Monthly Archives: May 2017

Andy Murray secured his place in the third round of the Madrid Open with a 6-4, 6-3 win over Marius Copil.

Eighth-seeded Dominic Thiem of Austria joined him by defeating Jared Donaldson of the United States 6-3, 6-4 -- while ninth-seeded David Goffin had nine aces on his way to a 7-6 (3), 6-0 win over Florian Mayer in an action-packed second round.

Murray -- who is continuing his return from an elbow injury after reaching the semifinals in Barcelona -- eventually forced a late break in a tense opening set before his superior power came through against Copil.

Copil - the 26-year-old from Romania -- had initially put up some strong resistance, having saved two break point chances on his opening service game of what developed into a tight first set.

With both players holding, Murray went ahead at 5-4, which put more pressure on the Romanian as he served to stay in the set.

Murray did not let his chance slip, forcing Copil into a long return from the corner before another fine passing shot from Murray brought up a set point.

Copil -- who will move into the top 100 next week -- put a return into the net as the Scot claimed the first set in 47 minutes.

Despite the momentum now being with Murray, Copil continued to find his range, holding a testing fourth game having squandered a 40-love lead to level at 2-2 on serve.

Murray, though, slowly upped the tempo, forcing another deuce on Copil's next service game that saw a double fault followed by a break chance, which this time the world number one claimed when the Romanian's backhand was long.

The world No. 1, set to also play in Rome ahead of the French Open, soon moved 5-2 up with a straightforward hold which left Copil serving to save the match.

However, Murray, who will turn 30 next week, was forced to wait until the next game after another brave response from the world No. 104.

Murray, though, made no mistake on his serve, forcing Copil into errors to complete his straight-sets win in one hour and 24 minutes after another long return by the Romanian.

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Murray, Thiem, Goffin progress at Madrid Open - ESPN

ATLANTA - Georgia Governor Nathan Deal will be speaking Wednesday morning about the reconstruction progress of the Interstate 85 overpass.

A news conference is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday at the State Capitol, where Governor Deal will be joined by Georgia Department of Transportation Commissioner Russell McMurry and State Transportation Board Chairman Robert Brown, Jr.

On March 31, a massive fire underneath the I-85 bridge over Piedmont Road caused a portion of the interstate to collapse. The damage was so extensive that crews had to repair the interstate in both directions.

PHOTOS: I-85 fire and overpass collapse

Demolition began almost immediately with a tab just calculated at $1.6 million, according to MarcMastronardi, the Director of Construction for the DOT. He said the cost to rebuild andre-pavethe 750 feet of interstate overpass is $11.9 million. Coupled with $3 million in incentives, Mastronardi said the final cost will be approximately $16 million, which includes support from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

RELATED:Gov. Deal declares state of emergency following I-85 fire

Last week, transportation officials said the I-85 overpass will reopen before the busy Memorial Day weekend. It was originally scheduled to reopen by June 15.

MORE:I-85 to reopen before Memorial Day

While it is hard to put a price tag on the toll this project has taken on commuters who have learned to sit through and maneuver around the closed section of interstate, DOTofficials promise the end is near.

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Gov. Deal to speak about I-85 reconstruction progress - FOX 5 Atlanta

Recently, I came across a stunning statistic. By mid-century, there will be more Nigerians than Americans. Nigeria is one of the world's worst run countries and its unemployment rate hovers around 24 percent. A dysfunctional country and an exploding population do not mix very well. What is true of Nigeria is also true of large parts of the African continent.

As we speak, one out of seven inhabitants of the planet lives in Africa. By mid-century, one in four people on Earth will be African. If the current trends continue, somewhere between one third and one half of the world's population will live in Africa by 2100. African unemployment is not easy to guesstimate, but South Africa, the continent's economic powerhouse, suffers from an unemployment rate of 27 percent. How, I wonder, are all of these people going to make a living?

This column is, generally speaking, the very definition of optimism. I am, for example, largely sanguine about the impact of automation on America's unemployment rate. Our country has lived through profound economic changes in the past and risen to the challenge. At the time of the American Revolution, for example, over 90 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. As late as 1900, 40 percent of Americans did so. Today, 1.5 percent do, while feeding the country as well as much of the rest of the world too. All that surplus labor was soaked up by manufacturing and, later, services. Adjusted for population growth, a record number of Americans today has a job, dislocation emanating from the IT revolution notwithstanding.

Relatively speaking, the United States is well placed to deal with automation, robotics, and perhaps even artificial intelligence. Our state-run primary and secondary education systems sucks, but American universities are second to none and the number of college-educated Americans is at an all-time high. We have a decent legal system and business environment. The welfare state, while technically bankrupt, can provide a cushion for the temporarily unemployed in extremis (and after cuts elsewhere). That does not mean that America does not need reforms, hence the "relatively speaking" at the start of this paragraph. But we are in better shape to face the challenges of the future than many other nations.

Unfortunately that is not true of Africa. The African legal system, the African business environment, and all levels of Africa's state-provided education are, compared to the rest of the world, abysmal. The continent is far too poor to afford even a rudimentary social welfare net. So what are the hundreds of millions of people, mostly young, to do in the coming decades?

Much of Asia has escaped from poverty through labor-intensive and export-oriented industrialization. Africa, by contrast, is actually de-industrializing. This is not happening because of free trade, since Africa remains the least economically free region in the world. Rather, African workers cannot compete with much more productive Asian labor due to a number of factors that include lack of decent education and skills, bad financial and transport infrastructure, Byzantine bureaucracy and heavy regulation, and so on.

To make matters worse, automation and robotics are bound to make Africa's workers even less competitive in the future. Simply put, it is difficult to see how the Asian route out of poverty can be repeated on the African continent. And in order to leapfrog Asian-style industrialization into an American-style modern economy, Africa would need well-functioning rule of law, property rights, and a welcoming business environment. It has none of those.

That leaves agriculture, but even here the outlook is not promising. The continent is rapidly urbanizing and few Africans see their future in farming. In any case, farming in the rest of the world is increasingly dominated by large and mechanized agricultural concerns, not small and labor-intensive farms. So, again, where will the African jobs of the future come from? I do not know, but the prospect of between one third and one half of humanity living on a continent without the prerequisites for succeeding in the 21st century economy strikes me as a reason for concern.

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The Prospects for Progress in Africa - Reason (blog)

President Trump moved quickly and aggressively in his first days in office to advance his trade agenda, launching investigations into dumping of foreign products in the U.S. and establishing an office to protect American manufacturing, but the promised NAFTA do-over stands as a tantalizing brass ring that remains out of reach.

Nearly two weeks ago, the president prodded Mexico and Canada to agree to renegotiate the 24-year-old trade pact. But Mr. Trump has barely started the process and has yet to even give the required notice to Congress.

Right now there is nothing to share, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said when pressed by a reporter Monday about progress toward opening the renegotiations.

Either reworking or quitting the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly called the worst trade deal in the history of the world, was one of Mr. Trumps top campaign promises and key to the appeal to Rust Belt voters who helped swing the November election his way.

Mr. Trump rushed to fulfill many other trade promises he made to blue-collar workers, who were suffering after their jobs moved to Mexico or other lower-wage countries. He officially pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with a dozen Pacific Rim nations, began a large-scale review of U.S. trade deficits and trade deals, and opened investigations into imported steel and aluminum. He also threatened to rip up a trade deal with South Korea approved five years ago under President Obama.

The president got tough in a trade dispute with Canada, slapping tariffs of up to 24 percent on Canadian softwood lumber shipped into the U.S.

With NAFTA, however, not so fast.

Part of the holdup is the stalled Senate confirmation of Mr. Trumps pick for U.S. trade representative. Senate Democrats have slow-walked the nomination of Robert Lighthizer, an experienced negotiator who would lead the talks.

He won unanimous approval from the Senate Finance Committee late last month, clearing the way for what should be an easy confirmation by the full Senate as early as this week.

After that, the Trump team must strike a deal with Congress before beginning to haggle with Mexico and Canada on a revised NAFTA. A month ago, Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. was already exasperated with the snails pace for trade talks in Washington.

Its been frustratingly slow, he fumed on Fox News.

Mr. Ross and other top Trump officials met with the House Advisory Group on Negotiations, a first step toward trade promotion authority for the president to fast-track any deal with Mexico and Canada.

Mr. Trumps aides have yet to meet with the Senate Advisory Group on Negotiations or provide formal notice to Congress of their plans. The notice begins a 90-day waiting period for intensive negotiations between the administration and Congress to set parameters and objectives for the NAFTA rewrite. A leaked draft of the proposed NAFTA notice in late March proved a disappointment to trade hawks, seeking what appeared to be far more modest concessions from Mexico and Canada than Mr. Trump had talked about on the campaign trail.

Rising leverage

When the Trump administration does reach the bargaining table, it will face two neighbors with significantly more leverage on trade than they had a quarter-century ago when NAFTA was first approved.

Mexicos more muscular stance is on display this week with a delegation of government and business leaders in Argentina and Brazil to explore alternative sources of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice. The U.S. is Mexicos biggest supplier of these agriculture products.

Francois-Philippe Champagne, Canadas minister of international trade, plans to be in Washington for a trade conference on Wednesday and is emphasizing the integrated nature of the North American economy.

Maintaining strong economic ties is vital to our mutual success, said Mr. Champagne. Canada strongly supports open, principled and progressive trade throughout the Americas to create greater prosperity that leads to good-paying middle-class jobs for all of our citizens.

Last year, Canada had a trade surplus in goods with the U.S. of $12.1 billion, and Mexico had a goods trade surplus of $63.2 billion.

The Trump administration also must contend with a tangle of competing U.S. business interests and political forces on Capitol Hill, many with strongly vested interests in the free trade arrangements.

His effort to repeal and replace Obamacare will seem like childs play compared to the effort that would be needed to get a massive rewrite of major trade legislation through Congress, said Democratic strategist Jim Manley, who served as a top adviser to Harry Reid when he was Senate majority leader.

One of the biggest issues will be the fact that despite some legitimate criticism of trade policy, there are major business groups fighting tooth and nail to protect their interests, said Mr. Manley.

Mr. Trump already backed off plans to pull out of NAFTA, saying the threat of a pullout prompted Mexico and Canada to agree to reopen the deal. However, Mr. Trump quickly determined that NAFTA had plenty of winners in the U.S., especially border states. U.S. agriculture and energy industries have prospered greatly in the free trade zone.

They dont want to hurt the progress that has been made for American workers, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a researcher heading a NAFTA project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. You have several million jobs in the United States, manufacturing and otherwise, that are dependent on NAFTA. You dont necessarily want to trade those jobs for other jobs.

She was optimistic that something positive would come out of renegotiations.

At the end of the day, whatever is negotiated, the president is going to say he won, said Ms. Brown.

Mexico and Canada indicated their approach to the talks by describing the need to update the agreement.

Indeed, there are areas of trade that have evolved dramatically since NAFTA was signed in 1993, such as e-commerce.

Success for Mr. Trump will hinge on the size of concessions he wants from Mexico and Canada, said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

I dont know the administrations ultimate aims here. If a small political victory is all the president is looking for, I think he can achieve his goal, he said. If instead he wants concessions large enough to move us to huge U.S. trade surpluses with Mexico and Canada, the road to achieving his goal will be much, much rougher.

He noted the range of businesses involved in cross-border commerce as a result of NAFTA, including automakers that assemble cars on both sides of the Rio Grande and U.S. retailers that rely on low-cost winter produce from Mexico to keep their shelves stocked.

Im not sure whether the U.S. defenders of NAFTA are all that powerful, but the more U.S. industries that feel they are losers under a revamped NAFTA deal, the more political opposition will spring up to stop a new deal, said Mr. Burtless. Compared with 1993, there are now a lot more players on both sides of the border who have a big stake in keeping the trade relationship strong and tariff-free.

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Donald Trump's NAFTA renegotiation progress slow - Washington Times

All of the Jazz are now fully aware what they're up against for the foreseeable future with their designs on ascending to the top of the Western Conference. Exactly what they must do to make the climb is a little murkier.

During the coming offseason, which starts now, they have to first hold onto the ground they've already gained, beginning with the re-signing of Gordon Hayward. From there, there are changes and improvements to make, subtractions and additions, beyond relying on the ongoing growth of the players who were not good enough against the Warriors.

Yeah. Who is?

It's a tough ask for the Jazz, given the lofty standard set by a super team. But Dennis Lindsey, as competitive a general manager as there is, and Quin Snyder, as competitive a coach, are the last people to whine about the realities their team faces.

And those realities were on full display in Game 4.

Staring straight into the teeth of those realities, as impossible odds washed over them, the Jazz seemed motivated as much by pride as anything else. Winning the series was far beyond their sight line. Beating the Warriors one time, avoiding a sweep, not getting pushed out on their home floor, in front of their home crowd, required some imagination, a stretch of that imagination, but at least it was something to shoot for.

Keeping with a recent trend, though, the Jazz missed that shot, shooting 37 percent.

They fell behind by 24 points in the first quarter, then, characteristic of them, they fought back, closing to within six in the second half. Hayward was solid, going for 25 points. He got help from Rudy Gobert, who scored 12 and grabbed 13 boards. Dante Exum came off the bench to score 15 points, driving to the basket and hitting from deep. Shelvin Mack also pitched in with 18, making up for the absence of George Hill, who either couldn't or wouldn't play.

It all fell short.

And, so, the Jazz learned and learned some more. As Hayward said before the loss, in facing the Warriors, "You see where you have to be if you want to be a championship-contending team."

Said Snyder, afterward: "The idea is to keep growing."

Not there, yet, the Jazz players and everyone around them have big intentions for what lies ahead. They know how far they've come, how far they have yet to go.

As they slowly left that floor Monday night, the fans applauded them, recognizing the progress made. They had boosted their regular-season win total by 11 games, qualified for the playoffs for the first time in five years, won a playoff series for the first time in seven years, had fired through a wall of injuries that might have undone a lesser group. Two of their players had either become All-Stars or come under serious consideration for first-team all-NBA. And they got swept by the best basketball team in the world.

"I couldn't be more proud," Snyder said.

The crowd paid tribute, then, in spite of the lopsided result, even as it understood the work that remains. The players understood, too, responding, even neck-deep in postgame disappointment, to the cheers with acknowledgment back, with appreciation and applause of their own, as the crowd chanted: "Gordon Hayward, Gordon Hayward, Gordon Hayward."

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Monson: Jazz now have more progress to make, God willing - Salt Lake Tribune

Forbes

AFC Election: How Politics Not Progress Left Moya Dodd On The Sidelines Forbes The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) had one job during its election to fill the FIFA Council seat reserved for a female member select the most qualified candidate to represent the interests of women in football. Elect someone with a proven track ... and more »

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AFC Election: How Politics Not Progress Left Moya Dodd On The Sidelines - Forbes