Before it became one of the venues for the World Cup, the city of Volgograd in southwest Russia was famous for an overabundance of small, annoying flies called midges. While the small two-winged flies don’t bite, soccer fans are finding that they don’t leave you alone either. VOA’s Mariama Diallo takes a look at what Russian officials are doing to make the sporting life more comfortable for World Cup fans and players.
…
Month: June 2018
Jehovah’s Witnesses have a long history of being persecuted around the world. Their activities are banned or restricted in several countries. They are considered an extremist organization in Russia, while their members are imprisoned in South Korea and Eritrea. Even near their main headquarters and publishing house in New York state, Jehovah’s Witnesses lead a somewhat secluded life. VOA’s Anush Avetisyan has the story.
…
Globalization in the 20th century facilitated the exchange of goods, ideas and technology. But it also helped spread deadly germs and viruses around the world. A new exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History illustrates the impact of these sometimes lethal biological linkages and looks back at the deadliest and scariest epidemics throughout history. Maxim Moskalkov has more.
…
In an attempt to capitalize on what’s become a ratings bonanza for Arabic satellite channels during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, two comedies struck the wrong chord with audiences when their lead actors appeared in blackface.
Criticism was swift on social media, but failed to trigger a deeper discussion on racism in the Middle East.
The shows — one produced in Egypt, the other in Kuwait — also poked fun at Sudanese culture, mocking the Sudanese Arabic dialect and portraying darker-skinned people from Sudan as either poor or lazy.
In the Egyptian show called Azmi We Ashgan, which aired on the privately owned Al-Nahar channel, comedian Samir Ghanem and his daughter Amy Ghanem wore skin-darkening makeup and wigs with Rastafarian-looking braids.
Amy’s character is a half-Sudanese, half-Malawian housemaid who works for a rich, older Egyptian man who makes unwanted sexual advances toward her. Her father onscreen, played by her real-life father, arrives at the house in hopes he, too, can live there.
Her boss responds in anger, saying: “Did I get this house for fun or did I buy it to set free some slaves?”
In another sketch aired on state-run Kuwait TV, an ensemble of Kuwaiti actors appear in blackface, wearing traditional Sudanese turbans and jalabeyas, the long garment worn by men in Upper Egypt and Sudan.
In the show, called Block Ghashmara, Kuwaiti actor Dawood Hussein’s character lounges around on a daybed and constantly falls asleep. He repeatedly says “ayy” in a horse-like pitch, exaggerating the Sudanese dialect.
Rapid response
The backlash from Sudanese viewers was swift, prompting Hussein to issue an apology for what he said was a “misunderstanding with our brothers, loved ones and family in Sudan.”
“I have the bravery to apologize if this offended people and I don’t want anyone offended by me,” he said. In a nod to Sudan’s often overlooked contribution to Arab Gulf countries, he also noted that he was proud to have been taught by Sudanese teachers in Kuwaiti schools.
Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese political cartoonist living in Denmark who spoke out online against the skits, said it surprised him that so many actors, writers and producers on both shows didn’t stop to question the offensive nature of the scenes before they aired.
“They need to figure out a better way to represent black people,” he told The Associated Press. “It is laziness and a lack of talent that gets an actor to do that.”
When a viewer similarly criticized the Egyptian show Azmi We Ashgan on Twitter for relying on old racist tropes for laughs, writer Ahmed Mohy responded that the show did not mean to insult anyone, but he also defended the show’s take on humor.
“There’s no difference between someone who is black or white. It’s normal to also show a white person as a janitor or waiter, just as we can show a black person working in any job,” he wrote on Twitter.
Despite criticism on social media, the exchanges failed to produce wider discussion, analyst Hana Al-Kharmi wrote in an opinion piece for Al-Jazeera.
“There is almost no public debate about it within the wider Arab society. On the contrary, there is a popular outright denial that racist attitudes against black people exist,” she wrote.
After seeing the Kuwaiti show online, Sara Elhassan, 33, a Sudanese-American writer based in Phoenix, uploaded videos on Instagram criticizing the show and its depiction of Sudanese people.
‘Still in denial’
“Everybody knows there is a discrimination issue in the Middle East when it comes to black people or darker-skinned people,” she told the AP in a phone interview, “but people are still in denial a little bit about it.”
“We like to say: ‘Oh, we are all Muslim. We can’t be racist,’ ” she added.
Beginning around the 1940s, Egyptian movies were not too unlike Hollywood films in that black actors were often cast as servants and doormen. Darker-skinned women were often cast as housemaids and prostitutes.
Since then, attitudes in the U.S. have shifted. As the Ramadan shows were airing, a major television network in the U.S. was quick to cancel the popular reboot of Roseanne after its star, Roseanne Barr, posted a racist tweet that referred to a former adviser to Barack Obama as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes.
ABC announced Thursday it would air a spinoff of the show without its star this fall, rebranding it as The Conners.
Film critic and curator Joseph Fahim said part of the problem in tackling racism in Arab media is that there’s a general lack of understanding among audiences in the region as to why these skits are offensive.
“There isn’t a culture of sensitivity,” Fahim said. “It’s not there. It’s not as if this has been thought through. It wasn’t even thought out. This is how it’s been done over decades, and people think that it’s OK.”
…
President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to keep migrant children with their parents at the southwestern U.S. border, but more than 2,000 children are living in shelters without their families. Doctors and mental health workers are concerned that some of these children will suffer permanent damage. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
…
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry will meet Russia’s energy minister next week in Washington, a person familiar with the situation said Friday, as the two countries compete to supply global markets with natural gas and crude.
Perry will meet Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak on Tuesday, in the context of the World Gas Conference in Washington, the source said.
Meetings between top energy officials from Russia and the United States, two of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, have been rare in recent years.
Relations between Moscow and Washington have cooled over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and as the Trump administration blames the Russian government for cyber attacks that targeted the U.S. power grid over the last two years.
The two countries are competing to sell natural gas to Europe. Russia’s Gazprom, the European Union’s biggest gas supplier, and several Western energy companies hope to open Nord Stream 2, a pipeline to bring Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.
The United States, meanwhile, has begun some sales of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to Poland and Lithuania, though LNG shipments can be more expensive than gas sent via pipeline.
The United States says the advantage of its LNG is dependability and stable pricing.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump opposes the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as did the administration of former President Barack Obama. Washington believes that the pipeline would give Russia, which has at times frozen deliveries to parts of Europe over pricing disputes, more power over the region.
The meeting comes as U.S. national security adviser John Bolton plans to visit Moscow next week to prepare for a possible meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Perry and Novak will also likely talk about oil markets. On Friday, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed in Vienna to raise oil output by a modest amount after consumers had called for producers to curb rising fuel prices.
Russia, which is not an OPEC member, began cooperating last year with the group for the first time, holding back production to support global oil prices. Before the Vienna OPEC meeting, Novak said Moscow would propose a gradual increase in output from oil-producing countries, starting in July.
…
Tracking wildlife migration has been historically difficult in the rugged terrain of Alaska. Researchers primarily rely on either surveys or GPS tracking to understand bird migration patterns. Both methods are expensive, either in terms of time or money. And the trackers are often too large or heavy.
One way to sidestep these common issues is to record audio from frequently used nesting grounds. Using birdsong allows researchers to unobtrusively study the animals, although there’s a downside. Each day produces a flood of audio recordings from multiple microphones placed around nesting grounds. It takes trained listeners endless hours to search the noisy soundscape for birdsong.
In a recently published paper in the journal Science Advances, U.S. researchers explain how they got around these tracking troubles. Columbia University ecologist Ruth Oliver and her fellow collaborators replaced the human ears with machine learning algorithms to listen to birdsong.
Costly proposition
Oliver told VOA News, “Arrival times of migratory song birds is really important for their reproductive success. And obviously sending people to the Arctic to do field work is very expensive and takes a lot of time” — hence, the scientists’ interest in creating an automated method for tracking bird species.
Oliver and her colleagues focused on migratory songbirds who fly to northern Alaska during their mating season. These birds tend to chirp more frequently as soon as they reach the breeding grounds to attract a mate. Spring is short in Alaska and the birds must breed and hatch their clutch before winter.
The team of researchers recorded the springtime soundscape of northern Alaska for five sequential years. They placed microphones at four sites in the foothills of the Brooks Range, which recorded 1,200 audio hours.
However, Oliver admitted the recordings weren’t always perfect. “There’s a lot of other noise in these recordings” Oliver said. “Even in May in northern Alaska there’s lots of wind, lots of rain, and all of that is confounding when you’re listening to birds.”
The scientists fed hours of audio into two types of machine learning algorithms — one that used human expertise to help train it and one that relied solely on the collected audio. Both algorithms were based on the same model that’s used by applications like Siri and Alexa.
Oliver told VOA that in creating the human-supervised algorithm, she “wrote a little program to randomly sample about 1 percent of the data set” and then listened to 4-second clips. She scored these clips as either containing or not containing songbird vocalizations and then fed this information into the program.
Both algorithms were fairly accurate at estimating when the avian commuters arrived in the foothills. The models showed the importance of snowmelt for the arrival of the traveling birds. The human-trained model was slightly better at recognizing the relationship between weather conditions and bird calls, although neither model specifically tracked individual species.
This technique has great potential according to Emily Jo Williams, vice president of migratory birds and habitat at the American Bird Conservancy, “This kind of technique that allows you to survey populations in those remote areas is really exciting and could allow us to even discover new places where protection and conservation efforts are needed,” she said.
This study looked at nesting grounds near the Alaskan Arctic Refuge, which is a summer home for birds from nearly every continent. For example, the Northern Wheatear travels approximately 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles) from Africa to summer in the refuge.
Climate change
Williams told VOA, “We know from some research that some birds’ ranges have actually changed, and they’ve moved in response to what we think is a warming climate.” She went on to explain that “the timing of that migration has evolved over eons, and in large part it’s relative to what food sources are available over a particular time, what weather patterns are or aren’t favorable. So you could end up with bird migration out of sync with insect hatches or the phenology of plants that birds have a relationship to.”
Tools like the algorithm created in this study could be used to track how migratory patterns of many species may shift in response to climate change. Using machine learning is a new way to follow these shifting patterns in birds, insects and other animals.
…
“All I want to do is the Bataclan, the Bataclan.” Those are lyrics to a song released earlier in the year by rapper Medine. Two of his concerts are scheduled for the Bataclan theater in October. But not everyone wants to see the shows go on.
At issue, in part, are the words to another song by the artist, whose real name is Medine Zaouiche. In the song, “Don’t Laik,” one line goes, “I put fatwas on the heads of idiots.” The song was released in 2015 — the same year that France was hit by several terrorist attacks, including one targeting the Bataclan.
This is not the first time Medina has generated controversy. A decade earlier, he released an album titled Jihad — and he has been photographed in a T-shirt bearing the term, and a massive sword.
Now, thousands of people have signed a petition launched by the far right and demanding Medine’s concerts be canceled. Critics are tweeting their opposition via the hashtag #pasdemedineaubataclan, or “no Medine at the Bataclan.”
On French radio, far-right National Rally party head Marine Le Pen described Medine as an Islamic fundamentalist. His performance at the Bataclan, she said, is a threat to public order.
Victims’ associations are divided. Philippe Duperron, who heads one of them, is against the concerts taking place, out of respect for the victims and the memory of them.
Medine and his lawyers are fighting back. The rapper has criticized Islamic fundamentalism a number of times and says he is against violence. He says “Don’t Laik” is more of a slap at France’s tough secular creed, and that the jihad he refers to is an internal spiritual struggle, rather than violence.
“It’s been 15 years since I’ve criticized all forms of radicalism in my albums,” he posted recently on social media. Banning his concerts, he argues, amounts to caving in to the far right.
Medine’s arguments are drawing support, partly in the name of free expression. That appears to be the argument of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.
Still, others argue the divisions over the rapper’s concerts are the worst outcome, at a time when the French should be united against terrorism.
…
The human backup driver in an autonomous Uber SUV was streaming the television show “The Voice” on her phone and looking downward just before fatally striking a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix, according to a police report.
The 300-page report released Thursday night by police in Tempe revealed that driver Rafaela Vasquez had been streaming the musical talent show via Hulu in the 43 minutes before the March 18 crash that killed Elaine Herzberg as she crossed a darkened road outside the lines of a crosswalk. The report said the crash, which marks the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle, wouldn’t have happened had the driver not been distracted.
Dash camera video shows Vasquez was looking down near her right knee for four or five seconds before the crash. She looked up a half second before striking Herzberg as the Volvo was traveling about 44 miles per hour.
Vasquez told police Herzberg “came out of nowhere” and that she didn’t see her prior to the collision. But officers calculated that had Vasquez been paying attention, she could have reacted 143 feet before impact and brought the SUV to a stop about 42.6 feet before hitting Herzberg.
“This crash would not have occurred if Vasquez would have been monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions and was not distracted,” the report stated.
Tempe police are looking at a vehicular manslaughter charge in the crash, according to a March 19 affidavit filed to get a search warrant for audio, video and data stored in the Uber SUV.
The detective seeking the warrant, identified as J. Barutha, wrote that based on information from the vehicular homicide unit, “it is believed that the crime of vehicular manslaughter has occurred and that evidence of this offense is currently located in a 2017 Grey Volvo XC-90.”
A previously released video of the crash showed Vasquez looking down just before the crash. She had a startled look on her face about the time of the impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board, in a preliminary report issued last month, said the autonomous driving system on Uber’s Volvo XC-90 SUV spotted Herzberg about six seconds before hitting her, but did not stop because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled.
The system is disabled while Uber’s cars are under computer control, “to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior,” the NTSB report said. Instead of the system, Uber relies on the human backup driver to intervene, the report stated. But the system is not designed to alert the driver.
Uber pulled its self-driving cars out of Arizona the day before the NTSB report was released, eliminating the jobs of about 300 people who served as backup drivers and performed other jobs connected to the vehicles. The company had suspended testing of its self-driving vehicles in Arizona, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto while regulators investigated the cause of the crash. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey prohibited Uber from continuing its tests of self-driving cars after Herzberg was run over.
Police initially determined that Vasquez was not impaired after giving her a field test.
Analysis of video taken from the vehicle shows Vasquez looked downward 204 times in the 11.8 miles traveled before the crash. While the SUV was in motion, Vasquez averted her eyes away from the roadway nearly a third of the time, according to the report.
“Sometimes, her face appears to react and show a smirk or laugh at various points during the times that she is looking down,” the report said. “Her hands are not visible in the frame of the video during these times.”
The office of Cristina Perez Hesano, an attorney for Herzberg’s daughter and husband, declined to comment on the police report. Attorney Pat McGroder, who represents Herzberg’s mother, father and son, didn’t immediately respond to a call late Friday morning seeking comment.
An Uber spokeswoman said in a prepared statement Friday morning that the company is cooperating with investigations while it does an internal safety review. “We have a strict policy prohibiting mobile device usage for anyone operating our self-driving vehicles. We plan to share more on the changes we’ll make to our program soon,” the statement said.
Use of a mobile device while an autonomous vehicle is moving is a fireable offense, and “this is emphasized on an ongoing basis,” the statement said.
After the crash, the ride-hailing company said it did a top-to-bottom safety evaluation, reviewing internal processes and safety culture. Uber also said it brought in former transportation safety board chairman Christopher Hart to advise the company on safety.
Both Vasquez and Uber could still face civil liability in the case, Uber for potentially negligent hiring, training and supervision, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who closely follows autonomous vehicles.
Vasquez could be charged criminally, and if there’s evidence that Uber or its employees acted recklessly, then charges against them are possible, Smith said. But charges against the company are not likely, he added.
“This should not have happened in so many ways and on so many levels,” Smith said. “This report, if true, makes things worse. And obviously it would not look good to a jury.”
Uber settled quickly with some of Herzberg’s family members but others have retained legal counsel.
The Yavapai County Attorney’s Office hasn’t set a deadline for deciding whether to bring charges, said Penny Cramer, assistant to County Attorney Sheila Polk. The prosecutorial agency declined to comment on the police report.
The case was handed to Polk’s office after the prosecutor’s office in metro Phoenix passed on the case, citing a potential conflict of interest. The agency in Phoenix had previously participated in a public-safety campaign with Uber.
On a body camera video the night of the crash, police gathered at the scene quickly realized that they were dealing with a big story because an autonomous vehicle was involved.
An officer who identifies himself as supervisor of the unit that investigates fatal crashes is seen asking a man who appears to be an Uber supervisor about getting video from the SUV and whether Uber’s lawyers have been contacted.
“You guys know as well as I know that this is going to be an international story,” the police supervisor says. “We want to make sure that we’re doing not only what we normally do and not doing anything different, but also making sure that everything’s above board and everything’s out in the open.”
The supervisor goes on to say that he’s going to communicate as honestly as he can. “I hope that you guys do the same because we’re going to be working together throughout this whole process from now, probably for months from now.”
…
U.S. celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who killed himself in a French hotel room earlier this month, had no narcotics or alcohol in his body when he died, a local prosecutor said on Friday.
Bourdain, host of CNN’s food-and-travel-focused “Parts Unknown” television series, was 61. Brash and opinionated, he had spoken openly about his use of drugs and addiction to heroin earlier in his life.
“No trace of narcotics, no trace of any toxic products, no trace of medicines, no trace of alcohol,” prosecutor Christian de Rocquigny told Reuters.
Bourdain, whose career catapulted him from washing dishes at New York restaurants to dining in Vietnam with President Barack Obama, hanged himself in a hotel room near Strasbourg, France, where he had been working on an upcoming episode of his TV series, according to CNN.
Michael Benanav has traveled around much of the world, chronicling in words and pictures nomadic communities from Mali, to Jordan to Mongolia. But when the photographer heard about the Van Gujjar tribe of Northern India, he knew he wanted to do more than just document their existence. He wanted to join them on a migration to better understand their nomadic way of life and culture.
…
Michael Benanav has traveled around much of the world, chronicling in words and pictures nomadic communities from Mali, to Jordan, to Mongolia. But when the American photographer heard about the Van Gujjar tribe of Northern India, he knew he wanted to do more than just document their existence. He wanted to join them on a migration to better understand their traditional way of life.
Forest-dwelling Van Gujjars
For 44 days, Benanav embedded himself with a family, and through the help of a translator, set about learning all he could about their nomadic, forest-dwelling lifestyle.
“It was partly because I just thought it would be a fascinating experience,” he explained. “And also because it seemed really critical to just understand their nomadic way of life.”
One of the first things Benanav noticed right away was how welcoming the Van Gujjars were toward him.
“They really invited me and welcomed me into their world, and really was taken into the family with an incredible amount of warmth and trust,” he said. “My work has taken me [to] many places in the world, meeting many different kinds of people, and there was something about this family that really touched me in a way that was quite unique,” he added.
An animal-loving community
Benanav said that while the Van Gujjars are Muslim, he found them to be among the more liberal communities in India, especially the women.
“Even though I was a man coming in from the outside, there were no barriers whatsoever to me talking to, hanging out with, spending time with the women in the family,” he said. “It was a very well-integrated situation gender-wise.”
Benanav also noticed how devoted tribe members were not only to each other, but to their herd of water buffalo around which their lives revolved. Understanding that profound connection to their animals, he said, is fundamental to understanding the Van Gujjars.
“They think of their buffaloes as family members. They would never eat them. They never even sell them for slaughter. And even though this is a Muslim community, they also happen to be vegetarian, not for any religious reasons, but because they really just don’t like the idea of killing animals,” he said.
The family keep their buffaloes solely for the milk they produce, he explained, which they use for their own consumption within the family. They sell what’s left over, and use that money to buy anything else that they need. “They really love these animals,” he emphasized.
That love for their animals manifested itself in many ways.
“Every Van Gujjar buffalo has a name. Every buffalo they say has a unique personality. If a buffalo was to get sick, the family would be really wracked with concern. And if a buffalo dies, they’ll bury it and mourn for it almost as if it was human.”
Sacred lands
Spending time with the family gave Benanav an opportunity to also learn about the tribe’s migration patterns.
“The Van Gujjars practice a form of seasonal migration,” he explained. “They live all year in the wilderness. In the fall and the winter, they live in an area called the Sivalik Hills, which is a chain of low but very rugged hills in North India that is covered by a thick, junglely kind of forest which provides plenty of food for the buffaloes during that time of the year.”
By April, it starts to get so hot that there’s nothing left for the buffaloes to eat or drink there, he said, which means that in order to survive, they have to trek to a cooler climate up in the Himalayas.
“Because while in the lowlands the forest is wilting in heat, what’s happening up in the highlands is the snows are melting, revealing these great grassy meadows where there’s plenty of food and water to sustain the buffaloes all summer long,” he said. “So, they really follow this cycle of natural seasonal migration based on where they can find food and water for their animals.”
But the tribe’s ancestral homelands are becoming less accessible to them as the land is incorporated into national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
“Some of them have already been forcibly evicted from the forests where they and their ancestors have lived for over 1,000 years,” Benanav observed. “And others are today facing that same kind of pressure.”
And that is having a major impact on the Van Gujjar tribe members and other nomadic communities around the world.
“Whether it’s Navajo people, or whether it’s the nomadic Van Gujjars, or whether it’s the Alevi Kurds in Turkey — there’s a really profound relationship with the natural world,” Benanav said. “Maybe some of that comes from the fact they’re living really in intimate contact with the natural world but also their perspective on it as something that is essentially sacred.”
It’s often forgotten, the photographer noted, that people have been living on wild lands for generations.
“To the typical American mentality, national parks are created on these pristine wild lands where people don’t live. It’s a place where these amazing landscapes are being protected from development,” he said. “But that’s because here in the United States, the indigenous people were evicted from the areas that became national parks 100-plus years ago already.”
He cited America’s Yellowstone National Park as an example.
“So, this whole idea of people evicting from parks is known as the ‘Yellowstone model,’ because that was the place where it was first pioneered.”
PHOTO BLOG: See more of Michael Benanav’s photos
Tolerance
“And that really gets to one of the more complicating factors in this whole idea of evicting indigenous people from parks, which is that we tend to have an idea that nature in its pure form — untouched, pristine, unaffected by man — is what we are protecting in national parks. But the reality is that many of these places, including Yellowstone … were essentially curated and managed by indigenous people for thousands of years before European people ever encountered them or discovered them,” he said.
Benanav said his experiences have helped him appreciate the diversity that exists in so many cultures around the globe.
“I really value the legacy that different peoples around the world bring to our humanity today,” he said. “And as the world becomes a more homogenized place, I think it’s really important to be remembering all of the different possible ways that it is to be human.”
Benanav has chronicled his experience with the Van Gujjars in his latest book “Himalaya Bound,” which he hopes will expand the world of his readers.
“Once you’ve seen or read about people who for example are willing to save the life of a buffalo with a broken leg and carry it over the Himalayas, you don’t forget that,” he noted. “And your world is bigger for that, and I think your world is richer for that.”
“And whether it’s from the Van Gujjars, or whether it’s the Navajos, or whether it’s any of the other communities that I’ve been working on documenting, I think each of our worlds is a richer place for knowing about these different cultures and the ways that they live and the things that they value,” he concluded.
…
U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose a 20 percent tariff on vehicles assembled in the European Union and shipped to the United States, in retaliation for European tariffs on American imports.
On Friday, the day new EU tariffs went into effect, Trump tweeted, “…if these Tariffs and Barriers are not soon broken down and removed, we will be placing a 20% Tariff on all of their cars coming into the U.S. Build them here!”
Auto industry experts say such tariffs could negatively impact the U.S. economy, as well as Europe’s.
“It’s really a tangle; it’s not a simple question” of cars being made in one place and sold in another, Kasper Peters, communications manager of ACEA, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, said Friday in an interview with VOA.
In March, ACEA Secretary General Erik Jonnaert noted the impact European carmakers with plants in the United States have on local economies. “EU manufacturers do not only import vehicles into the U.S. They also have a major manufacturing footprint there, providing significant local employment and generating tax revenue,” Jonnaert said in a statement.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said earlier this week that his department plans to wrap up by July or August an investigation into whether imported cars and car parts are a threat to national security. But Daniel Price, a former senior economic adviser to President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post that Trump’s threat of new tariffs “short-circuited the … process and conclusively undercut the stated national security rationale of that investigation.”
The new EU tariffs enacted Friday apply to billions of dollars’ worth of American goods — including jeans, bourbon and motorcycles.
The action is the latest response to Trump’s decision to tax imported steel and aluminum.
The U.S. is scheduled to start taxing more than $30 billion in Chinese imports in two weeks.
Like the EU, China has promised to retaliate immediately, putting the world’s two largest economies at odds.
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president, John Murphy, was cited by the Associated Press as saying he estimates that $75 billion in U.S. products could be subjected to new foreign tariffs by the end of the first week of July.
Separately, a spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry said, “The U.S. is abusing the tariff methods and starting trade wars all around the world.”
“Clarity [is] still lacking about how far things will ultimately go between [the] U.S. and China and the potential ripple effect for world trade,” said financial analyst Mike van Dulken.
During his presidential campaign, Trump promised to apply tariffs, saying countries around the world had been exploiting the U.S.
A former White House trade adviser says Trump “has been so belligerent that it becomes almost impossible for democratically elected leaders — or even a non-democratic leader like [Chinese President] Xi Jinping — to appear to kowtow and give in.”
Phillip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said, “The president has made it very hard for other countries to give him what he wants.”
…
It had been a magical mystery tour as Paul McCartney led James Corden through his hometown of Liverpool during a “Carpool Karaoke” segment on CBS’ “The Late Late Show.”
Thursday’s program wraps up a weeklong stay in London and the 76-year-old Beatles legend joined Corden for a drive.
In between songs, McCartney autographs the Penny Lane wall and visits his childhood home.
Corden chokes up as McCartney explains how a dream about his late mother led to the lyrics for “Let It Be.”
The pair ends up at a pub, where Corden serves as bartender and encourages patrons to use the jukebox. When one does, a curtain dropped and revealed McCartney on stage with a band. He sings some of his old hits before inviting Corden onstage for “Hey Jude.”
…
Retaliating against the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, India has raised duties on 29 U.S. goods worth about $240 million.
New Delhi made the announcement Thursday after Washington ignored its request to be exempted from the tariffs because its exports were tiny compared to others, such as China and the European Union. India accounts for about 2 percent of American imports of steel and aluminum, or $1.5 billion in sales.
India is the latest country to hit back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff increases on steel and aluminum imports.
Among the items on which India will impose higher tariffs are agricultural products such as almonds, apples, walnuts, chickpeas and lentils, as well as some stainless steel products. India is the world’s biggest buyer of U.S. almonds and among the biggest importers of apples. The new tariffs will go into effect August 4.
New Delhi imposed the retaliatory tariffs amid worries that the U.S. might target India’s more significant exports, such as pharmaceuticals.
“It is an appropriate signal,” said Rajiv Kumar of the government’s policy research organization, NITI Aayog. “I am hopeful that all this will die down.”
Although the Indian levies on American products are small compared with those involved in the U.S.-China spat, the trade friction between the two democracies signals discord and uncertainty at a time when they are developing a closer strategic partnership.
India is among the countries named by Trump as following trade practices unfair to the U.S.
Speaking at the Group of Seven summit in Canada earlier this month, he said, “This isn’t just G-7. I mean, we have India, where some of the tariffs are 100 percent. A hundred percent. And we charge nothing. We can’t do that.”
Trump has repeatedly said India imposes a punitive import duty on Harley-Davidson motorcycles whereas the U.S. has much lower duties on motorcycles imported from India. His complaint prompted New Delhi to cut the import duty from 75 percent to 50 percent on high-end bikes earlier this year.
For the time being, India has kept high-end motorcycles off the list of items selected for higher tariffs.
The U.S. tariffs and counter-tariffs are “opening a Pandora’s box whereby countries will impose, retaliate, somebody will act, somebody will react. This is going to be a process that will pull everybody down,” said economist Ram Upendra Das, who heads the Center for Regional Trade in New Delhi, a research organization of India’s Commerce Ministry. He calls it “a race to the bottom.”
A trade deficit in New Delhi’s favor of about $30 billion in their annual bilateral trade of approximately $125 billion has long been an irritant for Washington. India is on the Trump administration list of countries with which it had a large deficit.
Officials from New Delhi and Washington are expected to hold trade talks next week to try to bridge their differences.
But amid growing fears that the rising wave of protectionism signaled by the U.S. tariffs threatens emerging economies like India, economists are confident that the trade disputes will be short-lived. “It has to get corrected. We will have to see how long it takes,” said economist Das.
…
In comments at odds with his home state’s whiskey distillers, Kentucky’s Republican governor is downplaying fears that the European Union’s retaliatory tariffs could disrupt the booming market for the Bluegrass state’s iconic bourbon industry.
“There’s always the potential for some type of impact, but I don’t think it will be a tremendous impact,” Governor Matt Bevin said when asked about tariffs during a TV interview this week with Bloomberg.
Bevin, a regular at bourbon industry events celebrating new or expanded facilities, called the tariffs that took effect Friday a “money grab” by the EU, but sounded confident that Kentucky bourbon will expand its share of the vast European whiskey market.
“Europeans are still going to drink more bourbon this year than they did last year; they’re just going to pay more for it because their government is going to take some of it,” he said this week during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Bevin referred to Europe as a “small portion” of the bourbon market, but the Kentucky Distillers’ Association said EU countries accounted for nearly $200 million of the more than $450 million in total exports of Kentucky bourbon and other distilled spirits in 2017.
Kentucky whiskey exports to EU countries have grown more than 10 percent annually in the past five years, said the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, which represents dozens of distillers, large and small. Kentucky whiskey exports overall rose by a whopping 23 percent last year, it said.
The governor’s comments downplaying the effect of tariffs stood in stark contrast to the distillers’ group, which warned that duties on American whiskey would have a “significant impact” on investment and employment in the state’s $8.5 billion bourbon sector.
“As we have said for the past few months, there are no winners in a trade war, only casualties and consequences,” the Kentucky Distillers’ Association said in its statement, which was released shortly after Bevin’s comments but did not directly refer to the governor.
Tariffs will drive up the price of Kentucky whiskey in EU markets where customers have plenty of spirits to choose from.
If a trade war breaks out, bourbon wouldn’t be the state’s biggest casualty, said University of Kentucky economics professor Ken Troske.
Kentucky’s auto parts sector could be hit hard, since many of its products are shipped to auto assembly plants in Canada and Mexico, he said Friday. Many of those vehicles are sent to the U.S. for sale. “Kentucky is a big, big player in that,” Troske said.
As for the bourbon sector, he said: “I don’t think tariffs are going to slow the growth down that much.”
The EU’s tariff action comes in response to Republican President Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on European steel and aluminum. Its retaliatory move targets other American goods including Harley Davidson bikes, cranberries, peanut butter and playing cards.
Kentucky produces about 95 percent of the world’s bourbon, with such brands as Jim Beam, Evan Williams, Wild Turkey, Maker’s Mark, Woodford Reserve and Four Roses. The industry supplies about 17,500 Kentucky jobs, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Association.
The industry is in the midst of a building boom, with more than $1.1 billion in projects planned, under way or completed in the past five years, it said. The construction includes expanded production facilities and new tourism centers.
Bevin, who routinely lavishes praise on Trump, said this week that the back-and-forth trade actions reflect “a certain amount of posturing that’s going on. It’s part of the negotiation process.” The governor said the EU has more to lose in a trade dispute.
“If they want to play this game with the United States, ultimately they’re going to lose,” he said during the Bloomberg interview. “So I don’t see that this will have long-term implications on trade between the EU and the U.S. I really don’t, but especially as it relates to bourbon. People in Europe still love bourbon, they’re still going to buy it and the European Union will just make money off it.”
Other trade disputes
Bevin’s downplaying of tariffs ran counter to comments by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who said during a recent speech in Louisville that tariffs “will not be good for the economy” and expressed hope that “we pull back from the brink.”
American spirits makers are being targeted for duties in other trade disputes. Mexico imposed tariffs on U.S. whiskey in response to Trump administration duties on Mexican steel and aluminum, while other countries including China and Canada are taking aim at American spirits.
Wall Street has been closely monitoring threats of a trade war. Vivien Azer, an analyst at Cowen & Co., said in a recent note that tariffs could affect a “notable piece” of international sales for Kentucky-based Brown-Forman Corp. The producer of such brands as Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and Woodford Reserve tried to hedge against tariff-related price increases by stockpiling inventories overseas.
Small and mid-sized distilleries often don’t have the financial wherewithal to stockpile supplies. But even for the biggest distillers, stockpiling offers “only a short-term fix, as there’s only so much excess inventory” they could ship, Azer said.
But if the trade dispute drags on, “we would generally expect the tariff impact to subside over time as pricing and consumer purchase behavior adjusts,” Azer wrote.
…
OPEC ministers agreed Friday to increase oil output, a move that could ease supply fears and lower world prices, but uncertainties remain about the durability of the outcome.
The agreement theoretically sees OPEC raising crude oil production by a million barrels a day, but analysts say the output will be quite a bit less because some member states have production constraints.
Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Khalid al-Falih confirmed as much to reporters at the Vienna OPEC meeting.
“We know that not all 24 countries can produce above their targets, and which is the reason the cut has increased from 1.8 to 2.8 [million barrels per day],” he said. “So what the actual volumes are released into the market is going probably to be less than a million, but the nominal figure we’re talking about is a million barrels.”
While the production increase is small compared to OPEC’s overall output, the cartel’s decision to boost supplies is a first since 2017, when it started withholding oil to prop up faltering prices. But strong oil demand this year has given a big boost to prices — sparking calls by consumers for more output.
That sentiment was echoed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who tweeted Friday that he hoped OPEC would increase output substantially.
But it’s unclear just how effective OPEC’s decision will be in lowering prices in the longer term. U.S. investment bank Jeffries Group was reported as saying the supply boost could help offset declining production and exports by Venezuela and Iran, but it also would leave spare supply capacity at its lowest level in decades. Possible Chinese tariffs against U.S. oil imports, as part of an escalating trade war, is another uncertainty.
The OPEC meeting was marked by disagreement, with Iran’s minister reportedly storming out of a meeting on Thursday. Iran opposed the output increase, while Russia and Saudi Arabia were for it. But Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, told reporters the ministers had agreed to a compromise.
He said they agreed to manage the market so Iran didn’t face difficulties and not to send the wrong signals to the international market.
Experts, however, believe the output increase will not benefit Iran, because the country is already exporting close to its maximum capacity. And the expected drop in oil prices will actually mean lower Iranian oil revenue.
…
The European Union is set to impose tariffs Friday on billions of dollars worth of American goods — including jeans, bourbon and motorcycles.
The action is the latest retaliation against U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to slap import tariffs on steel and aluminum from around the globe.
The U.S. is scheduled to start taxing more than $30 billion in Chinese imports in two weeks.
China has promised an immediate retaliation, a measure that would put the world’s two largest economies at odds.
John Murphy, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president, estimates that $75 billion in U.S. products could be subjected to new foreign tariffs by the end of July.
“The U.S. is abusing the tariff methods and starting trade wars all around the world.” said a spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry.
“Clarity (is) still lacking about how far things will ultimately go between (the) U.S. and China and the potential ripple effect for world trade,” said financial analyst Mike van Dulken.
During his presidential campaign, Trump promised to apply tariffs because he said countries around the world had been exploiting the U.S.
The European stock market was bracing itself in the face of the new tariffs .
In early Friday trading London’s FTSE 100 index of major blue-chip firms rose 0.2 percent to 7,571.78 points (compared with Thursday’s closing level.)
In the eurozone, Frankfurt’s DAX 30 was unchanged at 12,507.72, while the Paris CAC 40 gained almost 0.3 percent to 5,330.5 points.
But that could all change after the reality of the tariffs takes hold.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” at least not since the Great Depression, said Syracuse University economist Mary Lovely.
A former White House trade advisor says Trump “has been so belligerent that it becomes almost impossible for democratically elected leaders – or even a non-democratic leader like (Chinese President) Xi Jinping – to appear to kowtow and give in.” Phillip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said, “The president has made it very hard for other countries to give him what he wants.”
…