Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), speaking in the context of the killing of 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand, suggested Sunday that people in America who “stay silent” and those who “support the Muslim ban” are facilitating a “white supremacy” agenda.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Tlaib was asked about a comment she made Friday, after news of the mass killing at two mosques in Christchurch broke.
“You said in a statement after the attack that you were angry at, quote, those who follow the white supremacy agenda in my own country that sends a signal across the world that massacres like this are a call to action,” said host Jake Tapper. “Who are you specifically talking about?”
“The ones that stay silent and the ones that support the Muslim ban,” she replied, in reference to President Trump’s 2017 travel orders and proclamations.
“Not only once, but twice, three times, did we in this nation say to the world and to everyone in this country that Muslims don’t belong here. From the fact that every time we talk about a wall, it’s not about a structure, but about xenophobia. It’s about racism.”
FILE PHOTO: A Ryanair aircraft stands on the tarmac at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport during a strike of their pilots and cabin crew in Hahn, near Frankfurt, Germany, September 12, 2018. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski
March 21, 2019
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Two deadly crashes involving Boeing’s 737 MAX jet have not changed Ryanair’s plans to buy the model, an executive of the Irish airline told Reuters on Thursday.
“Nothing changes because we are still awaiting the outcome of the investigation,” Chief Marketing Officer Ryanair Kenny Jacobs said.
He added that the delayed deliveries of five of the airliners to Ryanair will not have an impact on the budget carrier’s summer schedule.
(Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach; writing by Thomas Seythal; Editing by Edward Taylor)
FILE PHOTO: The Netflix logo is seen on their office in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, U.S. July 16, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo
April 16, 2019
By Noel Randewich
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Shares of Netflix jumped 3 percent on Tuesday ahead of the streaming video service’s quarterly results, with traders expecting a larger than normal reaction from the stock as new competition looms from Walt Disney Co.
Netflix will be the first to report March-quarter earnings among major high-growth firms and Wall Street’s reaction to its results will be viewed as an indicator of what to expect when Amazon.com Inc and Facebook Inc report next week.
“There is some concern that real competition is entering the market, but Netflix is still a good proxy for investor risk appetite, especially for technology,” said Joel Kulina, Senior Vice President of Institutional Cash Equities at Wedbush Securities.
Options traders expect Netflix shares to swing by about 7% in either direction in the session after its report, which is expected after the market closes on Tuesday. That is more than the median move of 5.4% in Netflix’s eight most recent quarterly reports, according to options analytics firm Trade Alert.
On Jan. 18 following its last quarterly results, Netflix dropped 4% over concerns about slowing growth, and investors are now focused on how Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings plans to fend off a major challenge from Walt Disney, with its upcoming Disney+ streaming service.
(GRAPHIC: Walt Disney mounts a challenge to Netflix – https://tmsnrt.rs/2VN8dcL)
Disney’s stock has surged 12% since it unveiled the service last week, which will be priced below Netflix and include some of the world’s most popular entertainment franchises. Netflix has slipped almost 3% during that time.
“The real question that investors will want answered is how will the company launch a counterattack to Disney’s massive offensive that is on the horizon?,” Jones Trading Chief Market Strategist Mike O’Rourke wrote in a client note.
The so-called FANG group of high-growth stocks, including Facebook, Netflix, Google-parent Alphabet and Amazon, has rebounded sharply following a steep market selloff late last year. Facebook is up 36% year to date, followed by Netflix’s 34% rise. Facebook reports on April 24, Amazon reports on April 25 and Alphabet Inc reports on April 29.
For the first quarter, Netflix has said https://s22.q4cdn.com/959853165/files/doc_financials/quarterly_reports/2018/q4/01/FINAL-Q4-18-Shareholder-Letter.pdf it expects to add 8.9 million global subscribers.
Analysts on average expect Netflix to report a 21.6% rise in quarterly revenue to $4.5 billion, which would be its most modest quarterly revenue increase since 2013, according to Refinitiv. Analysts on average expect non-GAAP earnings per share of 57 cents.
(Reporting by Noel Randewich, additional reporting by Saqib Ahmed in New York; editing by Grant McCool)
An artisanal gold miner holds a gold nugget at an unlicensed mine in Gaoua, Burkina Faso, February 13, 2018. Picture taken February 13, 2018. REUTERS/Luc Gnago
April 24, 2019
By Ryan McNeill and Zandi Shabalaba David Lewis
NAIROBI (Reuters) – Billions of dollars’ worth of gold is being smuggled out of Africa every year through the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East – a gateway to markets in Europe, the United States and beyond – a Reuters analysis has found.
Customs data shows that the UAE imported $15.1 billion worth of gold from Africa in 2016, more than any other country and up from $1.3 billion in 2006. The total weight was 446 tonnes, in varying degrees of purity – up from 67 tonnes in 2006.
Much of the gold was not recorded in the exports of African states. Five trade economists interviewed by Reuters said this indicates large amounts of gold are leaving Africa with no taxes being paid to the states that produce them.
Previous reports and studies have highlighted the black-market trade in gold mined by people, including children, who have no ties to big business, and dig or pan for it with little official oversight. No-one can put an exact figure on the total value that is leaving Africa. But the Reuters analysis gives an estimate of the scale.
Reuters assessed the volume of the illicit trade by comparing total imports into the UAE with the exports declared by African states. Industrial mining firms in Africa told Reuters they did not send their gold to the UAE – indicating that its gold imports from Africa come from other, informal sources.
Informal methods of gold production, known in the industry as “artisanal” or small-scale mining, are growing globally. They have provided a livelihood to millions of Africans and help some make more money than they could dream of from traditional trades. But the methods leak chemicals into rocks, soil and rivers. And African governments such as Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia complain that gold is now being illegally produced and smuggled out of their countries on a vast scale, sometimes by criminal operations, and often at a high human and environmental cost.
Artisanal mining began as small-time ventures. But the “romantic” era of individual mining has given way to “large-scale and dangerous” operations run by foreign-controlled criminal syndicates, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo told a mining conference in February. Ghana is Africa’s second-largest gold producer.
Not everyone in the chain is breaking the law. Miners, some of them working legally, typically sell the gold to middlemen. The middlemen either fly the gold out directly or trade it across Africa’s porous borders, obscuring its origins before couriers carry it out of the continent, often in hand luggage.
For example, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a major gold producer but one whose official exports amount to a fraction of its estimated production: Most is smuggled into neighboring Uganda and Rwanda. “It is of course worrisome for us but we have very little leverage to stop it,” said Thierry Boliki, director of the CEEC, the Congolese government body that is meant to register, value and tax high-value minerals like gold.
The customs data provided by governments to Comtrade, a United Nations database, shows the UAE has been a prime destination for gold from many African states for some years. In 2015, China – the world’s biggest gold consumer – imported more gold from Africa than the UAE. But during 2016, the latest year for which data is available, the UAE imported almost double the value taken by China. With African gold imports worth $8.5 billion that year, China came a distant second. Switzerland, the world’s gold refining hub, came third with $7.5 billion worth.
Most of the gold is traded in Dubai, home to the UAE’s gold industry.
The UAE reported gold imports from 46 African countries for 2016. Of those countries, 25 did not provide Comtrade with data on their gold exports to the UAE. But the UAE said it had imported a total of $7.4 billion worth of gold from them.
In addition, the UAE imported much more gold from most of the other 21 countries than those countries said they had exported. In all, it said it imported gold worth $3.9 billion – about 67 tonnes – more than those countries said they sent out.
“There is a lot of gold leaving Africa without being captured in our records,” said Frank Mugyenyi, a senior adviser on industrial development at the African Union who set up the organization’s minerals unit. “UAE is cashing in on the unregulated environment in Africa.”
The Dubai Customs Authority referred Reuters’ queries to the UAE foreign ministry, which did not respond. The UAE government media office referred Reuters to the UAE federal customs authority, which also did not respond.
Not all the discrepancies in the data analyzed by Reuters necessarily point to African-mined gold being smuggled out through the UAE. Small differences could result from shipping costs and taxes being declared differently, a time-lag between a cargo leaving and arriving, or simply mistakes. And gold analysts say some of the trade, especially from Egypt and Libya, could include gold that has been recycled.
But in 11 cases, the per-kilo value that the UAE declared importing is significantly higher than that recorded by the exporting country. This, said Leonce Ndikumana, an economist who has studied capital flows in Africa, is a “classic case of export under-invoicing” to reduce taxes.
Matthew Salomon, an American economist who has researched the use of trade statistics to identify illicit financial flows, said the issue deserves scrutiny. “Persistent discrepancies in the trade of particular goods and between particular countries … can identify significant risks of illicit activity,” he said.
POLLUTION, CONFLICT AND BANDITS
Over the past decade, high demand for gold has made it attractive for informal miners to use digging equipment and toxic chemicals to boost the yield. Contaminated water is returned to rivers, slowly poisoning the people who need the water to live.
Small-scale miners have long used mercury – easy to buy at around $10 for a thumb-sized vial – to extract flecks of gold from ore, before sluicing it away. Mercury’s toxic effects include damage to kidneys, heart, liver, spleen and lungs, and neurological disorders, such as tremors and muscle weakness. Cyanide and nitric acid are also being used in the process, according to researchers and miners in Ghana.
Industrial mining companies have also been responsible for pollution, ranging from cyanide spills to respiratory problems linked to dust produced by mining operations. But almost a dozen states including DRC, Uganda, Chad, Niger, Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Mali and Sudan have complained in the past year about the harms of unauthorized mining.
Burkina Faso has banned small-scale mining in some areas where al Qaeda-linked Islamists are active, and earlier this month Nigeria’s government suspended mining in the restive northwestern state of Zamfara, saying intelligence reports established what it called “a strong and glaring nexus” between the activities of armed bandits and illicit miners.
Strong prices have fueled the boom. Today, gold trades at over $40,000 per kilo, which is below a peak from 2012 but still four times the level of two decades ago.
Western investors want gold so they can diversify their portfolios; India and China want it for jewelry. But most Western companies – and the banks that finance them – avoid handling non-industrial African gold directly. They are unwilling to risk using metal that may have been mined to fund conflict or that may have involved human rights abuses in, for instance, DRC or Sudan. Various Uganda-based traders have been sanctioned for handling gold smuggled out of DRC.
DESTINATION DUBAI
In other states, including the UAE, these concerns have been less of a problem. Over the last decade, gold from Africa has become increasingly important for Dubai. From 2006 to 2016, the share of African gold in UAE’s reported gold imports increased from 18 percent to nearly 50 percent, Comtrade data showed.
The UAE’s main commodity marketplace, the Dubai Multi-Commodities Centre (DMCC), calls itself on its website “your gateway to global trade.” Trading in gold accounts for nearly one-fifth of UAE’s GDP.
However, no big industrial companies reached by Reuters – including AngloGold Ashanti, Sibanye-Stillwater and Gold Fields – say they send gold there. Reuters contacted 23 mining companies with African operations, the smallest of which produced around 2.5 tonnes in 2018: 21 of them said they did not send metal to Dubai for refining, the other two did not respond.
While the big South African miners have local refining capacity, the main reason others gave is that no UAE refineries are accredited by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), the standard-setter for the industry in Western markets.
The LBMA is “not comfortable dealing with the region” because of concerns about weaknesses in customs, cash transactions and hand-carried gold, its chief technical officer Neil Harby told Reuters. Investigators and people in the gold industry say the ease with which smugglers can carry gold in their hand-luggage on planes leaving Africa helps gold flow out unrecorded. And limited regulation in UAE means informally mined gold can be legally imported, tax-free.
Gold can be imported to Dubai with little documentation, African traders told Reuters.
A DMCC spokesman said it has a robust regulatory framework that includes strict responsible sourcing rules. These are aligned with the international benchmark for responsible sourcing laid out by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Sanjeev Dutta, head of commodities at DMCC, said in January that the center is building strategic relationships with most gold-producing countries on the African continent, “and we are very confident of how that production is done and how responsible” it is. Over the past 12 months, he said, DMCC has firmed up a standard for refineries, called Dubai Good Delivery, which he said is very strict on responsible sourcing and sustainability. “We track right from responsible sourcing to sustainable development, things like human rights etc.,” he said. “We demand export certificates.”
A “very limited” number of refineries accept gold that has been imported as hand luggage, Dutta said, but gave no figures.
GOLD TO GO
Some African miners are swapping their pickaxes and shovels for diggers and crushers – increasing production volumes exponentially. Regulation remains scant, and accidents are frequent. In one week this February, three accidents at illegal mining operations in Zimbabwe, Guinea and Liberia claimed the lives of more than 100 people.
Often, miners must surrender a cut of their output, as commission, to the people who control a pit, let out the equipment, or buy and sell the gold. NGOs such as Global Witness and Human Rights Watch have documented child labor, corruption and links to conflict at some of these mines. At one mine in Zimbabwe visited by Reuters, people said they had to hand over some of their find before they would even be allowed out of the pit.
Reuters presented its analysis to 14 African governments. Of them, five said it reflected an existing concern about gold being smuggled out of their countries that they are trying to address. One said they did not think gold smuggling was a problem for them. The rest declined to comment or did not respond.
Governments across Africa are trying to work out how to manage a sector that, whatever its risks, provides a livelihood for many of their citizens, and which could be harnessed as a source of revenues.
Some, including Ivory Coast, are taking gradual steps to regulate their informal mining operations. Ghana and Zambia have sent security forces into mining areas to halt operations so miners can be registered and regulations put in place. Ghana, concerned that a rush of mainly Chinese-led ventures is harming the environment, has arrested hundreds of Chinese miners and expelled thousands in the past six years.
At the end of last month, Ghana temporarily banned the import of excavator equipment to try to stem a surge in illegal mining using heavy machinery.
In Sudan, one of the continent’s biggest producers, the government has unveiled a $3 billion plan for private banks to work with the central bank to buy gold from small-scale miners, offering prices that would make it less attractive to sell on the black market.
A Tanzanian parliamentary report estimated that 90 percent of annual production of informally mined gold is smuggled out of the country: The government wants the central bank to buy this up. In March, President John Magufuli launched a plan to establish hubs where the trade would be formalized by offering access to financing and regulated markets.
In Burkina Faso, Oumarou Idani, minister of mines, believes his country is leaking gold to UAE on a massive scale. Of the 9.5 tonnes of gold the government estimates informal miners dig up each year, just 200 to 400 kg are declared to the authorities, he said.
Much of the gold is smuggled from landlocked Burkina Faso to its Atlantic coast neighbor Togo, according to the minister. In Togo, virtually no taxes are imposed on gold.
Togo’s director of mining development and controls, Nestor Kossi Adjehoun, said informal mining is “an area that we have not properly figured out.” For now, he said, Togo saw no reason to suspect gold was being smuggled through the country.
“I understand that Dubai is the destination for this gold,” his Burkina Faso neighbor, Minister Idani, told Reuters in an interview last year. “But since (the trade) is fraudulent, I have no details.”
(Additional reporting by John Ndiso in Nairobi, Tim Cocks in Ouagadougou, Ed McAllister in Dakar, Chris Mfula in Lusaka, Giulia Paravicini in Kinshasa, MacDonald Dzirutwe in Battlefields, Zimbabwe, John Zodzi in Lome, Fumbuka Ng’wanakilala in Dodoma, Maha El Dahan in Dubai, and Peter Hobson in London; Edited by Sara Ledwith, Alexandra Zavis and Richard Woods)
President Donald Trump has weighed in on the most recent controversy involving Rep. Ilhan Omar, retweeting video edited to suggest that the Minnesota Democrat was dismissive of the significance of the Sept. 11 attacks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the president "shouldn't use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack."
The video pulls a snippet of Omar's speech last month to the Council on American-Islamic Relations in which she described the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center as "some people did something," as well as news footage of the hijacked planes hitting the towers. Trump on Friday tweeted, "WE WILL NEVER FORGET!"
Omar's remark has drawn criticism largely from political opponents and conservatives. They say Omar, one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress, offered a flippant description of the assailants and the attacks on American soil that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Neither Trump's tweet nor the video includes her full quote or the context of her comments.
Omar told CAIR in Los Angeles that many Muslims saw their civil liberties eroded after the attacks, and she advocated for activism.
"For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I'm tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it," she said in the March 23 speech, according to video posted online. "CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties."
CAIR was founded in 1994, according to its website, but its membership increased dramatically after the attacks.
Many Republicans and conservative outlets expressed outrage at Omar's remarks.
"First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as 'some people who did something,'" tweeted Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas. The retired Navy SEAL lost his right eye in 2012 in an explosion in Afghanistan.
"Here's your something," the New York Post blared on its cover beneath a photograph of the flaming towers.
Pelosi said in a statement released Saturday while she was in Germany visiting American troops that "the memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence." She said "it is wrong for the president, as commander-in-chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe."
Omar doesn't seem to be backing down.
She tweeted a quote from former President George W. Bush shortly after the attacks, when he said: "'The people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"
"Was Bush downplaying the terrorist attack?" Omar tweeted. "What if he was a Muslim."
Several of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates condemned Trump's tweet.
"Someone has already been charged with a serious threat on Congresswoman Omar's life. The video the president chose to send out today will only incite more hate," said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. "You can disagree with her words — as I have done before — but this video is wrong. Enough.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Omar "won't back down to Trump's racism and hate, and neither will we."
And Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts accused Trump "of inciting violence against a sitting congresswoman — and an entire group of Americans based on their religion."
Omar has repeatedly pushed fellow Democrats into uncomfortable territory over Israel and the power of the Jewish state's influence in Washington. She apologized for suggesting that lawmakers support Israel for pay and said she isn't criticizing Jews. But she refused to take back a tweet in which she suggested that American supporters of Israel "pledge allegiance" to a foreign country.
Her comments sparked an ugly episode among House Democrats when they responded with a resolution condemning anti-Semitism became a broader declaration against all forms of bigotry.
FILE PHOTO: Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador looks on during a meeting with industry bosses and members of his cabinet to discuss the new administration's policy on the minimum wage at National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico December 17, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido/File Photo/File Photo
April 10, 2019
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The former political party of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador issued a blistering attack against the veteran leftist on Wednesday, accusing him of pushing the country toward authoritarianism.
In a full-page advertisement in newspaper Reforma, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) said Lopez Obrador was dismantling 30 years of reforms aimed at checking the power of the state under Mexico’s old rulers.
“We’re in the process of restoring a presidential, centralizing and authoritarian system which weakens and suppresses the legislative branch and undermines the independence of the judiciary,” the PRD said.
Once Mexico’s main left-of-center group, the PRD has been reduced to a rump of its former self since Lopez Obrador split to form a new party after finishing runner-up in the 2012 presidential election.
Spokespeople for the president and the party he founded after the leaving the PRD, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
In office since December, the president has enjoyed soaring levels of popularity while blaming Mexico’s problems on old rivals and the previous six administrations.
He has dominated the political agenda with a daily morning news conference, often using it to criticize many checks and balances on his power from within civil society and the media.
The PRD’s attack on him underlines the increasingly partisan flavor of politics in Mexico under Lopez Obrador.
Lopez Obrador says he is democratizing freedom of expression with his media conferences and has regularly pushed back against suggestions he aims to install an authoritarian government.
Through MORENA and its allies, Lopez Obrador has firm control of Congress, and adversaries fear that his concentration of power could soon extend to the Supreme Court.
MORENA has proposed increasing the number of judges in the court to create an anti-corruption chamber. His supporters reject criticism that the move is aimed at controlling the body.
For most of the past century, Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which melded patronage and vote-rigging with corruption and authoritarianism.
As disaffection with the party’s rule grew, a group of reform-minded politicians formed the PRD in the late 1980s. Like Lopez Obrador, many of its leaders once belonged to the PRI.
Serving as PRD chairman in the late 1990s, Lopez Obrador went on to become mayor of Mexico City for the party in 2000, and narrowly failed to win the presidency six years later.
Lopez Obrador refused to accept defeat in 2006, saying he had been robbed. Relations between him and other senior PRD figures gradually broke down and he decided to leave the party behind following his 2012 election defeat.
Many former stalwarts of the PRD joined Lopez Obrador after he founded MORENA, and the remnants of the party backed a rival candidate in the 2018 presidential election.
The PRI ruled Mexico from 1929 until it was voted out in 2000. Returning to power from 2012 to 2018, the PRI suffered a record defeat at the hands of Lopez Obrador in July.
(Additional reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez; Editing by David Gregorio)
A view shows the new Galeries Lafayette flaghip store on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris, France, March 26, 2019. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes
March 26, 2019
By Dominique Vidalon
PARIS (Reuters) – High-end French department store Galeries Lafayette will open a new outlet on Paris’s Champs Elysees this week, aiming to lure big-spending tourists and trendy Parisians back to the tree-lined avenue that was once a byword for style.
The opening comes as top-tier department stores are increasingly trying to pitch themselves as day-trip destinations to counter competition from online rivals such as Amazon and Net-a-Porter.com.
“The store is a retail laboratory where we will test new practices,” said Nicolas Houze, head of the family-owned Galeries Lafayette group, which also owns retailer BHV Marais.
“It is a symbol of our ongoing transformation into an omni-channel retail leader,” he said of the March 28 opening.
The four-story, 6,500-square-metre (70,000 square feet) store, in an Art Deco building once home to a Virgin megastore, will sell edgy fashion brands such as RouJe, Walk of Shame and Mira Mikati, as well as top-end labels from Gucci to Chanel.
The store, at 60 Champs Elysees, has recruited and trained 300 tech-savvy personal stylists to advise shoppers on the range of fashion, accessory, beauty and lifestyle brands on offer.
The opening comes at a difficult time, however, with the Champs Elysees repeatedly targeted by the “yellow vest” protest movement that has rocked France, with windows smashed, stores looted and buildings set on fire this month.
The historic avenue has also been battling for years to put itself back at the heart of the Paris fashion map – many locals avoid the Champs Elysees, seeing it as a tourist trap for its 300,000 daily visitors.
As well as the shopping, the new Galeries Lafayette will offer an upmarket food court, a coffee lounge, a restaurant and “smart hanger” technology, giving shoppers information about product availability and fitting rooms with natural light.
Both Galeries Lafayette and rival Printemps are trying to capitalise on a rebound in Paris’ tourism industry, which was hit hard by a wave of militant attacks in 2015. Both cater heavily to shoppers and tourists from Asia.
YELLOW VEST VIOLENCE
Galeries Lafayette’s move has been welcomed by France’s finance minister, who sees it as a vote of confidence in central Paris at a challenging time.
“The Champs Elysees are standing up again,” said Bruno Le Maire. “They are stronger than all of this violence, which is unacceptable and must stop as it hurts the attractiveness of our country.”
The store, designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, is a tenth of the size of the group’s flagship one on Boulevard Haussmann, which draws 60,000 to 80,000 visitors a day, half of them foreign tourists, notably Chinese.
Houze sees the Champs Elysees store as a complement to the headquarters, whose revenue rose 2 percent to 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) last year. The new store hopes to draw 10,000-15,000 visitors per day.
Founded in the late 1800s, Galeries Lafayette has 61 stores in France and abroad. It opened a second store in Shanghai last weekend and has plans to open 10 more across China in the coming three to four years, Houze said.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Luke Baker and Mark Potter)
FILE PHOTO: Jet Airways aircraft are seen parked at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai, India, April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Aditi Shah and Abhirup Roy
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI (Reuters) – The grounding of India’s Jet Airways is turning into a quick windfall and long-term opportunity for international airlines keen to scoop up nearly a million outbound passengers from what was once the nation’s biggest airline.
Jet, which previously had a fleet of around 120 largely Boeing Co planes, was forced to indefinitely halt all flight operations on April 17 after its banks rejected the carrier’s plea for emergency funds.
The carrier’s descent into crisis has benefited international airlines in the form of rising fares and demand, data showed.
Fares from India to cities such as Dubai, London, New York, Singapore and Bali in the first quarter of 2019 rose between 4 percent and 32 percent from a year ago, according to Indian travel portal MakeMyTrip Ltd.
In the peak travel months of May and June, fares to London have spiked as much as 36 percent and tickets to San Francisco are up nearly 20 percent from a year ago, according to data from travel portal Yatra.com.
“For the next three months it’s actually bonanza time for international players,” said Ashish Nainan, a research analyst at CARE Ratings. “At least until the middle of June, the fares are not going to come down.”
Due to rising demand, even before Jet’s lessors grounded planes, carriers such as British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, Singapore Airlines Ltd and United Airlines saw an up to a 27 percent increase in passenger numbers from India in the last quarter of 2018, data from India’s aviation regulator showed. That is the latest period for which the data is available.
India is one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets, clocking 15-20 percent domestic growth in recent years. It has long had only two full-service long-haul carriers, state-run Air India and Jet.
Jet is now hoping to be bailed out by a new investor, with final bids due on May 10.
INCREASING CAPACITY
Before its grounding, Jet had the biggest share of India’s outbound international air traffic, carrying 12 percent of the 7.8 million passengers headed overseas in the Oct-Dec quarter, down from 14 percent a year earlier, data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation showed.
For an interactive graphic on Jet’s market share, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2WvDQYi
For an interactive graphic on average daily flights by the airline, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2FeFDel
The total number of passengers traveling overseas with Jet fell 10 percent during the last quarter of 2018 even as the outbound travel market grew about 5 percent.
Meanwhile, Singapore Airlines posted a 27 percent increase in passengers from India, Cathay registered 17 percent growth and British Airways saw a 10 percent rise in the same period.
Cathay said the events at Jet combined with increasing demand for travel had led it to deploy larger aircraft with more seats on some Indian routes.
“In the long term we would certainly like to be able to offer more capacity into India, not just on our existing routes but by establishing new services to secondary cities,” Cathay said in a statement.
Singapore Airlines, in an email to Reuters, said the Indian market is “very promising” but declined to give details of airfare levels or demand patterns in the wake of Jet’s exit, citing a quiet period before the release of its annual results.
DOMESTIC GAINS
Jet’s grounding has also had a big impact on the domestic market, with inter-city air fares to major cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata soaring more than 20 percent in May and June, according to Yatra.com.
The spike in fares is expected to underpin strong earnings for IndiGo and SpiceJet Ltd, which are set to report results for the quarter ended March 31 in the coming weeks.
“Domestic Indian carriers are the main benefactors, but I suspect if Jet fails to be revived by May 10 then Vistara and other airlines that ply international routes, particularly the lucrative Gulf market, are the main winners,” said Shukor Yusof, the head of aviation consultancy Endau Analytics. Vistara is a joint venture of India’s Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines.
Inadequate bilateral traffic rights between India and other countries, however, could be an impediment to foreign carriers’ hopes of winning business lost by Jet, some analysts said.
“Even before Jet’s operational shutdown, international capacity was significantly constrained,” said Kapil Kaul, CEO for South Asia of consultancy CAPA. “We have now more serious capacity challenge … this is unlikely to be stabilized in the near term.”
A new national government likely to be in place sometime after elections end in May is expected to address the international capacity constraints, and once bilateral agreements are eased airlines including Emirates, Turkish and Qatar would immediately benefit, said Kaul.
“We would love to add more flights but we are at the limit of the allocation granted to us for traffic rights,” Emirates Chief Commercial Officer Thierry Antinori told reporters in Dubai on Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Jamie Freed in Singapore and Tanvi Mehta in Mumbai; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
FILE PHOTO: The company logo for pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is displayed on a screen on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., April 8, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
April 26, 2019
By Pushkala Aripaka and Ankur Banerjee
(Reuters) – AstraZeneca Plc beat first-quarter sales and earnings expectations on Friday as the British drugmaker benefited from a push into cancer drugs and emerging markets including China.
Newer treatments such as lung cancer drug Tagrisso, now the company’s top selling medicine, have helped the drugmaker’s return to growth after years of crumbling sales due to patent losses on older drugs.
Sales in China have shown explosive growth, more than doubling since 2012, but AstraZeneca executives on Friday said that may not be sustained.
“The enormous growth you currently see in China, 28 percent, probably is not sustainable, but we feel very bullish that the growth will continue to be at a pace of between 15 percent and 20 percent,” Ruud Dobber, executive vice president, BioPharma, told Reuters.
Shares of the company were down 0.2 percent at 5,878 pence at 1031 GMT.
The turnaround in AstraZeneca’s fortunes has been powered by a push into cancer treatments led by Chief Executive Pascal Soriot, who saw off a 2014 takeover bid from Pfizer in part by promising annual sales of $45 billion by 2023.
In the first quarter, sales from its oncology unit rose 59 percent to $1.89 billion, accounting for 35 percent of total product sales.
The company has moved deeper into cancer therapy market through wide-ranging deals, including those for immunotherapy and targeted therapy. Last month, it agreed a multi-billion dollar oncology deal with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd.
Interactive graphic on AZN’s top 10 drugs by sales – https://tmsnrt.rs/2W5XIRX
“We’re reaching that point where after years of having to keep faith, we have actually got something tangible to believe in,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Nicholas Hyett said.
AstraZeneca also backed its annual sales and earnings forecast and said it has extensively prepared for UK’s anticipated exit from the European Union, even in the event of a no-deal exit.
The company has already spent more than 40 million pounds ($52 million) on Brexit preparations, including stockpiling six weeks’ worth of drugs in the UK and four weeks in continental Europe to guard against shortages.
AstraZeneca said product sales rose 14 percent at constant currency to $5.47 billion in the quarter, led by its lung cancer drug Tagrisso and respiratory treatment Pulmicort.
Interactive graphic on AZN’s quarterly oncology sales – https://tmsnrt.rs/2W9tbCD
China sales increased by 28 percent to $1.24 billion in the quarter, accounting for nearly a quarter of overall product sales.
Core earnings came in at 89 cents per share in the quarter. Analysts on average were expecting core earnings of 85 cents per share and product sales of $5.29 billion, according to a company provided consensus of 19 analysts.
(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka and Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernard Orr/Keith Weir)
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It’s the type of crime that doesn’t happen every day.
Police in the suburbs of Philadelphia say three suspects broke into a medical facility in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, last Saturday and fled with 18 colonoscopies – devices used for examining the health of patients’ colons.
Suspects are seen leaving a medical facility in Wynnewood, Pa., allegedly carrying 18 colonoscopes worth about $450,000. (Lower Merion Police Department)
The devices were reportedly worth a total of about $450,000, authorities said.
But police were perplexed about what the suspects might have planned to do with the instruments.
“This is not something that a typical pawn shop might accept,” Lower Merion Police Detective Sergeant Michael Vice told Philadelphia’s WCAU-TV. “My feeling would be that it was some type of black market sales.”
Such a market apparently does exist, Lower Merion Police Superintendent Michael J. McGrath told Philly.com.
“They appeared to know precisely where to go, and they pried the door open,” McGrath said of the suspects, who were captured on surveillance video leaving the facility, carrying bulging backpacks.
Police are hoping the suspects will be caught in the end.
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