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Malta Business Review
EU CONFIDENTIAL
POLITICO EU CONFIDENTIAL, PRESENTED BY GROW
WITH GOOGLE: DOWN WITH GROUPTHINK — INSTATUSK
— DUTY-FREE BREXIT
Macron and Trump, British
Blunders, survival story
Emmanuel Macron was centre-stage again
this month, sharing the spotlight with
Dandruff-Brusher-In-Chief Donald Trump.
Our podcast panelists analyze the body
language and the big issues in the Don and
Manu show. Also up for discussion: Britain’s
immigration system blunders, a story of
survival and triumph that links Europe and
Australia and where to go to get a sense of
European history in Brussels. Plus, POLITICO
reporter Kalina Oroschakoff sketches out the
controversies around the EU’s efforts to cut
carbon emissions and change its energy mix.
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725,000 Europeans so far who have found a
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million more.** MBR
Macron & Trump
One-on-one
Spencer Dale’s energetic battle
Spencer Dale knows all about the dangers of
groupthink. A longtime employee of the Bank
of England, he rose to the heights of chief
economist and was in the eye of the storm
during the 2008 financial crisis.
“I think at the roots of that financial crisis was
a collective intellectual failure,” said Dale,
who is now chief economist at energy giant
BP. “That was a very sort of humbling process
and I think you … recognize that you actually
knew an awful lot less than you thought you
did and those types of lessons stay with you,”
he told EU Confidential.
Dale, who switched to BP in 2014, was in
Brussels this week to present the company’s
annual Energy Outlook — an attempt to
sketch out the global energy landscape until
2040. Making the report public, Dale said,
was an effort to avoid more groupthink. “If
you stand up around the world and say, ‘This
is what I think’s going to happen,’ guess what?
People love telling you you’re wrong and you
come away smarter,” he said. MBR
Talk of the town
Insta grandpa: European Council President
Donald Tusk spent his birthday weekend
setting up an Instagram account with help
from his grandsons.
Ghost train: An unoccupied train started
moving from Brussels North station toward
Schaarbeek on Tuesday, colliding with
another moving train. SNCB, the national
train operator, has not yet said why the empty
train started moving.
Bonkers read — ‘My dearest Fidel’: An
ABC journalist’s secret liaison with Cuba’s
Fidel Castro,” by Peter Kornbluh in POLITICO
Magazine. “Today, almost no one remembers
Lisa Howard. But in the early 1960s, she was
one of the most famous female TV journalists
in the United States — a glamorous former
soap opera star who reinvented herself as a
reporter and then climbed to the top of the
male-monopolized world of television news.
She became ABC’s first female correspondent
and the first woman to anchor her own
network news show. Her influential role in
the media empowered her efforts on Cuba,
even as it worried White House officials who
were the targets of her ceaseless pressure to
change U.S. policy.
“In top-secret reports from the era, those
officials speculated about ‘a physical
relationship between’ Howard and [Fidel]
Castro and feared she would use her position
at ABC News to break the story of Washington’s
secret talks with the Cuban comandante. But
both she and Castro took the secret of their
intimate diplomacy to their graves. Only now,
thanks to declassified official documents and,
most important, Howard’s own unpublished
diaries and letters, can the story finally be told
of how one tenacious journalist earned the trust
of the legendary leader of the Cuban revolution,
and cajoled two U.S presidents into considering
peaceful coexistence with him.” MBR
We Spy
Ready to depart: The Eurostar terminal
in London’s St. Pancras station is getting
a duty-free shop. That’s taking Brexit
readiness seriously! MBR
Amber Rudd
EU Wtf?
The U.K.’s Home Office keeps messing up. It
was forced to hold a briefing for EU diplomats,
admit to more immigration failures and
promise EU27 citizens would not be the next
victims. First there was the Windrush scandal,
in which Caribbean migrants who’ve lived in
the U.K. for decades were threatened with
deportation because they lacked paperwork
that the Home Office itself has destroyed.
Then Home Secretary Amber Rudd, above,
was reported to have said the system for EU27
migrants registering with U.K. authorities
after Brexit would be as simple as signing
up to a fashion store’s customer club. That’s
likely untrue: The Home Office admitted that
the app for registering residence wouldn’t be
available on Apple iPhones, which make up
just over half of the U.K. smartphone market.
Separated at birth
MBR
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s
mother Joan and music legend Elton John. MBR
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