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Casino campaign hires firm behind European Union exit effort - News & Observer

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain on Wednesday said it had sent dozens of letters telling European Union nationals to leave the country in error, an embarrassing mistake as the issue of the rights of such citizens in the UK is being negotiated.

Britain's interior ministry said it was investigating after around 100 of the letters were sent to citizens from other European Union countries, saying they would be removed under immigration law.

"A limited number of letters were issued in error and we have been urgently looking into why this happened. We are contacting everyone who received this letter to clarify that they can disregard it," a spokeswoman for the Britain's Home Office said in a statement.

"We are absolutely clear that the rights of EU nationals living in the UK remain unchanged."

Eva Johanna Holmberg, a Finnish academic who is married to a Briton, told The Independent newspaper that she "couldn't believe what she was seeing" when she received the letter.

While Britain has promised a generous deal for EU citizens following Brexit, there is not yet agreement over how rights will be protected.

The rights of EU citizens in Britain is one of three issues the bloc wants to settle before it begins discussing the future relationship between Britain and the EU. The EU says more progress on those core issues needs to be made before talks move on.

Reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg

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In error, Britain tells dozens of EU citizens to leave - Reuters

Using a hypothetical Finnish exit of the eurozone, the report detailed the surprisingly low cost of quitting the euro and highlighted the benefits of having a domestic currency.

And economists suggested the best way to leave the euro would be if a members joined together in secret to ambush the European Union and quit en masse, which would prevent spiteful punishment.

Although the reports authors stressed it was politically neutral - adding it was neither advocating or discouraging an exit but merely highlighting the need to investigate the issue - it nonetheless threw light on the positives of leaving the eurozone.

The report, entitled How to leave the eurozone: The Case for Finland, said an exit could lead to noticeable benefits for the country.

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They began by stating the cost of quitting the Eurozone need not be very large, perhaps just 9.1billion (10bn), and urged EU members to weigh the short-term costs of an exit again the possible long-term benefits of having a domestic currency.

And they said having their own currency would improve the democratic control of the country.

The report, put together by seven Finnish economists, said: After the Greek crisis in the Summer of 2015, it has been silently acknowledged that a country can abandon the euro.

[In some areas] countries have had persistent problems with the implementation of structural measures, e.g., improving economic structures, and fiscal and other economic policies.

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A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock prices

In the long run, Finlands exit from the euro could lead to noticeable benefits

Report

Previous studies into countries quitting currency unions, they said, found exits have not produced any noticeable short-term fluctuations in key economic variables including GDP, investments and government budgets.

The report continued: In the long run, Finlands exit from the euro could lead to noticeable benefits. If redenomination was successful, her foreign net position could, over time, improve considerably.

Finlands euro membership has provided Finnish small and medium sized businesses access to European goods and financial markets without exchange rate risk. Still, there is no point in denying the benefits Finland and her companies would gain from a rapid adjustment to relative cost shocks through its own floating currency.

The benefits of not being a part of the euro area also include stepping out from the tendency toward increasing political federalism and reclaiming democratic control over domestic affairs."

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If multiple countries quit the currency together, this would reduce the shared impact and also diminish the extent to which the EU could punish countries who dared to cut ties, the authors said.

The report said: Countries and country groups sufficiently large to destabilise the EU are likely to be provided with the option of continued access to joint systems.

Small countries may not be offered such terms, particularly if lessons need to be taught to dissuade followers.

[But] legally, there is no clause in European treaties allowing the expulsion of a country from the EU or the EMU.

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The report concluded by urging the Finnish government, along with other EU governments, to seriously look into quitting the eurozone - if only to be suitably prepared in the case of an inevitable collapse.

It said: The intention of this report is not to argue whether Finland should continue her membership in the euro. We have envisaged one possible path out of the euro, which may be considered an alternative to the ever louder calls for further integration. It is also a sign of great ignorance to say that political constructions like the euro cannot fail. At some point, they always will, and political moods dictating their fate can change surprisingly quickly, as we have seen recently.

Benjamin Franklin was quoted as saying: By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. After the near miss exit of Greece, this should be the guiding principle of every member of the European common currency. If (when) the breakup or exit of a country or countries from the euro occurs, those not prepared will be the hardest hit. The authors of this report hope that Finland will not be among them.

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Eurozone EXODUS - Economists reveal THIS is how easy it is to quit EU's failing currency - Express.co.uk

China's Foreign Ministry defended its ally Pakistan earlier this week after President Donald Trump said the United States could no longer be silent about militants using safe havens on Pakistani soil.

On Monday, Trump committed the United States to an open-ended conflict in Afghanistan, signalling he would send more troops to America's longest war and vowing "a fight to win."

He insisted that others - the Afghan government, Pakistan, India and NATO allies - step up their own commitment to resolving the 16-year conflict, but he saved his sharpest words for Pakistan.

Yang, who outranks China's foreign minister, told Tillerson on Wednesday that China was willing to coordinate with the United States on Afghanistan and make joint efforts to realize peace and stability there and in the region, according to a Chinese statement issued late that night.

"We must value Pakistan's important role on the Afghanistan issue, and respect Pakistan's sovereignty and reasonable security concerns," Yang told Tillerson.

Pakistan has been battling home-grown Islamists for years.

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Key China diplomat defends Pakistan's role in Afghanistan in call to US Secretary of State - CNBC

US marines on patrol in a poppy field in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in 2010. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

Was the 2001 US-led invasion and subsequent ongoing occupation of Afghanistan never an illegal war, as the Guardian asserts (Editorial, 23 August)?

Written in 2010, the official House of Commons Library briefing paper on the subject makes interesting reading: The military campaign in Afghanistan was not specifically mandated by the UN, but was widely (although not universally) perceived to be a legitimate form of self-defence under the UN charter.

The paper goes on to explain that article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The accepted exceptions to this are when the security council authorises military action or when it is in self-defence under article 51 of the charter.

Writing a month into the invasion, Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Californias Thomas Jefferson School of Law and a former president of the US National Lawyers Guild, described the US and British attack as a patently illegal use of armed force. The bombing was not a legitimate form of self-defence under article 51 for two reasons, according to Cohn.

First, the attacks in New York and Washington DC were criminal attacks, not armed attacks by another state. Second, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the US after September 11, or the US would not have waited three weeks before initiating its bombing campaign. Ian Sinclair London

Donald Trump declares that he will win the Afghan war that you say is both unwinnable and unlosable. If the war is to continue indefinitely, then the world faces a miserable future, because the war on terror is one of the main drivers of Islamic terrorism.

But there is a way of bringing the misery to an end. To win a war we need to win the hearts and minds of the people. We cannot do this while the most valuable crop they are growing is illegal. Afghanistans economy is now heavily dependent on opium, and at present the trade is run by the Taliban, who are sustained by its profits, and export it to feed addiction and crime in the west. The illicit opium trade is one factor in the endemic corruption that is holding the country back. Meanwhile, about 6 million Africans die of cancer each year, their agony unrelieved by morphine or heroin.

Five problems, one solution. Buy the opium crop from the Afghan farmers, medicalise it, and use it in Africa. Everyone benefits, except the Taliban and the drug barons.

When asked why this is not done, the stock government reply is that some of the medical morphine might leak on to the drugs market.

So sad, as Trump would say. Dr Richard Lawson Churchill, North Somerset

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Read more Guardian letters click here to visit gu.com/letters

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The lack of legality in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan - The Guardian