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Friday, April 19, 2013
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Question mark over House and bailout
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Bundestag ‘yes’ to Cyprus bailout Schaeuble warns German MPs of contagion risk if island was allowed to go bankrupt
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ERMANY’S lower house of parliament voted overwhelmingly yesterday to grant Cyprus a €10 billion bailout that is designed to avert bankruptcy and keep the island in the eurozone. “We must avoid turning the problems in Cyprus into new problems for other euro countries,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told lawmakers in a speech before the vote. “Cyprus is in a dramatic situation. If we don’t help Cyprus, then Cyprus inevitably faces sovereign default.” Schaeuble warned lawmakers that a failure to offer Cyprus aid would unleash contagion across the 17-nation single currency bloc. “Step by step we are winning back confidence. If you look at the markets, there is still nervousness and uncertainty. But it is considerably less than three years, two years or one year ago,” Schaeuble said in his speech. “The aid for Cyprus secures the successes we’ve already achieved in the eurozone. We must prevent the problems in Cyprus from unleashing new problems in other eurozone countries.” Of the 602 lawmakers in the Bundestag chamber, 487 backed the rescue, under which Cyprus has agreed to impose major losses on depositors, shut-
ter its second largest bank and raise its corporate tax rate. The Cyprus vote was not in doubt given widespread support from within German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition and backing by many opposition lawmakers from the Social Democrats and Greens. After the vote, Schaeuble said in an email statement: “We aren’t over the hump, but after comprehensive reforms Europe and the euro are in better and more stable shape than ever before. “The gap between north and south is closing.” Responding to Schaeuble, the leader of the centre-left Social Democrats in parliament, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his party would support the bailout, but attacked the government for initially backing a plan to hit small savers in Cypriot banks. That proposal was scrapped after being rejected by the Cyprus parliament, and subsequently re-negotiated with international lenders to leave deposits under €100,000 untouched. “Mr. Schaeuble, whether you asked for this or simply joined others in supporting it, it was a huge mistake. It stoked fear and insecurity in Europe,” said Steinmeier. Separately, German parliamentarians also backed seven-year loan extensions for bailout victims Portugal and Ireland.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble chat at the German Bundestag, the parliament, in Berlin yesterday where the Cyprus bailout was being debated (EPA)
Message in a bottle finally arrives ... 28 years later A CANADIAN man’s message in a bottle honouring his promise to write to a woman named Mary has finally washed ashore 28 years later in Croatia. Surfers cleaning the debris from a beach at the mouth of the Neretva river in the southern Adriatic came across a half-broken bottle with a piece of paper inside, Croatian newspaper Dubrovack Vjesnik said on its website this week. A 23-year-old local surfer, who gave her name as Matea Medak Rezic, nearly threw the bottle away when she spotted a wet piece of paper in-
side, which contained a message from ‘Jonathon’ in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, which lies on Canada’s eastern coast.
IDENTITIES UNKNOWN “Mary, you really are a great person. I hope we can keep in correspondence. I said I would write. Your friend always, Jonathon, Nova Scotia, 1985,” said the message, which the daily carried in English. It’s not known where Mary is from, or how the two knew each other 28
years ago. The letter contained no last names, so Jonathon’s identity is also unknown. According to CBC News, Rezik posted a photo of the letter to her Facebook account and said she hopes to find out what happened to Jonathon and Mary. If the bottle was launched in Nova Scotia, it would have travelled about 6,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean before likely squeezing into the Mediterranean Sea between southern Spain and northern Morocco. It would have then drifted up the Adriatic Sea before washing up on the beach.