Airbus signed a deal worth tens of billions of dollars on Monday to sell 300 aircraft to China as part of a trade package coinciding with a visit to Europe by Chinese President Xi Jinping and matching a China record held by rival Boeing.

The deal between Airbus and China’s state buying agency, China Aviation Supplies Holding Company, which regularly coordinates headline-grabbing deals during diplomatic visits, will include 290 A320-family jets and 10 A350 wide-body jets.

French officials said the deal was worth some 30 billion euros at catalogue prices. Planemakers usually grant significant discounts.

The larger-than-expected order, which matches an order for 300 Boeing planes when U.S. Donald Trump visited Beijing in 2017, follows a year-long vacuum of purchases in which China failed to place significant orders amid global trade tensions.

It also comes as the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX has left uncertainty over Boeing’s immediate hopes for a major jet order as the result of any warming of U.S.-China trade ties.

There was no evidence of any direct connection between the Airbus deal and Sino-U.S. tensions or Boeing fleet problems, but China watchers say Beijing has a history of sending diplomatic signals or playing off suppliers through state aircraft deals.

“The conclusion of a big (aviation) contract … is an important step forward and an excellent signal in the current context,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a joint address with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

The United States and China are edging towards a possible deal to ease a months-long tariff row and a deal involving as many as 200-300 Boeing jets had until recently been expected as part of the possible rapprochement.

Long-term relationship

China was also the first to ground the newest version of Boeing’s workhorse 737 model earlier this month following a deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash, touching off a series of regulatory actions worldwide.

Asked if negotiations had accelerated as a result of the Boeing grounding or other issues, Airbus planemaking chief and designated chief executive Guillaume Faury told reporters, “This is a long-term relationship with our Chinese partners that evolves over time; it is a strong sign of confidence.”

China has become a key hunting ground for Airbus and its leading rival Boeing, thanks to surging travel demand.

But whether Airbus or Boeing is involved, analysts say diplomatic deals frequently contain a mixture of new demand, repeats of older orders and credits against future deals, meaning the immediate impact is not always clear.

The outlook has also been complicated by Beijing’s desire to grow its own industrial champions and, more recently for Boeing, the U.S.-China trade war.

French President Macron unexpectedly failed to clinch an Airbus order for 184 planes during a trip to China in early 2018 and the two sides have been working to salvage it.

Industry sources have said the year’s delay in Airbus negotiations, as well as a buying freeze during the U.S. tariff row, created latent demand for jets to feed China’s growth.
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British lawmakers voted on Monday to wrest control of Brexit from Prime Minister Theresa May for a day in a bid to find a way through the European Union divorce impasse that a majority in parliament could support.

Lawmakers should now vote on a range of Brexit options on Wednesday, giving parliament a chance to indicate whether it can agree on a deal with closer ties to Brussels, and then try to push the government in that direction.

The move underlined to what extent May has lost her authority, although she said the government would not be bound by the results of the so-called indicative votes on Wednesday.

Monday’s vote was put forward by Oliver Letwin, a lawmaker in May’s Conservative Party, and came after the prime minister admitted that the deal she had agreed with the EU after two years of talks still did not have enough support to pass.

Lawmakers backed Letwin’s proposal by 329 votes to 302, and were almost certain to confirm their decision in the final vote of the evening on the overall “motion as amended.”

Earlier, May said the proposal would set an unwelcome precedent and could lead to support for an outcome to which the EU itself would not agree.

“No government could give a blank cheque to commit to an outcome without knowing what it is,” May said before the vote. “So I cannot commit the government to delivering the outcome of any votes held by this house.”

Last week, the EU agreed to delay Britain’s original March 29 departure date because of the deadlock. Now, it will leave the EU on May 22 if May’s deal is approved by parliament this week. If not, it will have until April 12 to outline its plans.

Monday’s vote was an attempt to find a way to come up with such a plan European Council President Donald Tusk said last week that all Brexit options were still open for Britain until April 12, including a deal, a departure with no deal, a long extension – or even revoking Article 50 and remaining in the EU.

But nearly three years after the 2016 EU membership referendum and four days before Britain was supposed to leave the bloc, it was still unclear how, when or if Brexit would take place, with parliament and the nation still bitterly divided.

May’s deal was defeated in parliament by 149 votes on March 12 and by 230 votes on Jan. 15, but she had signaled that she would bring it back a third time this week.

To get her deal passed, May must win over at least 75 MPs who voted against her on March 12 – dozens of rebels in her Conservative Party, some opposition Labour Party MPs and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which props up her minority government but has voted against the deal so far.

“Why would the prime minister ever expect us to give support to an agreement which is based on a lie?” DUP Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson told BBC television.
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British Prime Minister Theresa May says she does not have enough support in parliament to hold a third vote on a deal for Britain’s exit from the European Union.

“But I also indicated that I was continuing to talk to colleagues across this House [of Commons], and I would hope to be able to bring back a vote in this House that enables us to guarantee Brexit,” she told parliament.

May’s proposed deal for Britain to leave the European Union has been rejected twice. At present, Britain is set to leave the bloc without a deal on April 12 — an outcome which May has said she will avoid.

May said that she is “skeptical” that indicative votes for alternative Brexit plans would provide a clear path to the divorce.

Northern Ireland’s DUP and many other lawmakers oppose May’s Brexit deal because of the Irish backstop clause — a proposal that would prevent a physical border between Ireland (which would remain a member of the EU) and Northern Ireland (part of Britain).

May has come under increasing scrutiny, facing calls to step down even from within her party, as the country’s exit from EU proves complicated.

 
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Ukraine is getting set to choose a new president – with the first round of voting scheduled for March 31. The leading two candidates will then face a run off two weeks later to determine who will lead a country still at war with Russia. As Henry Ridgwell reports from Kyiv, the election now appears to be a three-way race between the incumbent Petro Poroshenko, the well-known politician Yulia Tymoshenko, and a television comedian – who has come out of nowhere to lead the polls.
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Former communist militant Cesare Battisti has admitted four murders carried out in the 1970s, weeks after being jailed in Italy for the killings that were part of a failed bid to spark a far-left revolution.

Battisti, 64, admitted all the charges brought against him in four murder cases during Italy’s so-called “Years of Lead,” Milan prosecutor Alberto Nobili was quoted as saying by Italian media on Monday.

He also admitted that armed revolution was wrong, Nobili said.

Nobili, who questioned Battisti at a high-security prison in Sardinia for nine hours over the weekend, said it had “felt like I was watching the liberation of someone who was initially embarrassed, troubled.”

Nobili quoted Battisti as saying: “I realize the wrong I have done and apologize to the families.”

Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini told journalists he now expected “these pseudo-intellectuals on the left who for years cuddled this murderer also to apologize.”

Jailed in 1979 for belonging to an armed revolutionary group outlawed in Italy, Battisti escaped from prison two years later and spent nearly four decades on the run.

An international police operation eventually tracked him down and arrested him in Bolivia in January, before he was extradited to Italy.

Battisti was sentenced in absentia to life for having killed a policeman and a prison guard; for taking part in the murder of a butcher who was also a far-right militant; and for helping plan the slaying of a jeweler, who died in a shootout that left his teenage son in a wheelchair.

Apologies ‘out of place’

The murdered policeman’s brother Maurizio Campagna said “apologies now seem out of place”.

“I think his lawyer is advising him so he can have his sentence reduced,” Campagna told Italy’s Sky TG24 television.

Battisti is serving his sentence in a Sardinian prison housing more than 250 convicts, many of them living under the tough “41-bis” prison regime usually applied to Mafia members.

His lawyer Davide Steccanella said the statements weren’t made “for possible benefits, the hope was to give [my] client back a fair image, not that of someone who could strike again, as he has been described.”

Battisti admitted the killings “little by little … not as a flood,” Nobili said.

“The armed struggle prevented the development of a cultural, social and political revolution which, from the events of ’68, would have been absolutely positive,” Nobili quoted Battisti as saying.

After his jailbreak, Battisti had reinvented himself as an author, writing a string of noir novels.

In 2004, he skipped bail in France where, like many other far-left Italian militants, he had taken refuge. He then went to live clandestinely in Brazil until he was arrested in 2007 in Rio de Janeiro.

After years in custody, then-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva issued a decree — later upheld by Brazil’s Supreme Court — in 2010 refusing Battisti’s extradition to Italy, and he was freed, angering Rome.

But earlier this year, Battisti was seized without a struggle in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in an operation carried out by a joint team of Italian and Bolivian officers.

Years of Lead

Until now, he had admitted to being part of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, a radical group that staged a string of robberies and attacks, but always rejected responsibility for any deaths, painting himself as a political refugee.

Italy’s Years of Lead was a decade of violence which began in the late 1960s and saw dozens of deadly attacks by hardline leftwing and rightwing groups.

During his election campaign, Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro vowed that if elected he would “immediately” send Battisti back to Italy.

Battisti, who has a five-year-old Brazilian son, in 2017 told AFP he would face “torture” and death if he were ever to be sent back to Italy.

Italian authorities are still hunting 30 “terrorists” on the run abroad, 27 from the left and three from the right.

Fourteen of those being sought are believed to be in France.
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