The Supreme Court has declined to stop the Trump administration from enforcing its ban on “bump-stock” devices, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
Ahead of the ban, which took effect on Tuesday, gun right groups had asked the court to stop the government from enforcing the ban.
“This case represents the single biggest A.T.F. seizure of private property in history,” their lawyers wrote, “made even more noxious because all existing bump stocks were manufactured and purchased in accordance with A.T.F. rulings approving their sale.”
Under the regulation, Americans who own bump stocks have 90 days to destroy their devices or to turn them in to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. An appeals court previously exempted specific people and groups involved in the Washington case from the ban while that case continues.
Banning bump stocks is easy but the way it was arbitrarily done with a “rule” by a bureaucracy, sets a very dangerous precedent.
Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, representing the administration, urged the justices to deny the stay in the case, Gun Owners of America v. Barr, No. 18A963.
“The protection of the public and law enforcement officers from the proliferation of prohibited firearms is a bedrock foundation of federal firearms legislation,” he wrote, adding that the regulation “promotes that public interest by protecting the public from the dangers posed by machine guns prohibited by federal law.”
And now, as AP reports, Chief Justice John Roberts declined one request for the court to get involved on Tuesday and a second request was declined by the court on Thursday.
The administration’s ban puts it in the unusual position of arguing against gun rights groups.
NAIROBI, Kenya – A police officer in Somalia says a bomb exploded in the capital, Mogadishu, killing one person and wounding another.
Col. Ahmed Abdi said the blast from a bomb planted in a private luxury car exploded Tuesday in Mogadishu's Hodan district, killing the driver and injuring a nearby pedestrian.
There was no immediate claim for the bombing, the latest in a string of attacks often claimed by the Somalia's Islamic extremist rebels, al-Shabab, who are linked to al-Qaida and are fighting to topple the western-backed government protected by African Union forces.
FILE - In this Sept. 21, 2016 file photo, Iran's Revolutionary Guard troops march in a military parade marking the 36th anniversary of Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran, in front of the shrine of late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, just outside Tehran, Iran. The Trump administration is preparing to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps a “foreign terrorist organization” in an unprecedented move that could have widespread implications for U.S. personnel and policy. U.S. Officials say an announcement could come as early as Monday, April 8, 2019, following a months-long escalation in the administration’s rhetoric against Iran. The move would be the first such designation by any U.S. administration of an entire foreign government entity. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration is preparing to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a "foreign terrorist organization" — an unprecedented move that could have widespread implications for U.S. personnel and policy.
U.S. officials say an announcement could come as early as Monday, after a monthslong escalation in the administration's rhetoric against Iran.
The move would be the first such designation by any U.S. administration of an entire foreign government entity, although portions of the Guard Corps have been targeted before.
Two U.S. officials and a congressional aide are confirming the move. They're not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and are speaking on condition of anonymity.
The designation comes with sanctions, including freezes on some assets and a ban on Americans doing business with the group.
The medical community knew that a day of reckoning was coming.
For years, they were repeatedly warned that the rampant overuse of certain types of medications would result in the development of “super diseases” that we would not be able to stop, and now that day has arrived. Just like many types of bacteria, fungi have also been developing defenses against our most effective modern medicines. One in particular, a fungus known as Candida auris, is now a massive public health threat. An expert quoted by the New York Times has admitted that it is “pretty much unbeatable”, it spreads very easily, and it kills close to 50 percent of the people that it infects. In other words, we are in the early chapters of a medical horror show of our own making, and there is no way out.
Candida auris (or C. auris for short) spreads most easily among those with weakened immune systems. Infants, seniors, smokers and diabetics are among the most vulnerable.
About a year ago, a senior was admitted to a hospital in Brooklyn, and what doctors discovered after running a blood test absolutely stunned them…
Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious.
Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit. The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe.
Like so many others that get infected, the elderly man died, but before he did C. auris had literally spread to every surface in his entire room…
The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.
“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
But unlike other major potential health threats, C. auris is not confined to a particular geographic region.
According to a top official from the CDC, the fungus has quickly spread all over the globe, and “now it is everywhere”. The following comes from Zero Hedge…
“It is a creature from the black lagoon,” said the CDC’s Dr. Tom Chiller, who heads the fungal branch. “It bubbled up and now it is everywhere.”
In the last five years alone, it it has swept through a hospital in Spain, hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, spread throughout India, Pakistan and South Africa, and forced a prestigious British medical center to close its ICU for nearly two weeks.
We do not currently have any way to defeat C. auris.
Perhaps some day we will, but for now it will always be with us. We just need to hope that the number of people that it kills is minimized.
It is often multidrug-resistant, meaning that it is resistant to multiple antifungal drugs commonly used to treat Candida infections.
It is difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods, and it can be misidentified in labs without specific technology. Misidentification may lead to inappropriate management.
It has caused outbreaks in healthcare settings. For this reason, it is important to quickly identify C. auris in a hospitalized patient so that healthcare facilities can take special precautions to stop its spread.
If you become infected, there is a really good chance that you are going to die.
Among one group of clinical case patients in New York, 45 percent of them died within 90 days…
The Centers for Disease Control said it “identified 51 clinical case-patients and 61 screening case-patients” in New York alone. The CDC reported 45% of the clinical case-patients died within 90 days.
This hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients — or prospective ones.
Dr. Silke Schelenz, Royal Brompton’s infectious disease specialist, found the lack of urgency from the government and hospital in the early stages of the outbreak “very, very frustrating.”
So we have been left totally in the dark about a “super fungus” that could potentially kill millions of us.
This is yet another example that shows that we are not going to be able to rely on the authorities when things really hit the fan. If it suits their purposes, they will keep things quiet even when people are dropping dead all around us.
And there isn’t just one version of C. auris that the medical community has to contend with. Apparently there are four distinct versions, and they are all incredibly deadly.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know if you have been infected. The main symptoms are a fever, aches and fatigue, and those symptoms are common to a whole host of different illnesses.
Of course those that do not know that they have been infected also don’t know that they are spreading it either.
The experts assure us that C. auris spreads very easily, and in heavily congested cities there is the potential for it to start spreading like wildfire.
The stage is set for a public health crisis unlike anything we have ever seen before, and unlike other diseases, the medical community has no way to stop it.
FILE PHOTO: The Twitter application is seen on a phone screen August 3, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas White
April 10, 2019
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Twitter launched on Wednesday an emoji for the European Parliament elections in May, seeking to provide a visual link to channel conversations around a vote set to affect the European Union in the coming years.
Together with Facebook and Google, Twitter has come under pressure to do more to combat disinformation about the elections.
All three companies have pledged to the European Commission to crack down on fake news to avoid heavy-handed legislation.
The emoji features a ballot box and a ballot paper in EU navy blue, with a tick mark on the ballot paper in EU yellow, all surrounded by the iconic ring of stars, which is triggered when the hashtags #EUElections2019 and #EP2019 are used.
“This emoji will encourage more voters to easily connect with the conversation, find out what’s happening and participate in the democratic process,” Karen White, Twitter’s public policy director, said in a statement.
The European Commission is keen to address the threat of fake news and foreign interference during campaigning for the parliament elections, as well as for national elections in Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Poland and Portugal.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, editing by Robin Emmott)
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton is the latest Democrat to jump in the race for the White House.
The Massachusetts lawmaker and Iraq War veteran made the announcement on his website Monday.
Moulton first came to prominence in 2014 when he unseated long-term incumbent Rep. John Tierney in a Democrat primary and went on to represent the state's 6th Congressional District, a swath of communities north of Boston including Salem, home of the infamous colonial-era witch trials.
Speculation about a possible Moulton run has been simmering as far back as 2017 when he spoke at a Democrat political rally in Iowa, home of the first-the-the-nation presidential caucuses. At the time he brushed aside talk of a presidential run.
Talk of possible run ramped up during last year's election when the former U.S. Marine helped lead an effort to get other Democrat military veterans to run for Congress — a cause he continues to push.
"16 years ago today, leaders in Washington sent me and my friends to fight in a war based on lies. It's still going on today," Moulton said in a recent tweet. "It's time for the generation that fought in Iraq to take over for the generation that sent us there."
The 40-year-old Moulton also gained national attention for helping lead an effort within the party to reject Nancy Pelosi as House speaker after Democrats regained control of the chamber. Moulton said it was time for new leadership.
Moulton has also been a frequent critic of President Donald Trump — from foreign policy, including Trump's recent veto of a resolution to end U.S. military assistance in Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, to his push for a wall at the southern border.
And when Trump claimed to be the target of the "single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history," Moulton responded that "as the Representative of Salem, MA, I can confirm that this is false."
Despite occasionally differing with some on the most liberal wing of the party, Moulton has staked out familiar policy positions for those seeking the Democrat presidential nomination.
He's called health care "a right every American must be guaranteed," pushed to toughen gun laws, was a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, has championed a federal "Green Corps" modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, and has called for an end to the Electoral College.
Money could prove a challenge to Moulton, who has raised $255,000 so far this year and had about $723,000 in his campaign account as of the end of March.
Moulton is now the third political figure from Massachusetts to take a stab at a White House run. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren — a Democrat — and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld — a Republican — are also running.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., argued Sunday that among the presidential candidates, he was the best Democrat to win back a string of Midwestern states from President Trump in 2020, claiming that the sitting president had told working-class families a "monstrous lie" by vowing to take on monied interests in Washington.
"Donald Trump has told literally thousands of lies since he began his campaign and since he has been in the White House," Sanders told an estimated crowd of 4,500 at an outdoor rally in Pittsburgh. "But, the biggest lie that he told the people of Pennsylvania ... was that he was going to stand up for working families and take on the establishment."
Sunday's rally wrapped up a weekend swing in which Sanders also held rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan. Voters in all three states backed Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, stunning Democrats who had seen them as part of a "blue wall" held together by urban African-American voters and traditionally liberal white working-class voters.
"We are going to win in Pennsylvania, we’re going to win in Michigan, we're going to win in Wisconsin, we're going to win in Indiana and Ohio," Sanders promised his cheering supporters. "And, by the way, we’re going to win the election."
The self-described democratic socialist said his political movement mirrored the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the gay rights movement in showing that "real change never takes place from the top on down, always from the bottom up." He recited a laundry list of policies -- including raising the federal minimum wage, government-run health care and legalizing marijuana -- that he claimed were described as "too radical" by members of the media and political establishment.
"Today, virtually all of those ideas are supported by a majority of the American people and they are ideas that Democratic candidates from school board to president of the United States now support," Sanders said, noting that his insurgent campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination had netted "more votes from young people than Trump and Clinton combined."
Sanders also proudly noted that his supporters had campaigned successfully to change the party's rules governing superdelegates at next year's Democratic National Convention "and maybe ending a system in which one candidate had 500 superdelegates before the first vote was cast." The Democratic National Committee voted last summer to prevent superdelegates from voting on the first presidential nomination ballot unless a candidate had enough votes from pledged delegates, who choose a candidate based on the results of the Democrats' primaries and caucuses.
The Vermont senator also addressed his signature issue, vowing to health insurance companies that "whether you like it or not, the United States will join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care to all people as a right."
"It is an international embarrassment that in America today we got 30 million people with no health insurance and even more who are underinsured with high deductibles and high co-payments and for all of that we end up spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as do the people of any other nation," said Sanders, who warned his audience that "the insurance companies are getting nervous" about his message.
"They are prepared and will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to stop us," he said, "but we are gonna win this struggle and we will pass a Medicare for All single-payer program."
Fox News' Jennifer Oliva in Pittsburgh and Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
Members of The Cranberries, bassist Mike Hogan, drummer Fergal Lawler and guitarist Noel Hogan speak to Reuters during an interview in London, Britain, April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Gerhard Mey
April 26, 2019
By Hanna Rantala
LONDON (Reuters) – Irish rockers The Cranberries are saying goodbye with their final album released on Friday, a poignant tribute to lead singer Dolores O’Riordan who died last year.
“In the End” is the eighth studio album from the band that rose to fame in the early 1990s with hits likes “Zombie” and “Linger”, and includes the final recordings by O’Riordan, who drowned in a London hotel bath in January 2018 due to alcohol intoxication.
Work on the album began during a 2017 tour and by that winter, O’Riordan and guitarist Neil Hogan had penned and demoed 11 tracks.
With O’Riordan’s vocals recorded, Hogan, bassist Mike Hogan and drummer Fergal Lawler completed the album in tribute to her.
“When we realized how strong the songs were, that was the deciding factor really… There was no point… trying to ruin the legacy of the band,” Noel Hogan said in an interview.
“It was obvious that Dolores wanted this album done because when you hear the album, you hear the songs and how strong they are, and she was very, very excited to get in and record this.”
The Cranberries formed in Limerick in 1989 with another singer. O’Riordan replaced him a year later and the group went on to become Ireland’s best-selling rock band after U2, selling more than 40 million records.
O’Riordan, known for her strong distinctive voice singing about relationships or political violence, was 46 when she died.
“She was actually in quite a good place mentally. She was feeling quite content and strong and looking forward to a new phase of her life,” Lawler said.
“A lot of the lyrics in this album are about things ending… people might read into it differently but it was a phase of her personal life that she was talking about.”
The group previously announced their intention to split after the release of “In The End”.
“We are absolutely gutted we can’t play (the songs) live because that’s something that’s been a massive part of this band from day one,” Noel Hogan said.
“A few people have said to us about maybe even doing a one off where you have different vocalists… as kind of guests of ours. A year ago that’s definitely something we weren’t going to entertain but I don’t know, I think it’s something we need to go away and take time off for the summer and have a think about.”
Critics have generally given positive reviews of the album; NME described it as “(seeing) the band’s career go full-circle” while the Irish Times called it “an unexpected late career high and a remarkable swan song for O’Riordan”.
Their early songs still play on the radio. This week, “Dreams” was performed at the funeral of journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot dead in Londonderry last week as she watched Irish nationalist youths attack police following a raid.
“We wrote them as kids, as a hobby and 30 years later they are on radio and on TV, like all the time… That’s far more than any of us ever thought we would have,” Noel Hogan said.
“That would make Dolores really happy because she was very precious about those songs. Her babies, she called them and to have that hopefully long after we’re gone… that’s all any band can wish for.”
(Reporting by Hanna Rantala; additoinal reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Susan Fenton)
2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren participates in the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston, Texas, U.S. April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Loren Elliott
April 26, 2019
By Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Senator Elizabeth Warren will introduce a bill Friday that offers new protections for U.S. military families facing unsafe housing, following a series of Reuters reports revealing squalid conditions in privately managed base homes.
The Reuters reports and later Congressional hearings detailed widespread hazards including lead paint exposure, vermin infestations, collapsing ceilings, mold and maintenance lapses in privatized base housing communities that serve some 700,000 U.S. military family members.
(View Warren’s military housing bill here. https://tmsnrt.rs/2Dy5aht)
(Read Reuters’ Ambushed at Home series on military housing here. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-military)
The Massachusetts Democrat’s bill would mandate both regular and unannounced spot inspections of base homes by certified, independent inspectors, holding landlords accountable for quickly fixing hazards. The military’s privatization program for years allowed real estate firms to operate base housing with scant oversight, Reuters found, leaving some tenants in unsafe homes with little recourse against landlords.
The bill would also require the Department of Defense and its private housing operators to publish reports annually detailing housing conditions, tenant complaints, maintenance response times and the financial incentives companies receive at each base. The provisions aim to enhance transparency of housing deals whose finances and operations the military had allowed to remain largely confidential under a privatization program since the late 1990s.
The measure would also require private landlords to cover moving costs for at-risk families, and healthcare costs for people with medical conditions resulting from unsafe base housing, ensuring they receive continuing coverage even after they leave the homes or the military.
“This bill will eliminate the kind of corner-cutting and neglect the Defense Department should never have let these private housing partners get away with in the first place,” Warren said in a statement Friday.
The proposed legislation comes after February Senate hearings where Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 U.S. presidential election, slammed private real estate firms for endangering service families, and sought answers about why military branches weren’t providing more oversight.
Her legislation would direct the Defense Department to allow local housing code enforcers onto federal bases, following concerns they were sometimes denied access. Warren’s office said a companion bill in the House of Representatives would be introduced by Rep. Deb Haaland, Democrat of New Mexico.
In response to the housing crisis, military branches are developing a tenant bill of rights and hiring hundreds of new housing staff. The branches recently dispatched commanders to survey base housing worldwide for safety hazards, resulting in thousands of work orders and hundreds of tenants being moved. The Defense Department has pledged to renegotiate its 50-year contracts with private real estate firms.
Congress has been quick to take its own measures. Earlier legislation proposed by senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris of California, along with Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, would compel base commanders to withhold rent payments and incentive fees from the private ventures if they allow home hazards to persist.
FILE PHOTO: Offices of Deloitte are seen in London, Britain, September 25, 2017. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Noor Zainab Hussain and Tanishaa Nadkar
(Reuters) – Deloitte quit as Ferrexpo’s auditor on Friday, knocking its shares by more than 20 percent, days after saying it was unable to conclude whether the iron ore miner’s CEO controlled a charity being investigated over its use of company donations.
Blooming Land, which coordinates Ferrexpo’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program, came under scrutiny after auditors found holes in the charity’s statements.
Ferrexpo on Tuesday said findings of an ongoing independent investigation launched in February indicated some Blooming Land funds could have been “misappropriated”. It did not provide any details or publish its findings.
Shares in Ferrexpo, the third largest exporter of pellets to the global steel industry, were 23.4 percent lower at 206.1 pence at 1022 GMT following news of Deloitte’s resignation.
“Ferrexpo’s shares are deeply discounted vs peers … following the resignation of Deloitte, we expect downside risks to dominate Ferrexpo’s shares near term.” JP Morgan analyst Dominic O’Kane said in a note on Friday.
Swiss-headquartered Ferrexpo did not provide a reason for the resignation of Deloitte, which declined to comment, while Blooming Land did not respond to a request for comment.
Funding for Blooming Land’s CSR activities is provided by one of Ferrexpo’s units in Ukraine and Khimreaktiv LLC, an entity ultimately controlled by Ferrexpo’s CEO and majority owner Kostyantin Zhevago, Ferrexpo said on Tuesday.
Ferrexpo’s board has found that Zhevago did not have significant influence or control over the charity, but Deloitte said it was unable reach a conclusion on this.
Reuters was not immediately able to contact Zhevago.
In a qualified opinion, a statement addressing an incomplete audit, Deloitte said it had been unable to conclude whether $33.5 million of CSR donations to Blooming Land between 2017 and 2018 was used for “legitimate business payments for charitable purposes”.
Deloitte said on Tuesday that total CSR payments made to Blooming Land by Ferrexpo since 2013 total about $110 million.
Ferrexpo, whose major mines are in Ukraine, has said that the investigation was ongoing and new evidence pointed to potential discrepancies.
Zhevago, 45, who ranked 1,511 on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires for 2019 with a net worth of $1.4 billion, owns the FC Vorskla soccer club and has been a member of Ukraine’s parliament since 1998.
(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain and Tanishaa Nadkar in Bengaluru and additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kiev; editing by Gopakumar Warrier, Bernard Orr)
Children walk past a damaged building in the aftermath of the Cyclone Kenneth in Pemba, Mozambique April 26, 2019 in this still image obtained from social media. SolidarMed via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES
April 26, 2019
By Emma Rumney and Stephen Eisenhammer
JOHANNESBURG/LUANDA (Reuters) – Cyclone Kenneth killed at least one person and left a trail of destruction in northern Mozambique, destroying houses, ripping up trees and knocking out power, authorities said on Friday.
The cyclone brought storm surges and wind gusts of up to 280 km per hour (174 mph) when it made landfall on Thursday evening, after killing three people in the island nation of Comoros.
It was the most powerful storm on record to hit Mozambique’s northern coast and came just six weeks after Cyclone Idai battered the impoverished nation, causing devastating floods and killing more than 1,000 people across a swathe of southern Africa.
The World Food Programme warned that Kenneth could dump as much as 600 millimeters of rain on the region over the next 10 days – twice that brought by Cyclone Idai.
One woman in the port town of Pemba died after being hit by a falling tree, the Emergency Operations Committee for Cabo Delgado (COE) said in a statement, while another person was injured.
In rural areas outside Pemba, many homes are made of mud. In the main town on the island of Ibo, 90 percent of the houses were destroyed, officials said. Around 15,000 people were out in the open or in “overcrowded” shelters and there was a need for tents, food and water, they said.
There were also reports of a large number of homes and some infrastructure destroyed in Macomia district, a mainland district adjacent to Ibo.
A local group, the Friends of Pemba Association, had earlier reported that they could not reach people in Muidumbe, a district further inland.
Mark Lowcock, United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, warned the storm could require another major humanitarian operation in Mozambique.
“Cyclone Kenneth marks the first time two cyclones have made landfall in Mozambique during the same season, further stressing the government’s limited resources,” he said in a statement.
FLOOD WARNINGS
Shaquila Alberto, owner of the beach-front Messano Flower Lodge in Macomia, said there were many fallen trees there, and in rural areas people’s homes had been damaged. Some areas of nearby Pemba had no power.
“Even my workers, they said the roof and all the things fell down,” she said by phone.
Further south, in Pemba, Elton Ernesto, a receptionist at Raphael’s Hotel, said there were fallen trees but not too much damage. The hotel had power and water, he said, while phones rang in the background. “The rain has stopped,” he added.
However Michael Charles, an official for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said heavy rains over the next few days were likely to bring a “second wave of destruction” in the form of flooding.
“The houses are not all solid, and the topography is very sandy,” Charles said.
In the days after Cyclone Idai, heavy inland rains prompted rivers to burst their banks, submerging entire villages, cutting areas off from aid and ruining crops. There were concerns the same could happen again in northern Mozambique.
Before Kenneth hit, the government and aid workers moved around 30,000 people to safer buildings such as schools, however authorities said that around 680,000 people were in the path of the storm.
(Reporting by Emma Rumney and Stephen Eisenhammer; Writing by Emma Rumney; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Alexandra Zavis)
FILE PHOTO: A worker holds a nozzle to pump petrol into a vehicle at a fuel station in Mumbai, India, May 21, 2018. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas
April 26, 2019
By Manoj Kumar and Nidhi Verma
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Surging global oil prices will pose a first big challenge to India’s new government, whoever wins an election now under way, especially as domestic prices have been allowed to lag, meaning consumers are in for a painful surge as they catch up.
For oil-import dependent India, higher global prices could lead to a weaker rupee, higher inflation, the ruling out of interest rate cuts and could further weigh on twin current account and budget deficits, economists warned.
But compounding the future pain, state-run fuel suppliers and retailers have held off passing on to consumers the higher prices during a staggered general election, which began on April 11 and ends on May 23, according to sources familiar with the situation.
That delay is expected to be unwound once the election is over. And there could be additional price increases to make up for losses or profits missed during the period of delayed increases, the sources said.
In some major Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pump prices are adjusted periodically so they move largely in tandem with international crude prices.
That was what was supposed to happen in India but the election means there have been many days when pump prices have been unchanged.
In New Delhi, for example, while crude oil prices have gone up by nearly $9 a barrel, or about 12 percent, in the past six weeks, gasoline prices have only risen by 0.47 rupees a liter, or 0.6 percent.
State-controlled fuel suppliers and retailers declined to say why they had delayed price increases, or discuss whether there has been any pressure from the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
A government spokesman declined to comment.
The opposition Congress party said Modi’s government was violating its own policy of daily price revision by advising the state oil companies to hold prices steady.
“The government should cut fuel taxes otherwise consumers will have to pay much higher oil prices once the elections are over,” said Akhilesh Pratap Singh, a senior leader of the Congress party.
Nitin Goyal, treasurer at the All India Petroleum Dealers Association, representing fuel stations in 25 states, said prices were similarly held down for 19 days in the southern state of Karnataka last year, when it held state assembly elections.
Only for them to surge after the vote.
“Consumers should be ready for a rude shock of a massive jump in retail prices, similar to the level we have seen in the Karnataka state election,” Goyal said.
‘CREDIT NEGATIVE’
Sri Paravaikkarasu, director for Asia oil at Singapore-based consultancy FGE, said retail prices of gasoline and gasoil prices would have been up to 6 percent, or about 4 rupee, higher if they had been allowed to rise in line with global prices.
“Indian pump prices have failed to keep up with the recent uptrend in crude prices,” Paravaikkarasu said.
“With the country’s general elections underway, the incumbent government has been keeping pump prices relatively unchanged.”
India had switched to a daily price revision in June 2017 from a revision every two weeks, as the government allowed retailers to set prices.
But the government faced protests last October when retailers raised prices by up to 10 rupees a liter after the crude oil price went above $80 a barrel, forcing it to cut fuel taxes.
Global prices rose to their highest level in 2019 on Thursday, days after the United States announced all Iran sanction waivers would end by May, pressuring importers including India to stop buying Tehran’s oil. [O/R]
Higher oil prices will mean Asia’s third largest economy is likely to see growth of less than 7 percent rate this fiscal year, economists said. Growth slowed to 6.6 percent in the October-December quarter, the slowest in five quarters.
Rating agency CARE has warned that a 10 percent rise in global oil prices could increase demand for dollars, putting pressure on the rupee and widening the current account deficit.
India’s oil import bill rose by nearly one-third in the fiscal year ending March 31 to $140.5 billion, against $108 billion the previous year.
“The increase in international oil prices is a credit negative for the Indian economy,” ICRA, the Indian arm of the Fitch rating agency, said in a note.
“Every $10/ bbl increase in crude oil prices increases the fiscal deficit by about 0.1 percent of GDP.”
Any big price rise would also build a case for the central bank to keep rates steady, or even raise them.
The Reserve Bank of India’s Monetary Policy Committee, which cut the benchmark policy repo rate by 25 basis points this month, warned that rising oil and food prices could push up inflation.
Policymakers are worried that a sustained increase in the oil price in the range of $70-75/barrel or higher can move the rupee down by 3-4 percent on an annual basis.
The rupee has depreciated by 1.24 percent against the dollar since a year high in mid-March.
($1 = 70.1800 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Manoj Kumar and Nidhi Verma; Editing by Martin Howell and Rob Birsel)
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