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AMMAN — Orange Jordan on Wednesday celebrated the graduation of the first group of Orange Coding Academy students who have received training to help them join the labour market, according to a company statement.

The ceremony, held at the Cultural Palace in Amman, was attended by Minister of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship Muthana Gharaibeh, Chief Commissioner of Telecommunications Regulatory Commission Ghazi Jbour, and Orange Jordan’s CEO Thierry Marigny. 

Addressing the attendees, Marigny congratulated the 46 graduates, voicing hope that their “intensive” training would pave the way for a fresh start in their professional lives.

The academy’s students received training in coding languages and personal development courses, followed by a one-month internship in local ICT companies. 

The Coding Academy serves Orange Jordan’s belief in the “Training for Employment concept”, Marigny said, noting that 70 per cent of the academy’s students have got jobs before completing their internships, marking a milestone in the journey of, both, Orange’s Coding Academy and its students.

The academy is the first of its kind in the Middle East that was established by Orange Group, in partnership with Simplon.Co, following the footsteps of Orange’s coding academies in Senegal and France, he indicated.

Marigny said the academy will welcome the second batch of students soon, expecting strong competition between applicants who seek educational opportunity in this “distinguished” academy.

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina and the IMF announced on Saturday that they have agreed to start talks aimed at reaching a new financing agreement for the heavily indebted south American country. 

The announcement in statements by both parties came after a meeting between IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and Argentine Economy Minister Martin Guzman on the sidelines of a G-20 meeting in Riyadh.

The meeting came days after IMF experts concluded that Argentina’s debt is unsustainable.

Argentine President Alberto Fernandez hopes to renegotiate $195 billion of its $311 billion foreign debt, including a deeply unpopular $57 billion IMF bailout loan in 2018.

Fernandez, who took office in December, has refused the final $13 billion disbursement of the loan, leaving Argentina’s exposure at $44 billion.

“Minister Guzman and I had a very fruitful exchange of views on the country’s challenges, and the path forward to ensure a more sustainable and inclusive growth for Argentina,” Georgieva said in a statement. 

“I commended the efforts thus far, under the leadership of... Fernandez, to put in place a set of policies to stabilise the economy and to reduce poverty.”

Georgieva said she discussed with Guzman plans “to secure a sustainable and orderly resolution” to his country’s debt situation, and welcomed Argentina’s commitment “to deepen our engagement including through an Article IV Consultation and steps toward a Fund-supported programme in the future. 

“The modalities of these next steps will continue to be discussed,” Georgieva said.

Argentina’s economy ministry issued a similar statement on engaging in talks with the global financing institution.

Negotiations will continue on Monday as Guzman meets with IMF experts in Washington, an economy ministry spokesman told AFP.

Argentina’s economy shrank by 2.1 per cent in 2019, the state statistics institute said on Friday. The country has been in recession since mid-2018 as poverty and unemployment rise, with inflation surpassing 50 per cent over the last year.

Argentina’s ability to service its debt deteriorated markedly compared to the IMF’s last analysis in July 2019, the fund said earlier, when the amount owed was manageable.

Since then the peso had depreciated by over 40 per cent, international reserves declined by about $20 billion, and real gross domestic product (GDP) contracted more than previously projected. 

Argentina is battling to avoid another situation like 2001 when it defaulted on $100 billion, becoming a market pariah.

The country currently owes $311 billion — more than 90 per cent of its GDP.

BRUSSELS — An EU summit called to set the bloc’s next seven-year budget ended in impasse late Friday, riven by competing groups among the 27 member states and pressure to fill a funding gap left by Brexit.

Differences were “still too great to reach an agreement,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters at the end of the two days of talks in Brussels.

No date had yet been set for another summit to try again, but Merkel added that “we are going to have to return to the subject”.

The trillion-euro-plus budget, the multiannual financial framework, is meant to be operational from next year and run to the end of 2027.

But the summit revealed stubborn differences between a handful of wealthy “frugal” states and a larger group wanting more money to meet both big European ambitions and to fill the 75-billion-euro shortfall left by Britain’s exit from the EU last month.

“Unfortunately we have observed it was not possible to reach an agreement, we observed we need more time,” said European Council President Charles Michel, who had called the extraordinary summit and stewarded the talks.

He said, however, he was right to make the effort: “As my grandmother said, to succeed you first have to try.”

‘Goup vs group’ 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is counting on a big enough budget to meet her executive’s “geopolitical” ambitions, said the EU discord was sign of “democracy”.

Despite Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron teaming up to back Michel in his search for an acceptable compromise, two groups of countries dug in their heels.

One was the so-called “frugal four” made up of Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden, which wanted the budget reined in to reflect the UK’s absence and to avoid them having to shoulder a bigger budgetary burden.

The other was the “friends of cohesion”, 16 member states including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland and Hungary that want to ringfence EU spending on things like infrastructure as well as farm subsidies.

“We ended up in a situation of group versus group. That’s why it failed,” a source close to the negotiations told AFP.

Germany and France stood apart from those groups but had their own interests to defend. 

Merkel is determined to retain a budget rebate her country has received ever since Britain wrangled one for itself while a member. Macron, who is against the rebates, is resolute that the farm subsides — from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) — not be cut.

“The CAP cannot go to pay for Brexit,” Macron said as the summit broke up. The French president was to visit a national farm show in Paris on Saturday.

He has sought to push the EU to be more united and more ambitious and insisted on Thursday that Britain’s departure should not clip the bloc’s wings.

A battle over percentages 

Much of the summit’s haggling focused on how much of a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) the member states would have to cough up.

The “frugals” were entrenched at paying no more than 1 per cent. 

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that position was “reasonable”, addressing inflation and economic growth.

But, he said, the hole left by Brexit “is now a fact has to be reflected in the budget”.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said his rival group was working on “counterproposition” with a vision of a “more ambitious” European Union that would require a higher GDP target.

Macron expressed frustration with the situation, saying “I don’t think it’s a good method, to try to break away in groups and to block things, to get together and form types of blocking coalitions”.

Michel’s revised proposal made on Friday was for 1.07 per cent, which would have resulted in a seven-year budget of 1.09 trillion euros. 

That would be just a bit above the previous one of 1.08 trillion euros while covering the Brexit hole. But it found no takers.

Far above the figures thrown around at the summit is the one proposed by the European Parliament, pressing for 1.3 per cent of GDP.

That would be to cover Brexit, fund all current programmes and go to ambitious new ones such as fighting climate change, increasing EU investment in space and technology, and boosting the bloc’s external borders.

Almost all leaders at the summit view the MEPs’ ask as way too much. But they are also aware that the parliament has to give its assent to a budget deal among member states, whenever that might be worked out.

BRUSSELS — EU leaders gathered on Thursday for a stormy summit to decide the bloc’s seven-year budget, with bitter divisions between parsimonious rich nations, poorer ones wanting to preserve spending and others wanting to fund grand global ambitions.

The tussle for money, hard-fought at the best of times, is especially problematic this time around because of Britain’s departure from the EU.

The “Brexit gap” caused by the loss of the UK’s contribution is 75 billion euros ($81 billion) over the 2021-2027 period.

On the eve of the summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had predicted “very tough and difficult negotiations”, with some officials bracing for talks to drag into the weekend.

Summit host Charles Michel, the EU Council president, kicked off the day with one-on-one meetings with leaders of the 27 states starting with Sweden, one of the so-called “frugal four” opposed to big budget increases.

“I am convinced that it will be possible to make progress in the next hours or in the next days,” Michel told reporters.

“The last steps to finding a compromise are always the most difficult, but I think everything is on the table to let us take a decision.”

But not everyone shares Michel’s optimism, with some EU sources suggesting differences are so great the summit could end quickly and the can kicked down the road to another summit — or two — in the coming months.

An analyst at the European Policy Centre, Marta Pilati, agreed, saying: “There likely won’t be agreement at this summit. All the member states aren’t showing much willingness to compromise.”

The minimum spending in the multiannual financial framework (MFF), as the long-term budget is called, is just over 1 trillion euros.

Different goals 

The discord is over how much this budget should increase by, how spending might be shifted between priorities and how much each member state should pay as a per centage of its gross domestic product.

Another touchy issue is whether budget rebates pocketed by a few wealthier countries should still exist.

The last MFF came in at 1.08 trillion euros (in 2018 prices).

The “frugal four” — Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden — want to rein in the budget and make up only some of the ground of the Brexit gap. They also want to keep their rebates, as does Germany.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz struck a tough note on Twitter at the start of the day, insisting Vienna’s budget contributions must not “grow immeasurably” and rejecting a compromise proposed by Michel.

At the high end of spending demands is the European Parliament, which wants the MFF expanded to 1.32 trillion euros to pay for costly goals such as turning the European Union into a carbon-neutral economy within three decades.

The legislature, which has to sign off on the final MFF, believes more money can be raised from EU-wide taxes on plastics and on the carbon emissions trading scheme.

A “friends of cohesion” group of mostly eastern and southern EU nations wants to ringfence money it gets to help bring infrastructure and society up to the level of wealthier counterparts.

Agriculturally sensitive countries such as France, Spain and Poland are also looking to preserve farmers’ subsidies. France would like to also see extra money for common security and defence and the “unfair” rebates scrapped.

The European Commission, which aims for a “geopolitical” mantle under President Ursula von der Leyen, is trying for a target of 1.13 trillion euros

Clinching a deal 

Ahead of the summit Michel proposed an MFF of 1.09 trillion euros, making cuts to cohesion funds and farm subsidies to finance other priority areas.

A senior EU official said Michel’s plan would re-allocate “about eight billion euros from richer to poorer member states”.

His plan, though, has little support.

The European Parliament has rejected it as too little. Germany says it is a “step backwards” and Spain has criticised it for “not recognising the role of agriculture” in EU cohesion.

But the senior EU official said Michel believes the splits will not change over the coming months and he “is very determined to clinch a deal in the coming days”.

WASHINGTON — At their national convention in 2012, Republicans mounted a clock counting the growing US national debt on the wall, a warning of the looming financial catastrophe they said imperiled Americans.

Eight years later, the clock has stopped under Republican President Donald Trump, and the "fiscal hawks" whose strident calls for action to contain the trillions of dollars in US government debt have either lost their influence, or are keeping quiet.

The latest sign of this shift away from fiscal discipline was on full display as White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said as much in a speech in Britain.

"My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president," Mulvaney said according to a report by The Washington Post late Wednesday.

But with Trump in office, "we're a lot less interested as a party", the former budget chief said, calling the growing deficit "extraordinarily disturbing".

The White House budget proposal released last week abandons Trump's deficit cutting promises and relies on economic growth assumptions most economists dismiss as unrealistic to pay down the debt.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts the deficit will surpass $1 trillion and government debt will reach 81 per cent of GDP by the end of September.

"The fiscal hawks are clearly an endangered species," Bill Hoagland, a former Senate budget staffer, told AFP. "I really can't pinpoint anybody that's willing to step up and clear the plate."

Though the budget proposal is unlikely to ever be implemented as Trump fights for re-election in November against Democrats who have their own radically different spending priorities, analysts worry that there is no will in Washington to address debt and deficit.

But economists warn the swelling levels are increasingly risky and could leave the US unprepared to fight the next recession.

"Ultimately, interest [on the debt] could become the largest federal government programme," warned Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

"Your debt cannot rise faster than the economy forever."

'Tidal wave of debt' 

While they have remained silent under Trump, Republicans repeatedly hammered Obama at every turn, from his plan to stimulate the economy out of recession in 2009 to his reform of the health care system.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of Obama's most prominent opponents in Congress, once warned the president's fiscal policies would unleash a "red tidal wave of debt".

Republicans blocked Obama's attempt to stimulate infrastructure spending, and put the debt clock front and centre at their national convention ahead of the 2012 election, where voters ended up giving Obama a second term.

But the Republican-led Congress had a change of heart in late 2017 approving Trump's massive tax cut for corporations and the richest Americans that has been credited with boosting growth but also piling on government debt.

"The fiscal hawks that were the loudest and most vocal during the Obama administration have been largely silent," said Romina Boccia of Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.

Sending signals 

Trump's $4.8 trillion budget proposal does address the deficit, but abandons his pledge to eliminate the budget gap in 10 years, pushing the goal back to 2035.

And even the extended deadline achieves balance by projecting the US economy will grow by around 3 per cent annually for years to come — a feat almost unheard of.

The spending blueprint has no chance of getting through Congress unaltered, and Democratic and Republican lawmakers are seen as unlikely to take up a budget during election season.

But Ben Ritz of the left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute said the cavalier attitude towards spending betrays "political opportunism" by Republicans who wielded the debt and deficit as a cudgel against Obama.

"We're seeing these people who criticised Obama for much lower debt levels suddenly being ok with much higher levels under President Trump," he said.

Who cares? 

And Trump himself has shown pronounced disregard for the future consequences of running debts so high.

On the campaign trail in 2016, he called himself "the king of debt". In January, The Washington Post reported Trump quipping in a behind-closed-doors speech, "Who the hell cares about the budget?"

Yet, the record-long US economic expansion has to end sometime, and in testimony to Congress this month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell once again called for a "more sustainable budget".

With the key lending rate holding at a very low 1.5-1.75 per cent, the central bank does not have much space to manoeuvre should a downturn hit.

But the growing deficit and debt, will make it harder for the government to boost spending to support a slowing economy.

Financed by the sale of US government bonds, that could be the force that brings the economic expansion to a halt, Goldwein said.

"I think there's kind of a slow-burn consequence," he said. "The more bonds we keep selling, the less investment there's going to be in the private sector. Over time, that's going to slow growth."

SAN FRANCISCO — A multibillion dollar dispute between Facebook and US tax authorities over profits shifted to an Irish subsidiary began playing out in front of a judge on Tuesday.

The Internal Revenue Service contends that Facebook dodged about $9 billion in taxes, while the leading social network says it is actually owed a refund, according to US media reports.

“This trial is about transactions that took place in 2010, when Facebook had no mobile advertising revenue, its international business was nascent, and its digital advertising products were unproven,” spokesperson Bertie Thomson said in an e-mail response to an AFP inquiry.

“We look forward to presenting our case in court and putting an end to this years-long dispute.”

The judge is to hear from an array of Facebook executives during the course of proceedings.

Shifting profits to low-tax countries is a routine practice by international companies, and the judge’s decision in this case is seen as a possible harbinger about whether that tactic will become less effective.

The tax period involved dates back nearly a decade to before Facebook became a publicly traded company and smartphones became primary devices for engaging with social media.

The IRS contends that Facebook undervalued technology it licensed to its Irish subsidiary, thereby cutting the amount of money that came to the US for taxation here.

Facebook has countered that it should have valued the technology even lower, further reducing the amount paid by the subsidiary and, therefore, the amount subject to taxation in the US.

“Throughout Facebook’s history, we have worked with the IRS and complied with all applicable tax laws,” Thomson said.

“Our business has had hits and misses but we stand behind the actions taken over a decade ago during a time of great risk and uncertainty for the company.”

TOKYO — Shareholders livid about the performance of struggling Japanese car giant Nissan on Tuesday blasted bosses over dividends, executive pay, the stock price, and even the type of vehicle they use.

Shareholders voted to approve new Chief Executive Makoto Uchida in his post but he received a barrage of furious questions at an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting after the most recent results showed a more than 87 per cent plunge in net profit for the nine months to December.

“I’ve been a Nissan shareholder for close to 20 years. You need to review what you’re doing. I have 3,000 Nissan shares. Uchida-san, you have 2,000 shares. I have more than you!” shouted one stockholder.

“I bought it at 800 yen per share. I never thought it would fall below 700 yen. It’s less than 500 yen per share now. What do you think about this? Is it better to sell them on the market? What shall I do with my Nissan shares?”

The firm failed to issue a dividend to shareholders after posting a net loss of 26.1 billion yen for the three months to December, its first third-quarter loss in more than a decade.

It is still battling to restore its reputation after the stunning arrest and later escape of former boss Carlos Ghosn on financial misconduct charges that he denies.

Uchida sought to placate the shareholders, pointing to a strategic review expected in May that he hopes will turn around the company’s fortunes. “Shareholders, please give us time. I appreciate your patience... I want Nissan to be better. All the top management including myself are taking this situation seriously and working on it,” he said.

But the audience continued attack after attack, with one upbraiding the chairman of alliance partner Renault, Jean-Dominique Senard, for driving off from one meeting in a competitor’s car.

“After the shareholders’ meeting, you rode a [Toyota] Alphard to leave Japan or leave Yokohama. Alphard! Nissan executives were enraged. Of course. You were in a competitor’s model. Why did you choose to do that, Mr Senard?”

“You cannot make the alliance successful with that kind of mindset,” fumed the shareholder.

A repentant Senard said there would be no repetition of the faux pas.

“As soon as I had noticed... I said that could never happen again. I apologise for that. I’m awfully sorry,” he said.

Executive pay was also an issue on shareholders’ minds, with one out-of-pocket member making the point: “If you are going to reduce the dividend by that amount, you have to revise executive compensation.”

“There are 57 executives in top management. These 57 people in the top management scheme, your compensation should be less than 10 million yen [$91,000].”

“You should immediately take this decision and send a press release immediately!”

BRUSSELS — Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg called for a new type of big tech regulator as he lobbied the EU officials who have become the world's top enforcers on big tech.

The founder of the world's biggest social network, which also owns Instagram and Whatsapp, came to EU headquarters as Brussels prepares to unveil a highly anticipated strategy to regulate artificial intelligence.

Zuckerberg's visit comes on the heels of similar meetings by Google boss Sundar Pichai, who in January called on Brussels to tread carefully in regulating artificial intelligence.

But in a document released to reporters about Mark Zuckerberg's meeting, Facebook emphasised the importance of better controlling hate speech and disinformation on platforms — all without muzzling free speech.

This was the topic he was going to raise with European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova, a top Brussels official who became an outspoken critic of Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018.

Jourova, an EU spokesman said, "intends to raise issues related to the protection of democracy and fundamental rights, free and fair elections, the fight against disinformation, including the transparency of political advertising".

The Facebook paper stressed that the way to limit unwanted speech was to make sure that platforms put systems in place to fight it, not by holding them liable for the speech itself.

"Publisher liability laws that punish the publication of illegal speech are unsuitable for the internet landscape," the paper said.

Online content "may require a new type of regulator", Facebook said.

Facebook is fighting on several fronts in Europe. It currently faces several probes with European data protection agencies and the EU executive is looking more deeply into possible anti-trust problems on data use.

Zuckerberg also met with European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager and Commissioner Thierry Breton who are in charge of designing the EU's stance on AI.

Their proposal, due on Wednesday, was expected to pursue a "risk-based" approach to assessing AI similar to how Europe approaches food safety concerns, such as GMOs and certain chemicals.

Vestager has told reporters she would back away from a ban on facial recognition technology and instead ask companies and authorities to think hard before deploying it.