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Real estate is local, and different markets in the U.S. will respond to Brexit depending on what's already been taking place.
There is likely to be some "flight to safety" from international investors, who will want to park their money where it will be safest.
There will be a temporary effect on markets, and Brexit might act as "an anchor" to the U.S. economy, but overall, the U.S. is expected to remain relatively untouched.
I bought a house at the end of February, and I still can’t decide whether it was the smartest or stupidest thing I’ve ever done. And I intentionally immerse myself in real estate every day, trying to learn more about the ins and outs — and the global economies that drive this industry. If I’m this confused, you can imagine how some consumers who don’t have a foundation in real estate might be feeling today. On Friday, the news that the citizens of the United Kingdom (UK) had voted to leave the European Union (EU) — a “British exit,” abbreviated as “Brexit” — almost broke the internet.
VILNIUS (Reuters) - The Lithuanian parliament appointed Saulius Skvernelis, a defense hawk and former interior minister affiliated to the Lithuanian Peasants and Greens Union, as prime minister on Tuesday.
The move comes after the party emerged as surprise winners of last month’s general election in which voters rejected established political parties.
Skvernelis says he will keep Lithuania’s pro-European policy, and, in the face of a resurgent Russia, pledged to increase country’s defense spending above NATO’s informal threshold of 2 percent of gross domestic product after 2018.
His nomination comes amid worries in the Baltics states that Russia, their former Soviet master, might act to grab them back by force following its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“We do not have a luxury to increase defense spending slowly, we must send clear signal to our partners and countries in the region that we look after our defense responsibly”, Skvernelis told parliament in an address last week.
The new prime minister, 46, first built a reputation as Lithuania’s police chief for his campaign to stamp out corruption in country’s force and cut its staff numbers.
He was tapped to head the interior ministry in 2014 but resigned the following year in a row over a decision to issue the country’s policemen with AK-47 rifle. He was told, however, top keep his job by the prime minister.
A homeless man was accidentally shot and a suspected drug addict stole one of the weapons from a police car before evading a police manhunt. The AK-47s, issued as a precaution after Paris attacks, were withdrawn soon thereafter.
Skvernelis remained popular in the polls and successfully led the Peasants and Greens effort in the general election, while refusing to join the party as a member.
The Peasants and Greens, with 54 seats in the 141-seat parliament, emerged as the biggest party in a late-October election, ousting a coalition of the Social Democrats, Labour and Order and Justice parties which had been in power since 2012. The new government takes over in December.
An also-ran in previous elections, the party created a coalition with Social Democrats and a number of independent law makers, giving them a workable majority.
Five candidates running in Saskatchewan's April 4 election have impaired driving convictions, including three from the Saskatchewan Party and two from the Saskatchewan NDP.
Five candidates running in Saskatchewan's April 4 election have had impaired driving convictions, including three from the Saskatchewan Party and two from the Saskatchewan NDP.
Saskatchewan Party Leader Brad Wall says he's "more than comfortable" knowing three of his candidates have past criminal convictions, adding that parties need to be accountable for the teams they put together.
On Monday, when asked by a reporter how many Saskatchewan Party candidates have criminal convictions, he confirmed there are three: Terry Dennis, who's running Canora-Pelly; Eric Olauson, who's running in Saskatoon University; and Scott Moe, who's running in Rosthern-Shellbrook.
Former Canora mayor Dennis was twice convicted for impaired driving. Moe and Olauson also have impaired driving offences in their pasts.
According to information released by the Saskatchewan Party, the charges against Dennis were from 1979 and 2001. He was 17 years old at the time of his first offence.
The Saskatchewan Party said Dennis has been open about his past mistakes. Dennis was elected as mayor of Canora four times after the convictions.
Moe was charged with impaired driving when he was 18 years old in 1992. He spoke with the local newspaper in his area, the Shellbrook Chronicle, before running for office.
Olauson was charged twice — in 1992 and 1993 for impaired driving. The Saskatchewan Party has said that he has since received treatment and counselling.
Olauson told CBC News those convictions happened a long time ago and he's been sober for the past seven years.
"You know, I'm not proud of it, I don't condone it, but it's part of what makes me who I am today, and I'm proud of what I've done since then and I'll continue to do that work," Olauson said.
Olauson's first brush with the law happened on the way to a Saskatchewan Roughrider game when police pulled him over for speeding — that led to one impaired driving charge. The second instance happened when he was on his way home from a party and was pulled over just a few blocks away from home. The Saskatoon city councillor said he was in his early 20s and has learned his lesson.
"Was it the right thing to do? Absolutely not. I would never condone it and I would feel sick if my kids, who are now getting to that age, did it, but I'm proud of the way I responded to it and I haven't done it since and I don't plan on doing it again."
Wall defended the three as candidates, including Dennis, saying he wants to have him in the legislature, representing constituents of the town and its surrounding area.
"These things are disclosed to us and decisions are made," Wall said.
"And I expect similar things are disclosed to other parties. It's part of our vetting."
"We make a decision on a case-by-case basis, about what the person's done to turn things around, how they've contributed since. And in these three instances we're more than comfortable, more than comfortable, having them as candidates and want them to be MLAs, want them to be part of our team."
The NDP also released information stating that two of its candidates had convictions, after the Saskatchewan Party made public the information regarding its candidates earlier in the day.
Dwayne Lasas, who is running in Meadow Lake, and Lyle Whitefish, who is running in Saskatchewan Rivers, faced charges and paid fines relating to drinking and driving, the party said.
Lasas was convicted in 1990. Whitefish said his charge dates back "more than five years."
The NDP has said both of these candidates disclosed these charges before joining the party.
The NDP said that while it does not condone drinking and driving, both candidates have made clear they regret their actions. The party has also said that it has been reassured by both men's behaviour since the charges.
NDP Leader Cam Broten also spoke Monday about candidates' behaviour on social media. With the campaign less than a week old, four NDP candidates have already been dropped as a result of things they once said in online posts.
The internet is full of bad humour, and off-colour jokes, but a line can be crossed when it comes to certain issues, Broten said at a campaign stop in Regina.
In his comments on Monday, Wall referred to one of the NDP ex-candidates, Saskatoon-Northwest's Clayton Wilson, who was cut for making a sexist post on Twitter.
"When his comments were disrespectful of women and making light of sexual harassment, I would say, there's the example of probably crossing the line," Wall said. "Mr. Broten agreed with that."
It's going to take some time for the Cubs second straight playoff disaster to really sink in, but the mood in the clubhouse after Saturday's 3-1 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the National League Division Series was a mixture of sadness and disbelief.
Still, after watching his league-leading offense disappear in the postseason once again, manager Lou Piniella admitted he wasn't shocked at all by the results.
"Nothing is shocking," he said. "I said once you get into postseason, all eight teams start equal and they all have chances. I was concerned about our offense coming into this thing, to be honest with you. And basically my concerns were realized.
"What can I say? We gave an effort, played as well as we could. At home we were sloppy, but today we played a damn good baseball game. But we just didn't take advantage of opportunities, and we didn't create opportunities. So give the Dodger credit. But let me tell you this, you could play postseason between now and another 100 years, and if you score six runs in a three-game series, it's going to be another 100 years before you win here. So we've got to score more runs, period."
Another 100 years of this kind of baseball is enough to squeeze the life out of every Cubs fans alive, plus the next two or three generations. It was that agonizing for Cubs fans to watch, and for the players as well.
Next year they'll get to answer questions about the 101-year curse.
"I don't believe in that stuff," said Aramis Ramirez, who was 2-for-11 in the series. "If you don't play good ball, you're not going to win. I don't care how many years we haven't won here in Chicago. Everything comes down to playing good on the field."
Alfonso Soriano, who was 0-for-5 on Saturday and 1-for-14 in the series, had no excuses for himself or the team's play.
"We have a very good team for a long season, but we're not ready for three games," he said. "We didn't do nothing for three games. We're a very good team for 161 games, but we don't do nothing after that. That's the difference. We're not put together for (a short series)."
Will the Cubs return almost everyone in 2008, or is it time to break things up and try something new?
"I wish they don't make a lot of changes," Soriano said. "If they want to make a lot of changes, I hope it makes the team better."
No one wants to think about next year yet, but Piniella was asked if he could get excited for 2009 after the way the '08 season ended.
"Sure I'm excited," Piniella said. "I want to do more than play the part of the good loser, congratulating the other team in the first round of the playoffs."
In the end, the Cubs lost another playoff series and will spend a long, hard winter thinking about how things could've been different. But it was a team collapse, not something that could be blamed on any individual, or any oblivious fan, or any supernatural occurrence.
The Cubs will be back in Mesa, Ariz. next February, starting the long trek again in hopes of a different ending.
"It's a game we love and we expect to do well in," Ryan Theriot said. "We won our division, the expectations are to win the World Series, like they are every year. We didn't do that this year.
"We won our division two years in a row, and next year we do it again hopefully, and see where we go. It's not a perfect formula. There's no rhyme or reason to what happened this year. But there's always next year."
There's always next year. Win or lose, Cubs fans can always count on that.
No funds raised for a 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero will go toward a pair of controversial culture centers until the issue over their contents is resolved, officials said yesterday.
The Memorial Foundation’s decision means that it will first raise the $500 million for the actual memorial to those lost in the terror attack, leaving the hot-button issue of the International Freedom Center and The Drawing Center on the back burner until Gov. Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. decide their fate.
“The first dollars contributed by the foundation will be to the memorial and the memorial museum,” said LMDC chairman John Whitehead.
The International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center were picked to share a 250,000-square-foot building adjacent to the six-acre memorial.
They have been blasted by critics who say they will be filled with inappropriate – and anti-American – displays that will imply the United States is to blame for 9/11 and talk about the Iraq war.
Whitehead said the board – which includes members such as David Rockefeller, Robert De Niro, Barbara Walters, Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Jets owner Robert Wood Johnson – hopes yesterday’s funding move will put the focus back on the subject of building a tribute the Sept. 11 dead.
The Memorial Foundation’s board is charged with raising the $500 million needed to build Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” tribute to those who died at the World Trade Center in 2001 and during the 1993 attack.
On a visit to Astana, James Mackintosh is seduced by the audacity and extravagance of its modern architecture – and the vibrancy of its expatriate social whirl.
Mr Schuler, the manager of the five-star Radisson SAS in Astana, can’t keep up with the number of heads of state coming through his hotel doors.
"Three European presidents in the next few weeks and that’s our hotel alone,” he informs me. “Although of course we can’t reveal which ones.” He smiles, a trifle wearily.
It’s only a couple of months since Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev was joined by President Medvedev of Russia, President Gül of Turkey, the King of Jordan plus heads of all the neighbouring ’Stans for the culmination of Astana’s 10th anniversary bonanza as capital of Kazakhstan.
What a bash that was. It took a year to prepare, hundreds of millions of dollars to execute and attracted international attention from around the world.
But why all the fuss over what, a decade ago, was a windswept, remote, provincial trading post no one had ever heard of?
In a nutshell, Astana is not only one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, possibly the world’s largest construction site and maybe the world’s most audacious, ongoing, architectural project, it is also, crucially, at the epicentre of global oil diplomacy as nations court Kazakhstan for its massive energy supplies.
I arrived late last month, too late for the celebrations. But that’s OK. The weather is bright and the sky is blue and clear. There’s enough extreme and breathtaking modern architecture to turn your head. There are enough relaxation possibilities to put you straight again: the oceanarium, the huge sauna-banya-Turkish bath complex or a trip out to the steppes.
There’s a satisfying contrast between the futuristic, gold-plated, new city extravagance on the right bank of the river Ishim and the bustling, ex-Soviet commercial centre on the left bank. And it’s all a manageable size, navigable on foot and rather relaxing.
But then I’m not on the front line, catering for the political and business elites storming Astana. Mr Schuler is.
“A stately pleasure-dome decree,” I join in, recalling Coleridge’s famous stanza.
“Nazarbayev is a latter day Kubla Khan. And Astana is his Xanadu,” I suggest.
“Astana is our Xanadu!” Mr Schuler corrects me.
Back in 1997, President Nazarbayev signed a decree moving the capital 600 miles north from cosmopolitan Almaty to the dusty, nondescript, provincial town of Akmola, which he renamed Astana (Kazakh for “capital city”). Since then, billions of dollars (some say up to 30 billion) have been poured into his dream capital.
The new city is a two-mile-long, rectangular block of magnificent proportions with gardens and fountains, sumptuous, metallic, gold-glinting tower blocks and austere, glass-and-marble government ministries.
At one end is the imposing blue-domed presidential palace with park sloping to the river. Across the river is a Norman Foster-designed giant Pyramid of Peace, complete with basement opera house. Near the palace is the 345-ft Baiterek Tower which has become a symbol of the city and houses an art gallery, an aquarium and a restaurant.
At the other end of the block squats the imperial grey-black, granite nerve centre of Kazmunaigaz, the state oil company and beyond that, another Foster extravaganza: the, as yet uncompleted, Khan Shatyr — the largest tent structure in the world — where, during the severe Astana winters, visitors will swim, sunbathe and stroll in lush garden terraces — in truth, a stately pleasure-dome, as the latter-day Khan decreed.
But for all its grand pretensions, Astana retains something of the Russian and Soviet steppe trading post of its roots. Traces of elegant, pastel-coloured, tsarist merchant mansions; the bustle of the dusty streets; the familiar Soviet grid-avenues lined with birch trees and ugly 1950s housing blocks; the cosy but elegant Russian drama theatre; the ubiquitous circus.
Placid, gold-toothed women sit all day at street stalls selling raspberries, cucumbers and varieties of forest berries in cut-off plastic bottles. Astana girls, miniskirted and flirtatious, Russian blondes and oriental-looking Kazakhs, cling giggling together like natural-born cousins.
At Line Brew, a Belgian pub quirkily designed as a Crusader castle, a Nordic-looking family and friends are swilling back lager. They speak Russian but this scene could be anywhere in Germany. They are Volga Germans, shunted by Stalin to this backwater many decades ago. We’re at the heart of Central Asia but, the paradox is that much of the culture is European.
On my last day in Astana, loitering around the embassy quarters, I am unexpectedly invited to a cocktail reception given by the French Embassy. That evening I am hobnobbing with the diplomatic crowd. It is apparent everyone knows everyone and, touchingly, they stick together in this remote outpost. “We are all friends here,” says the black South African Ambassador, smiling broadly.
An attractive French diplomat called Delphine takes me under her wing. Perhaps she senses the loneliness of the independent traveller. She introduces me to everyone, regularly commandeers waiters to top up my champagne glass with the free-flowing Taittinger Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs, and informs me – with merriment in her eyes – that she’s a divorcee, and better for it. I can see she’s a free spirit.
We jump into taxis and head for Chocolate, situated in the caverns of the Radisson.
Delphine and I arrive, we are witnesses to elite face control – ruthlessly executed by security guards who determine your financial status in a split-second – on the whole crowd in front of us, who are waved disdainfully away.
Soon it is our turn. My attire is scrutinised. No I don’t wear hand-tailored Brioni suits. I don’t sport Italian calf leather shoes. I’m a writer. I don’t look rich. Usually it doesn’t matter. Now it does – intensely . Split-seconds pass. Security raises an imposing, podgy hand to bar my entrance.
The podgy hand is lowered (reluctantly). This petite, blonde, charmante française is truly my saviour of the night.
We enter to rainbow laser lights and the deafening whine of the latest Kazakh rap. Long-limbed Kazakh girls perch on bar stools. The dance floor is heaving. The Brioni-suited new Kazakhs, in discreet alcoves, roar at each other above the hubbub, tossing back vodkas and beaming at their general good fortune.
Hours slip hypnotically by. I have danced wildly along with the diplomatic crowd, conversation proving impossible.
Enough champagne has been drunk. Enough vodka has been consumed. I have a flight to catch in a few hours. I am in urgent need of fresh air and sleep. Delphine guides my uncertain progress to the exit.
Outside, the quiet of the Siberian night has descended. On the other side of the river the gaudy lights of modern-day Kubla Khan’s proud and ambitious creation are glittering, out for show.
“Reviens, monsieur,” Delphine declares softly with an insouciant, joyful swing of her hip, a whirl of her exquisitely-tailored Parisian dress.
Air Astana (01293 596 622, www.airastana.com) flies direct from Heathrow to Almaty and to Astana via Amsterdam. Prices start from £299 plus tax. Air Astana operates six daily shuttle services from Almaty to Astana.
Austrian Air (020 7766 0300, www.aua.com) and Lufthansa (0871 945 9747, www.lufthansa.com) fly direct to Astana from Vienna and Frankfurt respectively four times weekly.
British passport-holders require a visa to visit Kazakhstan. These can be obtained from the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 33 Thurloe Square, London SW7 2SD (020 7581 4646; www.kazakhstanembassy.org.uk); or the Consulate of Kazakhstan, 12 North Silver Street, Aberdeen AB10 1RL (01224 622 465). Single-entry visas cost £20 for a 30-day stay. Holders of Air Astana tickets can use an express visa service allowing UK passport holders to process visas in one day if they apply at consulates in person.