The 2022 midterm elections are now 263 days away, and Republicans have a 13-point lead in their bid to recapture control of Congress.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, if the elections for Congress were held today, 50% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican candidate, while 37% would vote for the Democrat. Just four percent (4%) would vote for some other candidate, but another nine percent (9%) are not sure.
Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe’s competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech.
Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
Call it a decennial headache. The 2020 Census and subsequent Congressional redistricting could mean midterm trouble for Democrats, who currently have a precariously loose grip on legislative control.
Every 10 years the United States Census Bureau is charged with completing a full count of the American population, the $15.6 billion task was made especially difficult in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic, controversial changes in survey execution by the Trump administration, and the various legal challenges to them. Now, an arguably more difficult process is underway: analyzing the data and using it to redraw legislative and congressional districts. This redistricting, a job has long been tense and prone to abuse, will be the most challenging in decades, according to experts.
Last week, legislative apportionment numbers started to trickle out from the Census Bureau (after an unusual delay due to COVID), and states were told how many representatives they gained or lost based on population. When these numbers change, as they often do after a decade, the districts need to be redrawn to accommodate the change. This change will have a large impact on which party controls Congress for the next decade.
Tourism representatives have said 2016 has been “much worse” than the
predicted “worst case scenario,” noting the revenue loss in the sector
would likely surge to $12 billion over the year.
The current problems, which have risen amid escalating security concerns and a significant decrease in the number of Russian
tourists, will likely impact other sectors, including the agriculture
sector, and push up the unemployment rate across the country, according
to sector representatives.
The head of the Antalya Chamber of Trade and Industry (ATSO), Davut Çetin, said the number of Russian
tourists has almost zeroed over this year and they expected a
significant drop in the number of arrivals from Europe, mainly from
Germany, after a series of terror attacks which recently hit Turkey.
He noted the organization submitted various scenarios to the government after the Russian crisis erupted, but only optimistic scenarios were shared with the public.
“We are at a point which is much worse than what we had earlier
predicted in our worst case scenario,” he noted at a meeting late March
18.
The vice president of the organization and the head of the
Mediterranean Touristic Hoteliers’ Association (AKTOB), Yusuf
Hacısüleyman, said they predicted a loss of $8 billion in revenue in
their previous scenario upon the predicted loss of around 4 million
tourists following the jet crisis with Russia, by presuming the spending
per capita at $1,000 plus the multiplier effect at 1.87.
“With
the addition of the expected losses from the European market, we have
now revised our potential revenue losses to $12 billion,” he said one
day before another terror attack in Istanbul, which killed at least four
foreign nationals in central Istanbul on March 19.
Hacısüleyman
said the rising number of security warnings for Turkey by Western
countries has spurred further losses in the sector, noting that the German Travel Association (DRV) canceled a four-day meeting scheduled in April in the Aegean resort of Kuşadası.
“When
travel agencies canceled their meetings over security concerns, we
cannot wait for arrivals from Germany to Turkey,” he added.
He
noted that the number of European tourists may decline by almost half
over this year, adding that the number of Iranian tourists is expected
to decrease to 30,000 over this year from around 45,000 last year.
Spain
will lure much more tourists than it did earlier this year, and may
reach around 80 million tourists, according to sector representatives.
Another popular destination will be Greece, they added.
Çetin noted many hoteliers would not open their hotels this year, and around 80,000-100,000 job losses are expected in Antalya alone.
He
said the problems in the tourism sector have already started to
spillover to other sectors, mainly the agricultural sector, and the
losses will become more visible by May and the following months.
T urkey's governing AK party is on course to lose its parliamentary majority, early projections suggest.
They also suggest the pro-Kurdish HDP is set to cross the 10% threshold, securing seats for the first time.
With 90% of the vote counted, the AKP had 42% of the vote, according to Turkish TV stations.
If
confirmed, the result would end the AKP's 13-year single-party rule,
and upset President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plans to boost his office's
powers.
President Erdogan, who first came to power as prime
minister in 2003, has been seeking a two-thirds majority to turn Turkey
into a presidential republic.
One of the more enduring myths about waging war is that it helps the economy. Not so, this cold inhumane calculation, Paul Krugman writes today.
Alarmed
by the escalation of rhetoric and events in the Ukraine, Krugman casts
his shrewd eye on warfare since the start of World War I a century ago,
and concludes that we haven't learned much since. "The war to end all
wars" just didn't. Why, given the overwhelming amount of evidence that
war is ruinous in every way, including economically, would that be so?
First, the columnist takes a quick detour into history:
Once
upon a time wars were fought for fun and profit; when Rome overran Asia
Minor or Spain conquered Peru, it was all about the gold and silver.
And that kind of thing still happens. In influential research sponsored
by the World Bank, the Oxford economist Paul Collier has shown that the
best predictor of civil war,[4] which
is all too common in poor countries, is the availability of lootable
resources like diamonds. Whatever other reasons rebels cite for their
actions seem to be mainly after-the-fact rationalizations. War in the
preindustrial world was and still is more like a contest among crime
families over who gets to control the rackets than a fight over
principles.
But
times have changed, Krugman points out. "If you’re a modern, wealthy
nation, however, war — even easy, victorious war — doesn’t pay," he
writes. "And this has been true for a long time."
Back in April 2007, in the midst of the greatest commodities
rally on record, OAO Gazprom’s (OGZD) deputy chief executive officer,
Alexander Medvedev, was talking big.
Russia’s natural-gas export
monopoly aspired to be the world’s largest company, he said while
offering up a prediction: its market value would quadruple to $1
trillion in as little as seven years.
Medvedev was off by $910
billion. Since he made that forecast, no company among the world’s top
5,000 has suffered a bigger collapse in market capitalization than
Gazprom, a $154 billion plunge that’s become emblematic of the malaise
that has overtaken President Vladimir Putin’s economy.
The state-run
company has tumbled three straight years in the stock market as it
stepped up spending on everything from the Olympic games in Sochi to
projects in Siberia.
“Gazprom is a champion in value destruction,” Ian Hague, founding
partner of New York-based Firebird Management LLC, which manages $1.3
billion of assets including Russian stocks, said in an interview
yesterday.
“It’s not just Gazprom that failed to achieve its goal of
increasing market capitalization. It’s Russia who failed. It failed to
create an environment where state-owned companies would function as
shareholder-owned entities.”
Aliya Samigullina, a spokeswoman for
Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who oversees Russia’s energy
industry, declined to comment.
