Many Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh facing diminished income are supplementing their needs with work in the camps. Steve Sandford talks to a few young and old entrepreneurs who have set up new businesses in the refugee zones.
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Israel’s markets regulator said on Monday he will propose regulation to ban companies based on bitcoin and other digital currencies from trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE).
Shmuel Hauser, the chairman of the Israel Securities Authority (ISA), told the Calcalist business conference he will bring the proposal to the ISA board next week. If approved, it would be subject to a public hearing and then the TASE bylaws would need to be amended.
“If we have a company that their main business is digital currencies we would not allow it. If already listed, its trading will be suspended,” Hauser said, adding the ISA must find the appropriate regulation for such companies.
Bitcoin plunged by 30 percent to below $12,000 on Friday as investors dumped the cryptocurrency after its sharp rise to nearly $20,000. It recouped some losses to trade above $14,000 on the Bitstamp platform, down 9 percent on the day.
“We feel that the prices of bitcoin behave like bubbles and we don’t want investors to be subject to that volatility and uncertainty,” Hauser said. “There is an importance to signal to the market where things are… Investors should know where we stand.”
Earlier this month, Hauser had said bitcoin-based companies would not be included in TASE indexes and that there was a need for a suitable regulatory framework for such instruments given that the global market value of all digital currencies grew in 2017 to $300 billion from $18 billion.
The proposal will likely be the last for Hauser, who will step down next month after 6-1/2 years as ISA chief.
“But once it’s on its way it will continue to be pursued,” said Hauser, who will be replaced by Anat Guetta.
He said he hopes she will promote easing capital gains taxes and focus on regulatory enforcement.
Management experts are always coming up with innovative ideas to improve the work environment, inspire employees and raise productivity. Big companies in Germany, like Lufthansa, Siemens, Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen’s Audi, are bringing harmony to the workplace by having symphony orchestras and encouraging employees to play music together. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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In 2017, China’s Xi Jinping rose to become the country’s most powerful leader in decades. And as he shoulders more responsibility, analysts say the government in Beijing is likely to take more risks in 2018 at home and overseas, even as it deals with economic challenges at home, a nuclear North Korea and the looming threat of trade tensions with the United States. VOA’s Bill Ide has this report.
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Silicon Valley has long inspired Chinese business and tech ventures. But now that a Chinese dockless bike share company has landed in the Valley, is the tide turning? VOA’s Calla Yu has more.
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Americans are traveling in record numbers this season, according to the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) annual estimate, which forecasts more than 107 million will travel by road, rail or air between now and the start of 2018.
Despite higher gas prices, travel volume is expected to be 3.1 percent higher than last year’s holiday season, the association said.
AAA said this season marks the ninth consecutive year of rising year-end holiday travel in the United States. Since 2005, it said, holiday travel has grown by 21.6 million, an increase of 25 percent.
The majority of travelers, 97.4 million, will make their way to their destinations by road, while 6.4 million people are expected to fly to see family and friends or to take holiday vacations. Only 3.6 million are expected to take to trains, buses or cruise ships for the holiday.
Apparently, not all holiday travelers are making family visits.
AAA said, for the second year in a row, the top destinations for holiday travel are Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California – the homes of theme parks Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
Sunny destinations also make up the next seven entries on the top 10 destinations: Cancun, Mexico; Hawaii, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and several locations in Florida. The only non-beach destination on the list? No. 10, New York City.
What’s a bitcoin worth? Lately nobody knows for sure, but after a wild ride Friday, it’s worth a good deal less than it was Thursday.
After losses over the last few days, the digital currency fell as much as 30 percent overnight in Asia, and the action became so frenzied that the website Coinbase suspended trading. It later made up much of that ground, and slumped 9.5 percent to $14,042 Friday, according to the tracking site CoinDesk.
Experts are warning that bitcoin is a bubble about to burst, but things might get crazier before it does: A lot of people have heard of bitcoin by now, but very few people own it.
“Bubbles burst when the last buyers are in,” said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist for First Franklin. “Who are the last buyers? The general public, unfortunately.”
1,000 people own 40 percent
Ewing said 40 percent of bitcoin belongs to just 1,000 people, and hedge funds and other major investors are going to start buying it soon. But those funds may buy bitcoin and also protect themselves by placing bets that it will fall. Retail investors may just buy it only to see it fall.
“I think investors should approach it with caution and I think many people will dive into it not understanding what it is,” he said.
As bitcoin skyrocketed this month, the volume of trading was unprecedented as investors hoping to catch a ride up piled in. Prices have risen so fast, the fall on Friday returned the price of bitcoin only to where it was trading two weeks ago.
From tea to blockchain overnight
The volatility has created a circuslike atmosphere. Some companies that have added the word “bitcoin” or related terms to their names to get in on the action. The craziest thing is, it’s worked.
Long Island Iced Tea Corp. until this week had been known for its peach-, raspberry-, guava-, lemon- and mango-flavored drinks. Then, on Thursday, the company announced a radical rebranding. It’s changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp., shifting its primary focus from iced tea to “the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.”
Blockchain is a ledger where transactions of digital currencies, like bitcoin, are recorded.
Shares in Long Island Iced Tea soared 200 percent in one day.
The Hicksville, New York, company did what investors are doing, hitching a ride on a currency that raced from less than $10,000 at the end of November to almost $20,000 on Sunday. And it cost less than $1,000 at the beginning of the year.
Crash every three months
The rise of price of bitcoin, which is still difficult to use if you actually want to buy something, has led to heated speculation about when the bubble might burst.
The currency has been, if nothing else, highly elastic, bouncing back every time it crashes, which occurs about once every quarter.
It fell 11.5 percent over two days in early December and 21.5 percent over five days in November.
Curiosity has now driven bitcoin to the futures market, where investors bet on which direction it will go.
Bitcoin futures started trading on two major exchanges, the Cboe and CME, this month. Those futures fell about 8 percent Friday.
Investor beware
If people get burned, it won’t be because they were not warned.
The Securities and Exchange Commission put out a statement last week warning investors to be careful with bitcoin and other digital currencies. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission has proposed regulating bitcoin like a commodity, similar to gold or oil.
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a financial watchdog, issued a similar warning recently.
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Nestle, which sells Arrowhead bottled water, may have to stop taking millions of gallons of water from Southern California’s San Bernardino National Forest because state regulators concluded it lacks valid permits.
The State Water Resources Control Board notified the company on Wednesday that an investigation concluded it doesn’t have proper rights to pipe about three-quarters of the water it currently withdraws for bottling.
“A significant portion of the water currently diverted by Nestle appears to be diverted without a valid basis of right,” the report concluded.
Nestle Waters North America was urged to cut back its water withdrawals unless it can show it has valid water rights to its current sources or to additional groundwater.
The company, a division of the Swiss food giant, also was given 60 days to submit an interim compliance plan.
“We are disappointed by the fact that we have just received a copy of the report from the State Water Resources Control Board and that others appear to have received it much sooner,” Nestle said in a statement Thursday. “Once we have had an opportunity to review the report thoroughly, we will be in a position to respond.”
The move was applauded by activists who have fought to turn off Nestle’s tap in the forest.
Amanda Frye, who filed one of the complaints that prompted the investigation, said she was pleased with the result although she hadn’t read the entire report.
“I feel like it’s a victory,” Frye told the Desert Sun of Palm Springs. “I’m happy that the State Water Resources Control Board did pursue it and look into it. I feel that they’re protecting the people of California.”
Nestle took about 32 million gallons of water from wells and water collection tunnels in the forest last year. A long water board investigation concluded that it only had the right to withdraw 26 acre-feet per year, or about 8.5 million gallons.
Nestle has contended that it inherited rights dating back more than a century to collect water from the forest northeast of Los Angeles. It uses the water in its Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.
Opponents of the water withdrawal have long sought to turn off Nestle’s tap, arguing that it lacked proper permits and that the water usage could harm the local environment and wildlife, particularly in the midst of California’s drought.
In 2015, the U.S. Forest Service was sued by environmental and public interest groups who allege the Swiss-based company was being allowed to operate its Strawberry Canyon pipeline on a permit that expired in 1988. However, the court ruled that the company could continue water operations while its application to renew the permit was pending.
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Bitcoin plunged by a quarter to below $12,000 on Friday as investors dumped the cryptocurrency in manic trading after its blistering ascent to a peak close to $20,000 prompted warnings by experts of a bubble.
It capped a brutal week that had been touted as a new era of mainstream trading for the volatile digital currency when bitcoin futures debuted on CME Group Inc, the world’s largest derivatives market on Sunday.
Friday’s steep fall bled into the U.S. stock market, where shares of companies that have recently lashed their fortunes to bitcoin or blockchain — its underlying technology — took a hard knock in early trading.
The biggest and best-known cryptocurrency had seen a staggering twentyfold increase since the start of the year, climbing from less than $1,000 to as high as $19,666 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange on Sunday and to over $20,000 on other exchanges.
Bitcoin has fallen each day since, with losses accelerating on Friday.
In the futures market, bitcoin one-month futures on Cboe Global Markets were halted due to the steep price drop, while those trading on the CME hit the limit down threshold.
In the spot market, bitcoin fell to as low as $11,159, down more than 25 percent on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, its largest one-day drop in nearly three years. For the week, it was down around a third — its worst performance since April 2013.
“After its parabolic-like rally, a crash was imminent and so it has proved,” said Fawad Razaqzada, market analyst at Forex.com in London. “Investors may have also been put off buying bitcoin at those elevated levels amid repeated warnings from experts about the way it had climbed near $20,000.”
“A manic upward swing led by the herd will be followed by a downturn as the emotional sentiment changes,” said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive of industry website Cryptocompare in London. “A lot of traders have been waiting for this large correction.”
“With the end of the year in sight a lot of investors will be taking profits and saying thank you very much and closing their books for the holiday period,” he added.
Warnings about the risks of investing in the unregulated market have increased — Denmark’s central bank governor called it a “deadly” gamble — and there have been worries about the security of exchanges on which cryptocurrencies are bought and sold.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Youbit said on Tuesday it is shutting down and is filing for bankruptcy after it was hacked for the second time this year.
Coinbase, a U.S. company that runs one of the biggest exchanges and provides digital “wallets” for storing bitcoins, said on Wednesday it would investigate accusations of insider trading, following a sharp increase in the price of a bitcoin spin-off hours before it announced support for it.
Crypto-rivals
As rival cryptocurrencies slid along with bitcoin, the total estimated value of the crypto market fell to as low as $440 billion, according to industry website Coinmarketcap, having neared $650 billion just a day earlier.
But other cryptocurrencies surged this week, with investors moving into cheaper digital coins, rather than cashing out of the sector.
Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market size, soared to almost $900 earlier in the week, from around $500 a week earlier. Ripple, the third-biggest, has more than quadrupled in price since Monday.
Stephen Innes, head of trading in Asia-Pacific for retail FX broker Oanda in Singapore, said that there have also been moves out of bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash, a clone of the original cryptocurrency. Oanda does not handle trading in bitcoin.
“Most of it is unsophisticated retail traders getting burned badly,” Innes said on bitcoin’s recent retreat.
While some say the launch by CME and its rival Cboe Global Markets of bitcoin futures over the last two weeks has given the digital currency some perceived legitimacy, many policymakers remain skeptical.
Bitcoin is known to go through wild swings. In November, it tumbled almost 30 percent in four days from $7,888 to $5,555. In September, it fell 40 percent from $4,979 to $2,972.
Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York and Jemima Kelly in London; Additional reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro in Tokyo; Editing by Keith Weir and Susan Thomas.
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For retailers, Christmas can be a make or break season, but for a small Czech family owned business, Christmas means it is time to start looking ahead to next Christmas. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The U.N. Security Council is expected to vote Friday on another round of targeted sanctions aimed at further restricting North Korea’s crude oil imports, which fuel its illicit weapons programs.
The proposed sanctions come in response to Pyongyang’s November 28 launch of a newly developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) called a Hwasong-15, which the North Koreans claim is capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere in the continental United States.
It was Pyongyang’s third ICMB test this year and its 20th ballistic missile launch of 2017.
The United States drafted the text and negotiated it with China. It was circulated to the wider council membership on Thursday, and a vote is scheduled Friday at 1 p.m. EST (1800 UTC).
“We hope there will be a consensus and vote — the sooner, the better — and we are on board,” France’s U.N. ambassador, Francois Delattre, told reporters Thursday.
‘A good message’
“We support it wholeheartedly and we hope that it will be unanimous,” Japanese Ambassador Koro Bessho said. “I think it will be sending a good message if we can pass it, and that’s what I think will happen.”
The draft resolution, seen by VOA, seeks to cap crude oil exports to North Korea at current levels, not exceeding 4 million barrels per year. It would allow exemptions only on a case-by-case basis with Security Council approval.
The text also seeks to impose a ban on 90 percent of refined petroleum products exported to North Korea, as well as on all industrial machinery and some transport vehicles.
An earlier round of sanctions this year called on states not to renew work visas for North Korean laborers. The new draft goes a step further, requiring all North Koreans working abroad and their minders to return home within a year.
Council members have expressed concern that the regime sends its citizens abroad to perform manual labor and then confiscates all or part of their wages to help finance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
Deceptive shipping alleged
Some council members have also noted that North Korea appears to be illegally exporting coal and acquiring prohibited oil through deceptive shipping practices. The proposed text seeks to tighten maritime interdiction and inspection regimes.
There are also 19 new individuals, most of them in the banking sector, proposed for travel bans and asset freezes, as well as the Army ministry.
If approved, this will be the third round of targeted sanctions imposed by the Security Council this year in a bid to stop Pyongyang from advancing its illicit weapons programs and bring it to the negotiating table.
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Papa John’s founder John Schnatter will step down as CEO next month, about two months after he publicly criticized the NFL leadership over national anthem protests by football players — comments for which the company later apologized.
Schnatter will be replaced as chief executive by Chief Operating Officer Steve Ritchie on Jan. 1, the company announced Thursday. Schnatter, who appears in the chain’s commercials and on its pizza boxes, and is the company’s biggest shareholder, remains chairman of the board.
Earlier this year, Schnatter blamed slowing sales growth at Papa John’s — an NFL sponsor and advertiser — on the outcry surrounding players kneeling during the national anthem. Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick had kneeled during the national anthem to protest what he said was police mistreatment of black men, and other players started kneeling as well.
“The controversy is polarizing the customer, polarizing the country,” Schnatter said during a conference call about the company’s earnings on Nov. 1.
Papa John’s apologized two weeks later, after white supremacists praised Schnatter’s comments. The Louisville, Kentucky-based company distanced itself from the group, saying that it did not want them to buy their pizza.
Ritchie declined to say Thursday if the NFL comments played a role in Schnatter stepping down, only saying that it’s “the right time to make this change.”
Tougher competition
Shares of Papa John’s are down about 13 percent since the day before the NFL comments were made, reducing the value of Schnatter’s stake in the company by nearly $84 million. Schnatter owns about 9.5 million shares of Papa John’s International Inc., and his total stake was valued at more than $560 million on Thursday, according to FactSet. The company’s stock is down 30 percent since the beginning of the year.
Schnatter, 56, founded Papa John’s more than three decades ago, when he turned a broom closet at his father’s bar into a pizza spot. And it has since grown to more than 5,000 locations. Schnatter has also become the face of the company, showing up in TV ads with former football player Peyton Manning. Schnatter stepped away from the CEO role before, in 2005, but returned about three years later.
Ritchie said new ads would come out next year. The company said later Thursday that it had “no plans to remove John from our communications.”
The Papa John’s leadership change comes as the pizza chains that once dominated the fast-food delivery business face tougher competition from hamburger and fried-chicken chains that are expanding their delivery business. McDonald’s Corp., for example, expects to increase delivery from 5,000 of its nearly 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of the year.
New strategy
Ritchie said his focus as CEO will be making it easier for customers to order a Papa John’s pizza from anywhere. That’s a strategy that has worked for Domino’s, which takes orders from tweets, text messages and voice-activated devices, such as Amazon’s Echo. Papa John’s customers can order through Facebook and Apple TV, but Ritchie said he wants the chain to be everywhere customers are.
“The world is evolving and changing,” he said.
Ritchie, 43, began working at a Papa John’s restaurant 21 years ago, making pizzas and answering phones, the company said. He became a franchise owner in 2006 and owns nine locations. He was named chief operating officer three years ago. Ritchie said plans for him to succeed Schnatter were made after that.
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This remote town in Peru’s southern Andes was supposed to serve as a model for how companies can help communities uprooted by mining.
Named Nueva Fuerabamba, it was built to house around 1,600 people who gave up their village and farmland to make room for a massive, open-pit copper mine.
The new hamlet boasts paved streets and tidy houses with electricity and indoor plumbing, once luxuries to the indigenous Quechua-speaking people who now call this place home.
The mine’s operator, MMG Ltd, the Melbourne-based unit of state-owned China Minmetals Corp, threw in jobs and enough cash so that some villagers no longer work.
But the high-profile deal has not brought the harmony sought by villagers or MMG, a testament to the difficulty in averting mining disputes in this mineral-rich nation.
Resource battles are common in Latin America, but tensions are particularly high in Peru, the world’s No. 2 producer of copper, zinc and silver. Peasant farmers have revolted against an industry that many see as damaging their land and livelihoods while denying them a fair share of the wealth.
Peru is home to 167 social conflicts, most related to mining, according to the national ombudsman’s office, whose mission includes defusing hostilities.
Nueva Fuerabamba was the centerpiece of one of the most generous mining settlements ever negotiated in Peru. But three years after moving in, many transplants are struggling amid their suburban-style conveniences, Reuters interviews with two dozen residents showed.
Many miss their old lives growing potatoes and raising livestock. Some have squandered their cash settlements. Idleness and isolation have dulled the spirits of a people whose ancestors were feared cattle rustlers.
“It is like we are trapped in a jail, in a cage where little animals are kept,” said Cipriano Lima, 43, a former farmer.
Meanwhile, the mine, known as Las Bambas, has remained a magnet for discontent. Clashes between demonstrators and authorities in 2015 and 2016 left four area men dead.
Nueva Fuerabamba residents have blocked copper transport roads to press for more financial help from MMG.
The company acknowledged the transition has been difficult for some villagers, but said most have benefited from improved housing, healthcare and education.
“Nueva Fuerabamba has experienced significant positive change,” Troy Hey, MMG’s executive general manager of stakeholder relations, said in an email to Reuters. MMG said it spent “hundreds of millions” on the relocation effort.
Mining is the driver of Peru’s economy, which has averaged 5.5 percent annual growth over the past decade. Still, pitched conflicts have derailed billions of dollars worth of investment in recent years, including projects by Newmont Mining and Southern Copper.
To defuse opposition, President Pablo Kuczynski has vowed to boost social services in rural highland areas, where nearly half of residents live in poverty.
But moving from conflict to cooperation is not easy after centuries of mistrust. Relocations are particularly fraught, according to Camilo Leon, a mining resettlement specialist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
Subsistence farmers have struggled to adapt to the loss of their traditions and the “very urban, very organized” layout of planned towns, Leon said.
“It is generally a shock for rural communities,” Leon said.
At least six proposed mines have required relocations in Peru in the past decade, Leon said. Later this month, Peru will tender a $2-billion copper project, Michiquillay, which would require moving yet another village.
‘Everything is Money’
MMG inherited the Nueva Fuerabamba project when it bought Las Bambas from Switzerland’s Glencore Plc in 2014 for $7 billion.
Under terms of a deal struck in 2009 and reviewed by Reuters, villagers voted to trade their existing homes and farmland for houses in a new community. Heads of each household, about 500 in all, were promised mining jobs. University scholarships would be given to their children. Residents were to receive new land for farming and grazing, albeit in a parcel four hours away by car.
Cash was an added sweetener. Villagers say each household got 400,000 soles ($120,000), which amounts to a lifetime’s earnings for a minimum-wage worker in Peru.
MMG declined to confirm the payments, saying its agreements are confidential.
Built into a hillside 15 miles from the Las Bambas mine, Nueva Fuerabamba was the product of extensive community input, MMG said. Amenities include a hospital, soccer fields and a cement bull ring for festivals.
But some residents say the deal has not been the windfall they hoped. Their new two-and-three story houses, made of drywall, are drafty and appear flimsy compared to their old thatched-roof adobe cottages heated by wood-fired stoves, some said.
Many no longer plant crops or tend livestock because their replacement plots are too far away. Jobs provided by MMG mostly involve maintaining the town because most residents lack the skills to work in a modern mine.
Many villagers spent their settlements unwisely, said community president Alfonso Vargas. “Some invested in businesses but others did not. They went drinking,” he said.
Now basics like water, food and fuel – once wrested from the land – must be paid for.
“Everything is money,” Margot Portilla, 20, said as she cooked rice on a gas stove in her sister-in-law’s bright-yellow home. “Before we could make a fire for cooking with cow dung. Now we have to buy gas.”
Ghost Town
Some residents said they have benefited from the move.
The new town is cleaner than the old village, said Betsabe Mendoza, 25. She invested her settlement in a metalworking business in a bigger town.
Portilla, the young mom, says her younger sisters are getting a better education than she did.
Still, the streets of Nueva Fuerabamba were virtually deserted on a recent weekday. Vargas, the community leader, said many residents have returned to the countryside or sought work elsewhere.
Alcoholism, fueled by idle time and settlement money, is on the rise, he said.
Some villagers have committed suicide. Over the 12 months through July, four residents killed themselves by taking farming chemicals, according to the provincial district attorney’s office. It could not provide data on suicides in the old village of Fuerabamba.
MMG, citing an “independent” study done prior to the relocation, said the community previously suffered from high rates of domestic violence, alcoholism, illiteracy and poverty.
While the company considers the new town a success, it acknowledged the transition has not been easy for all.
“Connection to land, livelihood restoration and simple adaptation to new living conditions remain a challenge,” MMG said.
Nueva Fuerabamba residents continue pressuring the company for additional assistance. Demands include more jobs and deeds to their houses, which have yet to be delivered because of bureaucratic delays, said Godofredo Huamani, the community’s lawyer.
MMG said it stays apace of community needs through town hall meetings and has representatives on hand to field complaints.
While villagers fret about the future, many cling to the past. Flora Huamani, 39, a mother of four girls, recalled how women used to get together to weave wool from their own sheep into the embroidered black dresses they wear.
“Those were our traditions,” said Huamani from a bench in her walled front yard. “Now our tradition is meeting after meeting after meeting” to discuss the community’s problems.
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The United States needs to encourage domestic production of a handful of minerals critical for the technology and defense industries, and stem reliance on China, U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Tuesday.
Zinke made the remarks at the Interior Department as he unveiled a report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which detailed the extent to which the United States is dependent upon foreign competitors for its supply of certain minerals.
The report identified 23 out of 88 minerals that are priorities for U.S. national defense and the economy because they are components in products ranging from batteries to military equipment.
The report found that the United States was 100 percent net import reliant on 20 mineral commodities in 2016, including manganese, niobium, tantalum and others. In 1954, the U.S. was 100 percent import reliant for the supply of just eight nonfuel mineral commodities.
“We have the minerals here and likely we have enough to provide our needs and be a world trader in them, but we have to go forward and identify where they are at,” Zinke told reporters at an Interior Department briefing.
He also blamed previous administrations for allowing foreign competitors like China to dominate mineral production for minerals, such as rare earth elements, used in smartphones, computers and military equipment.
Zinke said the report is likely to shape Interior Department policy-making in 2018, as the agency looks to carry out its “Energy Dominance” strategy, expanding mining and resource extraction on federal lands.
The survey is the first update of a 1973 USGS report that catalogued the production of minerals worldwide. The update was started under the Obama administration in 2013.
Many of the commodities that are covered in the new volume were of minor importance when the original survey was done, since it pre-dated the global electronics boom.
The USGS and Interior Department said the report is meant to be used by national security experts, economists, private companies, the World Bank and resource managers.
It does not offer policy recommendations, but Zinke will rely on the findings as he prioritizes research into certain mineral deposit areas on federal land and plans policies to promote mining.
“We do expect that to lead to policy changes. The USGS is not involved in policy, but I suspect you will see some policy changes,” said Larry Meinert, lead author of the report.
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Greece’s parliament on Tuesday approved the 2018 state budget, which includes further austerity measures beyond the official end of the country’s third international bailout next summer.
All 153 lawmakers from the left-led governing coalition backed the budget measures in a late vote, while the 144 opposition lawmakers present rejected them. Three were absent from the vote.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras promised that the country would smoothly exit the eight-year crisis that has seen its economy shrink by a quarter and unemployment hit highs previously unseen during peacetime.
Tsipras argued that international money markets — on whose credit Greece will have to depend once its rescue loan program ends — are showing strong confidence in the country’s prospects, with the yield on Greek government bonds dropping to a pre-crisis low of less than 4 percent.
“The way to exit [the crisis] is for our borrowing costs to return to acceptable levels so the country can finance itself without the restrictive bailout framework,” Tsipras said.
The budget promises Greece’s international lenders continued belt-tightening measures and high primary budget surpluses — the budget balance before debt and interest payments are taken into account.
It sets the primary surplus at 2.44 percent for 2017 and 3.82 percent for 2018, higher than previously estimated. The economy is forecast to grow by 1.6 percent in 2017 and 2.5 percent next year, helped by a return to growth across Europe.
Debt to hold steady
With the Greek economy worth around 185 billion euros ($271 billion) in 2018, the national debt will remain at just under 180 percent of annual GDP, roughly unchanged from the previous year.
Greeks will see new tax hikes and pension cuts over the next two years. Bailout lenders had demanded additional guarantees the Greek economy will be stabilized before considering measures to improve the country’s debt repayment terms.
Opposition parties have criticized the budget, saying it will prolong the pain for Greeks. The main opposition conservative New Democracy party said the budget was “bleeding dry” the Greek people with 1.9 billion euros’ worth of new austerity measures.
Greece’s latest international bailout officially ends in August, more than eight years after the country began receiving emergency loans from the other European Union countries that use the euro currency, as well as from the International Monetary Fund.
In return for the funds, successive governments have had to impose repeated rounds of tax hikes and spending cuts, as well as structural changes aimed at reforming the country’s moribund economy and making it more competitive.
Tsipras first was elected in 2015 on promises to quickly end the painful austerity. But negotiations with bailout creditors soon went awry and, threatened with a disastrous euro exit, he signed on to more income cuts, increased taxation and further spending cuts.
His governing Syriza party is trailing New Democracy in the polls. But Tsipras insisted Tuesday that the government would see out its mandate, which ends in 2019.
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U.S. single-family homebuilding and permits surged to more than 10-year highs in November, in a hopeful sign for a housing market that has been hobbled by supply constraints.
Builders have struggled to meet robust demand for housing, which is being fueled by a labor market near full employment.
Land and skilled labor have been in short supply, while lumber price increases have accelerated.
The Commerce Department said on Tuesday that single-family homebuilding, which accounts for the largest share of the housing market, jumped 5.3 percent to a rate of 930,000 units.
That was the highest level since September 2007.
Pointing to further gains, single-family home permits rose 1.4 percent to a pace of 862,000 units, a level not seen since August 2007. The jump in groundbreaking on single-family housing units suggests housing could contribute to gross domestic product in the fourth quarter.
Investment in residential construction has declined for two straight quarters, weighing on economic growth. A survey on Monday showed confidence among homebuilders soaring to near an 18-1/2-year high in December, amid optimism over buyer traffic and sales over the next six months.
Prices of U.S. Treasuries remained at session lows after the data while the dollar pared declines against a basket of currencies. U.S. stock index futures were mixed.
Last month, single-family home construction in the densely-populated South shot up 8.4 percent to the highest level since July 2007 as disruptions from recent hurricanes continued to fade and communities in the region replaced houses damaged by flooding.
Single-family starts in the West increased 11.4 percent to their highest level since July 2007. They were unchanged in the Northeast and fell 11.1 percent in the Midwest.
Overall housing starts increased 3.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.297 million units. While that was the highest level since October 2016, October’s sales pace was revised down to 1.256 million units from the previously reported 1.290 million units.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast housing starts decreasing to a pace of 1.250 million units last month. Starts for the volatile multi-family housing segment fell 1.6 percent to a rate of 367,000 units.
Overall building permits dropped 1.4 percent to a rate of 1.298 million units in November, pulled down by a 6.4 percent decline in permits for the construction of multi-family homes.
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The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Tuesday on a Republican $1.5 trillion tax bill that will provide tax relief for most Americans, but benefit the wealthy the most, according to a non-partisan tax analysis group.
Following the House vote, the Senate will vote on the measure later Tuesday, according to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. If both houses approve the measure, it will be sent to President Donald Trump for him to sign into law, completing the first extensive modification of the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years and giving Trump his first major legislative victory.
Republican lawmakers appear to have the votes to permanently cut corporate taxes from 35 to 21 percent, temporarily and modestly reduce taxes paid by wage and salary earners, and boost America’s national debt by up to $1.5 trillion.
The non-partisan Tax Policy Center concluded Monday the bill would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans next year, but average cuts for top earners would greatly exceed reductions for people earning less.
The legislation also partially repeals former president Barack Obama’s signature health care law and is expected to add nearly $1.5 trillion to the federal debt during the next decade.
Republican supporters of the measure are hoping that eight consecutive years of U.S. economic growth will continue and accelerate due to a stimulus they hope the tax cuts will provide.
“This is going to make such a positive difference in the lives of working Americans,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
Democratic opposition
Democrats, who were excluded from the Republican closed-door bill drafting meetings, are unanimously opposed to the measure. They have argued the tax package favors big corporations and the wealthy, largely ignores the middle class and forces the elderly to pay a heavy price.
“There are so many rip-offs in this bill that people are going to say this is some kind of new Gilded Age,” said Ron Wyden, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Tax Committee.
Unless Republicans withdraw their support at the last minute, Congress could send the tax bill to the White House for Trump’s signature as early as Wednesday. Minority Democrats do not have the votes to kill the bill on their own, but have vowed to make it a major campaign issue in next year’s midterm elections.
As the Republican bill moves closer to becoming law, many polls show that most Americans oppose it.
A Harvard CAPS-Harris survey conducted between December 8-11 indicates 64-percent of American voters oppose the measure. A new CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS shows 55-percent of Americans oppose it, a 10-percent increase since early November. A Reuters/Ipsos released on December 11 found nearly half of Americans opposed the plan.
When asked about the bill’s weak showing in the polls, Ryan said he had “no concerns whatsoever,” and added “when you have a mudfest on TV … that’s what’s going to happen. Results are going to make this popular.”
CryptoKitties, an online game and marketplace featuring virtual kittens, has become an entry point for curious outsiders looking to dabble in cryptocurrencies – decentralized digital monies that rely on blockchain technology to enable peer-to-peer transactions.
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Another security based on the price of bitcoin, the digital currency that has soared in value and volatility this year, began trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Sunday.
The CME Group, which owns the exchange, opened up bitcoin futures for trading at 6 p.m. EST on Sunday. The futures contract that expires in January opened higher at $20,650, then declined steadily. The futures were trading at $18,775 at 9:00 p.m. EST, down $725.
The CME futures, like the ones that CME competitor the Cboe started trading last week, do not involve actual bitcoin. The CME’s futures will track an index of bitcoin prices pulled from several private exchanges. The Cboe’s futures track the price of bitcoin prices on the particular private exchange known as Gemini.
Each contract sold on the CME will be for five bitcoin.
As bitcoin’s price has skyrocketed on private exchanges this year, largely under its own momentum, interest on Wall Street has grown. The virtual currency was trading below $1,000 at the beginning of the year, and rose to more than $19,000 on some exchanges in the days leading up to its debut on the Cboe and CME. Bitcoin was trading at $18,417 Sunday evening on Coinbase.
But the growing interest in bitcoin has raised questions on whether its value has gotten too frothy. The Securities and Exchange Commission put out a statement last week warning investors to be careful with any investment in bitcoin or other digital currencies. Further, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission has proposed regulating bitcoin like a commodity, not unlike gold, silver, platinum or oil.
Futures are a type of contract where a buyer and seller agree on a price on a particular item to be delivered on a certain date in the future, hence the name. Futures are available for nearly every type of security out there, but are most familiarly used in commodities, like oil wheat, soy and gold.
Bitcoin is the world’s most popular virtual currency. Such currencies are not tied to a bank or government and allow users to spend money anonymously. They are basically lines of computer code that are digitally signed each time they are traded.
A debate is raging on the merits of such currencies. Some say they serve merely to facilitate money laundering and illicit, anonymous payments. Others say they can be helpful methods of payment, such as in crisis situations where national currencies have collapsed.
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Vietnam is set to auction up to a $5 billion stake in top brewer Sabeco on Monday, with Thai Beverage the only potential bidder to have expressed interest in a majority stake.
The keenly anticipated sale of the state-owned maker of Bia Saigon gained momentum in recent months after being hampered for years by political resistance, fickle policy-making and complications over valuations.
The government has set a minimum sale price of 320,000 dong or $14.10 a share for Saigon Beer Alcohol Beverage Corp (Sabeco), whose shares have nearly trebled to 309,200 dong since its listing a year ago.
Thai Beverage, through a partly owned Vietnam unit, is the only company that has expressed interest in owning more than 25 percent of the company, which has roughly 40 percent of the beer-loving Vietnamese market.
So far no formal bid had been made.
Vietnam’s young population and booming economy should make Sabeco an attractive asset for global brewers hoping to expand in Southeast Asia, but a high minimum bid price and foreign ownership limits appear to have turned off potential buyers.
Sabeco’s foreign ownership is capped at 49 percent. With 10 percent already in foreign hands, that leaves only 39 percent on the table for overseas buyers at Monday’s auction. Local bidders can bid for a majority stake of up to 54 percent. Heinken holds a 5 percent stake.
“There’s a disconnect between what the government wants to achieve and how international brewers view this auction,” said one person familiar with the matter. “In a normal auction, bidders are fully aware of what stake they’ll end up owning and bid for it accordingly,” said the person, who was not authorized to speak to the media.
Unlike similar sales in developed markets, where investors are whittled down over several rounds and offers can be adjusted, Sabeco bidders need to submit a single offer for a specific number of shares in a sealed envelope in one round.
Thai Bev, controlled by tycoon Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, was keen to acquire Sabeco as part of a strategy to expand outside its home market, sources told Reuters. The company had lined up bank guarantees to support the bid by its Vietnam unit, sources said.
There was no immediate response from Thai Bev to a query from Reuters.
Reuters previously reported that the auction was drawing the interest of brewing groups such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Kirin Holdings, Asahi Group Holdings and San Miguel, but there is no clear sign of whether they have participated in the auction so far.
The government’s minimum price for the 54 percent stake on offer valued Sabeco at about 36 times core earnings, more than double the trading multiples of around 15 for some global peers, according to Reuters data.
Vietnam’s trade ministry is expected to announce the bidding result Monday afternoon.
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U.S. President Donald Trump continued to tout the Republican tax bill Saturday, saying “everybody’s going to benefit” if it is signed into law.
“But I think the greatest benefit is going to be for jobs and for the middle class, middle income,” Trump said to reporters on the White House South Lawn before departing for the presidential Camp David retreat in Maryland.
Republican Senate and House negotiators finalized a final version Friday of their compromise $1.5 trillion tax bill, after appeasing Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who demanded an expansion of the child tax credit that provides benefits for low-income families.
Republican lawmakers hammered out differences Wednesday between the House and Senate versions, and both chambers of Congress plan to vote on the final bill early next week, with the intent of submitting it to President Donald Trump for his signature before Christmas.
Rubio said late Friday he would vote for the bill after saying one day earlier he would not support it unless it includes a more generous child tax credit, which has been beneficial to lower-income families by partially offsetting the expenses of raising children.
The bill doubles the current child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and allows parents to get a refund of up to $1,400 if the credit is greater than their federal income tax liability.
No Democratic support
No Democrats have publicly expressed their support for the legislation, which they have attacked as a giveaway to corporations and the wealthiest of taxpayers, including Trump, a billionaire.
The measure would cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, heavily weighted toward lower corporate taxation, and perhaps add $1 trillion or more to the country’s long-term $20 trillion debt obligations to investors and foreign governments such as China – the largest owner of U.S. debt.
When asked about the debt, Trump responded by saying a new tax law will encourage inflows of overseas money. “This is going to bring money in. As an example, we think four trillion dollars will come flowing back into the country. That’s money that’s overseas, that’s stuck there for years and years.”
Trump administration officials say millions of individual taxpayers, but not everyone, would see their annual tax obligation to the government cut, in many cases by a few hundred dollars, or in the case of wealthy taxpayers, by thousands of dollars.
In the final compromise bill, the individual tax rate for the highest income earners would be cut from 39.6 percent to 37 percent.
The country’s corporate tax rate, now at 35 percent and among the highest in the industrialized world, would be cut substantially to 21 percent.
With Democrat Doug Jones winning a special Senate election Tuesday in Alabama, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has asked that the final tax vote be delayed until January after Jones is sworn in. But Republicans appear intent on voting before then while they have one more Republican vote in the Senate.
An original version of the Senate bill was approved 51-49 with Rubio’s support. So if Rubio votes against the bill, it could still pass, though with a narrower margin.
If approved and signed into law, the tax legislation would be the first major legislative achievement of Trump’s nearly 11-month presidency after he and Republicans failed earlier this year dismantle national health care policies championed by former president Barack Obama.
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Two titans of U.S. business have come together to demand that Congress find an immediate solution for DACA recipients, whose legal immigration status will come to an end in March without intervention.
Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries, and Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, wrote in an opinion piece published Thursday in The Washington Post that “we strongly agree that Congress must act before the end of the year to bring certainty and security to the lives of dreamers. Delay is not an option. Too many people’s futures hang in the balance.”
Dreamers is another term for participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected undocumented young people who were brought to the U.S. as children and provided them with work permits.
President Donald Trump ended the DACA program in September although it will not begin to phase out until March, 2018.
His action put the ball in Congress’ court to find a long term solution for dreamers.
In their op-ed piece, the two CEOs note that both of their companies employ DACA recipients. “We know from experience that the success of our businesses depends on having employees with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. It fuels creativity, broadens knowledge and helps drive innovation.”
Koch Industries encompass a variety of companies including manufacturing and refining of oil and chemicals. Forbes Magazine lists Koch as the second largest privately held company in the U.S. Apple is the world’s largest information technology company, producing such familiar products as the iPhone and the Mac computers.
‘Firmly aligned’ on DACA issue
Koch and Cook are as different politically as their companies. Deeply conservative, Charles Koch has made significant financial contributions to rightwing causes and mostly Republican candidates. Tim Cook has been more bipartisan in his donations but did host a fundraiser for Democrat Hillary Clinton when she was running for president.
“We are business leaders who sometimes differ on the issues of the day,” the two concede in their piece. “Yet, on a question as straightforward as this one, we are firmly aligned.”
Congress seems unlikely to provide a DACA solution by the end of the year.
While some Democrats have remained firm in linking the spending legislation to a measure that would allow nearly 800,000 DACA immigrants to continue to work and study in the United States, the effort seems to have lost momentum.
Speaking Wednesday to a group of DACA recipients, Democratic Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois said he wished he could “tell you that we’re totally confident we can get it done. I can’t say that. I don’t want to mislead you.” Durbin is a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act which would protect DACA recipients.
Republican lawmakers have maintained that there is no reason to act on DACA in 2017.
“There is no emergency. The president has given us until March to address it,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said Sunday on ABC’s This Week program. “I don’t think Democrats would be very smart to say they want to shut down the government over a nonemergency that we can address anytime between now and March.”
But that was said before a major Republican donor urged immediate action.
“We have no illusions about how difficult it can be to get things done in Washington, and we know that people of good faith disagree about aspects of immigration policy,“ Koch and Cook write.
“By acting now to ensure that dreamers can realize their potential by continuing to contribute to our country, Congress can reaffirm this essential American ideal.
“This is a political, economic and moral imperative.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has touted progress on slashing federal regulations, which he says cost America trillions with no benefit. Speaking Thursday from the White House, the president said his administration had exceeded its goal of removing two federal regulations for every new one, by removing 22 for every new one. Opponents have criticized some of the deregulation, especially dismantling of the net neutrality rules that guarantee equal access to the internet. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
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An 800-foot-tall (244-meter) centerpiece is coming to Detroit’s resurgent downtown as the city continues to build momentum about three years after exiting the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
The 58-story building dominating the local skyline will rise on the site of the iconic J.L. Hudson department store, whose 1983 closing epitomized Detroit’s economic downfall.
“When we lost Hudson’s, it symbolized how far Detroit had fallen,” Bedrock Detroit real estate founder Dan Gilbert said Thursday during a ceremonial groundbreaking for the new building. “When it was imploded in 1998 it was a very sad day for a lot of people.”
One of four projects
But the bad times for downtown appear to be largely over. Bedrock Detroit’s $900 million, two-building project will include a 58-story residential tower and 12-floor building for retail and conference space. Up to 450 residential units can be built in the tower.
It is one of four projects representing a $2.1 billion investment in downtown by the Detroit-based commercial real estate firm. Altogether, the projects are expected to create up to 24,000 jobs in a city that desperately needs them and generate $673 million in new tax revenue.
Mayor Mike Duggan’s office has spearheaded redevelopment programs targeting a number of city neighborhoods, but Detroit’s growth is most evident in greater downtown, where office space now is limited and available apartments are tough to come by.
A ribbon-cutting was held in August for an $860 million sports complex just north of downtown. The 20,000-seat Little Caesars Arena is the new home of the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons. It will anchor a 50-block neighborhood of offices, apartments, restaurants and shops.
A 6.6-mile-long light rail system launched earlier this year along Woodward Avenue, downtown’s main business thoroughfare.
Microsoft move
Software maker Microsoft announced in February that it plans to move its Michigan Microsoft Technology Center next year from the suburbs to downtown. In 2016, Ally Financial opened new offices downtown that the financial services company said eventually would be occupied by more than 1,500 employees and contractors.
“Bedrock building on the Hudson’s site will be an important addition to the community and the vitality and prosperity of downtown,” said John Mogk, a Wayne State University law professor whose work has included policy on economic development issues.
“It will act as an important centerpiece for continuing the overall downtown development … but much more has to be done for the entire city to feel a resurgence.”
Many residents poor
However, much work remains for a city where many residents are still poor.
Detroit’s unemployment rate was about 8 percent in April, yet far below the more than 18 percent unemployment rate during the city’s 2013 bankruptcy filing.
The city’s 2016 poverty rate was just more than 35 percent, the highest among the nation’s 20 largest cities and more than double the national poverty of 14 percent. A family of four is considered living in poverty if its annual earnings are less than $24,563.
Downtown construction projects such as the work at the Hudson’s site can help change that, some say.
“What a shame that anybody should be unemployed in Detroit when we have a need for skilled trades,” Gilbert said. “We like to say Detroit is located at the intersection of muscle and brains. We need brains to sort this all out … somebody still has to build stuff. We still need muscle.”
While Bedrock’s new building would be Detroit’s tallest, rising above the 727-foot (222-meter) Renaissance Center along the city’s riverfront, it still would be far shorter than some other U.S. towers.
One World Trade Center in New York measures 1,776 feet (541 meters). Chicago’s Willis Tower hits 1,451 feet (442 meters), while the Empire State Building in New York climbs to 1,250 feet (381 meters).
Iconic Hudson’s
Although the 25-story Hudson’s building was once the nation’s tallest department store, it measured only about 400 feet (122 meters). It was far more famous for what was inside.
When Detroit was humming along and leading the nation in car production, the store was where auto executives and assembly line workers shopped. From household goods to clothing and furs and many things in between, it was a primary downtown destination.
There were 50 display windows, 12,000 employees and 100,000 customers per day. But as shopping tastes shifted to expansive suburban malls and Detroit’s population tumbled by more than 600,000 people between the 1950s and 1980, Hudson’s lost its luster.
“Building something of significant magnitude on the old site will provide a good deal of good feelings by older generations,” Mogk said.
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With the ceremonial flourish of oversized golden scissors slicing a giant piece of red tape, U.S. President Donald Trump symbolically cut through decades of regulations on Thursday.
“So, this is what we have now,” the former reality television program host said, gesturing toward a 190-centimeter-high pile of what was said to be 185,000 sheets of paper. “This is where we were in 1960,” he added, referencing a smaller stack representing an estimated 20,000 pages of federal regulations.
“When we’re finished, which won’t be in too long a period of time, we will be less than where we were in 1960, and we will have a great regulatory climate,” the president added at the event in the White House Roosevelt Room.
Trump decried that an “ever-growing maze of regulations, rules and restrictions has cost our country trillions and trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, countless American factories, and devastated many industries.”
The event took place just after the Federal Communications Commission, in a 3-2 vote, repealed a rule of the previous Obama administration calling for “net neutrality,” the principle that all internet providers treat all web traffic equally.
Lawsuits filed
The deregulatory zeal has generated a backlash.
The state of California has filed seven lawsuits challenging part of the administration’s deregulatory efforts dealing with the environment, education and public health.
The administration’s “rule rollbacks risk the health and well-being of Americans and are, in many cases, illegal,” according to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
In his remarks Thursday, Trump touted his executive order, signed days after he took office in January, mandating that two federal regulations must be eliminated for every new regulation put on the books.
His administration, Trump said, has exceeded that mandate by “a lot.”
The president, who as a real estate developer long railed against government regulation, claimed that for every new rule adopted, his administration has killed 22 — far in excess of the 2-for-1 pledge.
For the first time in “decades, the government achieved regulatory savings,” Trump said, boasting that “we blew our target out of the water.”
The administration, over its first 11 months, according to the president, has “canceled or delayed more than 1,500 planned regulatory actions — more than any previous president by far.”
He called for his Cabinet secretaries, agency heads and federal workers to “cut even more regulations in 2018.”
“And that should just about do it,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll have any left to cut.”
$570M in savings seen
The cost savings, according to administration officials, will total $570 million per year. But they say there are benefits that go beyond money.
“When the government is interfering less in people’s lives, they have greater opportunity to pursue their goals,” Neomi Rao, the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters following the president’s ribbon-cutting event.
Asked whether she could verify that this is, as Trump has declared, the largest deregulatory effort in American history, Rao hedged to echo such a sweeping statement, saying, “I don’t think there’s been anything like this since [Ronald] Reagan, at least.” Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989.
The president’s former strategist, Stephen Bannon, has said a primary goal of the Trump administration, through deregulation, is achieving “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
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Walt Disney Co on Thursday agreed to buy film, TV and international assets from Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox Inc for $52.4 billion as Disney seeks greater scale to tackle growing competition from Netflix and Amazon.com.
Under the terms of the all-stock deal, Disney acquires significant assets from Fox, including the studios that produce the blockbuster Marvel superhero pictures and the “Avatar” franchise, as well as hit TV shows such as “The Simpsons”.
Fox shareholders will receive 0.2745 Disney shares for each share held. This translates to a value of $29.50 per share for the assets that Disney is buying, Reuters calculations based on Disney’s Wednesday market closing price show.
Immediately prior to the acquisition, Fox will separate the Fox Broadcasting network and stations, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FS1, FS2 and Big Ten Network into a newly listed company that will be spun off to its shareholders.
The deal ends more than half a century of expansion by Murdoch, 86, who turned a single Australian newspaper he inherited from his father at the age of 21 into one of the world’s most important global news and film conglomerates.
Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, 66, will extend his tenure through the end of 2021 to oversee the integration of the Fox businesses. He has already postponed his retirement from Disney three times, saying in March he was committed to leaving the company in July 2019.
Disney will also assume about $13.7 billion of Fox’s net debt in the deal.
Through Fox’s stake in the Hulu video streaming service, Disney will assume majority control of one of Netflix Inc’s main competitors. Hulu is also partially owned by Comcast Corp and Time Warner Inc.
Shares in both Disney and Fox were up nearly 1 percent in premarket trading.
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A project in the Philippines that used debris to rebuild typhoon-ravaged houses and Californian homes providing year-round housing for migrant workers won one of the world’s most prestigious housing awards on Tuesday.
The development charity CARE used innovative techniques, such as teaching building skills to residents and using wreckage from destroyed homes, to rehouse more than 15,000 Filipino families devastated in 2013 by Typhoon Haiyan.
“This is the first time self-recovery has been used on such a large scale,” said David Ireland, director of British charity World Habitat, which co-hosts the World Habitat Awards together with the United Nations (U.N.) settlement program, UN-Habitat.
“It has helped more people, more quickly, than traditional disaster recovery programs. The potential of this approach to be used elsewhere is absolutely huge.”
The winners of the competition, which was established in 1985, received 10,000 pounds and opportunities to share their ideas around the world.
The second winner was Mutual Housing, a not-for-profit affordable housing developer in Yolo County in northern California, which built the first permanent year-round homes for seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers.
Tens of thousands of workers are brought in from Central America at harvest time to do low-wage jobs, often living in sub-standard houses in government-funded migrant centers.
“It has been a complete 180 degree turn since we’ve been living here,” said Saul Menses, who moved into one of Mutual Housing’s 62 apartments and houses in Spring Lake, some 60 miles (97 km) northeast of San Francisco, in 2015.
“For five years, we lived in an apartment there that was very cold and in poor condition. My wife had to board the windows up with tape and unclog the sink daily.”
The Spring Lake houses are the United States’ first certified zero-energy rental homes, meaning they consume less energy than they produce, using solar power, efficient lights and drought-resistant landscaping.
Seasonal work also disrupts family life for the estimated 6,000 migrants who come to Yolo County for the harvest, making it difficult for children to stay in one school. The new houses are less than 1 km from a secondary school and other services.
“Seasonal agricultural laborers are one of the most marginalized groups in the USA,” said World Habitat’s Ireland. “Mutual Housing California have managed to help a group not normally reached and proven that you don’t have to be a homeowner or on a high income to embrace green lifestyles.”
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India’s small farmers are better equipped than large landowners to deal with climate change, but need more support to find innovative ways to minimize the impacts of higher temperatures, uneven rainfall, floods and droughts, analysts said.
About 60 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion depends on agriculture for a living. More than three quarters of farmers cultivate than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land each.
While the small size of the land holding is often seen as a challenge to raising incomes, it is an advantage when it comes to tackling extreme weather and rising temperatures, said Arindom Datta, Asia head of sustainability banking at Rabobank.
Mono cropping
“Large farmers tend to do mono cropping, which is far more vulnerable to climate change, and more difficult to change and adapt as the situation demands. Plus they need more water, another resource under threat from warmer weather,” he said.
“Small farmers are far more versatile; they usually plant multiple varieties of crops, so they are more flexible and better able to adjust and adapt,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to double farmers’ incomes over the next five years, with reforms including better irrigation, crop insurance and higher prices for crops.
Size of land holdings drop
Poor prices for grains and cereal have led to mounting piles of debt for Indian farmers, triggering thousands of suicides every year. More than two-thirds of farmers who committed suicide were small and marginal farmers, data show.
The average size of land holdings in rural India has halved over the past two decades as land is passed down from father to son, and as more land is surrendered for development projects.
While a law caps the amount of land that can be owned by individual farmers, several states have introduced leasing laws to enable farmers to increase the land under cultivation.
Training for women farmers
But smaller land holdings are better suited if the government invests in training — particularly for women — on topics such as traditional grains such as millets, said Ishira Mehta, founder of CropConnect Enterprises, which links farmers to markets.
“With rising temperatures, we may not be able to grow basmati rice or wheat 20 years from now; we need to revive traditional grains that are more climate resilient,” she said.
“Women farmers in particular are more adaptable, more willing to learn about new harvest and marketing methods. But they cannot tackle the problem on their own.”
Farmers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu are already returning to indigenous varieties of rice and traditional seeds as the region suffers more frequent droughts.
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A major U.S. electronic retailer says it wants to help immigrant and underprivileged teens gain the technology skills they’ll need for the job market.
Best Buy, in partnership with a local nongovernmental organization known as the Brian Coyle Center, has opened a tech center in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside area. The center provides after-school computer classes for teens in the area, many of whom come from East African immigrant families.
The company plans to open 60 such centers nationwide by 2020. Trish Walker, the president of service for Best Buy, said the aim is to train a million teens each year to help them be prepared for tech-related jobs.
“Here, teens can learn so many skills, from coding to web programming, music production, 3-D design, editing, fashion design, getting leadership skills, entrepreneurship, mentoring from others,” Walker said at the opening ceremony for the center. “Great stuff to be able to prepare the teens for workforce for the future. Eighty percent of the future [jobs] are tech-related.”
Hamza Nur is a Somali youth who spent four years learning at the first Minneapolis-area Best Buy tech center, where he learned how to digitally edit and draw.
“I learned so much, and am grateful,” Nur said at the ceremony. “I think this is a great idea that we can all learn from. I think the idea of tech center is pretty great one, because it lets all the youth of Cedar have a great experience with technology.”
Abdirahman Mukhtar, the youth program director at the Brian Coyle Center, says the center gives young people a positive outlet through which to channel their energy, and it helps to keep them away from drugs and gangs, which have been recurring problems in the area.
“The time of the program is after-school time, and it’s [then] that a youth has free time and can commit negative habits,” he told VOA’s Somali service.
Minneapolis is home to the United States’ largest communities of Somali and East African immigrants, most of whom came to the U.S. because of armed conflicts in their home countries.
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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday he is making a second emergency move to keep the government from going above the debt limit while awaiting congressional action to raise the threshold.
In a letter to congressional leaders, Mnuchin said he will not be able to fully invest in a large civil service retirement and disability fund. Skipped investments will be restored once the debt limit has been raised, he said.
In September, Congress agreed to suspend the debt limit, allowing the government to borrow as much as it needed. But that suspension ended Friday.
The government said the debt subject to limit stood at $20.46 trillion on Friday. Mnuchin has said he will employ various “extraordinary measures” to buy time until Congress raises the limit.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in a recent report that Mnuchin has enough maneuvering room to stay under the limit until late March or early April.
If Congress has not acted before Mnuchin has exhausted his bookkeeping maneuvers, the government would be unable to borrow the money it needs to meet its day-to-day obligations, including sending out Social Security and other benefit checks and making interest payments on the national debt.
In August 2011, a standoff between Congress and the Obama administration over raising the borrowing limit came down to the wire and prompted the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency to impose the first-ever downgrade of the government’s credit rating.
Raising the debt limit is a separate issue from the need for Congress to pass a spending bill to cover government operations. A failure to pass a spending bill triggers a partial government shutdown but does not carry the potential catastrophic market disruptions that a failure to raise the debt limit poses.
In his new letter, Mnuchin said, “I respectfully urge Congress to protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting to increase the statutory debt limit as soon as possible.”
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