With negotiations between the UK and EU likely to formally begin on June 19, Bloomberg reports that Brexit Secretary David Davis has pre-emptively lashed out at EU officials, threatening that "The UK will quit talks on leaving the European Union unless the bloc drops its demands for a divorce payment as high as EUR100bn."
Authored by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
For years Uber has been battling with Barcelona taxi drivers who have argued that UberPOP engages in unfair competition by using unlicensed drivers that are not subject of the same regulatory hurdles as a regular "transport company." And while Uber has historically taken the approach of just entering new markets and sorting out the regulatory hurdles later, it looks like those hurdles are finally catching up with them in the European Union...which we suspect will not be well received by Uber's private investors that recently dumped money into the company at a modest $68 billion valuation.
Authored by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute,
Emmanuel Macron is the new president of France. The 39-year-old political shooting star got 66.1 percent of the votes in the second round of the presidential election last Sunday. His opponent, Marine Le Pen, secured just 33.9 percent of the votes.
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
The French election, won overnight by Emmanuel Macron, put several segments of the French population opposite one another in a pretty fierce contest. And that contest will continue. Because Macron won’t be able to lift the French economy out of its doldrums any more than Le Pen could have, or than Trump can life the US, and the new president will have the honor of presiding over a further and deepening downturn. The French political dividing line was aptly described by Simon Kuper recently: