Month: September 2019

Argentine economists sharply hiked 2019 inflation forecasts and cut their gross domestic product outlook for the year, according to a central bank poll released on Tuesday, following a wave of  political uncertainty that beat the local peso down 26% in August. The survey came two days after the government announced capital controls in a bid to halt a run on the peso currency. The controls, which followed an announcement that Argentina would extend the maturities of about $100 billion in debt, were a massive setback for the government’s free-markets reform effort. Inflation was seen at 55% for the year, according to the survey of 39 analysts, up from 40% in the same central bank poll a month earlier. The new weakness in the peso, which fell 50.5% against the U.S. dollar last year, is expected to lead to rising consumer prices over the months ahead. Gross domestic product was forecast to shrink 2.5% this year, the poll said, versus the previous month’s survey, which saw 2019 GDP shrinking by 1.4%. The poll was conducted after the Aug. 11 primary election, which triggered a sharp fall in the value of the peso currency when business-friendly President Mauricio Macri was soundly trounced by his populist-leaning rival Alberto Fernandez. Peronist Fernandez is now the front-runner ahead of the Oct. 27 general election. Macri is running for a second term, but his popularity has been beaten down by the poor economy. “Capital controls imply a full reversal of Macri’s reforms,” said Alberto Bernal, chief …

Hurricane Dorian will likely avoid landfall in Florida, but that does not mean residents of the Sunshine State or anywhere else along southeastern U.S. coast can relax. Forecasters say Dorian is getting bigger and will move “dangerously close” to Florida and Georgia Tuesday through Wednesday night, then threaten North and South Carolina with massive rainfall and powerful winds. Potential rainfall from Hurricane Dorian, through Sunday, Sept. 8 As of late Tuesday, Dorian was a Category 2 storm, about 200 kilometers east of Cape Canaveral, Florida, with top sustained winds of 175 kilometers per hour. Tropical storm warnings are in effect for an area from near the Savannah River along the Georgia-South Carolina border north to Surf City, North Carolina. Even if it stays offshore, Dorian’s winds and rain extend 95 kilometers from the center and is expected to remain a powerhouse the rest of the week. The National Hurricane Center in Miami cautions everyone along the Mid-Atlantic coast — from Maryland to New York City — to keep a close eye on Dorian. Dorian finally drifted away from the Bahamas Tuesday, leaving behind devastation described as “apocalyptic,” “total,” and looking as if a bomb had gone off. Cars sit submerged in water from Hurricane Dorian in Freeport, Grand Bahama. Dorian is beginning to inch northwestward after being stationary over the Bahamas, where its relentless winds have caused catastrophic damage and flooding. The lack of wind currents in the atmosphere kept Dorian parked on top of Abaco and Grand Bahama Island …

Facebook said Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would be violating the company’s rules if agents create fake profiles to monitor the social media of foreigners seeking to enter the country. “Law enforcement authorities, like everyone else, are required to use their real names on Facebook and we make this policy clear,” Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Pollack told The Associated Press in a statement Tuesday. “Operating fake accounts is not allowed, and we will act on any violating accounts.” Pollack said the company has communicated its concerns and its policies on the use of fake accounts to DHS. She said the company will shut down fake accounts, including those belonging to undercover law enforcement, when they are reported. The company’s statement followed the AP’s report Friday that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had authorized its officers to use fake social media accounts in a reversal of a previous ban on the practice. Homeland Security explained the change to the AP in a statement Friday, stating that fake accounts would make it easier for agents reviewing visa, green card and citizenship applications to search for fraud or security threats. The department didn’t provide comment when asked Tuesday. The plan would also be a violation of Twitter’s rules. Twitter said Friday that it’s still reviewing the new Homeland Security practice. It did not provide further comment. The change in policy was preceded by other steps taken by the State Department, which began requiring applicants for U.S. visas to submit their social …

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday challenged her rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to commit to transition the United States fully to clean energy over the next decade for electricity, vehicles and buildings. Warren, one of 20 Democrats vying to take on President Donald Trump in November 2020, issued the challenge in a comprehensive clean energy plan released ahead of a 7-hour CNN Town Hall on Wednesday at which 10 candidates will discuss how they would tackle climate change. Her climate strategy weaves together several policies she has sprinkled into other proposals she has rolled out, from agriculture to tribal lands to manufacturing. It also incorporates a clean energy plan she adopted from Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who made climate change the centerpiece of his White House bid before dropping out of the race late last month. Inslee’s clean energy strategy — which had been billed as the gold standard by environmental advocates — set a 10-year plan to achieve 100% clean energy by slashing carbon emissions from U.S. electricity generation, vehicles and buildings. “While his presidential campaign may be over, his ideas should remain at the center of the agenda,” Warren wrote in a post for the website Medium. “Today I’m embracing that goal by committing to adopt and build on Governor Inslee’s 10-year action plan to achieve 100% clean energy …  and I’m challenging every other candidate for President to do the same,” she wrote. All of Warren’s Democratic rivals who will participate in the climate …

“Harry Potter” actor David Thewlis plays a father desperate to understand his adult daughter’s choices in “Guest of Honour,” an exploration of a family relationship with hidden secrets. The movie, directed by Atom Egoyan, begins with Veronica, a former high school music teacher recently released from jail, meeting a priest to discuss her father’s funeral. Over the course of the meeting, the priest (Luke Wilson), asks Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) to describe her father Jim and she looks back on his life. A widowed restaurant inspector with particular attention to detail, Thewlis’s Jim is frustrated by Veronica’s decision to go to jail after a failed hoax sees her falsely convicted of abusing her position towards a student. The young teacher, however, feels the need to be punished for an earlier crime from her past. Her determination to stay in jail soon begins to impact Jim’s work. The drama, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, sees both father and daughter conduct their own investigations about each other at different times. “There is the investigation that his daughter is conducting in the present day but there are several investigations that are happening at different points that he’s conducting while he was alive, that she’s conducting as she remembered it and that he’s positioning it as it actually happened,” Egoyan said. “It sounds complicated … even though there is five different periods I think it’s very clear at all times where you are in the film,” he added, speaking at …

People in the Bahamas experienced another hellish night as the center of powerful Hurricane Dorian sat stationary on the northern edge of Grand Bahama Island and pounded the area with fierce winds and the flooding effects of heavy rains and storm surge. Dorian made landfall on the island late Sunday night and barely moved throughout the day Monday. Forecasters expect the storm to finally move away during the day Tuesday and threaten the U.S. state of Florida. “We are in the midst of a historic tragedy in parts of northern Bahamas,” said Prime Minister Hubert Minnis. “Our mission and focus now is search, rescue, and recovery. I ask for your prayers in those in affected areas and for our first responders.” He told reporters at a Monday news conference there were five confirmed deaths on Abaco Island, where Dorian struck before moving to Grand Bahama. Minnis said initial reports from Abaco were of devastation that is “unprecedented and extensive.” What the storm did to Grand Bahama will become more clear as it moves away and authorities are able to survey the island. Strong winds from Hurricane Dorian blow the tops of trees and brush while whisking up water from the surface of a canal that leads to the sea, in Freeport, Grand Bahama, Bahamas, Sept. 2, 2019. “We know that there are a number of people in Grand Bahama who are in serious distress and we will provide relief and assistance as soon as possible after the Met (Meteorology) Department …

East Timor is marking the 20th anniversary of a referendum that ended 24 years of Indonesian occupation and delivered independence, but that also sparked a bloody rampage by pro-Jakarta militias who killed 1,500 people and pushed another half-a-million out of their homes. The capital has been sprucing up with freshly painted structures, newly paved streets and manicured gardens for the arrival of foreign dignitaries for celebrations that will last until the end of the month. But beneath the cheery facade is a lingering anger. Joao Borras, now 37, was forced to flee as militias rampaged through the capital, Dili, shot dead his two best friends, and razed his home. He said the killings were not just in the open but also behind closed doors by a government apparatus backed by militias that watched every move. “It’s a horrible life actually,” Borras said. “There’s a lot of people killed, but you didn’t see because they took you in the night time. They said ‘let’s go for interviews’ – and you will not come back the next morning.” The struggle since independence United Nations peacekeepers landed three weeks after the August 30, 1999 referendum and restored order. Independence followed on May 20, 2002, with the election of resistance leader Xanana Gusmao as president. But East Timor has struggled to develop its democracy and rebuild an economy shattered by conflict and ongoing internal fighting, which hampered its ability to attract much needed investment dollars. In 2006, the United Nations sent in security forces …

Peru plans to beef up security at its border with Ecuador to prevent illegal immigration, after stricter entry requirements for Venezuelans led to a 90% drop in legal crossings, a government official said on Monday. More than 850,000 Venezuelans have fled their homeland for Peru in recent years, part of a mass exodus from the Caribbean nation as it faces a crippling economic crisis. But in June, Peru started requiring Venezuelans who arrive to already have visas, part of stricter policies for Venezuelans in some South American nations. “The entry of Venezuelan migrants to our country has dropped dramatically and today it’s 90% less than what we saw in June,” Foreign Minister Nestor Popolizio told journalists. Popolizio said his ministry was working with the interior ministry and police to make sure Venezuelan migrants were not evading the new requirements by crossing illegally. “We’re engaged in a very direct coordination … to ensure more protection all along our border and to avoid illegal entries,” Popolizio said. Popolizio said Peru was one of 11 countries in the region trying to coordinate their policies on handling immigration from Venezuela. After Peru started requiring visas of Venezuelans, Chile and Ecuador implemented similar measures. All three countries also now require Venezuelans to have passports, a document that is hard to obtain for the growing ranks of poor Venezuelans. …

The new U.S. ambassador to Mexico has taken aim at Mexican icon Frida Kahlo for her support of Marxism, stirring up a fierce social media debate with a tweet asking if the painter had not been aware of atrocities committed in the name of that ideology. Few Mexicans have enjoyed greater global recognition than Kahlo, who spent long periods bedridden after a traffic accident in her youth, attained international fame following her death in 1954 and became a feminist symbol in the 1970s. She created some 200 paintings, sketches and drawings – mainly self-portraits – in which she transformed her misfortune into works of bold color. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and sworn in last month, must navigate a volatile bilateral relationship. Trump frequently berates Mexico over trade and immigration. Not shying away from controversy himself, Landau took to Twitter on Sunday during a visit to Kahlo’s house, now a museum in the colonial-era Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacan. “I admire her free and bohemian spirit, and she rightly became an icon of Mexico around the whole world. What I do not understand is her obvious passion for Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism. Didn’t she know about the horrors committed in the name of that ideology?” he wrote in Spanish. Irish urban artist Fin Dac (2-R) and his assistant work on his mural “Magdalena,” in honor of Mexican painter Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo in the month of her birth, in Guadalajara, Jalisco state, July 9, 2019. …

Saudi Arabia is struggling to hold together a military coalition fighting Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen after local allies turned on each other in a power struggle that has strained Riyadh’s alliance with its main regional partner, the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, the second power in the coalition, has openly intervened on behalf of southern separatists battling the Saudi-backed government for control of the south, launching air strikes on government forces trying to regain their interim seat of power in Aden port. The escalation risks further fracturing the Saudi-UAE alliance and emboldening the Houthi movement, which the coalition was formed to fight. The United Nations is trying to restart talks to end the 4-1/2 year conflict, largely seen as a proxy war between rival powers Saudi Arabia and Iran. What’s happening in Southern Yemen? UAE-backed separatists, who seek self-rule in the south, seized Aden, base of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government, in early August after they accused a party allied to Hadi of complicity in a Houthi assault on their forces. The two sides were nominal allies under the Western-backed, Sunni Muslim coalition that intervened in Yemen in March 2015 against the Houthi group, which ousted Hadi from power in the capital Sanaa in 2014. But they have rival agendas. Saudi Arabia and the UAE called for talks to resolve the crisis. Hadi’s government insisted that separatists first cede control and that the UAE stop supporting southern fighters it has armed and trained. The separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) said …

Iran is for the first time acknowledging that a rocket explosion took place at its Imam Khomeini Space Center, with an official saying a technical malfunction caused the blast.   Government spokesman Ali Rabiei made the statement on Monday in comments broadcast by Iranian state television.   He said the explosion caused no fatalities and also that officials had found no sign that sabotage was involved in the explosion.   Satellite photos showed a rocket on a launch pad at the space center had exploded Thursday. The space center is located about 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, southeast of the capital, Tehran.   President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted a surveillance photo likely taken of the site by an American spy satellite. He wrote that the U.S. had nothing to do with the blast. …

A senior U.S. naval officer has underlined Washington’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific as the United States launched its first joint naval exercise with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations …

The U.S. and Poland signed an agreement on Monday to cooperate on new 5G technology amid growing concerns about Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Vice President Mike Pence and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki signed the deal in Warsaw, where Pence is filling in for President Donald Trump, who scrapped his trip at the last minute because of Hurricane Dorian.   The signing comes amid a global battle between the U.S. and Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of network infrastructure equipment, over network security.   The agreement endorses the principles developed by cybersecurity officials from dozens of countries at a summit in Prague earlier this year to counter threats and ensure the safety of next generation mobile networks.    “Protecting these next generation communications networks from disruption or manipulation and ensuring the privacy and individual liberties of the citizens of the United States, Poland, and other countries is of vital importance,” the agreement says.   Pence said the agreement would “set a vital example for the rest of Europe.”   The U.S. has been lobbying allies to ban Huawei from 5G networks over concerns China’s government could force the company to give it access to data for cyberespionage. Huawei has denied the allegation.   The U.S. has called for an outright ban on Huawei, but European allies have balked.   A senior Trump administration official told reporters during a briefing ahead of the trip that the agreement would help ensure secure supply chains and networks and protect against unauthorized access or …

Atop a string of green mountains in Saudi Arabia, a monthlong festival drew a medley of yoga enthusiasts, extreme adventure seekers, tourists and traditional Saudi families — many wearing colorful flower crowns native to the region as the kingdom looks for ways to revamp its image and build up tourism. The al-Soudah festival, which ran throughout the month of August, gave visitors a chance to experience a unique region in Saudi Arabia and take part in outdoor sports like hiking, mountain biking, paragliding, horseback riding, zip lining and bungee jumping. Thousands also attended concerts by Middle Eastern superstars. Scenes of women zip lining and young Saudis at concerts, while nevertheless in a remote village, are a stark departure from the ultraconservative policies that for decades barred concerts and gender mixing, as well as shunned women’s sports in the kingdom. The reforms are being pushed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the king’s powerful 34-year-old son. He is looking to revamp the country’s economy to become more resilient in the face of lower oil prices. Boosting domestic spending and opening the country to foreign tourists are seen as ways to create more jobs for the millions of young Saudis who will be entering the workforce and looking for jobs in the coming years. Saudi tourists wear helmets and keep their faces and hair covered according to local custom, as they pose for a photo before zip lining between cliffs, during the al-Soudah festival in Abha, southwest Saudi Arabia, Aug. 23, 2019. …

Afghan officials say U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani Monday in Kabul to share details of a draft U.S.-Taliban peace agreement, but did not hand a copy of the deal to the president. Afghan presidential spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told reporters that Khalilzad shared all the important details in the document and that the government will discuss it internally. Further discussions with Khalilzad’s team are expected to continue. Khalilzad announced Sunday via Twitter he had concluded the ninth round of peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar and was leaving for Kabul to brief Afghan leaders in his discussions with the insurgents. FILE – Suhail Shaheen, spokesman for the Taliban’s political office in Doha, speaks to the media in Moscow, Russia, May 28, 2019. Members of Khalilzad team remained in Doha and some technician level talks took place on Sunday, said Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen. “We are at the threshold of an agreement that will reduce violence and open the door for Afghans to sit together to negotiate an honorable & sustainable peace and a unified, sovereign Afghanistan that does not threaten the United States, its allies, or any other country,” Khalilzad tweeted. In the midst of the negotiations, the Taliban continued to launch attacks.   On Sunday, the insurgents attacked its second city in two days. Officials in Baghlan province said the insurgents were on the outskirts of the capital. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said its fighters stormed Afghan security posts around Pul-e-Khumri and were inside …