Argentina welcomes US decision not to impose steel tariffs
Argentina has welcomed the US decision not to impose tariffs on the South American country's steel and aluminum which President Donald Trump had threatened in December.
"We have just been left out, in a good way, of an internal communication from the (US) presidency regarding this issue. "The list of countries that will be sanctioned has come out and Argentina is not on it," Foreign Minister Felipe Sola said in an interview Sunday with Radio 10.
"We have seen the decision with satisfaction. We are happy," President Alberto Fernandez said later in an interview with C5N television. On December 2, a week before Fernandez took office, Trump announced via a series of tweets that he would reinstate tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Brazil and Argentina, accusing them of manipulating their currencies and hurting US farmers.
"Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies," which was hurting American farmers, Trump said. "Effective immediately, I will restore the Tariffs on all Steel & Aluminum that is shipped into the US from those countries."
In 2018 Trump had announced global tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum but later approved exemptions for some countries, including Argentina and Brazil which agreed to quotas.
On Friday Trump signed a proclamation to increase tariffs on aluminum imports by an additional 10 percent and those on steel by an extra 25 percent, to take effect from February 8. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and South Korea were exempt from the additional taxes on derivative steel products while Argentina, Australia, Canada and Mexico were also exempt from the aluminum tariffs.
Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a dwindling number of elderly Holocaust survivors gathered at the former German Nazi death camp on Monday to honour its more than 1.1 million mostly Jewish victims and to share their alarm over rising anti-semitism.
More than 200 survivors came from across the globe to the camp the Nazis built at Oswiecim in then-occupied Poland, to share their testimony as a stark warning amid a recent surge of anti-semitic attacks on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them deadly.
Survivors dressed in blue and white striped caps and scarves symbolic of the uniforms prisoners wore at the camp, passed through its chilling "Arbeit macht Frei" (German for "Work makes you free") black wroughtiron gate.
Accompanied by Polish President Andrzej Duda, they laid floral wreaths by the Death Wall in Auschwitz where the Nazis shot dead thousands of prisoners.
"We want the next generation to know what we went through and that it should never happen again," Auschwitz survivor David Marks, 93, said earlier at the former death camp, his voice breaking with emotion.
Thirty-five members of his immediate and extended family of Romanian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi Germany's camps that has come to symbolise the six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust.
From mid-1942 the Nazis systematically deported Jews from all over Europe to six camps- Auschwitz- Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.