Tag: InternationalNews

Around 400,000 Roman Catholics have joined a ceremony on Copacabana Beach in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro to mark the opening of World Youth Day.

The highlight of the festival will be a visit on Thursday by Pope Francis.

The Pope arrived in Brazil on Monday, making his first trip abroad since becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

His visit is taking place under tight security, after weeks of protests against the government and corruption.

Tuesday’s evening Mass at Copacabana Beach was led by Rio’s Archbishop Orani Joao Tempesta.

He welcomed pilgrims to the five-day festival, which is expected to draw about 1.5 million people from around the world.

The Pope, who is from neighbouring Argentina, had no public events scheduled for Tuesday and spent time at a private residence.

He is expected to greet large crowds at Copacabana on Thursday.

{wirestory}

{{A boat has sank off the Indonesian island of Java, the transit point for people-smugglers.}}

At least 157 people have been rescued. It is not clear how many are missing.

Meanwhile, Australia’s immigration minister said he would investigate abuse claims at the country’s offshore processing centre in Papua New Guinea.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced a new asylum policy last week, ahead of polls expected to be announced soon.

Under the policy, asylum-seekers arriving by boat in Australia will be sent to Papua New Guinea (PNG) for processing, and those whose refugee claims are upheld will be settled in PNG, rather than Australia.

Australia has experienced a sharp increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat in recent months. But critics have accused Australia of avoiding responsibility and passing on its problem to a developing nation.

Mr Rudd said that the sinking underlined the need for a policy shift, saying the government had to send “a very clear message to people-smugglers to stop sending people by boat to Australia”.

“We are seeing too many drownings, we are seeing too many sinkings, too many innocent people being lost at sea.”

PNG is to receive Australian investment as part of the deal. But some PNG politicians say the agreement could cause tensions on the island.

Opposition spokesman Tobias Kulang said PNG had “become a dumping ground for Australia’s inadequacies”.

“This is an appalling performance by Australia, which with its monetary wealth is able to pass the buck on to poorer countries,” he said.

BBC

{{The importer, a front man for the Calabrian mafia, tells the Chinese seller, who speaks fluent Italian and lives in Rome, that he wants to fix a lower price on the next shipment.}}

Their business is not drugs or weapons, but Chinese T-shirts, jeans and shoes. The buyer for the mob in Italy’s impoverished south wants to declare a falsely low price to reduce the customs duties he must pay because, as he says in a wiretap, “it goes to the state”.

This police recording offers a glimpse of the criminal underbelly of trade between the European Union and China, whose mind-boggling size – worth well over 1 billion euros a day – makes it fiendishly hard to police.

Making matters worse, the EU is a single market of 300 million people but which has 28 national customs authorities with differing priorities.

Italy, a high-fashion Mecca and home to a culture obsessed with elegant appearances, was the top EU importer of low-cost Chinese clothing a decade ago, before Italian customs agents cracked down on the illicit practice of undervaluation.

Criminal groups trying to evade tariffs by lying about the real value of clothing sold in the EU, China’s biggest export destination, had singled out the southern Italian port of Naples as their entry point.

There they were declaring pairs of jeans for as little as a euro each and T-shirts for 50 cents.

“The profit margins are high, the volumes are huge and the laws are lax,” said Rocco Burdo, the top intelligence officer at the Italian customs agency’s anti-fraud unit.

“Undervaluation is a grave threat to all of Europe, and so EU integration should be accelerated to make a unified fight against fraud across the region,” he told Reuters at his office’s headquarters on the outskirts of Rome.

After the crackdown led by Burdo, the savvy dealers simply re-routed goods through other EU ports such as Hamburg. Italy dropped to number six as importer of Chinese clothing in the region, but it became the top collector of textiles duties, customs data show.

National authorities collect customs duties, which vary but amount to 12 percent of the value of a pair of denim jeans or cotton T-shirts made in China, but hand three-quarters of the revenue to the EU’s central budget.

Europe has become a bonanza for trade gangs which exploit the free movement of goods within the EU by importing where there are fewest controls.

The increasingly sophisticated practice of undervaluation costs taxpayers billions in lost duties, and it is often accompanied by counterfeiting and value-added tax (VAT)
evasion.

Undervaluation accounts for only a small fraction of overall customs fraud, and European officials stress that criminal gangs, not the Chinese government or state-owned companies, perpetrate this type of fraud.

Nevertheless, it illustrates broader trends in an often difficult trade relationship, where China’s aggressive business strategy has brought on more than 50 EU trade defense measures for unfair practices.

Duty-dodging is made easier by the Chinese strategy of controlling both production and distribution to maximize profit.

Diverging opinions between EU countries on trade disputes, such as in a recent row over Chinese-made solar panels, also reflect an inconsistent approach to fighting undervaluation.

{agencies}

Iran condemned on Tuesday the European Union’s decision to put the armed wing of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on its terrorism blacklist and said the move was “contrary to all political and legal norms, surprising and unacceptable”.

Hezbollah was set up with the help of Iranian funds and military advisers some three decades ago and, along with Syria, is still Tehran’s most important ally in the region, positioned as it is on the “frontline” with Iran’s sworn enemy Israel.

Pressed by Britain and the Netherlands, the European Union blacklisted Hezbollah’s military wing on Monday over accusations it was involved in a bus bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israelis and their driver a year ago, and its deployment of thousands of fighters to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turn the tide of Syria’s civil war.

Many EU capitals had previously resisted lobbying from Washington and Israel to blacklist the group, warning such a move could fuel instability in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon where Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government and has dominated politics in Beirut in recent years.

“To label a resistance group which has campaigned against invasion and occupation and has a legal presence with the people’s support in the government of Lebanon shows it is based on loose logical foundations,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in a statement on the ministry website.

“This action was accomplished with the direction of some influential members of the European Union and is contrary to all political and legal norms, surprising and unacceptable,” he said.

Israel, which welcomed the EU decision, would be the main beneficiary, the Iranian foreign minister said.

“This action will be to be benefit of the illegitimate Zionist regime and its supporters.”

While there may be a softening of Iran’s tone towards Israel once outgoing hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is replaced with moderate President-elect Hassan Rouhani on August 4, Tehran’s official hostility to the Jewish state is very unlikely to change.

agencies