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Friday, July 15, 2016
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.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
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".
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
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
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
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
European Economist Warns U.K. Pound Could Fall to Parity With Dollar - Financial Times
Posted: 07 Jul 2016 08:21 AM PDT
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
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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. |
Monday, July 11, 2016
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
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
Sunday, July 10, 2016
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.
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.
Saturday, July 9, 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, July 8, 2016
US police should be more professional & respectful - New York Times
Videos of two fatal shootings of African-American men have again documented what appear to be almost casual killing by the police. They prompt the deepest shock at what the nation has witnessed over and over again: a chance encounter with the police and an innocent black life ended.
In the first killing, videos showed Alton Sterling on Tuesday pinned to the ground outside a store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was shot in the chest and back at close range by police officers.
The second death came on Wednesday in Minnesota when Philando Castile was stopped for an alleged traffic infraction in a St. Paul suburb and was shot several times by a police officer. The video starts seconds after, taken by a woman next to the wounded man. “He was just getting his license and registration, sir,” she calmly tells the officer. She says to the camera that he was not reaching for the gun he was licensed to carry.
“Would this have happened if the passengers, the drivers were white? I don’t think it would have,” Gov. Mark Dayton said at a news conference on Thursday. “All of us in Minnesota are forced to confront that this kind of racism exists.”
Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she told her son: “If you get stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.” She added, “I think he was just black in the wrong place.”
The Justice Department has been called on to investigate the two shootings. It speaks volumes that local law enforcement is not to be trusted to carry out investigations, as communities take to the streets to demand justice.
The shootings seem part of some gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement gone amok. For African-Americans, the threat of police abuse — in the form of random stops, assaults and violations of civil rights — has long been part of life. Yet this grievous reality became a national issue only with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in an encounter with a white officer in Ferguson, Mo.
After a year and a half of racial upheaval in Ferguson, the local government there agreed to reforms of a law enforcement system that Department of Justice investigators found regularly violated constitutional rights. Minority citizens were routinely harassed by police officers and shuttled through a court system that further exploited and victimized local residents.
Unfortunately, after Ferguson, police shootings of black citizens have continued, with the police too often maintaining their wall of resistance with the help of local prosecutors. Until ordered to do so by a judge, Chicago officials fought release of a dashboard video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He was shot 16 times by a police officer later indicted on charges of first-degree murder.
The killing in Minnesota on Wednesday was the 123rd killing of a black person by law enforcement in America so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fortunately, the rise of social media and smartphones in the hands of witnesses has delivered video evidence to much of the nation of what black communities have known all too well.
The latest killings are grim reminders that far more reforms are needed to make law enforcement officers more professional and respectful of the citizens they have a duty to protect. Intensive training, stricter use-of-force standards and prosecutions of officers who kill innocent people are necessary to begin to repair systems that have tolerated this bloodshed.
And beyond that, with killings happening in cities, suburbs and rural communities, there needs to be leadership in every police department in the country that insists on cultural and attitudinal change. Credible civilian oversight of the police has to be a factor if community trust is ever to be restored. The latest ghastly images show how much has not been done, two years after Ferguson.
In the first killing, videos showed Alton Sterling on Tuesday pinned to the ground outside a store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was shot in the chest and back at close range by police officers.
The second death came on Wednesday in Minnesota when Philando Castile was stopped for an alleged traffic infraction in a St. Paul suburb and was shot several times by a police officer. The video starts seconds after, taken by a woman next to the wounded man. “He was just getting his license and registration, sir,” she calmly tells the officer. She says to the camera that he was not reaching for the gun he was licensed to carry.
“Would this have happened if the passengers, the drivers were white? I don’t think it would have,” Gov. Mark Dayton said at a news conference on Thursday. “All of us in Minnesota are forced to confront that this kind of racism exists.”
Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she told her son: “If you get stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.” She added, “I think he was just black in the wrong place.”
The Justice Department has been called on to investigate the two shootings. It speaks volumes that local law enforcement is not to be trusted to carry out investigations, as communities take to the streets to demand justice.
The shootings seem part of some gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement gone amok. For African-Americans, the threat of police abuse — in the form of random stops, assaults and violations of civil rights — has long been part of life. Yet this grievous reality became a national issue only with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in an encounter with a white officer in Ferguson, Mo.
After a year and a half of racial upheaval in Ferguson, the local government there agreed to reforms of a law enforcement system that Department of Justice investigators found regularly violated constitutional rights. Minority citizens were routinely harassed by police officers and shuttled through a court system that further exploited and victimized local residents.
Unfortunately, after Ferguson, police shootings of black citizens have continued, with the police too often maintaining their wall of resistance with the help of local prosecutors. Until ordered to do so by a judge, Chicago officials fought release of a dashboard video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He was shot 16 times by a police officer later indicted on charges of first-degree murder.
The killing in Minnesota on Wednesday was the 123rd killing of a black person by law enforcement in America so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fortunately, the rise of social media and smartphones in the hands of witnesses has delivered video evidence to much of the nation of what black communities have known all too well.
The latest killings are grim reminders that far more reforms are needed to make law enforcement officers more professional and respectful of the citizens they have a duty to protect. Intensive training, stricter use-of-force standards and prosecutions of officers who kill innocent people are necessary to begin to repair systems that have tolerated this bloodshed.
And beyond that, with killings happening in cities, suburbs and rural communities, there needs to be leadership in every police department in the country that insists on cultural and attitudinal change. Credible civilian oversight of the police has to be a factor if community trust is ever to be restored. The latest ghastly images show how much has not been done, two years after Ferguson.
Bitcoin value depends on China miners - Bloomberg
China is home to 90% of bitcoin trades and 70% of mining
Key meeting this month as network gets closer to max capacity
Wu Jihan still remembers the exhilaration he felt after learning about bitcoin in 2011.
A self-described computer geek fresh out of China’s top university, Wu soaked up everything he could about the digital currency’s mysterious founder and its users’ ambitions to transform the global financial system. Within a year, he quit his job at a private equity firm to launch a bitcoin startup. Today, his company is one of the world’s biggest players in bitcoin mining, a computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible.
Yet for Wu, and the rest of bitcoin’s online community, feelings of exhilaration have been replaced by apprehension over what could be the biggest hurdle to the cryptocurrency’s growth since its emergence in 2009. Because of a pre-programmed cap on the amount of data bitcoin’s network is allowed to process, the current system for verifying payments needs to boost its capacity, or transaction times will balloon and undermine bitcoin’s 4,475 percent advance over the past five years.
In theory, there’s a simple fix: With some coding tweaks, transactions could continue apace. But the problem is that any change to bitcoin’s architecture will inevitably create losers, and the motley crew of miners, software developers, libertarians and entrepreneurs who comprise the bitcoin universe have yet to form a consensus. After at least five attempts in the past year, enthusiasts will try once again at a conference in Silicon Valley this month. Any solution will almost certainly need the support of attendees from China, now home to 70 percent of the world’s bitcoin mining power and 90 percent of trades.
"This truly is one of the biggest tests to global collaboration," said Wu, who runs AntPool, the world’s second-largest mining collective, and is also one of the largest manufacturers of mining hardware. "There’s a lot of money and emotions involved, and people have very different ideas on what they want bitcoin to be."
For a QuickTake explainer on bitcoin, click here.
It could be the opinions of Wu and his compatriots that matter most. Chinese miners have leveraged their access to cheap labor, inexpensive electricity and local chipmaking factories to outmaneuver their global peers in performing the complex calculations needed to verify bitcoin transactions -- a service for which they’re compensated in newly-minted bitcoin. When the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled from about $1,000 in late 2013 to below $200 in early 2015, lower costs in China allowed them to stay afloat even as many Western operators folded.
Bitcoin’s volatility, meanwhile, has attracted China’s horde of speculative individual investors, who are keener than ever to diversify out of yuan-denominated assets after a shock devaluation in the nation’s currency last year.
Mining Power
The concentration of bitcoin activity in China has some worried that the system could become vulnerable to meddling by the ruling Communist Party, which restricts cross-border capital flows and has tight control over the Internet. It’s of particular concern to libertarians who value the cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature above all else. Unlike most major units of exchange, bitcoin has no single authority, such as a central bank, with control over the money supply. The maximum number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million.
Having so much mining power in China “is a very negative thing,” Peter Todd, an active bitcoin code contributor based in Toronto, wrote in an e-mail interview. “It’d be all too easy for the Chinese government to do a lot of harm.”
While China’s central bank has said bitcoin isn’t a “real” currency and has taken steps to prevent it from becoming entrenched in the domestic financial system, there’s little evidence that policy makers are trying to gain control over its global development.
Instead, the influence lies with privately-run Chinese miners. Because the current system is dominated by the software miners use most, any proposal to update bitcoin’s architecture will need their validation.
Block Sizes
“The miners control the real voting power,” said Wang Chun, co-owner and chief administrator of F2Pool, the world’s largest mining collective.
The debate over how to resolve the digital currency’s capacity problem is split primarily into two camps. One group, known as Bitcoin Classic, says the size of digital “blocks” that contain bitcoin transactions should be increased as soon as possible to ensure that processing times don’t jump.
The other, Bitcoin Core, argues that it’s too soon to make major changes because it will take time to ensure that the new software is secure. They’re also worried that a major boost to block sizes will give too much power to the handful of miners with the processing capacity to handle the lengthy calculations associated with larger blocks.
Core supporters have been primarily focused on introducing features to increase transaction efficiency, while some have agreed to a capped increase in block sizes. They place a priority on widespread adoption before big changes are made, fearing a split in the bitcoin community that could send prices tumbling. The cryptocurrency dropped 4.4 percent to $645.33 on Thursday, paring this year’s gain to 49 percent.
Waiting Game
Major Chinese miners and a group of Core developers agreed on a proposed fix at a meeting in Hong Kong in February. The new code is due to become available this month, and could be activated by July 2017 if it gains broad support.
HaoBTC’s mining data center in Sichuan, China.
HaoBTC’s mining data center in Sichuan, China. Source: HaoBTC
"If the consensus is implemented successfully, it will set an example for future collaborations between all parties," said Wu Gang, chief executive officer of HaoBTC, which accounts for about five percent of the computing power used to verify bitcoin transactions.
If no agreement is reached, processing times could potentially climb to hours or even days, making the digital currency inconvenient for many users who can get almost instant confirmations on payments through their credit-card providers or online money-transfer services like PayPal. In its current iteration, the bitcoin network can handle about seven transactions per second. Visa Inc., the world’s largest payment processor, is capable of more than 24,000 per second.
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A surge in processing times would give credence to the views of bitcoin skeptics including JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, who says a digital currency without any central authority has no chance of survival in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. Even after its surge over the past five years, the total market value of outstanding bitcoin is less than $11 billion, with a network that handles about $120 million of transactions daily.
Despite the challenges, AntPool’s Wu is optimistic. He’s planning to attend the meeting of bitcoin enthusiasts in California this month and says miners from China are set to play a bigger role in driving the global community toward consensus.
"There’s no way we will be at this impasse forever," Wu said. "You have got to believe that with so many smart people in the industry, they will make the right decisions."
Key meeting this month as network gets closer to max capacity
Wu Jihan still remembers the exhilaration he felt after learning about bitcoin in 2011.
A self-described computer geek fresh out of China’s top university, Wu soaked up everything he could about the digital currency’s mysterious founder and its users’ ambitions to transform the global financial system. Within a year, he quit his job at a private equity firm to launch a bitcoin startup. Today, his company is one of the world’s biggest players in bitcoin mining, a computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible.
Yet for Wu, and the rest of bitcoin’s online community, feelings of exhilaration have been replaced by apprehension over what could be the biggest hurdle to the cryptocurrency’s growth since its emergence in 2009. Because of a pre-programmed cap on the amount of data bitcoin’s network is allowed to process, the current system for verifying payments needs to boost its capacity, or transaction times will balloon and undermine bitcoin’s 4,475 percent advance over the past five years.
In theory, there’s a simple fix: With some coding tweaks, transactions could continue apace. But the problem is that any change to bitcoin’s architecture will inevitably create losers, and the motley crew of miners, software developers, libertarians and entrepreneurs who comprise the bitcoin universe have yet to form a consensus. After at least five attempts in the past year, enthusiasts will try once again at a conference in Silicon Valley this month. Any solution will almost certainly need the support of attendees from China, now home to 70 percent of the world’s bitcoin mining power and 90 percent of trades.
"This truly is one of the biggest tests to global collaboration," said Wu, who runs AntPool, the world’s second-largest mining collective, and is also one of the largest manufacturers of mining hardware. "There’s a lot of money and emotions involved, and people have very different ideas on what they want bitcoin to be."
For a QuickTake explainer on bitcoin, click here.
It could be the opinions of Wu and his compatriots that matter most. Chinese miners have leveraged their access to cheap labor, inexpensive electricity and local chipmaking factories to outmaneuver their global peers in performing the complex calculations needed to verify bitcoin transactions -- a service for which they’re compensated in newly-minted bitcoin. When the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled from about $1,000 in late 2013 to below $200 in early 2015, lower costs in China allowed them to stay afloat even as many Western operators folded.
Bitcoin’s volatility, meanwhile, has attracted China’s horde of speculative individual investors, who are keener than ever to diversify out of yuan-denominated assets after a shock devaluation in the nation’s currency last year.
Mining Power
The concentration of bitcoin activity in China has some worried that the system could become vulnerable to meddling by the ruling Communist Party, which restricts cross-border capital flows and has tight control over the Internet. It’s of particular concern to libertarians who value the cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature above all else. Unlike most major units of exchange, bitcoin has no single authority, such as a central bank, with control over the money supply. The maximum number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million.
Having so much mining power in China “is a very negative thing,” Peter Todd, an active bitcoin code contributor based in Toronto, wrote in an e-mail interview. “It’d be all too easy for the Chinese government to do a lot of harm.”
While China’s central bank has said bitcoin isn’t a “real” currency and has taken steps to prevent it from becoming entrenched in the domestic financial system, there’s little evidence that policy makers are trying to gain control over its global development.
Instead, the influence lies with privately-run Chinese miners. Because the current system is dominated by the software miners use most, any proposal to update bitcoin’s architecture will need their validation.
Block Sizes
“The miners control the real voting power,” said Wang Chun, co-owner and chief administrator of F2Pool, the world’s largest mining collective.
The debate over how to resolve the digital currency’s capacity problem is split primarily into two camps. One group, known as Bitcoin Classic, says the size of digital “blocks” that contain bitcoin transactions should be increased as soon as possible to ensure that processing times don’t jump.
The other, Bitcoin Core, argues that it’s too soon to make major changes because it will take time to ensure that the new software is secure. They’re also worried that a major boost to block sizes will give too much power to the handful of miners with the processing capacity to handle the lengthy calculations associated with larger blocks.
Core supporters have been primarily focused on introducing features to increase transaction efficiency, while some have agreed to a capped increase in block sizes. They place a priority on widespread adoption before big changes are made, fearing a split in the bitcoin community that could send prices tumbling. The cryptocurrency dropped 4.4 percent to $645.33 on Thursday, paring this year’s gain to 49 percent.
Waiting Game
Major Chinese miners and a group of Core developers agreed on a proposed fix at a meeting in Hong Kong in February. The new code is due to become available this month, and could be activated by July 2017 if it gains broad support.
HaoBTC’s mining data center in Sichuan, China.
HaoBTC’s mining data center in Sichuan, China. Source: HaoBTC
"If the consensus is implemented successfully, it will set an example for future collaborations between all parties," said Wu Gang, chief executive officer of HaoBTC, which accounts for about five percent of the computing power used to verify bitcoin transactions.
If no agreement is reached, processing times could potentially climb to hours or even days, making the digital currency inconvenient for many users who can get almost instant confirmations on payments through their credit-card providers or online money-transfer services like PayPal. In its current iteration, the bitcoin network can handle about seven transactions per second. Visa Inc., the world’s largest payment processor, is capable of more than 24,000 per second.
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A surge in processing times would give credence to the views of bitcoin skeptics including JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, who says a digital currency without any central authority has no chance of survival in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. Even after its surge over the past five years, the total market value of outstanding bitcoin is less than $11 billion, with a network that handles about $120 million of transactions daily.
Despite the challenges, AntPool’s Wu is optimistic. He’s planning to attend the meeting of bitcoin enthusiasts in California this month and says miners from China are set to play a bigger role in driving the global community toward consensus.
"There’s no way we will be at this impasse forever," Wu said. "You have got to believe that with so many smart people in the industry, they will make the right decisions."
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Italian banking crisis may spread over Europe - Bloomberg
Italy’s banking crisis could spread to the rest of Europe, and rules limiting state aid to lenders should be reconsidered to prevent greater upheaval, Societe Generale SA Chairman Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said.
“The whole banking market is under pressure,” the former European Central Bank executive board member said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “We adopted rules on public money; these rules must be assessed in a market that has a potential crisis to decide whether some suspension needs to be applied.”
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg
With about 360 billion euros ($389 billion) in soured loans saddling Italian banks, the government has sounding out regulators on ways to shore up lenders bruised by a renewed selloff after the British vote to leave the European Union. The government would invoke an EU rule allowing temporary state aid if regulatory stress tests uncover a shortfall at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, a person with knowledge of the discussions said Tuesday.
European banking stocks resumed their descent as policy makers disagreed and sometimes issued contradictory statements about what may come next. Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s largest lender, slid 6.1 percent to its lowest level since at least 1989. Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank, which Bini Smaghi has chaired for just over a year, fell 1.8 percent as of 2 p.m. in Paris.
The Bloomberg Europe 500 Banks and Financial Services Index fell 2.3 percent to its lowest since November 2011, in the midst of the the European debt crisis.
Italian Finance Undersecretary Pier Paolo Baretta said in an interview on RAI radio Wednesday morning that a “technical solution” on Monte Paschi could be hours away, before issuing a statement an hour later that said “no intervention is expected in the next few hours.”
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking at a news conference in Berlin hours later, said his Italian counterpart Pier Carlo Padoan told him that Italy intends to stick to the banking-union rules.
Among the worst-hit Italian banks is Monte Paschi, which built up a pile of soured loans as the nation’s longest recession since World War II left businesses and households struggling to repay debt. Its market capitalization has sunk below 1 billion euros. The largest Italian lender, UniCredit SpA, has slumped more than 60 percent this year and replaced its chief executive officer amid speculation the bank will need to tap its investors for more capital. Its shares fell 1.4 percent Wednesday.
Despite the struggling market, it’s important to protect the regulations established for European banks since the financial crisis, Klaus Regling, managing director of the European Stability Mechanism, said in a separate television interview. Many solutions under the existing rules are still available to Italy, he said.
"The Italian government is in a dialog with the European Commission on how to apply the framework to these specific circumstances,” Regling said. “I am confident they will find a way."
Unprofitable Banks
Bini Smaghi said on Bloomberg TV that Europe’s banking market faces the risk of a system-wide crisis unless governments accept the idea of taxpayer money as the ultimate recourse. Any intervention should be as swift as possible, he said.
Both Italy and Germany have too many banks that are not profitable and more consolidation is needed, he said. Italy must do more to deal with non-performing loans, and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi will have to take politically unpopular steps, including encouraging mergers that will lead to job cuts, Bini Smaghi said.
“What’s needed is a European solution,” he said. “So far, we’ve had national solutions. We need a clear backstop.”
On Brexit, Bini Smaghi said he expects “very long” negotiations. He expressed concern that Britain’s proposal to reduce corporate taxes to attract companies could lead to risky tax competition across Europe.
Watch Next: Could the Next Banking Crisis Come From Italy?
“We are in a privileged position, being both on the continent and in London,” he said. “We think London will remain a major financial center. Whether it will be the only one remains to be seen.”
“The whole banking market is under pressure,” the former European Central Bank executive board member said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “We adopted rules on public money; these rules must be assessed in a market that has a potential crisis to decide whether some suspension needs to be applied.”
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi Photographer: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg
With about 360 billion euros ($389 billion) in soured loans saddling Italian banks, the government has sounding out regulators on ways to shore up lenders bruised by a renewed selloff after the British vote to leave the European Union. The government would invoke an EU rule allowing temporary state aid if regulatory stress tests uncover a shortfall at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, a person with knowledge of the discussions said Tuesday.
European banking stocks resumed their descent as policy makers disagreed and sometimes issued contradictory statements about what may come next. Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s largest lender, slid 6.1 percent to its lowest level since at least 1989. Societe Generale, France’s second-biggest bank, which Bini Smaghi has chaired for just over a year, fell 1.8 percent as of 2 p.m. in Paris.
The Bloomberg Europe 500 Banks and Financial Services Index fell 2.3 percent to its lowest since November 2011, in the midst of the the European debt crisis.
Italian Finance Undersecretary Pier Paolo Baretta said in an interview on RAI radio Wednesday morning that a “technical solution” on Monte Paschi could be hours away, before issuing a statement an hour later that said “no intervention is expected in the next few hours.”
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking at a news conference in Berlin hours later, said his Italian counterpart Pier Carlo Padoan told him that Italy intends to stick to the banking-union rules.
Among the worst-hit Italian banks is Monte Paschi, which built up a pile of soured loans as the nation’s longest recession since World War II left businesses and households struggling to repay debt. Its market capitalization has sunk below 1 billion euros. The largest Italian lender, UniCredit SpA, has slumped more than 60 percent this year and replaced its chief executive officer amid speculation the bank will need to tap its investors for more capital. Its shares fell 1.4 percent Wednesday.
Despite the struggling market, it’s important to protect the regulations established for European banks since the financial crisis, Klaus Regling, managing director of the European Stability Mechanism, said in a separate television interview. Many solutions under the existing rules are still available to Italy, he said.
"The Italian government is in a dialog with the European Commission on how to apply the framework to these specific circumstances,” Regling said. “I am confident they will find a way."
Unprofitable Banks
Bini Smaghi said on Bloomberg TV that Europe’s banking market faces the risk of a system-wide crisis unless governments accept the idea of taxpayer money as the ultimate recourse. Any intervention should be as swift as possible, he said.
Both Italy and Germany have too many banks that are not profitable and more consolidation is needed, he said. Italy must do more to deal with non-performing loans, and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi will have to take politically unpopular steps, including encouraging mergers that will lead to job cuts, Bini Smaghi said.
“What’s needed is a European solution,” he said. “So far, we’ve had national solutions. We need a clear backstop.”
On Brexit, Bini Smaghi said he expects “very long” negotiations. He expressed concern that Britain’s proposal to reduce corporate taxes to attract companies could lead to risky tax competition across Europe.
Watch Next: Could the Next Banking Crisis Come From Italy?
“We are in a privileged position, being both on the continent and in London,” he said. “We think London will remain a major financial center. Whether it will be the only one remains to be seen.”
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Posible Swiss model for Brexit - Financial Times
Micheline Calmy-Rey, a former Swiss president, thinks she knows what lies in store for Britain after its historic vote to leave the EU last month. She believes the UK has little option but to follow Switzerland itself.
“There isn’t what you can call a ‘Swiss model’; there is a ‘Swiss way’,” says Ms Calmy-Rey, who now teaches at Geneva university, referring to the more than 120 bilateral deals that provide Switzerland access to EU markets without some of the burdens of membership.
“I think it is inevitable that the UK will go the same way,” she adds. “I can’t see any other alternatives working.”
Such a path might prove highly attractive for a UK government pondering life after the EU and keen to establish controls over European immigration while minimising economic damage. The Swiss are one of the wealthiest nations in the world, their 8m strong country a stable, low-tax democracy.
Christoph Blocher, a veteran Swiss People’s party politician, argues that there are clear parallels between Brexit and his own successful campaign against Switzerland joining the European Economic Area — a waystation to membership — two-and-a-half decades ago.
“It was the same in our 1992 referendum,” he says. “All of the experts had predicted it would be our downfall. It would be an economic disaster, we would be isolated. None of that happened.”
And yet Switzerland’s arrangement with the EU may be difficult for Bern to maintain, let alone for the UK to replicate.
While Europe’s leaders scramble to deal with the UK, Swiss politicians are frantically seeking ways to preserve a web of trade and other agreements while implementing the outcome of a referendum that has caused problems of its own.
In February 2014 the Swiss voted narrowly for quotas on EU immigration — in direct contradiction with the EU’s cherished principle of the free movement of people across the continent.
“Like in the UK, nobody has a plan,” says Max Stern, co-founder of Foraus, a Swiss foreign policy forum. “There are ideas about what we might do but we don’t know how the EU will react. It’s a super high-risk situation.”
UK Brexiters might in any case object to the way Switzerland pays into EU programmes and has to adopt many of the bloc’s rules — without having any say over them.
But with Switzerland formally abandoning its goal to join the EU, Brussels has refused to deepen ties any further until the country has signed up to a broader deal to adopt EU rules as they evolve. Swiss voters would almost certainly reject any agreement to obey rulings of the European Court of Justice — also one of Brexiters’ chief causes of complaint.
If Bern also reneges on the principle of free movement of people, many of the most important existing bilateral deals with the EU could also become void.
Already, the stand-off has cast doubt over the future participation of Swiss universities in European research projects. To the dismay of Swiss banks, talks have been shelved on a financial services agreement.
Some Swiss see the UK vote as helpful in finding a way out. “Great Britain is a bigger power, it has leverage,” says Ms Calmy-Rey. “Switzerland could benefit from Brexit because it gets a de facto ally in its negotiations with the EU.”
When it comes to scientific research programmes, “the EU will not want to exclude the UK’s world-class universities”, argues Thomas Aeschi, one of a new generation of Swiss People’s party leaders. So there would be concessions too for top Swiss institutions, he says
The debate over the UK could open possibilities that would work for Switzerland, Mr Aeschi adds. “The EU has to recognise that it needs models which allow different countries to move at different speeds — including on the free movement of people.”
But the timing of the UK vote was bad for Switzerland. A three-year deadline for implementing the 2014 referendum result expires next February.
“It will penalise Switzerland because we don’t know the policy trade-offs that will be decided for the UK — and won’t for some time
”
- Alexis Lautenberg
“Brexit will mean a bumpy ride because of the spillovers,” says Alexis Lautenberg, former Swiss ambassador to the UK. “Short term, it will penalise Switzerland because we don’t know the policy trade-offs that will be decided for the UK — and won’t for some time.”
Swiss officials are working on compromise solutions, such as introducing an “emergency brake” procedure to halt immigration if the country becomes overwhelmed. A solution might have to be temporary pending resolution of the UK’s own immigration concern. To break the stalemate, however, Switzerland will probably need another referendum on its relationship with the EU.
“Up until now we could always find compromises that were in the interests of both sides,” says Christa Markwalder, a senior politician in the liberal FDP party. “I don’t know whether the pragmatism on the EU side is still there.”
“There isn’t what you can call a ‘Swiss model’; there is a ‘Swiss way’,” says Ms Calmy-Rey, who now teaches at Geneva university, referring to the more than 120 bilateral deals that provide Switzerland access to EU markets without some of the burdens of membership.
“I think it is inevitable that the UK will go the same way,” she adds. “I can’t see any other alternatives working.”
Such a path might prove highly attractive for a UK government pondering life after the EU and keen to establish controls over European immigration while minimising economic damage. The Swiss are one of the wealthiest nations in the world, their 8m strong country a stable, low-tax democracy.
Christoph Blocher, a veteran Swiss People’s party politician, argues that there are clear parallels between Brexit and his own successful campaign against Switzerland joining the European Economic Area — a waystation to membership — two-and-a-half decades ago.
“It was the same in our 1992 referendum,” he says. “All of the experts had predicted it would be our downfall. It would be an economic disaster, we would be isolated. None of that happened.”
And yet Switzerland’s arrangement with the EU may be difficult for Bern to maintain, let alone for the UK to replicate.
While Europe’s leaders scramble to deal with the UK, Swiss politicians are frantically seeking ways to preserve a web of trade and other agreements while implementing the outcome of a referendum that has caused problems of its own.
In February 2014 the Swiss voted narrowly for quotas on EU immigration — in direct contradiction with the EU’s cherished principle of the free movement of people across the continent.
“Like in the UK, nobody has a plan,” says Max Stern, co-founder of Foraus, a Swiss foreign policy forum. “There are ideas about what we might do but we don’t know how the EU will react. It’s a super high-risk situation.”
UK Brexiters might in any case object to the way Switzerland pays into EU programmes and has to adopt many of the bloc’s rules — without having any say over them.
But with Switzerland formally abandoning its goal to join the EU, Brussels has refused to deepen ties any further until the country has signed up to a broader deal to adopt EU rules as they evolve. Swiss voters would almost certainly reject any agreement to obey rulings of the European Court of Justice — also one of Brexiters’ chief causes of complaint.
If Bern also reneges on the principle of free movement of people, many of the most important existing bilateral deals with the EU could also become void.
Already, the stand-off has cast doubt over the future participation of Swiss universities in European research projects. To the dismay of Swiss banks, talks have been shelved on a financial services agreement.
Some Swiss see the UK vote as helpful in finding a way out. “Great Britain is a bigger power, it has leverage,” says Ms Calmy-Rey. “Switzerland could benefit from Brexit because it gets a de facto ally in its negotiations with the EU.”
When it comes to scientific research programmes, “the EU will not want to exclude the UK’s world-class universities”, argues Thomas Aeschi, one of a new generation of Swiss People’s party leaders. So there would be concessions too for top Swiss institutions, he says
The debate over the UK could open possibilities that would work for Switzerland, Mr Aeschi adds. “The EU has to recognise that it needs models which allow different countries to move at different speeds — including on the free movement of people.”
But the timing of the UK vote was bad for Switzerland. A three-year deadline for implementing the 2014 referendum result expires next February.
“It will penalise Switzerland because we don’t know the policy trade-offs that will be decided for the UK — and won’t for some time
”
- Alexis Lautenberg
“Brexit will mean a bumpy ride because of the spillovers,” says Alexis Lautenberg, former Swiss ambassador to the UK. “Short term, it will penalise Switzerland because we don’t know the policy trade-offs that will be decided for the UK — and won’t for some time.”
Swiss officials are working on compromise solutions, such as introducing an “emergency brake” procedure to halt immigration if the country becomes overwhelmed. A solution might have to be temporary pending resolution of the UK’s own immigration concern. To break the stalemate, however, Switzerland will probably need another referendum on its relationship with the EU.
“Up until now we could always find compromises that were in the interests of both sides,” says Christa Markwalder, a senior politician in the liberal FDP party. “I don’t know whether the pragmatism on the EU side is still there.”
UK Chilcot report find fault with involvement in Iraq war - Independent
Bereaved families of some of the 179 British servicepeople killed during the Iraq war burst into loud applause after hearing Sir John Chilcot deliver a summary of the long-awaited report into the conflict.
At their own press coneference, held immediately after Sir John delivered his findings, Sarah O'Connor, the sister of one dead soldier was cheered as she decribed Tony Blair as "the world's worst terrorist".
Ms O'Connor, whose brother Sergeant Bob O'Connor was killed in 2005 when the aircraft he was in was bought down by insurgents, said: "There is one terrorist that the world needs to be aware of and his name is Tony Blair, the world's worst terrorist."
The bereaved families made clear they would now be considering legal action on the basis of the Chilcot and that Tony Blair was likely to be one of their targets.
Grieving mothers, fathers, partners and other family members were present in the Queen Elizabeth II centre in London to read as much as they could of the 2.6 million-word, 12-volume tome, and to hear Sir John Chilcot read a summary of the findings.
They had arrived saying that had Sir John’s report not given grounds for them taking legal action in relation to the war, there would be “something terribly wrong with our political process”.
In the event, families burst into loud applause after hearing Sir John deliver a summary which including searing criticism of the failure to equip troops in Iraq properly and which stated that in the run-up to the war the alleged threat posed by Iraq was “presented with a certainty that was not justified.”
They also heard Sir John say that "Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were under-estimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate. The Government failed to achieve its stated objectives."
The Ministry of Defence was "slow" to respond to the threat from insurgents' roadside bombs, resulting in delays in the supply of armoured vehicles to protect troops which "should not have been tolerated".
This appeared to echo the comments of Richard and Maureen Bacon whose son Matthew died when his Snatch Land Rover was hit by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in Basra in September 2005.
Hourse before Sir John delivered his verdict, Mr Bacon told The Independent, that Tony Blair had delayed military planning and equipment procurement for the war “Because he didn’t want it to be seen that he was pre-empting any UN resolution. He was manipulating the system.”
The result, said Mr Bacon, was that his son died in a Snatch Land Rover with inadequate detection systems to protect against IEDs that could go through the insufficiently armoured vehicle “like a knife through butter.”
Mr Bacon said: “There were 27 incidents in which a serviceman got killed by an IED while travelling in a Snatch Land Rover. The first incident had been in 2004. With Snatch Land Rovers it was like Russian roulette.
“If the IED had been laid on that patrol’s route, and if the insurgents had people in place to set it off, then that vehicle was going to get hit.”
Mr Bacon, a retired police officer, added that there had to be “consequences” for leaders who sent soldiers to war unnecessarily.
“Because the consequences for the people they send is that some of them die doing the job they were told to do.”
As a result of the Chilcot Report, he added, “There has to be a basis for some kind of [legal] action, to ensure this never happens again. If not, I would say there is something terribly wrong with the political process.”
*
At their own press coneference, held immediately after Sir John delivered his findings, Sarah O'Connor, the sister of one dead soldier was cheered as she decribed Tony Blair as "the world's worst terrorist".
Ms O'Connor, whose brother Sergeant Bob O'Connor was killed in 2005 when the aircraft he was in was bought down by insurgents, said: "There is one terrorist that the world needs to be aware of and his name is Tony Blair, the world's worst terrorist."
The bereaved families made clear they would now be considering legal action on the basis of the Chilcot and that Tony Blair was likely to be one of their targets.
Grieving mothers, fathers, partners and other family members were present in the Queen Elizabeth II centre in London to read as much as they could of the 2.6 million-word, 12-volume tome, and to hear Sir John Chilcot read a summary of the findings.
They had arrived saying that had Sir John’s report not given grounds for them taking legal action in relation to the war, there would be “something terribly wrong with our political process”.
In the event, families burst into loud applause after hearing Sir John deliver a summary which including searing criticism of the failure to equip troops in Iraq properly and which stated that in the run-up to the war the alleged threat posed by Iraq was “presented with a certainty that was not justified.”
They also heard Sir John say that "Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were under-estimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate. The Government failed to achieve its stated objectives."
The Ministry of Defence was "slow" to respond to the threat from insurgents' roadside bombs, resulting in delays in the supply of armoured vehicles to protect troops which "should not have been tolerated".
This appeared to echo the comments of Richard and Maureen Bacon whose son Matthew died when his Snatch Land Rover was hit by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in Basra in September 2005.
Hourse before Sir John delivered his verdict, Mr Bacon told The Independent, that Tony Blair had delayed military planning and equipment procurement for the war “Because he didn’t want it to be seen that he was pre-empting any UN resolution. He was manipulating the system.”
The result, said Mr Bacon, was that his son died in a Snatch Land Rover with inadequate detection systems to protect against IEDs that could go through the insufficiently armoured vehicle “like a knife through butter.”
Mr Bacon said: “There were 27 incidents in which a serviceman got killed by an IED while travelling in a Snatch Land Rover. The first incident had been in 2004. With Snatch Land Rovers it was like Russian roulette.
“If the IED had been laid on that patrol’s route, and if the insurgents had people in place to set it off, then that vehicle was going to get hit.”
Mr Bacon, a retired police officer, added that there had to be “consequences” for leaders who sent soldiers to war unnecessarily.
“Because the consequences for the people they send is that some of them die doing the job they were told to do.”
As a result of the Chilcot Report, he added, “There has to be a basis for some kind of [legal] action, to ensure this never happens again. If not, I would say there is something terribly wrong with the political process.”
*
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Why Hillary Clinton’s Student Debt Idea Is Smart - TIME
|
Posted: 29 Jun 2016 06:19 AM PDT
 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.One of the most interesting economic solutions proposed by Hillary Clinton recently on the campaign trail is that the financial burden of education be eased for future entrepreneurs. Under her proposal, college graduates who start a business may end up being able to get their student loans deferred, interest-free, for up to three years as they launch new ventures. Those who locate in “distressed communities” or start a social enterprise also could ask the government to forgive as much as $17,500 in loans after five years in business. The goal is not just to create jobs and encourage entrepreneurship amongst millennials, who are graduating with record debt and entering a still weaker-than-normal job market, but also to help boost enterprise creation in general, which has fallen dramatically in this country since the 1970s. This is a big deal, because it ties into the most important economic question of the day, which is why there isn’t stronger productivity growth in the economy right now (economic growth is essential productivity plus demographics). In a speech Tuesday, Fed Governor Jerome Powell touched on the issue and the stakes: “One factor that may contribute to low productivity growth is the notable decline in recent decades in measures of the dynamism of our economy. Entrepreneurs start new firms; most of them fail, but a few of them succeed, grow very rapidly, and account for significant amounts of job formation. Older firms shrink or go out of business if they fail to keep up with innovation and advances in productivity. Workers change jobs and move around the country (or the world) as their careers evolve and as companies grow and shrink. These processes can be painful and messy for both workers and firms, but they are essential to the allocation of resources to their highest, most productive uses. The high levels of innovation and fluidity of our economy have long been thought to be among the principal reasons for our high and rising living standards.”Start-ups are a key driver of productivity. But the birthrate of startups has been in decline since the 1970s. Since then, it has dovetailed with a shift in how the financial sector business model works — it no longer invests primarily in new business, but rather buys up and trades existing assets, and funding for small and mid-sized start ups is still scarce (while increasing monopoly power on the part of large firms squashes new ones, as Robert Reich and others have recently written.) As Governor Powell puts it: “New firms can be loosely grouped into two categories: those started by “lifestyle entrepreneurs” who want to be their own boss, but who have little prospect or desire for high growth; and those founded by transformational entrepreneurs who start businesses that aspire to grow dramatically and change their industry. Before 2000, the decline in new firm entry was mainly in the first sort; since 2000, it is also found among the so-called transformational firms. While the drop in the formation of lifestyle-type firms could be neutral or even a positive for productivity, as in the case of the U.S. retail sector, the reduction in the creation of high-performance new firms suggests that lower dynamism could be associated with slower productivity growth . . . Fewer start-ups has meant lower “job flows,” as measured by job creation and destruction, and fewer opportunities for workers to find better jobs. And labor market dynamism across many dimensions has declined by more than can be explained by the reduction in startups. Workers have become less likely to leave their jobs, change jobs, or move geographically to take new jobs.”This is a big deal in a country in which labor mobility has traditionally given us a leg up economically over Europe and other nations. I think Clinton’s idea to tie together entrepreneurship and student debt forgiveness is a great one, and a good way to make some of Bernie Sanders’ most popular ideas more doable. I hope to hear more about portable benefits, another key idea that could help bolster entrepreneurship, from her soon. |
Here’s One Big Winner in the Brexit Chaos - Fortune
|
Posted: 24 Jun 2016 08:26 AM PDT
Global currencies might be plunging in the wake of the historic Brexit vote, but it’s had a much different effect on Bitcoin. Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that had been plunging in recent days, is soaring on Friday after the Brexit vote. As of this writing, Bitcoin is trading at $667.41 per unit, up significantly from a Thursday low of $582.92. At its height, Bitcoin was trading at more than $683, according to Coinbase, a company that follows the cryptocurrency’s exchange rate. Bitcoin’s gains on Friday stand in stark contrast to many major currencies after U.K. voters made the historic decision to leave the European Union in a referendum on Thursday. The move, called Brexit, has pushed the British pound’s exchange rate down 2.3% against the U.S. dollar on Friday and the euro by 0.8%. Other prominent currencies, including the yen and yuan are also down. At one point on Friday, the pound’s value was down about 10% against the U.S. dollar and more than 6% against the euro, according to Quartz. Soon after the Brexit results came in on Friday morning, investors started to invest heavily in the U.S. dollar, which they apparently believe won’t be impacted nearly as much as the euro or pound in the wake of Brexit. But investors have also seemingly found some value in Bitcoin, which lives outside the confines of a single country’s politics—a feature that has made it popular in the past, even if it can still be impacted by world events. However, Bitcoin has been on a bit of a roller coaster of late, and some had blamed Brexit for that. Earlier this week, Bitcoin—which reached a two-year high on June 18 of $774 per unit and was up up more than $300 in the last year—was down to a low of $551 on Wednesday. Speculation abounded over why Bitcoin was cratering, but CoinDesk sources said that it was likely due to concerns that the U.K. would remain in the European Union. Others blamed it on the ongoing saga of who created the currency and the rise of ethereum, a follow-up to Bitcoin that some say, is a more versatile crypto-currency.
After the Brexit vote, however, it appears there was indeed some concern among investors that the U.K. might stay with the European Union. And now that they know it isn’t, they’re moving to Bitcoin to find what they hope is safe haven as Europe gets ready for a new round of uncertainty.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com |
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