Middle East insurance pullback, beyond BRI, Strike Germany & Chile as the end point in the commodity chain of fast fashion.
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Middle East pullback
Global reinsurers have begun inserting cancellation provisions into policies to protect against a full-scale Middle East conflict, a move that threatens to further drive up costs and risks for businesses operating in the region. The pullback from reinsurers, who share risks with primary insurers and play a crucial role in the global economy, reflects mounting concern in the financial sector over the direction of the war between Israel and Hamas that began in October. The get-out clauses were inserted into some contracts drawn up with insurers as part of turn-of-the-year policy renegotiations, four market participants told the Financial Times. Such clauses were entirely new and had not been used before, two of them said. If triggered, this would mean that the insurer would not from that point have reinsurance coverage for any newly underwritten premises or other asset — such as, for example, a commercial building damaged by a rocket attack. The increased risk would then likely be passed on to the client in the form of higher premiums or reduced coverage. “The risk of something going out of control is extremely high,” said an executive at a big reinsurer. “The insurance industry has a problem in that region for the foreseeable future.” The global insurance sector has about $10bn of exposure to Israel through such political violence and terrorism policies, according to industry estimates.
Source: FT
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Martin Sandbu on Europe’s need for a grand bargain
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From One Belt One Road to Belts of Various Kinds On Things Other than Roads
A decade ago Xi Jinping, China’s leader, declared his intention to make a world-girdling web of infrastructure China’s gift to the planet. From the start, South-East Asia was to serve as a—perhaps the—main focus of what came to be called the Belt and Road Initiative (bri). The region of 690m people was China’s backyard. South-East Asia needed trillions of dollars of infrastructure and other development. China-centred supply chains increasingly ran through the ten-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations (asean). Some 60m-70m ethnic-Chinese citizens of South-East Asia, many of them successful businessmen, could help China’s mission. Ten years on, there is no missing the wave of Chinese money that has broken over the region, bringing giant earth-moving machines, Chinese construction crews, Chinese business folk and diplomats, and not a few criminal chancers. Many bri projects have gone well, bringing roads, railway tracks and power plants. In Cambodia, a new Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville expressway has cut the journey from the capital to the south coast from five hours to two. But others have provided poor returns. … As the bri wave recedes around the world, stories such as that can be found in many regions. Yet Chinese commitments in South-East Asia remain substantial, possibly amounting to more than $20bn last year. This leads to some striking conclusions, at least as far as the bri’s critics in the West are concerned. First, though Mr Xi may have hoped Belt and Road would be a strategic means to further China’s influence in South-East Asia, no grand plan is apparent. Rather, Chinese state-owned firms suffering from overcapacity at home often rushed to make money in the region, with diverse results. Second, South-East Asian countries have not only grown more cautious over their commercial dealings with China, but also—at least in the case of larger countries—more confident. Third, far from spurning fresh Chinese approaches, as some in the West hoped they would, many asean members continue to welcome them. Yet they increasingly do so on terms more obviously beneficial to their own economies. They are also encouraging different sorts of Chinese investment. Infrastructure deals are flagging. Chinese investment in technology, renewable energy and electric vehicles is increasing.
Source: Economist
What’s in Those Huge Suitcases? $125 Million in Cash
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Frances Woodman, self portrait 1976
No! Iraq doesnt need to import millions of tons of wheat!
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Chile as the end-point of fast fashion
Each day in Iquique’s port, giant cranes pluck containers full of discarded clothing from the decks of ships and deposit them onto flatbed trucks. No one really knows exactly how much clothing passes through the port every year; estimates range from 60,000 to 44 million tons. Next, they head to the nearby Free Trade Zone, known locally as “Zofri,” where trailers back into the warehouses of 52 used-clothes importers and forklift operators transfer sealed bales of clothing, or fardos, inside. Chile is the biggest importer of secondhand clothing in South America, and between 2020 and 2021 it was the fastest-growing importer of used clothing in the world. The port of Iquique is an established tax-free zone, incentivizing this booming industry of castaway textiles.
Source: Wired
What and when was the civil rights movement? - the sort of question strewn into a student essay that enlightens your morning.
What was the civil rights movement? When did it begin and end, and what did it achieve? As time distances historians from the events they study, periods that once appeared sharply defined become fuzzy at the edges, and changes that contemporaries thought sudden and profound seem less impressive than underlying continuities. The popular "Montgomery to Memphis" time-frame brackets the movement with the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., 19
Adam Fairclough, “Historians and the Civil Rights Movement” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Dec., 1990), pp. 387-398 (12 pages)
Strike Germany
More than 500 global artists, filmmakers, writers and culture workers have announced a push against Germany’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, calling on creatives to step back from collaborating with German state-funded associations. Launched this week, the campaign, backed by French author and Nobel Prize for literature winner Annie Ernaux, and Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, alleges Germany has adopted “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine”. Other artists involved are the American actress, Indya Moore, British Turner Prize winner Tai Shani, and Lebanese alternative rock singer Hamed Sinno of the popular disbanded group Mashrou’ Leila. The German authorities’ actions over the past 97 days of war, the signatories say, have had a chilling effect throughout the nation, especially in the arts.
Source: AlJazeera
Francesca Woodman (1958-1981)
It has been said that she was eccentric, introverted, passionate, charismatic, provocative, very theatrical, that she was frantically obsessed with her image and with the search for the self. We're talking about the indecipherable Francesca Woodman (Denver, 1958 – New York, 1981), whose monographic exhibition opens the autumn season of the Canal Foundation with 'Ser un ángel / On being an angel', which features 102 photographs and six short films. With an innate talent, Woodman created a body of photographic work loaded with symbolism. Her images focused primarily on the female form in general and on herself in particular, with portraits of herself naked, twisted, semi-hidden, disguised and blurred in abandoned, almost spooky settings. In her photographs we find references to a fragile and ethereal beauty, at once gloomy and, in many cases, set in lovely and decadent surroundings. After her suicide in 1981, Woodman had a cult following, and her work continues to generate debate and unanswered questions. All this is part of that shroud of mystery that surrounds her and is present in each of the photographs in this exhibition, whose title refers to one of the artist's favorite themes: 'being an angel'.
Source: Time Out
Self-deceit #1 Rome Italy 1976
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