As much as 5 Billion each day according tojpmorgan analysts. Us retailers, automakers and other businesses now face Ballooning Freight rates ahead of the crucial festive shopping season. Large retailers have pulled forward imports of much of their Holiday Merchandise and made reservations with west Coast Ocean and Rail Carriers in hopes of avoiding any disruption. Lets speak to peter sand, chief analyst at xeneta, an Ocean Freight analytics firm. Hello to you. I know you have already calculated what this could mean if the Strike Action goes ahead, so do tell us more. A disruption like this always comes at a bad time for European Exporters into North America as well as North American exporters out of thE East Coast And Gulf coast. It will be impacted at first but this seems to be a first for almost 50 years, has the potential not only to lift Freight Rates higher due to the disruption from the strike, but certainly also to have wider implications, one or two months later down the road w
Maria corina machado in venezuela, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you very much, stephen. It s a pleasure to be with you again. It s great to talk to you. It s two months now since venezuelans voted in the presidential election. Just tell me what has happened to you since that vote. Well, our victory by a landslide was something the regime didn t expect. As well as the fact that in less than 2a hours, we were able to collect, digitalise and put on a robust web page over 83% of the tally sheets, the official tally sheets that actually demonstrated our victory. It was a 70 over 30 victory, but if it had been a freer election, believe me, we would have won at least by 90 10. So this was a huge defeat for the regime. Maduro is naked in front of the whole world and his followers. So his decision was to get surrounded and entrenched around the top brass of the military and in fact, unleash terror. This has reached to thousands of venezuelans that have been detained, and everybody that was direct
Or, after the business of the exploding pagers and the continuing targeted bombings, is he hoping to continue humiliating hezbollah and showing it up as powerless? but suppose hezbollah hangs on and keeps firing missiles at israel, to the point where mr netanyahu feels he s got to take that extra step of putting israeli boots on lebanese soil? i spoke to nafiseh kohnavad, a middle east correspondent of bbc world service, at her flat in beirut. Nafiseh originally worked as a journalist in iran, but was forced to leave after asking too many hard questions of iran s political leaders. At the moment that i m talking to you, israeli air strikes have intensified significantly. For the first time, when hassan nasrallah, the leader of hezbollah, was giving a speech, he clearly mentioned that now this is a new phase, and that the group was expecting that israeli forces may enter southern lebanon by land. Before that, erm, all words were around that both sides don t want all out war. Now, you re