News round-up, April, 19, 2023
Words from the editor…
Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.
Spiegel.deHow do you describe the ludicrous maze through which Britain's current economic situation is wandering, growing more wretched by the day, unable to find a haven from which to emerge?
All this shame on the day of a pompous royal coronation…
Two artistic facts give us a possible explanation for this bizarre circumstance…
The enigmatic British artist Banksy's work "Love Is in the Bin," originally titled "Girl with Balloon," was resold. It was partially shredded after being purchased at a Sotheby's auction in 2018. After competition from a total of nine bidders, it was bought by a client over the phone for a price that beat Banksy's previous auction record of $23.2 million. Banksy's Red Balloon Girl self-destructed after selling for £1 million at Sotheby's in 2008.
The other explanation can be found in the absurd but hyper-real chapter 41 of Hopscotch by Brussels-born Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar…
Oliveira spends the afternoon in his apartment, where the sun is scorching, the heat is out of control, and he tries to straighten crooked nails for no apparent reason. To make matters worse, he has run out of -mate- and is tempted to wake Traveler, who is asleep in the other room. He is bored to death and needs the company of Traveler, who eventually wakes up. He asks him for grass and nails, though he cannot explain what he needs them for. While he waits, Horacio tries to write some games. Traveler arrives with the nails, but he forgets the -mate- but he thinks throwing them from window to window is risky as his aim could be better. So they decide to make planks to build a bridge and put the nails to good use. They set about building the absurd bridge, but the big problem was how to tie the planks connecting the two windows if they came from different places. Hammering in the air is a challenging task.
Hence, it is difficult to conclude that the world is mad… No easy task for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Most read…
The UK Faces a Steep Climb Out of a Deep Hole
Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.
Spiegel by Jörg Schindler in London, 18.04.2023US urges NATO vigilance for signs Russia could use nuclear weapon in Ukraine
Putin denies having any intention of employing nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
By REUTERS, Published: APRIL 19, 2023 India Is Passing China in Population. Can Its Economy Ever Do the Same?
India has a young, vast work force that is expanding as China’s ages and shrinks. But the country’s immense size also lays bare its enormous challenges.
NYT By Mujib Mashal and Alex Travelli Reporting from New Delhi, April 19, 2023China readies supersonic spy drone unit, leaked document says
THE DISCORD LEAKS | China’s cutting-edge drone could give it a surveillance advantage during a possible military confrontation over Taiwan
TWP by Christian Shepherd, Vic Chiang, Pei-Lin Wu and Ellen Nakashima April 18, 2023 German cabinet approves bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems
At a press conference, Economy Minister Robert Habeck assured reporters that the finance was guaranteed. Habeck declined to provide an estimate of the cost to the government, only saying that it would be "modest."
Reuters by Riham Alkousaa, and Markus Wacket, 
“We’re living in a volatile world…
it’s easy to get distracted by things like changeable commodity prices or a shortage of solar panels. But this wouldn’t be true to our purpose – we can’t allow ourselves to lose sight of our end goal; said Andres Gluski, CEO of energy and utility AES Corp
Today's events
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Today's events 〰️
Image: by Germán & CoThe UK Faces a Steep Climb Out of a Deep Hole
Food shortages, moldy apartments, a lack of medical workers: The United Kingdom is facing a perfect storm of struggle, and millions are sliding into poverty. There is little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.
Spiegel by Jörg Schindler in London, 18.04.2023In the innermost chambers of the old palace, Britannia is still just as large as it once was. Vast paintings stretching up to the ceiling narrate the glorious triumphs of a stupendous global empire – of battles against the Danes, Napoleon, the Spanish Armada, of the subjugation of India and the settling of America.
Those wishing to enter Westminster Palace, for centuries the seat of British Parliament, must pass by bronze statues of pioneers, commanders and thinkers – Walpole, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Thatcher – and a life-sized Winston Churchill, who still seems to be watching over the lower house, once destroyed by German bombs.
With every echoing step, British parliamentarians are reminded by these weighty premises of their own importance.
It is rather rare, however, that one of them makes their way from the halls of parliament into the underworld of the old palace, which was once built on a swampy island in the Thames. Here, in the low-ceilinged, labyrinthine catacombs, the foundation of Britannia’s democracy is literally rotting away, largely out of sight and out of mind. Most of the structure is contaminated by asbestos, while thick tangles of cables hang chaotically from the ceiling and pipes suddenly come to an end, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
Gas, power and water lines – all bunched together – run for several kilometers through the damp cellars. The fire alarm has been triggered more than 40 times here in the last 10 years, and fire experts are allegedly on patrol in the building 24 hours a day.
Seven years ago, an internal report outlined a "substantial and growing risk of … a catastrophic event," and the 1,000-room neo-Gothic monument with its 100 staircases is long overdue for a comprehensive renovation. It would take decades to complete and cost up to 22 billion pounds. But thus far, the honorable members of parliament have been unable to agree on when and how.
Instead, inside the gold, brocade and hardwood-trimmed imperial halls upstairs, the country’s representatives continue to put on a show of democracy week after week while a time bomb continues to tick below them.
The old palace, in fact, has become a perfect symbol for the United Kingdom of today.
Boarded Up Windows
Things aren’t going well for the United Kingdom these days. For the past several months, the flow of bad news has been constant, the country’s coffers are empty, public administration is ineffective and the nation’s corporations are struggling. As this winter came to an end, more than 7 million people were waiting for a doctor’s appointment, including tens of thousands of people suffering from heart disease and cancer. According to government estimates, some 650,000 legal cases are still waiting to be addressed in a court of law. And those needing a passport or driver’s license must frequently wait for several months.
Boarded up windows and signs reading "To Let" and "To Rent" have become a common sight on the country’s high streets, while numerous products have disappeared from supermarket shelves. Recently, a number of chains announced that they would be rationing cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers for the foreseeable future.
"Whereas the number of billionaires in the UK – at 177 – is higher than it has ever been, millions of Britons have slid into poverty."
Last year, 560 pubs closed their doors forever, with thousands more soon to follow, according to the industry association. Without Oxfam, the Salvation Army and other charitable organizations that operate second-hand stores, numerous city centers would have almost no shops left at all.
Last week, the International Monetary Fund forecast that in no other industrialized nation would the economy develop as poorly as in Britain this year. Even Russia is expected to end up ahead of the UK.
One Pound Wonders
Whereas the number of billionaires in the UK – at 177 – is higher than it has ever been, millions of Britons have slid into poverty. Newspapers and television channels are full of cheap recipes and shows like Jamie Oliver’s "£1 Wonders." Since December, hardly a day has passed without a strike by bus drivers, medical workers, teachers, public servants, university employees or rail workers. Last week, assistant doctors across the country went on strike for four days, with the media calling on the populace to avoid all activities that could result in injury.
For many, the situation is reminiscent of the 1970s, when high debt, punishing inflation and widespread protests brought the country to its knees – leading Henry Kissinger, who was U.S. secretary of state at the time, to grumble from across the Atlantic: "Britain is a tragedy, reduced to begging, borrowing and stealing."
To be sure, after two years of pandemic and one year of war, the rest of Europe isn’t doing particularly well either. But nowhere is the feeling of having "lost the future" stronger than in Britain, according to the public opinion pollsters from Ipsos. In 2008, the year of the banking and financial crisis, 12 percent of people in the UK believed that their children would be worse off than them. Now, that number is 41 percent, Ipsos has found.
One significant reason for that pessimism is the fact that many simply no longer trust their speechifying politicians in Westminster to get much done. The Tory party, which has been in power now for a dozen years, has gone through four prime ministers since 2016 alone.
And even if the fifth in the series, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is doing all he can to leave behind the period of sloganeering and slapstick, the UK isn’t likely to recover from his predecessors any time soon. Particularly not from Boris Johnson, who still refuses to admit any personal responsibility for the plight in which Britain finds itself and continues to bleat in a huff from the sidelines.
Even as his country slid further and further into the abyss, Johnson spent years absorbing all political momentum like a black hole, instead throwing his energy into projects like bringing back imperial measurements, announcing his intent to build a sinfully expensive royal yacht named Britannia and convincing the populace that he was building a "global," or even a "galactic Britain," a reference to the country’s budding space program.
Yet in early January, when the first 11 satellites ever to be launched from British soil were to head into space from Cornwall, the mission failed, and they ended up in the Atlantic instead. Excitement about the launch had been limited anyway, with an earthly populace that would have been happy with functioning school toilets.
Even before the failure, the Economist wrote: "A country that likes to think of itself as a model of common sense and good-humored stability has become an international laughing stock." No longer is it a single government or political party that seems dysfunctional, the magazine intimated, "Britain itself can seem to be kaput."
The question is: Who broke it? Was it just the pandemic and the warmonger to the east, as the current government never tires of insisting? Or did the unstoppable decline of the kingdom perhaps begin much earlier? On the search for answers to these questions, it is helpful to take a trip to the edges of a now modestly sized empire – to the people who no longer expect much from the political classes in faraway London.
"You probably won’t believe this, but this used to be one of our most fashionable areas," says Simon Cartmell, as he comes to a stop on Bond Street in Blackpool one Wednesday morning in winter. A cold wind is blowing in from the Irish Sea and the drizzle is falling almost horizontally, but Cartmell, a friendly 50-year-old wearing a colorful scarf, can’t stop gushing about times past. "There were banks, boutiques, an old bingo parlor, a cinema, and right there, the red-brick building, was once a busy hotel."
Over the phone, Cartmell – head of the local employment agency – had said: "Come to Bloomfield." This neighborhood in the south of the city, one of the poorest not just in the city, but in the entire country, is, he continued, the best place to see what has happened to Blackpool. "Just a couple of paces away from the sea, and you’re already in the middle of a Dickens novel."
Countless shops have closed their doors in recent years, with only bargain stores, cheap supermarkets and fast-food chains remaining. Almost all of the empty lots are filled with trash, while signs on the walls announce the spaces as perfect for advertising.
The people here have lost a lot over the years, but not, apparently, their sense of humor. Entire streets are lined with bed-and-breakfasts bearing names like Sweet Dreams Hotel, Fortuna House, Great Escape Hotel and Hollywood Apartments, even as most of them have become home to welfare recipients.
The local pub is called Last Resort. Even the screeching of the seagulls sounds like a sarcastic commentary on the current times.
When Prince William and his wife Kate visited the place a few years ago to show solidarity with the poor, the local community garden was quickly replanted, says Cartmell. They wanted to present at least a little bit of the town’s past glory to the royal couple.
Yet no matter how hard one might try, it is impossible to deny the dismal reality of Blackpool’s present. This "Las Vegas of the North" may still attract more than a million visitors every summer who relive their childhoods between the glaring neon of the beach promenade and the Pleasure Beach amusement park. But the "Golden Mile" has long since declined into a crumbling Potemkin façade along which gleamingly modern street cars – funded by the EU – run.
The city’s decline came in waves. Like other cities in northern England, Blackpool profited many centuries ago from the British empire’s involvement in trading slaves and other wares. The wealth of Lancashire County, where Blackpool is located, was primarily the result of the local textile industry. Following the deindustrialization of the north, mass tourism kept the city’s 140,000 residents afloat for a time. But budget airlines soon began flying to sunny southern destinations, and Blackpool has had a hard time competing.
And since then, the place has been left largely to its own devices. The young and energetic have left, while many who failed to make it elsewhere have come to Blackpool for old times' sake.
The city was already on its knees when the conservative-liberal government of David Cameron announced an era of austerity in order to recoup the fantastical sums the government had injected into the banking industry during the financial crisis. And there was hardly another area of the country that was hit as hard by the savings measures as Lancashire. Blackpool had to slash far more than a billion pounds in public spending, and there was little left over for the poor. The city then had to close its doors to holidaymakers for two years during the pandemic.
Today, Blackpool is a place of records. No other city in the country is home to as many run-down neighborhoods. The life expectancy of male residents is just under five years below the national average, while that for women is almost four years lower. Almost one in five residents suffers from what local doctors call "shit life syndrome," while anti-depressants are prescribed here twice as often as in the rest of the country.
Brexit, this grandiose promise of restoring lost greatness, found a willing audience in Blackpool, ready to grasp onto any straw – as was the case across northern and central England, where production had plunged over time and hardly anything grew in its place. Aside from inequality.
"If you are poor, sick, weak or tired, don’t come to Blackpool," says Simon Cartmell at the end of his stroll through the present. "Nobody will help you here." Nor will the 40 million pounds pledged by the government in London to the university as part of a national Leveling Up Fund – money intended to create a carbon-neutral campus. "It’s like giving a beggar 10 pounds after taking his house."
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took it upon himself to personally announce the windfall for Blackpool and several additional municipalities in the north a few weeks ago, and even flew into the airport in Blackpool for the event. Cartmell, who is running as the local Labour Party candidate in the next parliamentary elections, was in front of the airport to shoot a campaign video.
As he was waiting, he says a construction worker suddenly appeared with a shovel and a bucket to fill in a pothole in the airport’s access road. "And 90 seconds before Sunak’s limousine drove past, the road was once again in passable condition."
Pain Pills and Yorkshire Tea
It’s one of those days when Jo McReynolds doesn’t know what to do first. On the screen in front of her is a seemingly endless list of food items. Thirty trays of bread, two pallets of mixed vegetables, hundreds of cans of chicken tikka masala, 600 kilograms of Maris Piper potatoes, 52 packages of frozen buttermilk scones, 144 cartons of veggie meat, 200 crates of yogurt, 318 packets of Caesar dressing – and those are just the items that came in early that morning.
Ideally, most of it should be shipped today. McReynolds laughs. "I begin each day with a nervous breakdown, and things get worse from there," she says. On her desk in Hall 2 is a tabloid newspaper with Putin’s face on the cover, pain pills and a package of Yorkshire tea.
A blond, 62-year-old with a nasal piercing and wearing a reflective vest, Jo McReynolds is the manager of the FareShare outlet in Birmingham. To fight both food waste and hunger, FareShare collects food that is no longer completely fresh, but which has not yet expired, from supermarkets and producers, distributing it to schools, food banks and other facilities. When McReynolds started as a volunteer 10 years ago, FareShare had six small outlets in the UK, but it now runs 30 regional centers with 1,500 employees and around 5,000 volunteer assistants.
Feeding the needy has turned into big business.
In the Nechells district north of the Birmingham city center, McReynolds now oversees four brick warehouses filled to the roof with nonperishable food. Forklifts are in constant motion as they load up delivery vans, while countless, mostly good-natured workers are bustling about in their reflective vests marked with the words: "Food Hero."
The Nechells site processes six to eight tons of food every single day, with the daily nationwide total in December reaching 3,300 tons – a new record. And they still aren’t able to keep up with demand. The waiting list, says McReynolds, is longer than her forearm. "It is frightening. For Christ's sake, we can send people to the moon, but we aren’t able to feed our own people."
Hunger has been the focus of numerous recent stories coming out of the United Kingdom. Stories about a government that was planning on making cuts to the school dinners program before a football star intervened. About how even UNICEF stepped in to help feed children in a country with the sixth largest economy in the world. And about the skyrocketing popularity of Asian instant noodles, popular because they are filling and cheap, and because they take almost no time to cook – a huge advantage given that spiking energy prices have made electricity unaffordable for many Britons.
Indeed, in addition to the almost 3,000 food banks in the country – more than three times the number found in the much larger country of Germany – facilities in the UK like churches, museums, public libraries and schools opened up "warm banks" around the country this winter. The needy can also go to baby banks to pick up free diapers and formula, bedding banks for mattresses and down comforters, and fuel banks to receive vouchers for coin-operated gas and electric meters. The Blue Cross also introduced the country’s first pet-food banks this winter so that people with nothing could at least keep their dogs and cats.
And in some places, community centers have turned into multi-banks, where the needy can go to find all of the things they might be short on in one place.
The New Hutte Neighbourhood Centre in Knowsley, a 10-minute train ride from Liverpool, is one such a place. On a recent chilly Tuesday, 69-year-old Linda was there, wearing short, raspberry red hair and a leopard-patterned shirt that was far too thin for the weather. On Tuesday, the former school offers free lunch, and Linda has learned how to make her money go a long way. A former elderly care nurse, Linda tried to apply for state aid, but she was told that her 700-pound pension was 29 pence over the limit.
Since then, she’s been going to the New Hutte on Tuesdays, to the food bank at St. Hilda’s on Fridays, and to the one at St. Mary’s on Saturdays. She also frequents the Asda supermarket, where a bowl of soup and a cup of tea costs just one pound. "This is a good community," says Linda, who hardly cooks at all anymore and only turns on the heat when her youngest grandson is visiting. But she doesn’t want to complain and talks about her life as though discussing some distant relative. "Things are a bit upside-down at the moment," she says, but at least she has friends and a place to live. "And next Tuesday, they’re serving curry with rice. I’m already looking forward to it."
Killed By Mold
Someone has put up Union Jack bunting in front of the house where two-year-old Awaab died – almost as if they wanted to say: This, too, is the UK. The plastic flags are the only color on the dirty-white facade of the four-story residential block, a structure which looks exactly like all the other blocks that make up Freehold Estate in the town of Rochdale. There are no markers, no flowers and no sign to commemorate what happened here, just outside Manchester.
Awaab Ishak died shortly before Christmas 2020. But the country where he lived only took notice of his death last November. As part of a court case relating to the death, it became widely known that Awaab’s parents, who are from Sudan, had been complaining for years about the damp walls and black mold in their apartment.
Their landlord, Rochdale Bouroughwide Housing, denied all responsibility, saying that the mold was likely the product of the renters' questionable "lifestyle" and should be painted over. That ignorance cost the two-year-old his life, as the court found. Awaab died due to "prolonged exposure to mold" in an apartment that was "not fit for human habitation." The furious coroner asked: "How in the UK in 2020 does a two-year-old child die from exposure to mold in his home?"
According to research conducted by the renter rights organization Shelter, such subpar conditions are far from uncommon in the country, with 2 million apartments allegedly in a similarly miserable and unhealthy condition. Yet they remain occupied, since in the vast majority of the cases, the only alternative would be homelessness. No other country in Europe faces such a severe housing shortage, and those most frequently affected are people with low incomes or no income at all. In England alone, hundreds of thousands of men and women are waiting for the council housing to which they are legally entitled – and more than 30,000 of them have been waiting for 10 years or more.
The situation is largely the result of the vast wave of privatizations set off by the administration of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, with municipalities across the country selling their housing inventory to investors. The loss of public housing accelerated again during the financial crisis in 2008/09.
Construction continued throughout the ensuing years, of course, but little heed was paid to what the country actually needed. Whereas London is now home to almost 3 million square meters of empty office space – the equivalent of 25 Westminster Palaces – countless people in Briton are competing tooth and nail for whatever apartment they can find, even if it is drafty and moldy.
Just as is the case in Blackpool, Knowsley and so many other places in the country, Rochdale – population 200,000 – also had little choice. City officials had to cut the budget by 183 million pounds in accordance with the austerity plans imposed by London following the financial crisis. Freehold Estate, with its regiments of housing blocks, was privatized in 2010.
One evening in winter, Terry Williamson – whose name has been changed for this story – is standing in front of a fenced-in playground at the estate with her 20-month-old son. Pointing to a soccer-ball sized patch of moss on the wall of a nearby building, she says: "That’s what it looks like in my kitchen, too." Nobody, she says, was surprised by the news of Awaab’s death. "We all live in the same holes. It’s disgusting."
She says she has complained to the landlord on several occasions – about the fact that the heating unit in the bedroom is becoming dislodged; about the newly installed window that is too small, leaving a gap in the wall. "Nobody cares," says Terry, adding that she would move out immediately if she had somewhere else to go.
She doesn’t think that Awaab’s death will change anything, either, even if a government minister from London showed up in Rochdale once the case started receiving publicity. Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove, a member of the Conservative Party, toured Freehold Estate last November, expressing his disgust at the situation and announced that landlords would henceforth be forced to make improvements. The regulations, he insisted, would soon be outlined in "Awaab’s Law."
Gove insisted that a lack of money would not be accepted as an excuse. "It is a basic responsibility of the local authority ... to make sure that people are in decent homes," he said. "All this what-aboutery. Do your job, man!"
The Ambulance Arrived 15 Hours Late
It was early on a Monday morning when David Wakeley stumbled and fell on his patio in the small town of Indian Queens. The 87-year-old, already weakened by prostate cancer, broke seven ribs and a hip. His family called the ambulance at 7:34 p.m.
When it still hadn’t arrived after several hours, Wakeley’s son used tarps, a toy soccer goal and three umbrellas to shelter his father, who was still in too much pain to move, from the wind and rain. He emptied his father’s catheter several times during the night – until the paramedics finally arrived on Tuesday morning, 15-and-a-half hours after the first call went out.
The images of Wakeley’s makeshift shelter triggered widespread anger in the UK. But not for long. It was quickly replaced by anger over similar cases across the country as winter began. Images of ambulances lined up in front of countless hospitals where every single bed was occupied; reports of nurses mounting IKEA hooks on the walls in hospital hallways to be able to administer IV drips to patients; photos of a three-year-old suffering from scarlet fever and croup who finally fell asleep on plastic chairs in the waiting room, 22 hours after her parents had first called the ambulance and five hours after she had finally made it to the hospital.
The media has been rife with such reports in recent months. The National Health Service (NHS), an element of Britain’s identity on par with the BBC and the Premier League, is sinking into chaos. In December, heart attack patients were forced to wait an average of 93 minutes for the paramedics to arrive – a record. Some 54,000 hospital patients had to be parked in hallways because there were no free beds – a record. Experts believe that there are hundreds of preventable deaths in the country each week – you guessed it, a record.
Government ministers insist that the pandemic is to blame, but at most, that is only half true. Even long before 2020, London had been cutting the NHS budget, and the number of hospital beds in the country was falling. Britain spends 21 percent less on healthcare than France, and 39 percent less than Germany.
Once Brexit became reality, the country experienced an exodus of workers from other EU countries that affected all industries – including the NHS. Today, around a tenth of all healthcare jobs are unfilled. And those who are still working in the industry are at the ends of their ropes.
One of them is Kim Gordon. It’s an ice-cold Tuesday in February, and Gordon is standing on Headley Way in Oxford holding a to-go cup of coffee and a protest poster. Every few seconds, she waves at trucks, buses and cars that honk at her in encouragement. Around a hundred meters behind her is the vast, gray structure of John Radcliffe Hospital, where the photo of the young, scarlet fever patient on plastic chairs was taken. The hospital is considered to be one of the best in Britain, but today, many of its workers are out on strike.
Gordon, 56, has been working as a nurse for 39 years, and can still remember times when it was difficult to find a job in the field. "Today, people are leaving in droves. They’re already stressed before they even start."
She says she understands quite well why that is. For at least the last 10 years, the NHS has been consistently going downhill. "We haven’t been taking lunch breaks for a long time. We work 10 hours or more at a time and still only manage to do the bare minimum." If there are any beds available at all, they’re only for the direst cases, she says, and there is a shortage of important drugs. "Allegedly because of Brexit," Gordon says. During the pandemic, she says, she and several of her colleagues were even assigned tasks normally taken care of by doctors. "But of course without paying us even a penny more."
But this strike, the first one she’s ever participated in, is about more than just money for her, says Gordon. It’s about a vital profession, about her patients, and about the future. "There’s something rotten here," she says. "Nothing is as it used to be."
The longer she speaks, the more it seems as though she’s actually talking about the entire country. A country in which the famous wartime propaganda maxim "Keep Calm and Carry On" – one which tourists still like to take home on souvenir mugs – is no longer really a serious option for an increasing number of Britons.
It is a country which, thanks to its universities, its thinkers and its cultural importance, has so many opportunities, yet which makes so desperate little out of them. And that is mostly due to the fact that for decades, it has been essentially standing still, seeking its salvation in the very financial industry that collapsed so spectacularly 15 years ago, creating a situation in which billions were squandered – billions which are still lacking today.
This country was already on its knees before Brexit, before the endless phase of political trench warfare and before the pandemic.
And now, it seems as though it has dialed 999 and is waiting in vain for the paramedics to show up.
RS-24 Yars ballistic missile system at a military parade on Red Square, 2016 / (photo credit: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/WWW.KREMLIN.RU) 7 Editing by Germán & CoUS urges NATO vigilance for signs Russia could use nuclear weapon in Ukraine
Putin denies having any intention of employing nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
By REUTERS, Published: APRIL 19, 2023 The US and its NATO allies must remain alert for signs Russian President Vladimir Putin could use a tactical nuclear weapon in a "managed" escalation of his war in Ukraine, the second-highest US diplomat said on Tuesday.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman issued the warning during the opening session of an annual NATO arms control conference that was being held in North America for the first time since its inception in 2004.
"We have all watched and worried that Vladimir Putin would use what he considers a non-strategic tactical nuclear weapon or use some demonstration effect to escalate, but in an managed risk escalation," Sherman said. "It is very critical to remain watchful of this."
Putin's March 25 announcement that Russia is preparing to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus "is his effort to use this threat in a managed way," Sherman said.
Tactical nuclear weapons are designed for battlefield gains or for use against limited military targets.
Ukrainian serviceman reacts as he throws a grenade during a training, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Donbas region, Ukraine April 8, 2023. (credit: Yan Dorbronosov/Reuters)
Russia denies intending to use nuclear weapons
Putin denies having any intention of employing nuclear weapons in Ukraine, where his forces for months have been bogged down in fierce fighting that has been costly for both sides.
Belarus, which shares a border with Ukraine and NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, provided a staging ground for part of the Russian force that invaded Ukraine in February 2022 in a failed bid to overrun the country.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who joined Sherman in opening the conference, called Putin's plan to place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus part of a years-long pattern of "dangerous, irresponsible nuclear rhetoric" that intensified with "the brutalization of Ukraine."
The alliance, he said, is "monitoring very closely what they (Russia) are doing."
Sherman said the United States would continue to "downgrade" intelligence for sharing with NATO's other 30 members "so that everyone knows...where we stand."
Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country
…Armando Rodríguez, vice-president and executive director of the company, talks to us about their projects in the DR, where they have been operating for 32 years.
More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.
Image: NYT, Editing by Germán & CoIndia Is Passing China in Population. Can Its Economy Ever Do the Same?
India has a young, vast work force that is expanding as China’s ages and shrinks. But the country’s immense size also lays bare its enormous challenges.
An auto rickshaw factory in Aurangabad, India, on Tuesday.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times
NYT By Mujib Mashal and Alex Travelli Reporting from New Delhi, April 19, 2023India’s leaders rarely miss a chance to cheer the nation’s many distinctions, from its status as the world’s largest democracy to its new rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy, after recently surpassing Britain, its former colonial overlord. Even its turn this year as host of the Group of 20 summit is being celebrated as announcing India’s arrival on the global stage.
Now, another milestone is approaching, though with no fanfare from Indian officials. The country will soon pass China in population, knocking it from its perch for the first time in at least three centuries, data released by the United Nations on Wednesday shows.
With size — a population that now exceeds 1.4 billion people — comes geopolitical, economic and cultural power that India has long sought. And with growth comes the prospect of a “demographic dividend.” India has a work force that is young and expanding even as those in most industrialized countries, including China, are aging and in some cases shrinking.
But India’s immense size and lasting growth also lay bare its enormous challenges, renewing in this latest spotlight moment a perennial, if still uncomfortable, question: When will it ever fulfill its vast promise and become a power on the order of China or the United States?
“The young people have a great potential to contribute to the economy,” said Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “But for them to do that requires the country to make investments in not just education but health, nutrition and skilling for employability.”
There also need to be jobs. That’s a longstanding deficiency for a top-heavy and at times gridlocked economy that must somehow produce 90 million new jobs before 2030, outside agriculture, to keep employment rates steady. Even in the years immediately before the pandemic, India was falling far short of that pace.
In China, a shrinking and aging population will make it harder to sustain economic growth and achieve its geopolitical ambitions to surpass the United States. But in previous decades, when it was still growing, it found its way to transformative growth through export-driven manufacturing, like smaller East Asian countries did before it.
India has yet to be able to replicate that formula or to come up with one of its own that can achieve more than incremental gains.
India’s infrastructure, while vastly improved from where it stood a few decades ago, remains far behind China’s, hindering foreign investment, which has stagnated in recent years. Another major problem is that only one in five Indian women are in the formal work force, among the lowest rates anywhere and one that has actually declined as India has gotten more prosperous. Apart from quashing the aspirations of the country’s hundreds of millions of young women, keeping them out of formal jobs acts as a terrible brake on the economy.
“In terms of education, employment, digital access and various other parameters, girls and women do not have equal access to life-empowering tools and means as the boys and men have,” Ms. Muttreja said. “This needs to change for India to truly reap the demographic dividend.”
India’s economy has been growing much faster than its population for a generation, and the proportion of Indians living in extreme poverty has plummeted. Yet most Indians remain poor by global standards. To enter the top 10 percent by income, an Indian need make only about $300 a month. Famines are a thing of the past, but more than a third of all children are malnourished.
The country’s economic shortfalls, which have bred fierce competition even for the lowest-level jobs and stoked impatience among an aspirational Indian middle class, bring the risk of instability as dreams and realities diverge.
The rate of development across the huge country remains widely unequal, with some Indian states akin to middle-income nations and others struggling to provide the basics. The distribution of resources is increasingly becoming a tense political issue, testing India’s federal system.
When Gayathri Rajmurali, a local politician from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, found herself in India’s north for the first time this year, the disparity shocked her. “The north, they are behind 10 to 15 years to our places,” she said, pointing to indicators like basic infrastructure and average income.
And then there is the combustible environment created by the Hindu-first nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party, as his support base has sped up a century-old campaign to reshape India’s pluralist democratic tradition and relegate Muslims and other minorities to second-class citizenship. Demographic numbers are part of the political provocation game, with right-wing leaders often falsely portraying India’s Muslim population of 200 million as rising sharply in proportion to the Hindu population as they call on Hindu families to have more children.
Mr. Modi and his lieutenants say India is heading in only one direction: Up. They point to the undeniable gains in a country that has quadrupled the size of its economy within a generation.
Among major economies, India’s is projected to be the fastest-growing this year, with the World Bank expecting it to expand 6.3 percent in the new fiscal year after a sharp downturn early in the pandemic. A rapid increase in public investment is still improving the country’s lagging infrastructure. It has multiple dazzling tech start-up scenes and a technologically savvy middle class, and its unique system of digital public goods is lifting up the marginalized. Its culture, from popular films to a rich tradition of music, will only grow in influence as it expands its reach to new audiences.
And now it has an enviable demographic profile, with people in their most economically productive years represented in the largest numbers. While China’s extended “one-child policy” has resulted in a steep decline in population that could put dire strain on its economy, similar extreme measures in India, like forced sterilization, were short-lived.
Instead, India addressed its fears of overpopulation and reduced the growth rate through more organic and gradual ways, including serious efforts to promote contraception and smaller families. As mass education has spread, especially among girls and women, the fertility rate has dipped to just above the level required to maintain the current population size.
And India is increasingly looking to capitalize on China’s economic and diplomatic difficulties to become a higher-end manufacturing alternative — it is now producing a small share of Apple’s iPhones — and a sought-after geopolitical partner and counterweight.
“India’s time has arrived,” Mr. Modi recently declared.
Parallels
As India passes China in population — the new U.N. figures show that India has surpassed mainland China and will move past the mainland and Hong Kong combined next year — the two countries are estranged, in part over a series of clashes on their shared Himalayan border.
But not long ago, Mr. Modi saw China as a nation much like his own, striving to reclaim lost glory and a fairer place in the new world order, with lessons to offer about the pursuit of prosperity.
As a state and national leader, he has met with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, at least 18 times — they have shared fresh coconuts as well as a seat on a swing and many waterfront and garden strolls. Beyond Mr. Modi’s penchant for the strongman power that is typical of China’s one-party rule, analysts say the Indian leader was looking to Beijing for something more fundamental: solutions to the problems posed by a huge population.
The two nations share several historical parallels. The last time they traded places in population, in the 18th century or earlier, the Mughals ruled India and the Qing dynasty was expanding the borders of China; between them they were perhaps the richest empires that had ever existed. But as European powers went on to colonize most of the planet and then industrialized at home, the people of India and China became among the world’s poorest.
As recently as 1990, the two countries were still on essentially the same footing, with a roughly equal economic output per capita. Since then, China has shaken the world by creating more wealth than any other country in history. While India, too, has picked itself back up in the three decades since it liberalized its economy, it remains well behind in many of the most basic scales.
Today, China’s economy is roughly five times the size of India’s. The average citizen of China has an economic output of almost $13,000 a year, while the average Indian’s is less than $2,500. In human-development indicators, the contrast is even sharper, with infant mortality rates much higher in India, life expectancy lower and access to sanitation less prevalent.
The divergence, analysts say, comes down largely to China’s central consolidation of policy power, serious land reform, an earlier start in opening up its economy to market forces starting in the late 1970s, and its single-minded focus on export-led growth. China took the first-mover advantage and then compounded its dominance as it pursued its plans relentlessly.
India started opening its quasi-socialist economy nearly a decade later. Its approach remained piecemeal, constrained by tricky coalition politics and the competing interests of industrialists, unions, farmers and factions across its social spectrum.
“There is that element where China is a natural role model — not for its politics, but for the sheer efficiency,” said Jabin Jacob, a professor of international relations and governance studies at Shiv Nadar University near New Delhi.
The world now has a radically different power structure than it did in 1990. China has already made itself the world’s factory, all but closing off any path India could take to competitive dominance in export-driven manufacturing.
A “Make in India” campaign, inaugurated by Mr. Modi in 2014, has been stuttering ever since. Wage costs are lower in India than in China, but much of the work force is poorly educated, and the country has struggled to attract private investment with its restrictive labor laws and other impediments to business, including lingering protectionism.
To become as rich as China, economists say, India needs to either transform its development model radically — doing whatever it takes to become a center for globalized light manufacturing — or chart a path no other country has tried before.
Where India has found success is in the higher-value range of services. Companies like Tata Consultancy Services have become world leaders, while plenty of multinational firms like Goldman Sachs have more of their global staff working from India than anywhere else in the world.
But service-sector growth can go only so far in reaping India’s promise of a demographic dividend, or blunt the peril of an unemployment crisis. Hundreds of millions of people can’t find jobs or are underemployed in work that pays too little. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, 35 percent of university graduates are estimated to be unemployed, unable to find work commensurate to their credentials.
Nowhere is the competition for jobs clearer than at the coaching centers that train young Indians for the employment entrance exams at government agencies. These jobs are still coveted as private sector work remains limited and less stable.
Dhananjay Kumar, who runs a coaching center in Bihar, India’s poorest state and its youngest, with a median age of 22, estimated that 650,000 students will apply for just 600 or 700 jobs in the national civil service this year. The civil service is a tiny part of the work force, but it is prestigious — in part because it comes with job security for life. Most applicants spend years, and a big chunk of their family’s savings, and still fail to make the cut.
Mr. Kumar’s own parents worked on a small farm and never learned to read or write. After excelling in school, he trained for the civil service exams but ended up landing work overseas, at Lloyds Bank in Britain, after learning computer coding along the way.
He sees the irony in his current business endeavor, training others for a line of work that did not pan out for himself.
“Here there is no enterprise, no companies,” Mr. Kumar said. For any young person, “the question comes, ‘What next? What can I do?’”
Models
The lessons Mr. Modi is taking from China are most apparent in his push for infrastructure development, investing heavily in highways, railways and airports to improve supply chains and connectivity.
India has quintupled its annual spending on roads and railways during Mr. Modi’s nine years in power. In some weeks, he has been able to preside over ribbon cuttings at a new airport, a new highway and a new rail service.
But, analysts and critics say, what also drew him to Beijing was his aspiration for something approaching authoritarian power. Mr. Modi’s firm grip over the country’s democratic pillars at the expense of the opposition — highlighted by the recent ouster from Parliament of his most famous adversary, Rahul Gandhi — has pushed the country closer to a one-party state.
As Mr. Modi has boxed in opponents, cowed the press and overwhelmed independent elements of civil society, his government has lashed out at expressions of concern from abroad as evidence of a colonial plot to undermine India or a lack of understanding of India’s “civilizational” approach — both elements that diplomats had long heard in China’s own defensiveness.
All the while, the increasing militancy of his Hindu nationalist supporters, as arms of the state hang back and give perpetrators a free pass, exacerbates India’s religious fault lines and clashes that threaten to disrupt India’s rise.
The perpetual potential for conflagration was on display in recent weeks in episodes of violence across half a dozen states, particularly in West Bengal in the country’s east, as celebrations of the birthday of the Hindu deity Ram coincided with Ramadan.
Even as the state hosted events to celebrate India’s G20 presidency, violence there raged for days as Hindu and Muslim groups clashed, with the police shutting down the internet and carrying out marches to quell the clashes.
In Bihar, a third of those detained in connection with the violence were teenagers.
Shyam Saran, a former Indian foreign secretary, argued that India would in the end resist further centralization of power and remain democratic. That, he said, is the only way to keep India intact as a wildly diverse nation across languages, religions and caste distinctions.
“The very plurality of the country is like a safety valve,” he said.
As India’s democracy has eroded, Western powers have remained largely silent, prioritizing trade deals and courting India as a security ally. But deep down, diplomats say, there is a growing discomfort. Increasingly, many countries are drawing a distinction between engaging with India on issues such as trade and embracing India as a partner with shared values.
That could pose a problem for an India whose appeal as an alternative to China is in part a reflection of its position as the world’s largest democracy — a distinction that Mr. Modi lauds regularly even as he tightens his grip on power.
It is uncertain how much this moment, geopolitically and demographically, will turn into a lasting pivot toward India, bringing with it expanded economic opportunity for its vast work force.
Even as India tries to align its growing technological and economic capacity to capitalize on the Western tensions with China, it is determined to stick to its neutrality and maintain a balancing act between the United States and Russia. There is also the question of whether the West’s shift from China, the linchpin of the global economy, is a temporary recalibration or a more fundamental one.
In the end, Mr. Saran sees a tremendous opportunity.
“China took advantage of a favorable geopolitical moment to really transform itself by having access to technology, to capital, to markets led by the United States. It took advantage of that to build itself up,” Mr. Saran said. “This could be that moment for India.”
Beijing made clear its ambition to deploy advanced drones in 2019 when two jet-black drones were paraded through Tiananmen Square. Few analysts considered the drones fully operational at the time. (Greg Baker/AFP/) / Editing by Germán & CoChina readies supersonic spy drone unit, leaked document says
THE DISCORD LEAKS | China’s cutting-edge drone could give it a surveillance advantage during a possible military confrontation over Taiwan
TWP by Christian Shepherd, Vic Chiang, Pei-Lin Wu and Ellen Nakashima April 18, 2023 Beijing made clear its ambition to deploy advanced drones in 2019 when two jet-black drones were paraded through Tiananmen Square. Few analysts considered the drones fully operational at the time. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)
The Chinese military could soon deploy a high-altitude spy drone that travels at least three times the speed of sound, according to a leaked U.S. military assessment, a development that would dramatically strengthen China’s ability to conduct surveillance operations.
A secret document from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which has not previously been reported, shows the Chinese military is making technological advances that could help it target American warships around Taiwan and military bases in the region.
The document features satellite imagery dated Aug. 9 that shows two WZ-8 rocket-propelled reconnaissance drones at an air base in eastern China, about 350 miles inland from Shanghai. The drones are a cutting-edge surveillance system that could help China gather real-time mapping data to inform strategy or carry out missile strikes in a future conflict.
The assessment says the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had “almost certainly” established its first unmanned aerial vehicle unit at the base, which falls under the Eastern Theater Command, the branch of the Chinese military responsible for enforcing Beijing’s sovereignty claims over Taiwan.
The Washington Post obtained the assessment of the WZ-8 program from a trove of images of classified files posted on Discord, a group chat service popular with gamers, allegedly by a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
The Defense Department declined to comment. China’s Ministry of National Defense did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
Other documents in the trove detail a number of disclosures about Chinese spying and military modernization, including intelligence that revealed the existence of additional Chinese spy balloons and an assessment that Taiwan is ill-prepared to prevent early Chinese air superiority during an invasion.
This image is part of the leaked classified material that was circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. The Post informed the Defense Department that this imagery would be published with this story. A document, marked secret, highlights capabilities and notional flight paths of China's supersonic reconnaissance drone, along with satellite images of its home base at Liuan Airfield. (Obtained by Washington Post)
This latest revelation about the advancement comes as intensifying military aggression around Taiwan has heightened concern about a Chinese invasion on the self-governed island democracy.
CIA Director William J. Burns has said Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants the PLA to be capable of seizing Taiwan by 2027, although he added that this does not mean Xi will order an attack at that time.
Taiwan highly vulnerable to Chinese air attack, leaked documents show
Beijing introduced the WZ-8 drones in 2019 when two of the jet-black aircraft were paraded past Tiananmen Square during celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Communist Party-run People’s Republic of China. Few analysts considered the drones fully operational at the time.
Also included in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s assessment are possible flight paths for the drone as well as for the twin-engine H6-M Badger bomber used to launch it. After taking off from its home air base, the warplane would fly to just off China’s east coast before releasing the stealthy drone, which could then enter Taiwanese or South Korean airspace at a height of 100,000 feet and fly three times the speed of sound. The document does not detail how the drone is propelled but says “engine features are primarily associated with rocket fuel.”
A map of projected routes, labeled “not necessarily authoritative,” suggests ways the drone’s “Electro-optical” cameras and sensors could gather intelligence on Taiwan’s main island and the western side of South Korea including Seoul, the capital city. The use of synthetic aperture radar would allow it to map territory at night and foggy weather.
The drone’s primary use won’t be against Taiwan but against the United States and its military bases in the Pacific, said Chi Li-pin, director of the aeronautical systems research division at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, Taiwan’s military-run weapons developer. “It’s a weapon for anti-access and area denial,” he said.
Chi added that the aircraft does not currently appear to be designed to launch attacks, but he noted modifications could allow it to conduct strikes in future. “It is difficult to detect and intercept. The existing U.S. air-to-air weapons aren’t good enough,” he said.
Dean Cheng, a nonresident senior fellow with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said the disclosure shows China is developing a capability to monitor the entire Indo-Pacific region. “This is not just aimed at the United States or South Korea,” said Cheng, who had not seen the documents. “Japan has to worry about it. India has to worry about it. All Southeast Asia has to worry about it.”
China, he noted, is creating a range of high-tech systems for military use — from hypersonic weapons that can use drone reconnaissance for anti-ship purposes to antisatellite weapons that they could use to try to blind the United States. “Individually, none of these things are game-changers,” he said. “Taken together, we’re looking at a PLA that is developing a reconnaissance strike complex: Find the enemy, hit the enemy, kill the enemy.”
Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons
The airfield described in the document as “Liuan” appears to be a base in Dushan County of Lu’an city, according to coordinates in the document. (The first Chinese character in Lu’an is often pronounced ‘liu’ but it is ‘lu’ in this instance.)
It was originally built in 1970, part of leader Mao Zedong’s campaign to move crucial industries and military installations into mountainous regions, prompted after relations with the Soviet Union soured and left China’s communist leadership feeling vulnerable to attack. The hangars of the original air base, known then as the 8301 airfield, were burrowed into the hillside and had steel-plated doors that were 12 inches thick, according to Chinese state media.
A review of satellite imagery publicly available on Google Earth and provided to The Post by Planet Labs shows the base has expanded multiple times in recent years, with at least 18 new structures constructed after August 2020. Beginning in late February 2022, new, significantly wider thoroughfares that lead into the hills south of the runway were constructed. In some places, the new clearing is about 130 feet wide.
A satellite image taken on April 17 shows the expansion of an air base in the Chinese city Lu'an. (Planet Labs)
Enthusiasts who use open-source material to track the Chinese air force believe the base is home to a regiment of the Eastern Theater’s 10th bomber division, the branch most likely to conduct air attacks if China launches a full-scale assault on Taiwan.
Joseph Wen, a Taipei-based independent analyst who tracks military installations in China, says that the base was abandoned for years. It was even used as a filming location for a patriotic action film about the Sino-Japanese War.
But there have been clear signs since 2019 that the base has been brought back into service. Wen has tracked a flurry of construction activity, included widening the paths that lead to the southern cavern entrance to nearly 130 feet. The wingspan of the bomber plane used to launch the drone is 108 feet.
Image: Germán & CoCooperate with objective and ethical thinking…
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck attends a news conference to present a planned reform to the law on householding heating in Berlin, Germany, April 19, 2023. REUTERS/Christian MangGerman cabinet approves bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems
At a press conference, Economy Minister Robert Habeck assured reporters that the finance was guaranteed. Habeck declined to provide an estimate of the cost to the government, only saying that it would be "modest."
Reuters by Riham Alkousaa, and Markus Wacket, Berlin's ruling coalition last month agreed that almost all newly installed heating systems in Germany should run on 65% renewable energy from 2024, both in new and old buildings.
The plan is part of Germany's ambition to become climate neutral by 2045 as the construction sector was responsible for 112 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions last year or 15% of the country's emissions.
Houses could also use heat pumps that run on renewable electricity, district heating, electric heating or solar thermal systems as acceptable alternatives to fossil fuel heating, according to the bill, which was seen by Reuters.
The policy has met resistance from within Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition, with critics calling it too costly and a burden on low- and medium-income households and tenants.
Such a shift could cost Germans around 9.16 billion euros ($10 billion) annually until 2028, the draft bill showed. The costs would fall to 5 billion from 2029 as Berlin expects renewable energy expansion and a ramp up of heating pumps production to make the switch cheaper.
The government will offer a subsidy of 30% for residential properties occupied by owners and 10% extra if the owners opt for an earlier climate-friendly heating switch than required by law, regardless of the household income.
Homeowners who receive income-related welfare benefits could get 20% extra subsidy for the switch.
The money will come from the Climate and Transformation Fund, a supplementary budget to push green investments, with some 180 billion euros earmarked for 2023 to 2026.
"The financing is secured," Economy Minister Robert Habeck told journalists in a news conference presenting the bill. Habeck declined to give a figure of how much this would cost the government but the sum would be "moderate".
The bill gives some exemptions, for instance for homeowners who are over 80 years old and living in hardship.
Those who violate the new rules face a fine of 5,000 euros, said the draft law, which will be now be debated in parliament.
Germany's push to phase out gas in heating became more urgent after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine prompted Berlin to halt Russian fossil fuel imports.
Heating uses up more than 40% of Germany's annual gas consumption as almost half of the country's 41 million households heat with natural gas while almost 25% use heating oil.
"We're starting comparatively late with this. Other countries have done this earlier," Habeck said, citing the heating sector in Scandinavian countries that are much less reliant on fossil fuel to keep their homes warm.
The bill means Germany would have to shut down more than 90% of its 500,000-km (310,685-mile) gas distribution network in the next 20 years, a study by Agora think-tank showed on Tuesday.
Around 78% of Germans are against the planned law, a survey by Forsa pollster published by ntv and RTL broadcasters showed on Wednesday. About 62% of those surveyed expect heating bills to rise after a switch to renewables, the poll showed.
Germany's association of local utilities, VKU, said the law was an "emotional roller coaster" as the time given for the changes it required was too short.
"The deadlines should therefore be extended. At least transitional periods are urgently needed," VKU said in a statement.
Environmental group Greenpeace called the bill a "milestone" for climate protection in Germany, and was long "overdue".
"In this way, Germany can achieve the climate protection goals in the future, which the building sector has exceeded for three years," it said.