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General view of a destroyed building during World War II is pictured in Warsaw, Poland April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
April 26, 2019
By Joanna Plucinska
WARSAW (Reuters) – Germany could owe Poland more than $850 billion in reparations for damages it incurred during World War Two and the brutal Nazi occupation, a senior ruling party lawmaker said.
Some six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed during the war and Warsaw was razed to the ground following a 1944 uprising in which about 200,000 civilians died.
Germany, one of Poland’s biggest trade partners and a fellow member of the European Union and NATO, says all financial claims linked to World War Two have been settled.
The right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) has revived calls for compensation since it took power in 2015 and has made the promotion of Poland’s wartime victimhood a central plank of its appeal to nationalism.
PiS has yet to make an official demand for reparations but its combative stance towards Germany has strained relations.
“Poland lost not only millions of its citizens but it was also destroyed in an unusually brutal way,” Arkadiusz Mularczyk, who heads the Polish parliamentary committee on reparations, told Reuters in an interview.
“Many (victims) are still alive and feel deeply wronged.”
His comments come a month before European Parliament elections in which populist and nationalist parties are expected to do well. Poland will also hold national elections later this year, with PiS still well ahead of its rivals in opinion polls.
EU LARGESSE
Mularczyk said the reparations figure could amount to more than 10 times the estimated 100 billion euros ($111 billion) that Poland has received so far in European Union funds since it joined the bloc in 2004.
Germany is the biggest net donor to the EU budget and some Germans regard its contributions as generous compensation to recipient countries like Poland which suffered under Nazi rule.
In 1953 Poland’s then-communist rulers relinquished all claims to war reparations under pressure from the Soviet Union, which wanted to free East Germany, also a Soviet satellite, from any liabilities. PiS says that agreement is invalid because Poland was unable to negotiate fair compensation.
Mularczyk said his committee hoped to complete its report on the reparations issue by Sept. 1, the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.
Accusing Berlin of playing “diplomatic games” over the issue, he said: “The matter is being swept under the rug (by Germany) … until it’ll be wiped from the memory, from people’s awareness.”
His comments come after the Greek parliament voted this month to seek billions of euros in German reparations for the Nazi occupation of their country.
(Additional reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Editing by Justyna Pawlak and Gareth Jones)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Colin Huang, founder and CEO of the online group discounter Pinduoduo, speaks during the company’s stock trading debut at the Nasdaq Stock Market in New York, during an event in Shanghai, China July 26, 2018. Picture taken July 26, 2018. Yin Liqin/CNS via REUTERS
April 25, 2019
(Reuters) – The United States on Thursday added China’s third-largest e-commerce platform to its list of “notorious markets” for violations of intellectual property rights and kept China on its priority watch list for piracy and counterfeiting concerns.
The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office placed Pinduoduo.com, which USTR described as third largest by number of users, on its blacklist of commercial marketplaces that fail to curb the sale of counterfeit products. It also kept Alibaba Group’s taobao.com, China’s largest e-commerce platform, on the list.
USTR’s annual review of trading partners’ protection of intellectual properties rights and so-called “notorious markets” comes as the United States and China are embroiled in negotiations to end a tit-for-tat tariff battle that has roiled supply chains and cost both countries billions of dollars. The two countries are due to resume talks in Beijing next week.
China’s inclusion on the list “reflects the urgent need to remediate a range of intellectual property-related concerns,” a USTR official told reporters on a call to discuss the report.
He noted longstanding concerns that have been voiced by the Trump administration in the trade talks, including “coercive” technology transfer requirements, widespread copyright infringement and “rampant” piracy and counterfeiting.
The official declined to discuss how the talks with China were going, but said that additional actions using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 were possible. The United States has levied tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods under the act.
Of Pinduoduo.com, USTR said in the report: “Many of (the site’s) price-conscious shoppers are reportedly aware of the proliferation of counterfeit products on pinduoduo.com but are nevertheless attracted to the low-priced goods on the platform.”
While Alibaba has taken steps to address counterfeit products offered and sold on the Taobao marketplace, companies continue to see widespread infringement, USTR said.
ADDITIONAL ENGAGEMENT
A total of 36 countries were on this year’s overall watch list of trade partners warranting additional bilateral engagement over these issues, including Russia and India.
In addition, USTR raised Saudi Arabia to include it among 11 countries on the priority list. The bump-up in Saudi Arabia’s status as a concern was in part due to an illicit service for pirated content called BeoutQ, the report said.
Despite “extensive engagement” in Saudi Arabia by both U.S. government and private stakeholders, treatment of intellectual property rights “continued to deteriorate,” USTR said.
Canada was removed as a priority because of commitments made in the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade pact agreed in 2018. It remained on the overall watch list, however.
Tajikistan was removed from the list due to “concrete steps” to improve its intellectual property regime, the agency said.
(Reporting by Chris Prentice in New York and David Lawder in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Sonya Hepinstall)
Source: OANN
Former president and current leader of opposition party, Mahinda Rajapaksa, speaks to media in Negombo, Sri Lanka, April 21, 2019 in this still image obtained from video. Derana TV/via Reuters TV
April 25, 2019
By Sanjeev Miglani and Shihar Aneez
COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, then the defense secretary, crushed Tamil Tiger separatists with such ferocity ten years ago that Western powers sought war crime trials against them and greeted their defeat in elections later with barely concealed glee.
But now the tiny Indian Ocean island is faced with South Asia’s deadliest militant attack – claimed by Islamic State – and may well again turn to the Rajapaksas for a strong-willed response to the new threat, politicians and diplomats say.
Elections to pick a new president are due between October and December and Mahinda Rajapaksa is already targeting President Maithripala Sirisena and his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for failing to preserve the hard fought peace.
Rajapaksa cannot contest for president again, but his brother Gotabaya is ready to make a bid, his aide has said.
“Rajapaksas’ will take the easy benefit and be able to claim with some credibility that if they come back to power, they will adopt the same strong security policy that allowed them to free the country from terrorism,” said a Western diplomat.
Sri Lanka, a country of 21 million, has been a tinder box of sectarian and ethnic tensions, first between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and minority Tamil groups and in recent years between the Sinhalese and the Muslims.
At the same time, the island nation better known for its beaches, jungles and tea plantations, has gained in geopolitical importance, becoming an arena for influence peddling between India, its traditional partner, and China, which has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure.
With Islamic State claiming responsibility for the Easter Sunday attacks in which more than 350 people were killed, Sri Lanka has been thrust further into the global limelight.
Rajapaksa and his supporters say that the government – under foreign pressure – has been weakening the military and intelligence arms he had built up to ensure there was no revival of the Tamil movement, but also keep an eye on disaffected minorities.
Instead, the government has spent its energy investigating old allegations of abuse against soldiers stemming from the 26-year civil war against the Tamil separatists.
“Because the government was engaged in relentlessly persecuting its own armed forces, we became an easy target for terrorists,” Rajapaksa said in parliament this week.
“No other country has persecuted and weakened their own armed forces and intelligence services in this manner. Terrorists observe these things and plan accordingly,” he said.
The government said it had received prior warnings about impending attacks on churches but these were not shared across the government and admitted that was a lapse.
DISBANDING INTELLIGENCE CELLS
A source in the Indian government, which provided three warnings ahead of the Sunday bombings, said Sri Lanka no longer had the sophisticated national security apparatus that the former defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa ran.
Out in the east, home to the suspected mastermind of the attacks, there was a 45-member cell of intelligence operatives that had been wound up, said Kehelia Rambukwella, a spokesman for Rajapaksa’s party.
“Some of its people had been sent to the welfare department. If you had them still functioning, we might have picked this plot up,” he said.
But government officials said many of these secret intelligence cells were disbanded because they faced allegations of abuse, including torture and extra judicial killings, during the war and in the months afterwards, officials said.
Rajitha Senaratne, a government spokesman said: “We can’t allow the military to kill innocent people, children, and journalists. Murderers can’t be war heroes.”
Gotabaya is himself facing lawsuits in the United States where he is a dual citizen.
The South Africa-based International Truth and Justice Project, in partnership with U.S. law firm Hausfeld, filed a civil case in California this month against Gotabaya on behalf of a Tamil torture survivor.
In a separate case, Ahimsa Wickrematunga, the daughter of murdered investigative editor Lasantha Wickrematunga, filed a complaint for damages in the same U.S. District Court in California for allegedly instigating and authorizing the extrajudicial killing of her father.
Gotabaya has denied the allegations and said these were timed to thwart his possible presidential run.
For the Sinhalese nationalists who fully backed the measures against the Tamil separatists, the new attacks have already fueled calls for strong leadership.
Political differences between President Sirisena and his premier, Wickremesinghe, have presented a picture of a government in drift and an economy vastly underperforming.
Both sides have said they were not aware of the intelligence that was provided by India about the attacks, prompting questions about who was in command.
The worry is that the election campaign, now months away, could turn into a contest on who is tougher on Islamist militancy and in that the country’s largely peaceful Muslim community would be under pressure, said political commentator Kusal Perera.
“The post-attack situation is going to create a demand for Rajapaksas because Sinhala Buddhist nationalists are going to say they need a dictator or a strong leader who can handle the national security threats,” he said.
Earlier the country’s Tamil minority were the targets, but now in the aftermath of the attacks carried out by suicide bombers who have been identified as well-educated local Muslims, the community could face the heat in the elections.
“The anti-Muslim racist card could become the main election campaign strategy of all political parties,” said Perera.
(Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Source: OANN
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Oh, how their heads hurt. After two intoxicating years, the Mueller Investigation & Media Tequila Party is over. Morning has come, and Democrats have opened their eyes to a pounding headache. Liquor bottles held high the night before now litter the floor: Democrats even ate the Michael Cohen worm.
Inconveniently, the special prosecutor found no collusion. Those who imbibed most have been left stumbling, trying to explain how Donald Trump covered up the crime no one committed. But the feast was moveable, and the partygoers celebrated each other. They are convinced it was not overindulgence that caused their hangover; merely that they stopped drinking. A little hair-of-the dog is all we need. Pour us another Margarita, and let’s get this party started again.
In the confusion, more sober leaders reasserted control. Old pro Nancy Pelosi determined Democrats are not going to raise the flag of impeachment now, understanding it will become even less likely as the 2020 election grows closer. Delay, delay, delay, Pelosi believes, until the mystic chords of impeachment become memories that never again swell.
Pelosi did have to throw her caucus’s fine young radicals a bone: Madam Speaker gave them impeachment without impeachment. Democrats will be allowed to hold hearings and pursue investigations. That will keep Trump in the spotlight, Democratic activists motivated, and MSNBC fed.
Pelosi has even gotten most of her 2020 presidential candidates on board. With the notable exceptions of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, most Democratic contenders are calling it closing time. It is a remarkable display of the speaker’s power, considering the Democratic field has expanded to 20 candidates, requiring at least two clown cars. Poor Joe Biden is just entering the race.
Sen. Harris, who tells us she is not a socialist, just another Democrat who supports Bernie Sanders’ socialist agenda, would like to party on. She has said, “I believe Congress should take the steps toward impeachment.” California’s junior senator is sinking in the polls despite or, perhaps, because of her powerful socialist/impeachment one-two punch. She has dropped 6 points in New Hampshire, falling to 4% support, the survey’s margin of error. Technically, Harris may have erased herself.
Warren, who has been defined by her war with Trump over her illusory Native American heritage, has also worked her way down to near nothing in the same survey, notching only 5%. The Massachusetts senator, too, would like to extend impeachment festivities and she embraces every possible radical orthodoxy, including reparations for oppressed minorities, confiscating billionaires’ wealth, and canceling student debt. How would you like to be the last generous soul to pay off his or her student loan, just before Warren erases everyone else’s?
Harris and Warren provide lessons for Democrats who hear “Hail to the Chief” every time they rouse crowds with molten, anti-Trump rhetoric: Voters who don’t support Donald Trump aren’t looking for a Democratic Trump replica. They are looking for an alternative. Hot Democrats who balance Trump’s fire with their own aren’t different from our current president. They are just the other side of Trump’s coin. One of his great gifts is magnetism: The Donald drags his adversaries into no-rules-barred combat on the muddy turf where he fights best.
Yet, the Democrat gaining momentum is not a rabid, anti-Trump fanatic, nor a radical, collectivist zealot. Pete Buttigieg is the calm to Trump’s storm, the still waters to this president’s tempest. As others have noted in the now obligatory veneration, the gay, 37-year-old, left-handed Mayor of Smallville is an articulate polymath who speaks numerous languages, quotes Scripture, plays piano, and has studied history, philosophy, and ethics. If Buttigieg’s resume is a contrast to the president’s, so is his joyful maturity, which stands in staggering contrast to the cheerless and substanceless knife fights that pass for Republican and Democrat debate these days, ravenously merchandized by our sensationalist news media. When Bernie Sanders flies into space, for example, endorsing the right of convicted terrorists, rapists, and pedophiles to vote while in prison, it is the young mayor who plays grown-up, elegantly distancing himself from Sanders’s enflamed radicalism by saying, simply, “No, I don’t think so.”
Cool as an after-dinner mint, Buttigieg uncommonly resorts to reason to explain his positions, avoiding name-calling, charges of senility, or accusations of treason. “Part of the punishment when you are convicted of a crime and you’re incarcerated is you lose certain rights. You lose your freedom,” Buttigieg told a town-hall audience. “And I think during that period, it does not make sense to have an exception for the right to vote.”
Often, voters want in their next president what they didn’t find in their last one. That’s trouble for Sanders who, in many ways, parallels Trump, a fellow radical, white-hot populist who aims to overthrow the corrupt Washington establishment. Sanders, we might argue, is Donald Trump with a smaller balance sheet, no experience leading anything, and a college sophomore’s naïveté.
Joe Biden is calmer than Donald Trump, but the dead often are. Having lost twice, Biden 2020 is the sequel to movies no one went to see in 1988 and 2008. He is #YesterdaysCandidate, the old, white male that today’s Democrats crave to run against. Biden still owns a 1967 Corvette. It is an antique everyone admires, but no one would drive today.
No Democratic candidate provides a brighter alternative to Donald Trump than Pete Buttigieg. Could he give the incumbent a real run for his billions? Maybe, but Trump is still the odds-on favorite for re-election.
First, he’s doing a good job delivering growth, jobs, and higher wages, and Democrats admit as much when they openly hope the economy won’t be in as good a shape in 2020. Desperate prayers for an economic downturn do not usually evolve into promising strategy. Second, Buttigieg is a self-described democratic capitalist and a voice of reason, but only in comparison to the rest of his left-lurching party. He is at home in a party that has swallowed Sanders’ socialist agenda whole. Behind his moderate appearance, he embraces the tenets of the global elite, including a carbon tax. That is the tax that alienated the working class from the cognoscenti in Emmanuel Macron’s France. Third, Buttigieg is young and untested, and newbie challengers often get beat when the economy is doing well. Adversaries don’t have to persuade people to vote against them, just to put them back in the pantry until they have time to ripen. Lastly, Democrats have control of the House and a reasonable shot of taking the Senate in 2020, when Republicans will defend 22 of the 34 seats contested.
A turbulent Donald Trump may make the case that he is actually the candidate of stability and restraint, the indispensable counterbalance to a rabid and socialist Democratic Party, proving that God does have a sense of irony, if not humor. So party on, Democrats. As someone once wrote, “There is a great independence, and a confident immunity to risk, in all drinks made out of cactus.”
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Story Stream
recent articles
Oh, how their heads hurt. After two intoxicating years, the Mueller Investigation & Media Tequila Party is over. Morning has come, and Democrats have opened their eyes to a pounding headache. Liquor bottles held high the night before now litter the floor: Democrats even ate the Michael Cohen worm.
Inconveniently, the special prosecutor found no collusion. Those who imbibed most have been left stumbling, trying to explain how Donald Trump covered up the crime no one committed. But the feast was moveable, and the partygoers celebrated each other. They are convinced it was not overindulgence that caused their hangover; merely that they stopped drinking. A little hair-of-the dog is all we need. Pour us another Margarita, and let’s get this party started again.
In the confusion, more sober leaders reasserted control. Old pro Nancy Pelosi determined Democrats are not going to raise the flag of impeachment now, understanding it will become even less likely as the 2020 election grows closer. Delay, delay, delay, Pelosi believes, until the mystic chords of impeachment become memories that never again swell.
Pelosi did have to throw her caucus’s fine young radicals a bone: Madam Speaker gave them impeachment without impeachment. Democrats will be allowed to hold hearings and pursue investigations. That will keep Trump in the spotlight, Democratic activists motivated, and MSNBC fed.
Pelosi has even gotten most of her 2020 presidential candidates on board. With the notable exceptions of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, most Democratic contenders are calling it closing time. It is a remarkable display of the speaker’s power, considering the Democratic field has expanded to 20 candidates, requiring at least two clown cars. Poor Joe Biden is just entering the race.
Sen. Harris, who tells us she is not a socialist, just another Democrat who supports Bernie Sanders’ socialist agenda, would like to party on. She has said, “I believe Congress should take the steps toward impeachment.” California’s junior senator is sinking in the polls despite or, perhaps, because of her powerful socialist/impeachment one-two punch. She has dropped 6 points in New Hampshire, falling to 4% support, the survey’s margin of error. Technically, Harris may have erased herself.
Warren, who has been defined by her war with Trump over her illusory Native American heritage, has also worked her way down to near nothing in the same survey, notching only 5%. The Massachusetts senator, too, would like to extend impeachment festivities and she embraces every possible radical orthodoxy, including reparations for oppressed minorities, confiscating billionaires’ wealth, and canceling student debt. How would you like to be the last generous soul to pay off his or her student loan, just before Warren erases everyone else’s?
Harris and Warren provide lessons for Democrats who hear “Hail to the Chief” every time they rouse crowds with molten, anti-Trump rhetoric: Voters who don’t support Donald Trump aren’t looking for a Democratic Trump replica. They are looking for an alternative. Hot Democrats who balance Trump’s fire with their own aren’t different from our current president. They are just the other side of Trump’s coin. One of his great gifts is magnetism: The Donald drags his adversaries into no-rules-barred combat on the muddy turf where he fights best.
Yet, the Democrat gaining momentum is not a rabid, anti-Trump fanatic, nor a radical, collectivist zealot. Pete Buttigieg is the calm to Trump’s storm, the still waters to this president’s tempest. As others have noted in the now obligatory veneration, the gay, 37-year-old, left-handed Mayor of Smallville is an articulate polymath who speaks numerous languages, quotes Scripture, plays piano, and has studied history, philosophy, and ethics. If Buttigieg’s resume is a contrast to the president’s, so is his joyful maturity, which stands in staggering contrast to the cheerless and substanceless knife fights that pass for Republican and Democrat debate these days, ravenously merchandized by our sensationalist news media. When Bernie Sanders flies into space, for example, endorsing the right of convicted terrorists, rapists, and pedophiles to vote while in prison, it is the young mayor who plays grown-up, elegantly distancing himself from Sanders’s enflamed radicalism by saying, simply, “No, I don’t think so.”
Cool as an after-dinner mint, Buttigieg uncommonly resorts to reason to explain his positions, avoiding name-calling, charges of senility, or accusations of treason. “Part of the punishment when you are convicted of a crime and you’re incarcerated is you lose certain rights. You lose your freedom,” Buttigieg told a town-hall audience. “And I think during that period, it does not make sense to have an exception for the right to vote.”
Often, voters want in their next president what they didn’t find in their last one. That’s trouble for Sanders who, in many ways, parallels Trump, a fellow radical, white-hot populist who aims to overthrow the corrupt Washington establishment. Sanders, we might argue, is Donald Trump with a smaller balance sheet, no experience leading anything, and a college sophomore’s naïveté.
Joe Biden is calmer than Donald Trump, but the dead often are. Having lost twice, Biden 2020 is the sequel to movies no one went to see in 1988 and 2008. He is #YesterdaysCandidate, the old, white male that today’s Democrats crave to run against. Biden still owns a 1967 Corvette. It is an antique everyone admires, but no one would drive today.
No Democratic candidate provides a brighter alternative to Donald Trump than Pete Buttigieg. Could he give the incumbent a real run for his billions? Maybe, but Trump is still the odds-on favorite for re-election.
First, he’s doing a good job delivering growth, jobs, and higher wages, and Democrats admit as much when they openly hope the economy won’t be in as good a shape in 2020. Desperate prayers for an economic downturn do not usually evolve into promising strategy. Second, Buttigieg is a self-described democratic capitalist and a voice of reason, but only in comparison to the rest of his left-lurching party. He is at home in a party that has swallowed Sanders’ socialist agenda whole. Behind his moderate appearance, he embraces the tenets of the global elite, including a carbon tax. That is the tax that alienated the working class from the cognoscenti in Emmanuel Macron’s France. Third, Buttigieg is young and untested, and newbie challengers often get beat when the economy is doing well. Adversaries don’t have to persuade people to vote against them, just to put them back in the pantry until they have time to ripen. Lastly, Democrats have control of the House and a reasonable shot of taking the Senate in 2020, when Republicans will defend 22 of the 34 seats contested.
A turbulent Donald Trump may make the case that he is actually the candidate of stability and restraint, the indispensable counterbalance to a rabid and socialist Democratic Party, proving that God does have a sense of irony, if not humor. So party on, Democrats. As someone once wrote, “There is a great independence, and a confident immunity to risk, in all drinks made out of cactus.”
FILE PHOTO: The Capitol building is seen in San Juan, Puerto Rico May 4, 2017. REUTERS/ Alvin Baez
April 24, 2019
By Luis Valentin Ortiz
SAN JUAN (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Wednesday denied a request by Puerto Rico’s federally created financial oversight board to extend a looming deadline to file claims, the latest hurdle for its plan to recoup billions of dollars paid to bondholders of potentially invalid debt issued by the island’s government.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who is hearing Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy cases, declined to extend a two-year statute of limitations that runs out on May 2, saying it was “not something I’m persuaded this court is allowed to do.” Edward Weisfelner, a lawyer for the board, said this could mean the board could be forced to file hundreds of lawsuits by that deadline against bondholders in order to preserve its claims.
The board, which filed bankruptcy for the U.S. commonwealth in May 2017 in an effort to restructure about $120 billion of debt and pension obligations, had requested more time, arguing that the judge had to rule first on the validity of certain debt before claims against scores of bondholders could be filed. Extending the deadline would have avoided unnecessary and costly litigation, according to the board.
The judge also rejected a request by a creditors committee to pursue claims for fraud and other infractions against advisers, underwriters and public officials involved in potentially illegal Puerto Rico debt sales. The Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, which includes labor unions, as well as suppliers and contractors to the Puerto Rican government, argued that the board would not pursue these claims.
But Weisfelner told Swain 27 underwriters, nine law firms, and five accounting firms were being targeted for fraud and other claims.
In her denial, Swain said that “the ability to propose a confirmable plan of adjustment” was at stake and that the oversight board had not consented to the committee’s motion.
The court has yet to decide on the board’s January motion to void more than $6 billion of general obligation bonds sold in 2012 and 2014 on the basis they were issued in violation of debt limits in Puerto Rico’s constitution. Creditor groups involved in the bankruptcy have also sought to invalidate debt issued by the Public Buildings Authority and bonds sold for the island’s Employees Retirement System.
Several banks were ordered last week to comply with the board’s request for customer information that would be used in recovering bond payments.
During Wednesday’s court hearing, Martin Bienenstock, an attorney for the board, told Swain that negotiations to restructure about $9 billion of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) debt were “very promising.” He also reported that transmission and distribution contracts with private companies are expected to be finalized in 2020’s second quarter.
Meanwhile, the oversight board this week filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to overturn a Feb. 15 appeals court ruling that determined its members were unconstitutionally appointed. The board also asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the 90-day deadline it set to allow President Donald Trump and the Senate to constitutionally validate the appointments or reconstitute the board.
(Reporting by Luis Valentin Ortiz in San Juan Additional reporting by Karen Pierog in Chicago; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney leaves after a news conference at the Bank of England in London, Britain February 7, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/Pool/File Photo
April 24, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain is searching for a new governor of the Bank of England to succeed Mark Carney in early 2020.
Finance minister Philip Hammond is hoping that concerns about Brexit will not deter potential applicants.
Below are possible contenders to run the BoE which oversees the world’s fifth-biggest economy and its huge finance industry.
ANDREW BAILEY
The former deputy BoE governor was tipped by analysts as Carney’s most likely successor. But delays to the search, after Carney extended his time in London, have raised questions about whether Hammond sees him as the best candidate.
Bailey, 60, was deputy governor with a focus on banks before becoming chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, a markets regulator.
While at the BoE, Bailey helped to steer Britain’s banks through the global financial crisis.
Heading the FCA is fraught with risks. Lawmakers criticised Bailey for not publishing all of a report into alleged misconduct by bank RBS. Bailey cited privacy restrictions.
As FCA boss, Bailey sits on important panels at the BoE that oversee banks. Although he has never been interest-rate setter, he once ran the BoE international economic analysis team.
RAGHURAM RAJAN
Rajan, 56, headed the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, and was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund between 2003 and 2006 when he warned of the risk of a financial crisis.
Now a professor at Chicago Booth business school, Rajan has published a book on dissatisfaction with markets and the state – touching on some of the underlying issues behind Brexit.
Rajan unexpectedly did not seek a renewal of his three-year term at the RBI, having faced hostility from some sections of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party who disliked his less nationalist stance and brief forays into political territory.
Rajan declined to comment when asked by Reuters last week whether he would consider a return to active policymaking.
MINOUCHE SHAFIK
Egyptian-born Shafik, 57, was a BoE deputy governor between 2014 and 2017, in charge of markets and banking, including the central bank’s asset purchase programme. She quit the job early to become director of the London School of Economics.
Between 2008 and 2011 she was the top civil servant at Britain’s ministry for overseas aid and was then deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, where she represented the fund in the Greek debt crisis.
Shafik would become the first woman to head the BoE, and was only its second female deputy governor.
BEN BROADBENT AND DAVE RAMSDEN
Broadbent, 54, and Ramsden, 55, are deputy governors for monetary policy and for markets and banking respectively.
Broadbent, a former Goldman Sachs economist who trained as a classical pianist, is respected for his economic analysis but has less experience on banking oversight.
Ramsden was the Treasury’s chief economic advisor.
The two other BoE deputy governors, Jon Cunliffe and Sam Woods, are less likely contenders. Woods focuses mostly on financial regulation while Cunliffe – a former British ambassador to the European Union – would be aged 66 at the start of the term which usually runs for eight years.
SHRITI VADERA
Vadera, 56, has no central banking experience but is seen as a contender due to her current role as non-executive chairwoman of Santander UK, one of Britain’s biggest banks, and her time as a junior business minister during the financial crisis.
Vadera served as a minister from 2007 to 2009 after a career in investment banking and a period at the finance ministry.
In 2008, she was part of a small group of ministers and officials who devised a plan worth hundreds of billions of pounds in loan guarantees to keep high-street banks in business.
ANDY HALDANE
The BoE’s chief economist, Haldane has developed a reputation for floating unconventional ideas, including the possibility that music apps such as Spotify and multiplayer online games might give central bankers just as a good a sense of what is going on in the economy as traditional surveys.
In 2012, he praised the anti-capitalist Occupy movement for suggesting new ways to fix the shortcomings of global finance. Haldane has experience of both sides of the BoE, having served as executive director for financial stability, overseeing the risks to the economy from the banking system. But he might be seen as too much of a maverick to take the job of governor.
A LABOUR PARTY GOVERNOR?
The prospect of the left-wing Labour Party taking power has grown as Prime Minister Theresa May struggles to break the Brexit impasse.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his would-be finance minister John McDonnell are socialists and have in the past proposed that the BoE should fund investment in infrastructure, a big change from its current focus on inflation.
Former members of Labour’s economic advisory committee included U.S. academic and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and Ann Pettifor, a British economist who is an austerity critic, and former BoE rate-setter David Blanchflower.
(Writing by William Schomberg and David Milliken, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Tugboat escorts French Navy frigate Vendemiaire on arrival for a 5-day goodwill visit at a port in Metro Manila, Philippines March 12, 2018. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco/File Photo
April 24, 2019
By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A French warship passed through the strategic Taiwan Strait this month, U.S. officials told Reuters, a rare voyage by a vessel of a European country that is likely to be welcomed by Washington but increase tensions with Beijing.
The passage is a sign that U.S. allies are increasingly asserting freedom of navigation in international waterways near China. It could open the door for other allies, such as Japan and Australia, to consider similar operations.
The French operation comes amid increasing tensions between the United States and China. Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, which also include a trade war, U.S. sanctions and China’s increasingly muscular military posture in the South China Sea, where the United States also conducts freedom of navigation patrols.
Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a French military vessel carried out the transit in the narrow waterway between China and Taiwan on April 6.
One of the officials identified the warship as the French frigate Vendemiaire and said it was shadowed by the Chinese military. The official was not aware of any previous French military passage through the Taiwan Strait.
The officials said that as a result of the passage, China notified France it was no longer invited to a naval parade to mark the 70 years since the founding of China’s Navy. Warships from India, Australia and several other nations participated.
Colonel Patrik Steiger, the spokesman for France’s military chief of staff, declined to comment on an operational mission.
The U.S. officials did not speculate on the purpose of the passage or whether it was designed to assert freedom of navigation.
MOUNTING TENSIONS
The French strait passage comes against the backdrop of increasingly regular passages by U.S. warships through the strategic waterway. Last month the United States sent Navy and Coast Guard ships through the Taiwan Strait.
The passages upset China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory. Beijing has been ramping up pressure to assert its sovereignty over the island.
Chen Chung-chi, spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, told Reuters by phone the strait is part of busy international waters and it is “a necessity” for vessels from all countries to transit through it. He said Taiwan’s defense ministry will continue to monitor movement of foreign vessels in the region.
There was no immediate comment from China’s foreign or defense ministries.
“This is an important development both because of the transit itself but also because it reflects a more geopolitical approach by France towards China and the broader Asia Pacific,” said Abraham Denmark, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia.
The transit is a sign that countries like France are not only looking at China through the lens of trade but from a military standpoint as well, Denmark said.
Last month France and China signed deals worth billions of euros during a visit to Paris by Chinese President Xi Jinping. French President Emmanuel Macron wants to forge a united European front to confront Chinese advances in trade and technology.
“It is important to have other countries operating in Asia to demonstrate that this is just not a matter of competition between Washington and Beijing, that what China has been doing represents a broader challenge to a liberal international order,” Denmark, who is currently with the Woodrow Wilson Center think-tank in Washington, added.
Washington has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help provide the democratically ruled island with the means to defend itself and is its main source of arms.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart in Washington; Additional reporting by Sophie Louet in Paris, Yimou Lee in Taipei and Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by James Dalgleish)
Source: OANN
Five years ago, ISIS reigned over 34,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria and collected billions of dollars in taxes and oil revenues as well as from looting banks. Today, its so-called caliphate is virtually gone. And yet on Sunday, Peter Bergen writes, the continued influence of ISIS’ ideology became gruesomely apparent: A terrorist attack, one of the most lethal since 9/11, killed at least 321 people at churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka.
FILE PHOTO: Small toy figures are seen in front of a displayed Huawei and 5G network logo in this illustration picture, March 30, 2019. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
April 24, 2019
(Reuters) – Britain’s plan to allow Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies a restricted role in its next generation mobile networks is part of a heated international debate over the security risks so-called 5G technology presents.
Britain plans to allow Huawei access to non-core parts of fifth-generation, or 5G, networks on a restricted basis and block it from all so-called core parts, sources told Reuters.
The core is where the network’s most critical controls are located and the most sensitive information is stored, while the periphery includes masts, antennas and other passive equipment.
The move comes despite calls from Britain’s close ally, the United States, for countries to ban Huawei altogether from 5G networks because of concerns that its equipment could be used by Beijing for spying or sabotage.
5G promises super-fast connections which tech evangelists say will transform the way we live our lives, enabling everything from self-driving cars to remote surgery and automated manufacturing.
But that dramatically increases the security risk, U.S. officials say, because of the increasingly central role that telecommunications will play in our lives and the expected dramatic increase in connected devices in the network.
CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
As 5G becomes embedded in everything from hospitals to transport systems and power plants it will rapidly become a part of each country’s critical national infrastructure.
This makes the consequences of the networks failing or being deliberately sabotaged in a cyber attack significantly more serious.
“5G will really start touching all parts of our lives because it will be the underlying infrastructure for so much of the critical services that are provided to the public,” said Robert Strayer, the U.S. State Department’s lead cyber policy diplomat.
“So if a 5G network fails, there would be significant ramifications for all parts of society,” Strayer said.
MORE CONNECTIONS
With much faster data speeds, experts predict there will be billions of connected devices.
These will include traditional mobile and broadband connections, but also internet-enabled devices from dishwashers through to advanced medical equipment. Industry association GSMA forecasts the number of internet-enabled devices will triple to 25 billion by 2025.
The larger the network, the more opportunities there are for hackers to attack, meaning there is an increasingly complex system with more parts that need protecting.
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM
One of the biggest changes between 4G and 5G is the ability to take the advanced computing power usually kept in the protected “core” of a network and distribute it to other parts of the system. This will provide more reliable high-speed connections.
But it also means engineers will no longer be able to clearly ring-fence the most sensitive parts of the system, U.S. officials say.
Some British lawmakers agree.
“Allowing Huawei into the UK’s 5G infrastructure would cause allies to doubt our ability to keep data secure and erode the trust essential to Five Eyes cooperation,” said Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of Britain’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
The Five Eyes alliance is an intelligence sharing group that comprises the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
“The definition of core and non-core is a very difficult one with 5G,” he added.
(Editing by Cassell Bryan-Low)
Source: OANN
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