EU-Israel relations: EU rejects public call to ban Israeli settler products

Read more at:
https://euobserver.com/foreign/144767

Britain - US relations: US Trump Administration warns Britain to cut relations with Huawei or risk intelligence break-up with US

Huawei tech would risk UK-US intelligence ties, official says

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/29/drop-huawaei-or-we-could-cut-intelligence-ties-us-warns-uk?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

Canada: oil imports from Saudi Arabia on the rise since 2014 trade figures show

Canada's oil imports from Saudi Arabia on the rise since 2014, trade figures show.

Read more at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/saudi-oil-imports-rise-canada-diplomacy-1.5096887

EU country briefing: The Netherlands – by Ery Papalamprou, Fengwei David An and Robert Steenland

In this year’s European Parliament (EP) election, the Netherlands will vote for 26 or 29 (minus UK) Members of  Parliament (MEPs) to represent its interests. 

Most Dutch people appear to have a positive outlook on the EU, as 78% (fourth highest  in the EU) consider EU membership to be a good thing, compared to just 5% that have opposing views on the matter.

Similar percentages reflect Dutch support for the euro, as 78% are in favour of the single currency while  18% are against. Furthermore, 75% of the Dutch population feel 
that they are citizens of the EU.

Read more: EU country briefing: The Netherlands – EURACTIV.com

European Airline Industry: SAS pilot walkout leaves some 70.000 people stranded

SAS pilot walkout leaves thousands stranded

Read more at:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48062918

European Airline Industry:Lufthansa flies pro-European message ahead of EU elections – Business Traveller

 Airlines have been known to dabble in the political, from Aeromexico’s pointed ads referencing ‘borders’ to Air New Zealand’s Make Christmas Great Again kid.

But it’s rare for such messaging to make it onto an aircraft, as it has with a Lufthansa A320.

Yesterday the German carrier unveiled a livery emblazoned with themwords ‘Say yes to Europe’ alongside a sizeable European Union flag. The Lufthansa Group also includes Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, Brussels Airlines and Air Dolomiti

Lufthansa said it would send a “very special signal” ahead of European elections scheduled to take place from May 23 to 26, and hoped it would encourage higher voter turnout.

The carrier confirmed on social media that the aircraft, registered D-AIZG, would serve destinations across Europe, including the UK, which voted to leave the European Union in 2016. It added that a “specific message to individual countries (eg the UK) is not the intention of this initiative.”

Lufthansa also announced that future liveries will feature the European flag next to the German flag as part of the aircraft registration code.

“With their vote in May, the citizens of Europe will decide the future of the European community. Now more than ever, it is a question of taking a stand, taking responsibility and strengthening the idea of a united and free continent,” said Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr.

“As a genuine European company with roots in several countries in the heart of Europe, our airlines … connect the continent’s countries with each other and connect Europe with the world. For this reason, Europe is very close to our hearts.”

Note Insure-Digest: Bravo Lufthansa : united we stand divided we fall

Read more: Lufthansa flies pro-European message ahead of EU elections – Business Traveller

POPULISM: Beware of the simplistic nonsense Populist Rightwing Nationalistic politicians are telling you

Read more at:  

https://www.socialeurope.eu/populism-and-complexity

USA Weapons Exports: Ninety Eight Countries buying the most weapons from the US government

 The US is the worlds largest exporter of weapons and sells these weapons to some 98 countries around the globe.

Read more: Countries buying the most weapons from the US government

IRAN OIL EXPORTS: US TO END SANCTIONS EXEMPTIONS. FOR MAJOR COUNTRIES

IRAN OIL Exports: US to end sanctions exemptions for major importers

Read more at: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-48011496

SRI LANKA: MENTALLY DISTURBED TERRORISTS KILL MORE THAN 200 INNOCENT CIVILIANS IN SRI LANKA SRI LANKA: MENTALLY DISTURBED TERRORISTS KILL MORE THAN 200 INNOCENT CIVILIANS IN SRI LANKA

More than 200 killed as blasts hit Sri Lankan churches, hotels on Easter Sunday A series of eight devastating bomb blasts ripped through high-end hotels and churches holding Easter services in Sri Lanka on Sunday, killing at least 207 people, including dozens of foreigners.

 

Read more at: 

http://www.france24.com/en/20190421-multiple-blasts-hit-sri-lanka-churches-easter-sunday

CLIMATE CHANGE : Sir David Attenborough warns of Catastrophe to mankind

Climate change: Sir David Attenborough warns of 'catastrophe'

Read more at: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47976184

USA: the Mueller report: the report is worse for Trump than Barr let on-but likely wont cause him to be impeached

Mueller's report is worse for Trump than Barr let on — but likely not as ruinous as Trump feared

Read more at: 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/robert-mueller-report-released-analysis-1.5102224

Canada - EU pushing back on controversial US law over seized Cuban properties

Canada pushes back after U.S. clears the way for lawsuits over seized Cuban property

Read more at:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/us-lawsuits-properties-cuba-1.5101479

US - Cuba - EU relations: New US policy on seized property in Cuba threatens ties with EU

New US policy on seized property in Cuba threatens EU ties

Note EU-Digest: This "new" Trump policy obviously must also be seen as part of Trump's 2020  reelection campaign strategy, in getting the Florida Cuban/Latino population into his camp .

However, given his controversial financial aid withholding policies against El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. This, in addition to his empty threats against the Maduro regime in Venezuela don't carry much weight.

It is obvious that Mr. Trump's latest declaration on Cuba must once again be classified as the President "talking the talk, but not walking the walk" 

Read more at:

https://p.dw.com/p/3Gvl9

Turkey - unemployment climbing rapidly in Turkey during Erdogan's AKP Regime

Read more at:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-15/turkey-bleeds-jobs-as-unemployment-climbs-to-highest-in-a-decade

USA - Capitalism: Slowly but surely Capitalism is committing suicide

Peter Georgescu — a refugee-turned-C.E.O. who recently celebrated his 80th birthday — feels deeply grateful to his adopted country.

He also feels afraid for its future. He is afraid, he says, because the American economy no longer functions well for most citizens. “For the past four decades,” Georgescu has written, “capitalism has been slowly committing suicide

Read more at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/opinion/peter-georgescu-capitalism.html

USA - Wall Street: Trump says stock market should be 10.000 points higher

Donald Trump: The stock market should be as much as 10,000 points higher

Read more at:
https://on.mktw.net/2IxU4ML

Britain - Brexit: May back in Parliament defends extension

May, back in Parliament, tries to defend Brexit extension to skeptical lawmakers

Read more at: 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/brexit-parliament-session-1.5079583

USA - Voodoo Economics: Crazy US economy, biggest deficit ever, but Wall Street stocks nearing records

Wall Street’s ‘fear index’ tumbles to 6-month low as stock market nears records

Read more at:
https://on.mktw.net/2GkF4QP

EU-China Relationship: EU, China hail 'breakthrough' trade agreement that contrasts Trump's 'America First' agenda

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has promised the European Union Beijing will no longer force foreign companies to share sensitive know-how when operating in China, and it is ready to discuss new global trading rules on industrial subsidies.

Key points:

• China said it is ready to open up to foreign companies and end demands for trade secrets
• EU and Chinese negotiators agreed on a final communique of cooperation
• The two sides agreed to intensify talks on subsidies and pledged a deal by 2020

Marking a significant shift, Mr Li's pledge at the annual EU-China leaders' meeting last night follows similar offers to the United States, and potentially signals an opening for which European companies have long lobbied.

"European companies will enjoy equal treatment," Mr Li told a news conference following the three-hour summit in Brussels, offering to set up a disputes mechanism to handle complaints.

Summit chair Donald Tusk talked of a major turning point in the relationship between the EU and China. "It is a breakthrough", he said. "For the first time, China has agreed to engage with Europe on this key priority for WTO [World Trade Organisation] reform."

Read more at: EU, China hail 'breakthrough' trade agreement that contrasts Trump's 'America First' agenda - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

TURKEY - Military purchases: Turkey will look elsewhere (Russia) if US wont sell them Patriots and F-35s

"Turkey says it will look elsewhere if U.S. won't sell Patriots, F-35s" -

Read more at: 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-usa/turkey-says-it-will-look-elsewhere-if-u-s-wont-sell-patriots-f-35s-idUSKCN1RM0D2

Inventing the Future: PostCapitalism and a World Without Work - by Nick Srnicek and Alex William

"Since the beginning of capitalism, workers have struggled against the imposition of fixed working hours, and the demand for shorter hours was a key component of the early labor movement. Initial battles saw high levels of resistance in the form of individual absenteeism, numerous holidays and irregular work habits. 

This resistance to normal working hours continues today in widespread slacking off, with workers often surfing the internet rather than doing their job. At every step of the way, then, workers have struggled to escape normal working hours, and many of the labor movement’s earliest successes had to do with reducing work time. The two-day weekend, for example, emerged spontaneously from workers’ predilection for drinking and spending an extra day recovering rather than working. 

The weekend’s eventual consolidation as a recognized and bounded period of time off was the product of sustained political struggles (a process that was not completed in the Western world until the 1970s). Likewise, workers achieved significant success in reducing the working week from sixty hours in 1900 to just below thirty-five hours during the Great Depression. Such was the speed of success that, over a period of five years in the 1930s, the working week declined by eighteen hours".

"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” writes Karl Marx in Das Kapital, likely the most direct invocation of architecture in his influential, and controversial, writings. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”

Regardless of the veracity of his claims about the imaginative faculties of bees, Marx’s point stands: humans don’t just work, they also create the conditions within which they work. And the social attitudes we have towards our labor are constructions as well.

“Four jobs in 20 years, oh this can never be, we only take on men who work on until they die,” sings Donovan in “Gold Watch Blues,” assuming the voice of a boss. This seems ridiculous today – more like four jobs in two years, just to get a good CV – because the availability of jobs, as well as their character and pay, has radically changed in the fifty years since the song was written.

Read more at:
https://archinect.com/features/article/149935222/architecture-after-capitalism-in-a-world-without-work

Britain - Brexit: Customs Union at Centre of compromise talks

Brexit: customs union at centre of compromise talks ahead of crucial EU summit 

Note EU Digest : The problem is that Theresa May has not been able to put a concrete proposal together supported by a parliamentary majority in the British parliament, and keeps wasting EU members time and finances discussing "pies in the sky". 

It is high time now the EU starts to play some hard ball with Theresa May, and gives her an "indefinite extension" until she can come up with a concrete proposal, which is backed by a majority in the British parliament.

Read more at: https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/07/brexit-uk-prime-minister-says-there-is-still-a-chance-of-a-compromise-deal

US Economy: Ray Dalio Warns of Dire Consequences From America’s Failing Capitalism - by Cissi Cao

Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio became a capitalist by definition at the age of 12 (when he started putting money earned from odd jobs into the stock market) and has since been a firm believer in capitalism. The system evidently served him well—over the course of 50 years, he went from being a middle-class boy living in Queens, New York to heading the world’s largest hedge fund firm with an enviable personal net worth of $18 billion.

But in recent years, the 69-year-old investing guru has increasingly felt that his success story is irreplicable for the young people of today. And the reason, he figured, lies in the current system of capitalism itself.

Instead of creating a society promoting equal opportunity and economic mobility, capitalism in America today “is producing self-reinforcing spirals up for the haves and down for the have-nots,” Dalio recently wrote in a lengthy essay.

The commentary, shared on Dalio’s LinkedIn page on Thursday, was part one of a bigger discussion about why he believes that capitalism needs to be reformed in order to live on and how it should be done.

To most readers who regularly follow economic news, it’s probably no surprise that the wealth gap in the U.S. is widening between the country’s richest and its poorest. However, in his essay, Dalio underscored a less headline-grabbing, but more important fact, about our economy—that widening wealth gap does not only concern people on the two extremes of the income spectrum, but actually affects everyone in the middle as well.

To illustrate this point, Dalio laid out a series of charts derived from studying America’s richest top 40 percent and the remaining (or the bottom) 60 percent. The finding was astonishing: Since 1980, real income hasn’t grown at all for the bottom 60 percent, while income for the top 40 percent has doubled—and tripled for the top one percent.

As a result, “the income gap is about as high as ever and the wealth gap is the highest since the late 1930s,” Dalio wrote. “Those in the top 40 percent now have on average more than 10 times as much wealth as those in the bottom 60 percent. That is up from six times in 1980.”

He argued that this increasing economic inequality is limiting the resources for children from poor families to get good educations, which hampers their opportunities to get well-paying jobs, which prevents their children from getting a good education again—hence a negative cycle of reinforcement for the poor to be stuck in poverty perpetually.

And if the economic trend continues, there could be serious dangers to social stability and even risks of a total collapse of the government, Dalio warned.

“I believe that, as a principle, if there is a very big gap in the economic conditions of people who share a budget and there is an economic downturn, there is a high risk of bad conflict,” he explained. “Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and, in the government, that manifests itself in the form of populism of the left and populism of the right and often in revolutions of one sort or another.”

That is not to say that socialism will be a possible solution, Dalio clarified, for its inherent lack of an incentive system. “I think that most capitalists don’t know how to divide the economic pie well and most socialists don’t know how to grow it well.”

So what’s the fix? We’ll have to wait for part two of the discussion. You can follow the updates here.

Filed Under: Business, Economy, recession, INCOME INEQUALITY, Ray Dalio, US economy

• SEE ALSO: Why the World’s Brightest Minds Agree That a Recession Is Coming

Note EU-Digest: In the context of the above report, Trumps recent partisan picks of Herman Cain and Stephen Moore, to  become members of the Federal Reserve Board is not only dangerous to the integrity of the Federal Reserve Board, but also the American economy.

 

Read more at: Ray Dalio Warns of Dire Consequences From America’s Failing Capitalism | Observer

EU-Winners of the EU Big Data Hackathon 2019

Between 8-12 March 2019, the second European Union (EU) Big DataHackathon took place alongside the 10th New Techniques and Technologiesfor Statistics (NTTS) conference in Brussels.

A hackathon is an event where IT experts and statisticians collaboratively look for nsolutions to a particular issue over a short period of time.

Seventeen teamsm from European National Statistical Institutes competed to develop a data analytics tool to address this year's challenge:

"How can innovative solutions for data collection reduce response burden and enrich or replace the statistical information/data provided by the timeuse survey?"

The award ceremony took place on 12 March and was hosted by the Director-General of Eurostat, Mariana Kotzeva.

The winners of the Hackathon are:

1st prize - the team from Statistics Poland, who created an open source prototype delivering a dashboard for the data analysis of population time use.

2nd prize - the team from ISTAT – Italy, who created SMUTIS, an integrated open source environment for data analytics, visualisation and food classification.

3rd prize - the team from the ONS – United Kingdom, who developed a system to enrich the data collected via traditional  questionnaire-based surveys with automatic processing of photos of meals taken by respondents.

Read more: Winners of the EU Big Data Hackathon 2019 - Product - Eurostat

France: French finance minister to tax digital giants including Facebook and Apple despite US protests

France dismisses US opposition to tax on tech giants French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Friday that France would stick to plans for a tax on digital giants such as Facebook and Apple, despite opposition from Washington.

 

Read more at:  

http://www.france24.com/en/20190404-pompeo-urges-france-drop-plans-tax-tech-giants

China-US relations-tariffs : Toughest part of US - China trade deal stll lies ahead

Why the toughest part of a U.S.-China trade deal still lies ahead

Read more at :
https://on.mktw.net/2UyJUSc

Britain: A labour Conservative coalition on Brexit?

What is UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s policy on Brexit?

Read more at: 

https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/03/what-is-uk-labour-leader-jeremy-corbyn-s-policy-on-brexit

USA: Chicago elects Lori Lightfood as first female black major

Chicago elects Lori Lightfoot as first female black mayor

Read more at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47797478

Britain-Brexit: EU worried: no deal Brexit very likely

No-deal Brexit more likely by the day, says EU's Barnier The European Union's chief negotiator Michel Barnier warned Tuesday it is "day after day more likely" that Britain will crash out of the bloc next week without an orderly withdrawal agreement.

Read more at:
http://www.france24.com/en/20190402-no-deal-brexit-barnier-parliament-eu-european-union-may-uk

Airline industry: flights to Europe now 15 % cheaper

Flights to Europe are now 15% cheaper. Here’s where to go for deals. -

Read more at:
https://on.mktw.net/2HPYzmi