>>> Monday Morning Papers Summary

Monday Morning Papers Summary

LA REPUBBLICA
-A warning from Moscow about the supply of weapons to Ukraine that had already been delivered to Washington has also reached some of its NATO allies. Washington has decided to continue the supplies. Italy has also received the warning that Russia has sent to the US, threatening "unforeseeable consequences" if it continues arms supplies to Ukraine. The official diplomatic message, sent through official channels between Wednesday and Thursday, was delivered to several Western allies, including the Czech Republic. But next week Rome could be called upon to approve the new inter-ministerial decree, to finance the second package of military aid to Kiev.
-The shipping giant MSC Group backed by Lufthansa has proposed a flash offer for Ita Airways, Italy’s national airline. The company, controlled by the Aponte family (MSC), active in cruises and freight transport by sea, wants to displace the other potential bidders targeting an Ita takeover: the joint Air France, Delta and Certares fund; and finally the Indigo fund. Next week, the Ministry of Economy will open the Ita Airways data room to the now three competing entities, where confidential information on the carrier (now 100% public) is kept. After a few days, MSC will be able to present binding purchase offer for Ita.

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
-On Easter Monday, there are some sobering statistics about the state of Christianity in Germany. In a sober administrative tone, the press office of the district court in Cologne announced that more than 5,800 Christians officially turned their backs on the churches in the first quarter of the New Year. Now the statistics do not show the exits broken down by denomination. But no one doubts that there are more Catholics than Protestants who are breaking with their Church. And never before have there been so many at this time of year. "It really hurts," says Johannes Quirl, the pastor of St. Severin in Cologne.
-China achieved unexpectedly strong GDP growth of 4.8% in the first quarter according to the statistics office in Beijing, beating forecasts, which predicted just a little over 4%. China's government had forecast growth of 5.5% for the year as a whole. However, the planning had not taken into account the extent of the latest corona wave in China and the subsequent lockdowns and the effects of the Ukraine war. Experts expressed doubts as to whether the goal can be achieved.-There is currently no place in south-eastern Europe that is politically and militarily more important than Alexandroupolis. The Thracian port city in northern Greece has become a transshipment point for western arms deliveries to the Black Sea countries Bulgaria and Romania as well as the Ukraine. In Greece it is being nicknamed the ‘NATO port’.

HANDELSBLATT
-Federal Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) has rejected criticism of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier from Ukraine and defended the cautious course of the government of Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) with regard to arms deliveries. In a guest article for the Spiegel Gabriel spoke of "targeted attacks on the German President" and accused the Ukrainian Ambassador Andriy Melnyk of "conspiracy theories".
-The oligarchs are missing from the Mediterranean. More than any other region, posh seaside resorts in France and Italy, which on rich customers from Russia are suffering. Because of the sanctions against Russia and Russians, this is not happening - the search for a replacement has begun. One of the most affected towns is Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast.
-The price of lithium, the most important component of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, has been rising steeply for months. According to data from Benchmark Minerals, the price has increased almost tenfold within two years. The raw material is currently so scarce that even cost-intensive mining projects in Europe would be worthwhile. Nevertheless, lithium production is not increasing quickly enough: in Serbia, mining giant Rio Tinto recently canceled an EUR2B investment in a related mining project due to protests from local residents. Companies across Europe are exploring lithium mining, from Finland to Portugal. But many countries have similar problems.

IL SOLE 24 ORE
-In an interview with Bild am Sonntag, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen warned that: "We must prepare ourselves for the fact that, in the worst case, the war could last months, even years". A dramatic scenario, which, from an economic point of view, will have heavy repercussions on the economies of many countries. In a recent hearing over the Budget Law in Italy, the Parliamentary Budget Office sounded the alarm: once peace returns, there will be unknowns and challenges for the Italian economy: "When the military hostilities are over, a phase of tensions will open up in commercial relations and in the commodities markets with inevitable repercussions for an economy as heavily dependent on foreign suppliers as the Italian one".
-The need for gas has turned Europe into an Eldorado for anyone with supplies to sell. And even China - which usually imports huge quantities of LNG - did not miss the opportunity, managing in recent months to place several loads in the Old Continent with stratospheric profits: in all probability more than $100M for each one. Chinese companies are certainly not the only ones to have taken advantage of the situation.

LES ECHOS
-Emmanuel Macron has not managed to attract crowds. In Marseille, the outgoing president and candidate held the main meeting between the two rounds of the presidential election. Far from the show of force of the meeting at La Défense before the first round, the candidate gathered just under 4,000 people (according to his campaign team) in Marseille, for what was presented as a "regional meeting". -In its latest 30-year traffic forecast, Eurocontrol has estimated that the pandemic has caused European air traffic to lose 10 years of growth. However, this slowdown in growth pushes back the risk of infrastructure saturation and will facilitate the objective of carbon neutrality by 2050.

ABC
-In Putin's agenda, no movement is negligible , and many theories are being shuffled about the reasons for the invasion of Ukraine. One of the pieces that has come into play in this puzzle is the abundant reserves of lithium, a strategic material in the new economy, which is said to be abundant in its territory. “Taking into account the proven reserves and expected resources of lithium, Ukraine can be considered the richest country in the world. It can fully cover its own needs and supply lithium to the European market," said Svitlana Vasylenko and Uliana Naumenko, researchers at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in a report titled Prospects for the development of the lithium resource base in Ukraine.
-Cutting all energy ties with Russia could eventually trigger an economic recession - at least two consecutive quarters with falling GDP - in Europe. This follows from a recent Moody's report in which it warns of the risks for the Old Continent of doing without Russian natural gas and oil, according to Servimedia.

(ZH) The Greatest Danger To The Political-Corporate-Media Triumvirate Is That Mu

The Greatest Danger To The Political-Corporate-Media Triumvirate Is That Musk Is Right

Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company.
The move is one way to fend off hostile takeovers, but what is different in this case is the added source of the hostility: Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site.
Company boards have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for shareholders, which usually is measured in share values. Twitter has long done the opposite. It has virtually written off many conservatives — and a large portion of its prospective market — with years of arbitrary censorship of dissenting views on everything from gender identity to global warming, election fraud and the pandemic. Most recently, Twitter suspended a group, Libs of Tik Tok, for “hateful conduct.” The conduct? Reposting what liberals have said about themselves.
The company seemingly has written off free speech too. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”
Not surprisingly, selling censorship is not a big hit with most consumers, particularly from a communications or social media company. The actions of Twitter’s management have led to roller-coastering share values. While Twitter once reached a high of about $73 a share, it is currently around $45. (Musk was offering $54.20 a share, representing a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he invested in the company.)
Notably, Musk will not trigger the poison pill if he stays below 15 percent ownership of the company. He could push his present stake up to 14.9 percent and then negotiate with other shareholders to take greater control.
Another problem is that Twitter long sought a private buyer under former CEO Jack Dorsey. If Musk increases his bid closer to $60, the board could face liability in putting its interests ahead of the company’s shareholders.
Putting aside the magical share number, Musk is right that the company’s potential has been constrained by its woke management. For social media companies, free speech is not only ethically but economically beneficial — because the censorship model only works if you have an effective monopoly in which customers have no other choice. That is how Henry Ford could tell customers, back when he controlled car-making, that they could have any color of Model T “as long as it’s black.”
Of course, the Model T’s color was not a critical part of the product. On the other hand, Twitter is a communications company selling censorship — and opposing free speech as a social media company is a little like Ford opposing cars.
The public could be moving beyond Twitter’s Model T philosophy, however, with many people looking for access to an open, free forum for discussions.
Censorship - or “content modification,” as used in polite company - is not value maximizing for Twitter, but it is status enhancing for executives such as Agrawal.
It does not matter that consumers of his product want less censorship; the company has become captive to its executives’ agendas.
Twitter is not alone in pursuing such self-defeating values. Many in the mainstream media and many on the left have become some of the loudest advocates for corporate censorship.
The Washington Post’s Max Boot, for example, declared, “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”
MSNBC’s Katy Tur warned that reintroducing free speech values on Twitter could produce “massive, life- and globe-altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.”
Columnist and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian in explaining why freedom is tyranny. Reich dismissed calls for free speech and warned that censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”
He then delivered a line that would make Big Brother blush:
“That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”
The problem comes when you sell fear for too long and at too high a price.
Recently, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) agreed with MSNBC analyst John Heilemann that Democrats have to “scare the crap out of [voters] and get them to come out.”
That line is not selling any better for the media than it is for social media, however. Trust in the media is at a record low, with only 7 percent expressing great trust in what is being reported. The United States ranks last in media trust among 46 nations.
Just as the public does not want social media companies to control their views, it does not want the media to shape its news. In one recent poll, “76.3% of respondents from all political affiliations said that ‘the primary focus of the mainstream media’s coverage of current events is to advance their own opinions or political agendas.'”
Thus, an outbreak of free speech could have dire consequences for many in the political-corporate-media triumvirate. For them, the greatest danger is that Musk could be right and Twitter would become a more popular, more profitable company selling a free speech product.
Poison pill maneuvers are often used to force a potential buyer to negotiate with the board. However, Twitter’s directors (who include Agrawal and Dorsey) have previously limited their product to advance their own political preferences. This time, federal law may force them to fulfill their fiduciary duties, even at the cost of supporting free speech. The problem for the board will occur when the “nightmare” of free speech comes in at $60 a share.

FT : BMW pledges not to cut jobs in transition to electric vehicles

BMW pledges not to cut jobs in transition to electric vehicles
Some industry bodies say plans to ban new combustion-engine cars will cause large-scale unemployment

BMW will not cut a single employee in the transition from combustion engines to electric models, its chief executive has pledged, even as economists predict tens of thousands of job losses across the industry.

“We will not have job losses due to the transformation,” Oliver Zipse said. “At the end of the day, possibly already in this decade at our Munich plant, there will be fully electric production without anyone losing their job.”

His comments come as the European auto sector, as well as leading economists, warn that plans to ban petrol and diesel cars will lead to mass unemployment.

The VDA, which represents German car manufacturers, said last year that an EU proposal to ban new combustion-engine sales by 2035 was “almost impossible to achieve” and that the impact on jobs would be “significant”.

A survey carried out on behalf of the VDA also found that more than 100,000 jobs would be at risk in Germany’s automotive sector if staff were not retrained.

But Zipse said that BMW, which posted record profits in 2021 and is due to unveil its first electric limousine car, the i7, would train employees worldwide with the skills to work on battery-powered models.

“It’s how you manage the transformation . . . a highly qualified workforce is able to adapt to almost any technology,” he said.

“We want to keep our people because we are counting on their competencies.”

Zipse, who is also head of the ACEA, the trade body for European automakers, stressed he was only speaking for BMW, which has adopted a flexible approach to electric manufacturing.

Rather than convert plants exclusively to produce electric vehicles, BMW is transforming factories step by step, and initially ensuring that combustion- engine, hybrid and electric versions of its models can be built on the same assembly lines, using the same staff.

“We have a decade of transformation and the ground rule is: you have to locate the new technologies where the existing technologies are,” he said.

“You have to talk to the people and explain to them how their job will change in the next five years. And when they are given a perspective, they will follow. So I think that is a manageable task.”

So far, job losses in the German car industry have been largely confined to suppliers such as Continental, which is cutting 13,000 staff in the country.

Clepa, which represents European suppliers, warned in December that half a million jobs could be lost under the EU’s current combustion engine phaseout plans.

WSJ : The Coming Green-Energy Inflation

The Coming Green-Energy Inflation
Demand for metals and other commodities will keep skyrocketing unless mandates are reversed.

If you think inflation is bad, wait until the rest of the commodity markets really heat up. Although prices for basic materials like copper, aluminum, nickel and steel—used to build everything—have already inflated, they haven’t yet escalated as much as fuels and energy-driven commodities like food. But they will if European and U.S. policy makers have their way. Buckle up.

On both sides of the Atlantic, leaders promise that more green energy—solar, wind and electric vehicles—will cure Western overreliance on volatile oil and natural gas and further isolate Russia. But that cure would be far worse than the disease because green energy’s staggering use of basic minerals will fuel inflation.

Just as inflated prices for oil and natural gas rip through the economy, so do the costs of basic minerals, which are needed to build every class of product from appliances and houses to computers and cars. And while materials have for most of recent history constituted a minor share of the final cost of products, that share becomes major if mineral prices balloon.

Producing energy from wind and solar machines, and especially from batteries, requires an enormous increase in supplies of copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, lithium and other minerals. Each electric vehicle contains about 400 pounds more aluminum and about 150 pounds more copper than a conventional car. That’s really going to add up at the proposed levels of production. The same goes for the suite of minerals necessary to build the tens of thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar modules needed for green plans. Unfortunately, as the International Energy Agency and others have pointed out, supply of critical minerals isn’t expanding apace. Not even close. That’s an incendiary formula for inflation.

To wit: In Paris on March 24, the IEA convened a summit of member nations to strategize on replacing Russian oil and gas supplies while also reaffirming “decarbonization” goals. Attendees issued a declaration to “accelerate” as a “top priority” the green-energy transition to replace hydrocarbons. President Biden and the president of the European Union both reinforced the theme of a green-energy “double down.”

On the face of it, that seems logical. Huge increases in the use of solar and wind power, and electric vehicles, could displace enough fossil-fuel use to bring down prices of natural gas and oil. Or it could insulate markets from inflation triggered by the loss of, or sanctions against, of Russian supplies. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said as much when opening that Paris summit.

Whether realistic or not, the mere pursuit of such a strategy is inflationary. And it would last longer than food or fuel inflation. International Monetary Fund economists last year looked at mineral commodity data going back to 1879. They calculated the inflationary impact from trying to meet mineral demands to build enough machinery for a green double-down. Metal prices would reach historical peaks, they wrote, “for an unprecedented, sustained period of roughly a decade.” The IMF also pointed out that the “integrated assessment models” for the energy transition “do not include the . . . potential rise in costs.”

Epic escalation in the costs of minerals would create powerful headwinds for the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame inflation. Evidence supporting the IMF’s warning is already at hand.

Lithium—now well-known because of car and grid batteries—has seen prices soar nearly 1,000% in the past two years. Prices of copper and nickel, more widely used, are up 200% and 300% respectively over the same period. Aluminum, the second-most-used metal on earth after iron ore, is up 200% and trading at a 30-year high.

While metals historically have constituted a minor share of the fabrication cost of most products, the picture changes with stratospheric input prices. A doubling of aluminum prices would add input costs that wipe out nearly the entire profit margin for U.S. manufacturers of heavy vehicles, according to a 2020 United States Geological Survey paper. Higher prices for cars and trucks are inevitable.

Commodity materials inflation has already ended the long-run decrease in battery, solar-module and wind-turbine costs. That’s because minerals alone constitute over half the cost of fabricating batteries and solar modules, and about 20% for wind turbines. Well before the latest mineral escalations, forecasters saw cost rises in 2022 of 5% for batteries, 10% for wind machines and 25% for solar modules. The biggest Chinese and U.S. electric-vehicle makers, BYD and Tesla, recently announced price increases.

The potential for greater inflationary pressure should be obvious. Despite fast growth, the world still gets only 3% of its energy from wind and solar. Less than 1% of all cars on global roads are battery-electric. ING determined in late 2021 that a double-down on electric-vehicle goals would alone soak up about half of all current aluminum and copper production and about 80% of global nickel output.

Polls show that consumers believe increasing oil and natural-gas production reduces inflation. We’ve seen genuflections to that reality on both sides of the Atlantic: Europeans petitioning for more fuel from Algeria and Qatar, and the Biden administration releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But no one in Europe or the U.S. is talking about a surge in mining capacity, nor is a Strategic Energy Minerals Reserve even possible.

Mining is like anything else. Eventually high prices stimulate more production. But the slow real-world expansion capabilities of mining explains the IMF’s forecast that mineral inflation would last “roughly a decade” until supply catches up.

Most analysts focus on where the gigatons of new minerals will come from, and the derivative geopolitical impacts of the new supply chains. It would shift Europe’s dominant dependency from Russia to China; for America, from domestic industries to China. But policy makers are going to be hit first by the fast and furious inflationary effects of chasing minerals.

Policy makers do have a tool they’re familiar with to conquer more minerals inflation: Use President Obama’s famous “I have a pen and a phone” logic to repeal green mandates that inflate demand. As Ms. Granholm told the IEA summit, the “decisions we make today . . . will shape the energy landscape of tomorrow.”

WSJ : Growing Jewish Community Goes Big for Passover in Another Dubai First

Growing Jewish Community Goes Big for Passover in Another Dubai First
Jews have established the first new congregations in an Arab nation since the establishment of Israel in 1948
Worshipers in February light candles for Shabbat underneath portraits of the United Arab Emirates's leaders at the Jewish Community Center of the U.A.E. in Dubai.

DUBAI—This year the Jewish celebration of Passover, which began on Friday, is being celebrated in the United Arab Emirates, where a small Jewish community has established the first new congregations in an Arab nation since the founding of Israel in 1948.
Jewish immigrants see Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the U.A.E.’s capital, as havens from anti-Semitism that also have the benefit of low taxes and relaxed Covid rules. The country’s strict laws against hate speech toward any religion—not just Islam—leave some Jews feeling safer wearing a yarmulke in Dubai than they do in some Western cities.
The Jewish presence is as visible as it has ever been for the weeklong Passover holiday. In a first for the U.A.E., two dozen Jewish residents gathered at a private home in Dubai last month to bake matzo, the unleavened bread that is integral to Passover celebrations. The organizers also distributed hundreds of pounds of matzo in the country and neighboring ones. Similar events took place in Abu Dhabi.
Passover seders, the meals that tell the biblical story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, are drawing Jews in hotels and residences across Dubai and Abu Dhabi—with the support of U.A.E. authorities. One Jewish congregation advertised the “Pesach of your dream in the heart of Dubai,” using another name for passover. About 1,000 Israelis and American Jews from abroad are expected to attend events, candle lightings and prayers this week.
Jews in the United Arab Emirates had for years kept their culture and religion from public view. They say a game changer was the Abraham Accords, U.S.-brokered deals in 2020 to normalize relations between Israel and four Arab states, including the U.A.E., that reshaped Middle East diplomatic relations.
For 50 years, Edwin Shuker sought a return to the Arab world after fleeing Iraq as a 16-year-old Jew facing persecution. He’s back in the Middle East. A Londoner who plans to buy a home within walking distance of one of Dubai’s Jewish congregations, Mr. Shuker settled last year in the U.A.E. as part of the region’s first new Jewish community in decades.
“I cannot describe the joy of walking and hearing my mother tongue, hearing the Arab neighbors that I grew up with, and to find it in such an atmosphere of total safety,” said Mr. Shuker, 66 years old. “I never thought I would see that in an Arab country.”
The Jewish population has grown to roughly 2,000, according to Jews leading congregations, dividing from a few dozen in just one congregation into at least four groups, which range from liberal to orthodox.
They have begun building the infrastructure of Jewish life: kindergartens, synagogues, kosher caterers and restaurants and even a mikvah, a ritual bath. Their hope is to create a permanent place for Jews among the mosaic of foreigners who make up 90% of the U.A.E.’s population.

Rabbi Mendel Duchman reads prayers in Dubai before sunset during a children's Shabbat dinner earlier this year.
Children in Dubai explore traditional Shabbat activities at Mini Miracles Nursery, the Emirate's first secular Jewish nursery school, in February. Inaugurated in January 2021, the nursery caters to all children but has dedicated extra-curricular activities tailored to the community's Jewish population.
The U.A.E is an autocratic state, with Islam as its official religion. There is little room for open discussion of political views, meaning its new Jewish residents hesitate to discuss Israeli policy in public despite the recent normalization agreement.
However, the country allows expatriates a largely Western lifestyle and in recent years has introduced longer-term visas and policies, such as decriminalizing cohabitation for unmarried couples and consumption of alcohol without a license, aimed at attracting more white-collar international expertise.
Countries including Iran, Yemen and Libya remain officially hostile toward Jews and Israel. The region’s volatile politics and history of persecution of Jews means the fledgling community in the U.A.E. can’t be certain it will be long lasting.
Judaism has never been part of public life in the U.A.E. Arabs from other parts of the Middle East, as well as Iran, have criticized the U.A.E.’s warmth toward Israel and Judaism. A recent interview on Dubai’s state-run television channel by a U.A.E.-based rabbi faced criticism on social media from some viewers who said it failed to acknowledge Palestinian influence over Israeli cuisine.
Some Jews in the U.A.E. said they still feel uncomfortable revealing their religion to colleagues from the Palestinian territories and other Arab countries. Others keep their heritage secret because they believe that being a Jew might affect their business relationships with clients here.
In Morocco, a party to the Abraham Accords, a small Jewish community is growing. Another party, Bahrain, hosts a longstanding Jewish community that is now raising funds to maintain its cemetery. Egypt, which isn’t in the accords but struck a peace deal with Israel in 1979, is renovating synagogues and permitting Holocaust remembrance. Last year, an American-Israeli rabbi visited Saudi Arabia, despite it having no formal ties with Israel and restrictions on practicing any religion other than Islam.

Jewish rabbis and business executives have learned to navigate bureaucracy in a country where non-Muslim practice is closely monitored and religious worship is regulated with permits.
“There was no playbook for this,” said Ross Kriel, a lawyer appointed as the Dubai government’s contact for establishing prayer services.



Ross Kriel, one of the founders of the Jewish community in the U.A.E., inside catering firm Kosher Arabia in Dubai. An employee at Kosher Arabia, the U.A.E.’s largest kosher-compliant kitchen, able to produce over 2,000 meals a day. Kosher Arabia made its debut a few months after the signing of the Abraham Accords.
Mr. Kriel estimates the Emirati community has attracted hundreds of new Jews since the Abraham Accords, mainly from Israel and Europe. Jews in Dubai helped host cultural events and nurtured commerce, participating in the recent visit of Israel’s president and head of state, Isaac Herzog.
Another crucial signal in recent years, some Jews said, was the Emirati effort in 2020 to evacuate some of the last Jews living in Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula state that has fought a war against Houthi militants. The U.A.E. resettled them permanently within its own borders.
Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the U.S. who helped negotiate the diplomatic accords with Israel, said all visitors and foreign residents should feel safe in his country. “Provided they’re not breaking laws, you will be treated just as everyone else,” Mr. Otaiba said.
More than 850,000 native Jews left Arab countries for the U.S., Europe and Israel during a violent period of riots and pogroms after World War II and then the establishment of Israel in 1948, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Dwindling pockets remained.
There was never a significant Jewish presence in the collection of Persian Gulf sheikhdoms that in 1971 unified as one nation, the U.A.E., according to British historian Tudor Parfitt, who studies Jewish communities around the world. So the U.A.E never developed the same entrenched animosities as much of the region, he said.
The total number of Jews in the U.A.E. in the late 2000s was around 40, and they purposely kept a low profile and didn’t flag their existence to U.A.E. authorities, according to Giacomo Arazi, an early member. Events beyond their control gave them pause, such as the 2010 assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai, blamed on Israeli intelligence services, and conflicts between the Islamist movement and Israel.
This community often met at Mr. Arazi’s home in Dubai and began vetting new members and non-Jews who attended events following the Mossad hit, he said. Things got more formal with the arrival in 2013 of Mr. Kriel, an orthodox Jew who for years had visited Dubai from his native South Africa. Another newcomer, Alex Peterfreund, from Belgium, was the first who could read aloud Hebrew texts. Before their arrival, the community was more secular and services were usually conducted by visiting rabbis.




Staff run food to tables packed with customers at the Israeli Kosher restaurant TLV in the H Hotel in Dubai.
Together, they borrowed a Torah scroll from a synagogue in London by convincing a member to carry it through Dubai’s airport in a bag for golf clubs.
“Wearing the kippah in Antwerp and London, you risk your life. People are spitting in your face, they can attack you,“ said Mr. Peterfreund, using the Hebrew word for yarmulke. ”Here, I never had that.”
After Mr. Kriel’s arrival, Jews decided to better connect with the government and business community in Dubai. They sought the help of an American Jew, Eli Epstein, an aluminum executive who had visited the U.A.E. for years and built a relationship with Emirati leaders including Mohamed Alabbar, a billionaire real estate tycoon close to Dubai’s ruler.
Mr. Alabbar, a practicing Muslim, said at the time that the Islam his parents taught him was tolerant of other religions. “Islam is compatible with your presence here and I want to welcome you,” Mr. Alabbar remembered telling Jews gathered at Mr. Arazi’s house, which was known as the Villa and effectively became the U.A.E.’s first synagogue.
In an interview, Mr. Alabbar said he related with the Dubai Jewish community’s feeling of being an outsider, having lived as a young Muslim in Seattle and Singapore. “I felt that they needed someone to hold their hand,” he said.
In December 2018, the Jews revealed themselves in a series of news articles. The U.A.E. government had designated 2019 the “year of tolerance” to reinforce the idea that, in a region torn by conflict, people of diverse cultures and religions can find common ground. That year, the government hosted Pope Francis for the first visit by a sitting pope to the Arabian Peninsula. The Jewish community contributed to a book outlining the diversity of religions in the U.A.E.
Around that time, Messrs. Kriel and Peterfreund and others formed the Jewish Council of the Emirates to formally represent it, and appointed Yehuda Sarna as chief rabbi from his base in New York. The U.A.E. announced that it would build a compound featuring a mosque, church and synagogue in Abu Dhabi called the Abrahamic Family House, and that Israel would have a pavilion at Dubai’s Expo 2020 world fair.
Rabbi Levi Duchman, left, sits with a community member in Dubai. Hailing from Brooklyn, N.Y., Rabbi Duchman moved to the U.A.E. in 2015 and was the country’s first resident chief rabbi. He currently serves as the head of the Jewish Community Center of the U.A.E.
Levi Duchman, a rabbi who moved to the U.A.E. from New York, obtained a license in 2020 to conduct prayer in Abu Dhabi, the U.A.E. capital. At the same time, he ran services in Dubai and sought a permit for prayer from the emirate’s authority that regulates religious communities.
Mr. Duchman, who speaks some Arabic and is part of a New York-based ultraorthodox Chabad movement, began calling himself “Rabbi to the United Arab Emirates.”
He launched a kosher certification agency, offering to certify hotels and restaurants, and an organization called the Jewish U.A.E., which like the Jewish Council for the Emirates, seeks to promote Jewish life in the country. “I’m here to support the community with unconditional love,” he said.
In part to counter Rabbi Duchman, the Jewish Council of the Emirates appointed its own rabbi from the U.S., Elie Abadie, to be based in the U.A.E., according to people familiar with the appointment.
Elie Abadie, the Senior Rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates, begins prayers before the official start of Shabbat on Feb. 11 in Dubai.
“It is normal, where Jews live, that as the community grows and evolves, that they will subdivide according to religious rites,” said Mr. Abadie, who was born in Lebanon and speaks Arabic.
At a prayer service on a Saturday earlier this year, dozens gathered to hear celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach give a sermon on the Holocaust. Mr. Shuker, the Iraqi-born Jew, was asked to say a weekly prayer for the U.A.E., its royals and armed forces that the community first began saying in 2014 at the Villa.
“May this land and all its people be blessed with stability, prosperity and peace,” Mr. Shuker said.

FT : Number of vacant NHS hospital beds falls to lowest level since start of pan

Number of vacant NHS hospital beds falls to lowest level since start of pandemic
Health service in England is grappling with twin challenges of Covid and clearing record treatment backlog

The number of vacant NHS hospital beds in England is lower than at any time since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, as the health service contends with a wave of infections unleashed by the Omicron variant while attempting to clear a massive backlog of outstanding treatment.

In the week ending April 12, an average of just 4,933 adult general or acute hospital beds were unoccupied across England, according to a Financial Times analysis. This is the lowest level recorded during the coronavirus pandemic, and represents 5.4 per cent of the total.

It shows the NHS has less spare bed capacity than at any time in the past two years and calls into question its ability to meet a commitment to increase non-urgent hospital treatment by 30 per cent above pre-pandemic levels over the next three years.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a health think-tank, said the FT research revealed “an unsustainable level of [bed] occupancy . . . No hospital system can run at that level of occupancy outside of very short periods of crisis.”

The squeeze on hospital beds would inevitably result in patients waiting longer in accident and emergency departments to be admitted, and perhaps being sent to wards without the specialist staff and equipment to meet their needs, he added.

Edwards said that in some instances “it will certainly mean that planned [operations] will have to be postponed or cancelled at short notice”.


The UK government announced in February plans to lift all remaining coronavirus restrictions in England, and the most recent NHS data suggest the latest wave of Covid hospitalisations involving the highly infectious Omicron offshoot BA.2 may have peaked.

But the NHS is under exceptional strain in relation to bed availability, which is recognised as a key measure of the resilience of a health system. Hospitals are considered to work most safely and effectively when more than 10 per cent of beds are available.

The FT research found that only 5.4 per cent of adult general or acute hospital beds were vacant in the week ending April 12, compared with 6.3 per cent at the height of the initial Omicron wave. During the 2020-21 winter, the figure was 9.2 per cent because far more beds were deliberately kept empty to create space for Covid patients.

NHS data released last Thursday showed a record 6.2mn people in England were waiting for non-urgent hospital treatment. These care backlogs have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents healthcare organisations, said more than 15,000 patients were at present in hospital with, though not necessarily because of, Covid.

In addition, more than 20,000 patients medically fit to leave could not be discharged because the right care was not available at, or closer to, home, he added.

“That’s placing even more strain on bed capacity,” said Hopson. “And this at a time when the NHS is doing all it can to address care backlogs — so that’s another pressure.”

The issue of bed availability is about much more than infrastructure, he added. “You also need the staff to provide the care.” The NHS had 110,000 staff vacancies, a problem compounded by very high absences, many of them caused by Covid, he added.


Dr Rachel Kaminski, a respiratory consultant at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said the “vast majority” of patients had come in with ailments other than Covid and had only incidentally tested positive for the disease.

However, they still needed to be segregated which, in turn, was causing delays to operating schedules and prolonging discharges, placing more pressure on a limited bed base, she added.

A senior official at an NHS trust elsewhere in the south-west said local hospitals were being “absolutely battered” by the current Covid wave in addition to a “constellation” of other pressures, including clearing the treatment backlog, difficulty in discharging patients to social care, and an increase in people visiting emergency departments.

The official added that “the risk-benefit of infection control measures” had “completely changed with the latest wave”, and there was an expectation that social distancing and Covid testing rules in hospitals would be relaxed in the near future.

He also said that as a result of clinicians falling ill from the Omicron variant BA.2, the trust was facing “the biggest mismatch of staff to patients that we’ve had at any point during the pandemic”.

Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a professional body, said staff shortages were particularly affecting emergency departments.

She said running an emergency department at the moment was “like flying a plane with half the crew and three passengers to every seat. No airline would take off under those circumstances but we have to.”

Henderson expressed concern the current strain on the NHS could be a “glimpse” of the “new normal”.

“Every single metric in emergency care is worse than ever before and it’s going to take a huge change around to get things better, even to get back to how bad we were in December 2019 — when I was quite firmly saying this is the worst it’s ever been,” she said.

She added that ambulance delays were “the thing that freaks us out most . . . [The NHS has] always been there for you in life and death situations — and now there is a real worry that we’re struggling to get ambulances out to people and . . . to get patients into emergency departments, simply because the system is so clogged up.”


The NHS said that, while hospitals planned ahead to increase winter bed numbers to help ensure patients could be quickly admitted, “having more than a tenth of beds taken up by Covid patients has had a knock on effect”.

Despite these pressures and high levels of bed occupancy “we have managed to admit near record levels of A&E patients and do hundreds of thousands more diagnostic tests than last winter”.

This had been achieved while reducing the number of patients waiting more than two years for treatment which fell for the first time in February, it added.

Fortune : ‘The NFT thingy is starting to burst,’ warns guru whose ‘Black Swan’ t

‘The NFT thingy is starting to burst,’ warns guru whose ‘Black Swan’ theory foresaw 2007 financial crisis

The NFT bubble is beginning to burst, says the man who was one of the few to see the 2007-2008 financial crisis coming in a book some consider one of the most influential since World War II.

"The NFT thingy is starting to burst," Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the 2010 New York Times best seller The Black Swan, tweeted Saturday. "All you need is higher interest rates for things that make no sense to start making no sense."


Taleb cited the recent story of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, whose first tweet sold as an NFT last year for nearly $3 million. It's now only worth thousands, according to a CNBC article published this week.

The tweet's buyer, crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi, announced last Wednesday that he would be selling the NFT on OpeanSea and would donate half the proceeds to charity, CNBC reported. As of Saturday the highest bid was just over $18,000.

Taleb’s theory about black swans is all about the emergence of ultra-rare events for which the market is unprepared. In 2007, it was falling home prices, and in the 2020s it’s the end of low rates and easy money. The swans may not always be white, in other words.

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates by half a percentage point in May, part of more aggressive efforts to bring inflation down. U.S. consumer prices rose nearly 9% year-over-year last month, the largest increase since 1981. The market has been bracing for some time for the end of the ultralow interest rates and cheap money that have market pandemic monetary policy. Taleb seems to be arguing that much of this easy money has poured into speculative investments such as NFTs and that activity is coming to an end.

C.Z. Zaho, the billionaire founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency trading platform, expressed a sentiment similar to Taleb's in a recent interview with Fortune, responding to the 2021 sale of an NFT piece of artwork for $69 million with, "People have have lost their mind."

The recipient of that fortune, an artist known as Beeple—Mike Winkelmann in real life—worried last year that NFT art was in a bubble. He told Fox News Sunday that the internet, in its nascence, was also a bubble—and it eventually burst.

“But it didn’t wipe out the internet," he said. "And so the technology itself is strong enough where I think it’s going to outlive that.”

Zhao also sees the fragility of the market but is quick to point out he's not an art collector.

"Nothing is worth that much, right?" he said, referencing Beeple's mind-blowing sale. "But if you have one person willing to pay for it, if that person suddenly changed their mind, then that is no longer worth that much.”

NFT stands for non-fungible token—a unique, original digital asset that belongs only to its owner or owners. It's a bit like a certificate of authenticity for artwork, music, videos, and even tweets.

NFTs can be sold individually or as part of a collection, as in the case of Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of thousands of digital ape illustrations on the Ethereum blockchain. Those who purchase an ape graphic as an NFT gain membership to an exclusive club with members-only perks like access to “the Bathroom,” a members-only online graffiti board. Celebrities like comedian and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon and Grammy-winning producer Timbaland are currently using their Bored Ape NFTs as their Twitter profile pics.

A whopping $44 billion was spent on NFTs last year, Fortune previously reported.