Commercial area is pictured during a blackout in Caracas, Venezuela March 26, 2019. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado
March 26, 2019
By Vivian Sequera and Brian Ellsworth
CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela canceled work and school on Tuesday as the second major blackout this month left streets mostly empty in Caracas and residents of the capital wondering how long power would be out amid a deepening economic and political crisis.
President Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist government, which blamed the United States and the opposition for the previous power cut, blamed an “attack” on its electrical system for the blackout that first hit on Monday. The outage shuttered businesses, plunged the city’s main airport into darkness and left commuters stranded in Caracas.
The blackout came amid tensions with the United States over the weekend arrival of Russian military planes, which led Washington to accuse Moscow of “reckless escalation” of the country’s situation.
Russia, which has major energy investments in OPEC member Venezuela, has remained a staunch ally of Maduro, while the United States and most other Western nations have endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaido.
Citing the constitution, Guaido in January assumed the interim presidency, saying Maduro’s re-election last year was fraudulent. Maduro says Guaido is a U.S. puppet attempting to lead a coup against him and has blamed worsening economic difficulties on sanctions imposed by Washington.
Power was restored to much of the country by Monday evening but went out again during the night.
Western cities, including Maracaibo and Barquisimeto, both in the west of the South American country, as well as the central city of Valencia, had no power on Tuesday, according to witnesses.
Many people on Caracas’ streets went to work because they did not know about the government’s suspension of the workday, which was announced by the presidential press office in a 4 a.m. (0800 GMT) tweet.
“How am I supposed to find out, if there’s no power and no internet?” said dental assistant Yolanda Gonzalez, 50, waiting for the bus near a Caracas plaza. “Power’s going to get worse, you’ll see.”
Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez on Monday said the blackout that began in the early afternoon was the result of an attack on Venezuela’s main hydroelectric Guri dam which had affected three major transmission lines.
Rodriguez did not explicitly blame Monday’s outage on any particular individual or group. But he said, “the intention of Venezuela’s far right is to attack, generate anxiety and anguish, in order to seize power and steal all our resources.”
The country suffered its worst blackout ever starting on March 7. For nearly a week it left millions of people struggling to obtain food and water and hospitals without power to treat the sick. Looting in the western state of Zulia destroyed hundreds of businesses.
Electricity experts say the outages are the result of inadequate maintenance and incompetent management of the power grid since the late President Hugo Chávez nationalized the sector in 2007.
Russia, which has warned Washington against military intervention in Venezuela, declined to comment on the planes on Tuesday or respond to the accusations from the U.S. State Department.
Venezuelan Socialist Party Vice President Diosdado Cabello confirmed that two planes had flown to the country from Russia during the weekend, but he did not give a reason or say whether they carried troops.
In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump said the “military option” was on the table regarding Venezuela, prompting a strong backlash from regional leaders wary of U.S. troops being deployed to Latin American soil.
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio – like Trump, a Republican – on Tuesday wrote on Twitter, “I hope the members of Congress & the regional leaders who said they opposed U.S. ‘military intervention’ in #Venezuela will be just as forceful now that #Russia is sending (its) military to Venezuela.”
(Reporting by Diego Oré and Vivian Sequera; writing by Brian Ellsworth; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
BEIJING – A prominent activist campaigning for the release of ethnic Kazakhs caught in a sweeping crackdown on Muslims in China has been arrested in the Kazakh city of Almaty.
Leila Adilzhan told The Associated Press by phone that her husband, Serikzhan Bilash, head of the advocacy group Atajurt, called her Sunday morning from a policeman's phone saying he had been arrested and had been taken to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.
The detention of possibly more than a million Uighurs (WEE-gurs), Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into Chinese internment camps has been a touchy issue in neighboring Kazakhstan.
Atajurt became prominent last year for supporting the relatives of those detained. They wrote letters to embassies and the United Nations, and taped hundreds of testimonies by relatives looking for their loved ones.
Bridgepark Advisors managing partner Stefan Selig and Dow Jones Newswires global chief editor Glenn Hall discuss the uncertainty surrounding Brexit and President Trump’s threat to close the U.S. southern border.
Britain's Brexit drama went into overtime Wednesday as Prime Minister Theresa May and the country's main opposition sought a compromise deal to prevent an abrupt British departure from the European Union at the end of next week.
In an about-face that left pro-Brexit members of May's Conservative Party howling with outrage, the prime minister sought to forge an agreement with left-wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn after failing three times to win Parliament's backing for her Brexit deal.
May also said she would ask the EU for a further delay to Britain's departure date — postponed once already — to avert a chaotic and economically damaging no-deal Brexit on April 12. Skeptical lawmakers, reluctant to take her word for it, approved a hastily crafted law that compels May to ask for an extension to the Brexit deadline if a no-deal departure is looming.
"The country needs a solution, the country deserves a solution, and that's what I'm working to find," May told lawmakers before meeting with Corbyn for about two hours.
Afterward, both the government and Labour called the meeting "constructive" and said their teams would hold more in-depth talks Thursday.
May's office said both sides had shown "flexibility and a commitment to bring the current Brexit uncertainty to a close."
Corbyn, more muted, said "the meeting was useful but inconclusive."
"There hasn't been as much change as I expected," he said.
May's change of direction left her caught between angry Conservatives who accuse her of throwing away Brexit, and Labour opponents mistrustful of her sudden change of heart.
Labour lawmaker Paul Sweeney said May's outreach to his party "shows the desperation that she's in."
Pro-Brexit Conservatives, meanwhile, expressed outrage. Two junior ministers quit, and other lawmakers angrily accused May of putting the socialist Corbyn in the Brexit driver's seat.
Her cross-party talks — after almost three years of seeking to push through her own version of a Brexit divorce deal — came amid EU warnings that a damaging withdrawal without a plan was growing more likely by the day.
After lawmakers three times rejected an agreement struck between the bloc and May late last year, the leaders of the EU's 27 remaining countries postponed the original March 29 Brexit date and gave the U.K. until April 12 to approve the divorce deal or come up with a new one.
So far the House of Commons has failed to find a majority for any alternative plan.
"A no deal on 12 April at midnight looks more and more likely," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Wednesday, adding that would bring disruption for EU citizens and businesses, but much worse economic damage for Britain.
EU Economy Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said a "no-deal" Brexit would mean long lines at borders and paperwork headaches for customs checks on the 11,000 vehicles entering and leaving Britain each day.
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warned that, even though Britain and the EU both wanted to avoid a no-deal Brexit, it remained the legal default position, and the risk of Britain accidentally crashing out was "alarmingly high."
Carney told Sky News that claims by pro-Brexit politicians that such a situation could be managed were "absolute nonsense."
May's pivot toward Labour points Britain toward a softer Brexit than the one she has championed since British voters decided in June 2016 to leave the EU. Labour wants the U.K. to remain in the EU's customs union — a trading area that sets common tariffs on imports to the bloc while allowing free trade in goods moving between member states.
May has always ruled that out, saying it would limit Britain's ability to forge an independent trade policy.
May's decision to negotiate with Corbyn is risky for both the Conservatives and Labour, and could widen divisions over Brexit that run through both parties.
Labour is formally committed to enacting the voters' decision to leave the EU, but many of the party's lawmakers want a new referendum that could keep Britain in the bloc. They will be angry if the party actively helps bring about the U.K.'s departure.
Meanwhile, May's move infuriated pro-Brexit Conservatives who say Britain must make a clean break with the EU in order to take control of its laws and trade policy.
Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Brexit "is becoming soft to the point of disintegration."
Junior Wales Minister Nigel Adams quit his post, criticizing May for seeking a deal with "a Marxist who has never once in his political life put British interests first" — a reference to the left-wing Corbyn.
He was followed by junior Brexit minister Chris Heaton-Harris, who said in his resignation letter that the government "should have honored the result of the 2016 referendum" and left the EU on March 29.
Meanwhile, pro-EU lawmakers were not banking on talks between May and Corbyn succeeding. The House of Commons on Wednesday approved a bill to ensure May can't go back on her promise to seek a delay to Brexit rather than let Britain tumble out of the bloc.
The bill, debated and approved in a single day, compels May to seek to extend the Brexit process beyond April 12 in order to prevent a no-deal departure. In a reflection of how divided lawmakers are over Brexit, it passed by a single vote, 313-312.
The bill still needs approval from the House of Lords, Parliament's unelected upper chamber — likely on Thursday. And it does not force the EU to agree to delay Brexit.
EU leaders, weary of the whole Brexit circus, gave a cautious welcome to May's attempt at rapprochement.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would work "until the last hour" to secure an orderly Brexit, but stressed that "these solutions have to be reached above all in Britain itself."
Britain's televised political melodrama over Brexit — with its weeks of passionate debates, narrow votes and seemingly endless crises — has left EU leaders exasperated, but also fascinated.
The EU's Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, joked that "the sessions in the House of Commons have become more popular than the matches in the Premier League."
"The trouble is that it is always a draw in the House of Commons," he said.
HONG KONG – Business and human rights groups are expressing concern over proposed changes to Hong Kong's extradition law that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China where they say they could be subject to torture and unfair prosecution.
Hong Kong currently limits such extraditions to jurisdictions with which it has existing extradition agreements or to others on an individual basis under a law passed before the semi-autonomous territory's handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
China was excluded because of concerns over its poor record on legal independence and human rights.
However, changes to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Ordinance would expand the scope for the transfer of criminal suspects to China and remove the legislature's right to scrutinize individual extradition decisions.
Mexican troops questioned two U.S. soldiers along the two countries’ border earlier this month. The American soldiers were on the U.S. side of the border conducting a routine surveillance operation, defense officials say.
Military officials from the U.S. Northern Command said that “five to six Mexican military personnel questioned two U.S. Army soldiers who were conducting border support operations.”
The soldiers were in an unmarked Customs and Border Protection vehicle near the southwest border in the vicinity of Clint, Texas.
Officials confirmed that the Mexican troops were armed with what seemed to be assault riffles. They drew their weapons when they saw the two U.S. soldiers and ordered the U.S. troops to return their weapons to a military vehicle.
According to officials, the two Americans obliged “in an attempt to de-escalate a potential volatile situation.”
“Throughout the incident, the U.S. soldiers followed all established procedures and protocols,” Northern Command said in a statement.
The crisis at America’s southern border has reached unprecedented levels with human/drug trafficking and violence on the rise. Former heavyweight champion David “Nino” Rodriguez joins Alex to discuss the realities of illegal immigration you won’t hear about on any other network!
FILE PHOTO: Men walk past a 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) billboard at the fund's flagship Tun Razak Exchange development in Kuala Lumpur March 1, 2015. REUTERS/Olivia Harris/File Photo
February 22, 2019
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Friday said it had filed complaints seeking forfeiture and recovery of approximately $38 million in assets associated with its 1Malaysia Development Berhard, or 1MDB, case, bringing the assets now subject to forfeiture to a total of approximately $1.7 billion.
“These new lawsuits target assets collected by corrupt officials and their associates through a massive scheme that stole billions of dollars from the people of Malaysia and laundered the proceeds across the world,” U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna said in a statement.
(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
FILE PHOTO: Outside view of the Deutsche Bank and the Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, March 18, 2019. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski
March 19, 2019
By John O’Donnell and Arno Schuetze
BERLIN/FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German lawmakers on Monday criticized deputy finance minister Joerg Kukies and Goldman Sachs, alleging a conflict of interest in the U.S. investment bank advising state-backed Commerzbank on a possible merger with Deutsche Bank.
Kukies, who was formerly co-head of Goldman Sachs <GS.N> in Germany, left the Wall Street firm a year ago to become deputy German finance minister.
Kukies has since advocated a merger between Commerzbank <CBKG.DE> and Deutsche Bank <DBKGn.DE>, which unions warn could mean up to 30,000 job cuts, people familiar with the matter say.
Goldman Sachs is advising Commerzbank on the $28 billion plus deal deliberations, people familiar with the matter said.
“It’s a conflict of interest,” Fabio De Masi, a prominent leftist lawmaker in the German parliament, said, pointing to the state’s 15 percent stake in Commerzbank.
A spokesman for Kukies told Reuters there was no conflict of interest and that he had worked in the trading department at Goldman Sachs, which was “strictly separated” from bankers who advised on mergers.
Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
“In his 17 years at Goldman Sachs, Joerg Kukies exclusively worked for the sales and trading sector with no responsibility for the advisory/mergers and acquisitions section,” the spokesman for Kukies said.
Although confirmation of merger talks between Germany’s two largest banks, following months of speculation, has boosted their share prices, it has also triggered opposition and concerns over the impact on employment.
The issue is a highly emotive one in Germany and in its Tuesday edition, top-selling tabloid newspaper Bild raised a question mark over Kukie’s future in the government.
“When 30,000 jobs are on the line, the government must avoid the impression of a conflict of interest,” De Masi added.
This was echoed by Danyal Bayaz, a German parliamentarian and finance expert from the country’s Green party.
“In the financial crisis, we saw that government and finance were too interconnected. Ten years later, we don’t want to have the same. We want a strict separation from politics and industry,” Bayaz said.
“It is important to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest,” he added.
(Writing by John O’Donnell; Editing by Alexander Smith)
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad, California September 22, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake
April 26, 2019
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. economy is growing at a 2.08% annualized pace in the second quarter based on upbeat data on durable goods orders and new home sales in March, the New York Federal Reserve’s Nowcast model showed on Friday.
This was faster than the 1.92% growth rate calculated by the N.Y. Fed model the week before.
(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
FILE PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte arrives at an extraordinary European Union leaders summit to discuss Brexit, in Brussels, Belgium April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman
April 26, 2019
(Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday he had assured China’s Huawei Technologies that it would not face discrimination in the rollout of Italy’s 5G telecoms network.
Conte was speaking on a visit to China where he said he met Huawei’s chief executive, Ren Zhengfei. The prime minister’s comments were carried in Italy by TV broadcaster Sky Italia.
“I told him that we have adopted some precautions, some measures to protect our interests that demand very high levels of security … not only from Huawei but any company entering into the 5G arena,” he said.
Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, is under intense scrutiny after the United States told allies not to use its technology because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying. Huawei has categorically denied this.
(Writing by by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Angelo Amante)
U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he departs for travel to Indianapolis, Indiana from the White House in Washington, U.S., April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
April 26, 2019
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday was expected to announce his intention to revoke the United States’ status as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, which was signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but never ratified by Congress, two U.S. officials said.
Trump was expected to announce the decision in a speech in Indianapolis, to the National Rifle Association, the officials said. The NRA, a powerful gun lobby group, has long been opposed to the treaty, which was negotiated at the United Nations.
(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)
A remote controlled robot for the ‘Isotopium: Chernobyl’ game is seen at the game’s location in Brovary, Ukraine April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko
April 26, 2019
By Margaryta Chornokondratenko
KIEV (Reuters) – A Ukrainian computer game that brings to life a town abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster may not sound like everyone’s idea of fun but has attracted 60,000 people globally since its launch in October.
Players of “Isotopium: Chernobyl” drive tanks around the ghost town of Prypyat near Chernobyl, knocking out competitors as they search for an energy source called isotopium and collecting points every time they find some.
While the game takes its theme from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, which marked its 33rd anniversary on Friday, it was also inspired by the 2009 science fiction film “Avatar”.
Newcomers to the game think they have entered a virtual world when in fact they are controlling a real robot, equipped with a camera and computer, which makes its way around a model of the town rendered down to the tiniest detail.
“When playing our game, for the first 5-10 minutes many players don’t understand that it is not fictional,” said the game’s co-founder Sergey Beskrestnov. “They message us saying: ‘You have cool texture, you have good graphics, your designer is good, well done. You have a cool operating system.’
“People then reply: ‘It is not an operating system, it is real,’ and the player can’t believe it is real,” said Beskrestnov, speaking mid-game from Prypyat city square as he towers over surrounding five-storey buildings.
Kiev-born Beskrestnov was just 12 years old when on April 26, 1986 a botched test at the nuclear plant in the then Soviet Union sent clouds of smoldering nuclear material across large swathes of Europe, forced over 50,000 people, including Beskrestnov’s family, to evacuate and poisoned unknown numbers of workers involved in its clean-up.
Beskrestnov and his partner Alexey Fateyev used Google maps and hundreds of pictures from the Chernobyl area to recreate Prypyat landmarks, including residential buildings, a hotel, concert hall, amusement park and a stadium.
The game’s real-scale model occupies a 180 square meter (1,938 sq. ft) basement of a residential building in the Ukraine city of Brovary, just 150 km (93 miles) from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and 30 km east of Kiev.
Miniature radioactivity warning signs, graffiti on the walls of abandoned buildings and tables and chairs left scattered inside a small cafe all add to the creepy atmosphere of a once lively town.
“It’s a really neat concept …,” Shaun Prescott wrote in a review of the game published by PC Gamer magazine in January. “Controlling the tanks is kinda cumbersome, but they are tanks, after all.”
An attentive player will notice at least one inaccuracy – the real Chernobyl nuclear power plant is not located in town as it is in the game.
It costs $9 to immerse in the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic town for an hour but only 20 people at a time can play simultaneously. Beskrestnov’s company, Remote Games, said 62,615 people around the world have registered to play the game, including around 15,000 in France and 10,000 in the United States.
A camera fixed on top of a moving tank broadcasts high quality signal in real time, allowing players from as far apart as Australia and Canada enjoy the game without facing any time delay in delivering video signals.
Its creators next ambition is to devise a game featuring the colonization of Mars in which 1,000 people will be able to simultaneously control robots on different missions involved in the operation.
“Many people advise us to contact Elon Musk directly because it resonates his dreams and ideas,” Beskrestnov jokes.
FILE PHOTO: A Starbucks sign is show on one of the companies stores in Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 19,2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
April 26, 2019
(Reuters) – Initial optimism over first-quarter results from Starbucks Corp was waning fast on Wall Street on Friday, as analysts questioned the longer-term prospects of its new sales push given subdued overall customer traffic numbers especially in China.
The company on Thursday beat brokerage estimates for quarterly same-store sales on the back of demand for its new Cloud Macchiato, Matcha tea and cold brews in the United States.
However, BTIG’s Peter Saleh was one of a number of sector analysts who said while customers forking out for higher-priced new drinks had helped drive growth in same-store sales, “anemic” traffic at cafes remained a concern.
He and others pointed to a 1 percent decline in footfall at cafes in the Chinese market, viewed as crucial to the chain’s growth for the foreseeable future.
More broadly, transaction numbers, the substitute analysts use for customer traffic, were unchanged in all three of the company’s global regions.
Shares in the company, which hit a record high after the results on Thursday, fell 1 percent in morning trade.
“We remain cautious given near-term headwinds surrounding China, including cannibalization, increasing competition (and) a slowing economy,” Wedbush analyst Nick Setyan said.
Starbucks has also poured money into beefing up its delivery network in China as it battles with local startup Luckin Coffee, whose speedy growth led it to file for an IPO in the United States earlier this week.
New menu items and partnerships with delivery services, the heart of the company’s strategy to win back customers lost to artisanal coffee shops and cheaper fast-food rivals, did help Starbucks’ sales in its home market.
However, analysts said growth in China may continue to be subdued.
Wells Fargo analyst Bonnie Herzog said she expects store expansion in China to take priority over comparable sales growth.
She downgraded her rating on Starbucks’ to “market perform” from “outperform”, arguing that the company facing tough sales comparisons later on in 2019 from last year and the current rich valuation of shares meant the stock had limited room to rise.
“Investors will be hesitant to invest new money in a stock with a topline that, while still strong, is unlikely to meaningfully accelerate,” Herzog said.
Still, the company’s solid same-store growth in the United States, improving profit margins and a lower tax rate for the rest of the year led at least 6 Wall Street brokerages to raise their price targets on the stock to as high as $81.
11 of 29 brokerages rate Starbucks “buy” or higher, 17 “hold” and 1 “sell” or lower. Their median price target is $75.
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