March 18th, 2019

Next week’s visit to Italy by Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has nearly everyone jittery. The recent announcement by Five Star Movement Leader Luigi Di Maio that his country is prepared to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with China to be a part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative has set off a firestorm of response from Donald Trump to Angela Merkel to Di Maio’s own coalition partner, Lega leader Matteo Salvini.

With trillions in debt, Di Maio (Five Star Movement) display's Italy's leverage over the stability of the EU and it's partnership with the US. Courting China gives them even greater maneuverability. Even Di Maio's coalition partner Salvini (Lega leader) is on his tippy toes here. This is game theory at a super high level. Let's see how this plays out.

• Beijing cannot indefinitely continue to accumulate wealth and technology by exploiting America’s open markets.
• A prompt solution of the U.S.-China trade dispute requires a rebalancing on bilateral trade accounts — drastically lower Chinese sales to the U.S. and sharply increasing Chinese purchases of American goods and services. China’s regulatory changes are a different matter.
• Financial markets should stop fretting about the U.S.-China trade problem — that’s a peripheral issue and a purely trading event. Only the Fed can crash Wall Street.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday that US sanctions against Iran were “crimes against humanity”... Rouhani said in a speech broadcast live on state television that the US sanctions have affected the value of Iran’s rial currency and increased inflation,

A former Pennsylvania pediatrician is scheduled for sentencing Monday in the sexual assault of 31 children, most of them patients, in a case that state medical regulators failed to act on nearly two decades ago.

Dr. Johnnie Barto of Johnstown will be sentenced on dozens of counts, including aggravated indecent assault and child endangerment. Prosecutors say he spent decades abusing boys and girls in the exam room at his pediatric practice in western Pennsylvania and at local hospitals, with his victims typically ranging in age from 8 to 12. One was an infant.

American demand comes after Pyongyang blamed US for breakdown of talks in Vietnam.

Companies in the world’s electronics supply chains are preparing to shift part of their production lines out of China to mitigate the negative effects of higher US tariffs, with Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam emerging as preferred destinations...

“These three economies are in a good position to undertake the electronics work transferred from China in the lower value-added segments, such as the assembly of computers, mobile phones and consumer electronics products,” Singapore-based DBS economist Ma Tieying said in a report on Thursday.

“It’s the first time in a long time that a Brazilian president who is not anti-American, comes to Washington,” Bolsonaro said on Twitter after he arrived.
A Trump-Bolsonaro bond could see the leaders of the Americas’ two most populous democracies working in concert on a range of regional issues.

Their shared nationalist sentiment can be seen in another relationship: that of Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who is a federal lawmaker, with Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon.

Eduardo Bolsonaro announced in early February that he was part of the Brussels-based group known as The Movement, which Bannon set up to promote far-right nationalistic values and tactics.

The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago. But it went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

According to the AG’s office, Charity was “little more than a checkbook” for Trump’s business and campaign.

Letitia James is hoping to pick up where Eric Schneiderman left off. Birds of a feather...