1 Tata Steel plans to sell UK plants (BBC) India's
Tata Steel plans to sell its loss-making UK business, putting the jobs of thousands
of workers at risk. Its European holding company has been told to "explore
all options for restructuring", including the partial or entire sale of
its UK operations. Union leaders travelled to Mumbai in a bid to persuade Tata
to keep making steel at plants including Port Talbot.
The UK and Welsh governments said they are working
"tirelessly" to ensure the future of the British steel industry. Meanwhile,
Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood said that her party wanted the Welsh Assembly to
be recalled to discuss the crisis.
Tata's restructuring decision, which was announced
after a board meeting in Mumbai, will also affect workers its other UK plants. Tata
said trading conditions had "rapidly deteriorated" in the UK and
Europe due to a global oversupply of steel, imports into Europe, high costs and
currency volatility.
Unions expressed concern at the announcement and
urged Tata and politicians to work at finding a buyer for the business. Tata
Steel has been operating in the UK since 2007 when it bought Anglo-Dutch
steelmaker Corus. In January the company announced more than 1,000 UK job cuts.
And last October Tata Steel said nearly 1,200 jobs would go at plants in
Scunthorpe and Lanarkshire.
There have been allegations that Chinese steel is
being "dumped" on world markets at prices that UK plants cannot hope
to compete with. At the same time China's economy has remained sluggish,
meaning that the demand for steel from its construction sector is now weaker. Other
factors affecting the wider UK steel industry include relatively high energy
prices and the extra cost of climate change policies.
2 Impeachment looms for Brazil president (San
Francisco Chronicle) Brazil's largest party abandoned President Dilma
Rousseff's governing coalition, a decision that diminishes the possibility that
she will survive mounting pressure in Congress for her impeachment.
The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, known as
the PMDB, said after a meeting that six Cabinet ministers belonging to the
party as well as some 600 federal government employees who are members must
step down. The announcement was made after more than 100 lawmakers approved the
decision.
The session ended with chants calling for the end of
Rousseff's Worker's Party and for Vice President Michel Temer to become
Brazil's president. Temer, who is the leader of the Democratic Movement, would
assume the presidency if Rousseff was impeached for breaking fiscal laws.
The break increases the chance that Rousseff, whose
popularity has plunged amid Brazil's worst recession in decades and corruption
scandals, will be impeached in the coming months. Brazilians have been staging
wide protests demanding the president's impeachment and protesting the
sprawling corruption scandal at state-run oil giant Petrobras that has been
moving closer to Rousseff's inner circle.
Rousseff, a former chairwoman of Petrobras' board,
has not been implicated in the unfolding scandal at the oil company, which
prosecutors say is the largest corruption scheme ever uncovered in Brazil. Rousseff
backers say impeachment is a power grab by opponents who themselves have been
sullied by the probe into kickbacks and bribery at Petrobras.
The embattled leader will now search for new allies
and will try to form a new government before the end of the week, Rousseff's
chief of staff, Jaques Wagner, said. A recent poll by the respected Datafolha
agency says 68 percent of people surveyed want to see lawmakers vote to impeach
Rousseff, but only 11 percent believe they would be better off under Temer.
3 Gender markings to go in New York college (Molly
Redden in The Guardian) Last fall, the oldest building on the Cooper Union
campus underwent a sudden renovation. A group of students, agitating for their
transgender classmates, stripped the words “men” and “women” off the doors of
the Foundation Building’s restrooms.
The act expressed years of pent-up frustration that
in lower Manhattan, at one of the most liberal colleges in the country,
students who failed to conform to gender norms nevertheless risked harassment
whenever they went to the bathroom.
But then, the unexpected happened. The signs were
never replaced. And in an apparent first for a US college, the Cooper Union
administration this month moved to remove the gender designations from all the
bathrooms on campus by taking down the rest of the men’s and women’s signage
from bathrooms.
The decision stands in contrast to many of the
bitter fights over bathroom and locker room access transpiring across the
country. This year alone, states have considered more than two dozen bills to
restrict transgender individuals from using bathrooms and locker rooms based on
their gender identity.
Placards outside what was formerly the men’s room
will read “restroom with urinal and stalls”, and outside the former women’s
room, “restroom with only stalls”. The change represents a triumph even as the
student activists say that the campus can still be an unfriendly place for
transgender individuals and those who do not identify with either gender. The
dorms remain divided by gender, although the school says it is accommodating of
students who request different arrangements.
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