At least 43 migrants drowned on Sunday after the fishing boat on which they were traveling sank off the coast of the Italian region of Calabria.
According to local authorities, some 250 migrants were crammed aboard the ship, which broke in two about 20 kilometers from the city of Crotone. Over 100 passengers have been rescued, but at least 70 of the people who were aboard the ship remain missing.
Over the course of the morning, bodies, including those of children and at least one newborn baby, have washed ashore in the resort town of Steccato di Cutro, according to local reports.
Although the ship’s port of origin was in Turkey, authorities say the majority of the migrants that have been rescued are from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said the disaster was “a huge tragedy that demonstrates how necessary it is to oppose the chains of irregular migration,” adding that more needed to be done to clamp down on “unscrupulous smugglers” who, “in order to get rich, organize improvised trips with inadequate boats and in prohibitive conditions.”
Calabrian President Roberto Occhiuto slammed EU authorities for their inaction in addressing the migration crisis and asked “what has the European Union been doing all these years?”
“Where is Europe when it comes to guaranteeing security and legality?” he asked, adding that regions like his were left on their own to “manage emergencies and mourn the dead.”
According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, at least 2,366 migrants lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean last year; at least 124 have been reporting missing in its waters since the beginning of this year.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — Boris Johnson may have coined the phrase, but Rishi Sunak hopes he’s the man who can finally claim to have “got Brexit done.”
The British prime minister will on Monday host European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in what’s being sold by No. 10 Downing Street as the pair’s “final talks” on resolving the long-running row over post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.
Downing Street has drawn up a carefully choreographed sequence of events following the meeting. Sunak will brief his Cabinet following the late lunchtime face-to-face with the European Commission chief.
He then hopes to hold a joint press conference with von der Leyen to announce any deal before heading to the House of Commons late on Monday to begin his trickiest task yet — selling that deal to Brexiteer MPs on his own Conservative benches, many of whom will be closely watching the verdict of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
It’s likely to mark a defining moment in Sunak’s young premiership, which only began in October when he took over a Conservative Party still riven with divisions following the departures of Johnson and Liz Truss in quick succession. If successful, he will hope to draw a line under the rancorous follow-up to Britain’s 2020 departure from the bloc, and herald an era of closer cooperation with Brussels.
But even as Downing Street was drawing up plans for Monday’s grand unveiling, members of Sunak’s own party were voicing skepticism that the prime minister will have done enough to win their backing. And without DUP support, Northern Ireland’s moribund power-sharing assembly could remain collapsed.
Testing times
Since taking office, Sunak has put securing a deal with Brussels on the so-called Northern Ireland protocol near the top of his to-do list.
The post-Brexit arrangement has been a long-running source of tension between the U.K. and the EU, and the two sides have been locked in months of talks to try to ease the operation of the protocol while addressing the concerns of both the DUP and traders hit by extra bureaucracy.
Under the protocol, the EU requires checks on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in order to preserve the integrity of its single market while avoiding such checks taking place at the sensitive land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
But the DUP sees the protocol as separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. and is boycotting the region’s power-sharing government until changes are made.
In a statement Sunday night, Downing Street said Sunak wanted “to ensure any deal fixes the practical problems on the ground, ensures trade flows freely within the whole of the U.K., safeguards Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and returns sovereignty to the people of Northern Ireland.”
The Belfast to Dublin motorway crosses the border line between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Downing Street has kept the detail of any deal a closely-guarded secret. In an interview on Sky News Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab talked up the prospect of “more of an intelligence-based approach” to goods checks, and a move away from individual checks at Northern Irish ports. The U.K. and EU have already talked up more access for Brussels to British goods data.
One of the biggest flashpoints for Brexiteer MPs and the DUP will be the status of the Court of Justice of the European Union in governing disputes under the protocol. They see the continued presence of the EU’s top court in the arrangement as a challenge to British sovereignty.
On Sunday, Mark Francois, chairman of the European Research Group of Conservative Euroskeptics, set a high bar for his support, warning any deal must see Northern Ireland treated on the “same basis” as the rest of Great Britain. He warned that even a reduced role for the CJEU over Northern Ireland was not “good enough.”
Raab told Sky that scaling back some of the regulatory checks and paperwork “would in itself involve a significant, substantial scaling back of the role of the ECJ,” and he talked up the idea of a “proper democratic check coming out of the institutions in Stormont,” the home of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly.
Minefield
One potential source of Brexit trouble on Sunak’s benches is Johnson himself, who has already been warning the prime minister not to drop the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill aimed at allowing U.K. ministers to unilaterally sideline the arrangement.
The Sunday Times reported that Johnson, while being lobbied to support a deal to cement relations with U.S. President Joe Biden, responded with the colorful retort: “F*** the Americans!” The same paper cited a “source close to” Johnson who dismissed it as “a jocular conversation in the [House of Commons] chamber that someone evidently misunderstood.”
As another defining Brexit week begins, Sunak appears willing to plow ahead, even without the support of the most hardline Brexiteers in his party. Raab insisted on Sunday MPs would “have the opportunity to express themselves on the deal,” but did not elaborate on whether there will be a House of Commons vote on the arrangement.
Former Chancellor George Osborne, one of the key figures in the campaign to remain in the European Union, urged Sunak to press on and “call the bluff” of the DUP, Johnson and the ERG — or his premiership would be “severely weakened.”
“Having got to this point in the minefield, he has to proceed,” Osborne told the Andrew Neil Show.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Thiruvananthapuram: As part of the agreement between the Kerala government and Adani Ports, the former will now have to give Rs 400 crore to the latter as the construction of the breakwater at the upcoming Vizhinjam port is going forward.
According to the agreement between the two, Kerala will have to provide Adani Ports Rs 400 crore when 30 per cent of the breakwater is completed and they have been knocking on the doors of the government for a while.
The state government has been caught in a debt trap and its financial position has been in tatters hence they are unable to honour the commitment to the port builder. With time running out, the Pinarayi Vijayan government has now decided to take a loan of Rs 400 crore from HUDCO.
The Vizhinjam port has been a dream project of successive governments and was finally cleared by the then Oommen Chandy government (2011-16) and Adani Ports was the lone bidder for the project.
The work began on December 5, 2015.
Gautam Adani had then announced that the first ship will berth there on September 1, 2018, in a record time of less than 1,000 days, but due to various reasons things went haywire. State Ports Minister Ahamed Devarkovil has now said that the first ship will berth in March 2023 and the first phase of the port will be commissioned in 2023.
The project first stalled in 2017 after cyclone Ockhi hit the construction site and a portion of the constructed breakwater was washed away and since then the shortage of limestone, the most essential raw material for the project, caused another delay.
The total cost of the port project is Rs 7,525 crore and the state government has contributed 500 acres of land.
According to the plan, this would be one of India’s deepest ports once completed, and 80 per cent of the country’s cargo trans-shipments will go through here.
Adani Ports, which was the lone bidder for the project, had sought a Rs 1,635 crore grant for the construction purposes.
According to the agreement, Adani will operate the port for 40 years, extendable by 20 more years, while the state government will get a portion of the revenue from the port after 15 years.
Australia was, until recently, an international pariah on climate change and a punchline in Brussels. But a new government in Canberra coupled with Europe’s energy and economic woes mean a better relationship is now emerging — one that could fuel Europe’s transition to a clean economy, while enriching Australia immensely.
“Europe is energy hungry and capital rich, Australia’s energy rich and capital hungry, and that means that there’s a lot that we can do together,” said Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.
A little over a year ago, relations between Australia and the EU were in a parlous state. The government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison had reneged on a nuclear submarine contract — a decision the current government stands by — incensing the French and by extension the EU. Equally as frustrating for many Europeans was Australia’s climate policy, which was viewed as outstandingly meager even in a lackluster global field.
The election of Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — whose father was Italian — last May brought a change in tone, as well as a new climate target and a trickle of policies designed to cut greenhouse gas pollution that heats up the planet.
Those moves were “the entry ticket” to dealings with Europe, Bowen told POLITICO in Brussels, the second-last stop on a European tour. “Australia’s change of climate positioning, climate policy, has changed our position in the world.”
That’s been most notable in progress on talks on a free trade agreement with the EU. Landing that deal would be a “big step forward,” said Bowen. Particularly because when it comes to clean energy, Australia wants to sell and Europe wants to buy.
Using the vast sunny desert in its interior, Australia could be a “renewable energy superpower,” Bowen argued. Solar energy can be tapped to make green hydrogen and shipped to Europe, he said.
European governments are listening closely to the pitch. Bowen was in Rotterdam on Monday, inspecting the potential to use the Netherlands port as an entry for antipodean hydrogen. He signed a provisional deal with the Dutch government to that end. Last week, Bowen announced a series of joint investments with the German government in Australian hydrogen research projects worth €72 million.
It’s not just sun, Australia has tantalum and tungsten and a host of minerals Europe needs for building clean tech, but that it currently imports. In many cases those minerals are refined or otherwise processed in China, a dependency that Brussels is keen to rapidly unwind — not least with its Critical Raw Materials Act, expected in March.
According to a 2022 government report, Australia holds the second-largest global reserves of cobalt and lithium, from which batteries are made, and is No. 1 in zirconium, which is used to line nuclear reactors.
Asked whether Australia can ease Europe’s dependence on China, Bowen said: “We want to be a very strong factor in the supply chains. We’re a trusted, reliable trading partner. We have strong ethical supply chains. We have strong environmental standards.”
But Australia has its own entanglements.
Certain Australian minerals, notably lithium, are largely refined and manufactured in China. Bowen said he was keen on bringing at least some of that resource-intensive, polluting work back to Australia.
While its climate targets are now broadly in line with other rich nations, the rehabilitation of Australia’s climate image jars with its role as one of the biggest fossil fuel sellers on the planet.
Australia’s coal exports, when burned in overseas power plants, generate huge amounts of planet-warming pollution — almost double the amount produced annually by Australians within their borders. Australia is also the third-largest exporter of natural gas, including an increasing flow to the EU. At home, the government is facing calls from the Greens party and centrist climate independents to reject plans formore than 100 coal and gas developments around the country.
But how many of Bowen’s counterparts raised the issue of Australia’s emissions during his travels around Europe? “Nobody,” he said. “We are here to help.”
Antonia Zimmermann contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
New Delhi: Shares of Adani Group firms slumped on Wednesday and have lost more than Rs 7 lakh crore of their combined market capitalisation in the last five trading sessions amid concerns over US-based short seller Hindenburg Research’s report.
The decline is about 38 percent compared to the market valuation at the end of trading on January 24, the day when the report was released.
Adani Group stocks have taken a beating on the bourses after Hindenburg in the report made a litany of allegations, including fraudulent transactions and share price manipulation, at the Gautam Adani-led group.
At the end of Wednesday’s trading session, all the group companies settled in negative territory with shares of three companies hit their lowest price band.
Shares of Adani Enterprises nosedived 28.45 percent to close at Rs 2,128.70 on the BSE despite the company’s Rs 20,000-crore share sale sailed through on the last day on Tuesday after non-retail investors bid in big volumes. There was, however, a muted response from retail investors and company employees.
The share sale opened on January 24.
The counter of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone plunged 19.69 percent, Adani Total Gas slumped 10 percent, Adani Green Energy declined 5.78 percent, Adani Wilmar fell 4.99 percent, Adani Wilmar went down 4.99 percent, Adani Power dropped 4.98 percent and Adani Transmission (2.46 percent)
In addition, Ambuja Cements tanked 16.56 percent, while ACC dropped 6.34 percent and NDTV went down 4.98 percent.
The Adani group stocks (including Ambuja, ACC and NDTV) have lost more than Rs 7 lakh crore or about 38 percent of their combined market cap in the last five trading sessions, Manish Chowdhury, head of research at Stoxbox, said.
“With investors hoping for a breather following the successful closure of the Adani Enterprises FPO yesterday, it was another shocker when news emerged today that Credit Suisse has stopped accepting bonds of Adani group as collateral for margin loans to its private banking clients. With several questions being raised about the group, it looks prudent to stay away from these companies till the dust settles,” he added.
Equity benchmarks Sensex and Nifty ended on a mixed note after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman raised the personal income tax rebate limit, doled out sops on small savings and announced one of the biggest hikes in capital spending in the past decade in Budget 2023-24.
The 30-share BSE benchmark Sensex climbed 158.18 points or 0.27 percent to settle at 59,708.08. In contrast, the broader NSE Nifty declined 45.85 points or 0.26 percent to end at 17,616.30.
LONDON — Public sector workers on strike, the cost-of-living climbing, and a government on the ropes.
“It’s hard to miss the parallels” between the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 and Britain in 2023, says Robert Saunders, historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary, University of London.
Admittedly, the comparison only goes so far. In the 1970s it was a Labour government facing down staunchly socialist trade unions in a wave of strikes affecting everything from food deliveries to grave-digging, while Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives sat in opposition and awaited their chance.
But a mass walkout fixed for Wednesday could yet mark a staging post in the downward trajectory of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, just as it did for Callaghan’s Labour.
Britain is braced for widespread strike action tomorrow, as an estimated 100,000 civil servants from government departments, ports, airports and driving test centers walk out alongside hundreds of thousands of teachers across England and Wales, train drivers from 14 national operators and staff at 150 U.K. universities.
It follows rolling action by train and postal workers, ambulance drivers, paramedics, and nurses in recent months. In a further headache for Sunak, firefighters on Monday night voted to walk out for the first time in two decades.
While each sector has its own reasons for taking action, many of those on strike are united by the common cause of stagnant pay, with inflation still stubbornly high. And that makes it harder for Sunak to pin the blame on the usual suspects within the trade union movement.
Mr Reasonable
Industrial action has in the past been wielded as a political weapon by the Conservative Party, which could count on a significant number of ordinary voters being infuriated by the withdrawal of public services.
Tories have consequently often used strikes as a stick with which to beat their Labour opponents, branding the left-wing party as beholden to its trade union donors.
But public sympathies have shifted this time round, and it’s no longer so simple to blame the union bogeymen.
Sunak has so far attempted to cast himself as Mr Reasonable, stressing that his “door is always open” to workers but warning that the right to strike must be “balanced” with the provision of services. To this end, he is pressing ahead with long-promised legislation to enforce minimum service standards in sectors hit by industrial action.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner | POOL photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Unions are enraged by the anti-strike legislation, yet Sunak’s soft-ish rhetoric is still in sharp relief to the famously bellicose Thatcher, who pledged during the 1979 strikes that “if someone is confronting our essential liberties … then, by God, I will confront them.”
Sunak’s careful approach is chosen at least in part because the political ground has shifted beneath him since the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020.
Public sympathy for frontline medical staff, consistently high in the U.K., has been further embedded by the extreme demands placed upon nurses and other hospital staff during the pandemic. And inflation is hitting workers across the economy — not just in the public sector — helping to create a broader reservoir of sympathy for strikers than has often been found in the past.
James Frayne, a former government adviser who co-founded polling consultancy Public First, observes: “Because of the cost-of-living crisis, what you [as prime minister] can’t do, as you might be able to do in the past, is just portray this as being an ideologically-driven strike.”
Starmer’s sleight of hand
At the same time, strikes are not the political headache for the opposition Labour Party they once were.
Thatcher was able to portray Callaghan as weak when he resisted the use of emergency powers against the unions. David Cameron was never happier than when inviting then-Labour leader Ed Miliband to disown his “union paymasters,” particularly during the last mass public sector strike in 2011.
Crucially, trade union votes had played a key role in Miliband’s election as party leader — something the Tories would never let him forget. But when Sunak attempts to reprise Cameron’s refrains against Miliband, few seem convinced.
QMUL’s Saunders argues that the Conservatives are trying to rerun “a 1980s-style campaign” depicting Labour MPs as being in the pocket of the unions. But “I just don’t think this resonates with the public,” he added.
Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, has actively sought to weaken the left’s influence in the party, attracting criticism from senior trade unionists. Most eye-catchingly, Starmer sacked one of his own shadow ministers, Sam Tarry, after he defied an order last summer that the Labour front bench should not appear on picket lines.
Starmer has been “given cover,” as one shadow minister put it, by Sunak’s decision to push ahead with the minimum-service legislation. It means Labour MPs can please trade unionists by fighting the new restrictions in parliament — without having to actually stand on the picket line.
So far it seems to be working. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group representing millions of U.K. trade unionists, told POLITICO: “Frankly, I’m less concerned about Labour frontbenchers standing up on picket lines for selfies than I am about the stuff that really matters to our union” — namely the government’s intention to “further restrict the right to strike.”
The TUC is planning a day of action against the new legislation on Wednesday, coinciding with the latest wave of strikes.
Sticking to their guns
For now, Sunak’s approach appears to be hitting the right notes with his famously restless pack of Conservative MPs.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner.
As one Tory MP for an economically-deprived marginal seat put it: “We have to hold our nerve. There’s a strong sense of the corner (just about) being turned on inflation rising, so we need to be as tough as possible … We can’t now enable wage increases that feed inflation.”
Another agreed: “Rishi should hold his ground. My guess is that eventually people will get fed up with the strikers — especially rail workers.”
Furthermore, Public First’s Frayne says his polling has picked up the first signs of an erosion of support for strikes since they kicked off last summer, particularly among working-class voters.
“We’re at the point now where people are feeling like ‘well, I haven’t had a pay rise, and I’m not going to get a pay rise, and can we all just accept that it’s tough for everybody and we’ve got to get on with it,’” he said.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent.
‘Everything is broken’
But the broader concern for Sunak’s Conservatives is that, regardless of whatever individual pay deals are eventually hammered out, the wave of strikes could tap into a deeper sense of malaise in the U.K.
Inflation remains high, and the government’s independent forecaster predicted in December that the U.K. will fall into a recession lasting more than a year.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
Strikes by ambulance workers only drew more attention to an ongoing crisis in the National Health Service, with patients suffering heart attacks and strokes already facing waits of more than 90 minutes at the end of 2022.
Moving around the country has been made difficult not only by strikes, but by multiple failures by rail providers on key routes.
One long-serving Conservative MP said they feared a sense of fatalism was setting in among the public — “the idea that everything is broken and there’s no point asking this government to fix it.”
A former Cabinet minister said the most pressing issue in their constituency is the state of public services, and strike action signaled political danger for the government. They cautioned that the public are not blaming striking workers, but ministers, for the disruption.
Those at the top of government are aware of the risk of such a narrative taking hold, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, taking aim at “declinism about Britain” in a keynote speech Friday.
Whether the government can do much to change the story, however, is less clear.
Saunders harks back to Callaghan’s example, noting that public sector workers were initially willing to give the Labour government the benefit of the doubt, but that by 1979 the mood had fatally hardened.
This is because strikes are not only about falling living standards, he argues. “It’s also driven by a loss of faith in government that things are going to get better.”
With an election looming next year, Rishi Sunak is running out of time to turn the public mood around.
Annabelle Dickson and Graham Lanktree contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
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