A rising perception in western capitals that they need to ship fashionable battle tanks to Ukraine marks an necessary change within the mindset of Kyiv’s allies.
“It signifies that it [Ukraine] can go from resisting to expelling Russian forces from Ukrainian soil,” Britain’s defence secretary Ben Wallace stated this week as he confirmed the UK would ship a squadron of Challenger 2 tanks and dozens of self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine.
With Nato defence ministers set to fulfill on Friday to co-ordinate a recent arms package deal, western capitals recognise that Ukraine might solely have a slender window through which to behave — if Kyiv is to launch a profitable counter-attack earlier than Russia rearms and reinforces its depleted forces.
“That is an inflection level as a result of Russia is taking steps which clearly point out they don’t assume the conflict is misplaced,” stated David Petraeus, former director of the CIA and a retired four-star common who led US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Analysts and officers warned that this altering western calculus doesn’t essentially imply an finish to the present drip-drip provide of weaponry to Kyiv — partially as a result of some western capitals worry it may result in Russian navy escalation.
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A pivotal second will come on the Ramstein US air base in Germany on Friday, the place Britain, Poland and Finland will attempt to persuade a reluctant Berlin to supply Leopard 2 tanks to Kyiv and, crucially, allow different governments to take action. The US isn’t anticipated to decide to sending American-made Abrams tanks.
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Berlin has to this point refused, fearing the transfer may escalate the conflict and depart Germany uncovered to Moscow’s wrath. German officers are adamant they won’t go forward with tanks until the US is concerned within the initiative.
Behind the scenes, the US is supportive of Germany sending tanks however isn’t urgent Berlin to take action, officers stated.
“We’re not coaxing or making an attempt to govern any nation’s choice about what they need to present,” an administration official stated. “We respect these are sovereign choices and are grateful for all the weapons Germany is prepared to supply.”
Consensus is rising amongst Kyiv’s backers that Ukraine wants extra offensive firepower to interrupt the battlefield impasse earlier than Moscow piles extra mobilised troops into the entrance strains.
Ukraine wanted a “important enhance in help”, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg instructed Reuters on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos on Wednesday, saying the conflict had reached a “pivotal second”.
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“Ukraine’s armed forces have out there reserves and western help,” stated Jack Watling, senior analysis fellow on the Royal United Companies Institute think-tank in London. “Russian forces are presently at a nadir. However Russia has already mobilised 300,000 troops. By the tip of 2023, Russia’s navy industrial manufacturing is also beginning to spike. So there’s a navy and political crucial to behave now.”
Donating western tanks may present a number of advantages. It will make Ukraine much less depending on Soviet-era tanks, for which provides of ammunition and spare elements are restricted.
Offering Kyiv with sufficient artillery ammunition is an actual problem, stated a western official, so if Kyiv had extra armour for offensive operations, it could not must rely a lot on artillery bombardments to flatten Russian positions.
Wallace stated one other goal of sending tanks and self-propelled howitzers was to allow Kyiv to attain “a mixed arms impact” — operations integrating armour, artillery and infantry. The US this week started mixed arms coaching for Ukrainian forces in Germany.
Washington has pledged to ship scores of Bradley infantry preventing autos to Kyiv and is finalising plans to supply 100 Stryker fight autos, each of that are important for cellular warfare. Nevertheless, it has to this point declined to supply Abrams tanks, arguing they’re tougher for Ukrainian forces to gasoline and keep than the German-built Leopards.
Requested if the US would ship Abrams to Ukraine, Colin Kahl, US beneath secretary of defence for coverage, stated: “I don’t assume we’re there but,” citing upkeep and logistical challenges. However he stated Berlin mustn’t really feel it’s by itself if it had been to ship Leopards, pointing to the UK’s choice to ship Challenger tanks.
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“I believe if there was a priority about being alone in offering this functionality, that shouldn’t be a priority, however the German authorities goes to make a sovereign choice,” he stated.
Kyiv’s companions as soon as regarded sending tanks as taboo, given the chance that Russia would deem such a transfer as a casus belli with the west.
Gustav Gressel, senior coverage fellow on the European Council on International Relations think-tank in Berlin, stated “that Rubicon was crossed a very long time in the past with the sending of artillery, armoured artillery and Himars [precision-guided rockets]”. Putin’s “crimson strains” about western navy help for Kyiv had been “washed away”.
Washington has backed proposals to ship European tanks to Ukraine. Pentagon press secretary Brig Gen Patrick Ryder stated final week that Britain and Germany may ship tanks with out US participation. “We’re supportive of any sort of functionality that can give the Ukrainians a bonus on the battlefield,” he stated.
However some European officers suspect Washington’s refusal to ship even a token contingent of Abrams — thereby giving political cowl to German chancellor Olaf Scholz to supply Leopards — mirrored enduring US concern in regards to the threat of escalation.
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Washington has rebuffed Ukrainian pleas for longer-range precision missiles, such at ATACMs which have a 300km vary, or fashionable fighter jets, such because the F-16, fearing they might be used to strike Russian territory, simply because it as soon as did for tanks.
On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that western provides of weapons that would strike Russia and Russian-controlled territory equivalent to Crimea would “take the battle to a brand new degree”, in accordance with Interfax. “Even discussions about this are extraordinarily harmful,” he added.
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One other downside is that coaching Ukrainian forces to make use of fashionable western tanks may take months.
Furthermore, some western officers and analysts query how a lot progress Ukraine will be capable of make, even when strengthened with extra armour. Though Ukrainian forces overcame skinny Russian defences to retake Kharkiv province within the autumn, they made heavy going of liberating Kherson.
“Their technique is to let the Russians bleed out,” stated a European safety official, “however the Ukrainians are bleeding too.”
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Joe Biden is set to impose tariffs on double-sided solar panel imports, as the president moves to protect US clean energy manufacturers and boost jobs ahead of November’s election.
US officials said the move would immediately end an exemption from Trump-era tariffs on imports of a type of panel unit often used in large solar projects, one of the fastest-growing forms of clean energy in the country. They will now attract a tariff rate of 14.25 per cent.
The steeper levy marks the latest protectionist move by the president, who is competing with Republican rival Donald Trump to court blue-collar voters in US manufacturing heartlands, with less than six months to go until the election.
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On Tuesday, Biden sharply increased tariffs on Chinese imports including electric vehicles and solar cells, deepening trade tensions with Beijing and thrusting trade policy to the centre of the election battle.
US officials have warned that China is producing more goods than its own market can absorb, triggering fears that Beijing could use cheap exports to undercut producers in other countries.
Ali Zaidi, Biden’s climate adviser, said the US solar “investment boom” was threatened by “unfair and non-market practices taking place overseas”.
“The Chinese solar panel overcapacity, now projected to be double world demand, threatens to undercut panel manufacturing and solar supply chains around the world,” Zaidi said.
The announcement from the Biden administration comes as US imports of cheap solar panels and cells, largely from south-east Asia, have soared to record highs. An overproduction of solar panels from China has led to a collapse in global panel prices, threatening US manufacturing plans.
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The US imported 55 gigawatts of panels and 3.8GW of solar cells in 2023, with more than three-quarters of cell imports coming from Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam, according to BloombergNEF.
Alongside the new tariff on double-sided panels, the US is also offering some relief to domestic developers still reliant on imported cells — the units that make up panels — by increasing the amount that can be imported without levies from 5GW to 12.GW.
While some companies have announced their intent to open solar cell factories since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — aimed at boosting the domestic clean energy industry, among other goals — the US does not have any manufacturing capacity in operation.
The relief applies to cells imported from Asian countries except China, whose cell exports to the US face a 50 per cent tariff under the new regime announced on Tuesday.
“We know that the process of onshoring, friendshoring and frankly just diversifying the supply chains is not one that can be executed overnight,” said Zaidi.
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Raising the quota would ensure manufacturers in the US would have solar cells available to them and would support expanded US solar manufacturing, he added.
US manufacturers including First Solar and Heliene had called for the US International Trade Commission to remove the tariff exemption for double-sided panels.
But the increase in the cell quota could anger large US manufacturers that make their own cells, including First Solar and Qcells, which have petitioned for antidumping duties on south-east Asian solar cells.
LOMITA, Calif. (KABC) — Authorities are asking for the public’s help in identifying a baby who was left at a business in Lomita.
A photo of the child was released, along with a surveillance image of an unidentified pregnant woman who authorities say abandoned the infant inside the store.
The child is believed to be seven to nine months old.
Deputies responded around 5 p.m. Tuesday to a business in the 2000 block of Pacific Coast Highway. When they arrived, a store employee told them a pregnant woman with a baby had entered the store and asked for a taxi.
The woman went to the bathroom as the employee arranged for a taxi. When the taxi arrived, authorities say the woman got in the car and left the child behind in a shopping cart.
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The woman’s whereabouts are unknown, and the child is in the care of the Department of Children and Family Services, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Lomita Sheriff’s Station at 310-539-1661. Anonymous tips can be made by calling Crime Stoppers at 800 222-8477.
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One of the world’s best known luxury brands recently conducted a survey of its global store network, sending local platoons of secret shoppers to assess the level of customer service. Despite their stellar reputation, the outlets in Japan fared dismally.
“The problem was not the service. It was the shoppers,” relates the senior director in charge. “In reality, we knew the service in our Japan stores was by far the best anywhere in the world, but the Japanese customers that we sent found faults that nobody else on earth would see.”
Many will see an enviable virtuous circle in this tale — a parable of what happens when a service culture seems genuinely enthusiastic about and responsive to the idea that the customer is always right. High service standards have begotten high expectations, and who would see downside in this?
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The trouble is that, in Japan as elsewhere in the world, the “customer is always right” mantra is having a bit of a wobble. Perhaps existentially so.
The concept has always come with pretty serious caveats; fuller versions of the (variously attributed) original quote qualify it with clauses like “in matters of taste” that shift the meaning. But in a tetchier, shorter-fused world the caveats are multiplying.
Japan’s current experience deserves attention. After many decades at the extreme end of deifying the customer (Japanese companies across all industries routinely refer to clients as kamisama, or “god”), there is now an emerging vocabulary for expressing a healthy measure of atheism.
The term “customer harassment” has, over the past few years, entered the Japanese public sphere to describe the sort of entitled verbal abuse, threats, tantrums, aggression and physical violence inflicted by customers on workers in retail, restaurants, transport, hotels and other parts of the customer-facing service economy. One recurrent complaint has been customers demanding that staff kneel on the floor to atone for a given infraction.
However tame these incidents may appear in relative terms — comparing them with often violent equivalents in other countries — the perception of a sharp increase in frequency means the phenomenon is being treated as a scourge. The Japanese government is now planning a landmark revision of labour law to require companies to protect their staff from customer rage.
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The real breakthrough, though, lies in legislating the idea that customers can be wrong — a concept that could prove more broadly liberating.
Luxury goods and virtuous circles aside, customer infallibility has not necessarily been the optimal guiding principle for Japan, and is arguably even less so now that demographics are squeezing the ability to deliver the same levels of service as before. Excessive deference to customers came, during the country’s long battle with deflation, to border on outright fear that the slightest mis-step risked losing them forever.
So much deference was paid to the customer that companies were reluctant to raise prices even as they themselves bore the cost of maintaining high standards of service. Japan, during its deflationary phase, became one of the great pioneers of product shrinkflation: a phenomenon that, from some angles, made deference to customers look a lot like contempt for their powers of observation.
Perhaps the biggest dent left by Japan’s superior standards of service, though, has been the chronic misallocation of resources. The fabulous but labour-intensive service that nobody here wants to see evaporating has come at a steadily rising cost to other industries in terms of hogging precious workers. That has become more evident as the working-age population begins to shrink and other parts of the economy make more urgent or attractive demands. As with any large-scale reordering, the process will be painful.
Worldwide, though, the sternest challenge to the customer is always right mantra arises from its implication of imbalance. Even if the phrase is not used literally, it creates a subservience that seems ever more anachronistic. In a research paper published last month, Melissa Baker and Kawon Kim linked a general rise in customer incivility and workplace mental health issues to the customer is right mindset. “This phrase leads to inequity between employees and customers as employees must simply deal with misbehaving customers who feel they can do anything, even if it is rude, uncivil and causes increased vulnerability,” they wrote.
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Japan may yet be some way from letting service standards slip very far. It may be very close, though, to deciding that customers can have rights, without being right.
