| English: Ownership Unbundling in Energy Markets. An Overview of a Heated Debate in Europe
*Bài báo dưới bàn luận về vấn đề tách rời quyền sở hữu, hay tách sở hữu độc quyền trong ngành năng lượng tại châu Âu, dược khởi sướng từ đầu những năm 1990s cho đến những năm 2000s. Đây là một bước tiến giúp châu Âu có thị trường năng lượng tự do (liberal energy market) . Tương tự, với Việt Nam, đây là một vấn đề phức tạp, và đã đến lúc đòi hỏi cần phải đầu tư cho các thảo thuận, nghiên cứu về phương tiện chính sách và hỗ trợ thực tiễn để tách rời quyền sở hữu trong thị trường năng lượng độc quyền nói chung và thị trường điện nói riêng. Đây là bước đưa Việt Nam đến một thị trường năng lượng minh bạch tự do và bền vững dưới sự quản lý tốt của nhà nước. (Lời giới thiệu bởi T.S Đào Thu Hằng,) Quá trình thúc đẩy tự do hóa thị trường điện thúc đẩy bởi Ủy ban châu Âu từ hai thập kỷ đang bước vào một giai đoạn mới trong cuộc tranh luận về quyền sở hữu và điều tiết cơ sở hạ tầng truyền tải năng lượng. Vấn đề trọng tâm của quá trình là loại bỏ các nhà vô địch quốc gia kết nối theo chiều dọc, tạo ra một thị trường sản xuất điện cạnh tranh và có các cơ quan quản lý mạnh và độc lập để giám sát các nhà độc quyền tự nhiên (natural monopolies) như các lưới điện cao áp. Ủy ban châu Âu, nói về cái gọi là gói thứ 3, nhìn nhận việc tách quyền sở hữu là yếu tố chính để hạn chế khả năng của các nhà sản xuất điện Châu Âu sử dụng quyền lực thị trường trong những tương tác kỹ thuật phức tạp giữa sản xuất, truyền tải và phân phối. Cùng với nhau, các sắp xếp mới về quyền sở hữu, luật lệ đáng tin cậy về cơ sở hạ tầng (ERGEG +…) và một đơn vị giám sát thị trường có trình độ kỹ thuật cao (ACER…), là thành phần của gói biện pháp mới hiện đang được tranh luận giữa các bên có quyền lợi liên quan. Thị trường Điện 2008 của châu Âu sẽ là năm của “gói thứ ba”, gọi tắt trong nhiều báo cáo bằng thành phần chính của gói: Tách rời quyền sở hữu – Unbundling “Unbundling – Tách rời”, một khái niệm kỹ thuật từ lúc đầu, đã đi vào từ vựng của công chúng rộng rãi hơn. Có vẻ là kỹ thuật, nhưng cuộc tranh luận trên thực tế là một tranh luận mang tính triết học cao. Đang được áp dụng và hiện thực hóa cho viễn thông và đường sắt, ngày nay Unbundling là đối tượng của các cuộc luận chiến quan trọng trong nội bộ châu Âu cho thị trường năng lượng. Sau khi trình bày tình trạng hiện tại của “dự án, cũng như các quyết định sẽ được thực hiện vào năm 2008 về cái gọi là ‘gói lập pháp thứ ba’ (xem thêm tại đây) “, các lập luận ủng hộ và phản đối sẽ là trọng tâm chính của bài báo này; một bài báo nỗ lực để tăng tính minh bạch, thay vì đưa ra quan điểm ủng hộ hoặc chống lại. |
South China Sea: will Joe Biden take a more cautious approach in the disputed waters?
Laura Zhou in Beijing
Published: 6:00pm, 14 Nov, 2020 SCMP
A Sea Hawk helicopter lifts off from the American aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan during an exercise in the South China Sea in July. Photo: Reuters
The United States is expected to take a more contained approach to the South China Sea under Joe Biden, but the disputed waters will remain a potential hotspot in the relationship between Beijing and Washington, observers say.“I think he [Biden] will take a different approach to [US President Donald] Trump,” said Wu Shicun, head of the National Institute of South China Sea Studies, which advises the government.“He is likely to pay more attention to the South China Sea but his policies will be more balanced and more contained.”
One possible change is a reduction in the number of freedom of navigation operations conducted by the US Navy in the sea, Wu said.https://www.youtube.com/embed/BcMR2ZCcheI
The patrols have been a regular feature of US military operations since Barack Obama was in the White House but became more frequent under Trump, who gave more flexibility to the Pentagon to plan its naval patrol schedules in the contested waters.ADVERTISING
American forces have conducted eight freedom of navigation operations this year, the same number as in 2019, but up from six in 2018 and four in each of the previous three years. The US says the manoeuvres are necessary to maintain balance in the region, but Beijing regards them as provocative and has condemned them.
“The US military operations in the South China Sea have affected Sino-US relations and increased tensions,” Wu said.
US aircraft carriers and their strike groups take part in a drill in the South China Sea in July. Photo: EPA-EFELe Hong Hiep, a fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said the people Biden chose to fill key defence positions would affect Washington’s relationship with Beijing in the South China Sea, but whoever they were, the tensions were unlikely to go away any time soon.
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Among the front-runners for the post of defence secretary is Michele Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defence for policy under Obama and is known for advocating a tough stance on China.
“The South China Sea has become an important battleground for US-China strategic competition, where the US can mobilise countries in the region against Beijing, using China’s excessive territorial claims as the rallying call,” Le said.
“As such, under the Biden administration, the US and its allies are likely to continue to maintain or even strengthen their involvement in the South China Sea.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/8eqtl0ym1p8
Meanwhile, Beijing has been stepping up its engagement with its Southeast Asian neighbours.At a video meeting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on Thursday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said boosting relations with the 10-member bloc was one of Beijing’s priorities.He also called for the negotiations of a code of conduct for the South China Sea to be expedited. In 2018, Li proposed a three-year timeline to create such a code. A second reading of the negotiating draft began in January but the process was halted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
China drafts law to expand coastguard’s powers over islands and foreign vessels6 Nov 2020
Wu said that Washington’s policy to reject most of Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, the political turmoil in Malaysia, and possible leadership changes in Vietnam and the Philippines over the next two years would complicate the negotiation process.
Le said that despite those hurdles, Beijing was keen to finalise the code.“[A] deepening US-China rivalry may encourage China to accelerate the negotiations,” he said.
“On the other hand, it may also prompt Washington to back nations to resist some of China’s key demands, such as excluding countries from outside the region from conducting military exercises or marine economic activities in the South China Sea.”
China-EU relations: Can the EU have its cake and eat it too?
SCMP Newsletter
The European Union (EU) needs China, given their close economic ties. And China needs the EU, particularly given the sharp escalation of tensions between Beijing and Washington.
But ties are starting to fray given recognition in most European capitals that China’s economic model is not compatible with theirs, that there are security risks from China’s increasingly assertive global outreach, and that China does not place the same value on human rights as they do. Tiếp tục đọc “China-EU relations: Can the EU have its cake and eat it too?”
VIỆT NAM CẦN LÀM GÌ ĐỂ ĐẠT ĐƯỢC KHÁT VỌNG TĂNG TRƯỞNG LÂU DÀI?
English: What will it take to achieve Vietnam’s long-term growth aspirations?
COVID-19 đã làm gián đoạn hành trình của đất nước là trở thành một nền kinh tế tăng trưởng cao, tuy nhiên những điều chỉnh cơ cấu phù hợp có thể đưa nền kinh tế trở lại quỹ đạo.
Với một lượng ca nhiễm và tử vong do Covid 19 tương đối ít được ghi nhận đến nay, Việt Nam hiện đang có cơ hội và bắt buộc phải xem xét về khát vọng kinh tế dài hạn hơn, thậm chí giống như một quốc gia chịu trách nhiệm chống lại vi-rút. Thành công lâu dài sẽ đòi hỏi các nhà lãnh đạo Việt Nam phải tập trung vào vấn đề và cơ hội đã có từ lâu trước khi có đại dịch
Tiếp tục đọc “VIỆT NAM CẦN LÀM GÌ ĐỂ ĐẠT ĐƯỢC KHÁT VỌNG TĂNG TRƯỞNG LÂU DÀI?”
15th East Asia summit on Saturday to push for free, open, inclusive & rules-based Indo-Pacific region
SECTIONS ..
The 15th East Asia Summit on Saturday hopes to give a big push to a free, open, inclusive, transparent, rules-based, peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.
The Summit Meeting will also discuss ways and means to strengthen the EAS platform and to make it more responsive to emerging challenges on its 15th anniversary. The Leaders will also exchange views on issues of international and regional interest including the COVID-19 pandemic and the cooperation among EAS participating count ..
US bars investments in ‘Chinese military companies’
BBC
US President Donald Trump has issued an order banning American investments in Chinese firms the government determines have ties to the Chinese military.
In the order, Mr Trump accused China of “increasingly exploiting” US investors “to finance the development and modernisation of its military”.
The ban is to go into effect in January.
It could affect some of China’s biggest publicly-listed firms, including China Telecom and tech firm Hikvision.
Throughout his administration, Mr Trump has made efforts to disentangle the US from its close economic ties with China.
He has raised border taxes on billions of dollars worth of China goods and imposed sanctions on some of its tech companies.
Relations between the two superpowers have also soured over issues such as coronavirus, and China’s moves in Hong Kong.
Officials said the new order had been under review for months. It applies to shares owned directly or indirectly in 31 firms identified by the US earlier this year as backed by the Chinese military, a list that includes tech firms and large state-owned construction companies among others.
US investors have a year to comply with the rules.
Mr Trump, who recently lost to challenger Joe Biden in the US presidential election, is due to leave the presidency shortly after the order goes into effect.
Mr Biden has not outlined his China strategy, but during the campaign he promised to challenge the Chinese government on similar issues as Mr Trump, including trade abuses and cyber-theft.
Mr Trump’s stance on China is one of the rare areas in which he has sometimes received support from both Democrats and Republicans.
Several politicians in Congress have also proposed laws to block US investment in firms the White House designates as threats.
Earlier this year, Mr Trump ordered the pension fund for government employees to abandon a plan to invest in Chinese companies. The US has also said it is considering de-listing Chinese firms from US stock exchanges if they do not comply with US audit rules.
The efforts come as US exposure to companies listed on Chinese stock exchanges has grown.
But such investments remain a small fraction of overall US holdings. In a report earlier this year, researchers for financial regulators at the US Securities and Exchange Commission estimated that US mutual funds held about $43.5bn in Chinese stocks and bonds at the end of April.
A spokeswoman for the Investment Company Institute, a trade association for mutual funds and other money managers, said it was reviewing the order and had no further comment
World History – Lịch sử Thế giới
Báo cáo của tướng TQ viết gì về Lão Sơn?
Vì sao TQ muốn kéo dài chiến cục ở Vị Xuyên?
Exploring Saigon like a Saigonese
Thursday, October 29, 2020, 11:04 GMT+7 TUOITRENEWS
Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon, is Vietnam’s largest city and known as the country’s economic and financial hub. Though many visit the city to check out modern life in the metropolis, they often forget about its role as a hub of culture and scientific development.
Tiếp tục đọc “Exploring Saigon like a Saigonese”Coronavirus kills 15,000 U.S. mink, as Denmark prepares for nationwide cull
Wednesday, November 11, 2020, 09:16 GMT+7 tuoitrenews
CHICAGO — More than 15,000 mink in the United States have died of the coronavirus since August, and authorities are keeping about a dozen farms under quarantine while they investigate the cases, state agriculture officials said.
Global health officials are eying the animals as a potential risk for people after Denmark last week embarked on a plan to eliminate all of its 17 million mink, saying a mutated coronavirus strain could move to humans and evade future COVID-19 vaccines.
The U.S. states of Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan – where the coronavirus has killed mink – said they do not plan to cull animals and are monitoring the situation in Denmark.
“We believe that quarantining affected mink farms in addition to implementing stringent biosecurity measures will succeed in controlling SARS-CoV-2 at these locations,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Reuters on Tuesday.
The USDA said it is working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state officials and the mink industry to test and monitor infected farms.
The United States has 359,850 mink bred to produce babies, known as kits, and produced 2.7 million pelts last year. Wisconsin is the largest mink-producing state, followed by Utah.
Sick mink in Wisconsin and Utah were exposed to people with probable or confirmed COVID-19 cases, the USDA said. In Michigan it is still unknown if the mink were infected by humans, according to the agency.
In Utah, the first U.S. state to confirm mink infections in August, about 10,700 mink have died on nine farms, said Dean Taylor, state veterinarian.
“On all nine, everything is still suggesting a one-way travel from people to the minks,” he said.
Coronavirus testing has been done on mink that die and randomly on the affected farms, Taylor said. Like people, some mink are asymptomatic or mildly affected, he said.
The CDC said it was supporting states’ investigations into sick mink, including testing of animals and people.
“These investigations will help us to learn more about the transmission dynamics between mink, other animals around the farms and people,” the CDC said. “Currently, there is no evidence that animals play a significant role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to people.”
Coronavirus is thought to have first jumped to humans from animals in China, possibly via bats or another animal at a food market in Wuhan, although many outstanding questions remain.
Monitoring U.S. mink for virus symptoms and quarantining infected farms should limit the disease’s spread if cases are caught early, said Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
“I’m fairly confident that as long as they have that surveillance going and it’s strong enough, then they should be able to prevent the spread,” he said.
U.S. authorities are urging farmers to wear protective gear like masks and gloves when handling mink to avoid infecting the animals.
In Wisconsin, about 5,000 mink have died on two farms, State Veterinarian Darlene Konkle said.
One farm is composting the dead mink to dispose of the carcasses without spreading the virus, Konkle said. Authorities are working with the second farm to determine how to dispose of the mink, and dead animals are being kept in a metal container in the meantime, she said.
Michigan declined to disclose how many mink have died, citing privacy rules.
State officials said they are working with the USDA to determine whether farmers can sell the pelts of infected mink. The pelts are used to make fur coats and other items.
The coronavirus has also infected cats, dogs, a lion and a tiger, according to the USDA. Experts say mink appear to be the most susceptible animal so far.
Highlights
- Coronavirus kills 15,000 U.S. mink, as Denmark prepares for nationwide cull
- Brave heart: Donated heart survives helicopter crash in California
- How Pfizer vaccine could be cold comfort for some Asian nations
- Remote Canadian town programs radar to spot approaching polar bears
- Virus surge puts paid to Austria ski season restart
Reuters
Hanoi chronicles: when peace exposes the horrors of war
By Long Nguyen November 11, 2020 | 11:49 am GMT+7 vnexpress
After first visiting the capital at the height of the Vietnam War more than 50 years ago, Thomas Billhardt has kept returning to Hanoi to chronicle its changes.
However, he chose to do it not with graphic pictures of the violence, but by capturing normal, daily life that highlighted what was being destroyed.
Since October this year, the 83-year-old German photographer has been fielding numerous calls and messages from Vietnam, unable to attend an exhibition featuring 130 photos he’d taken in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.
“I am sad that I cannot be in Hanoi this time because of the pandemic, but the city is always in my heart,” he told VnExpress International from Berlin, Germany.
Billhardt has won worldwide recognition for his work in the late sixties and early seventies when the Vietnam War was at its peak. His photographs of daily life amidst the war were powerfully poignant.
 |
| Thomas Billhardt at an exhibition. Photo courtesy of Thomas Billhardt. |
Billhardt loved photography as a child, being raised by a photographer mother. He graduated from the University of Graphics and Book Design in Leipzig in 1963. When he made the first of his 12 trips to Hanoi four years later, he never imagined that it would give birth to an association lasting more than five decades.
He first came to the capital city with a group of moviemakers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1967 to film a documentary about American soldiers captured in Hanoi amidst the infamous Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing blitz unleashed by the U.S. against the north of Vietnam.
He remembers that at the Metropole, the fanciest hotel in town, “there were more mouses than guests and worms in the hotel’s water.”
Seeing the devastation of the war, the bomb craters, destroyed buildings, and the sounds of air raids and sirens calling for people to take cover, he was moved to tell the story of Hanoi and its people with a “photo chronicle.”
“I was angry on seeing the Americans destroy Hanoi… I wanted to show the world the photos I took in Vietnam so they would know exactly what was going on. Then they would understand and love Vietnam, just like me.”
He decided that his wartime photography would focus on people going about their daily lives, busy working and getting ready to fight at the same time.
 |
| A tram in 1975. The tram was a popular form of public transportation for Hanoians. Photo courtesy of Thomas Billhardt. |
The photographs of crowds cycling under pouring rain, the happy faces of barefoot children attending an outdoor painting class, a stadium filled with people cheering and laughing as they watched a football match and many such scenes of love and care powerfully contrasted and resisted the extreme violence of war.
“I felt a connection with Vietnamese people when looking into their eyes as they suffered from the raging war,” Billhardt recalled, adding the bravery of Vietnamese was a lesson for him.
“Thomas’s photos hold up a mirror to the world while holding out hope at the same time. They tell of the world’s social inequalities, of poverty, of suffering, of war, but also of the life and laughter of the people who live in it,” said Wilfried Eckstein, director of the Goethe Institute in Hanoi.
Tiếp tục đọc “Hanoi chronicles: when peace exposes the horrors of war”Remittances to fall for first time in 11 years
11/11/2020 06:45 GMT+7 vietnamnet
Remittances to Vietnam are set to fall for the first time since 2009 to $15.7 billion this year over Covid-19 impacts.
However, even though this is a 7.6 percent drop from last year’s 17 billion USD, Vietnam will remain the ninth biggest remittance beneficiary in the world, according to a recent report by the World Bank.
In the East Asia and Pacific region, the country is forecast to rank third behind China (59.5 billion USD) and the Philippines (33.3 billion USD).
This year’s remittance is estimated at 5.8 percent of Vietnam’s GDP, compared to 6.5 percent last year.
The dip reverses an upward trend that’s lasted two decades, starting at a mere 1.3 billion USD in 2000./.VNA
The US-China rivalry in tech and trade won’t end because Joe Biden is president
Analysis by Jill Disis, CNN Business
Updated 1043 GMT (1843 HKT) November 9, 2020
Hong Kong (CNN Business)President Donald Trump spent much of his term setting up Beijing as Washington’s greatest political and economic adversary. Don’t expectdrastic changes when Joe Biden takes the helm, even if he eschews the bluster and unpredictability of his predecessor.Economists and trade experts believe that the United States and China will move further apart on trade and technology as Washington continues to scrutinize virtually every aspect of its relationship with the world’s second-largesteconomy.”We have a fundamental, systematic rivalry between these two systems,” said Alex Capri, research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation and senior fellow and lecturer at the National University of Singapore. “In many ways, that rivalry is going to intensify.”
Tiếp tục đọc “The US-China rivalry in tech and trade won’t end because Joe Biden is president”
