MUNICH, July 22 (Reuters) - Gunmen went on a shooting rampage in a shopping mall in the southern German city of Munich on Friday, killing and wounding many people, police said.  Authorities were evacuating people from the Olympia mall but many others were hiding inside. The Bavarian Interior Ministry said three people were dead, NTV television reported. A Munich police spokeswoman said multiple people were killed or wounded.  "We believe we are dealing with a shooting rampage," the spokeswoman said.  More than one gunman was believed to be involved and no one had been arrested, she said.  "We believe there was more than one perpetrator. The first reports came at 6 p.m., the shooting apparently began at a McDonald's in the shopping center. There are still people in the shopping center. We are trying to get the people out and take care of them."  Police special forces had arrived at the scene, NTV said.  It was not immediately clear who carried out the attack, which took place a week after an axe-wielding teenager went on a rampage on a German train. Islamic State claimed responsibility for that attack.

Counter Balance and its partner CEE Bankwatch have launched a new report exploring corruption cases in Romania’s third largest company. The Oltenia Energy Complex (OEC) is a key player in the energy sector in Romania and today operates ten lignite mines and four power plants. Supposed recipient of a EUR 200 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD),  OEC stands out for a long list of corruption scandals collected in the last decade. Focusing mainly on the dodgy contracts signed by the company with the Șova and Associates law firm, the report shows a repeated history of state capture practices, involving prominent figures of the Romanian political panorama such as Dan Șova and Victor Ponta, members of the national Parliament, but also local officials.  Although, after fierce protests by civil society, the EU public money did not reach the Romanian company, it is worth remembering the Oltenia Energy Complex case as one to draw some lessons from. Alexandru Mustață, author of the report, claims: “It is crucial that large infrastructure financiers better investigate companies before doing business with them, and monitor them from that moment onwards”. Xavier Sol, director of Counter Balance, underlines: “Such cases of state capture should alert infrastructure financiers like the EBRD to aim for transparency of both the loaner and the loaned as an essential part of the due diligence practice public banks have to conduct”.

Speaking in Brussels on Monday, French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said: "It would be unbelievable if the death penalty was re-established in Turkey". He said Turkish reformists should ask themselves if they wanted progress to be "abruptly stopped" and that the EU would make "no concessions on values". German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “Reintroduction of the death penalty would prevent successful negotiations to join the EU”.  Steffen Seibert, chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, said in Berlin that Merkel had phoned Erdogan.  “A country that has the death penalty can't be a member of the European Union and the introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would therefore mean the end of accession negotiations”, he said.  Nato does not require its members not to execute people, but the defence alliance reinforced the EU’s appeals on Monday.   Its secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, also phoned the Turkish president. “Being part of a unique community of values, it is essential for Turkey, like all other allies, to ensure full respect for democracy and its institutions, the constitutional order, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms”, Stoltenberg said afterward. In a sign of the mood in Ankara, Egemen Bagis, Erdogan’s former EU affairs minister, said on social media: “Do you think Turks care about what EU states at this point? We are furious”. “EU should support Turkey not Feto”, he added, referring to Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in the US and who was also accused of plotting Erdogan’s downfall.  Speaking in a statement on Monday, John Bass, the US ambassador to Turkey, said: "Unfortunately, some ... public figures have speculated that the United States in some way supported the coup attempt. This is categorically untrue, and such speculation is harmful to the decades-long friendship between two great nations".  He said that if Turkey submitted an extradition request for Gulen, then it would be "considered" by US courts.

  In a banking system built on the foundation of money being created by banks through granting loans and fractional reserves, insolvency is the natural state of things.  In this context, the confidence of the depositors and the guarantees granted by the state, along with the permanent support of the central banks, represent essential conditions for the functioning of financial institutions. "The truth about banks" is the title of an article from the Finance & Development magazine of the IMF (author's note vol. 53, no. 1, March 2016), in which the authors, Michael Kumhof and Zoltan Jakab, write that "banks create new money when they grant loans, a phenomenon which can start and exacerbate financial crises".   Creating money out of thin air represents "a critical vulnerability of financial systems" for two reasons which have been known at least since the time of the Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century. First of all, "if banks are free to create money when they grant loans, then that amplifies the potential to create cyclical booms and busts, especially when banks mistakenly assess the debtors' repayment ability", according to the economists of the IMF.

A suitcase filled with multiple passports?  That’s not just the stuff of spy movies anymore. Increasingly, a growing number of high-net worth individuals are looking to have a passport portfolio. This has led to a proliferation of so-called citizenship-by-investment or economic citizenship programs that allow individuals from all over the world to legitimately acquire passports. The wealthy, especially in emerging market economies, see buying citizenship or residency rights as a means of greater global mobility (visa free travel in many countries), tax planning, and family security.  In exchange, countries administering such programs receive significant financial inflows into their economies.  Indeed, offering citizenship in return for investment has been a “win-win” for some small Caribbean states. The substantial inflows of funds from these programs have helped boost employment and growth. Inflows to the public sector alone in St. Kitts and Nevis had grown to nearly 25 percent of GDP as of 2013. Now more and more countries have joined the game. While all well and good, these countries face the critical challenge of preserving the credibility of their citizenship programs and weeding out the risks to governance and sustainability. In addition, small countries may also confront sizeable macro-challenges in managing large inflows.

Turkish media are widely reporting two men as having orchestrated the attempted coup. One of these is General Akin Ozturk, the former commander of the Turkish Air Force, who retired from the military in August 2015, but who continued to serve as a member of the Supreme Military Council. The second indvidual is Lieutenant-General Metin Iyidil, the Combat and Support Training commander of the Land Forces Training and Doctrine Command. Gaza's Hamas rulers have congratulated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for quashing an attempted military coup. The Islamic militant group condemned the attempt as a "vicious'' plot to overthrow Erdogan. The Turkish leader has been a staunch supporter of Hamas and a fierce critic of Israel. Hamas supporters took to the streets in several places across the Gaza Strip to celebrate the coup's failure, raising Turkish flags and posters bearing Erdogan's image. Turkey recently restored ties with Israel after a six-year lull following a deadly Israeli naval raid to stop an activist flotilla aiming to breach the Gaza blockade.  

 

In its over a hundred fifty years of its life, it has rung the time of history! The hour of the imperial greatness, spanning more than half of the Earth's surface, as well as the hour of the long sunset of Great Britain's global power. The sad and scary hours of the threat of a military invasion which, since the destruction of the invincible Armada (1587) seemed just a ghost forever stuck in the fog of history. It rang the long awaited hour of Victory, at the end of the first and second world war. It gave the time of NATO as well as the return of the UK to the post-war game in Europe. It has accurately marked the beginning and ending hour of the cold war. It has said almost everything about the rule of a Queen who watches, coldly, equal to herself and not at all moved by the ebb and flow of time, over the land where her authority is still the cornerstone of the most resilient and complex institutions of Democracy. Just like the clock which has been named the Queen of Elizabeth has counted without fail, monotonously, the hours of the politician of the day, the ephemeris that succeed each other through the imposing building of the Parliament, on Thames' Western Bank, or at Downing Street 10 and 11, who are allowed, for one second to think that they are the ones setting the course of power.  Today the clock in Westminster will ring the Hour of Referendum! A truly exceptional procedure in the British decision making process. Thus, rarely used. It has been put to work in 1975, to seal the UK's participation in the institutional system of the European Communities ("the return is the case of the decisions concerning Scotland's separation in 1997 and 2014, just like local referendums have preceded and reinforced important decisions concerning the powers delegated to the authorities in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Looked upon favorably by the "modernists", the referendum is viewed by the "purists", as more of a weakness of representative democracy. A kind of parasite fungus that it is better to avoid, the more attractive it looks. The main argument: "The overall opinion" is rarely the same as an informed opinion. A recent study shows that the Brits are wrong about almost every important thing they are asked about in the polls! That fact isn't limited to that area! As for the politicians of the older generations, some have not been shy in saying about the referendum that "it is an instrument that is completely foreign to our traditions (British)...which was most often used by Nazism and Fascism." (Clement Attlee).