The city’s Catholic Bishop, Juan-José Aguirre Muñoz, MCCI, said Monday, the situation was calm, but there had been looting, and many residents had fled into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Earlier reports spoke of artillery attack on the city by the suspected infamous 3R rebels (3R -Retour, Réclamation, Réhabilitation) and the Popular Front for the Rebirth of Central African Republic (FPRC) rebels. Bishop Muñoz, however, said a combination of mercenaries and rebels had overrun the city. The mercenaries are looking for natural resources and wealth.
“Yes, Bangassou has fallen into the hands of the rebels, many of whom are mercenaries and people from Niger. The morning (Sunday) was hectic. There was heavy artillery from 5 am with about thirty dead and wounded,” said Bishop Muñoz, the Bishop of Bangassou, a city in the southeastern Central African Republic, lying on the north bank of the Mbomou River.
Residents have fled to nearby DRC
The Bishop reports that, after trying to resist the rebel offensive, government soldiers fled Bangassou. “The military put up resistance for several hours” but were overwhelmed, said Bishop Muñoz.
As a result of the fighting, “part of the population of Bangassou has fled to Congo,” said the Bishop. Civilians have crossed the Mbomou River to seek refuge in the town of Ndu, just across the border. “Bangassou is almost deserted now. Sunday night went fairly well. There was no shooting,” confirmed Bishop Muñoz.
Touadera wins CAR’s presidential election
The siege on the city of Bangassou further complicates President Faustin-Archange Touadera’s electoral win announced Monday.
According to Reuters, Touadera won Central African Republic’s 27 December presidential election by securing more than 53% of votes in the first round, according to provisional results announced by the electoral commission on Monday.
“Faustin-Archange Touadera, having received the absolute majority of the vote in the first round with 53.9%, is declared winner,” Mathias Morouba, president of the electoral commission, told a news conference in the capital, Bangui.
CAR’s election was marred by a coordinated offensive carried out by rebel groups who tried to disrupt the vote after its highest court rejected former President Francois Bozize’s candidacy.
This book is the second in the Fiona Figg mysteries series.
Oliver is an award-winning, bestselling author of three mystery series: The Jessica James Mysteries, the middle grade Kassy O’Roarke, Pet Detective Mysteries, and historical cozies The Fiona Fig Mysteries. She garnered her Bachelor’s degree from Gonzaga University in Washington and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
When she is not writing mysteries, she is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her book, High Treason at the Grand Hotel: A Fiona Figg Mystery, is a perfect mix of romance, intrigue, suspense, and humor.
Oliver is the author of 13 scholarly books, 10 anthologies, and over 100 articles, which include work on campus rape, reproductive technologies, women and the media, film noir, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Particularly impressive about her work is that it has been translated into seven languages, and she has published an op-ed on loving our pets in The New York Times. She has been spotlighted in ABC television news, the Canadian Broadcasting Network, and various radio programs.
She resides in Nashville with her husband, Benigno Trigo, and her furry family, Mischief and Mayhem.
‘High Treason at the Grand Hotel: A Fiona Figg Mystery’ is book two in the Fiona Figg series. The first book ‘Betrayal at Ravenswick: A Fiona Figg Mystery’ was a huge success, what was it like for you to release the new book?
It’s so exciting. I can’t wait to see what readers think of Fiona’s latest adventures in Paris. I write three different mystery series, but I have to admit, Fiona Figg is the most fun to write. I love doing historical research. I learn a lot of interesting tidbits and sprinkle them throughout the novels. And, Fiona is one of my favorite characters to write. I also like the continuing characters. And the series gives me the opportunity to develop those characters, along with Fiona, and their relationships.
How has Fiona Figg, the protagonist in this series, grown in the second book?
Fiona has gone from being a file clerk in the War Office to becoming a professional spy. In High Treason, she’s still learning and gaining confidence. But she’s come a long way from Betrayal at Ravenswick, where her husband had just left her for another woman, and she didn’t know how she would survive without him. In the first book, she takes on the mission to forget about Andrew, her philandering husband.
In the second book, she jumps into the mission out of a sense of adventure and to prove herself. She’s very conscious of the restrictions on women’s movements and women’s roles in the early Twentieth Century. That’s why—against the orders of her boss—she resorts to male disguises. Even while she’s traveling through spaces off-limits to women, she is constantly trying to prove that a woman can do the job as good as a man.
Fiona’s proto-feminism motivates her sometimes reckless behavior, but it also gives rise to a lot of the humor in the novels. Fiona is a very funny character, whether she means to be or not.
While writing ‘High Treason at the Grand Hotel: A Fiona Figg Mystery’ what was the biggest challenge, and the biggest success?
The biggest challenge was also the biggest success—at least I hope so. Namely, developing Fiona as a character in relation to the two other major recurring characters, Clifford Douglas and Fredrick Fredricks. I had to show how the characters change and grow in relation to each other without changing them, or their relationships, so much that they’re no longer believable.
Also, getting the historical details right is always a challenge. Given that High Treason is based on real historical characters, it was even more challenging. I wanted to imagine the inner lives of these real-life characters while also writing a rip-roaring good adventure. So balancing truth and fiction—and using fiction to get at the truth—was sometimes tricky.
Did you write this book while the pandemic was going on? What was that like for you?
Yes. I started the book about the same time the pandemic hit early last spring in New York, where I have a lot of friends. Before coming to Nashville to take a job at Vanderbilt University, I lived and worked on Long Island.
Like a lot of you, I lived in a constant state of high anxiety and fear, which has abated somewhat but hasn’t gone away. I agonized for my friends in New York. And then the pandemic spread across the country. To say it was distracting is an understatement.
You’d think since I was working from home in my day job as a philosophy professor, I could get a lot of writing done. But the opposite was the case. Like so many others, I spent way too much time “doom-surfing.”
On the other hand, the pandemic inspired me to connect with old friends, some of whom I hadn’t talked to in months or years. The fear of death will do that.
Fiona will be heading into 1918—the year of the Spanish Flu pandemic—very soon. And the experience of the pandemic has given me a lot of feelings and thoughts about illness and death to draw on when Fiona faces the plague of her day.
I know you just released this book, but I still have to ask – what’s next for you?
Thanks for asking. I also just released the third book in my kids’ mystery series, The Pet Detective Mysteries. So that’s fun. And, right now, I’m finishing the very first rough draft of the sixth in my contemporary suspense series, The Jessica James Mysteries. It’s called Cottonmouth and it takes Jessica back West, this time to Wyoming. I’m having a lot of fun with a new character, a federal marshal named Lexington Colt, who is part Rylan Givens and part V. I Warshawski.
To learn more about Kelly Oliver and her book High Treason at the Grand Hotel: A Fiona Figg Mystery, check out her official website, as well as her Facebook page, and follow her on Twitter.
Perhaps the most interesting and telling fact about UFO sightings is that they have overwhelmingly occurred in the United States.
This might mean that either extraterrestrials are specifically observing the United States or that the United States is peculiarly rich in those cultural characteristics that stimulate eyewitness reports concerning alleged extraterrestrial encounters.
I believe there is much more evidence for the latter supposition.
In a scientific age where the world’s traditional religions are under constant intellectual and moral attack, it would not be surprising that people would, not despite this but because of this, continue their search for spiritual meaning and situatedness.
As Sigmund Freud once famously proclaimed, many people, perhaps a majority, are possessed of an “oceanic feeling” which naturally leads them to religious speculation and to seek cultural forms of mystical participation.
Since Freud’s time, the “oceanic feeling” has not disappeared apparently, even if the traditional ways in which they have been expressed have significantly weakened.
The peculiar strength of religious feeling in the United States has often been noted starting with the likes of Tocqueville through Karl Jaspers and continually debated by modern day sociologists. Many theories have been offered to try to explain this cultural phenomenon. The plural nature of the American religious market, the need for a cultural marker to signal cooperation and safety in a vast unsure continent, the perceived need for a kind of social conformism. Indeed, self-identifying atheists are still at a marked social and political disadvantage within the United States, although there are recent signs that this is rapidly changing.
So while the United States arguably still continues to be bathed in subjective lathes of “oceanic feeling” the traditional ground and structures that once channeled that feeling have either weakened or, even, disappeared.
Enter the Alien.
A belief in highly intelligent (read technically advanced) aliens is, in many ways, a perfect expression of a new American religion.
Firstly, in a society that, itself, is highly technical, scientific, expansionary (and at least mildly threatening), and puts a high cultural value on power, speed, and practical intelligence, Aliens seem to fit the bill of a refracted American presence somewhere beyond our vision, experience, and capabilities. Indeed, it is my view, that “ET” is a semi-unconscious projection of ourselves: space faring, colonialist, technical without a specific goal or creed other than ceaseless economic expansion.
As Emile Durkheim noted more than a century ago, a people’s religion is a parallax mirror of itself: its self-perception, ideals, fears, wants, and spiritual needs.
The Alien here is a thinly disguised American technocrat or member of a privileged elite. Powerful, inscrutable, amoral, secretive, vaguely menacing and, above all, omnipresent if not always immediately visible.
The fear and wonder of the Alien is the fear and wonder of a modern technical civilization that has seemed to escape any kind of moral control.
Indeed, the religion of the Alien is more like the religion of Alien ation in the Hegelian sense.
A total giving away of ourselves to something outside of us and thus beyond our control.
Next Page 1 | 2
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
People walk through the lobby of the London Stock Exchange in London December 3, 2015. ― Reuters pic
LONDON, Jan 4 — The London stock market jumped more than 1.5 per cent today in a strong start to 2021 on the first trading day since Britain formally left the EU’s single market and customs union.
The benchmark FTSE 100 index rallied 1.54 per cent to 6,560.33 points at the open, having last traded on New Year’s Eve when it had lost 1.5 per cent.
In the eurozone today, Frankfurt’s DAX 30 rose 1.2 per cent to 13,885.07 points and the Paris CAC 40 gained 1.3 per cent to 5,625.44.
The UK formally left the European Union on January 31, 2020 but remained in a standstill transition period up to December 31 as both sides negotiated a post-Brexit trade deal which was sealed only at the last moment on December 24.
Britain formally left the European customs union and single market at 2300 GMT on December 31.
“The finer implications of the UK’s exit remain to be seen but the fact that a deal was agreed prior to the deadline removes some of the overhang which had been haunting the index for some time,” said Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor.
Asian equities also began 2021 in strong fashion on burgeoning optimism about the economic outlook, despite ongoing fears over the coronavirus health crisis.
Investors are hopeful that the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines will offset a surge in infection rates.
With uncertainty over Brexit and a new US stimulus package gone, sights are set on economic recovery from the calamity that was 2020, with a broad expectation that countries will enjoy strong rebounds as life gets back to some semblance of normal. — AFP
San Francisco and Prague are beautiful cities. In San Francisco, it’s the lucent blue of a vast bay, pastel homes climbing formidable hills — and a magnificent bridge spanning the chasm just where bay and ocean meet.
In Prague, it’s the low graceful Charles Bridge spanning the river that winds through a bejeweled city. Cathedral spires pierce the sky above — and Prague Castle looms over the ancient bridge and nearby medieval towers.
Untouched in 20th century wars, Prague (after communism) was a sleeping beauty — waking from decades of enforced slumber.
Two cities, epicenters of change
Both cities, San Francisco in the 1960s, and Prague in the 1990s, were epicenters of change — magnets for idealistic youth longing to be part of building something new.
Bay Area historian Dennis McNally spent two decades as publicist for the Grateful Dead. More recently, he curated a photo exhibit of the 1967 Summer of Love.
“The counter-culture of the 1960s,” he says, “was transformative. It wasn’t just free love and drugs. It was political protest and racial justice, redefining sexuality, organic food, environmentalism, yoga — fringe issues then — mainstream today.”
That counter-culture ranged from Black Panther headquarters in Oakland, to free speech and anti-war protests in Berkeley — to Ken Kesey’s earlier acid trips in Palo Alto.
The Bay Area in the 1960s exemplified freedom. The future promised to be better than the present. “Doing your own thing” embodied a vision that far reaching societal change was coming.
Late, but I was there
I came late to the San Francisco scene. I spent the summer of 1970 in Berkeley. It was there, on June 21st, in the Pauley Ballroom on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, that I attended my first Grateful Dead concert.
It was ostensibly a concert to raise money for an Indian tribe — displaced from land near Mt. Shasta. Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue, was there, too.
What I remember most was a giant inflatable, transparent bubble — like a Buckminster Fuller dome, in which people danced and moved freely.
People’s park
On Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, a popular record shop had cleared a section of its display window and placed at the center the cover of the just released “Workingman’s Dead” album.
An understated advertisement beneath the album said simply, “New Dead.”
My sublet apartment at the corner of Ellsworth and Dwight Way was not far from where “People’s Park” had been. It was a block of vacant university property — which radical students had occupied a year earlier.
They christened the space “People’s Park — and turned it into a free speech zone where protesters and hippies gathered promoting alternative lifestyles.
In May 1969, (then-California Governor Ronald Reagan) sent in police and national guardsmen to reclaim the park — and quell the huge demonstrations of students wanting to preserve it.
It was an electric time in Berkeley, the city hailed by Tom Hayden in Ramparts magazine as “America’s first liberated territory.”
Another cultural revolution, this time in Prague
A generation later, on a smaller scale — but at least as significant — another cultural revolution took hold. This time in Prague (in central Europe — behind what was once behind the Iron Curtain).
In November 1989, a self-deprecating playwright, Vaclav Havel, was catapulted from prison to the presidency of Czechoslovakia.
This modest wordsmith — a true master of irony — was an unlikely pied piper. Yet, in the glow of freedom that followed peaceful revolution, the young and committed in the arts and business flocked to Prague — pilgrims seeking something bigger than themselves.
How to build a post-communist society?
Privileged young Americans, trekking through Europe, were lured to the city by beauty and cheap accommodation. They were among the first to be smitten by Prague — in a time of uncertainty and possibility.
How is a post-communist society built? How do people respond when the shackles stifling all forms of expression are removed? What kind of society should be built…
Would it be Havel’s idealistic land of peace and love, where towns had a pub and sweet shop on every corner? Or the crass, pulsating capitalism favored by Havel’s arch-rival — free-market ideologue Vaclav Klaus?
New newspapers and bookstores
In 1990, five students from Santa Barbara started an English-language newspaper — a bi-weekly called “Prognosis.”
A year later, some broke away to start a rival paper, the Prague Post – which was funded by a wealthy Texas investor.
Alan Levy, an expatriate New Yorker, approaching 60, and living in Vienna at the time, became editor.
He had been expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1968, after Soviet troops invaded to extinguish the Prague Spring — a brief period of freedom during which the arts flourished.
It was Levy who famously said that post-communist Prague was a haven for artists, the “left bank of the 1990s,” — like Paris in the 1920s.
Inspiration from Shakespeare
Other young Americans in 1993 opened The Globe Bookstore and Coffee House — modeled after Shakespeare and Company in Paris and City Lights in San Francisco.
Mark Baker, from Ohio, was a Globe founder — and still lives in Prague. He arrived, he says, “carried away with the optimism unleashed by the fall of communism.” It was, says Baker, an exhilarating time as Prague and all of eastern Europe reopened to the world.
Prague, of course, could not match San Francisco for depth or duration, as there were formidable language and cultural obstacles.
Havel himself in the early 1990s spoke little English. Nonetheless, the Globe prospered for several years — becoming a literary landmark that hosted readings by notable Czechs and Alan Ginsburg, whose poem “Howl” had first been read in San Francisco.
I was fortunate enough to have personally experienced Prague during this magical time. From 1994 to 1997, I lived with my family in a house on the crown of a hill — which gazed down over Prague Castle in the distance.
Expats in winter
I devoured each issue of the city’s English language papers. And on winter nights, coming from the airport and flights from shabby Sofia or Bucharest, it was a huge treat to wind through the cobbled lanes of Holesovice — and stop at The Globe to see what was happening.
No matter how late, there were people inside perusing books and speaking English. A cappuccino — or something stronger — could be had from the cafe and, near the front, there was an overstuffed chair where one could sit and unwind.
Back to old glory — and more
Prague today is more beautiful than ever. It sparkles from badly needed renovation. Privatization removed buildings — and small business from the dead hand of state control.
However, Prague’s artistic scene is a mere shadow of what it was in the 1990s — or the pre-WW1 period of Franz Kafka and Alfonse Mucha.
Not only are Havel and Levy long gone. Political corruption is endemic — and the vibrant expatriate community has shrunk. The Prague Post went bankrupt and, under new ownership, The Globe isn’t doing much matter.
The glorious Prague cultural scene of the 1990s, laments Mark Baker, was largely a media creation. The critical base of intellectuals and artists wasn’t big enough to last.
As goes Prague, so does San Francisco
Sadly, more or less the same thing occurred in San Francisco. Dennis McNally complains that, after the tech giants arrived in the Silicon Valley, the city’s artistic scene choked on money.
He says “young people no longer come for adventure or enlightenment, they come to get rich.” Before that, he continues, AIDS had devastated the gay community — deflating the arts.
Tech is the new magnet drawing the ambitious and well educated of another generation to San Francisco.
Preferring the city to the monotonous Silicon Valley suburbs where they work, the influx of the technocrats drove rents sky-high — and prompted huge developments in the old Mission district — obliterating most of what remained of 1960s hippiedom.
Conclusion
Today, San Francisco and Prague, these once vibrant meccas, cry out for a Vaclav Havel or someone like him.
As Alan Levy said of Havel, “it was his example of intelligence, modesty, artistry and love that drew people to Prague.”
Finland has been given almost EUR 3 million by the European Union to help finance a project aimed at promoting the export of pork and poultry meat to the Chinese market. Premium products that are widely popular in Chinese cuisine.
The campaign will focus on the safety, traceability and good taste of high-quality pork and poultry meat responsibly produced in the EU and Finland targeting Chinese retail and food service customers in both international and local companies in the four major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Zhengzhou and Chongqing in China.
Funding applicant Ruokatieto Yhdistys ry, Finnish non-governmental, non-profit inter-trade association that promotes food production and food culture in Finland, will also carry out the project together with its two member companies HKScan, Finnish manufacturer of meat foods and products and Atria, Finnish food industry company, which both currently export pork to China.
HKScan’s Juha Ruohola, EVP, Export, import and meat balance says, “It is great to continue the well-done export promotion work in China with EU funding. Warmest thanks to the partners who contributed to the success of the project. The export promotion support now granted will help us increase the sales and awareness of our products in the very demanding Chinese market.”
Atria was the first Finnish company to secure a license for the export of pork products to China in 2017. HKScan and Zhejiang Qinglian Food have since 2018 commercialized, sold and marketed Finnish HK Rypsiporsas (Omega-3 Pork) products in the local market in China through the commercial enterprise Nordic Lotus Food Inc.
ET AnalysisChina’s trade deal with the European Union should serve as a good hard reminder to India of the speed of competition it’s up against and why it needs to get off the blocks soon, especially on firming up long-term arrangements with the US, UK and also the EU. India’s experience with free trade agreements, as was discovered during the consideration of the RCEP, has shown that it has been at a disadvantage doing such deals with
“Well, Roxane, you’ve got people talking about religion around the dinner table.” The response from the newsroom revealed that, despite my having hit a tender nerve with some, what had begun as a quiet little column behaving itself at dinner parties was emerging as something with more fire and relevance.
<p>Though I hadn’t anticipated the strength of those reactions, I never doubted that religion as a topic of discourse mattered and deserved more airtime. And yet, heading into year eight in 2021, some might ask, “Does religious really matter anymore?” </p> <p>Studies show society becoming less religious by the year, and young people abandoning organized religion like a football stadium during COVID. The pandemic has further revealed that some churchgoers seem so content with online church that even post-COVID, they might continue worshiping God from their easy chairs at home.</p> <p>And then there are the hidden jabs. A recent seasonal frame applied to my Facebook profile picture announced “Merry Chrismas,” and I didn’t notice the missing “T” until a friend pointed it out. She’d seen numerous “Merry Chrismas” memes that week and interpreted this as an intentional “removing” of Christ. </p>
<div id="live-and-newsletter" class="p402_hide">
<div id="newsletterSignup">
</div>
</div> <p>But just as COVID-19 has shown waning enthusiasm regarding assembled worship, other faithful have become extra appreciative of in-person worship and more fervent in faith, realizing life’s brevity and the importance of getting this one thing right — and soon.</p> <p>We’re being called to make a choice about whether God is real, with consequences never weightier and the moral choices facing us never more critical. Despite disturbing trends, the soul, very much alive, yearns for something more than what this world can give. </p> <p>The importance of faith in our lives won’t disappear, any more than Christ will disappear because someone removed the “T” in a digital frame. </p> <p>We’ve just come through a horrendous year, and truly, the only way we’ll transcend the residue of 2020 well is by continuing to probe the wisdom of the One who transcends all. We still need God and one another. </p> <p>I encourage you, no matter where you’re at with God, keep coming back to think through faith with me. A vaccine might curb the coronavirus, but only the Divine Physician can inoculate and heal our souls. </p>
<p><i>Roxane Salonen, a wife and mother of five, works as a freelance writer and speaker in Fargo. Email her at [email protected], and find more of her work at Peace Garden Passage, https://roxanesalonen.com;
BRUSSELS – The Portuguese presidency of the EU inaugurated its first day of work, replacing Germany whose previous semester was marked by intense negotiations on the Recovery plan, on the rule of law and the post-Brexit commercial agreement with Great Britain. The Portuguese presidency intends to implement the agreements concluded, including the seven-year budget of the European Union. Lisbon’s objective is a recovery that is ”fair, green and digital”.
In a tweet, the Portuguese presidency wrote that today is being held ”the first meeting of coordination Coreper 1 to prepare a week of work”. On the agenda of the Portuguese presidency is the visit to Lisbon tomorrow of the president of the European Council Charles Michel.
LONDON (Reuters) – The biggest shift in European share trading in two decades was proceeding smoothly on Monday, on the first day of business since Britain left the European Union’s single market.
FILE PHOTO: Skyscrapers in The City of London financial district are seen in London, Britain, September 14, 2020. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
While a Brexit trade deal agreed last month set rules for industries such as fishing and agriculture, it did not cover Britain’s much larger finance sector, meaning London’s automatic access to EU financial markets came to an end on Dec. 31.
That has meant the bulk of trading in euro-denominated shares has had to switch from London to the EU, as the bloc seeks to reduce its reliance on a finance centre outside its borders.
Many London-based businesses had prepared for the new conditions by setting up units in the EU, and Monday put those new arrangements to the test.
Trading on Cboe Europe and London Stock Exchange’s Turquoise units in Amsterdam, and on Aquis Exchange’s new Paris platform, grew steadily with no glitches reported.
Data from Cboe, Europe’s biggest cross-border share trading platform, showed that two hours after the open, 60% of all of its activity was at its Amsterdam unit.
“All our systems are operating normally, and as expected the majority of activity in EEA-symbols (mainly EU listed shares) is now taking place on our Dutch venue, with activity across all our market segments,” Cboe Europe president David Howson said.
Cboe traded 5.1 billion euros in shares on Monday, the bulk in Amsterdam.
Aquis reported a “clean shift” in euro share trading from its London base to its new Paris unit, with the French capital now the location for most of the group’s business.
Aquis traded 1.9 billion euros of shares on Monday, mostly in Paris.
Trading on Turquoise was more evenly split, with 525 million euros in Amsterdam and 361 million euros in London.
No European trading of note had taken place on the three EU hubs until Monday.
Trading in non-EU listed shares remains in London.
“I don’t think there has been any impact from this switch,” said Keith Temperton, equity sales trader at Forte Securities. “It has been planned for years.”
Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the EU’s European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) had no comment.
FRANKFURT CALLING
Banks and other financial market participants in the EU are also required to trade swaps, a type of derivatives contract, on platforms inside the bloc and stop using venues in London, the world’s biggest centre for trading swaps.
In a last minute intervention on Dec. 24 before markets shut until Monday, the FCA said it would allow UK market participants to trade swaps on EU venues until the end of March to avoid disruption in markets.
Traders said that on Dec. 24 the spread between the 10-year interest rate swap on Deutsche Boerse’s Eurex in Frankfurt and LSE’s LCH swaps clearing unit in London widened.
This signified that it was more expensive to use Eurex Clearing than LCH. A trader said that normally there is little or no spread between the two clearing houses.
Eurex, which is offering customers incentives to attract euro clearing from London, said the spread had widened to 0.4 basis points on Dec. 24, but has since eased to 0.3 basis points.
Christoph Rieger, head of rates and credit research at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, said there was no big disruption in initial trading on Monday.
ESMA on Monday cancelled its authorisation for four trade repositories in London used for reporting derivatives trades, in a further sign of the British capital being locked out of EU markets.
Additional reporting by Thyagaraju Adinarayan and Dhara Ranasinghe; Editing by Rachel Armstrong and Mark Potter
