CIC executive says China regulator mismanaged market crash - Bloomberg

China's securities regulators mismanaged the country's stock market crash and are learning how to better manage the market, the head of public equities at China's sovereign wealth fund said on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported.
"It was a disaster how they managed public equity, it created turbulence," Bloomberg quoted Larry Zhang of China Investment Corp. (CIC) saying at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California.
China's benchmark stock indexes fell over 40 percent from June to January, with regulators widely blamed for mishandling the crisis.
The head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) was removed in February after an attempt to institute a stock market circuit breaker at the beginning of the year was scrapped after three days.
Calls to CIC's Beijing headquarters went unanswered after office hours. CSRC did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
(Reporting by Elias Glenn; Editing by Richard Borsuk)

How 'Stop Trump' failed to halt the Republican front-runner

By Michelle Conlin and Steve Holland 

Republican John Hammond III had made no secret of his distaste for Donald Trump and his desire to halt his march to the party's presidential nomination, telling the Indianapolis Star newspaper in March that the mogul was "unfit" to lead the country.But the Republican National Committee member, a partner at law firm Ice Miller, said no anti-Trump group ever reached out to him, nor did he see any evidence that such groups were in the state until just a few days before voting in Indiana's primary election. By the time some direct mail and TV ads popped up, it was "too late" to make a difference, he said.
"There was never really any early ‘Stop Trump’ effort in Indiana," he told Reuters.
Trump became the Republican party's presumptive nominee on Tuesday with his resounding win in Indiana's primary, which led his main rival U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to drop out and heaped pressure on distant third-place contender John Kasich, the Ohio governor, to do the same.
In the process, Trump dealt a seemingly fatal blow to the high-profile effort known as "Stop Trump" or "Never Trump" launched by conservative Republicans.
The movement - led by the conservative anti-tax nonprofit Club for Growth and the Our Principles PAC - for months failed to significantly slow Trump's momentum and now appears to be on death watch, political operatives and at least three officials involved in the movement say.
It emerged over the U.S. winter as initial skepticism over Trump's chances turned to anxiety among conservatives, who view many of the Manhattan real estate mogul's policy pledges as a liberal threat to their low-tax, low-spending principles.
But from the start it was hobbled by poor coordination, the lack of a single, influential public leader, and the absence of an agreed-upon alternative to Trump, according to leaders in the movement as well as Republican operatives familiar with it.
“You have to have a plan of action to deal with him,” said Republican strategist Doug Heye, a Trump opponent who has ties to people in the movement. “And it appears no one really did.”
Publicly, leaders in the Stop Trump movement dispute the notion that they were ineffective, saying their efforts in Wisconsin helped head off a Trump win in April. They also say the groups communicate effectively with one another and that they will continue fighting despite the Indiana results.
"We will continue to educate voters about Trump until he, or another candidate, wins the support of a majority of delegates to the Convention," Katie Packer, chair of the Our Principles PAC said in a statement on Tuesday.
But, in private, three top officials associated with the movement conceded that Indiana was a “do or die” moment.
LATE START, LACK OF COORDINATION
The movement suffered a major setback when Republican mega donors declined to play the role of “Trump Slayers.”
Both casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers, decided not to repeat their experience in 2012, when they lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on Republican candidates only to see no returns.
Deprived of such major financial backers, Club for Growth and Our Principles PAC together spent only $27 million on anti-Trump messaging, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Super PAC have spent at least $78 million so far, according to FEC reports.
The groups and their associates focused their messaging over the winter and spring on television and social media ads and Twitter blasts highlighting Trump’s comments about women being “bimbos,” “dogs” and “fat pigs,” as well as his statements supporting universal health care and higher taxes.
Throughout their campaign, the two groups did not coordinate directly with one another or even converse on a regular basis, according to one Club for Growth official.
It wasn’t until last week that Our Principles PAC and the Stop Trump effort in California, led by political consultant Rob Stutzman, even joined forces. Officials at Club for Growth said they weren’t aware of that California effort.
Some veteran Republican operatives said Our Principles PAC had been a waste of time and money.
“They’ve had no leadership. They’ve spent tens of millions of dollars by now and gotten zero message, zero movement," said one Republican familiar with the workings of the movement. "The whole thing has been a disaster from the beginning.”
Many donors, like Trump's rival candidates, underestimated the tycoon, believing he would burn out after his early successes, Republican consultants say.
Those who did come forward publicly to support the Stop Trump movement, such as Chicago Cubs owners and Our Principles PAC funders Joe and Marlene Ricketts, were swiftly treated to Trump’s social media wrath.
“They better be careful,” Trump said of the Ricketts in a Tweet in February. ”They have a lot to hide!”
By March, other wealthy families who had donated to the cause were asking reporters not to identify them in stories anymore because they didn’t want their spouses and children to face “abuse" from the Trump campaign.
“I don’t think you can underestimate how effective Donald’s bullying has been, even among wealthy donors,” said one top official at Club for Growth.
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski dismissed the notion that donors had been fearful, saying the identity of campaign contributors has long been public information.
(Additional reporting by Emily Flitter; Editing by Stuart Grudgings) 

North Korea completes work at missile sub shipyard: US think tank

SEOUL (AFP) - 

Recent satellite images suggest North Korea has completed the external refurbishment of a shipyard dedicated to building and launching a new class of ballistic missile submarines, a US think tank said Wednesday.

While it is unlikely that any such vessel would become operational before 2020, the North's efforts to develop a working submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) is clearly "making progress", according to the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

A credible SLBM capability would take North Korea's nuclear strike threat to a new level, allowing deployment far beyond the Korean peninsula and the potential to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack.

Last month, one of the North's experimental GORAE-class submarines carried out an SLBM test in the East Sea (Sea of Japan), launching a missile that travelled around 19 miles (30 kilometres).

South Korea deemed the test a failure as the missile appeared to have exploded, but analysts at the US Korea Institute said it was a success.

"It was probably intended to be limited, focusing upon the submarine's launch systems, missile ignition sequence and initial guidance operations rather than a full operational test," it said, predicting further similar launches this year before a "full-range" flight test.

Satellite pictures dated April 28, five days after the test, showed post-launch maintenance activity being carried out on the submarine at the North's Sinpo South Shipyard.

They also indicated that external work on the yard's submarine construction halls had been completed, and a ramp where new vessels are launched was nearly finished, the institute said.

"When complete, the North will be able to build and launch submarines much larger than the GORAE-class -- including a new class of ballistic missile submarines," it added.

South Korea is particularly concerned by the North's SLBM development, and its defence minister, Han Min-Koo warned Tuesday that Seoul had been slow to respond.

"I don't think there's much time left for us to come up with means to cope with the threat from North Korea's SLBM," Han told a parliamentary committee.

© 2016 AFP

Canadian city evacuated over wildfire

MONTREAL (AFP) - 

All 100,000 residents of the Canadian city of Fort McMurray have been ordered to leave town as fire sweeps through the oil sands region.

"North edge of [the] fire is growing rapidly. All of Fort McMurray is under a mandatory evacuation order," emergency services announced, noting that the airport was spared from the order.

Hours earlier, a more limited alert saw authorities evacuate 30,000 people.

© 2016 AFP

Venezuela's Maduro okays referendum if signatures validated

CARACAS (AFP) - 

Venezuela's embattled President Nicolas Maduro said Tuesday he would allow a referendum vote on removing him from power if electoral officials validate the 1.85 million signatures submitted on a petition.

Opposition leaders on Monday had presented reams of signatures to election authorities calling for a referendum to remove the man they blame for a crushing economic crisis.

"If on this second step, they say that the signatures were collected, we head to a referendum, period," Maduro said in his weekly radio address hours before the electoral council was set to start inspecting the signatures.

People across this oil-exporting South American nation fed up with food shortages, soaring inflation and now a paralyzing electricity crunch have flocked to sign a petition for a recall referendum, according to the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable.

The MUD said it had presented 1.85 million signatures -- more than nine times the number needed to launch the referendum process -- to the National Electoral Board.

And if Maduro's latest comments sounded conciliatory, those of the man named as head of the signature verification board were not.

"The process starts tomorrow," said board chair Jorge Rodriguez, on the president's weekly television show.

"In a few days, it is going to come out that they inflated the figure for the number of signatures they handed in, by a million."

Maduro's opponents are racing to hold a recall referendum before the end of the year.

Under Venezuela's constitution, after January 2017 a successful recall vote would transfer power to Maduro's vice president rather than trigger new elections.

The constitution gives the authorities five days to count the signatures collected by the opposition and five days to verify them.

If the electoral board accepts the signatures as valid -- far from a sure bet -- the opposition will then have to collect four million more for the board to organize the vote.

Once-booming Venezuela, which has the world's largest proven oil reserves, has plunged into economic chaos as global crude prices have collapsed.

The import-dependent country faces acute shortages of food and basic goods like toilet paper due to a lack of foreign currency.

The state-led economy has been in recession since 2013 and shrank 5.7 percent last year. The government said inflation came in at more than 180 percent in 2015.

Maduro was elected president by a razor-thin margin in 2013. A recent poll found that more than two thirds of Venezuelans want him to leave office.

by Maria Isabel Sanchez

© 2016 AFP

Wave of dead sea creatures hits Chile's beaches

SANTIAGO (AFP) - 

Heaps of dead whales, salmon and sardines blamed on the El Nino freak weather phenomenon have clogged Chile's Pacific beaches in recent months.

Last year, scientists were shocked when more than 300 whales turned up dead on remote bays of the southern coast. It was the first in a series of grim finds.

At the start of this year, a surge in algae in the water choked to death an estimated 40,000 tons of salmon in the Los Lagos region, where the Andes tower over lakes and green farming valleys down to the coast.

That is about 12 percent of annual salmon production in Chile, the world's second-biggest producer of the fish after Norway.

This month, some 8,000 tons of sardines were washed up at the mouth of the Queule river. And thousands of dead clams piled up on the coast of Chiloe Island.

Authorities blamed a "red tide" of algae.

They banned fishing in the affected region, putting thousands of fishermen out of work.

"We have red tides every year in southern Chile, but this time it reached further north," said Jorge Navarro, a researcher at the marine institute IDEAL.

"It affected bivalve populations (such as clams) that had never before been exposed like this" to the algae, he said.

On the shores of Santa Maria Island off the center off Chile's long coast, cuttlefish have been washed up dead in the thousands.

Various beaches in the center of the country were closed meanwhile as the specimens of the dreaded Portuguese Man-of-War jellyfish, normally foreign to the area, floated nearby.

- Shifting oceans -

Scientists largely blame the anomalies on El Nino, a disruptive weather phenomenon that comes with warming sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific.

With its 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) of Pacific coastline, Chile is particularly exposed to the effects of El Nino, which strikes every few years.

"We think that a common factor in the deaths of creatures in southern Chile, in the salmon farms and in fish off the coast is the El Nino phenomenon," said experts at the Chilean fisheries institute IFOP.

The current El Nino "has been classed as one of the most intense in the past 65 years," they told AFP in a statement.

Warmer sea water can lead to greater quantities of algae. They kill others species by consuming oxygen in the water or filling it with toxins.

"The Chilean ocean is shifting and changing," said Sergio Palma, an oceanographer at Valparaiso Catholic University.

"There has been a series of events that indicate an El Nino which is making its presence felt in many ways."

- Fish farming impact -

But scientists also suspect other causes for the mass destruction of the sea creatures.

The huge toll of whales last year "could be caused by a natural ecological process" that may be nothing to do with what killed the sardines and clams, said Laura Farias, an oceanographer at Concepcion University.

"There is no ecological, oceanographic or climatic explanation" linking the whales to the other incidents, she said.

She suspects the growth of fish farming in Chile's southern Patagonia region is to blame for killing the salmon and clams.

"There are studies indicating that in Patagonia the greater occurrence of toxic blooms could be a consequence of aquaculture."

Various scientists have said the current El Nino seems to be subsiding, causing the surface of the sea to cool slowly.

The mass destruction of sea life has been a wake-up call, however.

"Chile still lacks information about the sea," said Valesca Montes, a fisheries specialist at the Chilean branch of the World Wildlife Fund.

"It has to invest in oceanographic studies, so that we can predict certain events" and be better prepared for climate change.

by Giovanna Fleitas

© 2016 AFP

To experience Washington's ugly underbelly, ride the metro

WASHINGTON (AFP) - 

Be it election time or not, Americans love to groan about Washington. They dismiss it as mired in nothing-works, nothing-gets-done gridlock. But the dysfunction runs deeper. Literally.

To taste another kind of inertia in the seat of world power, ride the city's awful, bumbling subway.

Murphy's law rules on the busiest US metro system after New York's: anything that can go wrong does go wrong on a once-admired but now-decaying network that carries more than 700,000 people a day.

Its main woes? Money, management and a design foible that makes for easy mayhem.

Trains, tracks, switches, brand new escalators -- you name it -- are always breaking down. Simple daily commutes morph into draining odysseys in a work-obsessed town where everybody's in a hurry.

Lights in cars go out, suddenly at times. Trains seem to be running fine, then abruptly stop, a problem is reported, and exhale their load of irate travelers. At rush hour on a bad day, station platforms can turn into seas of stranded people.

After a recent spate of fire and smoke incidents in tunnels, many users wonder if the system, now 40 years old, is even safe anymore.

"Every morning that I know I am going to be riding the train, I tell my wife which stations I will be going through so she will know, just in case something happens," Tom Broadman, a 49-year-old IT worker, said while riding a noisy, screeching Red Line train headed downtown.

"It's that bad. It's a nightmare."

"I actually changed jobs just to avoid having to use the metro," adds John Cunningham, a 28-year-old bank employee. "It's pathetic."

Bottom line: many Washingtonians find it appalling that a capital city from which vast military and diplomatic power are projected around the world cannot move trains reliably and safely from Point A to Point B.

On March 16, with just hours' notice, the entire system shut down for an unprecedented 29 hours so crews could inspect electrical cables that have sparked several blazes.

- Major flaws -

Things were not always this ugly. Metrorail, as the subway system is called, opened in March 1976 to much fanfare.

Its quiet, gleaming trains and high, arched station ceilings stood as a futuristic symbol of city and national pride in the year America celebrated its bicentennial.

"I remember riding the Metro for the first time and it was this shiny, new ? it's like 'the Jetsons'. Like, 'Oh my God, this is the future,'" said Jack Evans, chairman of the board of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs Metrorail and the city's buses, recalling the summer of 1976 and the Hanna-Barbera science-fiction cartoon series.

But the system was created with two chinks that have proven costly as the subway expanded to keep pace with the metropolitan area's population growth, and money for repairs and upkeep became increasingly scarce.

First, while other subway systems in America were built with three or four tracks, Washington's has just two. This was done to save money.

That means that when a train breaks down or track work needs to be done, trains moving in opposite directions have to take turns sharing the same track and ensuing travel delays can be very long -- a major gripe for riders.

- Scrounging for money -

Then there is money, and geography. Metrorail is unique in that it spans three jurisdictions -- Washington, and the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, home to hundreds of thousands of people who work in the nation's capital.

Representatives of all three sit on the WMATA board, as do people from the federal government. This four-headed structure complicates decision-making and has been criticized as diluting accountability for the sad state of Metrorail.

Most of the board's 16 members have no hands-on experience with mass transit; they are political appointees.

What is more, Metrorail lacks so-called "dedicated funding" for its $1.8 billion yearly operating budget: a tax or fee whose revenue goes only to keep the trains up and running.

Instead, Evans said, "Every year I have to go, Metro has to go, to three different jurisdictions to get money."

Plus, Metro needs billions of dollars in coming years to pay for improvement projects like new cars -- most of those in use now are the original ones from 1976 -- and a new tunnel under the Potomac River, Evans said.

"They are not things that it would be nice if we could do them. They are essential things, things you must do, and I don't have the money," Evans said.

He said the system is still mechanically safe but no longer a reliable way to get someplace on time.

Things will probably get worse before they get better, Evans added.

Paul Wiedefeld, who used to run the Baltimore-Washington international airport, took over as Metrorail's new general manager in November, assuming what was probably the least wanted job in the city at a really tense time.

The system suffered a surge in fire and smoke incidents last year; one woman died and scores were injured when smoke engulfed a downtown train in January 2015. A federal safety board report issued Tuesday blamed bad management and maintenance.

Wiedefeld has promised to present a long-term maintenance plan soon. And some have defended him for putting safety first and shutting down that day, knowing it would raise hell, which it did.

But Metro has few fans of late. After the March 16 closure, The Washington Post -- unofficial arbiter and depository of things Washingtonian -- called it a "national embarrassment, an amateur operation."

Days later, a Twitter user with the handle @ironmanjt wrote: "Passenger in front of me just crossed herself boarding #WMATA train and is now saying Hail Mary."

by Daniel Woolls

© 2016 AFP