Eurozone struggles for a response to Greece; UK June car sales at record high; Uber as the way forward

1 Eurozone struggles for a response to Greece (Ian Traynor in The Guardian) Germany and France have scrambled to avoid a major split over Greece as the eurozone delivered a damning verdict on Alexis Tsipras’s landslide referendum victory and Angela Merkel demanded that the Greek prime minister put down new proposals to break the deadlock.

As concerns mount that Greek banks will run out of cash, and about the damage being inflicted on the country’s economy, hopes for a breakthrough faded. EU leaders voiced despair and descended into recrimination over how to respond to Sunday’s overwhelming rejection of eurozone austerity terms as the price for keeping Greece in the currency.

Tsipras, meanwhile, moved to insure himself against purported eurozone plots to topple him and force regime change by engineering a national consensus of the country’s five mainstream parties behind his negotiating strategy, focused on securing debt relief. Tsipras also sacrificed his controversial finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in what was seen as a conciliatory signal towards Greece’s creditors.

In Paris, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande tried to plot a common strategy after Greeks returned a resounding no to five years of eurozone-scripted austerity. The two leaders were trying to find a joint approach to the growing crisis. But Merkel said there was no current basis for negotiating with the Greek side and called on Tsipras to make the next move.

As eurozone leaders prepared for today’s emergency summit in Brussels, the heads of government were at odds. France, Italy and Spain are impatient for a deal while Germany, the European Commission and northern Europe seem content to let Greece stew and allow the euphoria following Sunday’s vote to give way to the sobering realities of bank closures, cash shortages and isolation.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/06/eurozone-struggles-joint-response-greek-referendum

2 UK June car sales at record high (BBC) UK new car sales in the year to June rose at the fastest rate on record, a motor industry survey has found. The Society of Motoring Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said there was a 7% rise in new car sales in the first six months of the year, taking the total to more than 1.3 million.

In June alone, there was a 12.9% surge in car sales compared with a year ago, amounting to 257,817 sales. About 15% of buyers chose a UK-manufactured vehicle, the SMMT said. That was the highest level in five years, it added. However, it said it expected slower growth in the next six months.

Low interest rates, attractive finance deals and the launch of new models continued to encourage consumers to buy new cars. SMMT also reported a strong surge in demand for alternatively fuelled vehicles in June. The Ford Fiesta remained the top-selling car last month, as it has all year, selling 12,543 units in June and 71,990 in the year to date.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33405946

3 Uber as the way forward (Johannesburg Times) Protests and legal action against Uber have increased exponentially as the online ride-sharing service - created in 2010 by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs frustrated by existing taxi services - has expanded around the world. Uber is banned in several countries and faces lawsuits, even prosecution, in others.

In France last week existing taxi operators rioted in several cities in an effort to force the government to crack down on it. Following the riots, and the arrests of two Uber executives, the company has suspended its UberPOP ride-hailing service in France.

Similar protests took place in London in April, and in just about every city where the app-based service operates it faces threats or legal trouble. Protests by established taxi operators have also occurred in Cape Town, South Africa where Uber drivers are struggling to secure provincial vehicle operating permits timeously and have had their vehicles impounded.

In Johannesburg, protests against Uber turned violent as metered-taxi drivers harassed their Uber counterparts . Some passengers were even pulled out of Uber cars and manhandled. And yet, the reason Uber has expanded, in just five years, to about 300 cities worldwide and has a valuation of about $50-billion is because millions of passengers find it cheap, quick, efficient and convenient.

The world is changing and metered-taxi operators need to change too. Provided that the company is acting lawfully and that its operators have the requisite permits, it is incumbent on the police and local authorities to protect Uber's drivers and its passengers.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2015/07/07/Quick-efficient-and-convenient-Uber-is-the-way-of-the-future

Greece 'No' brings world markets back to wild days of 2008; China stretches influence as US loses its way; Robots on the march

1 Greece ‘No’ brings world markets back to wild days of 2008 (Nils Pratley in The Guardian) After the ‘No’ vote by Greeks, we’re back to the wild markets seen at the height of the banking crisis in 2008. Many fund managers, even last week, were expecting a strong yes vote in Greece. It’s hard to know how severely they will be shocked by the scale of the no victory. Share prices in London are bound to be affected – a 2% fall, or about 130 points off the FTSE 100 index, was Sunday night’s indication in futures markets.

Bond markets, however, will take centre stage. That is where Grexit worries will be keenest. If Greece could be on the way out of the single currency, will investors be less willing to hold the debt of other eurozone states carrying heavy debt loads? The sovereign debt of Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland will be closely watched for knock-on effects. Will there be contagion?

All eyes will turn to the European Central Bank. First, to see if it cuts off support for Greek banks. Second, to learn if it is prepared to intervene to protect the bonds of other eurozone stragglers. If bond markets are relatively calm, the ECB might then sit on its hands. If not, it could step into the bond markets as a buyer, sweeping up stock as part of its established quantitative easing programme.

If markets are still panicked at the end of the week, the governing council could meet to consider emergency measures. Above all, the ECB and the eurogroup wants Spain, Italy and Portugal to continue to be able to issue bonds in normal fashion, at affordable prices. Angela Merkel and other eurozone leaders have argued for months that the eurozone could cope with Greece’s departure. The bond market will judge the credibility of that boast.

The euro itself will almost certainly fall in value initially – but perhaps not heavily. Indeed, one school of thought says the single currency would be strengthened in the long run by the departure of its weakest member.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/06/greek-referendum-wild-markets-banking-crisis

2 China stretches influence as US loses its way (Fareed Zakaria in Khaleej Times) As Daesh, Iran and Greece occupy the attention of the Western world, China marches forward, except now it is not just building its economy but also a new geopolitics in Asia.

Satellite photographs taken this week show that China has almost completed an airstrip on one of the many artificial islands it has created in the Spratly archipelago over the last year and a half. Its actions in the area are all intended to consolidate the country’s claims to 90 per cent of the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in trade flows every year. (These claims are disputed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.)

President Xi Jinping has marked a break with his predecessors in openly embracing an activist foreign policy, speaking about the “Asia-Pacific Dream” and announcing ventures like the Asian Infrastructure investment Bank and the “Maritime Silk Road.” Behind this rhetoric is an avalanche of cash.

The scholar David Shambaugh points out that if you add up China’s promised investments in all of these regional ventures, the total is $1.41 trillion. The Marshall Plan, by comparison, cost $103 billion in today’s dollars. A senior Southeast Asian diplomat explained to me that China is using money and pressure to “suborn” countries in the region. He pointed out that aid is often carefully targeted, so that money to Malaysia, for example, is directed specifically to the state of Pahang, the political base of the prime minister.

Politicians in Singapore told me that Beijing has even begun to reach out to local Singaporeans of Chinese descent and to nudge the city-state’s foreign policy — which remains staunchly allied to the US — in a more pro-Chinese direction. And how do diplomats in Southeast Asia see the US? As distracted and largely absent.

What makes dealing with China’s growing influence in Asia especially tricky is that a good part of it is inevitable and could be benign. China is the largest trading partner of almost all Asian economies, even Australia. Its increased involvement in the region could be a win-win. But it also produces great anxieties about political domination. Countries here are looking to the US to deter China but yet engage it.

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2015/July/opinion_July7.xml&section=opinion

3 Robots on the march (Rory Cellan-Jones on BBC) You can walk from one end of Innorobo, Europe’s largest robotics event, to the other in five minutes - but in that time you will see more innovation packed into a small space than you will ever find in those gigantic shows.

The show's focus has in the past been on industrial robotics, and there are plenty of advances on this front. I spotted a robotic arm delicately picking up individual chocolates and placing them in a box,

air-quality robots that can wander a factory reporting back on pollution levels, and cupboards on castors picking a route through a crowd to deliver tools to workers at the other end of the hall.

But the star of the show was undoubtedly Pepper, the French-made humanoid robot companion and the most advanced domestic robot to go on sale to the general public. "Pepper won't do the dishes" explains Magali Cubier of Aldebaran Robotics, "but if Pepper can see you are sad, then Pepper will propose a game to cheer you up."

How does the robot know I'm sad? It is packed with sensors which can for instance detect a sad face or intonation in your voice, so this internet-connected device may decide now is not the moment to read out the news headlines. This robot is solely devoted to being your companion, sensitive to your every mood - it can even dance with you, though I'm not sure my moves impressed Pepper.

It is facial recognition technology that will enable robots to recognise us - and that's just one of the controversial issues hanging over this fast growing industry. And then there's the question of jobs. One firm here is showing off an autonomous forklift truck, effortlessly shifting pallets without the aid of a driver. The driver is the most expensive element of a forklift, so the product pays for itself within a year, according to Fabien Bardinet of Balyo, the company behind the autonomous driving technology.

Let's not exaggerate the threat from the robots - they are still very bad at things we find easy, like climbing stairs or telling jokes. But over the next few years we could see them gradually filling more human roles, from sales assistants to child minders to taxi drivers. And we - the humans - will have to decide how far this robot revolution should go.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33360744

South Korea to pump $10bn into economy; China freezes IPOs to stop market plunge; After 99 years, Chile is Copa America champ

1 South Korea to pump $10bn into economy (Stephen Evans on BBC) South Korea's government has proposed pumping billions of dollars into its economy as it struggles with falling exports and an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers). A fresh stimulus package put forth last week worth 11.8tn Korean won ($10.5bn) is part of a larger economic stimulus plan worth 22tn won.

South Korea is targeting a growth rate of 3.1% for the year. Analysts say even with additional stimulus it may not achieve its target. South Korea's export-led economy has been hit by slowing global demand for its goods, together with sluggish consumer demand at home. The proposed injection of funds is an attempt to counter the impact of a flagging economy with government spending.

As the governments in London and Berlin stick tightly to "austerity" and reining in public spending as economies slow down, South Korea goes in the opposite direction and increases government borrowing to spend and pump the economy up. South Korean growth this year is forecast to be just over 3%. For many developed economies, that would be satisfactory but for South Korea it is far slower than they have come to expect.

This deceleration is caused primarily by the slowing of the Chinese economy but the outbreak of Mers raises a fear for the future. Accordingly, some of the extra spending is targeted at hospitals and clinics which failed to cope when the illness first appeared. Tourism, as an industry hit hard by the outbreak, will also get some money. But the detail does not seem as significant as the big picture: South Korea is rejecting the economics of Europe. Who's right?

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33375993

2 China freezes IPOs to stop market plunge (The Guardian) China has frozen share offers and set up a market-stabilisation fund, according to reports, as Beijing intensified efforts to pull stock markets out of a nose-dive that is threatening the world’s second-largest economy.

The report that Beijing has suspended initial public offerings (IPOs) came a few hours after major brokers and fund managers collectively pledged to invest at least $19bn of their own money into stocks.

China’s government, regulators and financial institutions are now waging a concerted campaign to prop up the nation’s two main share markets, amid fears that a meltdown would rock the financial system and inflict heavy losses across an economy where annual growth is already running at a 24-year low.

Almost $3 trillion in market value - more than the entire economic output of Brazil - has been wiped out since markets went into reverse last month, posing a bigger headache for many global investors than even the Greek debt crisis. The sell-off is especially worrying because the bull market had been built on a mountain of speculative loans. Some analysts suggest total margin lending, both formal and informal, could add up to around 4 trillion yuan ($645bn).

The freezing of IPOs can lend support to a falling market because large amounts of money are frozen when subscriptions are taken, drying up liquidity in the market. Large IPOs have been cited as a reason for triggering the recent plunge. Beijing has unleashed a barrage of official policy moves over the past week, including an interest rate cut, a relaxation of margin-lending rules and additional bank liquidity. But these efforts have so far failed to convince investors.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/05/china-freezes-new-share-offers-in-bid-to-shore-up-plunging-stock-markets

3 After 99 years, Chile win Copa America (Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian) After 99 years, it came down to Alexis Sánchez against Sergio Romero from 12 yards. The Arsenal forward attempted a Panenka, scuffed it badly, and scored anyway as the goalkeeper dived to his left.

Misses from Gonzalo Higuaín and Éver Banega in the shootout proved decisive and, finally, Chile, one of the four participants at the inaugural Copa América, had a first international trophy. For Argentina the drought goes on: 22 years since their last trophy and an increasing sense that this gifted generation of players will remain unfulfilled.

Where better to achieve that first win than at home, asked Claudio Bravo on Friday. Few stadiums in the world have such symbolic value as Santiago’s Estadio Nacional in being representative of their nation. Behind the goal at one end a block is left perpetually empty, the benches still as they were in 1973 when the stadium was used as a prison camp after the coup through which Augusto Pinochet seized power.

It was here that November that Chile kicked off against no opposition in a notorious World Cup qualifying play-off after the USSR refused to take to the field in a stadium in which leftists had been murdered a matter of weeks earlier. Above it is the legend Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro – a people without a memory is a people without a future.

Some, it seems, got carried away in their nationalist fervour, with Lionel Messi’s family having to be moved into a television cabin at half-time after being abused and having objects thrown at them in the stands. There were further reports that his elder brother, Rodrigo, was punched.

The one change Sampaoli made was to push the midfielder Marcelo Díaz extremely deep, almost as a third centre-back, which freed Gary Medel to leave the back-line and pursue Messi at times when he dropped deep. Messi had his quietest game of the tournament – his 63 touches in normal time were his fewest of this Copa América.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jul/05/chile-argentina-copa-america-final-match-report

Eurozone growth picks up speed; Solar Impulse completes longest non-stop solo flight ever; South Africa consumer confidence at 14-year low

1 Eurozone growth picks up speed (BBC) Eurozone business activity rose at its fastest pace in four years in June, boosted by higher spending by consumers and businesses, a survey has indicated. The final Markit composite eurozone Purchasing Manages' Index (PMI), which combines manufacturing and services activity, rose to 54.2, its highest reading since May 2011. Any reading above 50 indicates growth, while below 50 points to contraction.

It comes despite concerns over the possibility of a messy Greek exit from the euro. Speculation that Athens would miss a €1.6bn repayment to the International Monetary Fund held back manufacturing activity in the month, Markit said.

But the European Central Bank's (ECB) massive €1 trillion bond-buying programme announced in March was beginning to help the service sector, with activity running at its fastest rate since mid-2011. Price discounting helped drive up the PMI covering the service industry, which makes up the bulk of the eurozone economy. It rose to 54.4 from May's 53.8.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33377130

2 Solar Impulse completes longest non-stop flight ever (Emma Howard in The Guardian) A solar plane attempting the world’s first flight around the globe has landed in Hawaii, after breaking the record for the longest non-stop solo flight in history.

Solar Impulse 2, piloted by the Swiss pilot André Borschberg, took off from Nagoya in Japan at 3am on Monday, for the five-day crossing of the Pacific Ocean, the riskiest leg of its journey. At 72 hours into the eighth leg of its 22,000-mile circumnavigation, Borschberg broke the endurance record for a solo flight.

“The next leg is what I call the moment of truth,” he said before departing. “The first time we fly many days, many nights with a solar-powered airplane, the first time that we fly over the ocean, the first time that one pilot flies alone for so long. We are exploring new territories.”

Borschberg is sharing the round-the-world attempt, completing alternate legs with his co-pilot Bertrand Piccard, who will now fly the single-seater plane on a 100-hour leg to Phoenix, Arizona, in the US. Saving power is key to the journey’s success, as the plane – fitted with 17,000 photovoltaic solar cells – must reach heights of 9,000 metres during the day so that it can glide through the night. At top speed, it reaches 87mph.

During the 5,079-mile leg, Borschberg has spent about four days, 21 hours and 51 minutes in the air and throughout the journey has only been able to rest in 20-minute intervals. The 62-year-old veteran pilot and engineer has had to endure temperatures close to 37C (100F) in the cockpit. He said that yoga had been a “huge support” for sustaining a positive mindset and helped to keep him alert. Tweeting throughout the journey, Borschberg said that the fourth day of this leg had been tough, after he “climbed the equivalent altitude of Mount Everest four times”.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/03/solar-impulse-lands-in-hawaii-after-longest-non-stop-solo-flight-in-history

3 South Africa consumer confidence at 14-year low (Johannesburg Times) Consumer confidence in SA plummeted to a 14-year low in the second quarter of 2015 - thanks to power outages, higher fuel and maize prices, tax hikes and a slowdown in government spending.

Having declined from zero to minus 4 in the first quarter, the First National Bank/Bureau for Economic Research's consumer confidence index declined further to minus 15. A sub-index, measuring sentiment on the future, plunged 14 points to minus 24, the lowest level since the 1992-1993 recession.

Extremely low levels of consumer confidence mean consumer spending will be muted, which in turn knocks economic growth. The minus 15 was not only far lower than the lowest reading of minus 6, recorded during the 2008-2009 recession, but was also only the second time since 1994 that the index had dropped below minus 12.

A change in labour laws at the beginning of the year that made it nearly impossible to hire workers for short periods might also have led to a drop in temporary employment and a decline in take-home pay. Adding to the woes, South Africa's worst drought since 1992 is pushing up grain prices. The rand has weakened 5.6% against the dollar since the start of the year.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2015/07/03/More-gloomy-than-ever

Greece may need €60bn in funds and decades of debt relief; Airbus plans second unit in China; Status updates as personality fingerprints

1 Greece may need €60bn in funds and decades of debt relief (Phillip Inman, Larry Elliott & Alberto Nardelli in The Guardian) The International Monetary fund has electrified the referendum debate in Greece after it conceded that the crisis-ridden country needs up to €60bn of extra funds over the next three years and large-scale debt relief to create “a breathing space” and stabilise the economy.

Before Sunday’s knife-edge referendum that the country’s creditors have cast as a vote on whether it wants to keep the euro, the IMF revealed a deep split with Europe as it warned that Greece’s debts were “unsustainable”. Fund officials said they would not be prepared to put a proposal for a third Greek bailout to its board unless it included both a commitment to economic reform and debt relief.

According to the IMF, Greece should have a 20-year grace period before making any debt repayments and final payments should not take place until 2055. It would need €10bn to get through the next few months and a further €50bn after that. Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras welcomed the IMF’s intervention saying that what the IMF said was never put to him during negotiations.

Tsipras is campaigning for a no vote in the referendum on Sunday, which is officially on whether to accept a tough earlier bailout offer, to impress on EU negotiators that spiralling poverty and a collapse in everyday business activity across Greece has meant further austerity should be ruled out of any new rescue package. Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, pledged to resign if his country votes yes to the plan proposed by the EU, the European Central Bank and what appears to be an increasingly reluctant IMF.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/02/imf-greece-needs-extra-50bn-euros

2 Airbus plans second unit in China (BBC) Airbus has signed a deal for its second factory in China as it expands further its growing relationship with the world's second-largest economy. The new cabin-completion factory for A330 jetliners is worth a reported €150m ($166.3m; £106.5m) and is aimed at attracting new orders for Airbus.

The plant will be built alongside an existing site in the city of Tianjin. Earlier this week, China signed a deal for 45 new Airbus planes worth more than $11bn. "The signature of this [latest] framework agreement on the A330 completion and delivery centre will open a new chapter of strategic cooperation on wide-body aircraft with China," said Airbus' president Fabrice Brégier,

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33375915

3 Status updates are personality fingerprints (Psychology Today/Khaleej Times) Every message posted to a social media site is like a fingerprint--a fleeting trace of the poster. A close analysis of these words, researchers are showing, can enrich our sense of who the users are, online and off.

A team of investigators recently dug into millions of Facebook updates to get a better sense of how personality reads. That is, which words and phrases do specific types of people--the darkly neurotic, say, or the pleasantly agreeable--tend to use when communicating with friends. To find out, they cross-referenced the status updates of thousands of users with the results of a personality test those users accessed via the app MyPersonality.

“The results let you see what personality factors like conscientiousness look like in everyday life,” says Gregory Park, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. The analysis also yielded some surprises. Conscientiousness, for example, is associated with planning and a tendency to get things done, but much of the language highly conscientious people tend to use relates to R and R. “I was pretty surprised to see words like weekend and relaxing,” Park says.

For analysts of important human variables like personality, health, or political attitudes, social media offer naturalistic samples of how people interact with the world. “More and more,” says psychologist Molly Ireland of Texas Tech University, “the language that we are analyzing truly represents what people are thinking and feeling throughout the day.”

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2015/July/opinion_July5.xml&section=opinion

Moody's downgrades Greece to Caa3; World's 2.4bn lack sanitation facilities; A book club that terrified the Angolan regime

1 Moody’s downgrades Greece to Caa3 (San Francisco Chronicle) President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi are discussing ways to keep Greece in the eurozone. Greece has suffered its fourth ratings downgrade this week, as Moody's investors service slashed the country's rating from Caa2 to Caa3, or just above default.

The agency said Greece was likely to default on its remaining privately held debt due to its impasse with lenders. "Events of recent months have illustrated the distance between what Greece's official creditors will demand as a condition of continued support over the coming years, and what Greece's institutions are able to do to meet those demands. This creates significant difficulties for the achievement of a long-lasting support agreement," it said.

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said a deal with lenders could be reached after Sunday's referendum, while blaming creditors for the country's bank closures. "This is a very dark moment for Europe. They have closed our banks for the sole purpose of blackmailing what? Getting a "Yes" vote on a non-sustainable solution that would be bad for Europe," he said.

The European Central Bank's governing council has decided to maintain emergency liquidity funding for Greek banks at the same levels as before, a banking official said. The ECB has been keeping Greece's banks on life support while the country's left-wing government has negotiated for a bailout deal with creditors. Without the money, Greece could default and wind up leaving the euro.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/The-Latest-Markets-take-in-stride-Greek-failure-6359832.php

2 World’s 2.4bn lack sanitation facilities (Khaleej Times) Some 2.4 billion people - one out of every three inhabitants of the planet - still have no access to sanitation facilities, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unicef has said. Of those, 946 million continue to defecate outdoors, a very problematic practice, because in many places it creates a continuous source of disease and pollutes the water supply.

"Until everyone has access to adequate sanitation facilities, the quality of water supplies will be undermined and too many people will continue to die from waterborne and water-related diseases," said Maria Neira, director of the WHO Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

The UN, which refers to adequate sanitation as an entire system that hygienically separates human excrement from the population, set as one of its Millennium Development Goals the reduction by half of the number of people without access to such a system by 2015. That means that 77 percent of the world population should now have access to sanitation, a goal that will not be met by some 9 percentage points, or 700 million people.

According to Unicef and WHO, the lack of progress in this area also threatens to undermine child survival and the health benefits that were expected to be achieved by improving access to drinking water, another Millennium Development Goal that, in this case, has fortunately been achieved.

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?section=todaysfeatures&xfile=data/todaysfeatures/2015/July/todaysfeatures_July1.xml

3 A book club that terrified the Angolan regime (Simon Allison in The Guardian) As a group of young Angolans gathered in the capital Luanda for their regular book club, authorities clearly felt the act of reading was so subversive that it was tantamount to a rebellion, and state security forces immediately intervened. Thirteen of the readers were arrested in a raid last week, along with two others for good measure. All have been detained and distributed across various prisons in the city.

This incident reveals much about modern Angola, where the exercise of basic rights – to assembly, to protest, the right to read – has become a subversive act. Some of those arrested have a political history: rapper Luaty Beirao has been arrested for protesting in the past, and Manuel Nito Alves was jailed for two months in 2013 for printing T-shirts critical of the president.

On the reading list were two books that give Angolan authorities sleepless nights. The first was Gene Sharp’s seminal From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which describes itself as “a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to repressive regimes”. The second was Angolan journalist Domingos da Cruz’s book, whose title translates as “tools to destroy a dictator and avoid a new dictatorship”. Da Cruz himself was among those arrested.

Since March 2011, the country’s youth movement has been calling for protests aimed at bringing down the president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos who has ruled Angola for 35 years. That a book club has become the definition of rebellion shows just how paranoid and insecure the state has become: fifteen young men are now in prison, because they dared to discuss a future different from the one Dos Santos has decreed.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/angola-book-club-dos-santos-arrests

Moody's downgrades Greece to Caa3; World's 2.4bn lack sanitation facilities; A book club that terrified the Angolan regime

1 Moody’s downgrades Greece to Caa3 (San Francisco Chronicle) President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi are discussing ways to keep Greece in the eurozone. Greece has suffered its fourth ratings downgrade this week, as Moody's investors service slashed the country's rating from Caa2 to Caa3, or just above default.

The agency said Greece was likely to default on its remaining privately held debt due to its impasse with lenders. "Events of recent months have illustrated the distance between what Greece's official creditors will demand as a condition of continued support over the coming years, and what Greece's institutions are able to do to meet those demands. This creates significant difficulties for the achievement of a long-lasting support agreement," it said.

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said a deal with lenders could be reached after Sunday's referendum, while blaming creditors for the country's bank closures. "This is a very dark moment for Europe. They have closed our banks for the sole purpose of blackmailing what? Getting a "Yes" vote on a non-sustainable solution that would be bad for Europe," he said.

The European Central Bank's governing council has decided to maintain emergency liquidity funding for Greek banks at the same levels as before, a banking official said. The ECB has been keeping Greece's banks on life support while the country's left-wing government has negotiated for a bailout deal with creditors. Without the money, Greece could default and wind up leaving the euro.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/The-Latest-Markets-take-in-stride-Greek-failure-6359832.php

2 World’s 2.4bn lack sanitation facilities (Khaleej Times) Some 2.4 billion people - one out of every three inhabitants of the planet - still have no access to sanitation facilities, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unicef has said. Of those, 946 million continue to defecate outdoors, a very problematic practice, because in many places it creates a continuous source of disease and pollutes the water supply.

"Until everyone has access to adequate sanitation facilities, the quality of water supplies will be undermined and too many people will continue to die from waterborne and water-related diseases," said Maria Neira, director of the WHO Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

The UN, which refers to adequate sanitation as an entire system that hygienically separates human excrement from the population, set as one of its Millennium Development Goals the reduction by half of the number of people without access to such a system by 2015. That means that 77 percent of the world population should now have access to sanitation, a goal that will not be met by some 9 percentage points, or 700 million people.

According to Unicef and WHO, the lack of progress in this area also threatens to undermine child survival and the health benefits that were expected to be achieved by improving access to drinking water, another Millennium Development Goal that, in this case, has fortunately been achieved.

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?section=todaysfeatures&xfile=data/todaysfeatures/2015/July/todaysfeatures_July1.xml

3 A book club that terrified the Angolan regime (Simon Allison in The Guardian) As a group of young Angolans gathered in the capital Luanda for their regular book club, authorities clearly felt the act of reading was so subversive that it was tantamount to a rebellion, and state security forces immediately intervened. Thirteen of the readers were arrested in a raid last week, along with two others for good measure. All have been detained and distributed across various prisons in the city.

This incident reveals much about modern Angola, where the exercise of basic rights – to assembly, to protest, the right to read – has become a subversive act. Some of those arrested have a political history: rapper Luaty Beirao has been arrested for protesting in the past, and Manuel Nito Alves was jailed for two months in 2013 for printing T-shirts critical of the president.

On the reading list were two books that give Angolan authorities sleepless nights. The first was Gene Sharp’s seminal From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which describes itself as “a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to repressive regimes”. The second was Angolan journalist Domingos da Cruz’s book, whose title translates as “tools to destroy a dictator and avoid a new dictatorship”. Da Cruz himself was among those arrested.

Since March 2011, the country’s youth movement has been calling for protests aimed at bringing down the president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos who has ruled Angola for 35 years. That a book club has become the definition of rebellion shows just how paranoid and insecure the state has become: fifteen young men are now in prison, because they dared to discuss a future different from the one Dos Santos has decreed.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/angola-book-club-dos-santos-arrests