Month: March 2018

West Bank settlement construction surged during the first year of the Trump presidency, an Israeli monitoring group said Sunday, releasing data that added to Palestinian mistrust of the American administration.

Peace Now said that Israel began construction of 2,783 settlement homes in 2017. That was about 17 percent higher than the annual average since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office in 2009.

It said that 78 percent of the new homes were in outlying settlements that would likely have to be evacuated if a Palestinian state is established. And 234 units, or 8 percent, were in tiny outposts that are not even authorized by Israel, it said.

The Palestinians and most of the international community consider Israeli settlements to be illegal and obstacles to peace. Over 600,000 settlers now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war and claimed by the Palestinians for their future state.

While a string of Republican and Democratic presidents have opposed settlement construction, Trump has taken a softer line. He has asked Israel to show restraint at times, but avoided the strong condemnations voiced by his predecessors. His Mideast peace team, led by his son in law Jared Kushner, is dominated by people with close ties to the settlement movement.

Peace Now said its data is collected through aerial surveys and inspections by monitors on the ground. In its report, Peace Now stopped short of blaming the jump in construction exclusively on White House policies.

Netanyahu has been a strong supporter of the settlements throughout his career, and his coalition is dominated by religious and nationalist hardliners aligned with the settlement movement and who oppose Palestinian independence. Facing a growing list of corruption investigations, Netanyahu has also appealed to his hard-line base.

“The steady pace of construction and building deep in the West Bank attest to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s steadfast abetting of the settlement enterprise,” the report said. “It is also apparent that the new U.S. presidency in 2017 had no marginal deterrent effect on these Israeli unilateral moves.”

The West Bank settler movement has issued its own data showing growth in their communities. Last month, a settler leader, using official government data, said the West Bank settler population grew 3.4 percent last year, nearly double the growth rate of Israel’s overall population, to more than 435,000 people.

For the Palestinians, the Peace Now data was another cause for mistrust of the U.S. administration just as the White House is trying to wrap up a Mideast peace initiative.

The Palestinians have severed most contacts with the White House since Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December. The Palestinians view the move as being unfairly biased toward Israel on the most sensitive issue in the conflict, and have already rejected the U.S. peace plan before it has been made public.

Nabil Shaath, a top adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said the figures proved that Netanyahu is “not interested in peace” and is destroying hopes for a two-state solution.

“Netanyahu is continuing his settlement project, enjoying the fact that the U.S. is silent,” he said. “These numbers are very dangerous. We condemn it, and will continue working politically to stop it.”

Both Netanyahu’s office and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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A New York garbage collector talks about the unexpected lessons he learned along the way and what he still misses about the job.
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The United States has flouted trade rules with an inquiry into intellectual property and China will defend its interests, Vice Premier Liu He told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a telephone call on Saturday, Chinese state media reported.

The call between Mnuchin and Liu, a confidante of President Xi Jinping, was the highest-level contact between the two governments since U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans for tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese goods on Thursday.

The deepening rift has sent a chill through financial markets and the corporate world as investors predicted dire consequences for the global economy should trade barriers start going up.

Several U.S. chief executives attending a high-profile forum in Beijing on Saturday, including BlackRock Inc’s Larry Fink and Apple Inc’s Tim Cook, urged restraint.

In his call with Mnuchin, Liu, a Harvard-trained economist, said China still hoped both sides would remain “rational” and work together to keep trade relations stable, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

U.S. officials say an eight-month probe under the 1974 U.S. Trade Act has found that China engages in unfair trade practices by forcing American investors to turn over key technologies to Chinese firms.

However, Liu said the investigation report “violates international trade rules and is beneficial to neither Chinese interests, U.S. interests nor global interests”, Xinhua cited him as saying.

In a statement on its website, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said it had filed a request – at the direction of Trump – for consultations with China at the World Trade Organization to address “discriminatory technology licensing agreements.”

China’s commerce ministry expressed regret at the filing on Saturday, and said China had taken strong measures to protect the legal rights and interests of both domestic and foreign owners of intellectual property.

Counter moves

During a visit to Washington in early March, Liu had requested Washington set up a new economic dialogue mechanism, identify a point person on China issues, and deliver a list of demands.

The Trump administration responded by telling China to immediately shave $100 billion off its record $375 billion trade surplus with the United States. Beijing told Washington that U.S. export restrictions on some high-tech products are to blame.

“China has already prepared, and has the strength, to defend its national interests,” Liu said on Saturday.

According to an editorial by China’s state-run Global Times, it was Mnuchin who called Liu.

Firing off a warning shot, China on Friday declared plans to levy additional duties on up to $3 billion of U.S. imports in response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium, imposed after a separate U.S. probe.

Zhang Zhaoxiang, senior vice president of China Minmetals Corp, said that while the state-owned mining group’s steel exports to the U.S. are tiny, the impact could come indirectly.

“China’s direct exports to the U.S. are not big. But there will be some impact due to our exports via the United States or indirect exports,” Zhang told reporters on the sidelines of the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday.

Global Times said Beijing was only just beginning to look at means to retaliate.

“We believe it is only part of China’s countermeasures, and soybeans and other U.S. farm products will be targeted,” the widely-read tabloid said in a Saturday editorial.

Wei Jianguo, vice chairman of Beijing-based think tank China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, told China Daily that Beijing could impose tariffs on more U.S. products, and is considering a second and even third list of targets.

Possible items include aircraft and chips, Wei, a former vice commerce minister, told the newspaper, adding that tourism could be a possible target.

Soybeans, autos, planes

The commerce ministry’s response had so far been “relatively weak,” respected former Chinese finance minister Lou Jiwei said at the forum.

“If I were in the government, I would probably hit soybeans first, then hit autos and airplanes,” said Lou, currently chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund.

U.S. farm groups have long feared that China, which imports more than third of all U.S. soybeans, could slow purchases of agricultural products, heaping more pain on the struggling U.S. farm sector.

U.S. agricultural exports to China stood at $19.6 billion last year, with soybean shipments accounting for $12.4 billion.

Chinese penalties on U.S. soybeans will especially hurt Iowa, a state that backed Trump in the 2016 presidential elections.

Boeing jets have also been often cited as a potential target by China.

China and the U.S. had benefitted by globalization, Blackrock’s Larry Fink said at the forum.

“I believe that a dialogue and maybe some adjustments in trade and trade policy can be in order. It does not need to be done publicly; it can be done privately,” he said.

Apple’s Tim Cook called for “calm heads” amid the dispute.

The sparring has cast a spotlight on hardware makers such as Apple, which assemble the majority of their products in China for export to other countries.

Electrical goods and tech are the largest U.S. import item from China.

Some economists say higher U.S. tariffs will lead to higher costs and ultimately hurt U.S. consumers, while restrictions on Chinese investments could take away jobs in America.

“I don’t think local governments in the United States and President Trump hope to see U.S. workers losing their jobs,” Sun Yongcai, general manager at Chinese railway firm CRRS Corp, which has two U.S. production plants, said at the forum.

 
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Thousands of people participated in “March for Our Lives” rallies in Washington and cities across the United States, drawing attention to school violence and what they see as a need for stricter gun control.
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H. Wayne Huizenga, a college dropout who built a business empire that included Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and three professional sports franchises, has died. He was 80.

Huizenga died Thursday night at his home, said Valerie Hinkell, a longtime assistant. The cause was cancer, said Bob Henninger, executive vice president of Huizenga Holdings.

Starting with a single garbage truck in 1968, Huizenga built Waste Management Inc. into a Fortune 500 company. He purchased independent sanitation engineering companies, and by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers. By 1983, Waste Management was the largest waste disposal company in the United States.

The business model worked again with Blockbuster Video, which he started in 1985 and built into the leading movie rental chain nine years later. In 1996, he formed AutoNation and built it into a Fortune 500 company.

Sports team owner

Huizenga was founding owner of baseball’s Florida Marlins and the NHL’s Florida Panthers — expansion teams that played their first games in 1993. He bought the NFL’s Miami Dolphins and their stadium for $168 million in 1994 from the children of founder Joe Robbie but had sold all three teams by 2009.

“Wayne Huizenga was a seminal figure in the cultural history of South Florida,” current Dolphins owner Stephen Ross said in a statement. “He completely changed the landscape of the region’s sports scene. … Sports fans throughout the region owe him a debt of thanks.”

The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996, but Huizenga’s beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.

“If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home,” Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to Ross. “It’s something we failed to do.”

Fan favorite — for a time

Huizenga earned an almost cultlike following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes’ list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation’s top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation’s largest automotive retailer. In 2013, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion.

For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokey pokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in the franchise’s fifth year.

But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.

Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino’s retirement celebration in 2000 and kept a lower public profile after that.

In 2009, Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins’ payroll purge.

“We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, ‘You know what, I’m not going to do that,’” Huizenga said. “If I had it to do over again, I’d say, ‘OK, we’ll go one more year.’”

He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, and sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team’s public company.

Dolphins man

Huizenga’s first sports love was the Dolphins; he had been a season-ticket holder since their first season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.

He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.

Huizenga earned a reputation as a hands-off owner and won raves from many loyal employees, even though he made six coaching changes. He eased Pro Football Hall of Famer Don Shula into retirement in early 1996, and Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, interim coach Jim Bates, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron and Tony Sparano followed as coach.

Johnson tweeted: “A great man, one of the nicest individuals I have ever known, Wayne Huizenga passed away. RIP.”

Garbage business

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He began his business career in Pompano Beach in 1962, driving a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day for $500 a month.

Huizenga was a five-time recipient of Financial World magazine’s “CEO of the Year” award, and was the Ernst & Young “2005 World Entrepreneur of the Year.”

Regarding his business acumen, Huizenga said: “You just have to be in the right place at the right time. It can only happen in America.”

In 1960, he married Joyce VanderWagon. Together they had two children, Wayne Jr. and Scott. They divorced in 1966. Wayne married his second wife, Marti Goldsby, in 1972. She died in 2017.
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Randy Poskin, a soybean farmer in rural Illinois, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. But ask him now he feels about that decision, and you get a tepid response.

“I’m not sure,” Poskin said.

Like many farmers in the Midwest, Poskin is concerned about getting caught in the middle of a trade war, as Trump ramps up economic pressure on China.

Those fears were heightened after Trump announced plans Thursday to impose tariffs on as much as $60 billion worth of Chinese imports.

“I’m fearful they will retaliate on those tariffs,” Poskin said. “Soybean exports, wheat, poultry, chicken, beef — [there are] any number of products that we export to their country that they could retaliate with.”

The announcement has unnerved many in Trump’s base of supporters in U.S. agriculture. The trade tensions have also rattled global markets, which until recently had performed strongly.

Intellectual property theft

Trump’s tariff decision was meant to punish Chinese companies that benefit from unfair access to U.S. technology.

U.S. businesses have long bristled at Beijing’s requirement that they transfer technology to Chinese companies as a condition of entering the Chinese market. U.S. businesses have also had their technology stolen through cyberattacks.

“We have a tremendous intellectual property theft situation going on,” Trump said during the signing ceremony Thursday.

Some U.S. companies in China cheered the move and suggested that concerns about a trade war were overblown.

William Zarit, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, dismissed the “hair on fire” concern that Trump’s proposed moves would hurt the global economy.

“That the U.S. is willing to risk these disruptions indicates how serious the U.S. administration finds China’s forced technology transfer, cybertheft and discriminatory industrial policies,” he said in a statement to VOA.

Zarit pointed to a recent survey suggesting members of his organization wanted the White House to “advocate more strongly for a level playing field and for reciprocal treatment to improve market access” in China.

But it’s not yet clear whether Trump’s words will translate into that kind of action. That’s in part because the president’s move on Thursday did not actually implement tariffs.

Delayed move

Instead, Trump gave the U.S. trade representative 15 days to identify specific Chinese goods that will be subject to the penalties. There will then be a 30-day window for public comment. That means any move is at least 45 days away.

Trump took a similar approach to steel and aluminum tariffs earlier this month. Although the White House initially leaked news that there would be a universal tax on all steel and aluminum imports, at least six countries and the European Union have since received exemptions.

“You have announcements with a lot of big, very aggressive, very dramatic rhetoric, but when it comes time to actually implement the policy, it’s much more toned down, much more in line with historical U.S. trade enforcement policy,” said Geoffrey Gertz of the Brookings Institution.

Such a negotiating tactic often gets Trump the “tough on trade” headlines that he desires, even while reducing the immediate risk of starting a trade war.

But there are still uncertainties. For instance, it still isn’t clear how China will respond to Trump’s protectionist measures.

China’s response

On Friday, China blasted Trump’s move but did little in the way of countermeasures.

“If somebody imposes a trade war on China, we’ll fight to the end,” Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to Washington, said on state TV.

China also released a list of potential tariffs on $3 billion worth of U.S. goods, including pork, fruit, wine, steel pipes and other products.

“China responded strong verbally but soft in actual countermeasures,” said Allan Von Mehren, a China analyst at the Copenhagen-based Danske Bank.

“This is a very measured reaction, as $3 billion is a drop in the ocean out of the $131 billion the U.S. exports to China every year,” he said.

However, China has signaled it may impose more significant measures should Trump follow through with his tariffs.

Should China retaliate further, a prime target is soybean farmers like Poskin, who are uniquely vulnerable to Chinese retaliation.

One in every three rows of U.S. soybeans is exported to China, according to the American Soybean Association.

That vulnerability is leaving Poskin to wonder whether he did the right thing in supporting Trump.

“I mean, I do like the regulation side of things, the way he’s backing things off,” Poskin said. “But just the same, these areas of trade are very important to agriculture. We can’t interrupt this.”
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Inmates from an eastern Iowa prison have spent weeks learning German and perfecting inflections to make their New York City opera debut in a broadcast performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Heartbeat Opera invited the Oakdale Community Choir to perform the Prisoner’s Chorus for its New York City live production in May.

Production Director Ethan Heard traveled to the medium-security prison in Coralville, Iowa, on Wednesday to record the choir, comprised of 40 inmates and 30 community members. It’s among six choirs being recorded singing for a pivotal scene.

Inmate Shane Kendrick says any humanizing depiction of inmates is good for them and the community that they’ll re-enter.

Heard tells the Iowa City Press-Citizen that the idea to reimagine Fidelio came to him when he began exploring injustice in today’s prison system.
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A powerful storm that swelled California rivers, flooded streets and triggered water rescues throughout the state moved on early Friday, leaving only a few stray showers in its wake.

Though the three-day storm had spared communities a repeat of the deadly debris flows following a deluge earlier this year, it dumped record rainfall in some parts and unleashed flooding that led to dramatic rescues Thursday from Los Angeles in Southern California all the way to Folsom, some 400 miles (645 kilometers) to the north.

Most flood and weather warnings were rescinded but flooding remained possible along the Middle Fork Feather River in northeastern California. Winter storm warnings were posted across the top of the state and along the Sierra Nevada for heavy snow expected from new weather systems arriving Friday and expected to last through the weekend.

Authorities lifted evacuation orders for some 30,000 people Thursday in disaster-weary Santa Barbara County, which includes Montecito, where mudslides killed 21 people and inundated hundreds of homes in January.

“We dodged a bullet when this storm did not reach its full potential and actually veered off to the north and south of us,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said at a news conference.

Meanwhile in San Luis Obispo County in central California, rescuers reported pulling 10 people from the Salinas River in separate incidents throughout the day Thursday. A helicopter plucked six people from the water while swimmers got the others, said Paso Robles Fire Chief Jonathan Stornetta.

“I was swimming and going from tree to tree,” Monica Johnson, among those rescued from the Salinas River, told KSBY-TV.

Johnson, her boyfriend and their dog were rescued from the river by helicopter after they got trapped on an island trying to cross it.

“The guy, I told him, `Thank you,’ the guy that grabbed me up,” she said. “He wasn’t sitting there making me feel panicking. He made me feel safe.”

Rescuers pulled a man and his dog from the Los Angeles River and in Folsom, a man had to jump from the roof of his car to a rescue boat after he got stuck in floodwaters.

Some 80 miles (129 kilometers) east of Santa Barbara, passers-by helped rescue a couple whose car had turned upside down in rushing water on a neighborhood road, according to video posted by the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Department. Another video showed the moment a passer-by jumped onto the overturned SUV and broke out a back window before pulling out the driver.

Meanwhile, various problems arose in Tuolumne County, in the central part of the state

“We had a very heavy rain cell that came through and caused a great deal of havoc throughout the county,” Sheriff Jim Mele said at a news conference. “This cell was very powerful.”

One couple stranded atop a chicken coop had to be rescued after their home and cars were flooded, and a dam leak in the Sierra Nevada foothills prompted about three dozen people to evacuate. A full dam failure was averted.

Not far from the dam in the small community of Groveland, flooded streets caused minor property damage and students at two schools had to shelter in place because buses weren’t able to reach them. They were later released to their parents.

“We had basically a river going through downtown Groveland,” Mele said, adding that waters also dislodged two propane tanks from a home. The tanks hit a car and a home but no damage was reported.

Authorities began praising the storm for dropping a good dose of much-need water in the area, where drought conditions have recently gone back to extreme or severe levels.

“We’re still in a drought so this was a good rain, and we could use more of the good rain,” National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Jackson said.

The county saw between 2 to 5 inches (5 to 13 centimeters) of water in coastal areas, 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) in foothills and mountains and 8 to 10 inches (20 to 25 centimeters) in parts of the central coast.

Thousands of people fled Montecito and neighboring communities in advance of the storm, just as they had during previous rains and last year during a wildfire that became the largest in state history as it destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, mostly homes.

In Los Angeles County, authorities canceled some planned mandatory evacuations because of a projected decrease in rainfall but kept others in place because of debris flows in one canyon area stripped bare by wildfires.

A large chunk of a hillside fell away in a Los Angeles canyon that burned last year, but no one was hurt.

The storm also toppled a pine tree across one neighborhood street and a eucalyptus tree into a home in another neighborhood. No one was injured.

The storm came ashore earlier in the week as a so-called atmospheric river, a long plume of Pacific moisture that is also known as a “Pineapple Express” because of its origins near Hawaii.
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The U.S. on Thursday imposed economic sanctions on a French chemical weapons expert and an Uzbek fighting force, claiming they were supporting terrorists in the Syrian civil war.

The State Department declared both Joe Asperman, described as “a senior chemical weapons expert” for Islamic State, and Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari, the Uzbek group, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

The blacklisting freezes any assets they may have in the United States and bars Americans from any transactions with them.

The State Department said Asperman “oversaw chemical operations production within Syria for ISIS (Islamic State) and the deployment of these chemical weapons at the battlefront.”

It described Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari as “the largest Uzbek fighting force in Syria.” The State Department said the group “has played a significant role in the fighting in northwestern Syria, fighting alongside groups including al-Nusrah Front,” al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria and already a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

The State Department said that last April, the Uzbek group “published a video showing armed men taking part in clashes, and in December 2015, posted a video of a training camp for children, where children are taught to handle and fire weapons.”

 
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