The G-20 summit of the world’s richest economies wrapped up Saturday against a backdrop of angry protests, and a pledge by leaders to fight protectionism in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy and Brexit. The U.S. leader took center stage at the two-day gathering, and his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was the major headline. VOA Europe correspondent Luis Ramirez reports from Hamburg.
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Visiting Poland this week, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe and take on Russia’s stranglehold on energy supplies.

“America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump told reporters after talks with his Polish counterpart Thursday.

Up to now, that supplier has been Russia. It supplied around a third of Europe’s gas demand in 2016, with an even greater share in many of the former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe.

Watch: US, Russia on Collision Course in Competition for European Gas Market

Natural gas and dominance

Russian state-owned firm Gazprom shut off pipelines to Ukraine in 2015, depriving Kyiv of a major source of revenue and disrupting supplies to Eastern Europe.

“It’s a key pillar of Russian foreign policy: of using gas and energy as a means of asserting dominance over Central Europe,” said Marek Matraszek, founder of the lobby firm CEC Government Relations, who played a major role in the Polish government’s acquisition of U.S.-built F-16 fighter planes.

The first shipment of American liquefied natural gas arrived at the port of Swinoujscie on Poland’s Baltic coast last month. The port facility and liquefaction plant were finished in 2015, aimed at diversifying the country’s energy sources and enabling Poland to become a hub supplying imported gas across Central and Eastern Europe.

With that in mind, the Three Seas Initiative Summit in Warsaw Thursday brought together leaders from a dozen Eastern European nations, plus Trump. He pledged the United States will never use energy as a political tool. 

Russia’s pipeline

Energy analyst Grzegorz Malecki, a former head of Poland’s Foreign Intelligence Agency says Russia will be watching with interest.

“If this new source of gas supplies is moved forward and the infrastructure built, it may cause Russia to change its approach. The Polish government is probably counting on it. Russia may change its politics towards Poland regarding energy,” Malecki told VOA in an interview this week.

Russia has plans of its own to boost exports. Initially scheduled to open in 2019, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would double its capacity to export gas directly to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine. Eastern European states want the project blocked.

“If we want to have United States’ LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on Russia,” Matraszek said.

American LNG and the Nord Stream 2 project are on a collision course, with Poland stuck in the middle, Malecki said.

“It’s hard to hide the fact that these two projects compete with each other. The odds are that there will be a clash of these energy giants in Europe,” he said.

Three-hundred kilometers west along the Baltic coast from where the existing Nord Stream pipeline comes ashore in Germany, Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin held their first face-to-face meeting at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg Friday.

If the American LNG deal goes through, it could have a broader impact on U.S.-Russia relations, said John Hannah of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“I think it could all happen relatively quickly and in a way that will give us much stronger leverage over Putin and the Russians to begin pushing back against some of the more aggressive activities that we’ve seen, not only in Europe but against the United States as well,” Hannah said.

Trump remains upbeat about his relationship with Putin, but the evolving energy policies in Europe will likely remain a source of friction.
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Visiting Poland this week, US President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe, challenging Russia’s dominance of the market. Many European countries accuse Moscow of using energy as a political tool. As Henry Ridgwell reports from Warsaw, analysts say the United States and Russia are on a collision course over energy supplies to the region.
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Job creation in the U.S. appears to have picked up speed, with employers adding 222,000 jobs last month. But the unemployment rate ticked higher as more Americans resumed their job search. That’s probably a good thing, according to some economists who say the bigger challenge is how to speed up wage growth. Mil Arcega reports.
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London is a hotspot of modern slavery, with workers in hotels, restaurants and on construction sites at particular risk of exploitation, said the head of the Metropolitan police’s anti-slavery unit.

Modern slavery cases surged in the first half of this year to about 820 by the end of June, compared to about 1,013 in the whole of 2016, Detective Inspector Phil Brewer told Reuters.

The growth in cases is partly due to increased awareness about slavery, and as police and local authorities are now more often considering whether those involved in potential slavery crimes are victims rather than suspects, said Brewer.

The Metropolitan police is working closely with charities and frontline workers to ensure victims are more easily identified and helped faster.

“Everyone realizes now we’re never going to police our way out of this,” Brewer said in an interview this week.

Government departments, local authorities and police are investigating whether people in the construction and hospitality industries are being held against their will, working under threat, for no pay or in dangerous conditions, Brewer said.

Some government departments already have systems in place — on health and safety rules and the enforcement of minimum wages, for example — to lead the battle against modern slavery in construction and hospitality, he added.

Britain passed tough anti-slavery legislation in 2015, introducing life sentences for traffickers and forcing companies to disclose what they are doing to make sure their supply chains are free from slavery.

There are an estimated 13,000 victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude in Britain, according to government data.

Domestic servitude and slavery in supply chains are also major concerns for the Metropolitan police, said Brewer.

As paperwork is often only processed through embassies, police only hear about mistreatment if domestic workers come into contact with officers for other reasons, he said.

Domestic servitude is also fueled by cultural factors that might make it acceptable in some sections of London’s population to have a worker from a lower social group working as a domestic slave even though it is against the law.

“Labor exploitation in London is really misunderstood or not understood, it’s quite clear that it’s about what we don’t know rather than what we know,” Brewer said.

Victims, not suspects

One of the biggest challenges for the Metropolitan police is to make sure every officer in the force of 30,000 understands and reacts appropriately to modern slavery cases, said Brewer.

He said the police had faced criticism because officers had treated potential victims as suspects, so London’s police now “massively relies” on relationships with charities and advocacy organizations to ensure swift support for victims.

Under the “county lines” crime model, for example, young urban gang members are compelled and threatened to deal drugs in more rural areas. Some of these young people are now being referred as victims — a number that Brewer expects to grow.

Police also needed to have much more “grown-up conversations” with companies that find modern slavery in their supply chains, to calm their fears that reporting cases would result in them being prosecuted.

“There’s not really been any conversation about how companies can actually interact with policing. There’s probably some reassurance that we need to do, that if you come to us and say we found this, it won’t compromise your position,” he said.
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No more mini-skirts and large earrings for female civil servants in Uganda. Male staff are now required to wear a jacket and tie. The Ugandan government instituted a new dress code for public workers this week, and it continues to anger some people.

Women activists in Uganda have criticized the new dress code as a distraction from the real issues in the country.

Perry Aritua, executive director of Women’s Democracy Network, was one of them.

“Is [a woman] saying that men do not have any type of self-control? When a girl is dressed a certain way, that doesn’t mean she’s calling for your attention. Let us focus on the real issues that Ugandans are grappling with – the theft of our public resources, the inefficiency in service delivery, the absenteeism in public service, the capacity needs that public service has,” Aritua said.

The Ministry of Public Service issued the directive on “decent dressing” Tuesday. It prohibits female staff from wearing tight clothing, open-toed shoes, and skirts or dresses above the knees. Bright-colored nail polish, hair extensions, “exaggerated make-up,” and chandelier earrings are also on the banned list.    

The directive didn’t spare men either. All male officers are required to dress in neat, dark trousers but not ones that are tight-fitting. And only closed-toe black and brown shoes should be worn to the office, along with a jacket and tie.

Adah Muwanga, the human resource manager at the Ministry of Public Service, defends the new measures.  

“People in Uganda have a perception of what a public officer should look like and this is the image we are trying to protect and preserve. We are saying not above the knee, and for one reason, ‘above the knee’ – you know what it means, it can also [be] tantamount to sexual harassment, because when you sit you are exposing your thighs, which is not generally accepted and it can distract others from work,” Muwanga said.

Rights groups say the previous 2010 public order requiring dress to be neat and practical for one’s job was sufficient.

Ugandans have penned opinion pieces in local media against the dress code with one lawyer writing that “rights aren’t taken away overnight. They are taken away in small bits.”

The state-owned newspaper published photos it said were taken Wednesday of three civil servants – a man and two women – not adhering to the new dress code.

VOA caught up with one public worker on the issue.

“Me I think, my bright nails cannot distract someone, so the government should not discuss about that,” said the woman, declining to give her name.

The penalties for disobeying the new dress code are unclear. The directive simply said cases would be referred to the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Public Service.
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The U.S. economy posted strong job growth in June, with a net gain of 222,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate rose slightly to hit 4.4 percent. 

Friday’s report from the Labor Department shows wages grew 2.5 percent in June from the same period a year earlier. That is just slightly above the rate of inflation, and several analysts called the gain “disappointing.”

Economists say when hiring steps up, employers usually have to raise wages to attract and retain the best workers.Many companies complain they can not get all the technically-skilled workers they need.But so far, overall wages have grown little.

Chief economist for the global information company, IHS, Nariman Behravesh says wage growth will probably pick up over the next year as the economy gains between 150 and 180 thousand jobs a month.

PNC Bank Chief Economist Gus Faucher says employers will raise wages as they find it “more and more difficult to attract qualified workers.”

S&P Global Ratings Economist Satyam Panday says there are six million job openings in the United States, and more training programs could help prepare people to fillthese positions. 

Friday’s report from the Labor Department also says the unemployment rate edged up slightly to 4.4 percent. The one-tenth of a percent increase is due to more people, perhaps encouraged by mostly positive economic news, resuming their search for work.

About 7 million Americans are counted as unemployed. Another 1.6 million are not working but are not counted as officially unemployed because they have not sought jobs in the past four weeks.More than 5 million additional people want full-time jobs but can find only part-time employment.June’s job gains were concentrated in health care, business services and restaurants.
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