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Wednesday 23rd of August 2017 |
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World's Biggest Piggy Bank Grows by $285 Million a Day Africa |
As many investors question a global stock-market rally that’s now in its eighth year, the world’s biggest wealth fund is prepared to splurge.
Norway’s $970 billion wealth fund has been ordered to raise its stock holdings to 70 percent from 60 percent in an effort to boost returns and safeguard the country’s oil riches for future generations. Any short-term view on growing risks will play little part, according to Trond Grande, the fund’s deputy chief executive.
“We don’t have any views on whether the market is priced high or low, whether bonds and stocks are expensive or cheap,” he said in an interview after presenting second-quarter returns in Oslo on Tuesday. The decision to add stocks “was made at a strategic level, on a long-term expected excess return that we’re willing to take risk to achieve. And parliament has said that they wish to spend some time to phase in that increase.”
The fund has doubled in value over the past five years and is continually adding risk to its portfolio. It returned 202 billion ($26 billion) kroner in the second quarter, and 499 billion kroner in the first half, the best on record for the period.
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Trump Assails News in Selective Defense of Virginia Response Law & Politics |
President Donald Trump delivered an angry and forceful defense of his response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, declaring at a campaign-style rally of supporters in Phoenix that the news media had distorted his position.
Addressing thousands of supporters Tuesday evening at the Phoenix Convention Center, Trump accused major media organizations of being “dishonest” and of failing "to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry.”
Trump spent more than 20 minutes of a 75-minute speech delivering a selective account of his handling of the violence in Charlottesville, where he overlooked his initial statement blaming “many sides,” as well his subsequent remarks that there were good people marching alongside the white supremacists.
As the rest of the Republican party was eager to move on from Charlottesville, where one counter-demonstrator was killed and 19 people were wounded, Trump seemed like he couldn’t wait to go back and rehash one of the worst weeks of his presidency -- even carrying his much maligned initial statement to the podium. The controversy sparked intense objections from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and prompted an exodus of corporate executives from White House business advisory panels.
"It’s time to challenge the media,” Trump said, for their role "in fomenting divisions." The president added, "The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself and the fake news."
Before the speech was over, Trump had mocked the state’s two Republican senators, threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his way on border wall funding and suggested he might pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Futures on the S&P 500 Index reversed gains to slip as much as 0.3 percent as Trump spoke. The yen strengthened, while the Mexican peso weakened 0.2 percent.
After the rally, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went on CNN and said that “the real Trump came through” in the speech. Clapper, who served under President Barack Obama and has emerged as a Trump critic, questioned his fitness for office and expressed concern that he has access to the nuclear codes. Clapper said it would be up to Republican lawmakers to step forward.
Tennessee Senator Bob Corker last week voiced one of the strongest Republican rebukes of the president, saying "radical changes" needs to take place at the White House. Trump "needs to take stock of the role that he plays in our nation and move beyond himself -- move way beyond himself -- and move to a place where daily he’s waking up thinking about what is best for the nation,” Corker said.
Trump also walked up to the line of offering a pardon to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, saying the lawman had been punished for “doing his job,” yet left open the possibility one would likely come.
Arpaio, 85, the county sheriff for more that two decades until being voted out of office in November, was convicted July 31 on one count of federal misdemeanor criminal contempt for defying a 2011 court order to stop traffic patrols that targeted immigrants. He faces a maximum of six months at his sentencing hearing, scheduled for Oct. 5.
Responding to chants from the crowd calling for a pardon of Arpaio, Trump demurred, saying, “I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy.”
"If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall," he said to cheers from the crowd.
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McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency NYT Law & Politics |
The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.
What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.
The rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell comes at a highly perilous moment for Republicans, who face a number of urgent deadlines when they return to Washington next month. Congress must approve new spending measures and raise the statutory limit on government borrowing within weeks of reconvening, and Republicans are hoping to push through an elaborate rewrite of the federal tax code. There is scant room for legislative error on any front.
A protracted government shutdown or a default on sovereign debt could be disastrous — for the economy and for the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell are locked in a political cold war. Neither man would comment for this story. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, noted that the senator and the president had “shared goals,” and pointed to “tax reform, infrastructure, funding the government, not defaulting on the debt, passing the defense authorization bill.”
In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, then berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.
During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.
Mr. McConnell has fumed over Mr. Trump’s regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules, and questioned Mr. Trump’s understanding of the presidency in a public speech. Mr. McConnell has made sharper comments in private, describing Mr. Trump as entirely unwilling to learn the basics of governing.
In offhand remarks, Mr. McConnell has expressed a sense of bewilderment about where Mr. Trump’s presidency may be headed, and has mused about whether Mr. Trump will be in a position to lead the Republican Party into next year’s elections and beyond, according to people who have spoken to him directly.
While maintaining a pose of public reserve, Mr. McConnell expressed horror to advisers last week after Mr. Trump’s comments equating white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., with protesters who rallied against them. Mr. Trump’s most explosive remarks came at a news conference in Manhattan, where he stood beside Ms. Chao. (Ms. Chao, deflecting a question about the tensions between her husband and the president she serves, told reporters, “I stand by my man — both of them.”)
Mr. Trump has also continued to badger and threaten Mr. McConnell’s Senate colleagues, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose Republican primary challenger was praised by Mr. Trump last week.
Mr. Trump was set to hold a campaign rally on Tuesday night in Phoenix, and Republicans feared he would use the event to savage Mr. Flake again.
If he does, senior Republican officials said the party’s senators would stand up for their colleague. A Republican “super PAC” aligned with Mr. McConnell released a web ad on Tuesday assailing Mr. Flake’s Republican rival, Kelli Ward, as a fringe-dwelling conspiracy theorist.
“When it comes to the Senate, there’s an Article 5 understanding: An attack against one is an attack against all,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has found himself in Mr. Trump’s sights many times, invoking the NATO alliance’s mutual defense doctrine.
The fury among Senate Republicans toward Mr. Trump has been building since last month, even before he lashed out at Mr. McConnell. Some of them blame the president for not being able to rally the party around any version of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, accusing him of not knowing even the basics about the policy. Senate Republicans also say strong-arm tactics from the White House backfired, making it harder to cobble together votes and have left bad feelings in the caucus.
When Mr. Trump addressed a Boy Scouts jamboree last month in West Virginia, White House aides told Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from the state whose support was in doubt, that she could only accompany him on Air Force One if she committed to voting for the health care bill. She declined the invitation, noting that she could not commit to voting for a measure she had not seen, according to Republican briefed on the conversation.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told colleagues that when Mr. Trump’s interior secretary threatened to pull back federal funding for her state, she felt boxed in and unable to vote for the health care bill.
Former Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican who is close to Mr. McConnell, said frustration with Mr. Trump was boiling over in the chamber. Mr. Gregg blamed the president for undermining congressional leaders, and said the House and Senate would have to govern on their own if Mr. Trump “can’t participate constructively.”
“Failure to do things like keeping the government open and passing a tax bill is the functional equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded,” Mr. Gregg said.
Others in the party divide blame between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell. Al Hoffman, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee who has been supportive of Mr. McConnell, said Mr. McConnell was culpable because he has failed to deliver legislative victories. “Ultimately, it’s been Mitch’s responsibility, and I don’t think he’s done much,” Mr. Hoffman said.
But Mr. Hoffman predicted that Mr. McConnell would likely outlast the president.
“I think he’s going to blow up, self-implode,” Mr. Hoffman said of Mr. Trump. “I wouldn’t be surprised if McConnell pulls back his support of Trump and tries to go it alone.”
Connell’s Senate colleagues, however, have grown bolder. The combination of the president’s frontal attacks on Senate Republicans and his claim that there were “fine people” marching with white supremacists in Charlottesville has emboldened lawmakers to criticize Mr. Trump in withering terms.
Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee rebuked Mr. Trump last week for failing to “demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” required of presidents. On Monday, Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in a television interview that she was uncertain Mr. Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2020.
There are few recent precedents for the rift. The last time a president turned on a legislative leader of his own party was in 2002, when allies of George W. Bush helped force Trent Lott to step down as Senate minority leader after racially charged remarks at a birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina.
For the moment, Mr. McConnell appears to be far more secure in his position, and perhaps immune to coercion from the White House. Republicans are unlikely to lose control of the Senate in 2018, and Mr. Trump has no allies in the Senate who have shown an appetite for combat with Mr. McConnell.
Still, some allies of Mr. Trump on the right — including Stephen K. Bannon, who stepped down last week as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist — welcome more direct conflict with Mr. McConnell and congressional Republicans.
Roger J. Stone Jr., a Republican strategist who has advised Mr. Trump for decades, said the president needed to “take a scalp” in order to force cooperation from Republican elites who have resisted his agenda. Mr. Stone urged Mr. Trump to make an example of one or more Republicans, like Mr. Flake, who have refused to give full support to his administration.
“The president should start bumping off incumbent Republican members of Congress in primaries,” Mr. Stone said. “If he did that, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would wet their pants and the rest of the Republicans would get in line.”
But Mr. McConnell’s allies warn that the president should be wary of doing anything that could jeopardize the Senate Republican majority.
“The quickest way for him to get impeached is for Trump to knock off Jeff Flake and Dean Heller and be faced with a Democrat-led Senate,” said Billy Piper, a lobbyist and former McConnell chief of staff.
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Living in a void: life in Damascus after the exodus Law & Politics |
My sister, whom I haven’t seen for more than two years, told me she was going to cross the sea in a rubber dinghy. She hung up, not wanting to hear what I thought. She merely said something profound and sentimental and entrusted her three children to my care in the event that she drowned. A few minutes later I tried to call the unfamiliar Turkish number back, but the phone had been turned off. Hundreds of images from our childhood flooded my memory. It’s not easy to say goodbye to half a century of your life and wait for someone you love to drown. My fingers and toes felt cold and my head empty, and I didn’t feel able to argue anyway. What can one offer a woman who has lost her home and everything she owns and, not wanting to lose her children too, carried them off into exile to seek a safe haven in Turkey? Things are not easy for a woman like her there. She looks like millions of other Syrian women and does not have any special skills. All that’s left is the hope of asylum, even if it requires crossing the sea in a rubber dinghy. It’s as if she’s trying to tell me something I know already – that the sea is Syrians’ only hope.
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Skyscrapers Stand Unfinished as Angolan Election Marks New Era Africa |
Ruling-party candidate Lourenco expected to win Aug. 23 vote Angola grapples with economic crisis after oil prices dropped
Around the horseshoe-shaped bay of Luanda, Angola’s capital, unfinished skyscrapers stand as a testament to the challenges facing Africa’s second-biggest oil producer as it prepares for its first leadership change in almost four decades.
Before the oil slump, hundreds of container ships waited near the palm-tree lined waterfront to offload their goods at the port. Today, only a handful of vessels are visible. In the suburbs, gated communities built for foreign workers and a middle class that never materialized are standing practically empty.
“Where did all the ships go?” said Matias Joaquim, who owns a small restaurant in the Sambizanga slum, a maze of huts on a hill overlooking the port of Luanda. “If the rich are already not doing well, imagine the poor.”
Angola will hold elections on Wednesday as President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, 74, prepares to step down after 38 years in power. His successor, almost certainly from the same party, will face the challenge of reversing the worst downturn since the country emerged from civil war in 2002. While Dos Santos’s departure marks a new era in Angolan politics, the change in leadership won’t necessarily ease the economic crisis, according to Manuel Alves da Rocha, chief economist at the Catholic University of Angola in Luanda.
“The MPLA will win the elections,” said Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at the London-based policy center Chatham House. “The question will be the size of the majority.”
Dos Santos, who will remain MPLA chairman until at least 2018, will probably continue to wield influence even after he steps down, according to Isaias Samakuva, the 71-year-old head of Unita, which abandoned its armed struggle in 2002.
“In the past, investors thought they could land in Angola, shake a tree and collect the profits,” Antonio Cunha, owner of 7 Cunhas, a conglomerate of companies ranging from construction firms to restaurants, said in an interview. “That wasn’t normal. What’s happening today is the normalization of the economy.”
Conclusions
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Crime Wave Stalks South Sudan's Capital as War Ruins Economy Africa |
When three rifle-toting men in army uniforms barged into Silvano Pitia’s supplies store this month, he became the latest victim of a crime wave that’s rocking South Sudan’s war-weary, hunger-stricken capital.
“They told me that if I didn’t make them happy that night I would visit heaven or hell,” said Pitia, who was charging mobile phones and laptops for customers until the armed men seized the devices and about 200,000 South Sudanese pounds ($1,590) in cash. One gunman said they had the right to take directly from the city’s inhabitants because the government hadn’t paid them, the 43-year-old shopkeeper recalled.
The Aug. 12 theft was part of a surge in crime in Juba, a city of an estimated 500,000 people where armed robberies have claimed at least 53 lives this month and are almost twice as common as in July, according to the local Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, which collates figures. Authorities say they’re investigating claims that soldiers are mainly responsible and blame economic upheaval linked to the almost four-year civil war that’s caused prices to soar.
The war has decimated agriculture and sparked widespread food shortages, while reduced oil production and lower prices have slashed government income. The International Monetary Fund said in March the economy was set to contract 10.5 percent in the 2016-17 financial year, while annual inflation was 115 percent in July, slowing from 362 percent the month before. Judges and university lecturers have staged strikes after they weren’t paid.
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Congo Republic president reappoints PM after resignation Africa |
Congo Republic President Denis Sassou Nguesso reappointed Clement Mouamba as prime minister on Monday, four days after Mouamba and his cabinet resigned, the president's office said in a statement.
Mouamba, who resigned last week, is now charged with forming a new government, the statement said.
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ISS Today: Can the Zambian intervention resuscitate the Commonwealth? Daily Maverick Africa |
In the dying days of the British Empire, as Whitehall mandarins grasped for new ways to maintain their global influence, the Commonwealth of Nations came into being. The institution is designed to link all of Britain’s former colonial territories into one intergovernmental organisation; and, in true imperial style, its titular head – from its modern inception in 1949 – is none other than Queen Elizabeth ll.
“The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace,” the queen gushed in a speech in 1956.
Today the Commonwealth boasts 52 member states representing some 2.4-billion people. But its lofty profile has rarely been matched by its effectiveness. It regularly sends election observer missions to monitor votes in member states, and has previously played a role in international mediation efforts, including in South Africa at the end of apartheid
But a push for more political relevance has so far proved more successful for the Commonwealth, with a timely intervention in Zambia helping to secure the release of opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema from prison.
Hichilema, the head of the United Party for National Development, was arrested in April. He was charged with treason, in connection with a bizarre incident in which his convoy allegedly failed to give way to President Edgar Lungu’s motorcade en route to a traditional ceremony. Many commentators dismissed the charges as spurious, but HH, as he is popularly known, languished behind bars while waiting for his trial to commence.
Enter Patricia Scotland, secretary-general of the Commonwealth. She arrived in Zambia in early August and met with both Hichilema and President Lungu. From Lungu, she secured an agreement to drop the charges against his opponent; from HH, she received an undertaking to participate in a political dialogue designed to ease tensions between the opposition and the government.
The deal stuck. HH was released on Wednesday after the prosecution entered a nolle prosequi – a decision not to pursue charges. He returned to his Lusaka home amid jubilant celebrations from supporters.
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Nairobi Securities Exchange reports H1 2017 EPS -6.25% Earnings here Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: Closing Price: 23.75 Total Shares Issued: 259503194.00 Market Capitalization: 6,163,200,858 EPS: 0.71 PE: 33.451
H1 Operating income 282.603m vs. 266.796m +5.925% H1 Interest income 47.125m vs. 51.766m -8.965% H1 Other income 17.077m vs. 15.734m +8.536% H1 Total income 346.805m vs. 334.296m +3.742% H1 Administrative expenses [254.664m] vs. [235.782m] +8.008% H1 Profit before taxation 99.659m vs. 106.652m -6.557% H1 Profit for the year 77.770m vs. 81.962m -5.115% Basic and diluted EPS 0.30 vs. 0.32 -6.250% Total Assets 2.021336b vs. 1.936759b +4.367% Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 130.804m vs. 328.040m -60.126% No interim dividend
Commentary
Total Income increased by 4% from 334.3m in the six months ended 30 June 2016 to 346.8m for 6 months to June 2017. This was driven mainly by an 11% increase in equity turnover from 73.6b to 82b.
Conclusions
Its a volume Game and volumes are trending higher.
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