Behind the U.S. move to block Singapore-based Broadcom’s hostile bid for U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm lies a new global struggle for influence over next-generation communications technology — and fears that whoever takes the lead could exploit that advantage for economic gain, theft and espionage.

In the Broadcom-Qualcomm deal, the focus is on so-called “5G” wireless technology, which promises data speeds that rival those of landline broadband now. Its proponents insist that 5G, the next step up from the “4G” networks that now serve most smartphones, will become a critical part of the infrastructure powering everything from self-driving cars to the connected home.

5G remains in the early stages of development. Companies including Qualcomm, based in San Diego, and China’s Huawei have been investing heavily to stake their claim in the underlying technology. Such beachheads can be enormously valuable; control over basic technologies and their patents can yield huge fortunes in computer chips, software and related equipment.

“These transitions come along almost every decade or so,” said Jon Erensen, research director for semiconductors at research firm Gartner. “The government is being very careful to ensure the U.S. keeps its leadership role developing these standards.”

President Donald Trump said late Monday that a takeover of Qualcomm would imperil national security, effectively ending Broadcom’s $117 billion buyout bid. Broadcom said that it is studying the order and that it doesn’t believe it poses any national security threat to the U.S.

Higher stakes

It’s the second recent U.S. warning shot across the bow of foreign telecom makers. At a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in February, FBI Director Christopher Wray said any company “beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values” should not be able to “gain positions of power” inside U.S. telecommunications networks.

“That provides the capacity to exert pressure or control over our telecommunications infrastructure, it provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information and it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage,” he said.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House introduced a bill on Jan. 9 that would prohibit government purchases of telecoms equipment from Huawei Technologies and smaller rival ZTE, citing their ties to the Chinese military and backing from the ruling Communist Party. A few years earlier, a congressional panel recommended phone carriers avoid doing business with Huawei or ZTE.

The stakes are even higher in the 5G race. “Qualcomm/Broadcom is like the Fort Sumter of this technology battle,” said GBH Insights analyst Dan Ives, referring to the battle that kicked off the Civil War.

Although its name isn’t widely known outside the technology industry, San Diego-based Qualcomm is one of the world’s leading makers of the processors that power many smartphones and other mobile devices. Qualcomm also owns patents on key pieces of mobile technology that Apple and other manufacturers use in their products.

Compared to earlier generations of wireless technology, “we’re seeing China emerge and start to play a bigger role in the standards developing process,” Erensen said. Given a wave of consolidation in the telecom-equipment industry, fewer companies are involved “and the stakes are bigger,” he said.

National security

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, cited concerns about Broadcom’s penchant for cutting costs such as research spending. That could lead to Qualcomm losing its leadership in telecom standards, the committee wrote in a letter earlier in March.

Should that happen, Chinese companies such as Huawei, which the CFIUS has previously expressed concerns about, could take a larger, or even a dominant, role in setting 5G technology and standards and practices. That’s where national security concerns come in.

“Over time, that would mean U.S. government and U.S. technology companies could lose a trusted U.S. supplier that does not present the same national security counterintelligence risk that a Chinese supplier does,” said Brian Fleming, an attorney at Miller & Chevalier and former counsel at the Justice Department’s national security division.

Blocking the deal doesn’t eliminate Chinese influence on 5G development, of course. But it might slow it down, Fleming said: “They honestly believe they are helping to protect national security by doing this.”
…

From: MeNeedIt

Sao Paulo investment firm SouthRock Capital has signed an agreement with Starbucks that gives it the right to develop and operate branches of the Seattle-based chain in Brazil, the companies said late on Monday.

With the agreement, whose value was not disclosed, all of Starbucks’ retail operations in Latin America are now wholly licensed rather than directly managed, the companies said.

SouthRock founder Ken Pope said in a statement the fund would eye expansion opportunities in new and existing markets.

Starbucks now has 113 stores across the populous states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

“With Starbucks, we see continued opportunities for growth in existing markets … as well as new markets like Brasilia and the South,” he said.

SouthRock, founded in 2015, also owns Brazil Airport Restaurants, which operates in the country’s biggest airports.

Shares in Starbucks opened up 0.5 percent but closed down 0.58 percent. The S&P 500 Index fell 0.64 percent.
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From: MeNeedIt

“Dona Edir, Dona Edir” — the call is heard frequently in the narrow lanes of Canaa, a slum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

It is for Edir Dariux Teixeira, who is well known among the residents, having spent more than a third of her life trying to improve infrastructure and basic services in the ramshackle settlement.

At the heart of that fight are legal property titles to the residents’ homes — or, more accurately, the lack of them.

“Without these documents we have no rights,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, sitting close to a fan to alleviate the near-40C (104°F) heat funneling from her asbestos roof.

Debates on how to manage property rights in the world’s informal settlements are becoming ever more pressing, as millions of people move into cities from rural areas every year and many end up in fast-growing slums.

Rio has about 1,000 slums, known locally as favelas. They are home to nearly one in four of the city’s population and typically lack a range of infrastructure and services, experts say.

In Canaa, having title would bring certainty of tenure, and also help to get services provided: sewerage, basic sanitation, and tarred streets, said Teixeira.

“I am anxious. I pray every day [for land titles],” the 59-year-old said.

When she moved to the area 22 years ago, there was a lack of all basic infrastructure in Canaa, including clean water, pavements and lighting.

Teixeira realized change had to be driven by the residents’ themselves and took the lead in trying to improve the area.

“There was nothing here. It was all jungle,” said housewife Glaucia Milani, who has been living in the favela for 25 years. “Now things are getting better because of Dona Edir’s help.”

Milani said apart from helping residents to get legal title to their land, Teixeira has been organising food and clothes donations for the favela and its 300 families.

“Dona Edir is a great mother to us. Anything she can help us, she helps… Dona Edir solves everything for us,” Milani, 31, said. “Dona Edir is a warrior.”

Complex situation

Getting land titles for the residents is no easy task, Teixeira said, not least because some residents have bought land from private owners, while others are squatting.

Her own plot of land was donated by an uncle of her ex-husband but neither Teixeira nor the other residents have official proof of ownership.

ITERJ, the government body in charge of managing land in the state of Rio de Janeiro and responsible for Teixeira’s request to get titles for Canaa’s residents, did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of the favela’s streets got temporary pavements about five years ago but Teixeira said it happened only after she asked a politician for help because taxis were refusing to enter Canaa because the roads were full of potholes.

Despite Teixeira’s efforts, the residents in the favela about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from Rio’s city center are still waiting for the streets to be fully paved, sidewalks to be built and manholes to be constructed.

Teixeira has asked the city to fully pave the streets, provide sewerage infrastructure and a health post for the favela.

In emailed comments to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Rio’s city hall said the favela was “urbanized” four years ago but did not immediately respond to requests for details about which services were provided to the area.

Fighting for justice

A “very shocking scene” at school when Teixeira was eight years old prompted her decision to dedicate her life to fighting justice, she said.

While she and a boy were having a snack during a school break, another girl asked the boy to give her a piece.

“The boy said: only if you spread your legs,” she said. “Then she immediately spread her legs and … he gave her a bite. That broke my heart.”

At 15, Teixeira was raped and later witnessed the rape of a friend, experiences she said strengthened her resolve to help women.

Teixeira has been working for many years as a volunteer at a charity that distributes food in Rio’s poor neighborhoods, including Canaa.

She was honored for her work with a prize from the Federação de Mulheres Fluminenses, a Rio-based women’s federation.

Meanwhile, Teixeira, who survives on her father’s pension and cleans houses to make money, spends whatever she can of her income — equivalent to $300 a month — on building a school in the patio of her house.

“I do the construction works myself. When there is any money left I pay a professional to do the harder things,” she said.

Beyond literacy, her school will offer a range of classes: cooking, sewing, handicrafts and theater.

“That is my dream. … My dream is to take the kids off the street … because they have nothing to do [here],” she said in tears.

“There are lots of volunteers. What is missing is money to finish the school.”

Teixeira hopes the city will officially recognize Canaa as the favela’s name — it is the Portuguese version of Canaan and was chosen by her in reference to a passage from the Bible of a land promised by God to chosen people.

“We have to have faith. The faith in God is what keeps me standing. And the victories make me keep going,” said Teixeira.
…

From: MeNeedIt

The daily commute from Mexico to California farms is the same as it was before Donald Trump became president. Hundreds of Mexicans cross the border and line the sidewalks of Calexico’s tiny downtown by 4 a.m., napping on cardboard sheets and blankets or sipping coffee from a 24-hour doughnut shop until buses leave for the fields.

For decades, cross-border commuters have picked lettuce, carrots, broccoli, onions, cauliflower and other vegetables that make California’s Imperial Valley “America’s Salad Bowl” from December through March. As Trump visits the border Tuesday, the harvest is a reminder of how little has changed despite heated immigration rhetoric in Washington.

Trump will inspect eight prototypes for a future 30-foot border wall that were built in San Diego last fall. He made a “big, beautiful wall” a centerpiece of his campaign and said Mexico would pay for it.

But border barriers extend the same 654 miles (1,046 kilometers) they did under President Barack Obama and so far Trump hasn’t gotten Mexico or Congress to pay for a new wall.

Trump also pledged to expand the Border Patrol by 5,000 agents, but staffing fell during his first year in office farther below a congressional mandate because the government has been unable to keep pace with attrition and retirements. There were 19,437 agents at the end of September, down from 19,828 a year earlier.

In Tijuana, tens of thousands of commuters still line up weekday mornings for San Diego at the nation’s busiest border crossing, some for jobs in landscaping, housekeeping, hotel maids and shipyard maintenance. The vast majority are U.S. citizens and legal residents or holders of “border crossing cards” that are given to millions of Mexicans in border areas for short visits. The border crossing cards do not include work authorization but some break the rules.

Even concern about Trump’s threat to end the North American Free Trade Agreement is tempered by awareness that border economies have been integrated for decades. Mexican “maquiladora” plants, which assemble duty-free raw materials for export to the U.S., have made televisions, medical supplies and other goods since the 1960s.

“How do you separate twins that are joined at the hip?” said Paola Avila, chairwoman of the Border Trade Alliance, a group that includes local governments and business chambers. “Our business relationships will continue to grow regardless of what happens with NAFTA.”

Workers in the Mexicali area rise about 1 a.m., carpool to the border crossing and wait about an hour to reach Calexico’s portico-covered sidewalks by 4 a.m. Some beat the border bottleneck by crossing at midnight to sleep in their cars in Calexico, a city of 40,000 about 120 miles (192 kilometers) east of San Diego. 

Fewer workers make the trek now than 20 and 30 years ago. But not because of Trump. 

Steve Scaroni, one of Imperial Valley’s largest labor contractors, blames the drop on lack of interest among younger Mexicans, which has forced him to rely increasingly on short-term farmworker visas known as H-2As. 

“We have a saying that no one is raising their kids to be farmworkers,” said Scaroni, 55, a third-generation grower and one of Imperial Valley’s largest labor contractors. Last week, he had two or three buses of workers leaving Calexico before dawn, compared to 15 to 20 buses during the 1980s and 1990s.

Crop pickers at Scaroni’s Fresh Harvest Inc. make $13.18 an hour but H-2As bring his cost to $20 to $30 an hour because he must pay for round-trip transportation, sometimes to southern Mexico, and housing. The daily border commuters from Mexicali cost only $16 to $18 after overhead.

Scaroni’s main objective is to expand the H-2A visa program, which covered about 165,000 workers in 2016. On his annual visit to Washington in February to meet members of Congress and other officials, he decided within two hours that nothing changed under Trump. 

“Washington is not going to fix anything,” he said. “You’ve got too many people – lobbyists, politicians, attorneys – who make money off the dysfunction. They make money off of not solving problems. They just keep talking about it.”

Jose Angel Valenzuela, who owns a house in Mexicali and is working his second harvest in Imperial Valley, earns more picking cabbage in an hour than he did in a day at a factory in Mexico. He doesn’t pay much attention to news and isn’t following developments on the border wall.

“We’re doing very well,” he said as workers passed around beef tacos during a break. “We haven’t seen any noticeable change.”

Jack Vessey, whose family farms about 10,000 acres in Imperial Valley, relies on border commuters for about half of his workforce. Imperial has only 175,000 people and Mexicali has about 1 million, making Mexico an obvious labor pool.

Vessey, 42, said he has seen no change on the border and doesn’t expect much. He figures 10 percent of Congress embraces open immigration policies, another 10 percent oppose them and the other 80 percent don’t want to touch it because their voters are too divided.

“It’s like banging your head against the wall,” he said. 
…

From: MeNeedIt

A supervolcano eruption about 74,000 years ago on Indonesia’s island of Sumatra caused a large-scale environmental calamity that may have decimated Stone Age human populations in parts of the world. But some populations, it seems, endured it unscathed.

Scientists on Monday said excavations at two nearby archeological sites on South Africa’s southern coast turned up microscopic shards of volcanic glass from the Mount Toba eruption, which occurred about 5,500 miles (9,000 km) away.

While some research indicates the eruption may have triggered a decades-long “volcanic winter” that damaged ecosystems and deprived people of food resources, the scientists found evidence that the hunter-gatherers at these sites continued to thrive.

The shards were found at a rock shelter located on a promontory called Pinnacle Point near the town of Mossel Bay where people lived, cooked food and slept, and at an open-air site 6 miles (10 km) away where people fashioned tools of stone, bone and wood.

The rock shelter was inhabited from 90,000 to 50,000 years ago. The researchers found no signs of abandonment at the time of the eruption, but rather evidence of business as usual.

“It is very possible that populations elsewhere suffered badly,” said paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins and Nelson Mandela University’s Center for Coastal Palaeoscience in South Africa.

The researchers said the seaside location may have provided a refuge, with marine food sources like shellfish less sensitive than inland plants and animals to an eruption’s environmental effects.

Mount Toba belched immense amounts of volcanic particles into the atmosphere to spread worldwide, dimming sunlight and potentially killing many plants. It was the most powerful eruption in the past 2 million years and the strongest since our species first appeared in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago.

Scientists are divided over the eruption’s impact. Some think it may have caused a human population collapse that became a near-extinction event. Others believe its effects were less severe.

“On a regular basis through time, humans faced dire threats from natural disasters. As hunter-gatherers endowed with advanced cognition and a proclivity to cooperate, we were able to make it through this disaster, and we were very resilient,” said Marean, who led the study published in the journal Nature.

“But this may not be the case now with our reliance on our highly complicated technological system. In my opinion, a volcano like this could annihilate civilization as we know it. Are we ready?”
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From: MeNeedIt

Stone Temple Pilots, “Stone Temple Pilots” (Rhino Records)

Everything from the 1990s seems to be making a comeback these days, from “The X-Files” and “Will & Grace” to the Spice Girls and velour tracksuits. So is it time for Stone Temple Pilots?

Totally, as the kids said back then.

The four-piece band once closely associated with the grunge explosion of the early 1990s with such hits as “Creep” and “Plush” has returned with a new self-titled album and a new lead singer, Jeff Gutt.

Gutt, once a contestant on “The X Factor,” has big shoes to fill, namely those of original frontman Scott Weiland, who was dismissed from the band amid his drug troubles, and Weiland’s replacement, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, who did a two-year stint with the band (both are now dead).

If there are nerves, Gutt isn’t showing them. The album kicks off with “Middle of Nowhere” and Gutt sings with strutting bluster, “There’s a right way/And there’s a wrong way/And then there’s my way.”

The 12-track album is a nice collection of straight-ahead hard rock songs, from the bluesy “Never Enough” to the arena rocker “Meadow.” The band isn’t afraid to go slower, too, and offer two outstanding ballads, “Thought She’d Be Mine” and “The Art of Letting Go.”

Perhaps the most grunge-y song on the new album is “Roll Me Under,” which has the power of instantly transporting you to the sound of rock when Bill Clinton was new in the White House.

Stone Temple Pilots were often dissed by critics and fans of other bands as mere imitators of Pearl Jam and Nirvana. But they proved versatile and went on to explore other sonic terrain.

So credit guitarist Dean DeLeo, his bassist brother, Robert, and drummer Eric Kretz for keeping at it. There’s plenty of bad ’90s recycling, but having Stone Temple Pilots banging away in your earbuds isn’t one of them.

Album to be released on March 16.
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From: MeNeedIt

Chile’s new government is preparing belt-tightening measures after inheriting a larger-than-anticipated fiscal deficit from its predecessor, but the measures will stop short of “mega-adjustments,” Finance Minister Felipe Larrain said on Monday.

Conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera took office on Sunday vowing to combat economic “stagnation” and calling for a return to “fiscal equilibrium” as he seeks to transform Chile into a developed nation within a decade.

“We’re in a period of tight budgets, with levels of public debt that have doubled, which means we must begin with austerity measures, followed by a reassigning resources, in order to finance the president’s program,” Larrain told reporters as he entered the finance ministry for his first day on the job.

Shortly before leaving office, outgoing President Michelle Bachelet’s government reported it had left a fiscal deficit of 2.1 percent of gross domestic product, instead of 1.7 percent as targeted.

Chile’s Congress this year authorized an increase in public spending of 3.9 percent, which Pinera had previously criticized as “high.”

“These austerity measures, and the wise use of resources, are always welcome and are necessary. But we’re not talking about mega-adjustments, we’re talking about austerity measures,” Larrain said.

During his campaign, Pinera, who also governed from 2010 to 2014, said he hoped to guide the country to fiscal equilibrium within six to eight years.
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From: MeNeedIt

Masked Mexican rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos, wearing a purple three-piece suit, is paired with Britney Spears in a Wonder Woman costume. Their child is a tiny albino Marcos, smoking a pipe and wearing a turban with his own little ski mask, his body the black-suited torso of James Bond.  

Another work by border artist Claudio Dicochea shows Ronald Reagan standing on a Pan American jet in colorful cowboy boots. Coupled with Salma Hayek reprising her role as Frida Kahlo but wearing the uniform of a Russian czar, their son is Heath Ledger as the Joker dressed in a pirate’s getup. Their daughter is the late Mexican movie star Dolores del Rio with the body of superhero Vampirella and the headdress of Aztec emperor Montezuma.

Spotlighted in the exhibit “Acid Baroque,” on display at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art through May 20, these and other works by the 45-year-old Dicochea give a modern psychedelic spin to the colonial “casta” or caste paintings first created in 18th century Mexico, taking viewers to the crossroad of colonialism and contemporary popular culture as he examines the idea of “mestizaje,” or mixed-race identity. The exhibit is part of a program at the museum that showcases up-and-coming artists from Mexico and the American Southwest.

The original caste paintings are still seen at some museums, including the one at Mexico City’s Chapultepec Castle, and feature portraits of mixed-race families _ usually the parents and one or two children. They illustrate how intermarriage among Indians, blacks, Spaniards and mixed-race people after the conquest created hierarchal classifications of every mix imaginable, with the children born from diverse couplings arranged from lightest- to darkest-skinned in a kind of table of elements.

In Dicochea’s reimagining of the genre, public figures and celebrities from the 20th and 21st centuries such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Fidel Castro, as well as numerous Mexican TV soap opera stars, are the parents and children.

Race is fluid as the artist uses various materials on wood including acrylic, charcoal, graphite and transfer to tie images together into colorful collages. John Wayne the cowboy movie idol is pictured as an Indian rather than an Indian killer. Albert Einstein is shown as a black child in jeans and T-shirt on a bicycle.

“It’s a really serious meditation on race by someone who grew up on the border,” museum director and chief curator Sara Cochran said. “I like to call this a Trojan horse show, a beautiful show that teaches you something by the back door.”

For Dicochea, creating a new riff on the old casta paintings is a critique of the role visual arts play in shaping ideas about race.

“At the core level, I’m showing that the ideas of race and ethnicity are social processes that are made up rather than natural phenomenon, that they are constructed to exert control,” he said.

His work is being displayed through the museum’s southwestNET program, which annually spotlights one or more mid-career artists from the region believed to be on the verge of achieving iconic status, Cochran said. The artists can come from Mexico or anywhere in the Southwest from California to Texas and up to Utah and Colorado.

Past southwestNet artists have included Postcommodity, an arts collective that brought a four-channel video with sound of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, titled “A Very Long Line,” to the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York.   

Dicochea was born in San Luis Colorado, Mexico, where the northwestern corner of Sonora state meets southwestern Arizona, just south of Yuma. His family immigrated to the U.S. when he was an infant, and he grew up along the border.

As a youth, Dicochea labored briefly as a farmworker, irrigating fields in the Yuma Valley. He left at age 20 to study at the University of Arizona in Tucson, later continuing his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and Arizona State University in Tempe, where he obtained a master’s in fine arts. He and his wife, Adriana, a painter from the border city of Nogales, Mexico, now live in San Antonio, Texas.

Among Dicochea’s earliest mentors was the late African-American painter Robert Colescott, known for satirical paintings such as “George Washington Carver crossing the Delaware,” which replaced the revolutionary war hero with the black botanist and inventor standing in a boat filled with domestic workers and minstrels.

Dicochea included Colescott’s work in an exhibit of sometimes racially charged works he recently put together with curator Julio Cesar Morales at the ASU Art Museum in an examination of the current social and cultural climate.

“Claudio addresses gender, race and class,” said Morales, “offering a very smart mashup of different cultures and styles to tell the story of where we are now.”

 
…

From: MeNeedIt

A brain implant to decode complex speech signals could soon be a reality, giving people who’ve lost the ability to speak the power to be heard again. Faith Lapidus reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

A San Francisco fertility clinic says thousands of frozen eggs and embryos may have been damaged after a liquid nitrogen failure in a storage tank.

Dr. Carl Herbert, president of Pacific Fertility Clinic, told the Washington Post on Sunday that officials have informed some 400 patients of the failure that occurred March 4.

Herbert says the clinic’s staff thawed a few eggs and found they remain viable. He says they have not checked any of the embryos.

A call to the clinic from The Associated Press seeking further details was not immediately returned Sunday.

It’s the second such failure at a U.S. clinic in a matter of days. Last week, an Ohio hospital said more than 2,000 frozen eggs and embryos may have been damaged due to a refrigerator malfunction.
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From: MeNeedIt

Labor strikes. Nationwide protests. Bank failures.

In recent months, Iran has been beset by economic problems despite the promises surrounding the 2015 nuclear deal it struck with world powers.

Its clerically overseen government is starting to take notice. Politicians now offer the idea of possible government referendums or early elections. Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei acknowledged the depths of the problems ahead of the 40th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

“Progress has been made in various sectors in the real sense of the word; however, we admit that in the area of ‘justice’ we are lagging behind,” Khamenei said in February, according to an official transcript. “We should apologize to Allah the Exalted and to our dear people.”

Whether change can come, however, is in question.

​An economy run by the state

Iran today largely remains a state-run economy. It has tried to privatize some of its industries, but critics say they have been handed over to a wealthy elite that looted them and ran them into the ground.

One major strike now grips the Iran National Steel Industrial Group in Ahvaz, in the country’s southwest, where hundreds of workers say they haven’t been paid in three months. Authorities say some demonstrators have been arrested during the strike.

More than 3.2 million Iranians are jobless, government spokesman Mohammad-Bagher Nobakht has said. The unemployment rate is more than 11 percent.

Banks remain hobbled by billions of dollars in bad loans, some from the era of nuclear sanctions and others tainted with fraud. The collapse last year of the Caspian Credit Institute, which promised depositors the kinds of returns rarely seen outside of Ponzi schemes, showed the economic desperation faced by many in Iran.

​Or in security services’​ grip

Meanwhile, much of the economy is in the grip of Iran’s security services.

The country’s powerful Revolutionary Guard paramilitary force, which answers only Khamenei and runs Iran’s ballistic missile program, controls 15 to 30 percent of the economy, analysts say.

Under President Hassan Rouhani, a relatively moderate cleric whose government reached the nuclear accord, there has been a push toward ending military control of some businesses. However, the Guard is unlikely to give up its power easily.

Some suggest hard-liners and the Guard may welcome the economic turmoil in Iran as it weakens Rouhani’s position. His popularity has slipped since winning a landslide re-election in May 2017, in part over the country’s economic woes.

Analysts believe a hard-line protest in late December likely lit the fuse for the nationwide demonstrations that swept across about 75 cities. While initially focused on the economy, they quickly turned anti-government. At least 25 people were killed in clashes surrounding the demonstrations, while nearly 5,000 reportedly were arrested.

​A rare referendum?

In the time since, Rouhani has suggested holding a referendum, without specifying what exactly would be voted on.

“If factions have differences, there is no need to fight, bring it to the ballot,” Rouhani said in a speech Feb. 11. “Do whatever the people say.”

Such words don’t come lightly. There have been only two referendums since the Islamic Revolution. A 1979 referendum installed Iran’s Islamic republic. A 1989 constitutional referendum eliminated the post of prime minister, created Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and made other changes.

A letter signed by 15 prominent Iranians published a day after Rouhani’s speech called for a referendum on whether Iran should become a secular parliamentary democracy. The letter was signed by Iranians living inside the country and abroad, including Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.

“The sum of the experiences of the last 40 years show the impossibility of reforming the Islamic Republic, since by hiding behind divine concepts … the regime has become the principal obstacle to progress and salvation of the Iranian nation,” read the letter, which was posted online.

But even among moderates in Iran’s clerical establishment, there seems to be little interest in such far-reaching changes, which would spell the end of the Islamic Republic. Hard-liners, who dominate the country’s security services, are adamantly opposed.

“I am telling the anti-Islamic government network, the anti-Iranians and those runaway counterrevolutionaries … their wish for a public referendum will never come true,” Tehran Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said Feb. 15, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

​Take responsibility

Yet there are signs that authorities realize that something will have to give. Khamenei’s apology in February took many by surprise, especially as the country’s true hard-liners believe he is the representative of God on earth.

Khamenei’s apology came after a letter from Mehdi Karroubi, an opposition activist who remains under house arrest, demanding that the supreme leader take responsibility for failures.

“You were president for eight years and you have been the absolute ruler for almost 29 years,” Karroubi wrote in the letter, which was not reported on by state media. “Therefore, considering your power and influence over the highest levels of state, you must accept that today’s political, economic, cultural and social situation in the country is a direct result of your guidance and administration.”

Iran’s former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed by many for the country’s economic woes, has come out for early elections. He also demanded they be “free and fair,” while continuing his own campaign against Khamenei, whom he ignored in his attempt to run in the 2017 presidential election.

However, Ahmadinejad’s action drew immediate criticism, as his own widely disputed 2009 re-election sparked unrest and violence that killed dozens.
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From: MeNeedIt

China said Sunday it does not intend to ignite a trade war with the U.S. because the move would be disastrous for the entire world.

“There are no winners in a trade war,” Minister of Commerce Zhong Shan said on the sidelines of China’s annual parliamentary session.

“China does not wish to fight a trade war, nor will China initiate a trade war, but we can handle any challenge and will resolutely defend the interests of our country and our people,” Zhong said.

President Donald Trump signed proclamations Thursday imposing a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, with the new taxes set to go into effect this month.

​US, Japan, EU talk

Trade representatives for Japan and the European Union met with the U.S. trade representative Saturday in an effort to avoid a trade war over Trump’s new tariffs on aluminum and steel.

At the meeting in Brussels, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom and Japanese counterpart Hiroshige Seko discussed the tariffs as part of a trilateral effort to combat unfair trade practices.

The EU said in a statement that both Brussels and Tokyo had serious concerns about the U.S. tariffs. Both powers, two of the biggest trade partners with the United States, have asked for exemptions from the tariffs.

After the meeting, Malmstrom tweeted, “No immediate clarity on the exact U.S. procedure for exemption … so discussions will continue next week.”

“I firmly and clearly expressed my view that this is regrettable,” Seko said at a news conference following the meeting. “… I explained that this could have a bad effect on the entire multilateral trading system.”

Saturday afternoon, Trump accused the EU of treating “the U.S. very badly on trade.” He said if they drop their “horrific barriers & tariffs on U.S. products… we will likewise drop ours,” he wrote in a tweet.

If they don’t, he warned the U.S. would tax European cars and other products.

​Exemptions unclear

On Friday, the European Union said it is not clear whether the bloc will be exempt from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

EU Trade Commissioner Malmstrom said Friday in Brussels, “We hope that we can get confirmation that the EU is excluded from this.”

Canada and Mexico were given specific exemptions from the tariffs for an indefinite period while negotiations continue on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Brazil, South Korea and Australia have also asked for exemptions or special treatment.

Trump imposed the tariffs despite pleas from friends and allies who warned the new measure could ignite a trade war.
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From: MeNeedIt