Free Republic

Israel Is Planning an ‘Inland Suez Canal’ Across Its Desert. At What Cost? Israel's planned high-speed train to Eilat: dream or potential environmental train wreck? In theory, it sounds amazing: a high-speed train to Eilat, the country’s southernmost city on the shores of the Red Sea. This was attested to by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his recent Knesset speech enumerating the new government’s goals, in which he described it as a major national project: “The mission is to develop the country’s infrastructures, including developing a high-speed rail that will travel hundreds of kilometers per hour and connect the country...

The Corinth Canal is a waterway that crosses the narrow isthmus of Corinth to link the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf...It is believed that Periander, the tyrant of Corinth (602 BC), was the first to conceive of the idea of digging the Corinth Canal. As the project was too complicated given the limited technical capabilities of the times, Periander constructed the diolkós, a stone road which allowed ships to be transferred on wheeled platforms.Later on, Macedonian king Dimitrios Poliorkitis (c. 300 BC) tried to dig the canal, but his team of engineers warned him that if a connection...

The Car Dyke is an eighty mile artificial water channel, thought to have been constructed by the Romans from the first century AD... The Dyke runs along the western edge of the fens from the River Cam near Cambridge all the way to the River Witham, just south of Lincoln. Many stretches are protected as a scheduled ancient monument... William Stukeley... came up with the idea that Car Dyke was a canal... to supply the Roman Armies of the north with grain and food from Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire with drainage as a secondary function, a view which still perpetuates until...

...Pierre-Paul Riquet, the man behind one of the 17th century's greatest works of engineering -- and some say, works of art -- remains in Vauban's shadow, despite his life's accomplishment, which was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. This 150-mile long waterway was once known as the Canal Royal en Languedoc, for good reason. French revolutionaries may have removed the 'royal' from its title in 1789, yet this is a canal which remains fit for a king. Dappled sunlight streams onto its emerald-green water from between the leaves of the 42,000 plane and oak trees which line...

Environmentalist argues that conveying brine to the Dead Sea could cause irreparable damage to the basin. The cross-border water swapping and sharing partnership, Interior Minister Silvan Shalom and Jordanian Water and Irrigation Minister Hazim El Naser announced the issuance on Monday of initial tendering documents for the forthcoming "Red-Dead" project. The ministers met on Monday on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, where they jointly launched a prequalification tender for the plans - printed in various local and international media on Tuesday. The tender, they explained, will enable the advancement of the $800 million project that will supply water...

"Officials say the new waterway will be a symbol of the new Egypt" Few things in Egypt are more iconic, revered and profitable than the Suez Canal. So in a bid to refloat the country's ailing economy, President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is building another one. He broke ground on the second Suez Canal last August, at a ceremony full of pomp and patriotism. With fighter jets conducting aerial displays overhead, Egypt's new strongman promised it would be "a channel of prosperity". Tight deadline It was not plain sailing at the start. There was some flooding at the drilling site...

Senegalese Minister of Economy Amadou Hott has urged the global food industry not to boycott the trade of Russian and Ukrainian food products as the food crisis rages on in vulnerable countries. Hott said at the Group of 20 meeting of financial leaders in Bali last week that without immediate resolution, the crisis — which involves both a food shortage and high prices — would kill more people “than during Covid times.” The war has seen many countries such as the U.S. and those in the European Union sanction the use or trade of Russian goods. But while staples like...

International trade has always been in the news. Business reporters talk about a trade deficit, politicians wail about jobs being exported overseas, and every so often, the government signs a new free trade agreement or trade promotion agreement (they are different things) with one or two or a hundred faraway countries. But despite all this, international trade policy has not been at the forefront of the news cycle in a generation; not since the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement was voided 25 years ago, to be replaced by NAFTA, a three-party FTA between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Thanks to...

The voters of the United Kingdom stood up for British national sovereignty with their recent decision to leave the European Union (EU), and now Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is suggesting that he might take the lead in the United States leaving the World Trade Organization (WTO).When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump on Meet the Press if his punitive tariff plan for businesses that leave the United States could be nixed by the WTO, Trump responded strongly, “It doesn’t matter. Then we’re going to renegotiate or we’re going to pull out. These trade deals are a disaster, Chuck. World Trade...

Megan Cassella reports in Politico on the dread among the global trade elites of the possibility that Republican nominee Donald Trump could be president. From Politico: Donald Trump has officials in this world capital of trade running scared. Faced with the prospect of a U.S. president who pledges to rip up trade agreements, slap tariffs on allies and pull out of the World Trade Organization, top trade officials are in various states of denial and dread.

The voters of the United Kingdom stood up for British national sovereignty with their recent decision to leave the European Union (EU), and now Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is suggesting that he might take the lead in the United States leaving the World Trade Organization (WTO).When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump on Meet the Press if his punitive tariff plan for businesses that leave the United States could be nixed by the WTO, Trump responded strongly, “It doesn’t matter. Then we’re going to renegotiate or we’re going to pull out. These trade deals are a disaster, Chuck. World Trade...

Coined by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the term Davos Man was meant to refer to members of the global elite who view themselves as completely international. They have no need for the term "nationality" and feel that governments are merely shadows of time past to be used as facilitators in their global operations. ~ Akash ArasuThe pundit and activist class can't seem to figure Donald Trump out, but as I have attempted to argue elsewhere, Trump's politics are not really as inscrutable as all that. Trump is that guy at the barbershop who says "We need to run the...

Retraining can’t keep up with flood of jobs lost overseas?Those who preach the gospel of free trade say it will lift the whole world’s economy, from rich nations to poor. And, they say, if American workers lose jobs to workers overseas or cheap imports, they can get retraining — courtesy of the federal Trade Act — to learn higher-skilled jobs for the 21st Century. Forty-year-old Daryl Payne lost a production technician job at Daimler Trucks on Swan Island when the German company shifted manufacturing to Mexico. Uncle Sam is now paying him to learn how to be a water-treatment technician....

World trade is down 20% or more. US railroad shipments are down more than 20% year-over-year. Europe's banks have been much more aggressive in funding emerging-market expansion than US or Japanese banks. Europe's banking system is in far worse shape than the US system. The losses may be bigger, and their capital to meet those losses is certainly less. Let's look at some charts. Remove sharp objects or pour another adult beverage. And Then There Was Leverage. Thirty times leverage means that if you lose 3.3%, you wipe out all your capital. Regulators in the UK allowed 20:1 leverage on...

Critics have long believed environmentalists were planning global domination. The problem with making a credible case against such an ambitious plan was simple: no environmental leader had published one. Yet conflicts over global warming, world trade, multinational corporations, population control, sustainable futures, and transnational government left little doubt that environmentalists in fact shared the unspoken aim of wielding supreme power over a green future. But there was no proof. For years, critics, lacking hard evidence, were reduced to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of suspicious environmentalist actions - funding from huge charitable trusts, ties to the broader "progressive" community, and...

"India-Sweden trade hits $1.7bn NEW DELHI: Trade between Sweden and India has doubled between ’02 and ’06 to about $1.7bn per year. With Swedish exports to India increasing by 42.5% in ’06 alone, the country is optimistic that the future of bilateral trade relations between the two countries is bright. Launching the second edition of the Sweden-India Business Guide ’06-’07, Harald Falth of the Swedish embassy pointed out that trade had multiplied in both directions. “India is the third-largest export market for Sweden in Asia. And Indian export to Sweden is steadily increasing. The two-way future of Swedish-Indian trade sure...

Presbyterians in America aren't known for preaching fire and brimstone. "No frenzy, no fanaticism, no skirmishing," Mark Twain wrote of his mild-mannered denomination in 1866. "You never see any of us Presbyterians getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors."

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican President Vicente Fox has asked Congress to eliminate a 20 percent tax on corn syrup sweetened soft drinks to abide with a World Trade Organization ruling. In a presidential decree issued Tuesday, Fox urged legislators to act quickly to avoid U.S. trade reprisals against Mexico. The Mexican Congress Permanent Commission, which handles matters while the legislature as a whole is on break, turned the request over to the lower house for analysis. In March, a WTO panel rejected an appeal by Mexico and supported U.S. claims that Mexico was violating international law in imposing a...

U.S. repeals Byrd Amendment Thomas Russell -- Furniture Today, 2/14/2006 7:13:00 AM Import duties collected after September 2007 will go to government WASHINGTON — The U.S. government has repealed the Byrd Amendment, the controversial trade law that is allowing some U.S. furniture manufacturers to collect millions of dollars in import duties. Congress repealed the amendment as part of a budget bill, which President Bush signed into law on Feb. 8. The move will eliminate the payment of antidumping duties beyond Oct. 1, 2007, to U.S. manufacturers that petitioned for a federal investigation into the alleged dumping of Chinese-made wood bedroom...

The United States has said it had approved a World Trade Organisation deal to make generic medicines more widely available to poor countries. US Trade Representative Rob Portman (news, bio, voting record), in Hong Kong for a WTO conference, announced that Washington had formally accepted the accord, which was settled last week at the WTO's Geneva base. WTO members confirmed their support for a provisional 2003 amendment to intellectual property rules that enabled poor countries to import generic drugs to treat infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS. "Our acceptance of this amendment is an important step in the...