Month: January 2018

A new political dawn in Zimbabwe has sparked talk among farmers of land reform and the return of some whites who lost their land and livelihoods to President Robert Mugabe during a 37-year rule that drove the economy to collapse. Mugabe, 93, resigned in November after the army and his ZANU-PF party turned against him, prompting optimism among some of the thousands of white farmers ousted in the early 2000s on the grounds of redressing imbalances from the colonial era. For colonialists seized some of the best agricultural land that remained in the hands of white farmers after independence in 1980 leaving many blacks effectively landless and making land ownership one of Zimbabwe’s most sensitive political topics. Now some white landowners hope the post-Mugabe regime may address the land issue, either through compensation or returning land, and try to resuscitate a once vibrant agricultural sector boosting an economy once seen as one of Africa’s great hopes. “We are convinced positive signals will come quickly in terms of property rights,” Ben Purcel Gilpin, director of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), which represents white and black farmers, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It would send a good signal to people outside Zimbabwe.”  New president and long-time Mugabe ally, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has promised a raft of changes since he took office, including a return to the rule of law and respect for property rights. Land ownership has been a key issue for decades in Zimbabwe dating back to British colonial rule in what …

A new political dawn in Zimbabwe has sparked talk among farmers of land reform and the return of some whites who lost their land and livelihoods to President Robert Mugabe during a 37-year rule that drove the economy to collapse. Mugabe, 93, resigned in November after the army and his ZANU-PF party turned against him, prompting optimism among some of the thousands of white farmers ousted in the early 2000s on the grounds of redressing imbalances from the colonial era. For colonialists seized some of the best agricultural land that remained in the hands of white farmers after independence in 1980 leaving many blacks effectively landless and making land ownership one of Zimbabwe’s most sensitive political topics. Now some white landowners hope the post-Mugabe regime may address the land issue, either through compensation or returning land, and try to resuscitate a once vibrant agricultural sector boosting an economy once seen as one of Africa’s great hopes. “We are convinced positive signals will come quickly in terms of property rights,” Ben Purcel Gilpin, director of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), which represents white and black farmers, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It would send a good signal to people outside Zimbabwe.”  New president and long-time Mugabe ally, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has promised a raft of changes since he took office, including a return to the rule of law and respect for property rights. Land ownership has been a key issue for decades in Zimbabwe dating back to British colonial rule in what …

Many refugees would like to buy low-carbon stoves and lights but poor access in camps and a lack of funding is forcing them to rely on “dirty and expensive” fuels, a report said Tuesday. Millions of refugees worldwide struggle to access energy for cooking, lighting and communication and often pay high costs for fuels like firewood, which are bad for their health. Yet two-thirds would consider paying for clean cookstoves and more than one-third for solar household products, according to a survey by the Moving Energy Initiative (MEI), a partnership among Britain, the United Nations and charities. “Energy providers don’t tend to think of refugees as potential energy consumers, but the opportunities to build a relationship with them are huge,” Mattia Vianello, one of the report’s authors, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. Clean energy for refugees is a global priority for the U.N. refugee agency, which provides free solar power to thousands of displaced people in camps in Jordan and Kenya. Campaigners are seeking to create a market for cleaner-burning stoves and fuels to supply millions of households worldwide that are using inefficient, dangerous methods. Perilous smoke When burned in open fires and traditional stoves, wood, charcoal and other solid fuels emit harmful smoke that claims millions of lives each year, according to the Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund, which promotes stoves that produce less pollution. In Uganda, refugees collect wood from surrounding areas, “devastating” the local environment and creating tensions with locals, Raffaela Bellanca, an energy adviser with …

A colorful paint job has transformed one of Mumbai’s drab hilltop slums into a tourist destination, even prompting comparisons with Italy’s picturesque Amalfi Coast. During a recent journey on a Mumbai metro train, Dedeepya Reddy was struck by the grim appearance of a slum in Asalpha in the city’s eastern suburbs as she stared out from her air-conditioned carriage. Reddy, a Harvard University-educated co-founder of a creative agency, was keen to brighten the lives of slum residents, while also changing the perception of slums being dirty and dangerous, and decided on a simple makeover. Armed with dozens of cans of colorful paint, Reddy and a team of about 700 volunteers painted the walls and alleyways of the hilltop slum over two weekends last month. Residents, at first skeptical, also got involved and helped paint quirky murals, the 31-year-old said. “When you look at slums, you think they are shabby and dirty, and that also becomes a reflection of the people who live there,” Reddy told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We used bright colors to change how slums and their residents are viewed. It also gives residents a sense of pride and dignity about their homes.” Up to 37 million households, or about a quarter of India’s urban population, live in informal housing including slums because of an acute shortage of affordable housing, according to social consultancy FSG. In space-starved Mumbai, which has some of the priciest real estate in the world, the shortage is even more critical, with hundreds of …

Hackers who stole around $530 million worth of cryptocurrency from the Coincheck exchange last week — one of the biggest such heists ever — are trying to move the stolen “XEM” coins, the foundation behind the digital currency said on Tuesday. NEM Foundation, creators of the XEM cryptocurrency, have traced the stolen coins to an unidentified account, and the account owner had begun trying to move the coins onto six exchanges where they could then be sold, Jeff McDonald said. Hackers made off with roughly $533 million worth of the cryptocurrency from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck Inc late last week, raising fresh questions about security and regulatory protection in the booming market. The location of the hackers’ account was not known. “(The hackers are) trying to spend them on multiple exchanges. We are contacting those exchanges,” Singapore-based McDonald told Reuters. NEM Foundation spokeswoman Alexandra Tinsman said the hacker had started sending out “XEM” coins to random accounts in 100 XEM batches, worth about $83 each. “When people look to launder these types of funds, they sometimes spread it into smaller transactions because it’s less likely to trigger (exchanges’) anti-money laundering (mechanisms),” said Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, a cryptocurrency security firm in London. Robinson said such hopping among different cryptocurrencies was becoming more prevalent among cybercriminals trying to cover their tracks. The coins that the hackers had taken made up around 5 percent of the total supply of XEM, the world’s 10th biggest cryptocurrency, according to trade website Coinmarketcap. McDonald said …

Middle Eastern countries should pursue fiscal policies to support growth and build broader tax bases to fund infrastructure projects and social spending, the head of the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday. “A key priority is building broader and more equitable tax bases. All must pay their fair share, while the poor must be protected,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told an economic conference in Marrakech, organized by the Washington-based fund and the kingdom. That would allow them to spend more on social safety nets, health and education services than the current 11 percent of gross domestic product in the region. “Fiscal policy can and must be redesigned to support inclusive growth in the region,” Lagarde said. More efforts are also needed to support the private sector, she said. The state, the dominant employer in many Arab countries with their young populations, can no longer hire newcomers to the labor market. “This, too, can help make room for high-return social and infrastructure outlays,” Largarde said, adding that better access to finance, a more favorable business environment and fewer barriers such as red tape were necessary. “Protracted regional conflicts, low commodity prices, weak productivity and poor governance have held back the considerable potential of the region,” the final statement issued by the IMF and two other international bodies said. “Growth has not been strong enough to reduce unemployment significantly, and a staggering 25 percent of young people are jobless,” it added. …

President Donald Trump will herald a robust economy and push for bipartisan congressional action on immigration in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, as he seeks to rally a deeply divided nation and boost his own sagging standing with Americans. The speech marks the ceremonial kickoff of Trump’s second year in office and is traditionally a president’s biggest platform to speak to the nation. However, Trump has redefined presidential communications with his high-octane, filter-free Twitter account and there’s no guarantee that the carefully crafted speech will resonate beyond his next tweet. Still, White House officials are hopeful the president can use the prime-time address to Congress and millions of Americans watching at home to take credit for a soaring economy. Though the trajectory of lower unemployment and higher growth began under his predecessor, Trump argues that the tax overhaul he signed into law late last year has boosted business confidence and will lead companies to reinvest in the United States.   Considering the strength of the economy, Trump will step before lawmakers Tuesday night in a remarkably weak position. His approval rating has hovered in the 30s for much of his presidency and at the close of 2017, just 3 in 10 Americans said the United States was heading in the right direction, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. In the same survey, 67 percent of Americans said the country was more divided because of Trump.   It’s unlikely Trump will be able …

Tourism to Cuba, one of the few bright spots in its ailing economy, has slid in the wake of Hurricane Irma and the Trump administration’s tighter restrictions on travel to the Caribbean island, a Cuban tourism official said on Monday. Although the number of visitors rose nearly 20 percent in 2017, it fell 10 percent on the year in December, and is down 7-8 percent this month, Jose Manuel Bisbe York, the president of Cuban state travel agency conglomerate Viajes Cuba, said. Arrivals from the United States, which had surged in the wake of the U.S.-Cuban detente in 2014, took the worst hit, dropping 30 percent last December, he told Reuters. “Since Hurricane Irma, we’ve seen arrivals shrink,” Bisbe York said on the sidelines of the event organized by U.S. travel agency insightCuba to dispel tourist misperceptions about Cuba. Irma hit in September, just as the tourism sector was taking reservations for its high season from November to March. Images of destruction put many would-be visitors off although Cuba had fixed its tourism installations within two months, said Bisbe York. Arrivals of Canadians, the largest group of tourists to Cuba, were down 4-5 percent. “But we see this as a temporary thing and what we are seeing is that arrivals are recovering from month to month,” said Bisbe York, adding that Cuba would go ahead with its plans to launch more than 15 hotels island-wide this year. “The first trimester will be the most difficult, because logically the change in …

Amazon.com on Monday opened a rainforest-like office space in Seattle that it hopes will spark new ideas for employees. While cities across North America are seeking to host Seattle-based Amazon’s second headquarters, the world’s largest online retailer is still expanding its main campus. Company office towers and high-end eateries have taken the place of warehouses and parking lots in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. The Spheres complex, officially open to workers Tuesday, is the pinnacle of a decade of development here. The Spheres’ three glass domes house some 40,000 plants of 400 species. Amazon, famous for its demanding work culture, hopes the Spheres’ lush environs will let employees reflect and have chance encounters, spawning new products or plans. The space is more like a greenhouse than a typical office. Instead of enclosed conference rooms or desks, there are walkways and unconventional meeting spaces with chairs. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder, officially opened the project in a ceremony with Amazon executives, elected officials and members of the media — by voice command. “Alexa, open the Spheres,” Bezos said, as a circle in the Spheres’ ceiling turned blue just like Amazon’s speech-controlled devices, whose voice assistant is named Alexa. Amazon has invested $3.7 billion on buildings and infrastructure in Seattle from 2010 to summer 2017, a figure that has public officials competing for its “HQ2” salivating. Amazon has said it expects to invest more than $5 billion in construction of HQ2 and to create as many as 50,000 jobs. “We wanted to …

U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade chief on Monday dismissed Canadian proposals for unblocking NAFTA modernization talks but pledged to stay at the table, easing concerns about a potentially imminent U.S. withdrawal from the trilateral pact. Trump, who described the 1994 pact as a disaster that has drained manufacturing jobs to Mexico, has frequently threatened abandon it unless it can be renegotiated to bring back jobs to the United States. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said after a sixth round of NAFTA modernization talks in Montreal that Trump’s views on the pact are unchanged, and cautioned that talks are still moving too slowly on U.S. priorities. “We finally began to discuss the core issues, so this round was a step forward,” Lighthizer said. “But we are progressing very slowly. We owe it to our citizens, who are operating in a state of uncertainty, to move much faster.” But Lighthizer’s Mexican and Canadian counterparts said that enough progress was made in Montreal to be optimistic about concluding the pact “soon,” with nine days of talks in Mexico City scheduled to start Feb. 26. “For the next round, we will still have substantial challenges to overcome. Yet the progress made so far puts us on the right track to create landing zones to conclude the negotiation soon,” said Mexico’s Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo. Officials are now openly speculating that the bid to salvage the $1.2-trillion free trade pact will continue well beyond an end-March deadline set to avoid Mexican presidential elections. Canadian proposals …

Executive branch government employees in Argentina will get no pay raises this year and one out of every four “political positions” appointed by ministers will be cut, President Mauricio Macri said on Monday, deepening his austerity drive. The clampdown on political positions, including advisers appointed by government ministers, is viewed as an attack on a patronage system that has been in place for decades. The firings, expected to save $77 million a year, are symbolic of Macri’s drive to regain market confidence. “Austerity has to be part of politics,” Macri said in a televised address. He spent the first two years of his administration dismantling the trade and currency controls set up by his predecessor, Cristina Fernandez, who had expanded the role of government in the economy. He was elected in 2015 with a mandate to free the markets and improve Argentinas business climate. Macri, expected to seek re-election next year, denounced “the corruption and clientelism” of past administrations. Included in the measures announced on Monday, family members of ministers were banned from holding government jobs. Macri scored a series of business-friendly legislative wins late last year after his coalition swept mid-term elections. But passage of his pension reform bill last month triggered violent protests and a decline in the president’s approval ratings. The government wants to foster the idea that politically appointed officials share the burden of the fiscal adjustment. “It also wants to convey the message that this administration really is different from its predecessors,” said Ignacio Labaqui, …