Furloughed workers were told to spend four hours of paid time in an orderly shutdown after receiving furlough notice. They were expected to finish outstanding work, hand files over to coworkers exempted from the furloughs and post automatic out-of-office replies on email and phone accounts. Workers were told not to check government cell phones or email during the shutdown but that they would still be allowed on base to use commissaries and exchanges. According to government regulations, furloughed civilians will not receive pay and can only be compensated for back pay by an act of Congress. More than 1,400 civilians working for U.S. Air Forces in Europe-U.S. Air Forces Africa more than 80 percent of the commands appropriated-fund civilian workforce were to be furloughed, according to USAFE officials. This will certainly put undue stress on all of our Airmen as we adjust to this significant loss of manpower and professional expertise, Gen. Frank Gorenc, USAFE-AFAFRICA commander said in a message posted on the commands Facebook page Tuesday. U.S. Army Europe and U.S.
Tescos performance abroad is raising questions whether management will move to exit other markets such as Poland and Turkey, John Kershaw, an analyst at Exane BNP Paribas, said in a note previewing todays results. The grocer today said it would pay $558 million to fold its Chinese hypermarkets into a joint venture with China Resources Enterprise Ltd. (291) Chief Financial Officer Laurie McIlwee insisted that Tesco is committed to all the countries it operates in. We have great market positions in the majority of those markets, McIlwee said on a conference call. Well fight our way through a difficult macro environment. Stagnant U.K. Tesco said it expects to show an improved trading performance in the second half, noting that investments in Europe are already having an effect after a challenging retail environment in the first half. The company repeated its goal of mid-single digit trading profit growth in the medium-term. U.K. same-store sales, excluding petrol and value-added taxes, were unchanged in the second quarter, matching analyst estimates for that measure. That was an improvement from the 1 percent decline in the first quarter. After its first profit annual drop in almost two decades last year, Tesco has been investing in improving the quality of its own-brand products and is revamping its hypermarkets with bakeries, gourmet coffee and tapas while adding outlets like Harris & Hoole coffee shops and Giraffe restaurants to the premises to make them more desirable destinations.
GEORGE SOROS: Europe’s Nightmare Is Getting Worse, And Only Germany Can Make It Stop
This divergence was not envisioned by the Maastricht Treaty, which assumed that only the public sector produces disequilibrium. Then came the Crash of 2008. After the Lehman bankruptcy European finance ministers declared that no other systemically important financial institution would be allowed to fail but Chancellor Merkel insisted that the obligation should fall on each country individually, not on the European Union or the Eurozone collectively. That was the onset of the euro crisis but it took markets more than a year to react to it. Only when Greece revealed a much larger than expected fiscal deficit did markets realize that Greece may actually default on its debt but then they raised risk premiums with a vengeance not only on Greek bonds but on the bonds of all the so-called periphery countries. By then those countries became saddled with much more debt than a third world country would have been able to accumulate. The outbreak of the crisis put the European financial authorities in a bind. They had to deal with the crisis in accordance with rules that were patently inappropriate to prevailing conditions; yet they couldnt change the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties because public opinion especially in France and Germany was opposed to any further steps towards European integration. Consequently, the authorities had to resort to all kinds of legal subterfuges to prevent the euro from collapsing. This made the rules governing the euro much more complicated than they would have been if they had been designed de novo. At the same time some of the changes that arose in practice, notably the risk of default and the bail-in of bondholders were gradually given legal recognition. This has put heavily indebted countries at a large and recurrent disadvantage, which has not been properly acknowledged.
Windows Phone gains ground in Europe
September 30, 2013 10:55 AM PDT (Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) As you might expect, new research out today shows that Android is Europe’s favorite smartphone OS by a wide mile. But Windows Phone is turning into a serious contender. According to figures out Monday from researchers Kantar WorldPanel ComTech, Android featured on just over 70 percent of smartphones sold in the three months up to August across Europe’s five biggest markets: Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Equally unsurprisingly, iOS is in second position with 16 percent of the smartphone market in Europe — a year over year rise of around two percentage points for both operating systems. Windows Phone, meanwhile, continues to grow its share in the five countries, hitting 9.2 percent — around double its 5.1 percent share for the same period last year. The jump has been fueled by significant gains in the three major European markets: France, Germany, and Great Britain. In the latter, its share has risen from 4.5 percent a year ago to 12 percent today, while in Germany it’s grown from 3.8 percent to 8.8 percent — the first time it’s hit double-digit share in either country. In Germany, that puts Windows Phone only one percentage point behind iOS in market share. Related posts Apple revives in-store pickup for iPhone 5S “Windows Phone’s latest wave of growth is being driven by Nokia’s expansion into the low- and midrange market with the Lumia 520 and 620 handsets. These models are hitting the sweet spot with 16- to 24-year-olds and 35- to 49-year-olds, two key groups that look for a balance of price and functionality in their smartphone,” Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, said in a statement. And despite recent turbulence and a proposed $7.2 billion takeover by Microsoft, Nokia, Windows Phone’s main hardware champion, is growing its own market share across some of Europe’s biggest markets. (Nokia accounted for four in five of all Windows Phone device sales across the five markets.) For the three months to the end of August, Nokia bagged 7.8 percent of all smartphone sales, up from 6.9 percent a year ago, inching up on third-place Sony, whose share stands at 8.2 percent, a slight rise over a year ago. LG is also seeing something of a comeback, increasing its European share to 6.1 percent from 2.1 percent a year ago. Following its recent troubles , BlackBerry’s share has seen the biggest dip in Europe, falling from 5.8 percent of all smartphones sold in the five markets to 2.4 percent today.