YCLOAK

Syria’s government signed a contract with an Iranian company on Tuesday to import five gas-fired power plants to the war-battered city of Aleppo, in an early sign of the major role Tehran is expected to play in Syria’s reconstruction.

The deal, reported by Syria’s state news agency SANA, is part of a broader understanding reached by Damascus and Tehran promising Iranian companies contracts to restore electrical infrastructure in Syria, Electricity Minister Zuhair Kharboutli said during a visit to Tehran.

The Aleppo contract was awarded to the Iranian firm Mabna and is valued at around 130 million euros, according to a Kharboutli statement carried Sunday by SANA.

Kharboutli also signed memorandums with Iranian Energy Minister Sattar Mahmoudi promising to import five plants to provide 540 megawatts of electricity to the coastal Latakia province, as well as to build wind and solar plants, and to restore plants in Deir el-Zour and Homs.

Iran has been an indispensable ally to President Bashar Assad, organizing militias from Lebanon to Afghanistan to fight for alongside his forces and sending its own Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria to manage battles. Assad has been battling an uprising against his family’s 47-year dynasty since 2011.

Electricity generation plunges

The fighting has come at a tremendous cost to the nation’s infrastructure. Electricity generation dropped by more than half from 2010 to 2014, according to the latest figures available from the OECD’s International Energy Agency monitoring group.

Syrian troops retook eastern Aleppo at the end of last year with the help of Russian air raids and Iran-backed militias after years of heavy fighting. In the weeks after the fighting ended, electricity was cut off across the entire city, even in government-held neighborhoods, but residents say power has since been restored in some areas.

Most of the city’s power plants were in eastern Aleppo, which was captured by rebels in 2012 and suffered catastrophic destruction during the government’s drive to recapture it.

Assad’s government awarded a concession to Iran to operate a new cellular network for Syria in January. Other concessions signed to Iran include thousands of hectares of land for farming and oil and gas terminals, and the operation of a phosphate mine in central Syria, according to Iran’s official IRNA news agency.
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Eiffel Tower employees planned a walkout, angry carnival workers snarled traffic around Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, and Paris police girded for potential violence as unions and others hold nationwide protests Tuesday against changes to labor laws they fear corrode job security.

The protests are the first big public display of discontent with President Emmanuel Macron’s presidency, which kicked off in May amid enthusiasm over his promises of reviving up the French economy but is now foundering amid anger over the labor decrees and other domestic troubles.

The prominent CGT union is leading Tuesday’s protests, calling for strikes and organizing some 180 demonstrations against last labor decrees unveiled last month by Macron’s government.

At the Eiffel Tower, CGT union representative Denis Vavassori told The Associated Press that workers plan a walkout Tuesday afternoon, but it is unclear so far whether the monument will be forced to close or will stay partially open for tourists.

Horn-tooting funfair workers held a separate protest movement Tuesday against legal changes they say favor big corporations and could wipe out their centuries-old industry.

Dozens of big rigs drove at a snail’s pace around the Arc de Triomphe, causing rush-hour traffic snarls as protesters danced and waved flags on a flat-bed truck with a severed plastic head from a funfair ride.

The workers said they timed their protest to coincide with Tuesday’s broader labor demonstrations, since both movements are about workers fearing their jobs are at threat.

Bumper car worker Sam Frechon said, “everybody likes funfairs. Everybody has been to a funfair one time in his life … Funfair is France.”

Meanwhile, thousands of union activists marched Tuesday morning in the Mediterranean city of Marseille, in Le Havre on the English Channel and other cities.

An afternoon march is planned in Paris, where police announced extra deployments. While union marches are usually peaceful, troublemakers on the margins often clash with police. A broad movement against similar labor reforms last year saw several weeks of scattered violence.

The protests come amid anger at a comment last week by Macron suggesting that opponents of labor reform are “lazy.” Government spokesman Christophe Castaner said on RTL radio Tuesday that Macron didn’t mean workers themselves but politicians who failed to update French labor rules for a globalized age.

Macron’s labor decrees — which reduce the power of unions and give companies more authority to fire workers and influence workplace rules — are the first step in what he hopes are deep economic changes. The decrees are to be finalized this month.

Critics say they dismantle hard-fought worker protections and accuse the government of being undemocratic for using a special method to push the decrees through parliament.

Companies argue that existing rules prevent them from hiring and contribute to France’s high unemployment rate, currently around 10 percent.

Some unions refused to join the protests, preferring to negotiate with the government over upcoming changes to unemployment and retirement rules instead of taking their grievances to the street.

Macron himself chose Tuesday to go to the French Caribbean to bring aid and meet with victims of Hurricane Irma.
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While U.S. stock indexes continue to see record breaking gains and U.S. employment numbers are encouraging, American farmers continue to struggle with high costs for fertilizer and seed at a time when demand and prices for their products are low. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, the economic hardship has a ripple effect beyond the farmers’ fields.
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The former chairman of the world’s largest meatpacker, whose testimony implicated Brazil’s president in corruption, turned himself in to police Sunday after the country’s Supreme Court ordered his arrest.

Joesley Batista has avoided prosecution under a plea bargain deal in which he described how meatpacking giant JBS had bribed dozens of politicians, including President Michel Temer.

Earlier this year, Temer was charged with corruption for allegedly orchestrating a scheme in which he would get payouts totaling millions of dollars for helping JBS resolve a business issue.

Temer denies wrongdoing, and Congress voted in August that he would not stand trial on the charge while in office.

But Brazil’s sprawling probe into the massive trade in bribes and kickbacks for favors between companies and politicians, known as Operation Car Wash, continues to churn out new allegations on almost a daily basis. Just this week the country’s chief prosecutor, Rodrigo Janot, filed charges against three former presidents and several other powerful politicians, accusing them of forming criminal organizations to pilfer from public coffers, and authorities detained a former Cabinet minister and close ally of Temer after $16 million in cash was found in an apartment linked to him.

Janot also has said he plans to file more charges against Temer. To do so, he’ll need to act in the coming days since his terms ends on Sept. 18.

But the specter that Batista and others withheld information could cast a pall over the Car Wash investigation, which has relied heavily on plea bargain deals, a fairly new innovation here. Many in Brazil are uneasy with the agreements, in general, and the deals JBS executives got provoked specific outrage from those who thought they were too lenient.

Janot said last week that he is investigating whether Batista and other cooperating witnesses omitted some information from their testimony and he has threatened to revoke the deals if they didn’t tell the whole truth.

The revelation came after Janot’s office received audio of a conversation between Batista and Ricardo Saud, an executive at J&F Investimentos, the holding company that controls JBS. The men apparently did not know they were being recorded, and Janot said it contained vague references to potentially illicit activity not previously disclosed, including the possibility of wrongdoing in his own office and at the Supreme Court.

He was careful to add that any information they have given — like the allegations against Temer — was still valid.

In his decision, Justice Edson Fachin said there was sufficient indication that Batista and Saud had withheld information from prosecutors when formalizing their plea bargains. Fachin ordered both men be detained. The decision was made Friday but was only made public by the court on Sunday.

Guilherme Barros of the public relations firm GBR that represents J&F said Batista and Saud have turned themselves in to Federal Police in the city. A statement e-mailed by GBR said that both Batista and Saud deny that they lied or omitted information in their deals and that they are fulfilling the terms of the agreement.
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The White House’s decision this week to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), carries enormous repercussions for the nearly 800,000 beneficiaries: The undocumented young people who were brought to the United States as children.

But the cost, which is difficult to quantify for a workforce faced with the real possibility of losing their job and forced to leave the country, is evident to employers, who largely view both the moral and economic implications of ending the program as intertwined.

“Losing [the economic contributions of DACA recipients] is a direct cost,” said Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for New York City, which represents the city’s business leadership. She said the state’s DACA workforce contributes several billion dollars a year to the local economy.

WATCH: DACA Repeal to Cost U.S. Businesses, Economy Billions

“It’s also a signal to the rest of the world that somehow America is no longer a place that is embracing talent and hard work and the energy of immigrants,” Wylde told VOA. “That message has a ripple effect in terms of hurting recruitment efforts by our major companies, because they need talent — multilingual talent — from all over the world.”

Employers bear the brunt

To date, more than 400 U.S. entrepreneur and business leaders have signed an open letter that calls on U.S. President Donald Trump and Congress to preserve DACA and provide a permanent solution that ensures recipients’ ability to continue working legally in the country without risk of deportation.

“Our economy would lose $460.3 billion from the national GDP and $24.6 billion in Social Security and Medicare tax contributions,” the letter reads, referencing research conducted by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, over a 10-year period.

The conservative-leaning CATO Institute places that figure at $280 billion.

​Lose-lose

Following the announcement of DACA’s repeal, the White House suggested unemployed American workers might somehow benefit, based solely on the age of the workforce.

“There are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.

“Over 950,000 of those are African-Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group. Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs,” Sanders said.

But economists and immigration analysts find fault with Sanders’ argument: The native-born unemployed population is not a perfect substitute for the DACA workforce, and the displacement of one worker for another does not increase productivity.

Under the repeal of DACA, CATO estimated employers would incur $6.3 billion in turnover costs, a figure that includes the recruiting, hiring and training of 720,000 new employees in often highly skilled positions. Thirty-six percent of DACA recipients 25 and older hold a bachelor’s or advanced degree.

Many DACA recipients “are highly educated and working in positions such as health care and education, where they are more highly paid and therefore more productive,” said David Bier, immigration policy analyst at CATO Institute. “[Those are] the industries where you’re going to see a greater impact as a result of this forced turnover caused by the DACA repeal.”

“Contracting the labor force, kicking people out of the country, will not create jobs. It will just shrink the overall size of the economy,” Bier said.

Over the long term, Wylde said, failing to find a permanent solution for DACA workers would inhibit U.S. businesses’ ability to compete.

“We want to be at the forefront of the attraction and support of our talent,” she said. “We don’t want to be deporting them.”
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The White House’s decision to repeal DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, carries enormous repercussions for the nearly 800,000 beneficiaries who arrived in the U.S. as children. Over the next two years, more than 700,000 employed recipients will find themselves without a job. And for their employers, laying off a qualified workforce carries not only moral implications, but billions in lost revenue and an overall reduction in U.S. economic growth. VOA’s Ramon Taylor reports.
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Two back-to-back storms will have a significant impact on U.S. growth and productivity, according to economists tracking the impact of Hurricanes Harvey in Texas, and Irma — expected to make landfall in Florida this weekend. Despite the potential catastrophic loss in lives and capital, economists who spoke with VOA say the damage to the U.S. economy is likely to be short-lived. Mil Arcega has more.
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China’s producer price inflation accelerated more than expected to a four-month high in August, fueled by strong gains in raw materials prices and pointing to strong, sustained growth for both factory profits and the economy.

The producer price index (PPI) rose 6.3 percent in August from a year earlier, from 5.5 percent in July, the National Bureau of Statistics said Saturday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected the August producer price inflation rate would edge up to 5.6 percent, its first pickup in six months.

Strong industrial profits

China’s industrial firms have been posting their strongest profits in years thanks to a government-led construction boom that has fueled demand and prices for everything from cement to steel.

The country’s strong appetite for resources such as iron ore has helped fuel a reflationary pulse in the manufacturing sector worldwide.

But analysts continue to maintain that factory-gate prices will lose steam eventually as the government continues to clamp down on riskier types of financing, which is slowly pushing consumer and corporate borrowing costs higher.

China’s commodities futures markets have rallied hard this year and continued to surge through in August. Strong restocking demand and government pledges to shut inefficient and highly polluting mines and plants have underscored concerns over tight supply heading into winter.

Steel industry expands

Activity in China’s steel industry expanded in August at the fastest pace since April 2016, reflecting high levels of production and low inventory.

With the industrial sector in high gear, China’s economy grew by a faster-than-expected 6.9 percent in the first half of this year, turbo-charged by heavy government spending and massive bank lending last year.

That momentum plus strong August readings so far should allow Beijing to easily meet or beat its full-year growth target of 6.5 percent.

Indeed, relatively steady growth through the rest of the year would see the world’s second-largest economy accelerate for the first time in seven years. Last’s years pace of 6.7 percent was the slowest in 26 years.

China’s consumer inflation rate also rose more than expected to a seven-month high of 1.8 percent in August, the bureau said, the first time it has accelerated in three months.

The consumer price index (CPI) had been expected to rise 1.6 percent on-year compared with an increase of 1.4 percent in July.

Food prices, the biggest component of the consumer price index (CPI), fell 0.2 percent from a year earlier.

Nonfood price inflation quickened to 2.3 percent in August from 2 percent in July. Analysts had expected the CPI to rise 1.6 percent from 1.4 percent in July but remain well within the central bank’s comfort zone.
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