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Major U.S. airlines are hiring pilots at a rate not seen since before 9/11, and that is encouraging more young people to consider a career in the cockpit.

Hiring is likely to remain brisk for years. Smaller airlines in the U.S. are struggling with a shortage that will continue as they lose pilots to the bigger carriers, which in turn will need to replace thousands of retiring pilots over the next few years.

 

Aircraft maker Boeing predicts that the U.S. will need 117,000 new pilots by 2036. Just a decade ago thousands of pilots were furloughed and some abandoned the profession.

 

The shortage has been felt most keenly at regional carriers where many pilots start their airline careers.

 

Last summer, Alaska Airlines subsidiary Horizon Air canceled more than 300 flights over two months for lack of pilots. Republic Airways filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, citing a pilot shortage that forced it to ground flights.

 

Many regional carriers fly smaller planes for American Eagle, Delta Connection and United Express. Signing bonuses and higher pay have helped them hire more than 17,000 pilots in the past four years, but that only replaced those who moved up to the major carriers, according to the Regional Airline Association.

 

Demand at the major airlines is expected to grow as thousands of pilots at American, Delta, United and Southwest hit the U.S. mandatory pilot-retirement age of 65 in the next several years.

 

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker believes the industry will cope.

 

“Economics is going to take care of this, and I think that’s what is happening now,” Parker says. “The [flight] schools are starting to fill up with people who realize, ‘If I can get myself to 1,500 hours [the minimum flight hours needed to get an airline-pilot license], I can be assured of a career as a pilot.’ That’s not something people could convince themselves of from 9/11 on until now.”

 

Pilot hiring nosedived after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that led to a decline in travel, and again during the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Major U.S. airlines hired only 30 pilots in 2009, according to Future & Active Pilot Advisors, a career-counseling business for pilots.

 

The job market didn’t pick up significantly until around 2014. Last year 10 of the largest U.S. passenger and cargo airlines hired 4,988 pilots, the most since 2000 when they hired 5,105.

 

“It’s the best sellers’ market I have seen in the last 45 years of monitoring airline pilot hiring,” says Louis Smith, a retired airline pilot who runs the pilot-counseling outfit.

 

Smith says forums for aspiring pilots that once drew a couple dozen people now sometimes attract more than 150. Some hope to make a mid-career change, which was rare just a few years ago.

 

Aaron Ludomirski is one of those career-changers. The 31-year-old from Asbury Park, New Jersey, says he always wanted to be a pilot but studied business instead because the bleak job opportunities for pilots in the years after 9/11 didn’t justify the cost of school and flight training. After college he started an online marketing business.

 

“Year after year I found myself less and less satisfied with my work,” he says. “I started thinking about what kind of career would really lead me to feeling fulfilled and accomplished, and I kept coming back to aviation.”

 

Ludomirski did some fresh research and learned that pilots were back in demand — and more would be retiring in the next few years. He quit his job and went to flight school. Now he is working as a flight instructor to gain the required flying time for an airline pilot.

 

“I can interview for and even accept a conditional letter of employment and know I have my dream job lined up for me when I’m ready,” he says.

 

Applications for commercial aviation majors at the University of North Dakota, a big aeronautical school, have more than doubled in the last three years, says Elizabeth Bjerke, an aviation professor and one of the authors of the university’s widely watched forecast on pilot supply.

 

Some students graduate early to take advantage of the job market and the chance to move up the seniority list quickly because so many older pilots are retiring.

 

“Our graduates will fly at the regionals for a very short period,” Bjerke said. “They are getting picked up by the major carriers in their mid-20s, which would have been just crazy to think of 15 or 20 years ago.”

 

Michael Wiggins, chairman of the aeronautical science department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, says his school’s graduates are getting multiple job offers from regional airlines.

 

Pilots who become captains on jumbo jets that fly international routes can earn more than $300,000 a year. But for anyone starting out in the profession, the training is expensive — upward of $100,000.

 

A few years ago, those who made it faced starting pay for first officers or co-pilots at regional airlines in the low-$20,000s. With bonuses and higher hourly rates, some regionals now claim to offer starting pay of $80,000 or more, but even that might not be enough to meet future demand.

 

The Regional Airline Association is pushing to change a 2013 federal rule that requires 1,500 hours of flying time — usually in small, single-engine planes — by replacing some of it with supervised classroom instruction. The group’s president, Faye Malarkey Black, says supervised training would produce aviators with skills more relevant to piloting an airliner.

 

But a similar proposal appears stalled in Congress, partly due to opposition from families of the 50 people who died in the last deadly crash of a U.S. airliner, a Colgan Air plane in 2009. Black believes the Trump administration has the authority to change the minimum flight hours without waiting for Congress to act, but she admits that will be difficult “as long as those changes are successfully cast as rolling back safety.”

 

JetBlue Airways is beginning a small-scale program of training people with no flying experience — an approach used by Lufthansa and other international airlines. The JetBlue program costs about $125,000, however, the airline says it is looking into providing financial assistance.

 

Even with assistance, however, life for newcomers can be taxing. In addition to flying smaller planes for lower wages, they work on holidays and spend lots of time away from home.

 

Starting pilots need “a passion for flying that drives the thrill of going to work,” says Smith, the career adviser. “It’s certainly not for everyone.”

 
…

Amazon.com Inc.’s top television shows drew more than 5 million people worldwide to its Prime shopping club by early 2017, according to company documents, revealing for the first time how the retailer’s bet on original video is paying off.

The documents also show that Amazon’s U.S. audience for all video programming on Prime, including films and TV shows it licenses from other companies, was about 26 million customers.

Amazon has never released figures for its total audience.

The internal documents compare metrics that have never been reported for 19 shows exclusive to Amazon: their cost, their viewership and the number of people they helped lure to Prime.

Known as Prime Originals, the shows account for as much as a quarter of what analysts estimate to be total Prime sign-ups from late 2014 to early 2017, the period covered by the documents.

Viewers to shoppers

Core to Amazon’s strategy is the use of video to convert viewers into shoppers. Fans access Amazon’s lineup by joining Prime, a club that includes two-day package delivery and other perks, for an annual fee.

The company declined to comment on the documents seen by Reuters. But Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has been upfront about the company’s use of entertainment to drive merchandise sales.

The world’s biggest online retailer launched Amazon Studios in 2010 to develop original programs that have since grabbed awards and Hollywood buzz.

“When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” Bezos said at a 2016 technology conference near Los Angeles. He said film and TV customers renew their subscriptions “at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates” than members who do not stream videos on Prime.

​$5 billion in video

Video has grown to be one of Amazon’s biggest expenditures at $5 billion per year for original and licensed content, two people familiar with the matter said. The company has never disclosed how many subscribers it won as a result, making it hard for investors to evaluate its programming decisions.

The internal documents show what Amazon considers to be the financial logic of its strategy, and why the company is now making more commercial projects in addition to shows aimed at winning awards, the people said.

For example, the first season of the popular drama The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history depicting Germany as the victor of World War II, had 8 million U.S. viewers as of early 2017, according to the documents. The program cost $72 million in production and marketing and attracted 1.15 million new subscribers worldwide based on Amazon’s accounting, the documents showed.

Amazon calculated that the show drew new Prime members at an average cost of $63 per subscriber.

That is far less than the $99 that subscribers pay in the United States for Prime; the company charges similar fees abroad. Prime members also buy more goods from Amazon than non-members, Bezos has said, further boosting profit.

Amazon’s secret math

Precisely how Amazon determines a customer’s motivation for joining its Prime club is not clear from the documents viewed by Reuters.

But a person familiar with its strategy said the company credits a specific show for luring someone to start or extend a Prime subscription if that program is the first one a customer streams after signing up. That metric, referenced throughout the documents, is known as a “first stream.”

The company then calculates how expensive the viewer was to acquire by dividing the show’s costs by the number of first streams it had. The lower that figure, the better.

The internal documents do not show how long subscribers stayed with Prime, nor do they indicate how much shopping they do on Amazon. The company reviews other metrics for its programs as well. Consequently, the documents do not provide enough information to determine the overall profitability of Amazon’s Hollywood endeavor.

Still, the numbers indicate that broad-interest shows can lure Prime members cheaply by Amazon’s calculations. One big winner was the motoring series The Grand Tour, which stars the former presenters of BBC’s Top Gear. The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season.

The documents seen by Reuters reflect Prime subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Japan, where Amazon’s programs were available before Prime Video rolled out globally in December 2016.

Analysts estimate that 75 million or more customers have Prime subscriptions worldwide, including about half of all households in the United States.

Bigger bets

About 26 million U.S. Prime members watched television and movies on Amazon as of early 2017. Reuters calculated this number from the documents, which showed how many viewers a TV series had as a percentage of total Prime Video customers.

Rival Netflix Inc had twice that many U.S. subscribers in the first quarter of last year. It does not disclose how many were active viewers.

For years, Amazon Studios aimed to win credibility in Hollywood with sophisticated shows beloved by critics. Its marquee series Transparent, about a transgender father and his family, won eight Primetime Emmy Awards and created the buzz Amazon wanted to attract top producers and actors.

Yet Transparent lagged Amazon’s top shows in viewership.

Its first season drew a U.S. audience half as large as that of The Man in the High Castle, and it fell to 1.3 million viewers for its third season, according to the documents.

Similarly, Good Girls Revolt, a critically acclaimed show about gender inequality in a New York newsroom, had total U.S. viewership of 1.6 million but cost $81 million, with only 52,000 first streams worldwide by Prime members.

The program’s cost per new customer was about $1,560, according to the documents. Amazon canceled it after one season.

Amazon is now working on more commercial dramas and spin-offs with appeal outside the United States, where Prime membership has far more room to grow, people familiar with the matter said.

The effort to broaden Amazon’s lineup, long in the works, will be in the hands of Jennifer Salke, NBC Entertainment’s president whom Amazon hired last month as its studio chief.

Amazon’s Bezos has wanted a drama to rival HBO’s global hit Game of Thrones, according to the people.

In November, Amazon announced it will make a prequel to the fantasy hit The Lord of the Rings. The company had offered $250 million for the rights alone; production and marketing could raise costs to $500 million or more for two seasons, one of the people said.

At half a billion dollars, the prequel would cost triple what Amazon paid for The Man in the High Castle seasons one and two, the documents show. That means it would need to draw three times the number of Prime members as The Man in the High Castle for an equal payoff.
…

The U.S. Senate voted 67 to 31 Wednesday to ease bank rules, bringing Congress a step closer to passing the first rewrite of the Dodd-Frank reform law enacted after the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

The draft legislation now heads to the U.S. House of Representatives where Republicans in the majority say they want to add more provisions to ease financial regulations. Those changes have some of the bill’s backers worried that late alterations could upend the deal struck in the Senate between Republicans and Democrats.

The bill would ease tight restrictions on small banks and community lenders, and includes provisions beneficial to all but the largest U.S. banks.

The measure marks the first significant rewrite of financial rules since the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The White House said in a statement that President Donald Trump would sign the bill into law if approved by the House.

GOP: Dodd-Frank too much

Republican critics say Dodd-Frank went too far and curbs banks ability to lend, while many Democrats say it provides critical protections for consumers and taxpayers.

The bill would raise the threshold at which banks are considered systemically risky and subject to stricter oversight from $50 billion to $250 billion. It also exempts banks with less than $10 billion in assets from rules banning proprietary trading, as well as exempts smaller banks from several other post-crisis rules.

The bill would allow custody banks such as BNY Mellon and State Street Corp to exempt the customer deposits they place with central banks from a stringent capital calculation requirement.

In House, 30 bills

In the House, conservative Republicans say they want to expand the bill to include additional regulatory relief, identifying roughly 30 bills they have passed for inclusion. But that insistence has some of the bill’s supporters concerned it could disrupt the bipartisan support it needs to become law.

“To expect that the House would have a desire to have some fingerprints on this final product is more than reasonable,” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican, who wants additions to the bill.

Any changes made in the House would again have to pass the Senate, and Republican additions could drive away Senate Democrats whose support is needed for passage.

“There’s no guarantee that a modified bill would be able to pass the Senate,” said Paul Merski, executive vice president with the Independent Community Bankers of America, which supports the Senate bill. “That’s a real danger.”
…

Toys ‘R’ US plans to sell or close all of its US stores, potentially hitting 33,000 jobs, U.S. media reported Wednesday.

The debt-plagued retailer, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September, told employees that the retailer planned to file liquidation papers ahead of a Thursday court hearing, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post reported.

“We’re putting a for sale sign on everything,” CEO David Brandon said on a conference call with staff, according to the Journal.

Company officials did not immediately reply for a request for comment.

Started in 1948 amid the postwar US economic boom, Toys ‘R’ US has 881 stores in U.S. territories and nearly 65,000 employees globally, according to the company’s most recent press release last month.

The New Jersey-based company was saddled with debt following a leveraged buyout in 2005 by a consortium that included the KKR Group and Bain Capital.

Much like other retailers, Toys ‘R’ Us has also been bruised by competition from Amazon and other online retailers.

A weak holiday shopping season weighed on the company’s efforts to reorganize, analysts said.

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, blamed the company’s woes on poor leadership.

“As the competitive dynamics of the toy market intensified, management failed to respond and evolve. As such, the brand lost relevance, customers and ultimately sales,” Saunders said in a note Wednesday.

“The main tragedy of liquidation will be the extensive loss of jobs. In our view, those on the shop-floor have been badly let down by management and those doing financial deals.”

The company is exploring strategies for keeping the brand alive, including the sale of 200 U.S. stores that could be packaged with its Canadian business, CNBC and the Journal reported.

Brandon outlined this and other possibilities at the New Jersey meeting, CNBC reported. Brandon also told workers they have 60 more days of employment at the company.

In February, the company’s British business announced plans for an “orderly wind-down” of the company’s store portfolio. Toys ‘R’ Us employs 3,200 people at 100 stores in Britain.

 
…

Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the “Panama Papers” scandal, said Wednesday that it was shutting down because of the damage to its business and reputation inflicted by role in the global tax evasion debacle.

The Panama Papers, which consist of millions of documents stolen from Mossack Fonseca and leaked to the media in April 2016, provoked a global scandal after showing how the rich and powerful used offshore corporations to evade taxes.

“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial circus and the unusual actions by certain Panamanian authorities have occasioned an irreversible damage that necessitates the obligatory ceasing of public operations at the end of the current month,” the firm said in a statement.

Mossack Fonseca said a skeleton staff would remain in order to comply with requests from authorities and other public and private groups.

Nonetheless, the law firm said it would continue “fighting for justice,” adding it would also continue to cooperate with authorities.

Last month, Panamanian prosecutors raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, seeking possible links to Brazilian engineering company Odebrecht. The Brazilian construction firm has admitted bribing officials in Panama and other countries to obtain contracts in the region between 2010 and 2014.

Ramon Fonseca, a partner at Mossack Fonseca, denied last month that his firm had a connection to Odebrecht, while accusing Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela of directly receiving money from Odebrecht, Latin America’s largest engineering company.

Varela has denied taking any money from Odebrecht.
…

The Trump administration is pressing China to cut its trade surplus with the United States by $100 billion, a White House spokeswoman said Wednesday, clarifying a tweet last week from President Donald Trump.

Last Wednesday, Trump tweeted that China had been asked to develop a plan to reduce its trade imbalance with the United States by $1 billion, but the spokeswoman said Trump had meant to say $100 billion.

The United States had a record $375 billion trade deficit with China in 2017, which made up two-thirds of a global $566 billion U.S. trade gap last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

China reported its 2017 U.S. trade surplus as $276 billion, also about two-thirds of its reported global surplus of $422.5 billion.

The White House spokeswoman declined to provide details about how the administration would like China to accomplish the surplus-cutting goal — whether increased purchases of U.S. products such as soybeans or aircraft would suffice, or whether it wants China to make major changes to its industrial policies, cut subsidies to state-owned enterprises, or further reduce steel and aluminum capacity.

The request comes as the Trump administration is said to be preparing tariffs on imports of up to $60 billion worth of Chinese information technology, telecoms and consumer products as part of a U.S. investigation into China’s intellectual property practices.

It is also unclear if the requested $100 billion reduction would address U.S. complaints about China’s investment policies that effectively require U.S. firms to transfer technology to Chinese joint venture partners in order to gain market access.

The issue is a core part of the probe being conducted under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a provision seldom invoked since the World Trade Organization was founded in 1995. Trade experts have said tariffs imposed as a result of the China intellectual property probe may fall outside of WTO rules.

U.S. targets Indian subsidies

But Washington showed on Wednesday that it has not abandoned the global trade body, launching a WTO legal challenge to India’s export subsidies for domestic companies, including producers of steel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles and IT products.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said India had failed to remove the subsidies as required by WTO rules after the country reached certain economic benchmarks.

The United States is expected to invoke a national security exception to WTO rules in imposing import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum announced by Trump last week.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told lawmakers on Wednesday his department would soon publish procedures for product-specific exemptions from the steel tariffs for items that are not available from domestic producers or in short supply. The procedures are due by Sunday.

Anne Forristall Luke, president of the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, said the group would be “pressing very hard” for an exemption from tariffs for high-strength wire rod used to make cord for steel tire belts that is not produced by U.S. mills.

The largest sources for the material are Japan and Brazil, she said, adding that U.S. tire producers will lose business to foreign competitors if their steel costs rise.

“We are working this from the product side and the country side. We think we have a very good case,” she told Reuters.
…

A bag of rice on a hungry family’s kitchen table could be the key to Nicolas Maduro retaining the support of poor Venezuelans in May’s presidential election.

For millions of Venezuelans suffering an unprecedented economic crisis, a monthly handout of a box of heavily-subsidized basic food supplies by Maduro’s unpopular government has offered a tenuous lifeline in their once-prosperous OPEC nation.

The 55-year-old successor to Hugo Chavez introduced the so-called CLAP boxes in 2016 in a signature policy of his rule, continuing the socialist government’s strategy of seeking public support with cash bonuses and other giveaways.

Now, running for re-election on May 20, Maduro says the CLAPs are his “most powerful weapon” to combat an “economic war” being waged by Washington, which brands him a “dictator” and has imposed sanctions.

Mariana, a single mother who lives in the poor hillside neighborhood of Petare in the capital Caracas, says the handouts will decide her vote.

“I and other women I know are going to vote for Maduro because he’s promising to keep giving CLAPs, which at least help fix some problems,” said the 30-year-old cook, who asked not to give her surname for fear of losing the benefit.

“When you earn minimum wage, which doesn’t cover exorbitant prices, the box helps.”

Maduro’s rule since 2013 has coincided with a deep recession caused by a plunge in global oil prices and failed state-led economic policies.

Yet the worse the economy gets, the more dependent some poor Venezuelans become on the state.

Life in the South American country’s poor ‘barrios’ revolves around the CLAP boxes. According to the government, six million families receive the benefit, from a population of around 30 million people.

Venezuelans, many of whom are undernourished, anxiously wait for their monthly delivery, and a thriving black market has sprung up to sell CLAP products.

The government sources almost all the CLAP goods from abroad, especially from Mexico, since Venezuela’s food production has shriveled and currency controls restrict private imports.

Critics, including Maduro’s main challenger for the May 20 vote, Henri Falcon, say the CLAPs are a cynical form of political patronage and are rife with corruption.

Erratic supply and control of distribution by government-affiliated groups have sown resentment among others.

“I can’t count on it. Sometimes it comes, sometimes not,” said Viviana Colmenares, 24, an unemployed mother of six struggling to get by in Petare.

“Instrument of the Revolution”

Stamped with the faces of Maduro and Chavez, the CLAP boxes usually contain rice, pasta, grains, cooking oil, powdered milk, canned tuna and other basic goods. Recipients pay 25,000 bolivars per box, or about $0.12 at the black market rate.

That is a godsend in a country where the minimum monthly wage is less than $2 at that rate – and would be swallowed up by two boxes of eggs or a small tin of powdered milk.

Inflation, at more than 4,000 percent annually according to opposition data, is pulverizing household income.

The administration of the CLAP — the Local Supply and Production Committees — does not hide its political motivation.

“The CLAPs are here to stay. They are an instrument of the revolution,” said Freddy Bernal, CLAP chief administrator.

“It has helped us stop a social explosion and enabled us to win elections and to keep winning them,” he told Reuters, referring to government victories in 2017 local polls.

Sometimes, though, the tactic backfires, as it did when promised free pork failed to arrive over Christmas, prompting street protests.

Maduro’s inability to halt rising hunger has jarred with the experience of many under Chavez, who won the presidency in 1998 and improved Venezuela’s social indicators with oil-fueled welfare policies.

Even though Maduro’s approval rating is only around 26 percent, according to one recent poll, his re-election looks likely as Venezuela’s opposition coalition is boycotting the vote on accusations it is rigged.

His most popular rivals are banned from standing and the election board favors the government.

Former state governor Falcon has broken with the coalition to stand. One survey by pollster Datanalisis in February showed that in a two-way race, he would defeat Maduro by 45.8 percent to 32.2 percent of likely voters.

Falcon’s critics counter that those numbers mean nothing in the face of electoral irregularities that could arbitrarily tip the balance in favor of Maduro.

Several other minor figures have registered for the single-round election, but have little chance of making an impact.

‘Can’t Depend on the Box’

Juan Luis Hernandez, a food specialist at the Central University of Venezuela, estimates the country generates just 44 percent of the basic food supplies it produced in 2008.

Meanwhile, food imports fell 67 percent between the start of 2016 and the end of 2017 as the crisis bit, he said.

Almost two-thirds of Venezuelans surveyed in a university study published in February said they had lost on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year. Eighty-seven percent were assessed to live in poverty.

The same study found that seven out of 10 Venezuelans had received CLAPs.

“They (the government) don’t care about the food issue, just about getting people something to eat while they get through the elections,” said Susana Raffalli, a consultant with charity Caritas.

Some Venezuelans fear they would be found out should they vote against Maduro and be punished by no longer receiving food bags.

Already handouts are far from guaranteed.

A dozen recipients told Reuters that often they arrived half-full and would only come every few months. Outside of the capital Caracas, delivery was even more sporadic.

“I can’t depend on the box, otherwise I would die from hunger,” said Yuni Perez, a 48-year-old rubbish collector and mother of three.

Perez, who lives in a ramshackle house made from breeze blocks and corrugated steel at the top of Petare, said a CLAP box provided her family with food for a week. Often they would receive one every two months.

When her family is short of food, she hunts for leftovers dumped on the side of Petare’s winding streets. She said she had found several newborn babies discarded in the gutter, which she attributed to mothers unable to face providing food for another child.

Another Petare resident, mother-of-three Yaneidy Guzman said she dropped from 68kg to 48kg last year, despite receiving the CLAP.

“At least for 10 days you don’t have to think about finding food,” the 32-year-old said of the handouts, her cheekbones protruding from her face.
…

In one of the planet’s most northerly settlements, in a tiny Arctic town of about 2,000 people, Benjamin Vidmar’s domed greenhouse stands out like an alien structure in the snow-cloaked landscape.

This is where in summer the American chef grows tomatoes, onions, chilies and other vegetables, taking advantage of the season’s 24 hours of daily sunlight.

During winter’s four months of darkness, when temperatures can reach -30 Celsius (-22°F), Vidmar tends to microgreens – the leaves and shoots of young salad plants – and dozens of quails in two rooms beneath his home.

He is the sole supplier of locally-grown food in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen in the Svalbard archipelago. The North Pole is about 1,050 kilometers (650 miles) to the north; mainland Norway is about as far south.

Growing food in such conditions can be “mission impossible” but it is necessary, Vidmar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

He hopes to set an example for other remote towns in the region.

“We are so dependent on imports. Everything is by boat and plane,” said Vidmar, who comes from Cleveland, Ohio, and who has lived here for nearly a decade.

That makes the town vulnerable, he said. In 2010, stores in Longyearbyen stood empty after an Icelandic volcano erupted, bringing air transport to a halt. And the cost of imported food and its quality “is often disappointing.”

His company, Polar Permaculture, aims to produce enough food for the town and process all its organic and biological waste.

It sounds ambitious, but the firm, which received support from a government-funded body that helps startups, broke even last year, just two years in.

It was helped by the fact that he and his teenage son do not draw salaries, and Vidmar still cooks full-time at a school.

‘Crazy’ to Try

Vidmar’s produce now appears on many of Longyearbyen’s menus, including at Huset restaurant where intricate, multi-course Nordic tasting menus are served in stately surroundings.

Alongside reindeer steak and tartare of bearded seal is a delicate dish of quail egg with dill, red onions and anchovies on flatbread.

“We would not use quail eggs unless they were local so we designed a dish as soon as we got the opportunity to try them,” said Filip Gemzell, Huset’s head chef.

Vidmar first stepped foot in Svalbard in 2007 while working as a chef on a cruise ship. One of his first thoughts was, “How can people live here?,” but he was also intrigued.

“The sad part (in America) is you work so hard and you still have to worry about money. Then you come here and you have all this nature. No distraction, no huge shopping centers, no billboards saying, ‘buy, buy, buy.'”

A year later, he moved to the island and started working at restaurants and bars in Longyearbyen, a coal mining town turned tourist-and-research attraction.

He decided to grow his own food after becoming frustrated with the absence of fresh produce and the fact that a lack of treatment sites meant organic waste was dumped into the sea.

People thought he was “crazy” trying to grow food in the Arctic.

Initially he experimented with hydroponics – farming in water instead of soil – but that meant using fertilizer, which comes from the mainland. Eventually the city authorities gave him permission to bring in worms from Florida to do the job.

Now, whenever he or his son deliver a tray of microgreens to restaurants, they collect the previous tray and feed the soil to the worms, which break it down to produce natural fertilizer for bigger plants.

His next aim is to heat the greenhouse during winter using a biodigester – which generates energy from organic material – so he can use it all-year-round.

Sustainability

Vidmar also helps fourth- and ninth-grade students at Longyearbyen school to learn farming and sustainability. That has led older students to query the island’s supply chain, said teacher Lisa Dymbe Djonne.

“They question the transportation of food from the mainland to here and how expensive that is,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

“They’re going to interview some of the leaders … to figure out how much it costs for the island and if it is possible to grow our own food,” she added. “It’s a question a lot of people up here have.”

Eivind Uleberg, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Bioeconomy Research in Tromso in northern Norway, said that fitted a pattern of rising interest in locally produced food and sustainability in agriculture.

In a phone interview, Uleberg said that, although he was unaware of Vidmar’s undertaking, efforts to produce food locally in Norway were positive.

A short growing season and low temperatures are the main barriers to producing food in such latitudes, he said, but higher temperatures caused by climate change could help.

“There is definitely the potential to produce more vegetables and berries,” he said.

But there are also challenges, Uleberg added, including more rain in the autumn during harvest, and changing conditions in winter that could kill grasses crucial for animal feed.

For Vidmar, such obstacles and the unique conditions are the reason he is determined to produce “the freshest food possible.”

“We’re on a mission … to make this town very sustainable. Because if we can do it here, then what’s everybody else’s excuse?”
…

On a patch of gravel that was once a nondescript bus stop in Kuala Lumpur’s old city, passersby can now find brightly-painted wooden pallets that double as seating and shelves stocked with free books for the taking. At least, for the time being.

The transformation is temporary, a monthlong demonstration to judge the public’s reaction to the idea of turning a slice of the sprawling Malaysian capital no bigger than a small hotel room into a permanent public space.

This try-it-before-you-buy-it approach is known as a pop-up.

Pop-ups have become popular in many cities, often the brainchild of local residents in an effort to improve their neighborhoods or turn derelict spaces into community hubs.

They include cycling activists who paint bike lanes without government approval to push for safer streets, retailers who launch temporary shops in repurposed shipping containers to revitalize flagging high streets or food trucks gathered in empty parking lots.

“We’ve found by working with cities sometimes they are a little bit wary about having to put a lot of investment into public spaces,” said Cecilia Anderson, who leads the public space program at UN-Habitat, the U.N.’s lead agency on urban issues.

“Sometimes it helps to do a small pop-up public space just to showcase on a temporary level what kinds of benefits it has for the city, the citizens, and that neighborhood.”

Public space has been shrinking in the world’s fast-growing cities, where almost 70 percent of the population is expected to live by 2050, compared to just over half today, according to U.N. estimates.

Experts say, however, it should be a paramount goal for city leaders as research shows inadequate, poorly designed or privatized public spaces generate exclusion and marginalization.

“Public space is really the backbone or the skeleton of the city,” Anderson told Reuters.

Highlighting its importance for social inclusion and well-being, public space was included as a target in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, with the aim to provide universal access to “safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces” by 2030.

‘Ultimate irony’

In Kuala Lumpur’s bustling historic center, local urban regeneration agency Think City installed a pop-up plaza along Petaling Street and three small green spaces, known as parklets.

They form a cluster of benches, plants, and overhead canvas for shade taking up the size of a parking spot along the busy street, as well as a mock microhousing unit in an existing park.

It also spruced up a laneway next to the agency’s headquarters with a mural and a chalkboard inviting ideas on how else to improve the neglected alley.

For Think City director Neil Khor, the pop-ups are an attempt to reignite flagging interest in public space among residents in the city of 6.5 million people.

“This is the ultimate irony — when I was growing up, we had more public space,” said Khor, whose organization works on community-based urban regeneration.

“Some time in the 1980s, we had this mall culture from the United States. Suddenly the public space is exactly inside the mall.”

What people want

While Kuala Lumpur’s extravagant malls never seem to lack for visitors, the pop-ups garnered mixed reviews, if they were noticed at all.

On two recent visits to the temporary public spaces, some of the parklets were empty, though one equipped with mobile phone chargers proved popular with a quartet of teenagers.

A parklet adorned with a chessboard sat vacant while next door, Bangladeshi migrants conducted a vibrant trade in fruits and vegetables on the sidewalk, their produce truck blocking a freshly painted bike lane.

The plaza bedecked with bookshelves drew several curious onlookers, who were invited to leave comments on what they would like to see in the space, and whether it should be made permanent.

Visitors asked for more seating, a drinking fountain, shade and a playground for children. Most respondents declared their enthusiasm for a permanent plaza.

“It’s wonderful, it looks good, it makes the place beautiful and lively. No complaints,” said paralegal John Ng, who stopped by after work.

“There should be more public spaces instead of tall buildings and cars,” he said, standing in the middle of the plaza.

Retiree Emily Tan, taking a break from a shopping trip in Chinatown, preferred to sit on permanent benches next to the pop-up and take in the view.

“This one they should develop as a park,” she said. “More plants, flowers, and let people sit down.”

Universal design

While officially-sanctioned pop-up public spaces can be found in cities around the world, the trend started in the developed world.

A San Francisco design firm invented the parklet, and New York City became a model for carving out small plazas from unused odds and ends on the city’s streets.

“These temporary approaches in the global north were meant to bring informality to cities that didn’t have them,” said Ethan Kent from New York-based non-profit Project for Public Spaces. “These were solutions meant to bring back that life to the streets.”

But as the concept and the designs that go with them have become universal, critics question whether pop-ups can work just everywhere.

“On the one hand, it looks like a free street library, where you’re encouraged to take a book you like,” said Emily Silverman, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“But the black base, cheerful colors, and especially the position in the middle of a street during an international conference, signal ‘don’t touch,'” said Silverman, referring to the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur last month.

She said in Jerusalem, free street libraries worked well in secular and middle-class professional areas, but they got vandalized in ultra-Orthodox areas, for fear they would help distribute otherwise forbidden books.

“The [pop-up’s] lure of ‘lighter, quicker, cheaper’ can encourage artificial importing, ignoring local context to just get stuff done,” she said.

Khor defended the overall initiative in Kuala Lumpur as a valuable social experiment.

He noted an impromptu badminton game in the alleyway, chess matches between migrants in the parklet, a tea shop that regularly waters the plants in the parklet, and crowds eager to explore a micro-housing prototype.

“I’m not saying these projects are perfect,” he said. “We wanted to show that urban regeneration is a process.”
…

Behind the U.S. move to block Singapore-based Broadcom’s hostile bid for U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm lies a new global struggle for influence over next-generation communications technology — and fears that whoever takes the lead could exploit that advantage for economic gain, theft and espionage.

In the Broadcom-Qualcomm deal, the focus is on so-called “5G” wireless technology, which promises data speeds that rival those of landline broadband now. Its proponents insist that 5G, the next step up from the “4G” networks that now serve most smartphones, will become a critical part of the infrastructure powering everything from self-driving cars to the connected home.

5G remains in the early stages of development. Companies including Qualcomm, based in San Diego, and China’s Huawei have been investing heavily to stake their claim in the underlying technology. Such beachheads can be enormously valuable; control over basic technologies and their patents can yield huge fortunes in computer chips, software and related equipment.

“These transitions come along almost every decade or so,” said Jon Erensen, research director for semiconductors at research firm Gartner. “The government is being very careful to ensure the U.S. keeps its leadership role developing these standards.”

President Donald Trump said late Monday that a takeover of Qualcomm would imperil national security, effectively ending Broadcom’s $117 billion buyout bid. Broadcom said that it is studying the order and that it doesn’t believe it poses any national security threat to the U.S.

Higher stakes

It’s the second recent U.S. warning shot across the bow of foreign telecom makers. At a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in February, FBI Director Christopher Wray said any company “beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values” should not be able to “gain positions of power” inside U.S. telecommunications networks.

“That provides the capacity to exert pressure or control over our telecommunications infrastructure, it provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information and it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage,” he said.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House introduced a bill on Jan. 9 that would prohibit government purchases of telecoms equipment from Huawei Technologies and smaller rival ZTE, citing their ties to the Chinese military and backing from the ruling Communist Party. A few years earlier, a congressional panel recommended phone carriers avoid doing business with Huawei or ZTE.

The stakes are even higher in the 5G race. “Qualcomm/Broadcom is like the Fort Sumter of this technology battle,” said GBH Insights analyst Dan Ives, referring to the battle that kicked off the Civil War.

Although its name isn’t widely known outside the technology industry, San Diego-based Qualcomm is one of the world’s leading makers of the processors that power many smartphones and other mobile devices. Qualcomm also owns patents on key pieces of mobile technology that Apple and other manufacturers use in their products.

Compared to earlier generations of wireless technology, “we’re seeing China emerge and start to play a bigger role in the standards developing process,” Erensen said. Given a wave of consolidation in the telecom-equipment industry, fewer companies are involved “and the stakes are bigger,” he said.

National security

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, cited concerns about Broadcom’s penchant for cutting costs such as research spending. That could lead to Qualcomm losing its leadership in telecom standards, the committee wrote in a letter earlier in March.

Should that happen, Chinese companies such as Huawei, which the CFIUS has previously expressed concerns about, could take a larger, or even a dominant, role in setting 5G technology and standards and practices. That’s where national security concerns come in.

“Over time, that would mean U.S. government and U.S. technology companies could lose a trusted U.S. supplier that does not present the same national security counterintelligence risk that a Chinese supplier does,” said Brian Fleming, an attorney at Miller & Chevalier and former counsel at the Justice Department’s national security division.

Blocking the deal doesn’t eliminate Chinese influence on 5G development, of course. But it might slow it down, Fleming said: “They honestly believe they are helping to protect national security by doing this.”
…

Sao Paulo investment firm SouthRock Capital has signed an agreement with Starbucks that gives it the right to develop and operate branches of the Seattle-based chain in Brazil, the companies said late on Monday.

With the agreement, whose value was not disclosed, all of Starbucks’ retail operations in Latin America are now wholly licensed rather than directly managed, the companies said.

SouthRock founder Ken Pope said in a statement the fund would eye expansion opportunities in new and existing markets.

Starbucks now has 113 stores across the populous states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

“With Starbucks, we see continued opportunities for growth in existing markets … as well as new markets like Brasilia and the South,” he said.

SouthRock, founded in 2015, also owns Brazil Airport Restaurants, which operates in the country’s biggest airports.

Shares in Starbucks opened up 0.5 percent but closed down 0.58 percent. The S&P 500 Index fell 0.64 percent.
…

European Union finance ministers agreed new measures on Tuesday to force accountants and banks to report aggressive tax schemes that help companies shift profits to low-tax countries.

Ministers also added the Bahamas, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Saint Kitts and Nevis to a blacklist of tax havens, while Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia were delisted, confirming earlier Reuters reports.

Under the rules, proposed by the European Commission in June, accountants, banks and lawyers would be required to inform authorities about “potentially aggressive tax planning arrangements” set up for their clients. The 28 EU states will also share information on harmful tax planning in a bid to discourage the most aggressive tax avoidance schemes.

“It is a new progress for tax justice in the European Union,” EU tax commissioner Pierre Moscovici told ministers after they agreed the overhaul.

Once the new rules are finalized and approved by the European Parliament, tax advisers in the EU will risk fines if they do not report potentially harmful cross-border tax schemes.

Penalties should be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” but EU states will maintain discretion in setting sanctions or fines at national level.

If there is no intermediary, or the tax adviser is located outside the EU, the company or individual using the arrangement will be obliged to disclose it.

EU governments agreed on a compromise text put forward by the Bulgarian presidency of the EU, which slightly softened the Commission’s original proposal. Tax reforms require unanimity among the 28 member states.

Cross-border tax arrangements set up with jurisdictions that have a zero or “almost zero” corporate rate – such as the Channel Islands, Bahamas, Bahrain and the Cayman Islands – must be reported, despite initial opposition from some governments.

But ministers scrapped a requirement to report tax schemes with jurisdictions whose corporate rate is lower than 35 percent of the statutory average within the EU – which could have forced reporting for schemes involving countries with a tax rate

of around 7 percent.

Some states had argued such a requirement “would cause an administrative burden disproportionate to the objectives” of the new rules, a working document prepared by Bulgarian officials showed.

Smaller EU members like Luxembourg and Malta have in the past opposed stricter rules to prevent tax avoidance, fearing they could harm competitiveness. But their finance ministers gave the green light to the Bulgarian compromise. Some members, including Britain, Ireland and Portugal, have already introduced penalties at a national level for intermediaries helping set up aggressive tax schemes.

EU governments also added Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda to a “grey list,” which now includes 62 jurisdictions that do not respect EU anti-tax avoidance standards but have committed to change their practices.

Bulgarian Finance Minister Vladislav Goranov told a news conference after the meeting that commitments made by grey list countries will be made public, a move welcomed by anti-corruption groups because it will increase transparency.

Ministers agreed to move Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia from the black to the grey list, after they committed to change their tax practices.

American Samoa, Guam, Namibia, Palau, Samoa, and Trinidad and Tobago were already on the blacklist set up in December.

Blacklisted jurisdictions could face reputational damage and stricter controls on their financial transactions with the EU, although no sanctions have been agreed by EU states yet.

 
…

Thailand’s cabinet has agreed to draft a law to regulate cryptocurrency trading, seeking to tax the largely unregulated market.

Government spokesman Nathporn Chatusripitak said Tuesday the Ministry of Finance also proposed the new regulations to help prevent use of digital currencies in money laundering and fraud.

He said details of the proposed regulations would be announced later in the month.

In February, Thailand’s central bank issued a circular asking financial institutions to not handle transactions involving cryptocurrencies.
…

Cambodia is pushing ahead with new legislation in a bid to lure foreign investors to its vibrant casino and gaming industry, promoting the Kingdom as a key gaming center in South East Asia.

The proposed legislation, expected to be passed after general elections this year, has been three years in the making and will oversee an industry currently netting the government almost $50 million in tax revenues.

Cambodian officials said the government was looking to set a tax rate for casino games at between 4 and 5 percent to match regional casinos such as Singapore.

Cambodia’s casino business, with its sense of the “Wild West”, has grown rapidly since the late 1990s, with 65 licensed casinos and the sector dominated by the Hong Kong listed Naga World Hotel and Entertainment complex in Phnom Penh.

Gambling a booming business

Ben Reichel, executive director of the Sydney-listed Donaco International, says across South East Asia there is significant demand underpinning the potential growth in the gaming industry.

“There’s a lot of unsatisfied demand in the region as a whole. If you look at the number of tables compared to somewhere like the USA, it’s actually a very low number of gaming tables available – which is why there is so much illegal competition going on,” Reichel said.

Cambodia has benefited from restrictions or outright bans on legal casinos — such as in Thailand — or where local gamblers are prevented from entry to existing casinos.

Outside Phnom Penh, where Naga World enjoys a monopoly, other key clusters of casinos are in the border town of Poipet, near Thailand, the seaport of Sihanoukville, and to the east along the border with Vietnam.

But a decision by Vietnam’s authorities to allow local gamblers to use Vietnam based casinos was seen as a threat to those casinos near Vietnam’s border.

‘Junket agents’

A major driving force in the growth of the casino business generally lies in operators, known as VIP junket agents. These operators’ role is to act as facilitators, guaranteeing an amount of revenue, with offers of free accommodation, travel and other benefits to the gamblers.

And the impact of such VIP junket operators is significant. Cambodia’s premier casino, NagaWorld, recently reported a 140 per cent growth in VIP rolling turnover to $21.1 billion for 2017 up from $8.71 billion a year earlier, according Naga Corp’s Hong Kong stock exchange released financial results of February 28.

NagaWorld revenues amounted to $625.33 million in 2017 up from $225.66 million the previous year. Its net profit rose 39 percent to $255.2 million.

Reeling in Chinese gamblers

The boon to the Cambodian market also came with an easing of visa rules for Chinese visitors. In 2017 arrivals from China rose more than 40 per cent to 1.2 million, surpassing Vietnam to become the largest source of tourists in Cambodia.

“The government has said they want to make China one of their top three — if not number one source of tourism going forward,” said Donaco’s Reichel.

In comments emailed to VOA, executives of Macau-based VIP junket operator Suncity Group said; “Chinese gamers will definitely be the main course for the VIP market in Cambodia”.

Cambodia also offers Chinese gamblers an alternative to Macau where in recent years VIP junket numbers have fallen against the backdrop of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption.

Another ‘hot’ Cambodian gambling area

Poipet, Cambodia’s main border crossing with Thailand, is located between Siem Reap and Battambang. The Cambodian government is looking to further develop the Poipet region as an industrial zone.

Donaco’s Reichel, whose company oversees the Star Vegas casino in Poipet, says most costumers are from Thailand, but there is also a presence of gamblers from Indonesia, Malaysia, and expatriates living in Thailand.

“It really is growing rapidly and with the casino industry there you can cross the border [from Thailand] and you don’t have to change currency. The whole town operates using Thai baht — it’s like a little piece of Thailand on Cambodian soil,” he said.

But some operators are also cautious. Macau-based gaming investor, Amax International, with links to Cambodia, says the VIP market especially can be volatile.

The gaming business, it said, is sensitive to economic downturns, uncertainties, and factors affecting tourism. Amax added that countries, such as China, “may impose or adjust government restrictions on currency conversion or their ability to export currency.”
…

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called himself “a proud feminist” Monday and said all men should support women’s rights and gender equality.

His statement was loudly applauded by hundreds of women and a sprinkling of men at the opening of the annual two-week meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, a U.N. body that Guterres called “vital to end the stereotypes and discrimination that limit women’s and girls’ opportunities.”

The U.N. chief said changing “the unequal power dynamics” that underpin discrimination and violence against women is “the greatest human rights challenge of our time” – and a goal that is “in everyone’s interests.”

“Discrimination against women damages communities, organizations, companies, economies and societies,” he said. “That is why all men should support women’s rights and gender equality. And that is why I consider myself a proud feminist.”

Guterres added that this is “a pivotal moment for the rights of women and girls,” with the issue being discussed around the globe in the (hash)MeToo and (hash)Time’sUp movements.

As examples of the male-dominated world and male-dominated culture that needs changing, he said, “Women are pioneering scientists and mathematicians – but they occupy less than 30 percent of research and development jobs worldwide.”

And despite women being accomplished artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers, this year 33 men took home Oscars at the Academy Awards, but only six women did, he said.

The theme of this year’s U.N. meeting, which ends March 23, is “Empowering Rural Women and Girls.” Guterres called such women “particularly marginalized.”

According to UN Women, rural women do much of the work but fare worse than rural men or urban women.

“Less than 13 percent of landholders worldwide are women, and while the global pay gap between men and women stands at 23 percent, in rural areas, it can be as high as 40 percent,” UN Women says.

Ireland’s U.N. ambassador, Geraldine Byrne Nason, the commission chair, said its work will focus on these women “who are furthest behind” and are “disproportionately affected by violence, poverty, climate change and hunger.”

“Often their predicament quite simply shames us,” she said. 

“We want to make a difference. We have had enough rhetoric. Time is up for the debates that are long on promises and short on delivery,” Byrne Nason said. “We are on the move to bring a tangible result – one that will impact on the lives of women and girls in rural areas.”

UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told the opening session that almost one-third of employed women worldwide work in agriculture and there are 400 million women who are farm workers.

“Half of rural poor women in developing countries have no basic literacy, and 15 million girls of primary school age will never, never get the chance to learn to read or write in primary school,” she said. 

A rural girl is “twice as likely to be married as a child” compared to an urban girl, she added.

Mlambo-Ngcuka warned that progress toward gender equality is slowing and some gains are even reversing.

She pointed to the World Economic Forum’s 2017 “Global Gender Gap Report,” which found the gap between women and men widening in health, education, politics and the workplace for the first time since the forum’s research started in 2006.

“It predicts that it will take – and listen to this – 217 years before we achieve gender parity,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said, stressing that this can’t be allowed to happen. 

“It has never been so urgent to hold ourselves and leaders accountable for the promises to accelerate progress,” she said. “The ‘Me Too’ movement and ‘Time’s Up’ has also showed us change can happen fast – and that women must be believed. This is a moment that we intend to sustain for all.”
…

The daily commute from Mexico to California farms is the same as it was before Donald Trump became president. Hundreds of Mexicans cross the border and line the sidewalks of Calexico’s tiny downtown by 4 a.m., napping on cardboard sheets and blankets or sipping coffee from a 24-hour doughnut shop until buses leave for the fields.

For decades, cross-border commuters have picked lettuce, carrots, broccoli, onions, cauliflower and other vegetables that make California’s Imperial Valley “America’s Salad Bowl” from December through March. As Trump visits the border Tuesday, the harvest is a reminder of how little has changed despite heated immigration rhetoric in Washington.

Trump will inspect eight prototypes for a future 30-foot border wall that were built in San Diego last fall. He made a “big, beautiful wall” a centerpiece of his campaign and said Mexico would pay for it.

But border barriers extend the same 654 miles (1,046 kilometers) they did under President Barack Obama and so far Trump hasn’t gotten Mexico or Congress to pay for a new wall.

Trump also pledged to expand the Border Patrol by 5,000 agents, but staffing fell during his first year in office farther below a congressional mandate because the government has been unable to keep pace with attrition and retirements. There were 19,437 agents at the end of September, down from 19,828 a year earlier.

In Tijuana, tens of thousands of commuters still line up weekday mornings for San Diego at the nation’s busiest border crossing, some for jobs in landscaping, housekeeping, hotel maids and shipyard maintenance. The vast majority are U.S. citizens and legal residents or holders of “border crossing cards” that are given to millions of Mexicans in border areas for short visits. The border crossing cards do not include work authorization but some break the rules.

Even concern about Trump’s threat to end the North American Free Trade Agreement is tempered by awareness that border economies have been integrated for decades. Mexican “maquiladora” plants, which assemble duty-free raw materials for export to the U.S., have made televisions, medical supplies and other goods since the 1960s.

“How do you separate twins that are joined at the hip?” said Paola Avila, chairwoman of the Border Trade Alliance, a group that includes local governments and business chambers. “Our business relationships will continue to grow regardless of what happens with NAFTA.”

Workers in the Mexicali area rise about 1 a.m., carpool to the border crossing and wait about an hour to reach Calexico’s portico-covered sidewalks by 4 a.m. Some beat the border bottleneck by crossing at midnight to sleep in their cars in Calexico, a city of 40,000 about 120 miles (192 kilometers) east of San Diego. 

Fewer workers make the trek now than 20 and 30 years ago. But not because of Trump. 

Steve Scaroni, one of Imperial Valley’s largest labor contractors, blames the drop on lack of interest among younger Mexicans, which has forced him to rely increasingly on short-term farmworker visas known as H-2As. 

“We have a saying that no one is raising their kids to be farmworkers,” said Scaroni, 55, a third-generation grower and one of Imperial Valley’s largest labor contractors. Last week, he had two or three buses of workers leaving Calexico before dawn, compared to 15 to 20 buses during the 1980s and 1990s.

Crop pickers at Scaroni’s Fresh Harvest Inc. make $13.18 an hour but H-2As bring his cost to $20 to $30 an hour because he must pay for round-trip transportation, sometimes to southern Mexico, and housing. The daily border commuters from Mexicali cost only $16 to $18 after overhead.

Scaroni’s main objective is to expand the H-2A visa program, which covered about 165,000 workers in 2016. On his annual visit to Washington in February to meet members of Congress and other officials, he decided within two hours that nothing changed under Trump. 

“Washington is not going to fix anything,” he said. “You’ve got too many people – lobbyists, politicians, attorneys – who make money off the dysfunction. They make money off of not solving problems. They just keep talking about it.”

Jose Angel Valenzuela, who owns a house in Mexicali and is working his second harvest in Imperial Valley, earns more picking cabbage in an hour than he did in a day at a factory in Mexico. He doesn’t pay much attention to news and isn’t following developments on the border wall.

“We’re doing very well,” he said as workers passed around beef tacos during a break. “We haven’t seen any noticeable change.”

Jack Vessey, whose family farms about 10,000 acres in Imperial Valley, relies on border commuters for about half of his workforce. Imperial has only 175,000 people and Mexicali has about 1 million, making Mexico an obvious labor pool.

Vessey, 42, said he has seen no change on the border and doesn’t expect much. He figures 10 percent of Congress embraces open immigration policies, another 10 percent oppose them and the other 80 percent don’t want to touch it because their voters are too divided.

“It’s like banging your head against the wall,” he said. 
…

U.S. President Donald Trump is blocking Singapore-based Broadcom, maker of computer and smartphone chips, from taking over U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm.

Trump cited national security grounds in stopping the takeover, following the recommendation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The committee reviews national security implications when foreign entities purchase U.S. corporations.

The president’s order said there is “credible evidence” that the takeover “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”

Broadcom made an unsolicited bid last year to take over Qualcomm for $117 billion.

The company has been in the process of moving its legal headquarters from Singapore to the United States to help it win approval for the takeover.

Qualcomm, which is based in San Diego, has emerged as one of the biggest competitors to Chinese companies, such as Huawei Technologies, making it an attractive asset for potential buyers in the semiconductor industry.

Companies in the industry are racing against each other to develop 5G wireless technology to transmit data at faster speeds.
…

Eurozone creditors are expected to disburse new loans to Greece this month and are working on debt relief measures, the head of the bloc’s finance ministers said on Monday, steps that should help underpin its economic recovery.

Greece’s 86-billion-euro bailout program, its third since 2010, is due to end in August and international lenders are debating how to ensure the country makes its exit on a sustainable footing.

Among options under consideration in Brussels are support measures that could run into tens of billions of euros and help ease servicing costs on a public debt pile that, in terms of economic output, is among the biggest in the world.

Greece’s economy expanded by 1.6 percent last year after emerging from a long recession. The European Commission forecast growth of 2.5 percent this year and next, but that rate could slow if reforms stall after strict monitoring by the lenders ceases.

The eurozone bailout fund is expected to pay out a 5.7 billion euro loan later in March, Eurogroup head Mario Centeno told a news conference following the finance ministers’ monthly meeting, after Greece met commitments under the third review of its rescue program.

To successfully exit the program, a fourth review of 88 reform actions must be completed before August. This would allow Greece to access other loans.

“I am confident Greece will implement all remaining deliverables to conclude the program successfully,” Centeno said.

They include new privatizations and reform of the gas and electricity markets, which he said were preconditions to granting Greece new debt relief.

Debt relief

Technical talks are already ongoing on one of the possible measures that would grant Greece additional debt relief after it benefited from extensions of its debt maturities and other short-term aid in past years.

Centeno said that work was under way on linking future eurozone debt relief to the rate of Greek economic growth, with the objective of granting support if growth slowed.

Other more substantial measures will be discussed at the next meeting of finance ministers next month, Centeno said.

Among possible measures are the use of funds that will remain unused after the bailout program ends on August 20.

This could be as mush as 27 billion euros, and could be used to buy out Greek debt falling due in the next five years and replace it with cheaper and longer-term loans from the eurozone bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Another option could involve the return of profits made by the European Central Bank on Greek bonds.

Both measures would come with conditions attached, mostly linked to the implementation of reforms already approved but that would take years to fully execute.

The debate on conditionality is still wide open. Greece could ask for a new credit line after its aid programme ends, but this is likely to be seen in the country as a new wave of austerity, triggering a political backlash.

Alternatives could entail enhanced supervision by EU institutions over Greek reforms after the bailout ends.

Without a financial safety net Greece could face market pressure that would increase debt servicing costs.

Greece is also building a cash buffer, which could reach 20 billion euros, to bolster a full return to debt markets and support sustainable growth.
…

Mexico’s powerful CCE business lobby on Monday urged the leftist front-runner for a July 1 presidential election to stop questioning major planks of the government’s economic agenda lest it damage investment.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has led opinion polls by a wide margin for weeks, has gradually moderated his rhetoric and his leading advisers have sought to reassure investors that he will not be an economic liability as president.

However, his threats to scrap a new Mexico City airport already under construction and review oil and gas exploration and production contracts issued under a 2013-14 energy reform still worry some investors.

“As we’ve said, you can’t ask the private sector to take part in building a better country at the same time as undermining certainty and the rule of law as conditions for fostering investment,” Juan Pablo Castanon, president of the powerful CCE lobby, an umbrella group for business groups, said at an event in Mexico City.

“For this reason, we businessfolk demand guarantees that the contracts awarded under the energy reform and for the new airport will be respected,” he added. “In a country governed by the rule of law, contracts are honored, and cannot be subject to the will or interpretation of a sitting government.”

Lopez Obrador’s top energy adviser has said that while publicly available versions of the energy contracts appear to be without problems, further investigation was needed to ensure corruption had not tainted the awarding process.

The business community was also worried there were candidates and campaign teams already casting doubt on the validity of the election “depending on who the winner is,” Castanon said, without mentioning Lopez Obrador or his MORENA party.

Castanon’s comments follow a high-profile speech by Lopez Obrador at a banking convention last week, in which he stuck to promises to not build a new airport at the current construction site and warned there could be protests if he lost by fraud.

The former mayor of Mexico City, who was runner-up in the previous two elections, organized massive protests in the capital when he was narrowly beaten for the presidency in 2006.

Two polls published last week showed him with a lead of more than 13 percentage points over his nearest rival.
…

A global financial body warns central banks should carefully weigh the risks before introducing their own virtual currencies, saying such innovations could risk destabilizing banking systems and unleash disruption across borders.

But it said some forms of digital innovation could help by making trading in stocks and currencies more efficient.

Monday’s report from the Bank for International Settlements, an international organization for central banks in Basel, Switzerland, says virtual currencies issued broadly by central banks could worsen bank runs. A virtual currency could do that by making it easy to move money entirely out of the commercial banking system with a mouse click during a panic.

The report said virtual money issued by a country’s central bank could, if widely used in cross-border transactions, lead to disruptive international capital flows and exchange rate fluctuations.

The report noted that any virtual currency would have to comply with requirements aimed at stopping money laundering and financing of terrorism. That could limit how anonymous holding it could be.

The report doesn’t dismiss the idea. It said virtual currencies issued for wholesale use only — that is, by banks and financial institutions to settle payments rather than by consumers for purchases — could help make trading securities and foreign currencies more efficient.

That would not be so far from how central banks operate today. They already use money in an electronic form in the reserve accounts at the central bank that can be held only by banks and other designated financial institutions. Everyone else can access money issued by the central bank in the form of cold hard cash.

Benoit Coeure, chair of the BIS’ committee on payments and market infrastructures, said that virtual currencies issued by central banks showed promise in wholesale payments.

“Central bank digital currencies could help make settling trades of securities and foreign exchange more efficient in the future. But more work and experimentation would be needed to explore these benefits,” he said. Coeure is also a member of the executive board at the European Central Bank, the central bank for the 19-country eurozone and the issuer of the euro currency.

Coeure said that no central bank has so far decided to issue a virtual currency.

But the question has arisen in places such as Sweden, where the use of cash for everyday transactions is dwindling. Sweden’s central bank, the Rijksbank, is studying the possibility of issuing an e-krona. A decision is expected later this year or early next year. Sweden isn’t a member of the euro.

Central bankers in Europe have recently cast doubt on the usefulness of private virtual currencies such as bitcoin due to their volatility and lack of security.

“At this time, the general judgment is that their volatile valuations, and inadequate investor and consumer protection, make them unsafe to rely on as a common means of payment, a stable store of value or a unit of account,” the report said.
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Austria’s Constitutional Court on Monday dealt a blow to the government’s plans to cut benefits for groups including refugees, striking down identical rules in one province and saying refugees deserve special treatment.

Austria’s parliamentary election in October was dominated by Europe’s immigration crisis, when it took in some of the largest numbers of asylum-seekers in the European Union, relative to its population.

Conservatives led by immigration hard-liner Sebastian Kurz won and went into government with the far-right Freedom Party.

The two sides struck a coalition deal that includes reducing the main basic welfare payment for refugees to well below the standard amounts generally available. Opponents argue that refugees should be treated equally, as they still are in some provinces, including Vienna.

The court found that people granted asylum have, by definition, had to flee their home countries and cannot return.

“Those entitled to asylum cannot therefore in this context be put on the same footing as other foreigners [European Union citizens and nationals of third countries] who are free to return to their home countries,” the court said in a statement on its ruling on Lower Austria, the province that surrounds Vienna.

The government’s plans do not include capping the main benefit payment for EU citizens, which would be difficult under EU rules on freedom of movement. If refugees cannot be treated worse than EU nationals, that raises the question of whether Austria can cap refugee benefits.

The government does plan to restrict access to welfare payments for people who have lived in Austria for less than five of the past six years, as is the case in Lower Austria.

The court struck down that five-year residency requirement and a cap on the main basic welfare payment of 1,500 euros ($1,847) per family per month, which the government plans to introduce nationally.

The residency requirement’s stated objectives were to promote integration and encourage people to work. Since Austrians who have lived abroad could also fail to meet the residency requirement, the court found that it achieved neither aim, as Austrian citizens should be considered well-integrated and those who have lived abroad no less willing to work.

The government said in a statement that it respected the ruling.

“But we maintain our aim of finding a single countrywide solution that distinguishes between people who have paid into the social security system for longer and those non-Austrians who have newly arrived in the social security system,” it said, adding that a proposal would be submitted this year.
…

Labor strikes. Nationwide protests. Bank failures.

In recent months, Iran has been beset by economic problems despite the promises surrounding the 2015 nuclear deal it struck with world powers.

Its clerically overseen government is starting to take notice. Politicians now offer the idea of possible government referendums or early elections. Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei acknowledged the depths of the problems ahead of the 40th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

“Progress has been made in various sectors in the real sense of the word; however, we admit that in the area of ‘justice’ we are lagging behind,” Khamenei said in February, according to an official transcript. “We should apologize to Allah the Exalted and to our dear people.”

Whether change can come, however, is in question.

​An economy run by the state

Iran today largely remains a state-run economy. It has tried to privatize some of its industries, but critics say they have been handed over to a wealthy elite that looted them and ran them into the ground.

One major strike now grips the Iran National Steel Industrial Group in Ahvaz, in the country’s southwest, where hundreds of workers say they haven’t been paid in three months. Authorities say some demonstrators have been arrested during the strike.

More than 3.2 million Iranians are jobless, government spokesman Mohammad-Bagher Nobakht has said. The unemployment rate is more than 11 percent.

Banks remain hobbled by billions of dollars in bad loans, some from the era of nuclear sanctions and others tainted with fraud. The collapse last year of the Caspian Credit Institute, which promised depositors the kinds of returns rarely seen outside of Ponzi schemes, showed the economic desperation faced by many in Iran.

​Or in security services’​ grip

Meanwhile, much of the economy is in the grip of Iran’s security services.

The country’s powerful Revolutionary Guard paramilitary force, which answers only Khamenei and runs Iran’s ballistic missile program, controls 15 to 30 percent of the economy, analysts say.

Under President Hassan Rouhani, a relatively moderate cleric whose government reached the nuclear accord, there has been a push toward ending military control of some businesses. However, the Guard is unlikely to give up its power easily.

Some suggest hard-liners and the Guard may welcome the economic turmoil in Iran as it weakens Rouhani’s position. His popularity has slipped since winning a landslide re-election in May 2017, in part over the country’s economic woes.

Analysts believe a hard-line protest in late December likely lit the fuse for the nationwide demonstrations that swept across about 75 cities. While initially focused on the economy, they quickly turned anti-government. At least 25 people were killed in clashes surrounding the demonstrations, while nearly 5,000 reportedly were arrested.

​A rare referendum?

In the time since, Rouhani has suggested holding a referendum, without specifying what exactly would be voted on.

“If factions have differences, there is no need to fight, bring it to the ballot,” Rouhani said in a speech Feb. 11. “Do whatever the people say.”

Such words don’t come lightly. There have been only two referendums since the Islamic Revolution. A 1979 referendum installed Iran’s Islamic republic. A 1989 constitutional referendum eliminated the post of prime minister, created Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and made other changes.

A letter signed by 15 prominent Iranians published a day after Rouhani’s speech called for a referendum on whether Iran should become a secular parliamentary democracy. The letter was signed by Iranians living inside the country and abroad, including Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.

“The sum of the experiences of the last 40 years show the impossibility of reforming the Islamic Republic, since by hiding behind divine concepts … the regime has become the principal obstacle to progress and salvation of the Iranian nation,” read the letter, which was posted online.

But even among moderates in Iran’s clerical establishment, there seems to be little interest in such far-reaching changes, which would spell the end of the Islamic Republic. Hard-liners, who dominate the country’s security services, are adamantly opposed.

“I am telling the anti-Islamic government network, the anti-Iranians and those runaway counterrevolutionaries … their wish for a public referendum will never come true,” Tehran Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said Feb. 15, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

​Take responsibility

Yet there are signs that authorities realize that something will have to give. Khamenei’s apology in February took many by surprise, especially as the country’s true hard-liners believe he is the representative of God on earth.

Khamenei’s apology came after a letter from Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition activist who remains under house arrest, demanding that the supreme leader take responsibility for failures.

“You were president for eight years and you have been the absolute ruler for almost 29 years,” Karroubi wrote in the letter, which was not reported on by state media. “Therefore, considering your power and influence over the highest levels of state, you must accept that today’s political, economic, cultural and social situation in the country is a direct result of your guidance and administration.”

Iran’s former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed by many for the country’s economic woes, has come out for early elections. He also demanded they be “free and fair,” while continuing his own campaign against Khamenei, whom he ignored in his attempt to run in the 2017 presidential election.

However, Ahmadinejad’s action drew immediate criticism, as his own widely disputed 2009 re-election sparked unrest and violence that killed dozens.
…

China said Sunday it does not intend to ignite a trade war with the U.S. because the move would be disastrous for the entire world.

“There are no winners in a trade war,” Minister of Commerce Zhong Shan said on the sidelines of China’s annual parliamentary session.

“China does not wish to fight a trade war, nor will China initiate a trade war, but we can handle any challenge and will resolutely defend the interests of our country and our people,” Zhong said.

President Donald Trump signed proclamations Thursday imposing a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, with the new taxes set to go into effect this month.

​US, Japan, EU talk

Trade representatives for Japan and the European Union met with the U.S. trade representative Saturday in an effort to avoid a trade war over Trump’s new tariffs on aluminum and steel.

At the meeting in Brussels, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom and Japanese counterpart Hiroshige Seko discussed the tariffs as part of a trilateral effort to combat unfair trade practices.

The EU said in a statement that both Brussels and Tokyo had serious concerns about the U.S. tariffs. Both powers, two of the biggest trade partners with the United States, have asked for exemptions from the tariffs.

After the meeting, Malmstrom tweeted, “No immediate clarity on the exact U.S. procedure for exemption … so discussions will continue next week.”

“I firmly and clearly expressed my view that this is regrettable,” Seko said at a news conference following the meeting. “… I explained that this could have a bad effect on the entire multilateral trading system.”

Saturday afternoon, Trump accused the EU of treating “the U.S. very badly on trade.” He said if they drop their “horrific barriers & tariffs on U.S. products… we will likewise drop ours,” he wrote in a tweet.

If they don’t, he warned the U.S. would tax European cars and other products.

​Exemptions unclear

On Friday, the European Union said it is not clear whether the bloc will be exempt from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

EU Trade Commissioner Malmstrom said Friday in Brussels, “We hope that we can get confirmation that the EU is excluded from this.”

Canada and Mexico were given specific exemptions from the tariffs for an indefinite period while negotiations continue on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Brazil, South Korea and Australia have also asked for exemptions or special treatment.

Trump imposed the tariffs despite pleas from friends and allies who warned the new measure could ignite a trade war.
…

Trade representatives for Japan and the European Union met with the U.S. trade representative Saturday in an effort to avoid a trade war over President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on aluminum and steel.

At the meeting in Brussels, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom and Japanese counterpart Hiroshige Seko discussed the tariffs as part of a trilateral effort to combat unfair trade practices.

The EU said in a statement that both Brussels and Tokyo had serious concerns about the U.S. tariffs. Both powers, two of the biggest trade partners with the United States, have asked for exemptions from the tariffs.

After the meeting, Malmstrom tweeted, “No immediate clarity on the exact U.S. procedure for exemption … so discussions will continue next week.”

Seko said at a news conference following the meeting, “I firmly and clearly expressed my view that this is regrettable. … I explained that this could have a bad effect on the entire multilateral trading system.” 

Saturday afternoon, Trump accused the EU of treating “the U.S. very badly on trade.” He said if they dropped their “horrific barriers & tariffs on U.S. products … we will likewise drop ours.”

If they don’t, he warned, the United States will tax European cars and other products.

On Friday, the European Union said it was not clear whether the bloc would be exempt from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

Malmstrom said Friday in Brussels, “We hope that we can get confirmation that the EU is excluded from this.”

Trump signed proclamations Thursday imposing a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, with the new taxes set to go into effect in two weeks. 

Canada and Mexico were given specific exemptions from the tariffs for an indefinite period while negotiations continue on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Brazil, South Korea and Australia have also asked for exemptions or special treatment.

Trump imposed the tariffs despite pleas from friends and allies who warned the new measure could ignite a trade war.
…