 40 per cent of all our services exports.

And in the first quarter of 2016 the UK had an overall trade in services surplus with the EU of £5.9bn.

That was bigger than the UK’s services surplus with the United States.

EU vital for UK services export surplus

ONS data for UK services trade surplus Q1 2016

Without the UK's roughly £90bn annual services trade surplus for 2015 as a whole the UK's record current account deficit (the difference between everything the country as a whole earns and what it consumes and invests) would have been almost twice as large.

Angus Armstrong of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has explained why the UK's exporting services firms are likely to need full continued access to the EU’s single market for services (something that goes beyond simply a free trade deal) if they are not to suffer as a result of Brexit.

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ISIS sex slave Nadia Murad appeals for UK help - Independent

In the wake of the publication of the Chilcot report, a woman who was taken as a sex salve by Isis has described how she and other young women were captured and repeatedly raped by members of the terror group.
Nadia Murad, 22, was one of more than 5,000 Yazidi women kidnapped by Isis when the group took hold of territories in northern Iraq.
Speaking to the Mirror, Ms Murad revealed how in the summer of 2014 Isis fighters rounded up all Yazidis in the village of Kocho, where she lived in Iraq, killing 312 people and taking the younger women as “sabia” – slaves.

Isis told Yazidis “Convert to Islam or die,” said Ms Murad. “But no one agreed to convert”.

Nadia Murad, (C), human rights activist, testifies during Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill (Getty Images )
“They laughed at us. They said, ‘You are owned by IS. You will be married to us’.”
Ms Murad says she was taken to Mosul with 150 other girls where they were scrutinised by fighters and forced to “marry” them.
She described being taken as a slave by a man with a wife and daughter, who Ms Murad never met, however she would see hs daughter’s name – Sarah – light up on his phone as he raped her.
“I never met her or his wife, but they knew what he was doing to me. They accepted their men were raping us. To IS women, we are not worth the value of animals,” she said.
In November 2014, Ms Murad sucessfully escaped from her captor after three months of abuse and torture, and made her way via a refugee camp to seek asylum in Stuttgart, Germany. She said she escaped knowing she would be killed if caught - “I preferred to be killed and just finally stop it”, she said.


Isis using Whatsapp and Telegram to sell sex slaves
She told the UN that an earlier escape attempt led to her being beaten up and gang raped by six militants as a form of punishment.
Following the publication of the Chilcot report, which found that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had overstated the case for military action in March 2003 as there was “no imminent threat” posed by Saddam Hussein, many have reiterated the case that the Iraq War may have contributed to the rise of Isis.
Isis began as an off-shoot of the militant group Al-Qaeda. It can trace its origins back to the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who in 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq, allied himself to Osama Bin Laden and formed al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In 2006, after Zarqawi's death, AQI created an umbrella organisation, Islamic State in Iraq.

Assessments made by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in 2005, which are referenced  in the Chilcot report, said Islamist insurgencies launched in response to the invasion had strengthened Al-Qaeda in the area. “Al Qaeda has capitalized on the Iraq jihad," an assessment in April said.
A later assessment in June said: “The merger of Al-Zarqawi’s organization with Al-Qaeda…has firmly placed it in a pre-eminent position in Iraq…a unified jihadist command may be emerging. Iraq is now seen by Al Qaeda as its main theater of operations.”
An estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls are currently held captive by Isis. The majority were taken prisoner in 2014.
The Yazidis, a religious Kurdish community, have been attacked and killed by Isis in both Iraq and Syria, in what constitutes an act of genocide according to United Nations' investigators.
Attempts have been made to rescue the women, but many who do so are killed, according to the Associated Press.

Ms Murad is now campaigning for European governments, including Britain, to do more to help Yazidis.
A Change.org petition has been set up by Rozin Khalil, a Yazidi teenager who came to Britain from Iraq in 2008, asking Home Secretary Theresa May, Secretary of State for International Development Justine Greening, and Foreign Minister Philip Hammond to “prepare an action plan” to help the Yazdidi women and children held captive by Isis.
Ms Murad said: “What IS has done to the Yazidi people is genocide, the UK must offer more asylum to refugees. So many are in camps and they have been through terrible suffering.

How Tony Blair comes to be so unpopular ? - BBC News

No British prime minister in modern times has experienced a plunge in fortune like Tony Blair's.
Cheered to the echo as he left the Commons chamber for the last time as prime minister in 2007, after 10 years of largely untroubled dominance, the tragedy of Iraq quickly ensnared him so completely that by this summer he admitted he would be a liability in the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union. The old Blair magic had turned to sand.
But it had once seemed like magic. A parliamentary majority in 1997 of proportions that no-one in politics could remember, and along with it a feeling that like Margaret Thatcher, whom he'd watched in amazement as a young MP in the 1980s, he had set a national mood that made a permanent break with the past.
Then, after Bill Clinton had welcomed him on to the world stage, came George W Bush.
The Chilcot report lays out the consequences of that relationship - the "whatever" memo of support to the president in 2002 will surely stand as its emblem - and catalogues Blair's journey to the assault on Baghdad and his inability to control, perhaps even to influence, the chaos that followed.

Why?
I watched him in Chicago in April 1999 talking about a new world order in a now-famous speech, a rookie prime minister - in office for less than two years - making the case for liberal interventionism against despotic regimes as if he were a veteran statesman.
He was buoyed by a natural self-confidence, and something more at that particular moment - the belief that he had succeeded in persuading an American president to commit ground troops in the Balkans, against the weight of congressional and public opinion, to get rid of the last of the satellite Soviet dinosaurs, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.

That deal with Clinton was the making of his relationship with Bush.
When the Twin Towers came down nine months after Bush entered the White House, Blair's words were the most powerful that Americans heard from abroad - eloquent, and from the heart.
Most of them knew little of him but, by the time he went to Washington for private conversations in the days after 9/11, he had already started to take on heroic status. And some of those with him on that day marked a decisive change in his demeanour and belief after talking with Bush, alone in the Blue Room of the White House.
The conviction that the world had changed irrevocably was one that would always torment him, and it fed a habit when talking about world affairs - in contrast, intriguingly, with his attitude at home - to talk about black and white, good and evil.
In parts of the Bush White House, that was a gift from the gods. Vice-President Dick Cheney was the leader of those whose eyes had never turned from Iraq, and the most determined of those who called themselves neo-conservatives.
They saw the 1990-91 Gulf War as unfinished business, and could hardly believe their luck in having a Labour prime minister who was willing to join a war coalition. It was in effect to give powerful cover to an administration struggling for international support - with Blair setting aside the concerns of many of his officials (including some who saw the "whatever" memo before it was sent to the White House and were horrified by its tone, and the implicit promise of unconditional support).
Such was Blair's confidence at that time - greatly bolstered by the Tories' leadership travails and the consequent weakness of the parliamentary opposition - that no-one could hold him back. His instinct for "sofa government" had full reign, and the relationship with Washington after 9/11 was so strong that a near-inevitable course was set.
Gordon Brown, his iron chancellor, absorbed himself in the economy and declined to intervene strongly in foreign affairs. In the Foreign Office itself, Jack Straw shared his own worries in many hours of phone calls with his American counterpart, Gen Colin Powell.
But Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a weak secretary of state - not trusted by the ideologues who were pressing the president towards a confrontation with Saddam, and outside the White House inner core.

We now know, from Chilcot, what the consequences were. Fragmentary and thin intelligence was used to feed certainty, not to spread doubt; Blair's formidable political command meant that some officials became courtiers; there was too little appetite to question the assumptions that were driving policy. In short, the fabled Whitehall machine didn't do its work.
Alastair Campbell, director of communications, was having video conference calls with the White House every afternoon. Blair and Bush were talking regularly, so intimately and informally that some officials who saw the transcripts afterwards had to work hard to decipher precisely what each of them had meant in their exchanges.
This is not to say that Blair was determined on war, come what may. He wasn't. Along with his hope - however far-fetched - that Saddam might be persuaded to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors, he argued well into the spring of 2003 for a second UN resolution to authorise war if necessary. It was meant to give everyone more time.
But the Americans were on a fast track, and in the end Blair's commitment to Bush was too strong. He came to believe that scepticism would be a kind of betrayal - a surrender to the policy of appeasement that he'd warned against in Chicago in 1999.
Since he believed absolutely in the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - mistakenly - he convinced himself that too much delay would be a display of weakness. No-one could change his mind.
Although he defended his judgements after Chilcot was published, he knows well how great the cost has been. In Iraq, and for him.
The prime minister who showed patience and ingenuity in Northern Ireland, subtlety in Europe, and who was notably suspicious of an ideological approach to domestic affairs, become a true believer. There was an element of naivete in his approach to the hard-liners around Bush - confessing, for example, that he didn't really know what a neo-conservative was.

once heard Hillary Clinton in a private moment expressing astonishment at his lack of doubt, using a withering American phrase popularised after the Jonestown mass suicide. "What's happened to Tony," she asked. "He's started drinking the Kool Aid."
She meant that he had abandoned all caution and every sliver of scepticism. And he had. Although it would be foolish to suggest that he didn't understand the cost of war, nor give it deep thought, his loyalty to Bush had become so strong after 9/11 that it trumped everything else.
The result was the invasion of 2003. The American timetable was set, and Blair couldn't change it. Or at least believed that he couldn't.
One lingering question remains, and will lie unanswered. Could Blair have exercised decisive restraint if he had threatened to withdraw his support? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would have been contemptuous, but what of the American people?
There are some people who believe that he underestimated his own significance at that time. A public signal of real alarm from America's principal ally, a figure hugely popular in the United States, might have had more impact than even he believed.
We can't know. We do know that he had become determined to show no sign of weakness, and it was costly. Great conviction; not enough doubt.
Think of one day, a few months after the war began. Blair addressed both houses of Congress in Washington and got more than a dozen standing ovations. Heady stuff.

A few hours later, flying over the Pacific, he was told of a melancholy event at home. Dr David Kelly, a weapons expert at the Ministry of Defence, had been found dead, two days after giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about his doubts over weapons of mass destruction.
Two separate events. One tragedy.
Iraq has come to dominate the Blair legacy to such an extent that many of his notable achievements - the Good Friday agreement, devolution to Scotland and Wales, the minimum wage and a number of social reforms are doomed to shelter under its shadow.
Historians in the future will be able to restore some balance to the record (and to assess whether some classic Blair reforms, like the Private Finance Initiative and student loans and NHS reorganisation, have stood the test of time), but not yet.
His tragedy is that the progressive figure he wanted to be - the first prime minister born after World War Two, who gave the Labour Party a new appeal to the generation dubbed "the millennials" - will be obscured by his most momentous decision.
All his party's current travails tend to be interpreted against that background, as if it is still essentially an argument about him. He will have to wait for that to change, and it may take some time.
James Naughtie is BBC News Book Editor and presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4. He was a presenter on the Today programme from 1994 to 2015.