Tag Archives: austria

Germany Unhappy Over New Steel Tariffs

Mother Jones

Germany is upset at new tariffs on carbon and alloy steel cut-to-length plate:

Germany’s foreign minister on Friday morning said the Trump administration is taking a “dangerous step” after the Commerce Department announced a tariff on imports of foreign steel, indicating the tax could become a new source of conflict with the powerful U.S. ally and trading partner.

….“The U.S. Government is apparently prepared to provide American companies with unfair competitive advantages over European and other producers, even if such action violates international trade law,” Gabriel’s statement read. “I very much fail to comprehend the decision.”

FWIW, none of this is really a Trump thing. The International Trade Commission began investigating dumping claims against Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, and Turkey in early 2016, and finished up its work before Trump took office. The vote determining that these countries were dumping product in the US below cost was unanimous.

I don’t know what the Obama or Clinton administrations would have done if they’d had the final decision on this, but my guess is that they would have done the same thing as Trump, and the targets of the tariffs would have complained and threatened to take the case to the WTO. So there’s nothing much new here. It’s just another steel tariff. Because, you know, all the previous ones over the past four decades have been so successful.

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Germany Unhappy Over New Steel Tariffs

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This Chart Shows America Has a Unique Problem With Gun Violence

Mother Jones

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On Christmas Day, in a bitter reminder that, unlike stores and offices, gun violence in America doesn’t stop during the holidays, 27 people were killed and 63 others were injured by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

As the Washington Post‘s Christopher Ingraham notes, as many people were killed by firearms in the United States on Christmas day this year as in all of Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland combined, in one year. That’s 27 people out of nearly 29 million people in a given year, compared to 27 people out of a possible 320 million in one day. Granted, no one was killed from guns in Bermuda, Hong Kong, or Iceland at all, and the fatalities and injuries on Christmas Day in the United States are actually fewer than on a typical day this year. But the comparison is a stark reminder that gun violence in America is a unique health crisis.

Christopher Ingraham/Washington Post

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This Chart Shows America Has a Unique Problem With Gun Violence

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Forget Germany. Refugees in Croatia First Have to Figure Out Where the Hell They Are.

Mother Jones

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Information has been a lifeline for refugees on the route into Europe, with many of them trading updates and tips via WhatsApp while moving from country to country. But in Croatia this week, the information seemed to dry up.

“Where are we?” asked Mohammed, an elderly man from the Syrian city of Aleppo. He and three other men had just stepped off a bus in a cornfield near Šid, a town in northeastern Serbia, after a quick and confusing trip from Greece. They were a 15-minute walk from Croatia, the next step on their trip, but none of them had any clue what country they were in.

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Forget Germany. Refugees in Croatia First Have to Figure Out Where the Hell They Are.

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Germany Closes Its Border With Austria, Hoping to Stop the Refugee Flow

Mother Jones

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Two weeks ago I wrote about what might happen if Germany decided to start policing its borders again in response to the huge numbers of refugees and migrants entering the country. Now we’re going to find out.

The German government has announced that the country is closing its border with Austria and also suspending train traffic its southern neighbor, the route by which tens of thousands of refugees have entered Germany in recent days. Those borders have been open for nearly 20 years under the Schengen Agreement, which turned most of the European Union into one large free-travel zone with no internal border checks. Until now, you could go from Berlin to Amsterdam or Paris much like you were going from New York to DC. Along with the euro, the Schengen zone is considered one of the EU’s most important achievements, a powerful symbol of European unity as a well as a major booster of trade and tourism. All of that now hangs in the balance as the refugee crisis strains internal EU politics.

German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have been hinting at closing German borders for weeks, hoping to get the EU moving on a quota system that would send more of the refugees to other countries. Germany is currently taking in the majority of asylum-seekers and migrants, while other EU countries are resisting. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel newspaper that Germany is “reaching the limits of its capabilities” and called for an EU-wide response to the refugee influx. “By the time thousands of people are walking on the Autobahn, it’s too late,” he said.

Reinstating border checks is sign of how frustrated the German government is with its neighbors—and how divisive the refugee problem is within the EU. “The migrants have to accept that they cannot simply choose an EU member country,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said while announcing the new policy.

Germany says the border closure is temporary. But it’s the first major EU country to take such a step to deal with an ongoing crisis like this, and many are wondering whether it will prompt other Schengen countries to do the same.

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Germany Closes Its Border With Austria, Hoping to Stop the Refugee Flow

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Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

mo’ warming, mo’ problems

Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

Shutterstock

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Ratings Services has found yet another way that fossil fuel burning by rich countries is going to screw over poor ones — by making it harder for them to borrow money.

S&P analysts identified climate change as one of two “global mega-trends” that will shape countries’ economic risks in the years to come (aging populations is the other trend). In a new report, the analysts said climate change would hurt nations’ creditworthiness, with poor countries the worst affected.

The American financial services company considered how vulnerable 116 countries are to sea-level rise, assessed the role of agriculture in each of their economies, and factored in the results of a climate vulnerability index produced by Notre Dame University. The analysts found that the credit ratings of Vietnam, Bangladesh, Senegal, Mozambique, Fiji, the Philippines, Nigeria, Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia were the most vulnerable to the worsening whims of the weather. Not exactly a group of G7 candidates. Bloomberg reports:

Global warming “will put downward pressure on sovereign ratings during the remainder of this century,” S&P analysts led by Moritz Kraemer in Frankfurt wrote. “The degree to which individual countries and societies are going to be affected by warming and changing weather patterns depends largely on actions undertaken by other, often far-away societies.” …

Changing rainfall patterns could affect agricultural yields, and altered weather could spread disease and pests, hitting productivity, they said. …

“Unlike in the case of aging, individual societies cannot by themselves meaningfully reduce the impact they will feel as the climate changes,” the analysts said. “A society may choose to reduce its carbon emissions unilaterally to reduce the risk of the potential consequences of global warming, but due to the global character most of the benefits of that society’s sacrifice will accrue to other nations.”

Affected countries might want to shake a tin can in the direction of Europe. The nations whose economies were deemed least vulnerable to climate change were Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Austria.


Source
Climate Change to Hit Sovereign Creditworthiness: S&P, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change has found another way to screw the poor

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Can Balkan Beat Box Bring Us Together?

Mother Jones

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Ori Kaplan/DJ Shotnez

It’s 3 p.m. on a foggy August day at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival, but inside the Heineken Dome it feels like an after-hours party. Ori Kaplan, a founding member of the contagiously high-energy ensemble Balkan Beat Box, and formerly of the popular gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello, had just performed as his solo alter ego, DJ Shotnez. Festival goers writhed and cheered to his mix of cumbia and Balkan horns, an amalgamation of sounds he calls Global Crunk Base.

In his trailer after the set, Kaplan sparks a cigarette and kicks his feet up on a table. His appearance at the fest was one stop on a short West Coast tour to test out his new material on a non-European audience. A local promoter stops by the trailer to offer praise. “Today was really excellent,” Kaplan says, grinning. “It was a super crowd, really open and excited. I love San Francisco.”

The Israel-born, Vienna-based DJ and multi-instrument has had a love affair with the City by the Bay since his early days with Gogol, and before that with the New York band Firewater, a pioneer of the immigrant punk sound. This week, Balkan Beat Box launches a new mini-West Coast tour before heading into the studio to work on a new EP. With its members spread to the winds—Kaplan in Austria, other members in New York and Tel Aviv—the band keeps its sound fresh by “meeting on airplanes” and bringing the sounds and influences they’ve collected from their side projects back into the studio. At Outside lands, we chatted about the virtues of DJing and the origins of melting-pot music at Mehanata, a little black hole of a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

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Can Balkan Beat Box Bring Us Together?

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