News round-up, Tuesday, January 10, 2023
“The World Bank has cast a further shadow over the already worrying expectations for the performance of the global economy in 2023. The World Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday by the institution downgraded its forecast for global economic growth this year from 3% to 1.7% after revising downwards its forecasts for 95% of developed economies and 70% of emerging economies.”
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The World Bank warns that the global economy faces two recessions in the same decade for the first time in 80 years.
Downgrades its global growth scenario for 2023 from 3% to 1.7%, but warns that any setback would push the economy into recession.
He downgrades his forecasts for 95% of developed economies and 70% of emerging economies, for which he predicts a bleak future.
US economist and president of the World Bank, David Malpass
The US economist and President of the World Bank, David Malpass ABC
B. P. V.
Madrid
10/01/2023
ABC.es
The World Bank has cast a further shadow over the already worrying expectations for the performance of the global economy in 2023. The World Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday by the institution downgraded its forecast for global economic growth this year from 3% to 1.7% after revising downwards its forecasts for 95% of developed economies and 70% of emerging economies.
Its forecast for the advanced economies has gone from an expected growth of 2.5% a few months ago to a pyrrhic 0.5%, with a forecast of a 0.5% decline for the US economy, stagnation for the euro area, which includes Spain (previously 1.9%) and growth of 4.3% for China (compared with 5.2% previously).
However, the most worrying aspect is not the new forecasts revealed this Tuesday by the World Bank but the expectation that these may deteriorate further throughout 2023. The note released by the World Bank points out that "given fragile economic conditions, any further adverse developments, such as higher-than-expected inflation, abrupt interest rate hikes to contain it, a resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic, or an increase in geopolitical tensions, could push the global economy into recession".
If this scenario were to occur, the phenomenon would take on historic proportions, as the global economy would chain two economic recessions in the same decade, something that has not happened since World War II or, as the World Bank points out, since 80 years ago.
The IMF warns of the risk of global recession and lowers the growth forecast for Spain to 1.3%.
The stagnation of the world economy, which will ease somewhat in 2024 when the institution forecasts growth of 2.7%, will have very negative effects on emerging economies, partly because the high indebtedness of developed economies will concentrate a large part of the available capital, which is more reduced in a context of monetary policy contraction. "Emerging and developing countries face a multi-year period of slow growth driven by heavy debt burdens and weak investment as global capital is absorbed by advanced economies facing extremely high public debt levels and rising interest rates. Weak growth and business investment will exacerbate already devastating setbacks in education, health, poverty and infrastructure and the growing demands of climate change," says World Bank president David Malpass in a statement in the Bank's release.
Biden Lawyers Found Classified Material at His Former Office
The White House said it was cooperating as the Justice Department scrutinizes the matter.
“A small number” of classified documents were discovered in President Biden’s former office at a Washington think tank, the White House said.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
By Peter Baker, Charlie Savage, Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman
Jan. 9, 2023
NYT
WASHINGTON — President Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said on Monday, prompting the Justice Department to scrutinize the situation to determine how to proceed.
The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.
The documents found in Mr. Biden’s former office, which date to his time as vice president, were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2, when they were packing files at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, according to the White House. Officials did not describe precisely how many documents were involved, what kind of information they included or their level of classification.
The White House said in a statement that the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives and Records Administration on the same day the documents were found “in a locked closet” and that the agency retrieved them the next morning.
Mr. Biden had periodically used an office at the center from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 presidential campaign, and the lawyers were packing it up in preparations to vacate the space. The discovery was not in response to any prior request from the archives, and there was no indication that Mr. Biden or his team resisted efforts to recover any sensitive documents.
Mr. Garland has assigned John R. Lausch Jr., the U.S. attorney in Chicago who was appointed by Mr. Trump, to look into the matter, according to two people familiar with the decision, confirming a CBS News report. Mr. Lausch has been scrutinizing the situation since November, according to one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Two people familiar with the matter said that Mr. Lausch has been conducting a so-called initial investigation under a Justice Department regulation that allows an attorney general to appoint a special counsel, a special prosecutor who operates with a measure of day-to-day independence to conduct a particularly sensitive investigation.
Under the regulation, an initial investigation consists of “such factual inquiry or legal research as the attorney general deems appropriate” to “be conducted in order to better inform the decision” about whether a matter warrants the appointment of a special counsel.
The White House statement said that it “is cooperating” with the department but did not explain why Mr. Biden’s team waited more than two months to announce the discovery of the documents, which came a week before the midterm congressional elections when the news would have been an explosive last-minute development.
It also came shortly before Mr. Garland’s Nov. 18 appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel to take over the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s failure to return a large number of classified documents that were sent to his Florida residence and club, Mar-a-Lago, when he left office — even after being subpoenaed.
At the time, Mr. Garland cited the fact that Mr. Trump had just announced he was running for president again, and that Mr. Biden had indicated that he is likely to run as well, as justification to transfer control of the investigation to Mr. Smith. (An attorney general retains final say over whether anyone is charged with a crime by a special counsel.)
Mr. Trump jumped on Monday’s disclosure. “When is the FBI going to raid the many houses of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”
That appeared to refer to Mr. Trump’s disputed claim that before leaving office he declassified all the documents the F.B.I. found when it searched Mar-a-Lago in August. No credible evidence has emerged to support that claim, and his lawyers have resisted repeating it in court, where there are professional consequences for lying. In any case, the potential charges the F.B.I. cited in its search warrant affidavit do not depend on whether intentionally mishandled documents were classified.
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But while Mr. Trump tried to suggest a parallel, the circumstances of the Biden discovery as described appeared to be significantly different. Mr. Biden had neither been notified that he had official records nor been asked to return them, the White House said, and his team promptly revealed the discovery to the archives and returned them within a day.
“The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the archives,” Richard A. Sauber, a special White House counsel, wrote in the statement. “Since that discovery, the president’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden administration documents are appropriately in the possession of the archives.”
By contrast, in 2021 the archives repeatedly asked Mr. Trump to turn over large numbers of documents it had determined were missing. He put the agency off for months, then allowed it to retrieve 15 boxes of material in early 2022, including scores of classified documents, but it was later discovered that he kept more.
Eventually, the Justice Department obtained a grand jury subpoena for documents with classification markings remaining in Mr. Trump’s possession, and a lawyer for Mr. Trump turned over several more and told the department there were none left. But an August search by the F.B.I. found 103 more marked as classified — along with thousands of other official records.
The search warrant affidavit that the Justice Department submitted suggested that Mr. Trump was under investigation for obstruction, along with possible violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the willful unauthorized retention of national security documents and failure “to deliver them on demand” to a government official entitled to take custody of them.
Still, whatever the legal questions, as a matter of political reality, the discovery will make the perception of the Justice Department potentially charging Mr. Trump over his handling of the documents more challenging. As a special counsel, Mr. Smith is handling that investigation, along with one into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, under Mr. Garland’s supervision.
Moreover, the discovery will fuel the fires on Capitol Hill, where Republicans who have just taken the House majority were already planning multiple investigations of the Biden administration, including the decision to have the F.B.I. search Mar-a-Lago.
Representative James R. Comer, the Kentucky Republican who is in line to become the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said on Monday that he would investigate the discovery of the classified documents in Mr. Biden’s office, vowing to send letters demanding information within 48 hours.
“How ironic,” Mr. Comer said in an interview. “Now we learn that Joe Biden had documents that are considered classified. I wonder, is the National Archives going to trigger a raid of the White House tonight? Or of the Biden Center?” He added, “So now we’re going to take that information that we requested on the Mar-a-Lago raid, and we’re going to expand it to include the documents that Joe Biden has.”
The top Democrat on the committee, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, downplayed the matter, saying that he had confidence that Mr. Garland had taken appropriate steps to review the circumstances and that Mr. Biden’s lawyers “appear to have taken immediate and proper action” to notify the archives of the documents.
The department’s leadership decided to make the unusual choice of assigning the case outside the jurisdictions involved because Mr. Lausch was a Republican appointee and his work would likelier be seen as impartial, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Mr. Biden had kept Mr. Lausch in office at the request of the two Democratic senators from Illinois, Richard J. Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, because he was investigating Michael J. Madigan, the former speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, during the presidential transition in 2021. In March, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Madigan, a Democrat, on 22 counts of racketeering and corruption charges.
A former top prosecutor appointed during President Barack Obama’s administration said the attorney general should turn the Biden matter over to a special counsel, just as he did the Trump investigation.
“The circumstances of Biden’s possession of classified documents appear different than Trump’s, but Merrick Garland must appoint a special counsel to investigate,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017. “Merrick Garland waited too long to let us know he had opened this investigation,” he added. “To keep the confidence of the country, you need to be transparent and timely.”
A department spokesman had no comment on the matter, and would not say whether the national security division, which has spearheaded the investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of documents at his Florida residence and resort, was also involved.
With Mr. Lausch investigating the handling of classified information in Mr. Biden’s office, and David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, investigating the president’s son, Hunter Biden, both Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys who have remained at the department are now scrutinizing the Biden family.
Luke Broadwater and Katie Benner contributed reporting.
Supporting Ukraine to ensure peace
Editorial
The decision of France, the United States and Germany to deliver light armored combat vehicles to Ukraine reflects a shared commitment but also raises questions about the danger of escalation.
Published on January 10, 2023
Le Monde
In the war imposed on them by Vladimir Putin, one that puts the survival of their country at stake, the Ukrainians need the steadfast and appropriate support of the West. France's January 4 decision to deliver light armored combat vehicles to Ukraine marks a new stage in the assistance provided by democratic countries, as it was followed the next day by the United States and Germany. It is no longer just a matter of supplying Kyiv with defensive weapons, such as troop transport vehicles or artillery equipment, but with the means to support offensives. The French AMX-10 RCs, like the American Bradleys and German Marders, are vehicles armed with guns designed to be used as close to the front line as possible.
This evolution of the equipment delivered does not reflect a desire for escalation, but appears to be in line with the progression of Ukrainian war objectives. It is a question of helping the attacked country not only defend itself and reach a negotiation in the best possible situation, but to recover its entire territory by driving back the Russian army, and subjecting those responsible for crimes to international justice.
Russia's retreat on the ground since the summer of 2022 and Mr. Putin's pullback from red lines that are supposed to trigger retaliation seem to justify this strategy. The same goes for the worrying prospect of a large-scale Russian offensive at the end of winter, made possible by the new mobilization decreed this fall by Moscow. While the front seems to have stabilized, with more than 100,000 dead and wounded on each side according to various estimates, everything is happening as if the combatants were engaged in a race for equipment, training and personnel. The example of the false truce announced by Mr. Putin for Orthodox Christmas only reinforced the Western will to give Ukraine all the means to counter new aggressions.
Danger of escalation
While the almost simultaneous announcement of the French, American and German decisions to deliver light armored vehicles reflects a joint and coordinated commitment at a crucial moment, such a development is not without risk. It raises the question of the danger of escalation and the point at which the current proxy war could degenerate into a direct confrontation between the West and Russia. This threshold has shifted since the conflict began, but it cannot rise indefinitely. The whole point is to help the Ukrainians, without feeding the Russian rhetoric presenting Western democracies as aggressors.
Although the French decision has the benefit of removing any ambiguity about the position of Paris in the conflict, it also raises the question of its political framework and the information provided to our fellow citizens. Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, Parliament has never discussed the French position in depth. It is time to involve the national legislature in decisions that engage the country in a matter that is fundamental to its security. In order to avoid any risk of extended confrontation on European soil, the West has no other choice than to do everything possible to prevent Mr. Putin from succeeding in his invasion.
The rapid end of the significant suffering linked to this war requires unwavering support for Ukraine. Because it needs to be approved over the long term, this difficult balance deserves to be clarified and debated.