YAOUNDÉ (ANP/RTR) - De Eurocommissaris voor Handel zegt een "zeer positief" gesprek met de Amerikaanse handelsgezant Jamieson Greer te hebben gehad. Ze spraken onder andere over toegang tot kritieke mineralen en importheffingen, zei Maroš Šefčovič bij een top van de Wereldhandelsorganisatie (WTO) in Kameroen. De ontmoeting volgt enkele dagen op de goedkeuring van het Europees Parlement voor de handelsdeal die de VS en de Europese Commissie de afgelopen zomer sloten.
Het goede gesprek laat volgens Šefčovič zien dat zowel de VS als de EU zich aan de overeenkomst willen houden, "ondanks turbulentie op het wereldtoneel". Hij benadrukte dat de EU de komende tijd graag werkt aan handelsverdragen met andere landen "en aan het verlagen van de tarieven voor de partners met wie we al handelen."
De EU zoekt toenadering tot andere landen nu handel met de VS moeilijker is geworden door importheffingen van de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump. Volgens de handelsdeal met de VS belasten de Amerikanen de meeste import uit de EU nog altijd met 15 procent.
Experts say paid participants are using automated tools to generate unreliable survey responses at scale
If you had been keeping tabs on the news about church attendance in Britain lately, you would be forgiven for thinking the country was in the midst of a Christian revival.
Stories of swelling congregations, filled with young people returning to the flock, spurred on by everything from social media to a rise in bible sales appeared to be confirmed by a 2024 report from the Bible Society.
Continue reading...AI-generated footage depicts group of men performing a corrido, singing phrases including ‘return to your roots’
An AI-generated video from the US embassy in Mexico encouraging migrants to “self-deport” has sparked disbelief and outrage online.
The video posted this week on official embassy social media accounts depicts a group of men wearing black caps and sporting tattoos performing a kind of traditional Mexican ballad known as a corrido.
Continue reading...When did care homes come to be seen as recession-proof investments? And who pays the price?
On a spring morning in 1987, a 30-year-old man named Robert Kilgour pulled up beside a row of foamy cherry trees in the town of Kirkcaldy, on Scotland’s east coast, to visit an old hotel. The building was four storeys of blackened Victorian sandstone. Kilgour was a big man, a voluble Scot with a knack for storytelling. He already owned a hotel in Edinburgh but wanted to branch into property development and was planning to turn this old place, Station Court, into apartments. A few months after he completed the purchase, however, the Scottish government scrapped a grant for developers that he had been counting on. He had just sunk most of his personal savings into a useless building in a sodden, post-industrial town. He urgently needed a new idea.
Care homes weren’t so different from hotels, Kilgour thought. And the beauty was, their elderly residents were unlikely to get drunk, steal the soap dispensers or invite sex workers back to their rooms. Turning Station Court into a care home seemed like the best way out of a bad situation. Kilgour arranged a bank loan and in June 1989 he launched Four Seasons Health Care, taking the name from a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan where he had once dined.
Continue reading...Prime minister is scrambling to clean up her government after youth vote powered a damaging referendum defeat
Filippo Michelini was having a drink at San Calisto, a popular bar in Rome’s Trastevere neighbourhood on Wednesday night. As he chatted to his friends, Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government was reeling from a failed referendum, and her beleaguered tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè, had just resigned.
Michelini, a 29-year-old computer scientist who lives in Brussels, was spending a few days in the Italian capital after returning home last weekend to cast his ballot in the plebiscite on judicial changes.
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