The G-20 summit of the world’s richest economies wrapped up Saturday against a backdrop of angry protests, and a pledge by leaders to fight protectionism in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy and Brexit. The U.S. leader took center stage at the two-day gathering, and his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was the major headline. VOA Europe correspondent Luis Ramirez reports from Hamburg.
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Day: July 8, 2017
Visiting Poland this week, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe and take on Russia’s stranglehold on energy supplies.
“America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump told reporters after talks with his Polish counterpart Thursday.
Up to now, that supplier has been Russia. It supplied around a third of Europe’s gas demand in 2016, with an even greater share in many of the former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe.
Watch: US, Russia on Collision Course in Competition for European Gas Market
Natural gas and dominance
Russian state-owned firm Gazprom shut off pipelines to Ukraine in 2015, depriving Kyiv of a major source of revenue and disrupting supplies to Eastern Europe.
“It’s a key pillar of Russian foreign policy: of using gas and energy as a means of asserting dominance over Central Europe,” said Marek Matraszek, founder of the lobby firm CEC Government Relations, who played a major role in the Polish government’s acquisition of U.S.-built F-16 fighter planes.
The first shipment of American liquefied natural gas arrived at the port of Swinoujscie on Poland’s Baltic coast last month. The port facility and liquefaction plant were finished in 2015, aimed at diversifying the country’s energy sources and enabling Poland to become a hub supplying imported gas across Central and Eastern Europe.
With that in mind, the Three Seas Initiative Summit in Warsaw Thursday brought together leaders from a dozen Eastern European nations, plus Trump. He pledged the United States will never use energy as a political tool.
Russia’s pipeline
Energy analyst Grzegorz Malecki, a former head of Poland’s Foreign Intelligence Agency says Russia will be watching with interest.
“If this new source of gas supplies is moved forward and the infrastructure built, it may cause Russia to change its approach. The Polish government is probably counting on it. Russia may change its politics towards Poland regarding energy,” Malecki told VOA in an interview this week.
Russia has plans of its own to boost exports. Initially scheduled to open in 2019, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would double its capacity to export gas directly to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine. Eastern European states want the project blocked.
“If we want to have United States’ LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on Russia,” Matraszek said.
American LNG and the Nord Stream 2 project are on a collision course, with Poland stuck in the middle, Malecki said.
“It’s hard to hide the fact that these two projects compete with each other. The odds are that there will be a clash of these energy giants in Europe,” he said.
Three-hundred kilometers west along the Baltic coast from where the existing Nord Stream pipeline comes ashore in Germany, Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin held their first face-to-face meeting at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg Friday.
If the American LNG deal goes through, it could have a broader impact on U.S.-Russia relations, said John Hannah of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“I think it could all happen relatively quickly and in a way that will give us much stronger leverage over Putin and the Russians to begin pushing back against some of the more aggressive activities that we’ve seen, not only in Europe but against the United States as well,” Hannah said.
Trump remains upbeat about his relationship with Putin, but the evolving energy policies in Europe will likely remain a source of friction.
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Each year, wildfires around the world devastate thousands of square kilometers of forests and grasslands and make many people homeless. Some plants recover faster from fire than others, and scientists would like to know why. In Australia, they are experimenting with a simple monitoring device relying on fiber optics. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Microplastics are pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. They make up part of the estimated tens of millions of tons of plastic that gets washed into the ocean every year. That could be hurting fish that eat plastic, and humans, when we eat fish. But help may be on the way. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Visiting Poland this week, US President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe, challenging Russia’s dominance of the market. Many European countries accuse Moscow of using energy as a political tool. As Henry Ridgwell reports from Warsaw, analysts say the United States and Russia are on a collision course over energy supplies to the region.
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Job creation in the U.S. appears to have picked up speed, with employers adding 222,000 jobs last month. But the unemployment rate ticked higher as more Americans resumed their job search. That’s probably a good thing, according to some economists who say the bigger challenge is how to speed up wage growth. Mil Arcega reports.
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The shortage of housing in California’s Silicon Valley has gotten so severe that Facebook Inc. on Friday proposed taking homebuilding into its own hands for the first time with a plan to construct 1,500 units near its headquarters.
The growth of Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other tech companies has strained neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area that were not prepared for an influx of tens of thousands of workers during the past decade. Home prices and commute times have risen.
Tech companies have responded with measures such as internet-equipped buses for employees with long commutes.
Facebook has offered at least $10,000 in incentives to workers who move closer to its offices.
Those steps, though, have not reduced complaints that tech companies are making communities unaffordable, and they have mostly failed to address the area’s housing shortage.
“The problem with Silicon Valley is you don’t have enough supply to keep up with the demand,” said Sam Khater, deputy chief economist at real estate research firm CoreLogic.
With Facebook’s construction plan, the company said it wanted to invest in Menlo Park, the city some 45 miles (72 km) south of San Francisco where it moved in 2011.
The company said it wants to build a “village” that will also have 1.75 million square feet of office space and 125,000 square feet of retail space.
“Part of our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services,” John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for global facilities, said in a statement.
The 1,500 Facebook housing units would be open to anyone, not just employees, and 15 percent of them would be offered at below market rates, the company said.
Facebook said it expects the review process to take two years.
Alphabet has taken a smaller step, buying 300 modular apartment units for short-term employee housing, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.
Menlo Park Mayor Kirsten Keith said in an interview that there were concerns about whether the Facebook plan would increase traffic, a subject the city’s planning department would study.
She said, though, that Facebook’s plan fits with the city’s own long-term plan for development, and that the city was excited about the additional housing.
Facebook’s Tenanes said the density of the proposed development could also entice spending on transit projects.
“The region’s failure to continue to invest in our transportation infrastructure alongside growth has led to congestion and delay,” he said.
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Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr celebrated his 77th birthday on Friday by announcing a new album that will feature former bandmate Paul McCartney.
Starr’s 19th solo album “Give More Love” will be released on Sept. 15 and will include McCartney on two tracks – “We’re on the Road Again” and “Show Me the Way,” which is dedicated to Starr’s wife, Barbara Bach.
“We are still mates,” Starr told Reuters of his former bandmate. “He’s out on the road, he’s got his own life. I’m out on the road a lot making records and he was in town so I called him and I said, ‘I’ve got this track for you to play on.'”
Starr called McCartney “the most melodic bass player in the world.”
“I love the way he plays,” he said.
Starr holds his birthday celebrations in public every year, raising awareness of his peace-and-love message.
On Friday he led a crowd gathered on the sunny, hot streets of Hollywood in a “peace and love” chant, joined on stage by guests including guitarist Joe Walsh, who is a member of Starr’s band and also his brother-in-law, as well as “Twin Peaks” director David Lynch.
“There is a lot of trouble in the world, a lot of violence in the world and a lot of starvation and a lot of people without water,” Starr said. “I’m a big supporter of Water Aid because everyone should at least have water … It’s not all bombs and
guns.”
Starr and McCartney made musical history as members of seminal 1960s English band the Beatles, along with the late George Harrison and John Lennon. The “Fab Four” led the British invasion into U.S. pop music and became one of the most successful bands in the world.
All four Beatles have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame both as part of the band and as solo artists.
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At the peak of his career in the 1930s, Carlos Gardel’s fans used to gather at the curb outside his home, hoping to hear one of Argentina’s greatest tango singers practice a tune before a show. Now, they can gather inside to hear him again.
Visitors to the remodeled “Carlos Gardel Museum Home” at his former house in the Argentine capital can see black-and-white images of key moments in the career of the singer who gave tango a huge boost worldwide.
And the voice is on tap as well. Visitors can hear 893 recordings, which make up most of his repertoire, through headphones installed there.
“It’s very interesting to visit the house where he lived and to give children a chance to understand that there are other types of music,” said Siomara Gordon, a Colombian tourist visiting the museum. “He expresses love like no other.”
Gardel’s cult remains powerful more than eight decades after his death in a 1935 air crash in Colombia at the age of 44. Argentines often leave carnations and burning cigarettes at his tomb in Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires and couples dance to his songs in packed halls.
Iconic images of him with a fedora hat pulled over his brow and a cigarette dangling from his lips are plastered on walls throughout Buenos Aires — and on those of Argentine restaurants worldwide.
The museum was first inaugurated in 2003, and reopened in June. It is located in the tango-crazed Abasto neighborhood of Argentina’s capital, where Gardel used to frequent cafes and often perform. Gardel bought the home in 1926 at the peak of his career and lived there with his mother, Marie-Berthe Gardes. The place became the gathering point for journalists and friends visiting the singer.
“Gardel had this grand piano where he would rehearse his compositions. Guitarists and other musicians would get together with other friends and Gardel’s mother, who was a great cook, would cook for all of them,” museum director Carlos Koffman, said near the windows through which Gardel’s fans outside could hear him practice.
The museum is filled with mementos including unpublished audiovisual material made shortly before his death. There is an authenticated copy of Gardel’s birth certificate, which shows that he was born in Toulouse, France, on Dec. 11, 1890.
One room in the exhibition focuses on Gardel’s tour of Latin America before his death. Images from Argentina’s National Archives show Gardel’s remains returning to Buenos Aires in 1936, his wake and his funeral.
“Gardel is huge today,” said museum visitor Mariano Herrera. “And he’ll continue to be great throughout time.”
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