Estonia woke up to both a New Year and a new currency on Saturday as it became the first former Soviet state to adopt the euro at midnight and the 17th member of the eurozone, a bloc plagued by debt woes.
As a spectacular fireworks show lit up the sky over Tallinn, the 2004 EU entrant — which broke free from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991 — bade a reluctant farewell to its kroon, adopted in 1992 to replace the Soviet ruble.
At the stroke of midnight, Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip symbolically withdrew a crisp new euro banknote from a bank machine at the national opera as onlookers braved subzero temperatures.
“That’s one small step for the eurozone and one giant leap for Estonia,” Ansip said.
“Estonia is the poorest country in the eurozone, so we have a lot of things to do also now after the goal of reaching the eurozone has been accomplished,” he added.
Joblessness shot up to almost 20 percent last year in the country of 1.3 million inhabitants as Estonia’s economy struggled to recover from a recession that saw GDP shrink by about 14 percent.
GDP is expected to have expanded by 2.5 percent last year and is forecast at 4.2 percent growth this year, according to Estonia’s central bank.
Vendors who opened their stalls on New Year’s Day in a festive seasonal market in central Tallinn told reporters a majority of their customers were already using crisp new euros.
“I opened up shop at 9am and we are already getting paid mostly in euros,” said Jaanus Oidsalu, 32, selling candles, mulled wine and cookies.
However, while Ansip’s government has championed the switch to the euro as economic good sense despite the eurozone’s debt turmoil, it has received a muted welcome among average Estonians.
Most surveys put support for Estonia’s entry into the crisis-hit eurozone at about 50 percent, with almost 40 percent opposed.
However, Ansip’s government has long insisted euro adoption will build investor confidence and be a boon for businesses as 80 percent of Estonia’s trade is within the 27-nation EU.
Opponents say that Estonia’s timing could not be worse with the euro under threat after bailouts in Greece and Ireland and concerns about Portugal and Spain.
“Estonia is like a passenger that got the last ticket for the Titanic,” said Anti Poolamets, the euroskeptic head of the “Save the Kroon” campaign.
Pollsters also flag up concerns over price hikes and simple nostalgia for the kroon.
For the past 19 years, the kroon has carried much more than just monetary value for Estonians and was seen as a tangible sign of the success of the country’s patient postwar struggle for independence from the Soviet Union.
“When we switched from rubles to our own kroon currency, I cried like most Estonians that day. There are no such emotions now, just a neutral feeling,” Sirje Kaart, 46, told reporters as she withdrew her first euro banknote.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS