Aug 4 (Reuters) - The United States is discussing what support it would be prepared to offer a Kenya-led multinational force to help police in Haiti fight armed gangs amid a worsening humanitarian crisis there, a State Department official said on Friday.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Caribbean Affairs and Haiti Barbara Feinstein told reporters that U.S. contributions would depend on the outcome of a Kenyan assessment expected to take place in the Haitian capital in coming weeks.
She said the U.S. would seek contributions such as personnel, equipment, training, financing or other support from countries across the world.
Close to 200,000 people have been internally displaced in Haiti, according to recent U.N. estimates, largely in the Ouest department as residents face frequent shootings, kidnappings and sexual violence as rival gangs wage wars for territory.
Aid groups and food producers have struggled to move personnel and basic supplies to parts of the country, causing hospitals to shut and millions of people to live in famine-like conditions.
Broadening political inclusion and establishing conditions for free elections remained of “great urgency,” she said.
BRUSSELS/LONDON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - A major increase in solar power generation in southern Europe played a leading role in averting energy shortages during the heatwaves of recent weeks when temperatures broke records and drove unprecedented demand for air conditioning.
Solar power is particularly suited to coping with summer heat as the sun’s radiation is strongest around the hottest part of the day, when electricity demand for cooling is also at its highest.
“The very significant growth in solar basically compensates for the peaks that are caused by air conditioning,” Kristian Ruby, secretary general of electricity industry group Eurelectric, said of the situation in Spain.
“Without the additional solar, the system stability impact would have turned out much worse,” Refinitiv power analyst Nathalie Gerl said.
Catania, below Mount Etna in eastern Sicily, has faced power and water supply cuts that local officials blamed in part on the heat.
In a letter to the European Commission last week, industry groups including SolarPower Europe urged policymakers to speed up investments in energy grids and promote projects that couple solar with energy storage, to ensure solar power expands quickly enough to meet climate change goals.
Unless they have a special housing unit he’ll end up in solitary confinement. (Did a few years in a state prison for growing mushrooms).
If he went to general population he’d be the target of so much harassment. So, they will separate him, even if it means he serves his whole sentence in the hole.
Best case they have a seg unit. Which means he’ll be grouped with sex offenders.
Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.
According to technical data, the intrusion roughly began in late 2021 and continued until May 2022 when, according to internal communications at the company reviewed by Reuters, IT engineers detected the hackers’ activity.
The hackers dug into the company’s IT environment, giving them the ability to read email traffic, jump between networks, and extract data, according to Tom Hegel, a security researcher with U.S. cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, who initially discovered the compromise.
Hegel’s team of security analysts at SentinelOne learned of the hack after discovering that an NPO Mash IT staffer accidentally leaked his company’s internal communications while attempting to investigate the North Korean attack by uploading evidence to a private portal used by cybersecurity researchers worldwide.
The lapse provided Reuters and SentinelOne with a unique snapshot into a company of critical importance to the Russian state which was sanctioned by the Obama administration following the invasion of Crimea.
In 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin touted NPO Mash’s “Zircon” hypersonic missile as a “promising new product”, capable of travelling at around nine times the speed of sound.
AMSTERDAM, Aug 7 (Reuters) - UN appeals judges on Monday ordered the war crimes trial for elderly Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga indefinitely suspended because he has dementia, rejecting plans for an alternative slimmed-down procedure.
The judges, who are part of the court that succeeded the Rwanda war crimes tribunal, also ordered a lower trial chamber to rapidly evaluate under what circumstances Kabuga could be released.
The former businessman and radio station owner was one of the last suspects sought by the tribunal prosecuting crimes in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when ruling Hutu majority extremists killed more than 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates in 100 days.
Kabuga is in his late 80s, though his precise date of birth is disputed.
In June, judges at a U.N. war crimes court ruled Kabuga unfit to stand trial but said alternative procedures should take place.
Prosecutors had argued halting the trial would be unfair to the victims and said Kabuga’s own actions put him in the position of facing trial at an advanced age with diminished capacity.
OSLO, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Facebook owner Meta Platforms (META.O) will be fined 1 million crowns ($98,500) per day over privacy breaches from Aug. 14, Norway’s data protection authority told Reuters on Monday, a decision that could have wider European implications.
“As of next Monday, a daily fine of 1 million crown will start to apply,” Tobias Judin, head of Datatilsynet’s international section told Reuters.
Meta last week said it intends to ask users in the European Union for their consent before allowing businesses to target advertising based on what they view on its services such as Facebook and Instagram.
Meta had to stop the processing of personal data immediately, and until that consent mechanism was up and running.
“According to Meta, this will take several months, at the very earliest, for them to implement … And we don’t know what the consent mechanism will look like,” Judin said.
Meta said the change was made to address regulatory requirements in the region and stems from an order in January by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Meta’s lead EU regulator, to reassess the legal basis on how it targets ads.
And the West relies on Chinese manufacturing. All the scare mongering surrounding China, the US already would have pulled investment if they actually were the ones in control. The West has hitched its wagon to China at this point. They have no real alternative to turn towards.
Wouldn’t this be more of a double implication though? Without China to manufacture goods, the West is out of goods, but without the West to purchase said goods, China just gets stuck with a huge amount of goods it can only sell at a discount to other nations, thereby reducing their profit margins. Surely if other places were willing to pay just as much as the West for goods, they would be sold there as well, to not have all eggs in the same basket.
Sort of like what I read on a lunch place - “Eat here, or we both starve”.
Not trying to start a pro-/anti-anything discussion, genuinely curious about the mechanics at play here, global economics, game theory and all that.
Absolutely! Doesn’t change the fact that Biden’s warning is toothless bluster. If he actually tried to end US investment in China it would collapse the world economy. It’s a M.A.D. world
That’s exactly his point though. It’s more a reminder, less a threat. It actually sort of touched on it in the article, China’s relationship to Putin vs the West.
It’s sort of going "we see you eyeing off Taiwan, and chumming up to Russia… Please remember that there IS in fact a red line. We’ve told you where it is and if you cross it, you’ll likely destroy us both. Please don’t go thinking that you’ll be fine, because your economy relies heavily on ours, the same as ours does yours. "
The U.S. has been taking steps to change this, particularly in light of the supply chain issues that have popped up along with everything Taiwan. The process is slow, however, and possibly even slower than economic growth.
There are huge differences between China and countries like Vietnam and Mexico.
Vietnam is significantly poorer with poor infrastructure. They don’t have the capacity to move enough finished products onto modern container ships today. Their electricity infrastructure is unreliable, their local freight rail is poor, and their roads are awful. Chinese wages are much higher than Vietnam now, but because of economies of scale, China can invest in the best industrial infrastructure in the world to help keep prices down for manufactures in every other part of the business process. Vietnam could catch up one day, but they are far behind. India is also in this same position.
Mexico has wages that are just as high as China, but also has terrible infrastructure and and a failing government. No one in China is worried their products will be held hostage by drug gangs, or that their engineers inspecting their factories will get kidnapped.
China is doing so well because they have planned ahead. They created world class manufacturing infrastructure around Shanghai and Shenzhen that have laid the groundwork for modernizing the entire country. They have done a very good job building their “moat” to discourage manufacturers from moving elsewhere, there are just too many potential savings to keep manufacturing in China rather than take a risk moving elsewhere. Despite the US pushing “derisking” so hard, it will have only a slow impact on pushing companies to leave, because the US cannot actually offer them a better deal to move somewhere else.
Are there alternatives though? Some moved some production to Vietnam, for example. Do you know who’s their partner in Vietnam? Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn. Yeah, China, again.
There’s a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.
get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?
7 or 8 right?
okay let’s go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where’d you’d expect the manufacturing to go to.
aight… now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let’s include India, and Rotterdam, and LA… just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?
so, cargo shipping capacity… big difference right? day light.
Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.
all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers…
there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.
Wtf does this mean? It’s buried at the end of the article.
A few days after the girl’s disappearance, Berlin police said in a statement that there were “indications” that the woman was “in an exceptional psychological situation.”
Does it mean suicidal? The earlier mention of “not assuming additional parties were involved” seems to indicate as much, but intentionally vague, euphemistic language makes it hard to tell.
Or does it mean she was being held and/or tortured? That someone was after her…??
I don’t know the details or have any more information, but there is a background as to reporting suicides in Germany.
Usually, it is consensus between the German news outlets not to report suicides, unless it has been committed by a person of interest, usually a celebrity. This is not a law or otherwise enforced, but a common understanding of the outlets amongst each other, so there will be no promotion of suicide. Here is a source (in German, unfortunately, explaining the reasoning: deutschlandfunk.de/sagen-meinen-warum-medien-nich…)
To me, this seems to be a plausible reason for the vague language, but again, I don’t know.
Additionally it isn’t as obvious as one might think to rule out wrongdoing - what if she was drugged and then thrown into the canal,etc. These investigations take some time, often weeks, and are especially difficult the longer the person is deceased and even more so for bodies that were exposed to water for a long time.
It simply wouldn’t be a sensible idea to now declare the case a suicide only to revert the statement later on when something highly unlikely turns up.
Basically the current wording is a hint that the police has some evidence that it was suicidal, but did not rule out all other causes yet.
Could be some other form of mental breakdown, psychosis or whatever. Not everyone who commits suicide is actually suicidal, which is usually a state that can last years. Maybe she even thought she could fly or slipped within her confused mind. In the German
"No third-party blame can be assumed,"
This, at the current state of the investigation, means that they do not assume any third party involvement in her death.
Now I’m confused: If this is about temporary hiring falling, this means the economy is recovering and companies are looking to hire more permanently again, right?
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