These Are the Companies Conservatives and Liberals Hate Most - Fortune

These Are the Companies Conservatives and Liberals Hate Most

Posted: 07 Jun 2016 07:54 AM PDT

Call it the political retail divide. And it’s getting bigger.
Increasingly in America, it seems, our politics are dictating where we shop and what we consume. Asked on a survey of 10,000 U.S. adults, those who identified themselves as liberals indicated they were more likely to shop at Target. Conservatives showed a preference for Walmart. Liberals likely drink Pepsi. Conservatives, Coke.
Fortune has published the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies in America for over 50 years. This year for the first time ever we commissioned SurveyMonkey to conduct a poll on differences of opinion toward the top 100 companies. Respondents were asked about corporate reputations, trust, influence, and global impact. They were also asked to self-identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative.

Certainly, America’s political and cultural divisions are never more apparent than during a presidential election year. That is true this year as much as any. But those political divisions still exist even in years not divisible by , and they are something that business leaders and brands have to contend with, even when the markets they serve have seemingly little to do with politics.
What the survey found is that there are some striking differences (as well as as some similarities) between the companies conservatives and liberals think are bad for America, even for companies in the same business. The most notable example is Target and Walmart.
Liberals put Walmart as the No. 1 company on the Fortune500 that is the worst for America. They also ranked it as first on a list of companies in the Fortune 500 they would like shut down. Walmart has long been pilloried by the left for what liberals see as unfair wages and for fighting against unions.
Conservatives have concerns about Walmart as well. But higher on their list of companies that they want shut down was Target at No. 4. Walmart ranked at a lowly 10th on the conservatives respondents shut down list. Walmart did rank high on companies that conservatives think are bad for America, but not above some of the big banks.
Liberals on the other hand ranked Target all the way down at No. 62 among companies that they said was the worst for America, and gave it a similar rank for companies that they would like to shut down.
But here’s the thing, when it comes to workers wages and the other issues that liberals care about there is very little evidence that Target is any better than Walmart.
The conservative distaste towards Target could be explained by the the firm’s recent reaffirmation that transgender employees and customers at its stores should use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identities. Many conservatives responded to that announcement by boycotting the store.
The poll did find evidence that Republican minds are changing about companies like Walmart. Pundits have called Donald Trump “the Walmart candidate” for his ability to appeal to downscale voters, but Trump has also attacked large powerful corporations for their indifference to the plight of the American worker, and it’s possible that Walmart is being lumped into this group as well.
There were other areas were liberals and conservatives agreed or were close. When asked which companies on the Fortune 100 are are the “worst for the country,” conservatives and liberals agreed on six different companies, all which placed in the top 10:

• Walmart 
• Goldman Sachs 
• JPMorgan 
• Dow Chemical 
• Comcast 
• Bank of America 

It’s not surprising that Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are skeptical of big-name Wall Street banks like those above. After all, this year’s presidential race has often looked like a competition over who can bash big banks the most, even on the Republican side of the aisle. The same goes for Comcast, a company that hasn’t taken taxpayer bailout money but is one that millions of Americans deal with every day and which hasn’t exactly blown away its largely captive audience with its customer service.
The top four companies that conservatives think are bad for the country that weren’t on liberals’ hit list were:

• Fannie Mae 
• Freddie Mac 
• PepsiCo 
• Target 

Liberals exclusively had animus for:

• Exxon Mobil 
• Tyson Foods 
• Wells Fargo 
• Coca-Cola 

The conservative hatred for mortgage insurance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can be easily explained. The two firms are the quintessential example of so-called “crony capitalism” wherein a politically connected firm benefits from its relationship with government rather than its ability to win business on a level playing field.
Liberals one-upped their conservative counterparts by adding yet another large bank to its list of companies that are bad for America in Wells Fargo, while also putting oil exploration giant Exxon Mobil on the list, for reasons likely having to do with climate change. Tyson Foods also made their worst 10 list, reflecting liberal distaste for the mass production processes that are part of the meat industry.
The big head scratcher here is why liberals hate Coca-Cola while conservatives think PepsiCo is bad for the country. Perhaps it has to do their corporate colors. (Coke is red. Pepsi is blue.) Or maybe because it has to do with the general political leanings of where the companies have been based. Coke is in the South. And Pepsi’s headquarters is in the Northeast. But for whatever reason, the Coke-Pepsi political divide is just another sign that when it comes to politics, commerce is less immune than ever.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

The Problematic History Behind One of Donald Trump’s Favorite Ideas: Tariffs - TIME

The Problematic History Behind One of Donald Trump’s Favorite Ideas: Tariffs Posted: 07 Jun 2016 07:30 AM PDT Throughout the 2016 election season, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has made clear his admiration for an idea that hasn’t gotten serious play in American politics for nearly a century: tariffs. Though his official position statement on trade with China clarifies that his “goal is not protectionism but accountability,” he has said that he favors a 45% tariff on Chinese goods. And it’s not just China: he favors a 35% tax on cars made in Mexico and said “who the hells cares” if a trade war is the result of his policies. Even aside from the fact that many experts have said that such plans would be illegal and detrimental to the U.S. economy, Trump’s pro-tariff stance may sound a strange note to anyone familiar with the role of tariffs (or: taxes on imports) in American history. Though the subject was a controversial and common one in the 19th century, and could play a major role in presidential elections back then, it’s just not something that most candidates—or citizens—really talk about very much anymore. So what changed? For an answer, look to the 1930s. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was correct when she said in a speech last week that “we went down that road” back then. Though questions over the value of free trade haven’t been entirely absent from political discussion since then, you have to go back that far to see a full-on trade war—and to see what happened next. “In the 19th century there had been sporadic trade wars, but I’d call them more skirmishes rather than wars,” says Douglas A. Irwin, author of Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s. “In the early 1930s it really was a massive outbreak of protectionism.” Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Even before that decade, the tariff was on its way out. The early 20th century saw two major nails in the coffin of U.S. tariffs, says Joseph J. Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project. Each corresponds with a different function of a tariff: protecting domestic industry (or punishing foreign industry) and raising revenue. The first factor was that the U.S. economy was finally, about 150 years after the nation was founded, maturing. As U.S. industry became more able to compete on a global level, there was more incentive to help businesses trade freely with potential customers around the world and less of a need to use the tax code to protect them. The more important issue, however, came on the revenue side: World War I made the tariff stop doing its job. “Tariffs work very poorly as a way to raise revenue during a war, because ships get sunk and ports get blockaded,” Thorndike says. “Tariffs, which depend on a certain volume of trade, start to raise a lot less money.” The federal income tax had been introduced in 1913, right around when tariffs stopped being able to fund the nation and the war. Democrats—traditionally anti-tariff—happened to be in power during World War I, and they were “more than willing to pick up the slack with the income tax,” says Thorndike. Then, after World War I but before World War II, Republicans—who favored high tariffs—held the White House for several administrations in a row. And even after tariffs had lost their money-making power, they could be used to please certain constituent groups. A turning point for that strategy came in 1930, with the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, perhaps the last hurrah of the American tariff. “It was done for political reasons,” Douglas Irwin says. “It’s not like the U.S. was being swamped with imports. The Great Depression hadn’t struck in a big way yet. There’s no economic need for it.” The act raised tariff rates—which were already pretty high—to record levels. As TIME pointed out while President Hoover mulled whether to sign the bill into law, even though many business experts warned that the tariff could be a disaster, the general consensus was that Hoover would sign because “politically he could not afford to do otherwise.” Sure enough, he signed. The tariff went into effect, and played out just as some of the Cassandras had warned. Other countries around the world retaliated (hence, “trade war”) against the United States by imposing their own high tariffs. Plus, the decrease in trade meant that there were fewer international consumers able to buy American goods. The “beggar-thy-neighbor” policy led to what Irwin calls a “downward spiral in trade.” As a sign of how bad things got, one early-1930s tax law specified that “whenever the President finds that, under the laws of any foreign country, citizens or corporations of the United States are being subjected to discriminatory or extraterritorial taxes” the President could temporarily double certain taxes for citizens and corporations from that country. Though there remains debate over whether the Smoot-Hawley Tariff had a significant impact on the Great Depression domestically—or if that would have been bad regardless—Irwin says that “there’s widespread agreement that the trade wars of the early ‘30s were disastrous for the world economy.” After the shock to the world financial system that was the Great Depression and World War II, the tariff’s days were pretty much through. For one thing, as a revenue source, the income tax was here to stay. For another, Congress no longer had the power to set tariffs—the President had been given that power, to undo the damage—so they lost some clout as a political tool. Then, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the post-World War II precursor to the World Trade Organization, established international regulations about how and when tariffs could be instituted. Though there remain some tax quirks that would allow punitive tariffs—Joseph Thorndike points out that the current Section 891 of the tax code, which grew out of the 1930s system, still allows punitive taxation (and has gotten some recent attention)—it seems unlikely that Trump’s tariff plan would pan out, even if he were elected. Thorndike says that a “fiscal regime change” is always unlikely without a major revenue crisis, which in the past has usually meant boots-on-the-ground war. “That, to me, is the central fact of the fiscal history of the U.S.,” Thorndike says. “Things don’t really change until they have to.”

Free speech under attack - Economist

Free speech
Under attack
Curbs on free speech are growing tighter. It is time to speak out
Jun 4th 2016




IN A sense, this is a golden age for free speech. Your smartphone can call up newspapers from the other side of world in seconds. More than a billion tweets, Facebook posts and blog updates are published every single day. Anyone with access to the internet can be a publisher, and anyone who can reach Wikipedia enters a digital haven where America’s First Amendment reigns.
However, watchdogs report that speaking out is becoming more dangerous—and they are right. As our report shows, curbs on free speech have grown tighter. Without the contest of ideas, the world is timid and ignorant.

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Free speech is under attack in three ways. First, repression by governments has increased. Several countries have reimposed cold-war controls or introduced new ones. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia enjoyed a free-for-all of vigorous debate. Under Vladimir Putin, the muzzle has tightened again. All the main television-news outlets are now controlled by the state or by Mr Putin’s cronies. Journalists who ask awkward questions are no longer likely to be sent to labour camps, but several have been murdered.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ordered a crackdown after he took over in 2012, toughening up censorship of social media, arresting hundreds of dissidents and replacing liberal debate in universities with extra Marxism. In the Middle East the overthrow of despots during the Arab spring let people speak freely for the first time in generations. This has lasted in Tunisia, but Syria and Libya are more dangerous for journalists than they were before the uprisings; and Egypt is ruled by a man who says, with a straight face: “Don’t listen to anyone but me.”
Words, sticks and stones
Second, a worrying number of non-state actors are enforcing censorship by assassination. Reporters in Mexico who investigate crime or corruption are often murdered, and sometimes tortured first. Jihadists slaughter those they think have insulted their faith. When authors and artists say anything that might be deemed disrespectful of Islam, they take risks. Secular bloggers in Bangladesh are hacked to death in the street (see article); French cartoonists are gunned down in their offices. The jihadists hurt Muslims more than any others, not least by making it harder for them to have an honest discussion about how to organise their societies.
Third, the idea has spread that people and groups have a right not to be offended. This may sound innocuous. Politeness is a virtue, after all. But if I have a right not to be offended, that means someone must police what you say about me, or about the things I hold dear, such as my ethnic group, religion, or even political beliefs. Since offence is subjective, the power to police it is both vast and arbitrary.
Nevertheless, many students in America and Europe believe that someone should exercise it. Some retreat into the absolutism of identity politics, arguing that men have no right to speak about feminism nor whites to speak about slavery. Others have blocked thoughtful, well-known speakers, such as Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from being heard on campus (see article).
Concern for the victims of discrimination is laudable. And student protest is often, in itself, an act of free speech. But university is a place where students are supposed to learn how to think. That mission is impossible if uncomfortable ideas are off-limits. And protest can easily stray into preciousness: the University of California, for example, suggests that it is a racist “micro-aggression” to say that “America is a land of opportunity”, because it could be taken to imply that those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame.
The inconvenient truth
Intolerance among Western liberals also has wholly unintended consequences. Even despots know that locking up mouthy but non-violent dissidents is disreputable. Nearly all countries have laws that protect freedom of speech. So authoritarians are always looking out for respectable-sounding excuses to trample on it. National security is one. Russia recently sentenced Vadim Tyumentsev, a blogger, to five years in prison for promoting “extremism”, after he criticised Russian policy in Ukraine. “Hate speech” is another. China locks up campaigners for Tibetan independence for “inciting ethnic hatred”; Saudi Arabia flogs blasphemers; Indians can be jailed for up to three years for promoting disharmony “on grounds of religion, race...caste...or any other ground whatsoever”.
The threat to free speech on Western campuses is very different from that faced by atheists in Afghanistan or democrats in China. But when progressive thinkers agree that offensive words should be censored, it helps authoritarian regimes to justify their own much harsher restrictions and intolerant religious groups their violence. When human-rights campaigners object to what is happening under oppressive regimes, despots can point out that liberal democracies such as France and Spain also criminalise those who “glorify” or “defend” terrorism, and that many Western countries make it a crime to insult a religion or to incite racial hatred.
One strongman who has enjoyed tweaking the West for hypocrisy is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey. At home, he will tolerate no insults to his person, faith or policies. Abroad, he demands the same courtesy—and in Germany he has found it. In March a German comedian recited a satirical poem about him “shagging goats and oppressing minorities” (only the more serious charge is true). Mr Erdogan invoked an old, neglected German law against insulting foreign heads of state. Amazingly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has let the prosecution proceed. Even more amazingly, nine other European countries still have similar laws, and 13 bar insults against their own head of state.
Opinion polls reveal that in many countries support for free speech is lukewarm and conditional. If words are upsetting, people would rather the government or some other authority made the speaker shut up. A group of Islamic countries are lobbying to make insulting religion a crime under international law. They have every reason to expect that they will succeed.
So it is worth spelling out why free expression is the bedrock of all liberties. Free speech is the best defence against bad government. Politicians who err (that is, all of them) should be subjected to unfettered criticism. Those who hear it may respond to it; those who silence it may never find out how their policies misfired. As Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, has pointed out, no democracy with a free press ever endured famine.
In all areas of life, free debate sorts good ideas from bad ones. Science cannot develop unless old certainties are queried. Taboos are the enemy of understanding. When China’s government orders economists to offer optimistic forecasts, it guarantees that its own policymaking will be ill-informed. When American social-science faculties hire only left-wing professors, their research deserves to be taken less seriously.
The law should recognise the right to free speech as nearly absolute. Exceptions should be rare. Child pornography should be banned, since its production involves harm to children. States need to keep some things secret: free speech does not mean the right to publish nuclear launch codes. But in most areas where campaigners are calling for enforced civility (or worse, deference) they should be resisted.
Blasphemy laws are an anachronism. A religion should be open to debate. Laws against hate speech are unworkably subjective and widely abused. Banning words or arguments which one group finds offensive does not lead to social harmony. On the contrary, it gives everyone an incentive to take offence—a fact that opportunistic politicians with ethnic-based support are quick to exploit.
Incitement to violence should be banned. However, it should be narrowly defined as instances when the speaker intends to goad those who agree with him to commit violence, and when his words are likely to have an immediate effect. Shouting “Let’s kill the Jews” to an angry mob outside a synagogue qualifies. Drunkenly posting “I wish all the Jews were dead” on an obscure Facebook page probably does not. Saying something offensive about a group whose members then start a riot certainly does not count. They should have responded with words, or by ignoring the fool who insulted them.
In volatile countries, such as Rwanda and Burundi, words that incite violence will differ from those that would do so in a stable democracy. But the principles remain the same. The police should deal with serious and imminent threats, not arrest every bigot with a laptop or a megaphone. (The governments of Rwanda and Burundi, alas, show no such restraint.)
Areopagitica online
Facebook, Twitter and other digital giants should, as private organisations, be free to decide what they allow to be published on their platforms. By the same logic, a private university should be free, as far as the law is concerned, to enforce a speech code on its students. If you don’t like a Christian college’s rules against swearing, pornography and expressing disbelief in God, you can go somewhere else. However, any public college, and any college that aspires to help students grow intellectually, should aim to expose them to challenging ideas. The world outside campus will often offend them; they must learn to fight back using peaceful protests, rhetoric and reason.
These are good rules for everyone. Never try to silence views with which you disagree. Answer objectionable speech with more speech. Win the argument without resorting to force. And grow a tougher hide.

Ruchir Sharma Offers New Math for the World’s Economic Future - TIME Business

Ruchir Sharma Offers New Math for the World’s Economic Future Posted: 09 Jun 2016 08:47 AM PDT Most investors know that if something fundamental doesn’t change in the economic paradigm, we’re likely headed for a period of historically lower returns in stocks, bonds, and many other types of assets. Much of the low hanging fruit of globalization has been plucked, and other growth-driving trends, like the baby boom and the entrance of women into the workforce en mass have been tapped out. We’re entering a world in which the movement of assets across geographies and classes are no longer correlated as they once were. It’s a new world, and investors are looking for a roadmap to help them capture whatever return they can. Ruchir Sharma’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World, provides a guide. (Full disclosure: Sharma has been a source of mine for years; and I was a huge fan of his last book, Break-Out Nations.) Sharma’s new book is ambitious in positing new rules that investors should take into consideration as they think about the growth prospect of all nations, developed and developing, in the coming economic era of bifurcation, political populism, growing inequality, and uncertain technological disruption. As Sharma eloquently puts it in his introduction, “The American playwright Arthur Miller once observed that an era has reached its end `when it’s basic illusions are exhausted.’ Today, the illusions of widening prosperity that defined the pre-crisis era are finally spent.” He adds that “economic growth is not a God-given right,” noting that research looking back 150 years at countries that had outperformed found that after periods of boom, the majority experienced slumps that lasted six years or more, with numerous downturns going on more than a decade. One thing that sets Sharma’s take on the new world apart straight away: He isn’t making 20, 30 or 50 year predictions about who will fare well or poorly as many banks like Goldman Sachs, or consulting groups like McKinsey have lately been wont to do. He points out sharply that even when all the economic vectors seem to be leading in a certain direction, unexpected human behavior, usually in the form of political change, can shift everything in a heartbeat. (Consider that the Asian Development Bank was located in Manila in the 1960s because, back then, everyone was absolutely sure that the Philippines was the future star of Asia.) Rather he looks to help readers navigate this turbulent world with rules that can help them identify which countries might, over 5 to 10 year time horizons, rise, fall, or muddle through. The first rule is that “people matter,” meaning more precisely that demographics matter. Economic growth is basically demographics plus productivity, and given that both have been falling for a while now, as the gains of the last tech boom have been tapped out and the new one isn’t showing up in the data yet, we’re more dependent on demographics to drive growth than ever before. Unfortunately, in most parts of the world, the birth rate is falling. Countries that can come up with ways to welcome immigrants without causing too much political backlash will have a leg up, as will those that figure out ways to employ more older workers and women. That will be easier in nations that elect political reformers (as Argentina recently did) rather than populists (by this logic, Latin America may be at a turning point since its already passed through the dark life cycle stage of populism that many parts of Europe and even the US are in now). Of course, the populists have risen because inequality has grown. Sharma counts billionaires as a mark of that, but he says there are “good billionaires” (the Steve Jobs and Larry Pages of the world) that can actually point to higher productivity and prosperity in a country, versus bad billionaires (from extractive- or land-based industries like minerals, real estate, oil etc). Too many of those point to corruption and slower growth (on the Bad Billionaire metric, Russia is, not surprisingly, flashing red). Other things to watch: Countries’ own investments (public and private) into their economies (when investment rises growth is much more likely to accelerate). Inflation following debt binges can be a growth killer too, as is a run up in debt itself. Sharma has been one of the prescient seers of the Chinese debt crisis. He pointed out early on that it now takes $4 of debt to create a dollar of growth in China following the 2008 financial crisis, whereas it was a one to one ratio before. He was right, China’s debt crisis has since led to market volatility and much slower growth. By Sharma’s own admission, “there are precious few nations that would qualify as rising stars by the standards of the before crisis era. In 2007…the number of economies growing faster than 7% reached a postwar peak at more than sixty.” Today, there are only nine economies growing that fast. Slower growth has hit every region of the world, and this new math will require a mindset shift for investors. But there are some (relatively) bright spots. Sharma is more bullish on the U.S., particularly relative to the rest of the world, than many American voters are, noting that the shale oil revolution and dominance of Silicon Valley are positive signs for the future. South Asia, home to recent economic laggards, may also be set to rise, mostly because of Sharma’s life cycle theory of boom and bust and boom. Germany is a bright spot in Europe, as are a number of Eastern European nations. And yes, as the author wisely reminds us, a lot can change in 100 years. Foroohar is an assistant managing editor at TIME and the magazine’s economics columnist. She’s the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.

Facebook new feature to hide personal posts - Independent

Facebook is introducing a feature that will let people “hide” their updates from their profiles – making them appear within the news feed but without attaching themselves to people’s profiles.

The site will let people post just into Facebook’s feed, meaning that they’ll show for friends and will be visible in search, but won’t show for anyone who heads straight onto a users’ profile.

Facebook has had increasing trouble encouraging people to post about themselves and their lives, rather than sharing links to other websites. The new move is presumably aimed at that audience, allowing people to share updates without the pressure of knowing it will stay forever on a person’s profile.

10 facts you didn’t know about Facebook

• 10show all

Before the change, all Facebook posts appear on people’s profile and within their news feed, meaning that they will often show for friends who head to the Facebook home page, but can also be found by heading to the public-facing profile. The only way to post without leaving it for everyone to see is to hide it from the profile after the fact.

READ MORE

Facebook to force Messenger users onto separate app

Now users will be able to click an option that allows them to “Create Posts Just for News Feed”. Posting using the tool is the same as normal, but allows people to click the button and have the change enacted.

Facebook has increasingly let people have more control of what appears on their profile, offering increasing privacy options, the ability to not allow photos to appear there until they are approved and letting people hide messages. Posts can be sent out to just a specific set of people, for instance, or kept entirely private.

The site encourages people to use the page as a public-facing round-up of everything about a person, letting them fill in information like employment history and education. But for the moment it also shows the posts that a person has made, potentially causing problems with employers or others.

Only 10 countries are at complete peace in 2016 - Independent

Brazil is the country that has dropped out of the list, and as one of the worst performing countries year-on-year represents a serious concern ahead of the Rio Olympics, the IEP’s founder Steve Killelea told The Independent.
But perhaps the most remarkable result from this year’s peace index, he said, was the extent to which the situation in the Middle East drags down the rest of the world when it comes to peacefulness.
“If we look at the world overall, it has become slightly less peaceful in the last 12 months,” Mr Killelea said.
“But if we took the Middle East out of the index over the last decade – and last year – the world would have become more peaceful. It really highlights the impact the Middle East is having on the world.”

A snapshot of the Global Peace Index 2016
The index shows that 81 countries became more peaceful in the past year, while the situation deteriorated in 79.
Unlike with previous years, however, the IEP noticed a clear trend where the more peaceful countries improved further while the less peaceful countries got even worse – producing what they called greater “peace inequality” across the world.
“The key reason behind it is our inability to solve the conflicts which are emerging," Mr Killelea said. “The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have been going for well over a decade, then it spilled into Syria in 2011, and afterwards into Libya and Yemen. That [failure] is really the key to the problem.
“If we take battlefield deaths for example, they are up at 112,000 – a 20-year high. But again, if you took out Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, they count for 75 per cent of those deaths.”
The index shows that political instability worsened in 39 countries in the last 12 months, including what the report described as the “striking case” of Brazil.
It has fallen five places to 105th out of the 163 countries included in the study, due to increases in the number of people jailed, the number of security officers deployed by the state and also a slight increase in terrorist activity.
“It is very difficult to say how that will play out in terms of the Olympic Games,” said Mr Killelea. “It’s obviously a very volatile situation.”
Iceland was once again named the world’s most peaceful country, followed by Denmark, Austria, New Zealand and Portugal, the latter improving nine places. Syria was once again named the least peaceful country.

The index suggests the world is less peaceful in 2016 than at any point in the past eight years (IEP)
Asked how the rest of the world can learn from Iceland, Mr Killelea said: “It’s not just Iceland, it’s a whole range of countries which we can learn from. They are practising what we call positive peace, which are factors which create and sustain peaceful societies.”
The IEP tries to define positive peace in numerical terms, giving countries scores for a range of factors including “acceptance of the rights of others”, “low levels of corruption”, “the free flow of information” and a “well functioning government”.
“If positive peace is strong enough, then a country which is presented with shocks won’t actually have a deterioration in peace [as measured by violence],” he said.
Finally, the index identified Europe once again as the most peaceful region in the world, and by some margin, home to seven of the top 10 countries on the list.
Yet the continent is not immune to war – Britain, France, Belgium and others are heavily involved in external conflict in the Middle East, and face a growing threat to peace from international terrorism.


So given all the dire warnings from either side about the security of Europe if Britain leaves the EU, does the IEP foresee a change in the region’s fortunes in the event of Brexit?
“It’s unlikely to have an effect in the short term,” Mr Killelea said. “But the longer-term ramifications, more for Britain than for [the rest of] Europe, would probably depend on what the economic outcome of a British exit would be.
“If the economy was robust Britain would probably maintain its current levels of peace. However, if there’s a deterioration in the economy then that would come back and have a negative impact on peacefulness.”

There may be a fifth force in the universe - Financial Times

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94974922-2ca9-11e6-bf8d-26294ad519fc.html#ixzz4AzVm797W

A
sublime coincidence slipped by unnoticed last month. While audiences were thrilling to premieres of Tim Burton’s film Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice steps into a strange world where everything is “contrariwise”, physicists in Hungary announced they had possibly found the key to an unseen portion of the universe.
The results, which are a talking point in laboratories the world over, are remarkable because they might point to the existence of a fifth fundamental force. The current model for nature’s physical laws allows for four forces: the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear interaction, the weak nuclear interaction, and gravitation. A fifth would, literally, be a force for revolutionary change.

In truth, a revolution is a little overdue. The reason is so-called dark matter, the hidden stuff that makes up more than 80 per cent of the mass of the universe. Astronomers know it is there because of the gravitational effect it exerts on celestial bodies, but it behaves differently from the matter that makes up the visible world.
One way of investigating matter is to engineer collisions between particles, and then detect the particles that flutter out of the debris; this is how the elementary Higgs boson particle was conjured up at Cern. To this end, Attila Krasznahorkay at Hungary’s Institute for Nuclear Physics, fired protons at lithium isotopes, which produced unstable beryllium nuclei. These beryllium nuclei then decayed, as expected, into electron-positron pairs that flew away from each other at various angles.
But, anomalously, these electron-positron pairs seemed to have a fondness for shooting away from each other at 140 degrees. The simplest explanation was a new, intermediate particle in the radioactive decay mix. Calculations suggested a mass of 17 megaelectronvolts (MeV), around 7,000 times lighter than the Higgs boson.
While the Higgs was forecast to exist, this new nimble particle was not. That is why the team spent three years checking their results before going public. It is, as Alice muses while being bamboozled by the Red Queen, exactly like a riddle with no answer.

Gravitational waves and our golden age of physics

Confirmation of Einstein’s theory vindicates the pursuit of science and technology for its own sake
One exciting possibility is that the new particle is a missing link between our familiar world of matter and the unseen world of dark matter. One theory is that it is a “dark photon”, the carrier of an as yet unidentified force that might be connected with dark matter. A reanalysis led by Jonathan Feng at the University of California, Irvine, does not quite support the “dark photon” suggestion but does back the idea that it represents a fifth force operating over super-short distances.
The finding has also piqued the curiosity of those on the DarkLight project, who are exploring the “dark sector” (both dark matter and dark energy), and are looking for dark photons at between 10 and 100 MeV. They will now target 17 MeV as a priority, in an attempt to unmask the same particle.
To say that confirmation would be thrilling is an understatement. The theories of physics may be elegant but they are incomplete, capable of explaining only a small fraction of the observable universe. To uncover a new particle that straddles our visible world and the invisible world of dark matter would unlock a new realm of physics.
Even so, both visible and dark matter together account together for less than half of what we know exists in our universe. The biggest constituent is thought to be dark energy, which, contrariwise, might have nothing to do with dark matter. The more we learn, the more mysterious things become. The White Queen, who took pride in believing six impossible things before breakfast, would surely be clapping her hands in delight.
The writer is a science commentator

Cosmetic Lancombe in political trouble over sponsorship in HK - HK Free Press

We are all Denise Ho’: Lawmakers and activists protest against Lancôme ‘censorship’, urge boycott
8 June 2016 14:48 Kris Cheng

Dozens gathered outside Lancôme store in Times Square, Causeway Bay on Wednesday in protest of the company’s decision to cancel a concert featuring pro-democracy star Denise Ho Wan-see.
The French cosmetics giant cancelled the June 19 concert after Chinese state mouthpiece Global Times accused Ho of being a supporter of Hong Kong and Tibetan independence movements. The move sparked controversy among netizens and customers. Ho supported the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy protests but has rarely spoken about the independence debate.

Photo: SocRec.
The protesters urged an international boycott of the brand, as well as other brands under its parent group L’Oréal, until a full explanation and an apology are given. They urged to company to promise not to carry out further political censorship.


“What shocks the society is that an international brand, emphasising social responsibility and women[‘s] empowerment like Lancôme, also kneeled down to the bullying government,” said Avery Ng Man-yuen, chairman of the pro-democracy League of Social Democrats party.

Photo: Apple Daily screenshot.
Ng said the incident was a “great contradiction to L’Oréal’s mission.”
“Lancôme not only insulted Denise Ho, but also insulted Hong Kong citizens who fought for democracy for years, and all global citizens embracing democracy and liberty,” Ng added.
Several lawmakers of pro-democracy parties attended the protest, namely Helena Wong Pik-wan of the Democratic Party, Gary Fan Kwok-wai of the Neo Democrats, Cyd Ho Sau-lan and Fernando Cheung Chiu-hung of the Labour Party.

Photo: SocRec.
Citing a Whatsapp message from Denise Ho, lawmaker “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung said although Ho could not come due to her busy schedule, she thanked participants at the protest.

Claudia Mo (far right). Photo: Apple Daily.
“[She said] this matter is not her personal matter, and not the company’s matter anymore – it is white terror,” he said. “She hopes everyone will keep fighting, otherwise people will all live in fear.”

Stores closed across the city. Photo: Apple Daily.
The protesters produced a large banner with Ho’s face that said “We are all Denise Ho – say no to mainland tyranny”. Other banners read “No kowtow to Beijing” and “Protecting Hong Kong’s core values.”
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Civic Party lawmaker Claudia Mo Man-ching said Ho’s treatment by the firm was “simply blatant, naked and despicable”.
“We need to ask, whatever happened to the French qualities… liberty, equality, fraternity – are they telling us these days, today, that money talks? Profits come first?” she asked.
People Power party representative Tam Tak-chi questioned Lancôme’s decision to pull Ho from the event. He said that brand ambassadors who opposed animal testing for cosmetic products have not been dropped. L’Oreal is accused of using animal testing.
“Does that mean Hong Kong people are easier targets to suppression?” he asked.

Photo: Resistance Live.
Apology demanded
The Lancôme booth at Lane Crawford in Times Square was closed ahead of the protest.
The protesters pasted props criticising the company onto the booth, including one saying “Lancôme Lanout Hong Kong” – demanding the brand leave the city.

Photo: Apple Daily screenshot.
Ng said that they will allow a week for L’Oréal to apologise, and will not rule out any further actions.
A French petition addressed to L’Oréal Hong Kong president Stephen Mosely has almost reached its goal of 5,000 signatures.
Lancôme’s Facebook page, which posted statements cancelling the concert, has not been updated since Sunday.

China refined crude oil floods world market - Bloomberg

* Chinese exports jump as refining expands amid slowing economy

* Supplies seen reaching Americas on relatively higher prices

After supplying the world with everything from Victoria’s Secretlingerie to iPhones and Barbie dolls, China is now producing fuel that’s finding its way to pumps across the globe.
The Asian manufacturing giant is turning a record amount of crude into refined products and sending some of it abroad at an unprecedented pace. That includes jet fuel sent to Europe last year, gasoline that went to Nicaragua in May and another cargo currently headed to the Panama Canal. Traders say more shipments may be coming.
Burgeoning output from processors including privately held plants known as teapots is swelling supply as the domestic economy cools. Meanwhile, higher U.S. prices and weakening freight rates are making it more profitable to ship the fuel overseas, with delays in refining projects bolstering demand in Latin America. The cargoes already contributed to a slide of about 30 percent in Asian processing margins over the past year, and now threaten profitability in Europe and the Americas as well.

“China has become an accidental exporter of fuel,” said John Driscoll, chief strategist at JTD Energy Services Pte, who has spent more than 30 years trading crude and petroleum in Singapore. “They have overbuilt refining capacity, domestic demand has moderated and the teapots have entered the fray.”
Refining Surge
The country’s refining capacity has doubled to about 14.5 million barrels a day this year from a decade ago and is forecast to rise more in coming years, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data from state-run China National Petroleum Corp. While the surge was intended to meet domestic needs, economic growth that’s fallen by half to less than 7 percent from 2007 means the country will face a daily fuel surplus of about 700,000 barrels in four years’ time, CNPC data show.
China’s exports of gasoline and diesel have expanded by at least 30 percent in 2016 after an unprecedented amount of shipments last year, customs data show. The government also started allowing the independent refineries to import crude and export fuel.

The supply has swamped Asia, eroding margins for producers in India and South Korea, and boosted stockpiles in the trading hub of Singapore. To escape the glut, traders are looking to take advantage of cheaper freight rates and sell products in parts of the world where prices are higher.

“China has become more competitive after years of expanding refining capacity,” said Kang Yoo Jin, a Seoul-based commodities analyst at NH Investment & Securities. “Refiners in the U.S. and Europe will face intensified competition. It’s very positive for China because shipments indicate profits are still being made even after sending cargoes far away.”
The cost to carry about 300,000 barrels of gasoline from China to the U.S. Gulf Coast would be about $4 a barrel, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. U.S. futures of the fuel have on average been about $13 a barrel costlier than in Singapore since March, meaning it would potentially be profitable to ship a cargo even after accounting for freight, the data show.
Trafigura Beheer BV bought a cargo of gasoline from China’s Hongrun refinery for loading from Laizhou in April, three traders said last month. The oil tanker Dalmacija left that port on April 21 and initially signaled its destination as Houston. It’s now off the coast of Nicaragua, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the Torm Laura left Luhuashan, Zhejiang, last month and is traveling to the Panama Canal.
New Markets
Last May, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp., known as Sinopec, shipped 96,000 metric tons of jet fuel to Europe from its Hainan refinery as part of a strategy by the nation’s biggest processor to expand markets for its fuels, according to the company.
“Fuel will be shipped to wherever there’s demand, including places where they normally aren’t sent,” said Peter Lee, a Singapore-based analyst at BMI Research, a unit of Fitch Group.

Latin America is seen as a prime destination. The region’s fuel consumption is expected to rise to 10.263 million barrels a day in 2025, outpacing its predicted daily refining capacity of 9.939 million barrels, BMI Research said in a May 22 report, adding that budgetary and regulatory setbacks have led to project delays and cancellations, especially in Brazil.
Fuel Quality
China’s domestic demand also is being hampered by its effort to curb pollution that’s caused social unrest and health problems. It’s set to adopt a higher-quality specification for gasoline and diesel starting from January. That means the quality of its fuel is unlikely to be an impediment for foreign buyers.



The majority of refiners can already meet China V specifications, the equivalent of Euro V quality, according to Shen Fan, a deputy general manager at Pacific Commerce Holdings Pte, the Singapore trading unit of independent refiner Shandong Dongming Petrochemical Group. Sinopec, Asia’s biggest processor, said last year that 70 percent of its gasoline capacity and 40 percent of its diesel meet the standard. Traders also can typically blend lower-grade fuel with other products to meet quality specifications if required.

“The fuel surplus has increased in China, and as a result we are seeing exporters search much more aggressively for additional markets,” said Victor Shum, a vice president at Englewood, Colorado-based industry consultant IHS Inc. “There will be more competition. No question about it.”

New kind of telephone scam found in UK - Telegraph

Action Fraud is warning of a new form of fraud in which the public are sent letters, texts or emails asking them to phone their banks.
There is no request for passwords or other personal information, so many recipients may phone the number provided.
When your call is answered, a recording device is switched on.Your call is then transferred to a legitimate phone line operated by your bank, where you log in as usual by providing key letters of your password and other information. All of this is recorded, allowing the fraudster to build up information which could be used in future to access your accounts.

The reason why this scam is so successful is because the fraudster’s presence is unknown to both the victim and the bank,” Action Fraud said.
Customers should only ever use phone numbers displayed on banks’ websites or on statements, it said.

If you are responding to a message or letter, you should tell the bank member of staff at the outset of the call, it advised.

Nordic empire in Sweden - Economist

A Nordic pyramid
The lessons from 100 years of a family’s industrial empire
Mar 12th 2016  | STOCKHOLM


Wallenbergs: the fifth generation


SWEDEN is a progressive place. Women participate fully in the workforce. Companies are transparent, generally uncorrupt and often globally minded. Enthusiasm for technology helps Stockholm flourish as a lively startup centre for gaming, music and fintech firms. Business leaders earnestly talk of the benefits of going green, caring for workers and being ethical. In politics, Sweden is egalitarian, redistributing wealth through high taxes. So it is a puzzle that Swedish capitalism appears so strikingly unequal, with a small number of individuals owning and running large chunks of the economy.
Credit Suisse, in its annual report on global wealth in October, pointed to findings that the richest 1% of Swedish households control 24% of the population’s total wealth, making it only a bit less unequal than India (25.7%). In contrast, Spain’s 1% control 16.5% of the wealth, and Japan’s only 4.3%. As in many countries, family-controlled businesses are the norm in Sweden. But as Randall Morck of the University of Alberta in Canada has noted, Sweden is an extreme case among rich countries in that one particular family, the Wallenbergs, holds such sway in business.

The foundations were laid for the dynasty’s fortunes 160 years ago when André Oscar Wallenberg, the globe-trotting son of a Lutheran bishop, returned from America with a book on how to set up a bank, and founded Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB). The bank flourished, and began buying chunks of distressed industrial firms, leading the family to set up a holding company, Investor, 100 years ago.
At the height of the Wallenbergs’ pre-eminence, in the 1970s, their various firms together employed 40% of Sweden’s industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stockmarket. Like most modern manufacturers, the industrial firms in their portfolio, including ABB and Atlas Copco (engineering), AstraZeneca (drugs) and Electrolux (appliances), are no longer huge employers. But Investor, plus SEB and the other listed firms in Investor’s portfolio, still account for about a third of the stockmarket’s value. And they generally do better than the rest: in the past decade, Investor’s shares have doubled, whereas the OMX Stockholm 30 Index rose by just 40%.
Swedes often talk about the collection of companies as Wallenbergsfaren, “the Wallenberg sphere”, and to its smaller local rivals as “systems”. One of the largest systems is Industrivarden, whose portfolio includes Handelsbanken and the maker of Volvo Trucks. It has passed through several hands down the years, including those of Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the IKEA furniture stores; its leading investor nowadays is Fredrik Lundberg, the son of a construction magnate. The Wallenbergs and Industrivarden both have large stakes in Ericsson, a maker of telecoms equipment.
Many Wallenberg firms have roots in the 19th century, before Investor was founded. But they have generally flourished under the active ownership and close managerial oversight of the family. The sphere is now overseen by a genial triad of middle-aged men, two brothers and a cousin: Jacob, Peter and Marcus Wallenberg (pictured, next page). A transition to a sixth generation of the family is looming, with the next set of leaders to be drawn from a pool of around 30 relatives in their 30s or younger. A hitherto male-dominated empire is then likely to have some Wallenberg women right at the top. Already, Caroline Ankarcrona, younger sister to Marcus Wallenberg and in her late 40s, has been running the main family foundation, KAW, for four years.
“Sphere” is one way of describing the Wallenberg holdings. A more pointed term (literally as well as figuratively) is the one Mr Morck uses: a pyramid. The Wallenbergs are thought to have combined personal wealth of just $1 billion or so, but they control, or have strong influence over, businesses worth hundreds of times as much.
They do so through a number of foundations. KAW, the largest, is named after two ancestors who provided the largest endowment, 99 years ago. KAW has 50.1% of voting rights in Investor, chaired by Jacob Wallenberg. It in turn holds stakes—and often outsized voting rights—in their main, listed firms, at which family members often take leadership roles. (Through a division called Patricia Industries, Investor holds majority stakes in financial, telecoms and other firms, and is also a founder-investor in a private-equity fund, EQT.)
Fear of tunnelling
These successive layers let the Wallenbergs multiply their clout. Investor has beaten the Stockholm market handsomely, but its listed businesses often trade at a discount to their global peers, points out Thomas Zellweger, who directs a centre studying business families in St Gallen, Switzerland. Outside investors may be discounting the shares out of fear of “tunnelling”, in which a controlling family uses one firm to prop up another—though Mr Morck notes that there is scant evidence of this.
Shareholders may also fear a controlling family pursuing its private obsessions, while neglecting the business: an early Wallenberg, for instance, campaigned assiduously for a single global currency, based on gold and the French franc. They may also worry that the next generation of Wallenberg bosses are chosen for internal family reasons rather than on merit. The Wallenbergs have managed their successions well over the years, but there is no guarantee this will always be so.
The Wallenberg empire might in theory be threatened if, as in other countries, there were moves towards curbing the use of the dual-class shares that let the family exercise such sway over its firms. In Ericsson, for example, Investor has just 5.3% of total stock, but controls 21.5% of votes. In Electrolux, Investor has 15.5% of the stock, but 30% of voting rights. Family firms often use such dual shares (The Economist Group, largely owned by European business families, uses them too), but prevalence does not mean popularity. However, the family has long enjoyed good political connections: for all its support for free trade and open markets abroad, until the 1990s it had decades of help from protectionist policies that kept foreign predators at bay.
That the KAW and other foundations get the Wallenbergs’ share of profits helps shield them from Sweden’s top income-tax rate, of 62%. The foundations’ beneficence also helps shield them from criticism: the KAW, for instance, makes $250m of grants a year, notably to fund basic research and education.
Nordic, not Anglo-Saxon
Discuss their set-up with the Wallenbergs and they say “Anglo-Saxons”, schooled in British and American ideas that companies are best owned by masses of small investors (or pension funds), are wilfully blind to the benefits of family-dominated firms. The family argues that ownership models need not be “black and white”, that theirs has proved it can deliver a “nice track record” for more than a century-and-a-half. Well-run family firms can ensure modern virtues—transparency, professional management, clear communication, agility—as easily as those Anglo-Saxons.
Tour the headquarters of Ericsson, and its CEO, Hans Vestberg, offers a similar argument: a stolid company, founded in 1876 (and part-owned by the Wallenbergs since 1950), can be nimble, even ruthless. Ericsson frittered away the strong position it once had as a maker of mobile handsets. But Mr Vestberg talks optimistically of how it will prosper from the coming launch of fifth-generation (5G) wireless telecoms and the “internet of things”. Ericsson, with a $5 billion annual research-and-development budget, files 4,000 patents a year, he says. In less than two years it has hired 30,000 staff, but also let go 28,000, to make possible a shift from a company that sells products to one more focused on services.
Gunnar Wetterberg, author of a book on the Wallenberg family, argues that having most of its wealth locked up in the foundations best explains its long-term success: family feuds are discouraged when no relative can dream of running off to Bahamas with all the loot. “There are no family fights,” says one Wallenberg. “No one understands how it works, but it works well.”
Other observers prefer explanations that focus on the personality and skills of a mostly self-effacing, hard-working and polyglot clan. Their spells working in the companies make them better owners. Carina Beckerman, who has just written a book on culture and leadership in Wallenberg companies, lauds two qualities that help encourage success. One is doggedness: the Wallenbergs found few firms, but they stick with existing ones, seek new markets and try ways to make them flourish. She notes that Atlas Copco had to be rescued from near-bankruptcy three times in its first 27 years, but now flourishes.
The second quality, says Ms Beckerman, is a near-obsession with getting the right managers in place: it is often the top item on the agenda whenever the Wallenberg leaders gather. They typically favour loyal insiders, not show-offs who promise dramatic change.
Not everything the family touches turns to gold. Efforts to go digital, just over a decade ago, by investing in a pair of online firms, Spray Networks and Bredbandsbolaget, had disappointing outcomes. Scania, a lorry-maker that has flourished since being bought by Volkswagen in 2000, was sold too cheaply, says Ms Beckerman.
But the sphere’s more recent efforts to expand its medical interests have been more successful—witness its investments in Sobi, which specialises in treatments for haemophilia and other rare diseases, and in Mölnlycke Health Care, which makes products for use in surgery and treating wounds. Even if its dominance of the Swedish business scene has diminished in recent decades, the Wallenberg sphere looks set to go on prospering in the hands of its sixth generation.
That makes them mere parvenus compared with the Lovenskiold family across the border in Norway: now led by its 13th generation, it claims a 360-year history and runs successful timber and furniture firms. But there may be a shared recipe for such longevity. “The majority of the really successful, long-lasting families are, like the Wallenbergs, convivial, modest, see the hard work needed and do it quietly,” says a close observer. If they were a bunch of work-shy show-offs, Swedes would surely have noticed the inequality by now.

Young HK people snub June 4 Tiananmen vigil - HK Free Press

Young Hongkongers boycott Tiananmen vigil amid growing calls for greater autonomy from China
4 June 2016 16:16 AFP4 min read

Young activists will turn their backs on Hong Kong’s commemoration of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on Saturday amid growing calls in the city for greater autonomy from China.
The vigil, which each year draws tens of thousands, has caused a widening rift in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp between those who believe the victims of the crackdown should be remembered and those who see the event’s message as increasingly irrelevant.

File photo: HKFP.
Semi-autonomous Hong Kong is the only location on Chinese soil to see a major commemoration to mark the military’s brutal crushing of pro-democracy protests in central Beijing in 1989, with residents gathering en masse in Victoria Park every year.


But young activists from the new “localist” movement say Hong Kong should push for its own autonomy, even independence, rather than the democratisation of the mainland, which is part of the vigil’s main message.


Localism grew out of the failure of mass pro-democracy rallies in 2014 to gain concessions from China on political reform for Hong Kong.
A growing number of student groups have now broken away from the event.
“For this generation, we want to put emphasis on fighting for democracy in Hong Kong,” said Althea Suen, president of the Hong Kong University Student Union (HKUSU).
Suen added that building a democratic China was “not our responsibility”.

The Hong Kong Federation of Students, a founding member of the alliance that organises the vigil, will also not participate this year.
“The alliance has lost touch with Hong Kongers,” said Jocelyn Wong of HKFS.
“The candlelight vigil has not made any progress in the past 27 years.”
Others were more acerbic in their criticism.

Shue Yan University student union likened the organisers of the vigil to “pimps and bawds who run a brothel after they got raped themselves” on a Facebook post late last month.
HKU and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) will hold alternative forums at the same time as the vigil Saturday evening.
The leader of the new pro-independence Hong Kong National Party will speak at CUHK.
“Although the younger generation also feels sorry for the sacrifices of the students in 1989…they don’t share the same memory of Chinese identity with the older generation,” the party said in a statement Saturday.
‘Never forget’
Vigil organiser, the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, said although it had not achieved its ultimate goal of getting Chinese authorities to admit to the crackdown, it had helped keep the memory alive.

File photo: HKFP.
Richard Tsoi of the alliance said if the vigil was axed, Tiananmen would be rendered a “non-issue” due to repression from Beijing.
Hundreds — by some estimates more than a thousand — died after the Communist Party sent tanks to crush demonstrations in the square in the heart of Beijing, where student-led protesters had staged a peaceful seven-week sit-in to demand democratic reforms.
The protests are branded a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” by Chinese authorities and many on the mainland remain unaware of the crackdown.
Tsoi hopes for a turnout of more than 100,000 people Saturday, similar to numbers in recent years, although heavy rain may keep some away.

Photo: HKFP.
Newly formed political party Demosisto, founded by pro-democracy student leader Joshua Wong, set up street stalls near Victoria Park in the afternoon to promote self-determination for the city.
Members of the party, which supports the vigil, will also be attending the event.
Some student groups have backed the vigil saying that the Tiananmen protests and crackdown helped politicise a new generation and have organised forums to explain its impact to Hong Kongers.

Firewall kills China's innovative initiative - TIME

China’s Great Firewall is Harming Innovation, Scholars Say
* Hannah Beech / Shanghai @hkbeech June 2, 2016


Lucas Schifres—Getty Images
Lab employee polishes a LCD screen in Rhodia High-Technology facility on April 9, 2010 in the outskirts of Shanghai, China.
President Xi Jinping wants China to transform into the world’s leading science and technology power. But scholars say online censorship is stifling such innovation
Many people are stymied by the Great Firewall, the filigree of censorship and website obstruction that confines China’s online space. There are factory owners trying desperately to retrieve foreign orders via Gmail. There are students who are blocked from accessing foreign university websites. And there’s anyone who hankers after YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the thousands of other overseas websites that are banned in China, including TIME.com.

Now, another influential group is raising its voice in frustration: Chinese scholars. At a scientific conference held late last month in Beijing, domestic researchers protested that the nation’s Internet restrictions are harming their ability to innovate. One unnamed Chinese academic told the China Science Daily that “it is very difficult to achieve world-leading results or to be a frontrunner in global scientific research without any knowledge of [other countries’ achievements] and without comparison.”


Read More: The Other Side of the Great Firewall
That’s a big problem, given that at the same academic conference, China’s President Xi Jinping set ambitious targets for Chinese innovation. He urged the nation’s researchers to catapult China into the ranks of the world’s most innovative societies by 2020. By 2049, which will mark a century since the communist People’s Republic was formed, Xi expects China to transform into the world’s leading science and technology power. “Scientists should be allowed to freely explore and test the bold hypotheses they put forward,” Xi told conference participants, according to state media. “Leading scientists should be given more power and liberty to decide upon the direction of their research, and greater management of research funds and resources.”
But how can Chinese researchers fulfill Xi’s directive, given that the Great Firewall blocks everything from online tools like Google Scholar to groundbreaking papers by international peers? “Our nation’s mind is caged,” say Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “How is it possible for our nation to have prosperous culture and science? If we can’t access Google or other resources on the Internet, it is impossible for us to have a good vision and an open mind, let alone innovation. That’s why China has few great minds.”
Read More: The Architect of China’s Great Firewall Was Himself Blocked by the Firewall

Because China boasts an online ecosystem vibrant with successful tech firms like Alibaba and Tencent, it can be easy to forget that the Great Firewall looms in the shadows. But try connecting with the online world outside China’s borders and the most sophisticated cyber-censorship network on earth quickly intrudes. Even foreign websites that aren’t blocked load painfully slowly if they are outfitted with widgets for blocked sites like Facebook or Twitter.
For Chinese academics, these blockages — not to mention calls by the nation’s Education Minister to avoid peddling in “western values” on college campuses — can be crippling. “I am one of the complainers because it’s much more difficult now for me to search for international documents,” Cassandra Wang, who studies Chinese IT innovation at Zhejiang University in eastern China, told TIME last year. “We cannot just be innovative by ourselves. We need to establish a global network. Otherwise, we are locked in and cannot get anything useful from research spilling over borders.”
While Wang acknowledges that certain Chinese tech companies have nurtured creativity, she also worries that China’s Internet restrictions discourage the kind of revolutionary thinking needed to push the nation to the forefront of global innovation. A domestic search engine like Baidu, for instance, is shielded from having to contend with a world-beating company like Google, “At some level, competition stimulates innovation,” she says. “If you simply block the competition, this is not the right way for China to be innovative.”

Brexit from EU affects US Federal Reserve on interest rise - CNBC

This month's vote on the U.K.'s membership in the European Union will overshadow other risks and could spur the U.S. Federal Reserve to delay an interest rate hike, Axel Weber, chairman of UBS and a former central banker, told CNBC.
With the referendum on whether the U.K. should "Brexit" too close to call, "it creates huge uncertainty," Weber, who was president of the German Bundesbank from 2004-2011, told CNBC's "Street Signs" in an exclusive interview.
"You already see that British assets have a risk premium attached to them over recent months, including the pound," he said.
From a peak of around $1.5882 in mid-June of 2015, the pound is now fetching around $1.4431, losing more than 9 percent of its value against the greenback.
Concerns about the referendum may factor in to the Fed's decision-making on a rate hike, which has been clearly signaled as likely in June or July.
"I think June, because of the British poll, is less likely to some degree than a July move," Weber said.

But either way, he believes a rate hike is likely a done deal.
"Whether it's July or June, for domestic reasons, purely domestic reasons, I think the U.S. is ready for a rate hike and the Fed has signaled that," he said. "The rest is tactical decisions on when to do that best rather than whether to do it or not to do it."
While some analysts believe the Fed is less likely to move when no press conference is scheduled, Weber doesn't believe it will be a factor.
A press conference is scheduled to follow the June 14-15 meeting, but not after the July 26-27 meeting.
"Monetary policy is not as much about the decision of the day. It's really more about forward guidance and about informing markets what's ahead and that's a much more medium term view," he said. "The Fed has done most of that. It might actually be helpful to decouple the ability to move rates from the ability to have a press meeting," he said. "It ties your hands in the market in an unfortunate way."
If there's no June hike, the Fed's language will be "pretty clear," Weber said. "I think the market then will almost perfectly price a July rate hike if the language is pretty straight forward."

But Weber was skeptical on the efficacy of a negative interest rate policy, saying that while negative rates may have more pronounced effects in small open economies, such as Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland, in large economies, such as the eurozone and Japan, the impact could "easily go the other way."  

"What you usually want to do with lowering rates or going into negative territory, you want to boost consumption and reduce savings," he said. But in a negative-rate environment, people may become concerned about their ability to earn a decent pension, he said.
"That ability goes down dramatically in a negative interest rate environment so they might just overall be concerned about their level of pension and start saving more rather than saving less and consuming less rather than consuming more," Weber said.
Within the eurozone, UBS has repriced some of its products in response to negative rates, he said.
"Credit is getting more expensive in those areas where you can actually increase prices for those products," he said.


—By CNBC.Com's Leslie Shaffer; Follow her on Twitter @LeslieShaffer1

Vienna hosts both European Central Bank & OPEC meeting - Financial Times

Oh, Vienna. In an elegant piece of choreography, the Austrian capital will this week host both the European Central Bank rate-setting meeting and the semi-annual Opec get-together.
Both organisations have a history of “full and frank exchanges of views” behind the scenes. This time around, Opec is more likely to provide the drama, particularly with Saudi policy now flowing from the relatively unknown quantity that is deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Mario Draghi’s ECB meeting and press conference are likely to be a much more sedate affair. (Just don’t call it “boring”. The last time everyone expected a “boring” meeting, Mr Draghi ended up being showered in confetti by a protester wearing fashionably tight jeans.)


But fittingly enough, any big clues to what the central bank will do next will most likely stem from oil, with the chance of the first rise in the ECB’s staff projections on inflation since before its bond buying began in March 2015.
The price of oil has rocketed, albeit from a very low base, since January’s plunge. All told, it is up by nearly 80 per cent since that January nadir, with Brent crude nudging briefly above $50 a barrel earlier this month. From the ECB’s March 10 meeting to mid-May, the cut-off point for new projections, the rally stands at about 20 per cent.


Pictet Wealth Management’s Frederik Ducrozet points out that a combination of this and the expected effects of the ECB’s bond-buying could in theory push the median 2018 inflation forecast over 2 per cent. That is above target. It is hard to imagine, and Mr Ducrozet thinks the central bank will “avoid sending this kind of signal”, given persistent risks to global growth.
Still, a brighter outlook would be a real change in tone, and present a tricky balancing act for the central bank. If it looks too confident, the euro could well rally, a shift that would drag inflation expectations back down again.
So, no smiling. Curb your enthusiasm, and be sure to stress that any return to normal is predicated on continuing easy policy. Still, it all dampens the case for yet more rate cuts. Finally, some music to German ears. A Viennese waltz, if you will.
katie.martin@ft.com

Viacom media take over drama - Economist

American media
Sumner’s lease
The future of Viacom is shrouded in uncertainty and mired in litigation
May 28th 2016  | NEW YORK | From the print edition
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UNDER normal circumstances, a nasty public power struggle between a company’s controlling shareholder and its chief executive might put a dampener on the share price. But the circumstances at Viacom, a media conglomerate, are anything but normal. Sumner Redstone (pictured), an ailing 92-year-old mogul, recently kept control of his $42 billion media empire after a humiliating legal battle to prise it from his hands. Now the focus has shifted to the leadership of Philippe Dauman, the CEO of Viacom, prompting another round of lawsuits. Although the drama makes the firm’s future more uncertain, investors seem more excited.
Like many a television soap opera, recent events have been absorbingly far-fetched. First came a lawsuit by Manuela Herzer, a former lover of Mr Redstone’s who had been written out of his will. Her reinstatement would have threatened the tycoon’s control of Viacom and another media giant, CBS. A judge threw out that lawsuit on May 9th. Then, on May 20th, Mr Redstone ejected Mr Dauman from a trust that will decide the fate of his holdings after his death. Three days later Mr Dauman filed a lawsuit to block the move, arguing that Mr Redstone was mentally incompetent and that Shari Redstone, his daughter, was pulling the strings in an “unlawful corporate takeover”. Mr Redstone’s lawyers filed their own suit in response.

The share price has surged as the lawsuits have flown. The removal of Mr Dauman from the trust raises the prospect of his dismissal from the firm. That seems to promise the change in strategy at Viacom that many believe is overdue. Eric Jackson, an activist investor who has blasted Mr Dauman’s leadership, believes the share price, currently around $42, could rise by another $10 or more if Mr Dauman is fired. A long-standing confidant of Mr Redstone, and a spring chicken by comparison at 62, Mr Dauman has fallen out of favour as Viacom has floundered. The company’s share price fell by close to 40% over the past year. For nearly a decade before that under Mr Dauman it was the worst performer in its peer group. Since September 2006 Viacom’s shares have nudged up a little while Disney’s have more than tripled in value.
All parts of Viacom are underperforming. Its movie business, Paramount, has lagged behind the other big Hollywood studios for four years in a row; in April it reported a quarterly loss of $136m after disappointing box-office receipts for “Zoolander 2”. The company’s portfolio of cable channels, including MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, has lost more viewers in America than its big competitors—a decline of 35% over the past five years, by one measure. The cable networks remain lucrative but profits are falling as subscribers turn off and advertisers turn away.
Mr Dauman’s critics claim that he has run the company like the lawyer he is at a time when it required a creative leader. They say he never came up with a strategy for growth, resisting efforts to embrace the digital era. He pushed an aggressive buy-back programme to support the share price, which Mr Redstone was known to watch assiduously. If he kept Mr Redstone’s confidence, former executives say, he lost that of his workforce. Senior bosses and talented TV stars have left to work elsewhere. The 52nd floor of the Viacom building in New York, where Mr Dauman’s office is located, is a mirthless place, “like the gallows”, says one former employee.
If Mr Dauman is to keep his job it will require some fancy footwork. Ms Herzer’s lawsuit had challenged Mr Redstone’s competence to write her out of his will, which he did last autumn; she accused Shari Redstone of manipulating her father to her own benefit. If Ms Herzer had won her suit, control of Viacom and CBS might have gone to the trust on which Mr Dauman and an ally on Viacom’s board, George Abrams, held seats (Mr Abrams was also removed on May 20th).
At the time, Mr Dauman, in support of Mr Redstone and his daughter, gave sworn testimony on the nonagenarian’s “engaged and attentive” state of mind (though the decisive testimony was Mr Redstone’s own, in which he repeatedly called his former paramour a “fucking bitch”, in a lucid but deeply unpleasant videotaped tirade). Now, to regain his position at the trust, and, perhaps, to remain in the 52nd-floor suite, Mr Dauman is having to make the opposite case. Fortunately for him, lawyers are good at presenting either side of an argument.