November, 2019

• 20 November

  Mexico’s clean energy switch spurs ‘backlash’

  Bloomberg Sweeping changes to Mexico’s clean energy regulations by president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s administration has sparked a legal backlash from the industry. In October, Mexico’s energy ministry said it would grant older, government-run projects the same energy certificates — known as CELs — as the new projects the certificates were designed to support. Now, clean energy companies representing 14 ...

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• 20 November

  US Senate passes bill backing HK protests, draws China’s ire

  

  Bloomberg The US Senate unanimously passed a bill aimed at supporting protesters in Hong Kong and warning China against a violent suppression of the demonstrations — drawing a rebuke from Beijing. China reiterated on Wednesday a threat to impose unspecified retaliation if the bill became law and urged the US to stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs. Separately, the city’s ...

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• 20 November

  Sri Lankan PM to quit after presidential loss

  

  Bloomberg Sri Lanka’s prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has decided to resign, state-run Daily News reported, days after his party’s candidate lost the country’s bitterly contested presidential poll and allowing newly-elected president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to choose a replacement. The Daily News didn’t say whether Wickremesinghe, who leads the United National Party and the ruling coalition, took the decision in order to ...

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• 20 November

  Referendum tests Ethiopia’s ability to hold peaceful polls

  Bloomberg Ethiopia’s ethnic Sidama began voting in a referendum on whether to create a new regional state, the first of what’s expected to be a series of demands for more autonomy. The plebiscite will test whether the Horn of Africa nation can hold a general election scheduled for next year peacefully. The outcome will provide an indication of whether the ...

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• 20 November

  Thai oppn chief disqualified from parliament

  

  Bloomberg A court in Thailand disqualified from parliament a key opposition leader who had criticised the royalist establishment’s grip on power. The Constitutional Court found Future Forward leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit guilty of breaking rules meant to prevent politicians from owning shares in media firms. The court also barred him from being a member of parliament. He’d been suspended pending the ...

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• 20 November

  Paris unveils emergency funding to calm protests

  

  Bloomberg French president Emmanuel Macron’s government unveiled an emergency funding plan for ailing hospitals in an effort to calm protests from doctors and healthcare workers as the country braces for strikes over pension reform. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said the government will raise the budget for hospitals by 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) over the next three years, starting with ...

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• 20 November

  Merkel’s party clueless about where to lead Germany

  

  Bloomberg For the longest time, Angela Merkel was Germany and under her the center-right Christian Democrats were the dominant political force in the European Union. Today the party is a shambles and its new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), can’t seem to straighten it out. Just last month, the CDU suffered a historic beating in the eastern region of Thuringia. Mike ...

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• 20 November

  Mythology of Big Tech

  

  “Everyone seems to agree … that these companies are fundamentally different … [and] the old rules of capitalism simply do not apply to them” —Economist Thomas Philippon, author of “The Great Reversal:How America Gave Up on Free Markets” The public face of American capitalism is Big Tech. Its constituent firms — Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, to name a few ...

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• 20 November

  Trump EPA makes excuses for polluters

  

  The Trump administration has developed a way to make pollution sound appealing. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a plan to relax regulations to allow Americans to be exposed to more dirty air. But the agency has dressed it up to look like it’s just advocating the use of stronger, more transparent science. The policy, sometimes called the ...

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• 20 November

  TikTok is aiming at a bigger audience than US senators

  As US political opposition hardens to TikTok, the globally popular video app from Beijing-based ByteDance Inc., some inside the company want to find ways to make the business appear to be less Chinese. That’s a smart move, aimed less at critics in Congress and more at two other East Coast power centers: Madison Avenue and Wall Street. TikTok delivers short, ...

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