Several Democratic presidential candidates are declining invitations to a key pro-Israel policy group's conference next week, an annual meeting that has usually been a must-attend meeting for members of both parties, in what some see as a further sign of the party's growing disdain for the Jewish state.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and many others have said they won’t be attending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual Policy (AIPAC) conference, a move that coincides with a moneyed progressive advocacy group’s call to boycott the event.
MoveOn.org, a group that spent around $3.5 million in the 2018 midterm elections, called on the 2020 Democratic candidates to skip the conference, even though in the past all presidential candidates viewed the AIPAC conference as a crucial campaign stop.
The three-day conference this year will be headlined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
So far no Democrats who are officially running for president have issued a statement confirming their attendance at the conference.
Sanders’ aide Josh Orton told media outlets that the leading candidate among the Democrats won’t be attending because “he’s concerned about the platform AIPAC is providing for leaders who have expressed bigotry and oppose a two-state solution” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Other candidates such as Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, confirmed that they don't plan to attend the conference, but provided no explanation for their decisions.
Harris addressed the AIPAC in 2017, saying it was “an honor” to speak there and praised the group’s leadership. “And I'm proud to say and be among the many voices represented here, the California delegation is the largest and hopefully the loudest. There you go,” she said.
O’Rourke criticized the embattled Israeli prime minister during a campaign stop earlier this week, saying Netanyahu “has openly sided with racists.”
“Right now, we don’t have the best negotiating partners on either side. We have a prime minister in Israel who has openly sided with racists,” he charged.
Other Democratic candidates who won’t be attending the conference are Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. John Delaney, though the latter politician said he’s unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts.
AIPAC is a non-partisan organization that seeks to foster the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. The group, despite misleading portrayals on the far-left, supports a two-state solution and doesn’t endorse nor donate to political candidates.
Earlier this year, Democrats came to reckon with the split of views in the party after Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar prompted charges of anti-Semitism after she accused AIPAC of paying politicians to support Israel.
Pelosi called on Omar to apologize for the use of “anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters.” In response, Omar promised Pelosi, fellow lawmakers and voters that she is “listening and learning, but standing strong.”
Former CNN contributor Symone Sanders, said “we don’t need white people leading the Democratic Party right now,” after Trump’s election in 2016.
“The Democratic Party is diverse, and it should be reflected as so in our leadership and throughout the staff at the highest levels from the vice chairs to the secretaries all the way down to the people working in the offices at the DNC,” Sanders once told CNN’s Briana Keilar.
Now, Sanders is joining the very white Joe Biden as senior adviser to his 2020 presidential campaign.
Not living by the same identity politics she pushes, Symone also previously worked as press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign before taking a job at CNN.
The former CNN contributor’s move to the Biden campaign comes just hours after the former Vice President’s official 2020 launch.
To accompany the campaign launch, the Biden 2020 team released a video promoting the proven lie that Donald Trump said Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were “very fine people.”
According to the same Fake News polls MSM pushed leading up to the 2016 election, Biden has an 8-point lead over Trump on day one of his campaign launch.
Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson reported in 2016:
Emails revealed by Wikileaks show how Democratic operatives planned to encourage “oversamples for polling” in order to “maximize what we get out of our media polling.” In other words, sample more Democrats than Republicans in order to make people believe that Hillary’s lead is far greater than the reality of a tight race.
Given Sanders’ previous comments regarding white people leading the Democrat party, could she sabotage his campaign to allow a person of color or woman to get the Democratic nomination?
A battery prototype has been designed using salt water and materials that are non-toxic and charge quickly, paving the way for new types of battery.
The design principles behind the new prototype, which changes color as it charges, could also be applied to existing battery technologies to create new devices for energy storage, biological sensing, and smart color-changing materials.
The most widely used batteries currently are lithium-ion batteries, which have a relatively high capacity (they hold a large amount of charge) but do not discharge or recharge their energy quickly. They also contain organic electrolytes and other materials that can be hazardous and flammable, meaning they require careful handling and disposal.
The new battery prototype, developed by a team of researchers from the departments of Physics and Chemistry at Imperial College London, uses thin films of specially designed plastics and simple salt water instead.
While it can hold less charge than conventional lithium-ion batteries, the prototype, which is made from polymers – long chains of molecules that make up plastics – can charge and discharge in a matter of seconds. As an added benefit of the materials it uses, it also changes color as it charges, giving users an easy way to read out the state of charge of the battery.
The prototype, the details of which were published in Energy & Environmental Science, could pave the way for improving the charging rate and toxicity of existing batteries, or provide a route for making entirely new kinds of batteries.
Developing Recyclable Batteries
Co-lead author Dr. Alexander Giovannitti, who worked on the project while at the Departments of Physics and Chemistry at Imperial, said: “The materials we used to create the battery prototype could potentially be made at low cost and combined with the use of non-toxic and non-flammable water-based electrolytes. This approach could be a viable route to develop recyclable batteries.”
Batteries with faster charge time but lower capacity could have a range of applications where energy needs to be exchanged quickly but the batteries don’t need to be small, such as when energy from car braking is used moments later to accelerate the vehicle.
On a larger scale, when renewable technologies like solar or wind are used as part of a national or local grid, they can only provide energy intermittently. A battery system that could store this energy quickly, but also give it back to the grid when needed, would be valuable in keeping supply steady.
The team say their prototype would need more work to be suited to these areas, but that the principles behind its design could be applicable to a wide range of energy storage devices in development.
Polymer materials have been successfully used in batteries before, as additives to provide flexibility or as electrolytes that separate positive and negative electrodes, but their use as active materials in battery electrodes operating in water has proved challenging.
The breakthrough comes from the design of polymer materials that can take up and release positive or negative ions from salt water, quickly and reversibly without degrading. These ions are attracted to electrodes of opposite charge when the device is charging.
Water-based batteries are desirable because of their non-toxicity, but it has been difficult to get the ions in water to be reversibly exchanged with the electrodes.
The team got around this by designing side-chains to attach to the conducting polymer ‘backbones’. By using polar materials for the side chains, they could create electrodes with high affinity to water.
With this principle they were able to create positive and negative electrodes that can host their opposite ions from the water – and they had the ingredients for a battery. As the polymer backbones were already flexible – expanding and contracting while the battery charged and discharged – then no additives were needed.
Co-lead author Dr. Davide Moia, who completed the work while at the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “Using salt water gets rid of toxicity and flammability concerns, but it has not been easy to use as it can limit the amount of energy you can get in and out of a device compared to other organic electrolytes.
“We now want to test how far this limit can be pushed. We have compensated for lower performance with a safer combination of materials, but improving the performance could open up the path to whole new types of viable energy storage devices that are also safe and sustainable.”
FILE PHOTO: A man walks past branches of ASDA and Sainsbury's in Stockport, Britain April 30, 2018. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo
March 9, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – Walmart-owned British supermarket chain Asda said it will remove single kitchen knives from sale in all its stores by the end of April.
Britain’s knife-crime rate is soaring and, following a wave of fatal stabbings in recent weeks, many involving teenagers, Prime Minister Theresa May has convened a meeting of ministers and community leaders to discuss ways of tackling the problem.
“We know single knives are the most common knife products to be stolen and that is why we have chosen to remove these items from our stores,” Asda Senior Vice President Nick Jones said in a statement.
It is illegal to sell knives to under-18s in Britain.
(Reporting by John Stonestreet; Editing by Ros Russell)
President Donald Trump says he is taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to his threat to close the southern border as soon as this week.
Trump is telling reporters as he meets with NATO's secretary general that he's pleased with steps that Mexico has taken in recent days and that, "We're going to see what happens."
But he says that he's "ready to close it" if he has to and will do so if Mexico stops helping or if he fails to reach a deal with Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration laws."
Trump is bemoaning current regulations and says: "We're going to have a strong border or we're going to have a closed border."
A view shows the Bercy Economy and Finance Ministry on the day the government unveils budget plans for 2019, in Paris, France, September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann
March 26, 2019
By Leigh Thomas
PARIS (Reuters) – France cut its public sector budget deficit by more than expected last year, trimming it back to the lowest level in 12 years, according to data from the INSEE statistics agency.
The budget deficit came in at 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest level since 2006 and down from 2.8 percent in 2017, INSEE said on Tuesday in first estimates for France’s 2018 public accounts.
The 2018 deficit was also lower than the 2.7 percent foreseen in last year’s budget law and marked the second year in a row in which France had respected an EU limit of 3 percent, which Paris had flaunted for a decade prior to 2017.
Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin said the improvement vindicated the government’s strategy of reining in spending while also cutting taxes.
“We need to keep up the effort obviously because the public accounts remain in bad shape,” he added, speaking on French radio RTL.
The government expects the deficit to rise to 3.2 percent this year as a payroll tax credit scheme becomes a permanent tax cut, adding temporary pressure to the public finances.
With the deficit lower than expected last year, the national debt was steady at 98.4 percent of GDP.
Meanwhile, public spending, which is among the highest of developed countries, eased to 56.0 percent from 56.4 in 2017 while the overall tax burden on the economy slipped to 45.0 percent from 45.2 percent in 2017.
Slightly better than expected growth last year helped keep down the deficit and debt last year. INSEE said the economy grew 1.6 percent, better than the 1.5 percent it had reported in preliminary estimates.
Growth even held up at the end of the year at a quarterly rate of 0.3 percent despite a series of violent anti-government protests that weighed on business and consumer confidence.
The scrapping of a payroll tax for unemployment insurance helped boost households’ purchasing power, a key demand of protestors who say they get pinched by hefty taxes and a high cost of living.
Gross disposable incomes grew in the fourth quarter at the fastest pace 11 years, but household spending stagnated as consumers squirreled away the extra cash, pushing the savings rate to the highest level since the third quarter of 2012.
(Reporting by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of Wirecard AG, an independent provider of outsourcing and white label solutions for electronic payment transactions is seen in Aschheim near Munich, Germany April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
April 26, 2019
BERLIN (Reuters) – Wulf Matthias will not stand for a second term as Wirecard’s chairman in 2020, German daily Handelsblatt said on Friday, citing sources in the financial industry.
For age reasons alone this would not be an option for Matthias, aged 75, Handelsblatt added.
Matthias will keep his mandate until it ends in 2020, the paper quoted a company spokeswoman as saying.
Wirecard was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Editing by Thomas Seythal)
FILE PHOTO: The Credit Suisse logo is pictured on a bank in Geneva, Switzerland, October 17, 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
April 26, 2019
ZURICH (Reuters) – Shareholders approved Credit Suisse’s 2018 compensation report with an 82 percent majority on Friday, overriding frustrations expressed at its annual general meeting over jumps in executive pay during a year its share price plummeted.
Three shareholder advisers had recommended investors vote against Switzerland’s second-biggest bank’s remuneration report, while a fourth backed the report but expressed reservations about whether management pay matched performance.
The approval marked a slight increase over the 80.8 percent support garnered for the bank’s 2017 compensation report.
(Reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi; Editing by Michael Shields)
FILE PHOTO: Traders work on the trading floor of Barclays Bank at Canary Wharf in London, Britain December 7, 2018. REUTERS/Simon Dawson/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Simon Jessop and Sinead Cruise
LONDON (Reuters) – Activist investor Edward Bramson is likely to fail in his attempt to get a board seat at Barclays’ annual meeting next week, even though shareholders are dissatisfied with performance of the group’s investment bank.
New York-based Bramson’s Sherborne Investors and the board of the British bank have been sparring for months over Barclays’ strategy.
Bramson wants to scale back Barclays’ investment bank to reduce risk and boost shareholder returns. Barclays Chief Executive Jes Staley remains staunchly committed to growing the business out of trouble.
After failing to persuade Staley to change course since he began building a 5.5 percent stake in the bank in March last year, Bramson hopes a board seat will rachet up the pressure.
Both sides have written to shareholders pitching their case and Bramson has courted investors in one-on-one meetings, although none have publicly backed him yet.
Interviews by Reuters with five institutional investors in Barclays suggest Bramson has failed to persuade them.
Sherborne declined to comment.
Mirza Baig, head of investment stewardship at top-40 shareholder Aviva Investors, said Bramson was welcome on the bank’s register but the boardroom was a step too far.
“He has created a lot of value at other businesses, but, generally, when he has come in as executive chair and taken full control. This would be a different case where he would just be one lone voice on the board,” he said.
A second Barclays shareholder said he backed Bramson’s goal of improving returns but via an “evolutionary” approach.
“If you look at banks that have tried to restructure their operations in investment banking – you look at Natwest Markets, Deutsche Bank – I struggle to think of an example where a roughshod restructuring has been accretive to shareholder value.”
A third, top-30 investor said he had been impressed by incoming Chairman Nigel Higgins’ grasp of the challenge in hand, and felt investors would give him time.
“Management know they have to execute and deliver improved returns… [Higgins] will continue to re-shape the board but obviously he didn’t feel that having someone with a diametrically opposed view on it would be helpful.”
A fourth, top-30 investor agreed: “We voted for the chairman to come in and it would be crazy to allow an activist to join the board (at this time).”
Jupiter Fund Management, the 24th largest investor, said it also planned to vote against Bramson.
Barclays has nearly 500 institutional shareholders, Refinitiv data showed.
Since Staley joined Barclays in 2015, the investment bank returns relative to capital invested have increased but are still underperforming the overall business.
Barclays’ first-quarter figures showed the investment bank posted a 6 percent drop in income from its markets business and a 17 percent fall in banking advisory fees.
Returns in the investment bank fell to 9.5 percent from 13.2 percent a year ago.
Famed for successful campaigns against smaller British companies in sectors from chemicals to advertising, Bramson’s board seat pitch has been rebuffed by shareholder advisory firms.
Institutional Shareholder Services, the world’s biggest, said Bramson’s proposal “falls short of what can reasonably be expected from a shareholder trying to address issues at a 28 billion pounds, systemically important bank”.
Glass Lewis also flagged concern about Bramson’s lack of banking experience and “questionable” shareholding structure, referring to Sherborne’s use of derivative contracts to hedge losses should its strategy fail.
Critics said the arrangement meant his interests are not truly aligned with those of other long-term shareholders.
British advisory firm Pirc, however, said it recommended that investors abstain in the vote on Bramson’s proposal as a challenge to the board to do better in the year ahead – or face a similar contest in 2020.
After an over 15-month pregnancy, “Akuti,” a 7-year-old Greater One Horned Indian Rhinoceros, gave birth as a result of induced ovulation and artificial insemination at Zoo Miami, April 23, 2019.
FILE PHOTO: A Chevron gas station sign is seen in Del Mar, California, in this April 25, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
April 26, 2019
(Reuters) – U.S. oil and natural gas producer Chevron Corp reported a 27 percent fall in quarterly earnings on Friday, hit by lower crude prices and weaker margins in its refining and chemicals businesses.
Net income attributable to the company fell to $2.65 billion, or $1.39 per share, for the first quarter ended March 31, from $3.64 billion, or $1.90 per share, a year earlier.
Earlier in the day, larger rival Exxon Mobil Corp reported earnings well below analysts’ estimates, as margins in its refining business were hurt by higher Canadian prices and heavy scheduled maintenance.
(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
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