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U.S. Bullet train proposals shun public funds, favor private cash

China Railway High-speed Harmony bullet trains are seen at a high-speed train maintenance base in Wuhan

By Robin Respaut

(Reuters) – It took years of lawsuits and political battles for California to finally break ground last year on the nation’s first bullet train, which aims to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2029.

High-speed rail advocates had hoped the line, supported by more than $13 billion in state and federal money, would inspire similar government-financed projects. Instead, its many delays have left rail groups wary of accepting public funds for projects they are proposing in three other states.

Companies in Texas, Minnesota and Nevada all plan to tap private cash from investors globally, with help from foreign train makers and governments eager to export train technology. The projects would rely on partnerships with Japanese or Chinese firms that face saturated train markets at home.

“The United States is the Holy Grail of deployment for Japan, China, France, Germany and Spain,” said Tim Keith, Texas Central CEO.

California’s example shows that taking taxpayer money opens the door to political and legal challenges that can drag out planning, bidding and approvals for years, private rail advocates said. Companies now see a quicker – even cheaper – path by largely avoiding such headaches.

“All the rules relating to public engagement start the day you take public funding,” said Wendy Meadley, chief strategy officer for North American High Speed Rail Group’s project in Minnesota. With private financing, she said, opponents “can’t make thousands of public records requests and run the project over.”

The company said last year it would seek money from Chinese investors. Now, it said it is considering two foreign partners for the $4.2 billion project, which seeks to connect the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to the internationally renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, by 2022.

Texas Central is paying for engineering studies with $75 million from Texas investors, $40 million from a state-backed Japanese development fund and about $130 million in design work from two firms. The Dallas-to-Houston rail line is projected to cost $12 billion and be completed by 2021.

In Nevada, privately financed XpressWest plans to link Las Vegas to Southern California. Started by Las Vegas developer Marnell Companies, the company formed a joint venture last fall with a consortium of Chinese firms, infusing $100 million into the project expected to break ground as soon as this year.

XpressWest officials declined to comment.

GOVERNMENT JUMPSTART

Some experts remain skeptical that bullet trains can work without government money to finance initial legs of construction.

Rail lines are generally profitable once in operation, said Jim Steer, director of UK-based high-speed rail research organization Greengauge 21. But operating profits are unlikely to be enough to repay massive construction costs.

“No private party is actually going to stump up the kind of money needed to create these things,” said Steer.

Supporters of the new rail lines said investors can expect solid returns based on ticket sales and profits from high-end real estate developments near stations.

Current economic trends also make private financing for infrastructure projects easier to secure. Interest rates at historic lows have created global demand for stable, long-term investments, igniting interest in infrastructure projects from banks and major investors, such as pension funds.

The number of institutional investors in infrastructure, such as roads, airports and rail, more than doubled since 2011, according to Preqin, an alternative investments research firm.

“There’s a lot of money swimming around the world that doesn’t know where to go,” said Dr. Alexander Metcalf, president of TEMS, Inc., a transportation consulting firm. “We’ve seen huge increases in institutional money that is willing to go into transportation.”

Longstanding U.S. skepticism of expensive train projects does not necessarily extend to foreign investors, Meadley said.

“People outside of this country believe this will happen more than Americans believe this will happen,” she said.

POLITICAL PERILS

The U.S. is decades behind Europe and Asia in building fast trains.

In the early 1990s, French and German companies made plays to construct a high-speed network across Texas. But the project relied in part on taxpayer money, and the proposal collapsed when local political support waned.

Texas train officials now see private financing as the faster, cheaper – and only – avenue. If their project relied on public subsidies, “we’d end up pulling the plug,” said Robert Eckels, a director at Texas Central.

Project officials say they have avoided U.S. federal funding in part because it includes a requirement that American workers manufacture the trains – even though no such U.S. factory currently exists.

Since 2009, the government has spent $10 billion to improve passenger rail service in the U.S. California was the only recipient constructing a high-speed rail line, and the money will only go so far. The state will likely need private money to finance much of the project’s estimated $64 million cost.

State rail officials overseeing the California project, considered the most ambitious planned in the U.S. and the farthest along, say there’s growing interest from foreign governments and international firms to finance the second leg to Los Angeles.

In February, the state announced the opening of the train’s first leg, a 250-mile line from the rural Central Valley to Silicon Valley, would be pushed back by three years to 2025.

The progress has been measured in decades rather than years. California Governor Jerry Brown first signed legislation to study high-speed rail during a previous tenure in office – in 1982.

“Everything big runs into opposition,” Brown said at the rail line’s groundbreaking in January 2015.

(Additional reporting by Brenda Goh in Shanghai and Tim Kelly in Tokyo; Editing by Brian Thevenot)

EU proposes scheme to share out asylum seekers

Migrants line up to receive personal hygiene goods distributed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), outside the main building of the disused Hellenikon airport

By Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission proposed a system to distribute asylum seekers across the EU on Wednesday that aims to ease the load on states like Greece and Italy but drew immediate condemnation from governments in Eastern Europe.

The European Union executive published legislative proposals to reform the so-called Dublin system of EU asylum rules that includes a “fairness mechanism” under which each of the 28 states would be assigned a percentage quota of all asylum seekers in the bloc that it would be expected to handle.

The quotas would reflect national population and wealth and, if a country found itself handling 50 percent more than its due share, it could relocate people elsewhere in the bloc. States could refuse to take people for a year — but only if they paid another country 250,000 euros per person to accommodate them.

“There is no a la carte solidarity in this Union,” First Vice President Frans Timmermans told reporters. “This is a way to be able to show solidarity in a situation where … you are not able to take the refugees which were allocated to you.”

But at a meeting in Prague, ministers from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic all repeated their opposition to the idea of relocation: “It makes no sense, it violates EU member states’ rights,” Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak told reporters. Hungary’s foreign minister called it “blackmail”.

A two-year emergency relocation scheme was set up last year as Greece struggled to cope with the chaotic arrival of nearly a million people, many of them Syrian refugees, most of whom reached Germany. It was agreed over the furious objections of several central and eastern states, two of whom, Hungary and Slovakia, are contesting the quota system in the EU courts.

In fact, only 1,441 asylum seekers have been relocated out of the 160,000 allowed for under the current temporary scheme.

The proposals, which also include measures to speed up the process of handling asylum claims and tighter controls on the movements of migrants themselves, need backing from governments and the European Parliament — a process that officials expect to be an uphill battle and involve many amendments.

Germany, the bloc’s main paymaster and destination for the bulk of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, has pushed hard for a permanent relocation system and has voiced frustration with the refusal of governments in the east who benefit the most from EU subsidies to take in asylum seekers.

Poland, Hungary and other formerly communist states say immigration, especially from the Muslim cultures of the Middle East, would disrupt their homogeneous societies. Governments also object to paying as an alternative to taking people in.

A similar proposal last year to set a payment of 0.002 percent of GDP was not taken up in the temporary scheme. The Commission did not issue its quota figures. Last year’s tables gave Germany a roughly 18 percent share, France 14 percent, Poland 5.6 percent and Hungary 1.8 percent.

“CONTROVERSIAL”

Any reform of the system, from which Britain, Ireland and Denmark are exempt, will require majority approval by EU governments. But senior officials say EU leaders will try to avoid forcing a deal through over strong minority objections, as happened with the temporary relocation scheme last September.

Even the authors of the proposal admit it is “sensitive” and “controversial” but hope it bridges diverging expectations from member states, EU sources said.

Splits between east and west, north and south over migration have posed one of the biggest challenges the European Union has faced and leaders’ main hope is that a new deal with Turkey to hold down the numbers arriving can take the heat out of a debate that has seen nationalist parties surge in polls across Europe.

Italy has led a push for reform of a Dublin system that gives responsibility for handling asylum claims to the first country migrants arrive in. The Commission last month floated a possibility of scrapping that in favor of a central EU system but has now favored the relocation system.

Chaotic movements of migrants, including many allowed by Italy and Greece to head north without being registered, have thrown the bloc’s cherished Schengen system of open borders into disarray, with governments putting up new barriers to travel.

EU officials hope that the deal with Turkey, from where the bulk of 1.3 million people reached Europe last year, will stem the flow and allow the Union to regain control of its external borders and hence restore order in the Schengen area.

Also on Wednesday, Brussels was expected to confirm a lifting of visa restrictions on Turks as part of the deal with Ankara. The EU is offering to take in refugees directly from Turkey, which hosts 2.7 million Syrians, and such resettlements would be taken into account in countries’ quotas for relocation.

(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Nearly 90,000 unaccompanied minors sought asylum in EU in 2015

Two children gather poppies at a field next to a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Some 88,300 unaccompanied minors sought asylum in the European Union in 2015, 13 percent of them children younger than 14, crossing continents without their parents to seek a place of safety, EU data showed on Monday.

More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa reached Europe last year. While that was roughly double the 2014 figure, the number of unaccompanied minors quadrupled, statistics agency Eurostat said.

Minors made up about a third of the 1.26 million first-time asylum applications filed in the EU last year.

European Union states disagree on how to handle Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War Two and anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, even in countries that traditionally have a generous approach to helping people seeking refuge.

Four in 10 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in Sweden, where some have called for greater checks, suspicious that adults are passing themselves off as children in order to secure protection they might otherwise be denied.

Eurostat’s figures refer specifically to asylum applicants “considered to be unaccompanied minors”, meaning EU states accepted the youngsters’ declared age or established it themselves through age assessment procedures.

More than 90 percent of the minors traveling without a parent or guardian were boys and more than half of them were between 16 and 17 years old. Half were Afghans and the second largest group were Syrians, at 16 percent of the total.

After Sweden, Germany, Hungary and Austria followed as the main destinations for unaccompanied underage asylum seekers.

Seeking to stem the influx of people, the EU has struck a deal with Turkey to stop people crossing from there into the bloc. Turkey hosts some 2.7 million refugees from the conflict in neighboring Syria.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

German establishment rounds on anti-immigration party over Islam

BERLIN (Reuters) – German politicians from across the spectrum criticized the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Monday after the party declared Islam incompatible with the constitution.

The AfD, which has surged onto the political scene since its launch three years ago, backed a manifesto pledge at a congress on Sunday to ban on minarets and the burqa, the full face and body-covering gown worn by some Muslim women.

With concerns about Europe’s migrant crisis fuelling the AfD’s rise, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats led criticism of the party.

“What the AfD has decided on is an attack on almost all religions,” Armin Laschet, deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told ARD television.

“They have identified Islam as a foreign body in Germany,” he said. “That is divisive, and startling to a Christian Democratic party for which faith has meaning.”

Greens parliamentary party leader Katrin Goering-Eckardt described the AfD manifesto as “reactionary” and accused the party of dividing society with Islamophobia.

Opinion polls give the AfD support of up to 14 percent, presenting a serious challenge to Merkel’s conservatives and other established parties ahead of a 2017 federal election. They rule out any coalition with the AfD.

The AfD has no lawmakers in the federal parliament in Berlin but has members in half of Germany’s 16 regional state assemblies.

Merkel has said freedom of religion for all is guaranteed by Germany’s constitution and that Islam is a part of Germany.

Germany is home to nearly 4 million Muslims, about 5 percent of the total population. Community leaders have called on politicians to ensure that no religious community be disadvantaged and that Islam not be defined as a “foe”.

Many of the longer established Muslim community came from Turkey to find work. Last year, more than a million, mostly Muslim migrants, arrived in Germany. Most had fled conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alexander Gauland, who leads the AfD in the eastern state of Brandenburg, said Muslims could still practise their faith in Germany.

“A Muslim in Germany can follow his religion without minarets. The AfD has nothing against places of worship,” Gauland told Deutschlandfunk radio, insisting his party did not want existing minarets torn down but rather no new ones built.

Aiman Mazyek, head of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims who has likened the AfD’s attitude towards his community to that of Hitler’s Nazis towards Jews, told the Osnabruecker Zeitung the AfD manifesto was “an Islamophobic program” that “is of no help to solve problems, but rather just divides our country.”

(Writing by Paul Carrel; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Former Auschwitz guard apologizes at trial; says it was ‘nightmare’

Defendant Hanning, a 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz death camp, arrives for the continuation of his trial in Detmold

By Elke Ahlswede

DETMOLD, Germany (Reuters) – A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard on trial in Germany apologized in court to victims on Friday, telling them he regretted being part of a “criminal organization” that had killed so many people and caused such suffering.

“I’m ashamed that I knowingly let injustice happen and did nothing to oppose it”, said Reinhold Hanning, a former Nazi SS officer, seated in a wheelchair in the court in Detmold.

Hanning is charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people.

Holocaust survivors, who detailed their horrific experiences at the trial which opened in February, have pleaded with the accused to break his silence in what could be one of the last Holocaust court cases in Germany.

Hanning finally broke the silence he kept over the course of 12 hearings, each limited to two hours due to his old age.

Reading in a firm voice from a paper he took out of his gray suit pocket, he said: “I want to tell you that I deeply regret having been part of a criminal organization that is responsible for the death of many innocent people, for the destruction of countless families, for misery, torment and suffering on the side of the victims and their relatives”.

“I have remained silent for a long time, I have remained silent all of my life,” he added.

Just before, his lawyer, Johannes Salmen, had given a detailed account of the defendant’s view of his life and particularly his time in Auschwitz.

In this 22-page long declaration, Hanning admitted having known about mass murder in the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“I’ve tried to repress this period for my whole life. Auschwitz was a nightmare, I wish I had never been there,” the lawyer cited Hanning as saying.

The accused was sent there after being wounded in battle and his request to rejoin his comrades on the front had been rejected twice, he said.

“I accept his apology but I can’t forgive him,” said Leon Schwarzbaum, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor and co-plaintiff.

She said Hanning should have recounted everything that happened in Auschwitz and “what he took part in”.

Although Hanning is not charged with having been directly involved in any killings at the camp, prosecutors accuse him of facilitating the slaughter in his capacity as a guard at the camp where 1.2 million people, most of them Jews, were killed.

A precedent for such charges was set in 2011, when death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk was convicted.

Accused by the prosecutor’s office in Dortmund as well as by 40 joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Britain, the United States and Germany, Hanning is said to have joined the SS forces voluntarily at the age of 18 in 1940.

Hanning on Friday said however that his stepmother, a member of the Nazi-party, urged him to join.

A verdict is expected on May 27.

Germany is holding what are likely to be its last trials linked to the Holocaust, in which more than six million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis.

In addition to Hanning, one other man and one woman in their 90s are accused of being accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at Auschwitz.

A third man who was a member of the Nazi SS guard team at Auschwitz died at the age of 93 this month, days before his trial was due to start.

(Writing by Elke Ahlswede and Joseph Nasr; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Islamic State urges attacks on German chancellery, Bonn airport: SITE group

BERLIN (Reuters) – Islamic State posted pictures on the Internet calling on German Muslims to carry out Brussels-style attacks in Germany, singling out Chancellor Angela Merkel’s offices and the Cologne-Bonn airport as targets, the SITE intelligence group reported.

Western Europe is on high security alert after last week’s Islamic State suicide bombings in the Belgian capital that killed 32 people at its airport and in a metro station. On Wednesday, France said it was investigating a man on suspicion of planning an imminent act of “extreme violence”.

The Islamic State images and graphics, widely published by German media on Thursday, included slogans in German inciting Muslims to commit violence against the “enemy of Allah.”

Germany’s BKA federal police, who monitor suspected militants with German passports returning from stints fighting in Syria and Iraq, said it knew of the images but that their publication did not necessitate extra security measures.

“We are aware of this material and our experts are checking it,” a BKA spokeswoman said. “It is clear that Germany is the focus of international terrorism and that attacks could happen, but this material doesn’t change our security assessment.”

Federal police chief Holger Muench said after the March 22 attacks in Brussels that Islamic State appeared eager to carry out further “spectacular” attacks in Europe as it was suffering setbacks on battlefields in Iraq and Syria.

One of the disseminated Islamic State images features a militant in combat fatigues standing in a field and gazing at Cologne-Bonn airport with a caption reading: “What your brothers in Belgium were able to do, you can do too.”

Another shows the German chancellery building in Berlin on fire with an Islamic State fighter and a tank standing outside the structure. The headline reads: “Germany is a battlefield.”

Germany joined the U.S.-led air strike campaign against Islamic State in Syria last year, though limiting its role to reconnaissance and refueling missions, after the jihadist group killed 130 people in shooting and bombing attacks in Paris.

A third graphic featured a military jet, which German media identified as a Tornado used by the German air force, against the backdrop of a mountainous area juxtaposed with the bloodied faces of women and children – apparently meant to represent civilians who Islamic State says have been killed by air strikes on areas it controls.

The caption under this image says: “Will you continue to grieve or will you finally act?”

All five pictures circulated on social media on Wednesday bore the logo of Furat Media, an Islamic State affiliate, according to SITE.

German media also published an Islamic State video celebrating the attacks in Brussels that featured a three-second shot of Frankfurt Airport, apparently taken from German television news footage.

The BKA spokeswoman said police were aware of that video as well and current security measures were sufficient.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr and Tina Bellon; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Germany wants refugees to integrate or lose residency rights

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said he is planning a new law that will require refugees to learn German and integrate into society, or else lose their permanent right of residence.

The initiative comes after voters punished Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives in regional elections earlier this month, giving a thumbs-down to her open-door refugee policy and turning in droves to the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Around 1 million migrants arrived in Germany last year – many fleeing conflict and economic hardship in the Middle East and Africa – and de Maiziere said around 100,000 more had arrived so far this year.

Germany expected that in return for language lessons, social benefits and housing, the new arrivals made an effort to integrate, he told ARD television.

“For those who refuse to learn German, for those who refuse to allow their relatives to integrate – for instance women or girls – for those who reject job offers: for them, there cannot be an unlimited settlement permit after three years,” he said.

De Maiziere, who belongs to Merkel’s conservatives party, added that he wanted “a link between successful integration and the permission for how long one is allowed to stay in Germany.”

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel welcomed the draft law, which is planned for May.

“We must not only support integration but demand it,” Gabriel told mass-selling daily Bild.

Gabriel’s Social Democrats, the junior partner in Germany’s ruling coalition with Merkel’s conservatives, also suffered losses in this month’s elections in three German states.

(Writing by Paul Carrel; Editing by Susan Fenton)

Germany searches home of two Syrians suspected of planning attack

BERLIN (Reuters) – German police have raided the home of two Syrian brothers with links to the militant group Islamic State (IS), suspecting that they were preparing an attack, prosecutors in Frankfurt said on Thursday.

Police confiscated an air pistol, electronic storage devices, mobile phones and $16,000 in cash but did not arrest the brothers, 21 and 30 years old.

Prosecutors did not give more information on the exact nature of the suspected crime, which they called a “serious act of violent subversion”.

The older brother had entered Germany in February 2015 with a forged passport obtained by IS, a crime for which he was sentenced and fined last year.

Prosecutors said that in social media postings he had promoted the militant group, threatened German authorities and justified last November’s attacks in Paris.

The younger brother published a picture of himself on social media that showed him sitting in a “luxury car belonging to his brother” sporting a pistol, the prosecutor’s office said.

Germany has been on alert since militants with links to Islamic State killed 130 people in Paris in November.

The anxieties have been fueled by the arrival of over 1 million migrants in Germany last year, many of them fleeing war and conflict in the Middle East and beyond.

Last month, the government said that the whereabouts of more than 140,000 people registered in 2015 were unknown.

(Reporting by Tina Bellon)

Germany, France criticize Israel for seizing West Bank land

BERLIN/PARIS (Reuters) – Germany and France on Wednesday criticized Israel’s decision to appropriate large tracts of land in the occupied West Bank, saying the move violated international law and contradicted a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli Army Radio said on Tuesday the land was near the Dead Sea and the Palestinian city of Jericho.

Israel says it intends to keep large settlement blocs in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians. Palestinians, who seek to establish a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, fear Israeli settlement expansion will deny them a viable country.

“This decision sends a wrong signal at the wrong time,” the German Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“Especially in the current tense situation, both parties in the Middle East conflict are called on to take steps for a de-escalation and to find ways that lead to an urgently needed resumption of peace negotiations,” it said.

In Paris, Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said France was “extremely concerned” by the Israeli decision.

“Settlements constitute a violation of international law and contradict commitments made by Israeli authorities in favor of a two-state solution,” the spokesman said.

Palestinians have cited Israeli settlement activity as one of the factors behind the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks in 2014, and a surge of violence over the past five months has dimmed hopes negotiations could be revived any time soon.

Germany, which has forged close relations with Israel in the decades since the Holocaust, has repeatedly criticized Israel for its settlement plans.

“All people in Israel and Palestine have a right to live in peace and security. Only a clear political perspective for a sustainable two-state solution can guarantee this in the long term,” the ministry said.

Paris is lobbying for an international peace conference before May that would outline incentives and give guarantees for Israelis and Palestinians to resume face-to-face talks before August and try to end the decades-long conflict.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat on Tuesday called on the international community to press Israel to stop land confiscations. Most countries view Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as illegal and an obstacle to peace.

Israel’s Peace Now movement, which tracks and opposes Israeli settlement in territory captured in the 1967 war, said the reported seizure of 579 acres represented the largest land confiscation in the West Bank in recent years.

(Reporting By John Irish in Paris and Michael Nienaber in Berlin; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Germany shuts down Islamic center in Bremen, raids apartments

BREMEN, Germany (Reuters) – The northern German city-state of Bremen shut down an Islamic cultural center on Tuesday after police raided it and the apartments of 12 of its members on suspicion of associations with Islamist militants.

Bremen Interior Minister Ulrich Maeurer said The Islamic Association Bremen was closely linked to a similar cultural organization that was banned after some of its members joined the Islamic State (IS) insurgent group in Syria.

More than 220 officers participated in the raids, confiscating mobile phones, computers, hard drives and other memory cards, Maeurer told a news conference.

No arrests were made. Police also searched a car repair shop in Delmenhorst, just outside Bremen.

“This organization has promoted the radicalization of people, and support and following for IS. It really does mean that people who live in our immediate neighborhood are willing to become terrorists overnight,” Maeurer said.

“So I must sound cynical when I ask: What security do we have when they only plan attacks in Syria? We must assume that this could also happen in Germany.”

Bremen authorities banned the Culture and Family Society in the city in December 2014, saying that it had promoted jihad (holy war) and martyrdom among members, six of whom died while fighting with IS in Syria.

The German federal police chief said last month that the number of Islamist militants returning to Germany from Syria and Iraq was on the rise and more than 400 people were under surveillance.

(Reporting by Reuters TV; Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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