Month: March 2019

On a recent Sunday afternoon, thousands of shoppers crowded the hallways and stores of the Citygate Outlets shopping mall in Tung Chung, one of Hong Kong’s new town developments just a short train ride from the airport. Some visitors had recently arrived by plane, wheeling luggage with baggage claim tags, although thousands more came for short trips by bus over the newly opened 34-mile mega bridge connecting Tung Chung with Macau, another semi-autonomous Chinese city, and Zhuhai in mainland China. Many of the bridge tourists arrive in large groups with the help of tour bus operators, like Akira Liu from Foshan in southern China, who had ferried a group of 30 across the bridge to Tung Chung for the day. “Many of our tourists just want to cross the bridge…

Marin Mendez leaned a shoulder into his rusty Chevy Malibu rolling it forward each time the line of cars inched closer to the pump. Waiting hours to fill up, he says, is the high cost he pays for gasoline that's nearly free in socialist Venezuela. “You line up to get your pension, line up to buy food, line up to pump your gas,” an exasperated Mendez said after 40 minutes of waiting in the sweltering heat in Maracaibo — ironically the center of the country's oil industry — and expecting to be there hours or days more. “I’ve had enough!” Lines stretching a mile (1.6 kilometers) or more to fuel up have plagued this western region of Venezuela for years — despite the country's status as holder of the world's…

Celebrity chef Mario Batali on Wednesday said he had cut ties with his U.S. restaurants after being accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. Batali has sold his shares in the 16-restaurant operation, including Babbo and Del Posto in New York, to former partners Tanya Bastianich Manuali and her brother, Joe Bastianich, he said. "I have reached an agreement with Joe and no longer have any stake in the restaurants we built together. I wish him the best of luck in the future," Batali said in a statement from his representative, Risa Heller. He is also selling his stake in the Eataly market and restaurant complex, according to a report in The New York Times, citing Eataly spokesman Chris Giglio. Representatives for Eataly did not immediately respond to requests for…

U.S. officials have warned at an energy conference in Brussels that the Trump administration will take punitive action against European companies that are building the Kremlin-favored Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which will deliver energy from Russia to Germany while bypassing Ukraine. Nord Stream 2 (NS2) will largely replace an older pipeline running through Ukraine and Poland that has the backing of the German government. But it is prompting the alarm of Central European governments, increasingly infuriated with Berlin’s dismissal of their concerns. They object to Nord Stream 2 — which will run 1,200 kilometers from Vyborg, Russia, to Lubmin, Germany, and snake under the Baltic Sea — not only because they’ll lose lucrative transit fees from the older pipeline, but because they fear the Kremlin wants to develop…

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is warning of a slowdown in most of the world's largest economies, citing concerns about ongoing trade tensions, policy uncertainty and a decrease in business and consumer confidence. In its Interim Economic Outlook released Wednesday, the OECD is forecasting 3.3 percent growth worldwide this year, down from 3.6 percent in 2018. The report highlights lower estimates for China, the world's second biggest economy, as well as those in Europe as the main stresses on the global economy. It also says tariffs China and the United States have imposed on each other have hurt both economies and boosted inflation. Forecasts for the U.S. economy show it slowing from 2.9 to 2.6 percent growth. "A sharper slowdown in any of the major regions could derail…

In Zimbabwe, the high cost of bread is forcing citizens to look for alternatives to this basic commodity as food shortages and soaring prices continue to worsen. Columbus Mavhunga reports for VOA from Harare. ...

Leaders of Mexico's agricultural sector are urging "mirror measures" on U.S. farm imports in politically sensitive products such as yellow corn and poultry, in an effort they argue would counter decades of subsidized imports from the United States. The three-month-old government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is currently working on an updated list of products imported from its northern neighbor on which to possibly apply a second round of tariffs in response to U.S. measures imposed on Mexican steel and aluminum by the Trump administration last year. Last June, Mexico imposed tariffs of between 15 and 25 percent on steel products and other U.S. goods, in retaliation for the tariffs applied on the Mexican metals imports that Trump imposed citing national security concerns. Mexico's Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade…

The corporation behind a Florida detention camp for migrant children is abandoning its plans to go public as controversy grows around policies that lock up children crossing the Mexico border. The chairman of Caliburn International Corp., Thomas J. Campbell, sent a letter Tuesday to the Securities and Exchange Commission saying it no longer wishes to conduct a public offering. The Virginia-based company said in a press release the reason was "variability in the equity markets," adding that business continues to grow. Previous filings cited risks of "negative publicity" as something that could affect share price. Federal lawmakers toured the center last month and said it had a "prison-like feel," vowing to change a policy they say still separates families. The government announced in December that the facility was expanding from…

The global travel industry is likely to expand by 4 percent in 2019 despite slowing economic growth in key areas such China and Europe, but a no-deal Brexit could wipe out 700,000 travel-related jobs, a top industry association said on Tuesday. The travel and tourism sector grew 3.9 percent to $8.8 trillion in 2018, accounting for 10.5 percent of global gross domestic product, and outpacing global GDP growth of 3.2 percent, Gloria Guevara, president and chief executive of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), told Reuters. Based on data from 185 countries, the group forecasts steady growth of 4 percent this year, given continued demand from China, the second largest travel and tourism market behind the United States, and other countries in Asia. "Every crisis impacts the numbers, but…

India has downplayed the impact of U.S. plans to end New Delhi's preferential trade status that allows duty free access to products worth $ 5.6 billion.   Saying that India has not assured the United States that it will provide “equitable and reasonable access” to its markets, U.S. President Donald Trump has directed the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to remove India from a program that grants it preferential trade treatment.    In 2017, India was the biggest beneficiary of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which lowers duties on exports from about 120 developing countries.      While the preferential tariffs give India duty free access to exports worth $5.6 billion, Indian commerce secretary Anup Wadhawan told reporters in New Delhi that the actual benefits add upto $190 million. He…

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed Congress on Monday that he will stop making payments into two government retirement funds now that the debt limit has gone back into effect. In a letter to congressional leaders, Mnuchin said that he would stop making investments into a civil service retirement fund and a postal service retirement fund. These are among the actions that Mnuchin is allowed to take to keep from exceeding the debt limit, which went back into effect on Saturday at a level of $22 trillion. The debt limit had been suspended for a year under a 2018 budget deal. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Mnuchin likely has enough maneuvering room to avoid a catastrophic default on the national debt until around September. The U.S. government has never missed…

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido named Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann as the country's representative to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Guaido's envoy to the United States, Carlos Vecchio, wrote in a tweet on Monday. Guaido, who calls socialist President Nicolas Maduro a usurper after Maduro won re-election in a May 2018 vote widely seen as fraudulent, invoked the constitution to assume an interim presidency in January. He has been recognized as the OPEC nation's legitimate leader by most Western countries, including the United States. Hausmann, an economics professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, served as Venezuela's planning minister and as a member of the board of the country's central bank in the 1990s. He has also served as the country's governor for the IDB and World Bank, and…

A U.S. judge on Monday acquitted a former top foreign exchange trader at Barclays Plc accused of illegally trading ahead of an $8 billion transaction for Hewlett-Packard, without letting the case go to a jury. The acquittal of Robert Bogucki, who led Barclays' foreign exchange trading desk in New York, by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco sets back federal efforts to hold senior bankers and traders criminally responsible for suspected misconduct. It also marks a rare instance of such a case being tossed out immediately after the prosecution presented its case at trial, because the evidence was too weak to support a conviction. Bogucki's trial began on Feb. 21. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney David Anderson in San Francisco said that office was reviewing Breyer's decision. "We…

The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average snapped a three-day run of losses on Friday as optimism about the prospects for a U.S.-China trade agreement countered downbeat U.S. and China manufacturing data.  The Nasdaq, meanwhile, marked its longest streak of weekly gains since late 1999.  Following President Donald Trump's announcement last weekend of a delay in higher tariffs on Chinese imports, Bloomberg reported late Thursday that a summit between Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to sign a final trade deal could happen as soon as mid-March. "The optimism over trade resolution is outweighing the weakening economic data," said Ryan Detrick, senior market strategist at LPL Financial in Charlotte, N.C.  A private survey showed China's factory activity contracted for a third straight month in February, though at a slower pace, indicating a marginal improvement in domestic demand as…