Rio Tinto takes GFG Alliance to arbitration over outstanding smelter payments www.reuters.com

Rio Tinto Plc has triggered an arbitration process with billionaire industrialist Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance because the company did not make final payments for its purchase of the Dunkerque aluminium smelter in France, Rio said on Monday.

Bank of China approved $140 billion of credit for Silk Road projects www.rt.com

The Bank of China (BOC) has said that, by the end of June this year, it had approved more than $140 billion of credit and funded over 600 major projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Over the past few years, it has continuously invested in economies along the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (jointly known as the BRI), according to the bank.

Putin To Sign Landmark Permanent Treaty With Mongolia www.rferl.org

Russian President Vladimir Putin will sign a permanent treaty on friendship and extensive strategic partnership with Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga on September 3 during a two-day visit to the east Asian country, according to an interview published on the Kremlin’s website.

Putin: Permanent friendship treaty with Mongolia to take relations to new level www.tass.com

MOSCOW, September 2. /TASS/. The relations between Russia and Mongolia will enter a whole new level after the signing of a permanent bilateral treaty on friendship and extensive strategic partnership, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on the Kremlin website on Monday.

Mongolia named as FIBA’s most improved nation in 3x3 basketball www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ XXI FIBA World Congress took place on August 30 in Beijing, China with participation of guests and representatives from 154 countries. While evaluating its works done in the past, it organized FIBA Awards Ceremony, selecting its bests in various categories.

TİKA boosts Turkish aid in Mongolia www.dailysabah.com

The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA) has broadened the scope of its development aid in Mongolia. In one year, the agency launched 67 projects from health to infrastructure in the Asian country where it has been active since 1994, completing 661 projects, boosting relations between Turkey and Mongolia.

The agency runs projects and supports humanitarian aid in various fields from education to health and work to improve economic, civilian and administrative infrastructure, as well as social infrastructure. It also supports production sectors and works to improve cultural cooperation between the two countries, earmarking a budget of about $45 million for projects.

Among the projects it has carried out this year is the publication of a Mongolian dictionary and a grammar guide. Requested by Mongolian authorities, it funded the publication of 7,000 dictionaries and grammar guides to help preserve the language.

TİKA also provided 400 filing cabinets to Mongolian security forces' criminal archives to boost the capacity of courts' criminal archives.

For the Kazakh community in the country, about 10,000 people, who lacked the means for proper funeral rituals, TİKA set up a facility at a cultural center to help the community pay final respects to the dead and for meetings for condolences.

The agency, with the help of Istanbul's Sancaktepe municipality, also did maintenance work on a busy street in Nalaikh, a district of the capital Ulaanbaatar. Sidewalks were renovated and lighting fixtures were installed on the street. TİKA also placed benches and garbage bins along the sidewalks.

To address water-related problems, TİKA drilled seven wells in the towns of Ölziit, Jinst, Bogd, Shinejinst, Bayangobi and Bayanlig. Eight wells were also installed in Bayan-Ölgiy province where last year's floods curbed locals' access to drinkable water.

TİKA also supplied winter gear for 700 veterinarians who work in tough winter conditions in 21 provinces and 331 towns across Mongolia, a country where animal husbandry is a substantial source of income. In Darkhan, the country's second-largest city, TİKA furnished a vocational learning center.

In health projects, TİKA built and furnished a newborn intensive care unit at Darkhan-Uul hospital in Darkhan. It also supplied medical equipment to a clinic in Dornod province. In Ögiinuur town, TİKA furnished a clinic's postnatal ward. In cooperation with Turkish municipalities, the agency completed construction of three health centers in Ulaanbaatar and furnished them with medical equipment.

For education, TİKA built a dormitory for 40 students in Nalaikh for students who had to travel from remote regions for school. The dormitory opens later this year. The agency will also provide consultation for students who want to pursue studies in Turkey. It renovated a girls' dormitory in Bayan-Ölgiy, a province with a substantial population of Tuva, a Turkic ethnic group. A lunch hall for students at a school was also renovated and refurbished. In the capital Ulaanbaatar, a sports hall at Atatürk school, named after modern Turkey's founder, was renovated by TİKA.

The agency was also behind the renovation of a cultural center in Uvs province, where the Hoton, a Turkic community whose language and culture are in danger of extinction, live. Reaching out to Dukha, another Turkic community, TİKA supplied about 10 tons of food aid to the community living in northern Mongolia's taiga.

Pentagon chief visits Mongolia to strengthen military bonds www.apdf-magazine.com

With one hand resting on the mane of a sturdy Mongolian horse, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper invoked the name of one of America’s great Soldiers while seeking to strengthen the military bonds between the U.S. and the landlocked democracy sandwiched between Russia and China.

“I’d like to name this fine-looking horse Marshall, after Gen. George Marshall,” Esper said in early August 2019 as he was presented with a 7-year-old buckskin during a time-honored traditional ceremony at Mongolia’s Ministry of Defense. (Pictured: U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, left, is presented a horse in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, on August 8, 2019, during his visit to the country.)

Esper’s stop in Ulaanbaatar, the third U.S. engagement with Mongolia in recent weeks, underscored its key role in America’s new defense strategy that lists the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia as priority competitors.

With just over 3 million people spread over an area twice the size of Texas, Mongolia has worked to maintain its independence from Beijing and Moscow by increasing its ties to other world powers, including the U.S. It describes the U.S. as a “third neighbor.”

Esper made it clear throughout his weeklong travel across the Indo-Pacific that countering the PRC’s aggressive and destabilizing activities in the region is a top administration priority. The activities, he said, include the PRC’s militarization of man-made islands in the South China Sea, efforts to use predatory economics and debt for sovereignty deals, and a campaign to promote the state-sponsored theft of other nations’ intellectual property.

“We’ve got to be conscious of the toeholds that they’re trying to get into many of these countries,” Esper told reporters traveling with him to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Mongolia.

Esper, who was sworn in as defense secretary in July 2019, said the U.S. is working to build relationships with key countries in the Indo-Pacific that share values and respect for each other’s sovereignty, “whether it’s Mongolia this trip, Vietnam, a future trip, Indonesia, other countries who I think are key.”

His stop in Mongolia was less than 24 hours long, but he told his defense counterpart, Nyamaagiin Enkhbold, that it gives him the “opportunity to look at different ways we can further strengthen the ties” between the two nations.

As he stood outside the ministry, just steps away from a large statue of Mongolia’s famed founder Genghis Khan, Esper recounted a story of Marshall disciplining one of his Soldiers who had struck a Mongolian horse that was being stubborn. Marshall, said Esper, had a high regard for the horses.

As he spoke, the newly named Marshall yawned and stood patiently as Esper patted his neck.

“He’s happy,” Esper said. “He likes his name.”

Esper also presented the horse’s caretaker with a saddle blanket emblazoned with the name and insignia of the U.S. Army’s Old Guard.

The horses, which are bred for endurance, always remain in Mongolia, and the tradition dictates that recipients name them after something they consider important.

Esper’s trip comes on the heels of a visit to the White House by Mongolia’s president, Khaltmaa Battulga.

Esper said he wants to build stronger relationships at senior defense levels.

The State Department’s 2019 budget for foreign operations was explicit in outlining Mongolia’s importance, stating that the primary goals of U.S. assistance are to “ensure the United States remains a preferred partner over geographical neighbors Russia and China.”

Populism and protest lurk behind Europe’s dying coal mines www.mining.com

Eiffel Tower-sized cranes are digging deep into one of Europe’s largest lignite mines outside, as Ulrich Freese shakes his head and blows another cloud of cigar smoke into the room.

Anger and despair are running high ahead of Sunday’s state elections in Germany’s mining heartland and Freese, a Social Democratic member of parliament from the Lausitz region, warns that the electorate is on the verge of a rebellion.

Government plans to exit coal-fired power generation by 2038 have enraged voters already stirred up by a wave of immigration in 2015.

The winners? The populist AfD party, which polls show could win Sunday’s election in Freese’s state of Brandenburg, potentially marking its biggest victory to date.

“It has become a holy war where only absolute answers are allowed,” Freese said in his office in the town of Spremberg, which straddles Brandenburg and Saxony, the two states voting this weekend. “The AfD tell people that climate change doesn’t exist and the environmentalists say we must close all factories immediately.”

The Lausitz is just one of many battlegrounds that emerged across Europe as demands for climate action clash with much of the continent’s economic reality and tradition. From Yellow Vest demonstrators in France to protesting students in Sweden, fierce debates rage over how to get to cleaner energy and transport, and at what price.

For Europe’s mainstream parties it’s been a problem because it’s also a broader struggle between young and old, town and country, that is difficult to bridge.

Not by chance are the two forces that have seen most growth in Europe the Greens and right-wing populist insurgents who stand square against climate policies and thrive on voter fears that going clean spells sacrifices. With Brussels mapping out ambitious targets for clean energy, how the continent manages the transition can help shape its future political landscape.

“Our most pressing challenge is keeping our planet healthy,” Ursula van der Leyen, incoming President of the European Commission said this summer, adding she wanted Europe to become “the first climate-neutral continent in the world by 2050.”

Further east, behind the former iron curtain, the prospect of fossil-free life within a generation brings fears of fresh factory shutdowns to a region that already suffered decades of social and economic turmoil.

“We must not be subject to Utopian ideas in the fight against climate change,” Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said. He argues that the EU climate agreement would do serious damage to industry in the Czech Republic and elsewhere in Europe.

In Poland, where 100,000 out of Europe’s 170,000 coal workers reside, the Law and Justice party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski used the fear of job losses prominently in its victorious 2015 election win. Since then it changed tack and is looking to Brussels for compensation.

Some 200 km (125 miles) west of Warsaw, an open-pit mine owned by KWB Konin SA sticks out like a soar thumb among corn fields, forests and lakes. The rich coal seams first discovered during the Nazi occupation of the country, helped build schools, housing, sports clubs and culture centers.

Such bonds, typical of many mining communities, could be upended, as tighter EU climate requirements may push billionaire Zygmunt Solorz to close the mine he owns, a move that would cost 35,000 jobs, said trade union leader Alicja Messerszmidt.

“You can’t place the burden on workers,” Messerszmidt said. “We don’t want to go abroad. We don’t want to live in poverty without work and perspectives,” she said.

And that is exactly what happened in the region of Asturias in Spain, where the closure of mines over the past three decades left behind an impoverished, aging population with little hope for a bright future.

In the Caudal river valley, some 400 km northwest of Madrid, abandoned houses, rusting hopper cars and boarded-up mine shafts mark the landscape. There, the town of Mieres del Camino shrank by half from its heyday and unemployment stands at an above-average 19%. Asturias is the region with the lowest fertility rate in the European Union, according to Madrid-based demographic expert Alejandro Macarron.

The center-left government of acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is on red alert for signs that voters in Asturias are joining the backlash against the establishment, after an agreement last year with unions to shut down almost all of the country’s remaining mines in line with EU directives. In Asturias, the Socialists remain the leading political force but no longer command an absolute majority.

Much of the money that was supposed to help the region to transition to a new economy either never arrived or was misspent, said Jose Luis Alperi, secretary-general of a local miners’ union.

A gleaming new university, replete with state-of-the-art sports facilities, has become the town’s white elephant. Built in 2002, the campus that offers courses in forestry and engineering, operates well below capacity. Other projects, such as a technological park, have been discussed for decades but never got off the ground.

One person who didn’t abandon the region is Rolando Diez Gonzalez, an electrician who worked in mines for three decades before accepting an early retirement package at the age of 46. He took part in 1960s strikes against the closures of the mines, worried about jobs for future generations. His fears came true, he says. His 46-year-old daughter still lives at home, unable to find work.

“The community is being propped up by early retirements. When this generation goes, I don’t know what is going to happen,” said Gonzalez. “The hard part is yet to come because the old people are dying.”

The experience of Asturias—that compensation projects need to be discussed locally, planned carefully and audited closely—may well be a lesson for politicians in Berlin and Warsaw who are debating how to ease the passing of coal.

While much of Germany is criss-crossed by sleek, high-speed, electric trains, the Lausitz sits at the end of the line, served by infrequent, growling diesel locomotives. Germany’s coal exit plan that earmarks 40 billion euros ($44 billion) for infrastructure in the Lausitz and other regions, envisages adding high-speed commuter trains to Berlin. But even locals doubt people of working age would up sticks to move here.

Campaign stickers on a lamppost outside an abandoned miners’ bar, summarize the debate for voters. The Green party calls for “courage” in facing up to economic and migratory challenges. The AfD’s stirs memories of the past, calling on voters to “complete the revolution” against the ruling classes that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

“People here need something they can invest hope in,” Freese said. “It has gone dark in the Lausitz.”

China launches "Audio-China Global Broadcasting" program in Mongolia www.xinhuanet.com

ULAN BATOR, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- China on Sunday launched the "Audio-China Global Broadcasting" program in Mongolia to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

MNT 283 billion issued for mortgage loans by August 2019 www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. P.Munkhbayar, Director of the Reserve Management Financial Markets Department of the Bank of Mongolia delivered a report about the housing mortgage loan and financing. In the first eight months of this year, a total of MNT 283 billion from three different sources was issued for 4 thousand borrowers for mortgage loan to purchase apartments.