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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Budget 2016: George Osborne prepares Budget 'for long term'

George Osborne will set out £4bn in extra spending cuts and announce investment in the UK's infrastructure when he presents his Budget to MPs.

The Budget will "choose the long term" the chancellor will say, warning that the "storm clouds are gathering again".

His eighth Budget will include a £1.5bn education package to turn all state schools in England into academies and allow some to open later in the day.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell called for an end to "cruel cuts".

Mr Osborne will deliver his Budget at 12:30 GMT, after Prime Minister's Questions, setting out the latest economic forecasts and the state of the public finances.

In his biggest Parliamentary test to date, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will deliver the Opposition's response.

The chancellor is expected to say that the UK is economy "strong" but warn that "storm clouds are gathering".

"Our response to this new challenge is clear. A Budget where we act now so we don't pay later," he will say, with a pledge to "put the next generation first".

BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said people might wonder where the "sunshine chancellor" has gone.

Mr Osborne had "time and again" said the government had "fixed the roof while the sun was shining but "today the metaphors will feel very different", she added.

But she said she would be surprised if there were no "surprises" in his Budget as Mr Osborne usually has "the element of the flourish, always looking for the headline".

Mr Osborne's statement comes with three months to go before the UK votes on its EU membership. The government is campaigning to remain in the EU, and the chancellor will be keen to avoid antagonising either side in the debate with his announcements.

Budget 2016 on the BBC

A special edition of the Daily Politics presented by Huw Edwards starts at 11:30 GMT on BBC2 and the BBC News Channel, also including Prime Minister's Questions at noon. BBC Radio 5 Live Daily will also cover all the action. For full coverage online please visit the BBC's Budget 2016 in-depth section.

As well as eliminating the deficit by 2019-20, the chancellor has set himself a target of having debt falling as a share of GDP every year.

Sluggish growth since his November Autumn Statement - when cuts to tax credits and police budgets were watered down - could mean more spending cuts and tax rises are needed to achieve his surplus target.

He has already warned that global uncertainty and the state of the world economy means the UK has to "act now rather than pay later" in making further spending reductions.

The £4bn extra cuts would be "equivalent to 50p in every £100" of public spending by 2020, which was "not a huge amount in the scheme of things", he has said.

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Media captionRoss Hawkins looks at what to expect from the 2016 budget

Suggested tax rise options include a claim by the insurance industry that another increase in Insurance Premium Tax is planned, while capitalising on low oil prices to raise fuel duty would be opposed by many Conservative MPs.

On the investment side, Mr Osborne is also set to commit £300m for transport projects, with the government funding the start of work on the Crossrail 2 rail line and new High Speed 3 link across the north of England.

Almost half of the transport money committed was announced in the Autumn Statement.

The government has also announced a 'Help to Save' scheme under which would give low-paid workers a top-up if they put savings aside.

No longer the 'lucky chancellor'?

Analysis, by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssburg

If George Osborne was the "lucky chancellor" in November when the Treasury found an extra £27bn down the back of the Commons green benches, what will he be today?

How does he respond practically and politically to the fact that the numbers he based his plans on at the Spending Review have turned out to be wrong?

George Osborne is going to have to fess up - the pages and pages of numbers the independent Office for Budget Responsibility provided as the basis of his sums won't add up any more.

We know too - as he told me a few weeks ago - that means extra government cuts are likely, probably an additional £4bn billion a year by 2020.

Jeremy Corbyn will be responding to the chancellor's speech, but the opposition that really troubles Mr Osborne right now is those on his own benches - and if he's not the "lucky chancellor" any more, what they'll be calling him by the end of today.

1 dead in Belgian raid tied to Paris attacks

One suspect died and four police officers were wounded in the raid. Belgian police fear that two people are on the run following the operation in Brussels earlier Tuesday, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN.

A CNN crew arriving at a train station in the Belgian capital noticed a large police presence and heard helicopters over the area where the raid took place.

On Tuesday evening, Belgium Prime Minister Charles Michel told reporters that police operations were ongoing in the neighborhood.

Police went to search a presumably empty apartment Tuesday afternoon in southern Brussels, only to have people inside begin shooting at them, the counterterrorism official said.

A witness in Forest -- the southern Brussels district where the raid occurred -- heard about 30 shots early in the confrontation, including some from a suspect firing what appeared to be a rifle at police.

"I ended up in the middle of terror here in Brussels," the man said.

Three police officers -- including a French police woman -- were wounded in an initial burst of gunfire, with a fourth hurt later. Two of them were treated and released from a hospital, Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon said.

South Brussels police spokeswoman Marie Verdete initially indicated that three officers suffered slight injuries in two shootouts in the same building, which is along Rue du Dries, a small and typically calm road.

Police searching for explosives and weapons found the body of a suspect who had been barricaded inside, said Eric Van der Sypt, a spokesman for Belgium's federal prosecutor. A Belgian federal prosecutor said the suspect, who had a Kalashnikov rifle, was killed by a Belgian police sniper.

It will take some time to identify the body, Van der Sypt said, but a preliminary examination indicates it is "most probably not" suspected Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam.

Belgium a focus after Paris attacks

It's unknown what connection Tuesday's raid has to the November 13 carnage in Paris. Belgium has been a focal point for investigators.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings and gunfire that left at least 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.

European investigators focused on Belgium, especially Brussels, on the heels of the attack.

Earlier this year, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN that two terrorist operatives phoned in orders from Brussels to those directly involved in the Paris attacks.

These two had an even more integral role than Abdelhamid Abaaoud -- the man long identified as the ringleader of the attacks -- according to the official.

Attack suspect not target of latest raid, sources say

Abaaoud was killed during a dramatic raid that shook a Paris neighborhood and collapsed an entire floor of an apartment building.

Yet others with Belgian connections and ties to the November 13 attacks remain at large.

They include Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national who lived and spent time with Abaaoud in a Belgian prison. The trail for Abdeslam, one of the few alleged Paris attackers to escape alive, went cold in December, according to a senior European counterterrorism official.

French sources close to the investigation said Abdeslam was not the target of Tuesday's raid. (French police were part of that operation, according to those sources.)

There are many reason authorities investigating the Paris attacks are in Belgium. Many of those tied to the Paris attacks live in the country, and they're believed to have met there before lashing out.

There is concern more individuals from the same place may be ready to launch other attacks.

Last month, investigators conducting a search in connection to what happened in Paris found about 10 hours of video surveillance of a senior Belgian nuclear official, Belgian prosecutor's office spokesman Thierry Werts said. It's unclear if that footage was from before or after the November attacks.

RPT-INSIGHT-Suicide bombing exposes divisions tearing at Turkey's stability

(Repeats story first issued on March 15)

* Anger and division after bombing killed 37

* Erdogan calls for wider anti-terrorism laws

* Opponents see deepening authoritarianism

By Umit Bektas, Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk

ANKARA/ISTANBUL, March 15 "Government resign!" chanted some of the mourners at the funeral on Tuesday of four young victims of the suicide bombing in Turkey's capital Ankara.

"Our child has become a victim of ugly politics. We don't want any politicians at our funeral," one of the relatives called out, before family members hushed him and warned him against speaking out in front of journalists.

Far from bringing the nation together in mourning, the aftermath of Sunday night's attack has again laid bare the deep divisions tearing at Turkey as it struggles to avoid being drawn into its neighbours' conflicts.

If Turkey continues on this path, some analysts warn, it risks a cycle of violence and a lurch away from the European standards of freedom and democracy to which it once aspired. President Tayyip Erdogan shows little sign of healing the rifts.

Parties from across the political spectrum - from nationalists to the pro-Kurdish opposition - have condemned the car bombing, which killed 37 people in the heart of Ankara and was the third in the city in five months.

But the question of how to respond is far more divisive.

Officials quickly blamed Kurdish militants. Turkish warplanes began bombing their camps in northern Iraq within hours, and clashes with the security forces widened in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast.

In his first speech since the attack, Erdogan said the country's anti-terrorism laws, already seen by rights groups as too invasive and used in recent months to detain academics and journalists, should be widened further.

"It might be the terrorist who pulls the trigger and detonates the bomb, but it is these supporters and accomplices who allow that attack to achieve its goal," he told a dinner for doctors in his palace late on Monday.

"The fact their title is lawmaker, academic, writer, journalist or head of a civil society group doesn't change the fact that individual is a terrorist...We should redefine terror and terrorist as soon as possible and put it in our penal code."

Erdogan's opponents say he is using anti-terrorism laws to silence dissent and that his authoritarian leadership is dangerously dividing a nation needed by its European and NATO allies as a bulwark against the instability of the Middle East.

Almost as Erdogan spoke in Ankara, police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse several hundred leftist demonstrators in Istanbul who had gathered to protest what they perceive to be the government's failure to prevent Sunday's attack.

Some in the crowd began chanting "Thief, Murderer, Erdogan", a rallying cry during the anti-government protests of recent years, prompting police to intervene, Reuters witnesses said.

"ANGRY COUNTRY"

"Turkey has become a country that can neither rejoice nor mourn together, or find a common sense to unite around. It has become an angry country, with ever shrinking and fragmenting tribal outlooks," said Turkish-British researcher Ziya Meral.

"Pressure on media and denials of freedom of expression are only fuelling mistrust, dangerous propaganda and misinformation," Meral, a research fellow at Britain's Sandhurst military academy and founder of the London-based Centre on Religion and Global Affairs, wrote in a blog post.

The ruling AK Party, founded by Erdogan more than a decade ago, was "no longer driven by pragmatism" but by its own survival and its ambition of securing the stronger presidential system that Erdogan wants, he said.

Since winning Turkey's first popular presidential election in 2014, Erdogan has lobbied for replacing its parliamentary system with an executive presidency more akin to the United States or France.

Many of his supporters, who represent just over half the electorate and see him as champion of the pious working class, believe the narrative that Turkey, battered by regional conflicts, needs strong leadership for its long-term stability.

His opponents fear too much power in the hands of a man who brooks no dissent.

CHAOS OR STABILITY

Security officials have said the two perpetrators of Sunday's bombing, a man and a woman, were linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in southeast Turkey.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the authorities had "very serious and almost certain" evidence suggesting the PKK was responsible. There has been no claim of responsibility.

Against a backdrop of rising violence in the southeast, where a PKK ceasefire collapsed in July, the AK Party campaigned for a parliamentary election in November by promising stability if it won, or the risk of chaos if it lost.

It won, clawing back a majority lost five months earlier, but opponents say the victory brought anything but stability.

"In the democratic countries of the world, when a bomb goes off, everyone would be side by side, shoulder to shoulder ... That is what we are missing," said Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP, parliament's third largest party.

"They don't give account. They don't apologise. They don't say we made a mistake ... They just keep polarising."

Yet amid the fragmentation, there are no opposition figures who appear capable of bringing people together.

The divisions are ever more keenly felt far beyond the corridors of power.

Amedspor, one of the most prominent soccer teams in the southeast, were unable to find rooms for an away match in the central city of Sivas on Tuesday, with hoteliers refusing to take their reservation when they realised who was calling.

Eventually the local governor's office found them accommodation 40 km (25 miles) out of town, the team's president, Ali Karakas, told Reuters.

"We're seeing a severing of emotional bonds and this is such a dangerous thing," Karakas said. "Sports should be uniting. Brotherhood and solidarity should be its basis. But because of Turkey's politics, even sport has been poisoned." (Additional reporting by Osman Orsal and Melih Aslan; Writing by Nick Tattersall; editing by Janet McBride)

North Korea sentences U-Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison

Otto Warmbier, 21, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in a short trial on March 16. He has been detained in North Korea for more than two months for attempting to steal a propaganda sign in Pyongyang. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

SEOUL – The University of Virginia student being held in North Korea was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years of hard labor for trying to steal a propaganda sign from a hotel in Pyongyang.

Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old from Cincinnati, Ohio, was convicted after a one-hour trial at North Korea’s Supreme Court, China’s Xinhua news agency, which has a bureau in Pyongyang, reported Wednesday. Japan’s Kyodo News and the Associated Press also reported the verdict. Diplomats from the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which represents American interests in North Korea because the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with the country, were present at the trial.

North Korea’s state media had not commented on the case by 2 p.m. local time.

[U-Va. student held in North Korea ‘confesses’ to ‘severe’ crime]

Warmbier is being held at a particularly sensitive time, when annual military drills between the United States and South Korea are coinciding with international sanctions against North Korea’s regime to punish it for its recent nuclear test and missile launches.

North Korea always protests the joint military drills in South Korea because it sees them as a pretext for an invasion, but Pyongyang’s reaction is particularly ferocious this year because the allies are practicing “decapitation strikes” on North Korea’s leadership and taking out its nuclear and missile facilities.

Furthermore, the sanctions imposed by the United Nations, coupled with direct measures taken by the United States, Japan and South Korea, are the toughest yet and could inflict a significant amount of pain on the North Korean regime.

Warmbier, an economics major, was arrested at Pyongyang airport on January 2, at the end of a five-day tour to North Korea. But it wasn’t until three weeks later that Kim Jong Un’s regime announced it was holding the Ohio native for an unspecified “hostile act” against the state.

[U-Va. student detained in N. Korea described as ‘buoyant,’ inspiring and driven]

Then at the end of February, the North Korean authorities brought Warmbier out for a highly orchestrated press conference in Pyongyang, at which the student confessed to a “very severe and pre-planned” crime.

Reading from hand-written notes, Warmbier said that he had tried to steal a political sign promoting “the [North] Korean people’s love for their system” from the hotel, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

“The aim of my task was to harm the motivation and work ethic of the Korean people. This was a very foolish aim,” Warmbier told the mainly North Korean reporters. He was wearing a beige jacket with a shirt and tie, and was clean shaven.

Previous Americans who have been detained in North Korea have also been brought out to the press to “confess” their crimes, with the detainees told what to say and the reporters told what to ask.

A University of Virginia student confessed to a "severe crime" during an orchestrated news conference in North Korea on Feb. 29. Here's how other U.S. citizens detained in North Korea have apologized to the country in recent years. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

Analysts expect that Warmbier was also directed in this way to deliver the statement, in which the student said he was impressed by North Korea’s “humanitarian treatment of severe criminals like myself.”

Warmbier went on a trip organized by Young Pioneers Tours, one of a handful of travel companies that takes adventurous tourists into North Korea, while on his way to Hong Kong for a financial course for his U.Va studies.

Several United States citizens have been held in Pyongyang in recent years, usually because of activities relating to Christianity, and have also been sentenced to hard labor.

North Korea tries to use them as bargaining chips and releases them after high-profile interventions which it can then use for its domestic propaganda purposes, portraying the visits as Americans coming to pay homage to North Korea.

Former president Bill Clinton went to Pyongyang to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee in 2009, while Jimmy Carter traveled to the North Korean capital the following year to collect Aijalon Gomes, a Boston man who entered the country illegally.

More recently, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, went to Pyongyang at the end of 2014 to free three Americans being held there.

One of them, Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary, had been sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor for “hostile acts against the republic,” including proselytizing and attempting to overthrow the regime. Bae’s sister described how he was having to do manual work on a farm for eight hours a day, six days a week.

Another, Matthew Miller from California, had been sentenced to six years’ hard labor after ripping up his tourist visa on arrival in North Korea.

At U. Va., Warmbier was selected as an Echols scholar, a special four-year academic program for fewer than 250 students in each class. Those chosen are described as “intellectual risk-takers” who have shown “academic excellence, intellectual leadership, and evidence of the ability to grapple with complex topics,” according to the university’s website.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Budget 2016: George Osborne prepares Budget 'for long term'

Budget 2016: George Osborne prepares Budget 'for long term'

Budget 2016 on the BBC

No longer the 'lucky chancellor'?

Analysis, by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssburg

1 dead in Belgian raid tied to Paris attacks

RPT-INSIGHT-Suicide bombing exposes divisions tearing at Turkey's stability

North Korea sentences U-Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison

U-Va. student sentenced in North Korea after one-hour trial

How detained American citizens have apologized to North Korea