1 ECB could pump €1trn into Eurozone (Angela
Monaghan & Phillip Inman in The Guardian) The European Central Bank is
ready to pump up to €1tn of fresh stimulus into the flagging eurozone economy
to ward off a dangerous deflationary spiral, ECB president Mario Draghi has
signalled.
Draghi said that the bank’s governing council was
unanimously willing to announce more unconventional measures, signalling the
possibility of creating electronic money – or quantitative easing – should a
deteriorating economy make it necessary. “Should it become necessary to further
address risks of too prolonged a period of low inflation, the governing council
is unanimous in its commitment to using additional unconventional instruments
within its mandate”, he said.
Eurozone inflation is 0.4%, far short of the central
bank’s target of close to 2%. Separately, the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned in a stinging report that France,
Germany and Italy must agree to jolt the eurozone economy back to life or face
a long period of low growth, low inflation and an increasing debt burden.
2 Obama seeks $3bn for air war against ISIS (Straits
Times) US President Barack Obama will ask lawmakers for an additional $3.2
billion to pay for the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS),
including funds to train and arm Baghdad government forces, officials said on
Thursday.
The funds will help cover the cost of replacing
bombs in the weeks-long US-led air campaign against ISIS jihadists and
assistance for Iraqi army troops and Kurdish forces battling the ISIS on the
ground, two defence officials said.
The air war in Syria and Iraq - which commanders say
could last years - has involved thousands of sorties and hundreds of bombing
raids, at a daily cost of $8.3 million, according to the Pentagon. But
independent analysts say the price tag is higher if the full cost of the air
operations are taken into account, particularly numerous flights by
sophisticated surveillance aircraft. According to the Pentagon, the air war -
dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve - cost $580 million as of Oct 16.
3 Twenty five years after the German wall (Mahir Ali
in Khaleej Times) It was 25 years ago this week that the wall came tumbling
down. It didn’t exactly crumble until the bulldozers came to the party, but
ordinary folks were able to begin chipping away at it with little danger of
being shot down. No other structure defined the Cold War quite so solidly, and
seemingly ineradicably.
Back in the early 1960s, when the wall was a
novelty, young Germans got killed trying to climb over or dig under it. US
president John F. Kennedy told his aides in 1961 that it wasn’t “a very nice
solution, but a wall is a helluva lot better than a war”.
Just as the wall symbolised the Cold War, its
downfall 28 years later was a crucial juncture in the remarkable transformation
that occurred during the latter half of the 1980s, beginning with Mikhail
Gorbachev’s ascent to the pinnacle of the Soviet hierarchy in 1985. Gorby, as
he popularly became known in the West, had realised that the Soviet Union’s
claim to being a workers’ paradise was substantially spurious.
The fact that many East European countries have
veered to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum — with Hungary a clear
example, while Poland and the Czech Republic have attracted ignominy by
collaborating with the CIA’s extrajudicial activities — is one of many
unfortunate consequences of the process that acquired unstoppable momentum 25
years ago this week.
And the existence, meanwhile, of pockets of
nostalgia for the verities of the communist past across Eastern Europe and
Russia is a reminder that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, making it
necessary for the post-capitalist path to be delineated once more.
It’s been a largely unrewarding process so far. It
is not inconceivable, though, that shocks to the system roughly equivalent to
the demolition of the Berlin Wall could usher in a more constructive phase in
the progress of the 21st century.
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