Aid groups have criticized efforts by European leaders to stem the flow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, arguing Europe’s economy needs more workers. One nongovernmental organization in Italy has been trying to fill the gap by training African migrants to work as beekeepers and then pairing them with local honey producers in need of employees. Ricci Shryock reports for VOA from Alessandria, Italy.
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From: MeNeedIt
The French government said on Thursday it would cap unfair dismissal payouts and give companies more flexibility to adapt pay and working hours to market conditions in a labor reform France’s biggest union said was disappointing.
The reform, President Emmanuel Macron’s first major policy step since his election in May, is also the first big test of his plans to reform the euro zone’s second-biggest economy.
For decades governments of the left and right have tried to reform France’s strict labor rules, but have always diluted them in the face of street protests.
The government said in a document presenting the reform that it will make it possible to adapt work time, remuneration and workplace mobility to market conditions based on agreements reached by simplified majority between employers and workers.
Workers compensation for dismissal judged in a labor court to be unfair would be set at three months of wages for two-years in the company with the amount rising progressively depending on how long a worker was with the firm, unions said.
However, normal severance pay would be increased from 20 percent of wages for each year in a company to 25 percent, Liberation reported.
The government consulted with unions for weeks as it drafted the reform, and only the hardline CGT union, the country’s second biggest, said from the start that it would hold a protest, set for Sept. 12.
France’s biggest union, the reformist CFDT, said that it would not call a strike against the reform but described the reform as a missed opportunity to improve labor relations.
“CFDT disappointed,” the union’s leader Laurent Berger told reporters after a meeting with the government, but he added: “Taking to the streets is not the only mode of action for unions.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Mysterious black holes, thought to reside in the center of every galaxy, are difficult to study because even the closest one, in the center of our own Milky Way, is still some 27,000 light years away. But researchers at the University of Nottingham’s Quantum Gravity Laboratory have found that some of the physical phenomena linked to black holes can be studied in an ordinary bathtub. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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From: MeNeedIt
In the coming weeks, as Houston turns its attention to rebuilding areas devastated by Tropical Storm Harvey, people like Jay De Leon are likely to play an outsized role — if they stay around.
De Leon, 47, owns a small construction business in Houston, and he and his 10 employees do exactly the kind of demolition and refurbishing the city will need. But like a large number of construction workers in Texas, De Leon and most of his workers live in the United States illegally, and that could make things complicated.
The Pew Research Center estimated last year that 28 percent of Texas’s construction workforce is undocumented, while other studies have put the number as high as 50 percent. Construction employed 23 percent of working undocumented adults in Texas at the end of 2014, higher than any other sector, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Undocumented immigrants nervous
However, undocumented immigrants are growing increasingly nervous in Texas because of an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration that has cast a wide net.
In addition, a new Texas law that would have taken effect later this week bars cities from embracing so-called sanctuary policies, where they offer safe harbor to illegal immigrants, and allows local police to inquire about a person’s immigration status. A federal judge Wednesday temporarily blocked most of the law from taking effect.
De Leon, who has lived in the country for 20 years and has two citizen children, says the changes have spooked the city’s migrant workforce. In recent weeks, he said, one of his employees left the state and another returned to Mexico. Both feared that if they stayed they risked arrest.
Departing workers, he says, pose a problem for Houston in the wake of Harvey, which has caused flood damage to commercial buildings, houses, roads and bridges expected to run into tens of billions of dollars.
“The situation that Houston is going through now with the hurricane is going to be the trial by fire for the Republicans and the governor that approved these radical laws,” De Leon said. “They will need our migrant labor to rebuild the city. I believe that without us it will be impossible.”
Undocumented workers perform a wide range of construction jobs, from framing and dry-walling to plumbing and wiring.
Shortage of U.S. trained workers
Stan Marek, chief executive of Marek Construction in Texas, said his company doesn’t hire undocumented immigrants and has long had difficulty finding enough trained U.S. workers.
“It’s a crisis,” Marek said. “We are looking at several thousand homes that have flood damage. There is no way the existing (legal) workforce can make a dent in it.”
Marek would like to see the federal government grant emergency work authorization for undocumented workers in the rebuilding effort, he said. Otherwise, those immigrants are likely to be hired by firms that do not pay payroll taxes or provide benefits like workers’ compensation and legally mandated overtime.
It isn’t yet possible to estimate how many construction jobs will be added in Texas as it rebuilds, but in the 12 months after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Louisiana added 14,800 jobs in the sector, U.S. government data shows.
About 25 percent of the construction workers involved in the cleanup of New Orleans were undocumented, according to a study by researchers at Tulane and UC Berkeley universities. Those without papers were “especially at risk of exploitation,” the study found.
Worker exodus
The labor shortages are likely to grow worse, many builders warn. Earlier this year, a group of Hispanic contractors sent a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott warning that the pending ban on sanctuary city policies would make it “difficult to find and retain experienced workers.”
Javier Arrias, chairman of the Hispanic Contractors Association de Tejas and one of the letter’s signers, told Reuters that “many construction workers are already moving to other states.”
Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the role undocumented workers might play in the recovery.
Elizabeth Theiss, president of Houston-based anti-immigration group Stop the Magnet, sees another option besides looking to workers in the country illegally. She says the rebuilding effort should be used to help train U.S. veterans and other citizens who need jobs.
Theiss acknowledged that reconstruction might proceed more slowly, at least initially, if immigrants without work documents are not part of the effort, but she noted that rebuilding would be slow under any scenario.
Personal hardships
Whatever role undocumented people play in rebuilding Houston, they could face hardships rebuilding their own lives.
While the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides emergency food, water and medicine to anyone, regardless of immigration status, cash assistance and other longer term aid is only available to citizens and immigrants in households where at least one family member has legal status.
Immigrant advocates are launching private fundraising drives to help fill the void.
“It is deeply tragic and un-American that so many of those working men and women who will be rebuilding Houston and the rest of the state will be doing so while facing tragedy in their own lives,” said Jose Garza, executive director of the Workers Defense Project.
De Leon said his family was lucky and did not suffer flood damage. He is now busy rounding up supplies for immigrant families stuck at shelters who are afraid to seek out more help from authorities.
In the end, he says, President Donald Trump has to know “it’s going to be impossible to rebuild Houston without the labor force of immigrants. It is illogical, what he says with his words and what really has to happen.”
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From: MeNeedIt
The U.S. economy rebounded sharply in the spring, growing at the fastest pace in more than two years amid brisk consumer spending on autos and other goods.
The gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in the April-June quarter, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. It was the best showing since a 3.2 percent gain in the first quarter of 2015.
The result is a healthy upward revision from the government’s initial estimate of 2.6 percent growth in the second quarter. The growth rate in the January-March quarter was a lackluster 1.2 percent.
Improvements in consumer spending, particularly on autos, and business investment powered second-quarter growth. Those revisions offset a bigger drag from spending by state and local governments.
This was the second of three estimates the government will provide for second quarter growth. Even with the upward revision, the weak start to the year means that growth over the past six months has averaged 2.1 percent, the same modest pace seen for the recovery that began in mid-2009.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump attacked the Obama administration’s economic record, pledging to double GDP growth to 4 percent or better. His first budget, sent to Congress earlier this year, projects growth rates will climb to a sustained annual rate of 3 percent, a goal that many private economists believe is still too optimistic.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office sees growth averaging 1.9 percent over the next decade, a forecast much closer to estimates made by private economists.
Many economists had been forecasting growth in the current July-September quarter would be around 3 percent. Some are now saying that the devastation from Hurricane Harvey could shave about a half-percentage point off growth this quarter. However, analysts believe the pace of growth will bounce back once the rebuilding begins and oil refineries get back to full production, bringing down prices.
For the entire year, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, is forecasting growth of 2.1 percent. That would mark an improvement over last year when the economy grew a meager 1.5 percent, the poorest showing since 2009 when GDP shrank by 2.9 percent.
Zandi is forecasting that growth in 2018 will be an even stronger 2.8 percent. But he said 0.4 percentage point of that forecast reflects an assumption that the Trump administration will win a tax cut package that will take effect in early 2018. The economy will also be boosted by higher spending on the military and infrastructure projects, he said.
“For the first time since the Great Recession ended in mid-2009, the economy is not facing any significant headwinds,” Zandi said.
From: MeNeedIt
The U.S. is playing a World Cup qualifier in the New York metropolitan area for the first time, a critical match against Costa Rica on Friday night at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey.
The Americans have played plenty of matches in and near the Big Apple, mostly in the CONCACAF Gold Cup and exhibition games. Until now, the closest to New York a qualifier has been played was in 1989, a 2-1 win over Guatemala at Veterans Stadium in New Britain, Connecticut.
“This was a pipe dream, this stadium in Harrison,” said goalkeeper Tim Howard, who played for the New York/New Jersey MetroStars when the team was based at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford. “For it to be there and to actually be playing games, you know, there’s no crowd like playing in front of your home crowd for me.”
Howard spoke Tuesday during a news conference in Manhattan, joined by coach Bruce Arena, captain Michael Bradley and teenage star midfielder Christian Pulisic.
After the U.S. opened the final round of the North and Central American and Caribbean region with losses to Mexico and Costa Rica, the U.S. Soccer Federation brought back Arena to replace coach Jurgen Klinsmann. The U.S. has recovered and is in third place with eight points, trailing Mexico (14) and Costa Rica (11). Panama (seven), Honduras (five) and Trinidad and Tobago (three) follow.
The top three nations qualify, and the fourth-place team advances to a playoff against Asia’s No. 5 nation.
Perhaps no one understands the role fan support can play in an outcome more than Arena, a member of the U.S. National Soccer Hall of Fame. The U.S. had a 16-year home unbeaten streak in qualifying going into a match against Honduras at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 1, 2001. The majority of the sellout crowd of 54,282 backed Honduras, which won 3-2.
“Only in America, I guess, we’re fighting for a home-field advantage,” Arena, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, said at the time.
Costa Rica played a Gold Cup match at Harrison in July, but Arena expects a different crowd.
“We’re playing at home and I don’t care what anyone says. We have a home-field advantage,” Arena said. “My experiences in the short time that I’ve been here back with the U.S. team is that we have great support and I really believe that we’ll have great support on Friday, and hopefully the fact that Costa Rica played here in the Gold Cup is not going be a factor.”
At a venue with a 25,000 capacity that was built for Major League Soccer, the USSF and Red Bulls can control ticket allocation with pre-sales to Red Bulls season-ticket holders and national team regulars.
“We understand the challenges of playing at home versus going on the road in CONCACAF and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that in five or six weeks’ time we’ve punched our ticket to Russia,” Bradley said. “It’s on us to make sure that we can finish the job and allow ourselves the chance to look forward to playing at a World Cup next summer.”
The U.S. plays Honduras at San Pedro Sula on Sept. 5, and then closes the hexagonal against Panama on Oct. 6 at Orlando, Florida, and at Trinidad four days later.
“All the work that we’ve put in this year was for these next four games, to make sure that we can find the right ways in the biggest moments when the lights come on brightest to make sure that we get the job done,” Bradley said.
Reality check
U.S. players also have their minds on teammates and their families affected by Hurricane Harvey.
“I’ve heard DaMarcus (Beasley) speak of it. I haven’t yet had the chance yet to talk with Clint (Dempsey),” Arena said. “Hopefully his family’s safe. I know they’re in east Texas. I know it’s a tough week for them. I know for DaMarcus in particular it’s been very challenging. For him personally, for his friends and family ties to the Houston area. It’s difficult but all we can do is hope that the conditions improve in the Houston area and that everyone is safe.”
Added Bradley: “Some of the images and videos that have come out of Texas have been heartbreaking, and for all of us now as human beings, as fellow Americans, to find the right ways to show support and help that part of the country as they find the right ways to move on from this. That’s very important and obviously in our own very little way playing and representing the country in a really strong and proud way on Friday night is a little part of that.”
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From: MeNeedIt
U.S. sanctions on the finance boss of Venezuela’s oil company PDVSA have led to some exports to the United States being blocked as banks and investment funds refuse to provide letters of credit to potential buyers, three financial sources said.
U.S. businesses are barred from dealing with a sanctioned person or company and one of the sources said the sanctions on PDVSA’s Finance Vice President Simon Zerpa were deterring some businesses from investments with the company as so many of its transactions are linked to the finance department he leads.
A Venezuelan oil shipment to the United States was blocked this month as lenders refused to provide letters of credit to PDVSA customers, the sources said.
Letters of credit, issued by banks, guarantee to a seller that a buyer will pay a specified amount on time when a shipment is accepted. Without a letter of credit, shipments cannot be delivered and the shipper does not get paid. Blocking letters of credit for PDVSA oil chokes off cash that is desperately needed in the OPEC nation.
Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., commonly known as PDVSA, is the financial motor of President Nicolas Maduro’s leftist government, and it is operating within one of the deepest economic recessions Venezuela has ever experienced and widespread political unrest.
In one instance, U.S. refiner PBF Energy was unable to get a letter of credit for a Venezuelan crude cargo to be received at a U.S. port.
The Suezmax tanker Karvounis has been anchored in the U.S. Gulf for more than a month. It partially discharged its cargo on Aug. 23 in New Orleans, according to Thomson Reuters vessel tracking data. A trader close to the deal said PBF Energy ultimately agreed to a prepayment, removing the need for a credit letter. It was unclear what would happen with the rest of the cargo.
Some U.S. customers can import without a letter of credit if they pay up front.
In July, the United States imposed sanctions on 13 senior Venezuelan officials, including the head of Venezuela’s army, the national police chief, the director of elections, and Zerpa.
At the time, a U.S. official warned that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump was readying tougher measures that could be part of a “steady drumbeat” of responses to the Venezuelan crisis.
The most serious potential future step would be financial sanctions that would halt dollar payments for the country’ oil, starving the government of hard currency, or a total ban on oil imports to the United States, Venezuela’s biggest customer.
This month the United States imposed its first economic sanctions on Venezuela, banning debt trades for government-issued bonds and bonds issued by PDVSA.
The problem could spread to more cargoes if banks refuse to extend credit to companies that have a commercial relationship with PDVSA, the sources said.
The sources said foreign oil companies funding projects in Venezuela and financial entities negotiating with PDVSA were avoiding signing agreements that could involve Zerpa.
Major oil company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has pulled back from funding some operations at its joint venture in Venezuela, a source at PDVSA said.
Neither PDVSA nor the Information Ministry responded to requests for comment. Zerpa was not immediately available to comment.
“PDVSA will face additional trouble just by keeping a sanctioned individual as CFO,” said Jorge Piedrahita, chief executive of broker-dealer Gear Capital Partners, who has been involved with Venezuelan debt for many years.
“Even the Russians and China’s Development Bank should be worried about signing something with him as they can be subject to collateral damage from sanctions just by association.”
A close Maduro ally, Zerpa, 34, rose to prominence by leading the bilateral Venezuela-China fund through which Caracas borrows from Beijing and repays loans in oil and fuel. Venezuela has borrowed over $60 billion from China, earning Zerpa the nickname “Zerpa the Chinese.”
Two additional financial sources said having Zerpa as the company’s head of finance had made it impossible for U.S. entities to assist PDVSA in debt refinancing, even before the U.S. economic sanctions.
Even basic activities, such as a conference call with bondholders, are now essentially unthinkable, the sources said.
Sanctions against Zerpa are having a knock-on effect on Wall Street, affecting imports of food and medicine to Venezuela made through funds headed by Zerpa, according to Delcy Rodriguez, president of Maduro’s new legislative assembly.
“This wasn’t done to affect Venezuelan officials but rather the entire population,” Rodriguez said on Monday.
Zerpa has held several high-profile posts including heading Venezuela’s state economic development bank Bandes and off-budget investment fund Fonden.
Opposition lawmakers have said he is an example of how the late Hugo Chavez’s “21st century socialism” has allowed unprepared political figures to wield power over financial deals.
“I have a negative opinion of him because of the way he handled the Chinese fund,” said opposition lawmaker Angel Alvarado, describing Zerpa as Maduro’s “finance tsar.”
U.S. pressure could force PDVSA to remove Zerpa from his post, at least on paper. However, PDVSA has had issues in the past that have led investors to tread cautiously with Venezuela.
“In part, the sanctions codify an already existing situation in which PDVSA and the Republic have little to no access to international financial markets due to the combination of political risk, unsustainable policies, concerns about legality
of new issues and reputational risk from providing funds to the Venezuelan government,” investment firm Torino Capital wrote in a report to clients after Friday’s sanctions.
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From: MeNeedIt
U.S. President Donald Trump is traveling to the state of Missouri to try to build support for his goal of reforming the country’s tax code.
Administration officials say the president will focus on explaining the need for tax reform, but not the specifics of a plan to do so, during a speech Wednesday in the city of Springfield. They say he will promote tax cuts as a way to help American workers.
Trump has in the past proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.
The U.S. tax code has not undergone a significant overhaul since 1986.
Trump’s Republican Party controls both houses of the U.S. Congress, but failed in its earlier efforts to overhaul another major program as leaders were unable to get enough votes to change the health care system.
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From: MeNeedIt
Forests in the northeastern United States and southern Canada could be ravaged by tree-killing beetles in coming decades as a warming climate expands the pest’s habitat, a study has found.
Over the next 60 years, southern pine beetles could infest forests in new areas of the United States and Canada, disrupting industries and ecosystems alike, it said.
Warmer winter nights allow spread
The red-brown insects, the size of a grain of rice, known to feast on pine-tree bark, has typically only thrived in the hotter climate of Central America and the southeastern United States.
But in recent years warmer than usual winter nights have allowed it to survive the cold months and spread as far north as the U.S. state of New York. The coldest winter night has warmed by 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 4 degrees Celsius) over the past 50 years in various parts of the United States, the study’s authors said.
Using computer-based climate models, they predicted the beetles should gradually march north along the Atlantic coast, infesting forests including in the U.S. states of Maine and Ohio all the way to Canada’s Nova Scotia.
Pest moves fast
By 2080, the pest should proliferate to red — and jack-pine forests in a 270,000 square miles (700,000 square km) area of the United States and Canada — roughly the size of Afghanistan, the researchers wrote in Nature Climate Change.
That would not only upend ecosystems, but also disrupt several key industries “in already struggling rural areas,” said lead author Corey Lesk, a researcher at Columbia University in New York.
“Residents of these regions could see a direct hit to their pocketbooks,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday in a phone interview.
Infestations costly to timber industry
Where the southern pine beetle has struck in the past, timber industries have been hard hit.
Infestations of pine beetles have cost an estimated $100 million a year in timber losses from 1990 to 2004 in the southeastern United States, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Thousands of adult beetles can kill a tree in two to four months as the insects carve S-shaped tunnels under the bark, depriving their host of needed nutrients.
The tourism industry would also likely suffer, said Lesk, with the potential destruction of iconic forests including the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and Long Island.
Europe faces same problem
In Europe, previous research has shown that bark beetles have similarly been chewing through pine and spruce trees in forests from the Swiss Alps to Belarus alongside temperature increases.
Land managers have found the best way to fight off bark beetles has been thinning high-density forests and cutting out infested trees, though with limited success, the researchers said.
“The key question is whether those strategies would be able to keep up with rapid advance of the pest into regions with little or no experience managing it,” Lesk said.
From: MeNeedIt
The U.S. space agency’s Cassini spacecraft will end its 13-year mission to Saturn in mid-September by transmitting data until the final moment before it plunges into the ringed planet’s atmosphere, officials said Tuesday.
Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, will make the last of 22 farewell dives between the planet’s rings and surface on Sept. 15. The spacecraft will then burn up as it heads straight into the gas giant’s crushing atmosphere.
Cassini’s final dive will end a mission that provided groundbreaking discoveries that included seasonal changes on Saturn, the moon Titan’s resemblance to a primordial Earth, and a global ocean on the moon Enceladus with ice plumes spouting from its surface.
“The mission has been insanely, wildly, beautifully successful, and it’s coming to an end in about two weeks,” Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist, said on a telephone conference call with reporters from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Cassini’s final photo as it heads into Saturn’s atmosphere will likely be of propellers, or gaps in the rings caused by moonlets, said project scientist Linda Spilker.
The spacecraft will provide near real-time data on the atmosphere until it loses contact with Earth at 4:54 a.m. PDT (1154 GMT) on Sept. 15, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.
Spilker said Cassini’s latest data on the rings had shown they had a lighter mass than forecast. That suggests they are younger than expected, at about 120 million years, and thus were created after the birth of the solar system, she said.
During its final orbits between the atmosphere and the rings, Cassini also studied Saturn’s atmosphere and took measurements to determine the size of the planet’s rocky core.
Cassini has been probing Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, and its entourage of 62 known moons since July 2004. It has provided enough data for almost 4,000 scientific papers.
Since the craft is running low on fuel, NASA is crashing it into Saturn to avoid any chance Cassini could someday collide with Titan, Enceladus or any other moon that has the potential to support indigenous microbial life.
By destroying the spacecraft, NASA will ensure that any hitchhiking Earth microbes still alive on Cassini will not contaminate the moons for future study.
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From: MeNeedIt