1. Trump
to Impose Sweeping Steel and Aluminum Tariffs
The New York Times MARCH 1, 2018
A
steel furnace in Germany. At a White House meeting on Thursday, President Trump
said that he did not want any nation to be exempted from the
order. CreditAlexander Koerner/Getty Images
WASHINGTON
— President Trump said on Thursday that he would impose stiff tariffs on imports
of steel and aluminum, making good on a key campaign promise and rattling stock
markets as the prospect of a global trade fight appeared imminent.
In
a hastily arranged meeting with industry executives that stunned many inside
the West Wing, Mr. Trump said he would formally sign the trade measures next
week and promised they would be in effect “for a long period of time.” The
action, which came against the wishes of Mr. Trump’s pro-trade advisers, would
impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, effectively
placing a tax on every foreign shipment of those metals into the United States.
The
president told more than a dozen executives that he wanted the tariffs to apply
to all countries, one executive in attendance said. Mr. Trump argued that if one
country was exempt, all other countries would line up to ask for similar
treatment, and that metals could end up being shipped to the United States
through exempted countries.
Mr.
Trump’s authority to impose such sweeping tariffs stems from a Commerce Department
investigation that concluded last month that imported metal
threatened national security by degrading the American industrial base. The
administration has said it wants to combat cheap metals flooding into the
United States, particularly from China, but a broad set of tariffs would fall
most heavily on allies, especially Canada, which supplies steel and aluminum to
American companies as well as the military.
“People
have no idea how badly our country has been treated by other countries,” Mr.
Trump said on Thursday. “They’ve destroyed the steel industry, they’ve
destroyed the aluminum industry, and other industries, frankly.”
2. Berlusconi
Is Back. Again. This Time, as Italy’s ‘Nonno’
The New York Times JAN. 29, 2018
Silvio
Berlusconi arriving to attend the broadcast of a TV show in Rome this
month.CreditAndreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
ROME
— Silvio Berlusconi checked the puffiness of the pillow on his seat as he
settled in for another comfortable interview on another of the Italian
television channels he owns. In the final silent seconds before the cameras
started rolling, a mischievous gleam crossed his eyes as he used an Italian
double entendre to recall that, back in his old television days, people used to
have sex on the studio floor.
Yes,
Mr. Berlusconi, 81, is back. Again. His smile is brighter, his cheeks are Silly
Putty-toned and tauter, his waistline is slimmed and his hair has regenerated
into a Ken-Doll helmet. But despite his waxworks appearance, pre-Weinsteinian
penchant for priapic innuendo and lingering criminal trials, Mr. Berlusconi, a
former Italian prime minister, is no longer the joke of European politics.
Instead,
political analysts agree that the only sure bet in Italy’s coming and critical
March 4 elections is that Mr. Berlusconi will return as a major force in
Italian, and possibly European, politics. Even if he will not be prime minister
immediately (he is barred until next year following a fraud conviction), he is
likely to be the kingmaker.
His
resurrection is both astonishing and entirely unsurprising when one considers
that Mr. Berlusconi has over the decades conditioned and desensitized an
electorate that has picked him as prime minister three times despite, well,
everything.
3. Xi Jinping to cement
his power with plan to scrap two-term limit
China’s Communist party chiefs propose constitutional change to allow
president to stay on The Guardian 25 Feb 2018
The
Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, already considered the country’s
most dominant since Mao Zedong, looks to have further cemented his grip on
power after Beijing unveiled plans to scrap the presidency’s two-term limit.
China’s
official news agency, Xinhua, announced the dramatic news on Sunday in a bland 36-word dispatch. It paves the way for Xi
to remain in power well into the next decade and perhaps even beyond.
The
report said the Communist party’s 205-member central committee had proposed
China’s constitution be modified so that it no longer contained a section
stipulating that the president and vice-president “shall serve no more than two
consecutive [five-year] terms”.
Jude
Blanchette, an expert in Chinese politics from New York’s Conference Board
research group, said: “It’s amazing. I just did not think this was possible. I
just thought it was way too aggressive and bold [a move] and unnecessarily so.
Advertisement
“It’s
an unequivocal signal that Xi Jinping has designs to stay on past 2023. I don’t
think there is any other way to read it other than the four-decade long project
that Deng Xiaoping initiated to set hard term limits on power to make sure that
a Mao figure never came back is being dismantled.
“You
just need to look a few thousand miles to the west in Russia to see what this potentially
looks like.”
Bill
Bishop, the publisher of the
Sinocism newsletter on Chinese politics, said: “This is Putin-plus.
“It
means that so long as Xi is alive and the Communist party of China is in power
then Xi is going to be the most powerful man in China. And unlike Mao he is
going to be the most powerful man at a time when China is at its most powerful point in several
hundred years and is only getting more powerful.”
Steve
Tsang, the director of the Soas China Institute, said: “It means what it says
on the tin. It’s now official that he’s not going to stand down … welcome to Xi
Jinping’s brave new era.
“The
message [from Xi] is: ‘I can do it, I will do it, don’t even think about
challenging it!’”
4. Europe Was Colder Than the North Pole This Week. How Could
That Be?
The New York Times March 1, 2018
A
gondolier cleared snow near this week in Venice.CreditManuel Silvestri/Reuters
Subfreezing
temperatures have spread across much of Europe over the past week, stretching
from Poland to Spain. Snow fell in
Rome for the first time in six years. Britain issued a “red
alert” warning. Norway recorded the lowest temperatures of the cold snap:
minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 42 Celsius) in the southeast part of the
country on Thursday.
If
Europe feels like the Arctic right now, the Arctic itself is balmy by
comparison. The North Pole is above the freezing mark in the dead of winter;
there are no direct measurements there, but merging satellite data
with other temperature data shows that temperatures soared this week
to 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius). That is 50 degrees Fahrenheit
above normal, and 78 degrees warmer than in parts of Norway.
The
Arctic warmth and the European cold snap have raised questions over whether the
unusual weather occurrences are linked to each other, and if they are somehow
related to climate change. Here are some answers.
Are
the Arctic and European weather patterns connected?
Probably,
according to Judah Cohen, a climatologist who is director of seasonal
forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a
weather risk assessment firm. Dr. Cohen is the author of a 2017 study
that linked a warming Arctic to the intermittent
blasts of cold that those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have come
to know as the polar vortex.
The
polar vortex is a low-pressure system that, as its name suggests, ordinarily
rests over the North Pole. (There is also a polar vortex over the Antarctic.)
When
it behaves normally, the polar vortex helps trap cold air in the Arctic.
“It’s
locking in that cold air at the high latitudes in the Arctic region,” Dr. Cohen
said, comparing the polar vortex to a dam holding back the frigid arctic air
from the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
But
sometimes that dam bursts as the polar vortex weakens and allows cold air to
escape the Arctic to more temperate climes. This has always happened from
time to time, but a growing body of research suggests that because of climate
change the warming Arctic is weakening the polar vortex.
Why is the polar vortex weakening?
Researchers
are still figuring out how the warming Arctic is triggering the polar vortex’s
aberrant behavior. Some of them, including Dr. Cohen, point to the melting sea
ice and lack of snow cover over Siberia, caused by global warming. Dr.
Cohen says the loss of ice and snow creates patterns of high pressure near the
Barents Sea and Kara Sea off northern Russia. That high pressure blocks the
low-pressure system of the polar vortex, weakening it in the process.
There
is not yet a scientific consensus over the root cause of the weakening polar
vortex; it’s fair to say that it is not as definitive as, say, the evidence for
human-caused climate change, which is agreed upon by 97 percent of climate
scientists.
