The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has handed down its preliminary ruling in a dispute between the US and Europe over two of the worlds biggest aircraft makers.
Boeing, backed by the US government, claimed that Airbus Industry, a division of the European defence company EADS, received an unfair boost from billions of dollars in European government financing to develop new planes.
The details of the ruling, which follows a five-year investigation, will not officially be made public for months. But the Wall Street Journal newspaper says the WTO has ruled that European subsidies for the launch of the Airbus A380 airplane were illegal.
The Yemeni government has said that it has halted military operations against the Houthi fighters to allow aid to reach civilians trapped in the conflict zone.
Up to 150,000 people are said to have been forced from their homes by intense fighting and are in need of urgent assistance.
It was unsure, however, whether the truce would hold as the conflict between the Houthi group and the government has been going on for five years, and mistrust between both sides is deep.
There are fears that in this latest round of fighting has seen a regional proxy war is emerging with Iran supporting the Shi’a Houthi group and Saudi Arabia providing support to the Yemeni government. There have also been reports that Al Qaeda figthers have join the fight against the Houthi rebels.
Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Foreign Minister, is visiting sub-Saharan Africa as part of an eight day official tour of five African countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. Mr. Lieberman, who is also the Deputy Prime Minister of the State of Israel will be accompanied by a delegation of businessmen in the areas of Water and Agro-Technology, Energy and infrastructure, Medical Equipment, Telecommunications, Information Technology and Security. It is the first such visit by an Israeli Foreign Minister in more than 20 years.
Israeli officials say that tour is aimed at developing economic ties and countering Iran’s growing influence in the region.
Very few countries in Europe are feeling the recession as acutely as Latvia. The public purse is running so low that many hospitals and schools are being shut down because the government simply can’t afford to keep them open. Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull reports from Riga.
Here’s some analysis of the Latvian economic collapse by F. William Engdahl on the website Market Oracle:
The global financial and economic crisis has hit the small Baltic country Latvia harder than any single country with the possible exception of Iceland. As part of its attempt to join the European Monetary Union the country has fixed its currency the Lats to the Euro. The result has been to make a bad situation catastrophic. How the situation develops will have direct bearing on the fate of many emerging countries of eastern Europe. It marks the death of the radical experiment with Thatcherism in eastern Europe.
On the surface the crisis the country is experiencing the result of a borrowing binge among consumers which got out of control and now must be reigned in by tough government austerity measures. In reality, it is a tale of greed of foreign bankers, a failed economic reform and a political system that is fixated on Euro entry as the Holy Grail for the economy.
Events in Latvia over the past two years signal the death of the radical neo/liberal Thatcher economic shock therapy imposed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union when the West, led by Washington, mandated that the IMF dictate terms of economic transformation for the former Soviet economies.
On the one side are western banks, above all Swedish banks which more of less colonized Latvia after 1990 as their ‘sphere of influence.’ They are allied with the IMF and the EU, though of late the latter two are themselves in a deep policy split.
On the other side is a growing grass roots popular protest which since January has led major marches against the government, and which has just elected to Parliament an ethnic Russian party for the first time since 1990, with ethnic Latvian support, as a signal of the depth of protest to the free–wheeling plunder era of the past two decades. Until the present crisis, Latvia was praised in western financial markets as the ‘poster child’ of free market success in the region. It was growth based on easy credit, a real estate bubble and consumer debt. The success was only for a tiny elite of bankers and local oligarchs as now is clear.