[[#THE_GRAVNOUGHT_ZIMIA_IS_REMEMBERED_AT_SOUTHMAN,_LAST_OF_THE_TWELVE_STOPS_ON_THE_ROYAL_GOODWILL_TOUR|(2) The royal tour ends at Southman]]<br>[[#THE_ROYAL_TOUR'S_PROMISES_HEAD_FOR_THE_CORTES,_AND_THE_PARTIES_SPLIT_OVER_AVEY_AND_THE_GRENADE|(4) The parties weigh the royal tour's promises]]<br>[[#DRIED_PASTA_JOINS_THE_ESSENTIALS_BASKET_AT_HALF_THE_STANDARD_RATE_OF_VALUE_ADDED_TAX|(9) Dried pasta joins the essentials basket]]
[[#THE_GRAVNOUGHT_ZIMIA_IS_REMEMBERED_AT_SOUTHMAN,_LAST_OF_THE_TWELVE_STOPS_ON_THE_ROYAL_GOODWILL_TOUR|(2) The royal tour ends at Southman]]<br>[[#THE_ROYAL_TOUR'S_PROMISES_HEAD_FOR_THE_CORTES,_AND_THE_PARTIES_SPLIT_OVER_AVEY_AND_THE_GRENADE|(4) The parties weigh the royal tour's promises]]<br>[[#DRIED_PASTA_JOINS_THE_ESSENTIALS_BASKET_AT_HALF_THE_STANDARD_RATE_OF_VALUE_ADDED_TAX|(9) Dried pasta joins the essentials basket]]<br>[[#BANK_OF_SAINT_ANDRE_CONSORTIUM_OPENS_A_NAX€60_BILLION_WINDOW_FOR_THE_FEDERATION'S_REGIONAL_LENDERS|(12) Saint Andre consortium opens a bank window]]<br>[[#NATOPIA_OPENS_A_SECOND_ORDERS_WINDOW,_WORTH_NAX€160_BILLION,_FOR_NEW_ALEXANDRIAN_GOODS|(19) Natopia opens a second orders window]]
[[#THE_BLIVEN_FUND'S_FIRST_TRANSFER_REACHES_THE_ANGLIAN_TREASURY,_PAID_OUT_BY_A_MINISTER_WHOSE_PARTY_CAMPAIGNED_AGAINST_THE_FUND|(8) Bliven Fund makes its first transfer]]
[[#THE_BLIVEN_FUND'S_FIRST_TRANSFER_REACHES_THE_ANGLIAN_TREASURY,_PAID_OUT_BY_A_MINISTER_WHOSE_PARTY_CAMPAIGNED_AGAINST_THE_FUND|(8) Bliven Fund makes its first transfer]]<br>[[#NATOPIA_BUYS_NAX€100_BILLION_OF_THE_FEDERATION'S_FIRST_RECOVERY_BONDS|(16) Natopia buys the first recovery bonds]]
{{See also|Lindström Recovery Protocol|Bank of Saint Andre|Federal Bank of Nouvelle Alexandrie}}
{{NAXNewsStory2|
|headline={{team flag|Nouvelle Alexandrie|flag}}{{team flag|Natopia|flag}} BANK OF SAINT ANDRE CONSORTIUM OPENS A NAX€60 BILLION WINDOW FOR THE FEDERATION'S REGIONAL LENDERS
|image=
|image_size=250px
|image_caption=
|bullet1=Federal Bank Approves the Lindström Bank Window Terms
|bullet2=Preferred Equity Goes to Qualifying Regional Lenders, Not to Banks Already in Resolution
|bullet3=Treasury Confirms No Federal Guarantee, Budget Line, or Assembly Vote Is Involved
|bullet4=Governor Martel's Supervisors Will Vet Each Lender Before Any Money Is Paid In
|bullet5=Regional Banks Expect the New Capital to Reopen Business Lending in the Manufacturing Regions
|location=[[Cárdenas]], FCD
|body=A consortium led by the [[Bank of Saint Andre]], the Natopian maritime lender, has opened the NAX€60 billion bank window of the [[Lindström Recovery Protocol]], and will subscribe preferred equity in regional lenders across the Federation under the supervision of the [[Federal Bank of Nouvelle Alexandrie|Federal Bank]]. The Federal Bank approved the window's terms on 11.IX.{{AN|1760}}, and the consortium said the first subscriptions would follow once supervisors had cleared each applicant.
The window had been one of the last pieces of the Lindström framework still on paper. When the Protocol was signed on 29.XV.{{AN|1759}}, the bank window appeared in it only as a proposal under Federal Bank supervision, and regulated bank subscriptions were left for review after the caretaker government handed over to Premier [[Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves]].<ref name="LRP">[[Lindström Recovery Protocol]].</ref> Institutions already in resolution are excluded. The money is meant for lenders that remained solvent through the downturn but have too little capital to lend, the kind of regional institution that came under strain in {{AN|1758}}, when the [[Caisse Régionale de l'Alduria]] was wound up and its sound business sold to [[Quipu Bank]].
Under the terms the Federal Bank approved, each lender applies to the Bank's Division of Regional Financial Institutions, set up under the [[Comprehensive Financial Stabilization Act, 1749]], which examines its books before the consortium may buy its shares. Governor [[Lucienne Martel]] said the review would be the same one supervisors apply to any new capital. ''"This is private money, and it will be supervised as strictly as public money would be,"'' Martel said. ''"No institution receives a single écu from this window until our examiners are satisfied it can use the capital to lend."''
The Treasury published the disclosure that Treasury Secretary [[Tomás Iñiguez]] of the [[Civic Governance Alliance]] had promised before he took office, when he said any public exposure under the Protocol would be made known before it was authorized.<ref name="LRP" /> According to the disclosure, the window carries no federal guarantee and no line in the budget, and it needs no vote in the [[Federal Assembly of Nouvelle Alexandrie|Federal Assembly]]. Preferred equity ranks ahead of ordinary shares for dividends but carries no vote in the running of the lender.
Luis Aramburu, the Bank of Saint Andre's chief executive, said the consortium would be judged on whether credit returned to the Regions. ''"Our business is financing ports, trade and the infrastructure that serves them, and much of that business runs through New Alexandrian regional banks,"'' Aramburu said. ''"Those banks have the customers and the projects. What they have lacked is capital."''
Regional bankers told NBC they expected the first applications from lenders in the manufacturing Regions, where small manufacturers and contractors have found credit hardest to obtain since the [[Recession of 1757|downturn]]. The Federal Bank did not say how many lenders had applied or how quickly the NAX€60 billion would be drawn. The window forms part of the Protocol's third investment platform, the one covering finance, digital services and aerospace.
[[José Manuel Montero]], the [[Leader of the Opposition of Nouvelle Alexandrie|Leader of the Opposition]], said the window had been negotiated by his caretaker government and that the Accord was now delivering it. Iñiguez said it had taken eight months to put Federal Bank supervision and the public disclosure in place before any money moved.
|tldr=''A [[Bank of Saint Andre]]-led consortium has opened the NAX€60 billion bank window of the [[Lindström Recovery Protocol]], subscribing preferred equity in solvent regional lenders under [[Federal Bank of Nouvelle Alexandrie|Federal Bank]] supervision. Institutions in resolution are excluded, and the Federal Bank's Division of Regional Financial Institutions must clear each lender first. The Treasury disclosed that the window carries no federal guarantee, no budget line, and no Assembly vote. Governor [[Lucienne Martel]] promised strict supervision, and chief executive Luis Aramburu said the aim was to restore regional lending. [[José Manuel Montero]] said the window was negotiated by his caretaker government.''
|headline={{team flag|Nouvelle Alexandrie|flag}}{{team flag|Natopia|flag}} NATOPIA OPENS A SECOND ORDERS WINDOW, WORTH NAX€160 BILLION, FOR NEW ALEXANDRIAN GOODS
|image=
|image_size=250px
|image_caption=
|bullet1=Joint Economic Council Renews the Lindström Orders at Half the First Window's Size
|bullet2=Infrastructure, Manufactured Goods, and Defense Output Are Covered From Aureoris (IX) Through Early Next Year
|bullet3=The Council Publishes No Breakdown of the Orders by Sector or Region
|bullet4=Iñiguez Pressed for More Orders for Domestic Manufacturers
|bullet5=The First Window of NAX€320 Billion Closed at the End of Estivis (VIII)
|location=[[Lindström]], [[Natopia]]
|body=Natopian public buyers and the companies taking part in the [[Lindström Recovery Protocol]] will place a further NAX€160 billion of orders for New Alexandrian infrastructure, manufactured goods and defense output, the [[Natopian-Nouvelle Alexandrie Joint Economic Council]] announced on 19.IX.{{AN|1760}}. The second window runs from Aureoris (IX) into early {{AN|1761}}.
The council's ministerial committee of economic ministers and central bank governors met in Lindström for its quarterly session. The new window is half the size of the first, which scheduled NAX€320 billion of orders between Novarum (I) and Estivis (VIII) and closed at the end of that month.<ref>[[Lindström Recovery Protocol]].</ref> Natopian buyers pay for the orders.
Treasury Secretary [[Tomás Iñiguez]] of the [[Civic Governance Alliance]] led the New Alexandrian delegation. He repeated the case he made at the council's Cárdenas plenary in Ventaris (III), and said the government had asked for a larger part of the new orders to go to companies that manufacture inside the Federation, rather than to Natopian firms with New Alexandrian subsidiaries.<ref>[[NBC Newsfeed/1760#THE ACCORD PRESSES TO TURN NATOPIA'S RECOVERY ORDERS INTO LASTING NEW ALEXANDRIAN INDUSTRY|"The Accord Presses to Turn Natopia's Recovery Orders into Lasting New Alexandrian Industry"]], ''NBC Newsfeed'', 14.III.{{AN|1760}}.</ref> The council's communiqué did not say whether that request was met. ''"The first window kept factories open through the worst of the year,"'' Iñiguez said. ''"The second has to do more than that. We want these orders to leave behind jobs and capacity that stay here when the window closes."''
A spokesperson for the government of Chancellor [[Marco Lungo III]] said Natopia regarded the renewal as an investment in its own supply chains. ''"Natopian buyers need what New Alexandrian industry makes,"'' the spokesperson said. ''"The second window is smaller because the emergency is smaller, and that is good news for both countries."''
The council did not publish a breakdown of the NAX€160 billion by sector or by Region. [[Dingo Enterprises]] and [[Neridia Defense Industries]] were among the buyers in the first window, returning after their canceled orders had helped set off the [[1757 Alexandrium market crash]].
|tldr=''The [[Natopian-Nouvelle Alexandrie Joint Economic Council]] has opened a second NAX€160 billion window of Natopian orders for New Alexandrian infrastructure, manufactured goods and defense output, running from Aureoris (IX) into early {{AN|1761}}. It is half the size of the first window, which closed at the end of Estivis (VIII). Treasury Secretary [[Tomás Iñiguez]] sought a larger share for firms that manufacture in the Federation, and the communiqué did not say whether he got it. Natopia said the smaller window reflected a smaller emergency.''
|impact_stability={{steady}} 0
|impact_approval={{steady}} 0
|impact_economy={{increase}} +1
|impact_regional={{steady}} 0
|impact_international={{increase}} +1
}}
}}
Line 3,151:
Line 3,215:
|impact_regional={{steady}} 0
|impact_regional={{steady}} 0
|impact_international={{steady}} 0
|impact_international={{steady}} 0
}}
===16===
{{See also|Lindström Recovery Protocol}}
{{NAXNewsStory2|
|headline={{team flag|Nouvelle Alexandrie|flag}}{{team flag|Natopia|flag}} NATOPIA BUYS NAX€100 BILLION OF THE FEDERATION'S FIRST RECOVERY BONDS
|image=
|image_size=250px
|image_caption=
|bullet1=Private Investors Took NAX€150 Billion of the NAX€250 Billion First Issue
|bullet2=Treasury Says the Issue Priced Inside the Protocol's Yield Cap
|bullet3=The Fifteen-Year Bonds Remain New Alexandrian Public Debt, Repaid by the Federation
|bullet4=Issue Falls Inside the Borrowing That the Supplementary Appropriation Act Authorized in Aureoris (IX)
|bullet5=Montero Says Selling Federal Debt to Natopia Does Not Make It Cheaper
|location=[[Cárdenas]], FCD
|body=Private investors bought NAX€150 billion of the Federation's first recovery bonds, and Natopia took the remaining NAX€100 billion of the NAX€250 billion issue, the Treasury said on 16.XIII.{{AN|1760}}. No bond was issued when the [[Lindström Recovery Protocol]] was signed in {{AN|1759}}; this is the first.
The fifteen-year bonds were sold under the Protocol's backstop, under which Natopia offered to buy authorized New Alexandrian recovery bonds that private investors do not take, up to NAX€250 billion.<ref>[[Lindström Recovery Protocol]].</ref> The Treasury said the issue priced inside the cap of 0.75 percentage points above equivalent Natopian government debt but did not publish the final yield. The rest of the backstop remains available for any further issue the Cortes authorizes.
The [[Supplementary Appropriation Act, 1760]], which raised the federal borrowing limit in Aureoris (IX), authorized the issue as part of borrowing the Treasury already needed to cover lower tax receipts. The bonds remain New Alexandrian public debt and will be repaid by the Federation.
Treasury Secretary [[Tomás Iñiguez]] of the [[Civic Governance Alliance]] said the issue showed the Federation could borrow at a reasonable cost while its economy recovered. ''"Three écus in five came from private buyers, and that is the number I watch,"'' Iñiguez said. ''"The backstop did what it was built to do. It meant we never had to sell this debt in a hurry or at any price the market chose to name."''
Market participants on the [[Nouvelle Alexandrie Stock Exchange]] told NBC that the Natopian commitment had steadied bidding.
[[José Manuel Montero]], the [[Leader of the Opposition of Nouvelle Alexandrie|Leader of the Opposition]], said the purchase changed who held the debt but not how much of it there was. ''"Selling our bonds to Natopia does not make them cheaper to repay,"'' Montero said. ''"It makes our recovery a little more dependent on decisions taken in Lindström."''
|tldr=''Private investors bought NAX€150 billion of the Federation's first NAX€250 billion recovery-bond issue, and Natopia took the remaining NAX€100 billion under the [[Lindström Recovery Protocol]] backstop. The fifteen-year bonds priced inside the Protocol's yield cap and remain New Alexandrian public debt. The issue falls within borrowing the [[Supplementary Appropriation Act, 1760]] already authorized. Treasury Secretary [[Tomás Iñiguez]] welcomed the private demand; [[José Manuel Montero]], the [[Leader of the Opposition of Nouvelle Alexandrie|Leader of the Opposition]], said the debt was no cheaper for being sold to Natopia.''
King Sinchi Roca II opens an enlarged 14th Cortes, the first New Alexandrian government since 1739AN not led by the Humanists, with the Assembly's first Wakara Speaker in the chair
te Landbond, the interior league Boerhaaf leads, won 22 of the 84 seats in the Diet of Anglien on 32.0 percent of the vote, running in the lagging interior on the charge that the metropolitan establishment had captured the duchy's reconstruction money. It was the largest single bloc, but short of the 43 a majority needs. Boerhaaf formed a government with te Verzetsbond and te Eilanderbond, 45 seats between the three, and Hendrik Braam of te Verzetsbond became Chancellor of the Free Duchy. The metropolitan tendency of te Herstelliberalen under Eduard Vogt, which had led every government of the transition, fell to second on 18 seats and passed into opposition.
The vote, on an 81.8 percent turnout, was the last benchmark of the exit sequence Anglien agreed with the Concord Alliance when it wrote the constitution its people ratified by referendum in VII.1759AN. It closes a transition that began with the Natopian-led intervention that expelled the Nü Krantisk Rapskaff occupation and installed a caretaker order under Vogt in 1754AN. With the Diet seated, the Commissioner of Peace who certified the poll has closed his office, and the drawdown of the Natopian garrison is due to finish within six months of the vote.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Free Duchy of Anglien seated its first elected government at the turn of the year: Klaes Boerhaaf of te Landbond became the first Prime Minister of Anglien after the duchy's first competitive election on 12.XII.1759AN, in which his interior league took 22 of the Diet's 84 seats and formed a coalition with te Verzetsbond and te Eilanderbond. Transitional Prime Minister Eduard Vogt's te Herstelliberalen fell to second and passed into opposition, closing the transition that followed the Natopian-led expulsion of the Nü Krantisk Rapskaff occupation.
Seats won by party, 13th Cortes to 14th. The enlarged Assembly seats 801 deputies, up from 749.
No party won a majority in the autumn's election. The King first invited Premier José Manuel Montero, whose Federal Humanists remain the largest single party on 293 seats, to form a government; when Montero could not assemble a majority, the King commissioned Ferreira Gonçalves as formateur, and the three parties signed the Accord.[2]
The Assembly's first act was to elect a Speaker. Orocobix Magüana, a Wakara People's Party deputy for Boriquén who sits inside the Alliance bloc, defeated the Federal Humanist nominee Alexander Melas of Valencia by 480 votes to 321, from 801 valid ballots. Magüana is the first Wakara to hold the Speaker's chair, which has existed since 1693AN; by custom he sets aside his party whip on taking it.
The opposition will get a fair hearing in this chamber, and so will the government, Magüana told the Assembly before taking the chair. On the day either one tries to talk over the other, it will find me standing in the way.
The session opened in the traditional form, with Lord Protector Sayri Tʼito Waman, Baron of Ausangate, bearing the ancient Mace of State down the central aisle in the ceremonial dress of the Apu Kalanayak. In a short address he cautioned the new majority not to mistake the size of its victory for the breadth of its mandate, and reminded the House that citizens expect results and not performance.
His Majesty then delivered the Speech from the Throne, the program of the new Government, setting five priorities: the prosperity of ordinary households, integrity in public life, investment in science and clean energy, the Federation as a union of many peoples, and security abroad. The King said the Government would ask the Cortes to write the union of many peoples plainly into the Federation's own foundations, constitutional language the Speech did not tie to a bill, though the Accord commits the Government to the long-pending Plurinational Federation Constitutional Amendment Act, 1735. We are not one people who tolerate our differences, the King said. We are many peoples who have chosen one another. The full text appears below.
Montero, Premier since 1749AN, becomes Leader of the Opposition. He had told the King he could not command the chamber and stepped back rather than prolong the process. The Federal Humanists, down seventy-nine seats, lead an opposition that also includes the ten deputies of the new Republican Party of Oportia, led by Sofia Laurent, and roughly fifty independents.
The Opening was a joint sitting of the Federation's constitutional order: the Chamber of Peers, carried over from the 13th Cortes under Lord Anglés; the nine justices of the High Court of Justice under Chief Justice Élisée Pierrat; the incoming Council of State; and, in the galleries, the regional governors, among them Clementina Duffy Carr, the first Governor of Oportia to see her Region seated in a federal Assembly. Empress Clara attended beside the King.
The ceremony does not by itself install the Government. At the Assembly's next sitting the House will debate the Address in Reply and put its confidence in the Government to a vote, proceed to the election of Ferreira Gonçalves as President of the Government, and vote on the Council of State submitted under the Proclamation. The Accord's 448 seats give it the numbers on paper; whether they hold on the floor is the test of the sittings ahead.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Opening of the 14th Cortes stages the Federal Accord's arrival in government: the first administration since 1739AN not led by the Federal Humanists, the first Wakara Speaker of the Federal Assembly, and the enlarged 801-seat chamber seating Oportia for the first time. The confidence vote, the election of the Premier, and the approval of the Council of State are still to come.
I open this Fourteenth Cortes Federales, the first returned by the peoples of the Federation to an enlarged Assembly, in a spirit that has carried every session before it: with one heart, with one mind.
The autumn's election returned no party to a majority. The people did not hand the Federation to one party's keeping; they asked its parties to find common ground, and three of them have done so. My Government is drawn from their agreement, and it takes up the charge that a coalition alone can honor: to govern not for one part of the country, but for the whole of it.
And it asks the Federation to judge it plainly. Not by the warmth of this morning, nor by the promises of this Speech, but by the weight it lifts from the shoulders of the people before its work is done.
We meet in an age that does not want for difficulty. Prices press upon households that a generation ago knew security. Trust in public institutions, once given freely, is now asked to be earned. Beyond our shores, the map of the world is being contested by force. These pressures do not pause at our borders. They ask of us not fear, but resolve; not division, but a common answer.
My Government's first care will be the prosperity of ordinary households. It holds that the wealth of a nation is measured not by the fortunes of the few but by the security of the many, and it will act so that a family may afford a home, meet the cost of daily life, and find in honest work a fair reward. Prosperity is not the inheritance of a class. It is the birthright of a people.
My Government will restore integrity to public life. It holds the conduct of office to be a trust and not an advantage, and it will strengthen the means by which that trust is kept: the independence of those who audit the public purse, the powers of those who guard the conduct of ministers, and the protection of every citizen's freedom to assemble and to be heard without fear of intimidation. The law must bind the powerful before it constrains the weak.
My Government will invest in the science, the skills, and the clean energy on which the coming age will be built, and it will steward the land, the water, and the air that the Federation holds in trust for those not yet born. We will not spend the inheritance of our grandchildren to buy the comfort of an afternoon.
My Government holds this Federation to be a union of many peoples, and it will govern in that faith. It will honor the tongues and the traditions of its several nations, from the Wechua highlands to the shores of Boriquén, and it will defend the right of each to govern what is its own. It will ask this Cortes to write that truth plainly into the Federation's own foundations. We are not one people who tolerate our differences. We are many peoples who have chosen one another.
And My Government will keep the Federation secure and true to its friends. It will defend our sovereignty with firmness and extend our hand in friendship to those who share our values. A nation that keeps faith at home will not want for friends abroad.
My Lords and Deputies, a government is judged not by the promises of its opening but by the deliverance of its close. My Government asks to be measured by that standard, and it submits its purpose to your judgment and to the judgment of the people you serve.
For no sovereign and no government accomplishes these things alone. The strength of Nouvelle Alexandrie has always rested where it rests still: in its people, in their labor and their ingenuity, and in their steadfast belief in the promise of this nation. I pray that your counsels may be worthy of them.
THE FEDERAL ASSEMBLY OPENS THE CONFIDENCE DEBATE THAT WILL SEAT THE FEDERAL ACCORD
The leaders of the three Federal Accord parties at the signing of the coalition agreement in Cárdenas, 23.XIII.1759AN. The Assembly took up the Motion of Address the day after the Throne Speech, on 13.I.1760AN.
One Motion of Address Will Elect the Premier, Seat the Council of State, and Carry Confidence
Under Standing Order 8, Three Decisions Fold Into a Single Division
Party Leaders and the Leader of the Opposition Hold the First Day of Debate
With 448 Seats, the Accord Does Not Rely on the Chamber's Fifty Independents
José Manuel Montero Leads the Opposition to a Government His Party Held for Two Decades
No Vote Has Been Taken, With the House Set to Divide on the Address on 15.I
Cárdenas, FCD -- The Federal Assembly opened debate on 13.I.1760AN, the day after the Speech from the Throne, on the Motion of Address that will decide whether the Federal Accord takes office, a single question that elects the Premier, seats his Council of State, and stands as the new government's first vote of confidence.
Moving the Address, Gonçalves, the Alliance leader who sat as Leader of the Opposition through the last Cortes and, before it, the Democratic Socialists' chief whip and most practiced vote-counter, set his program to the five priorities the King had named from the Throne: the cost of living, integrity in public life, investment in science and clean energy, the Federation as a union of many peoples, and security abroad.[4] The Accord the three parties signed in the autumn commits them to a shared legislative program, and the Address asks the House to endorse it whole.
The Speaker, Orocobix Magüana, opened the floor with the reminder that the question before the House was the Address in the terms the Premier-designate had moved. Under the Standing Order the first day of debate belongs to the leaders of the parliamentary parties, and in particular to the Leader of the Opposition, José Manuel Montero, whose Federal Humanist Party led the Federation from 1739AN until the autumn's election. The floor then opens to all Deputies over the days that follow, and the House is set to divide on the Address in Reply on 15.I.1760AN, the vote that will decide whether the Government stands.
On paper the result is not in doubt. The Federal Accord of the Alliance, the Civic Governance Alliance and the Federal Consensus Party holds 448 of the 801 seats, above the 401 a majority needs and clear of the fifty independents who would hold the balance in a closer chamber. The Consensus Party is bound by the coalition agreement to support the government on confidence and supply for the whole term, so the result rests on the Accord itself rather than on the crossbench. Whether the three parties keep their benches together through a single confidence question is what the sitting must show, and what the Government must pass before Gonçalves and his Council of State can take office.
No vote had been taken when debate began. Under the Government Formation and Coalition Act, 1694, Montero stays on as caretaker Premier, barred from significant policy, until the Address is carried and the King confirms the appointment.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Federal Assembly opened debate on 13.I.1760AN, the day after the Throne Speech, on the Motion of Address that will seat the Federal Accord government, a single question under Standing Order 8 that elects Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves as President of the Government, presents his Council of State for approval, and stands as the government's confidence vote. The Accord's 448 of 801 seats put the result beyond doubt on paper; the House is set to divide on the Address on 15.I.1760AN, with José Manuel Montero leading the opposition to the government his party held for the last two decades.
THE FEDERAL ACCORD INHERITS A FROZEN NAX€200 BILLION AND THE BUDGET FIGHT TO RELEASE IT
NBC News Data Desk graphic from the close of 1759AN: unemployment at 8.7 percent, public debt at 67.4 percent of output, and NAX€200 billion of Recovery Act borrowing left undrawn.
Article 17 Bars Treasury From the Recovery Act's Final NAX€200 Billion Tranche
Public Debt Closed the Year at 67.4 Percent of Output
Budget First: the Appropriations Bill Is the Key That Would Unlock the Borrowing
Housing, Cost-of-Living Relief, Clean Government, and Civil Aviation Fill Out the Program
Tomás Iñiguez Takes the Treasury as the Coalition's Guarantor of the Budget
Joblessness Held at 8.7 Percent, and the Recession Has Not Ended
Cárdenas, FCD -- The government the Federal Accord is forming inherits a decision its predecessor left unmade: NAX€200 billion of borrowing authorized by law but frozen, and a budget it must pass before it can draw a single écu of it.
At the close of 1759AN, public debt, which had crossed the 65 percent line in the third quarter, reached NAX€33.22 trillion, or 67.4 percent of output, a point higher than in the autumn, and under Article 17 of the Economic Emergency and Recovery Act, 1758 that reading barred the Treasury from drawing the final NAX€200 billion tranche of the Act's borrowing line without a resolution of the Cortes.[5] The money was authorized but never raised, while the spending already committed stayed in place.
The Federal Assembly must settle two things the caretaker government left open: whether to release the frozen borrowing, and which of the recovery law's emergency powers, now lapsed, to renew. Neither is automatic, and both wait on a budget.
In the Speech from the Throne on 12.I.1760AN, Premier-designate Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves had set the cost of living first among five priorities, before integrity in public life, investment in science and clean energy, the Federation as a union of many peoples, and security abroad.[7] The pressure sits in the figures the recovery has not reached: a cost-of-living index of 106.2 and housing affordability that fell again to 98.1, with unemployment holding at 8.7 percent.
The budget that carries those choices falls to Tomás Iñiguez of the Civic Governance Alliance, whom the coalition names its guarantor of the budget at the Treasury. The Federal Consensus Party is bound by the coalition agreement to support the government on confidence and supply for the whole term, which gives any budget its numbers on paper; whether the three parties agree on what belongs in it is the harder question.
None of it can move until the government takes office. Gonçalves must first win the confidence of the Assembly, and only a confirmed government can lay a budget before the Cortes. When it does, the frozen NAX€200 billion, and the recovery it was meant to finish, are the first test of whether the Accord can govern as capably as it counts.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The government the Federal Accord is forming inherits NAX€200 billion of Recovery Act borrowing that Article 17 froze once debt crossed 65 percent in the third quarter of 1759AN. Debt reached 67.4 percent of output by the close of the year, and only a vote of the Cortes can release the money. Its first program is five bills led by the budget, the measure that would free the borrowing, followed by housing, cost-of-living relief, clean-government, and civil-aviation bills; the budget falls to Treasury guarantor Tomás Iñiguez once the confidence vote seats the government.
The independents who crossed to the Government followed Piti Gándara, the deputy for Alduria, after Ferreira Gonçalves accepted both of the undertakings she pressed from the floor: that the recovery accounts be laid before the appropriation is moved, and that the frozen tranche of recovery borrowing held back under the debt brake be released only by a separate act of the House. Across the seventy-two hours of debate the Government also confirmed that it would not lift the debt brake, that relief on the cost of living and on housing would come out of the appropriation rather than the frozen tranche, and that accession to the Convention on Civil Aviation would wait behind the domestic program.
We are two hundred and ninety-three,José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, told the House. We are fewer than we were. We remain the largest single party in this chamber, and we will hold this Government to every word of that Speech. The Federal Humanists carried their opposition into the division; the Government's majority held.
With the vote Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves takes office as President of the Government, at the head of the first administration since 1739AN not led by the Federal Humanists, with Elena Svensson of the Civic Governance Alliance as Vice-Premier and Tomás Iñiguez at the Treasury. Montero, Premier through the 13th Cortes and caretaker since the election, passed fully into opposition.
TL;DR:The Federal Assembly gave its confidence to the Federal Accord government on 15.I.1760AN, agreeing to the Address in Reply by 461 votes to 293, with 47 abstentions, and electing Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves President of the Government. The Accord's 448 deputies were joined by thirteen independents; the Federal Humanist Party divided the House against the motion, and the Republican Party of Oportia with the remaining independents abstained. The same vote approved the Council of State, and José Manuel Montero passed fully into opposition.
MONTERO'S ALDURIAN ALLIES ARE SWEPT AWAY AND PITI GÁNDARA INHERITS THE CROSSBENCH
Independent Deputy Piti Gándara, who refused the Humanist deal the Aldurian Independent Coalition signed, emerges as Alduria's leading independent.
Backing the Humanists Costs the Aldurian Independent Coalition Nearly All Its Seats
Coordinator Émile Bouchard Loses His Seat After Five Years Sustaining the Government
Twelve Deputies Who Sustained Montero's Majority Quietly Scatter
Fifty Independents Sit in the New Cortes, but the Accord Needs None of Them
Piti Gándara, Who Refused the Humanist Deal, Is Now Alduria's Leading Independent
She Is Rumored to Be Gathering Like-Minded Independents Into a Loose Caucus
Punta Santiago, ALD -- The Aldurian Independent Coalition, the bloc of twelve independents whose votes kept José Manuel Montero's government in office for five years, was all but swept away at the autumn's election, and early in 1760AN it dissolved, leaving the field of Aldurian independents to the crossbencher who had refused to join it, Piti Gándara.
Formed in 1754AN by twelve of the twenty-five independents Alduria returned after the collapse of its Democratic Socialist machine, the Coalition had traded confidence and supply for regional investment under the FHP-Independent confidence and supply agreement, 1754, and tied its fortunes to a Humanist government the country then turned out. Its Coordinator, Émile Bouchard, the former mayor of Saint-Augustin who had spoken for the bloc since its founding, lost his seat, and only one or two of its members held theirs. Bouchard had spent the last term pressing whether the recovery reached the inland mine towns around Piriya or only the coast at Punta Santiago; the voters of those towns did not return him.
With its numbers gone and its bargain spent, the Coalition wound up its registration as a caucus early in 1760AN, its survivors folding into the wider independent bench. That bench no longer holds the balance it once did: the 14th Cortes Federales seats fifty independents, but the Federal Accord's 448 of 801 seats command the chamber without them, and the power that made Bouchard's twelve a kingmaking bloc has passed.
The independent who gains by the Coalition's fall is the one who never joined it. Piti Gándara, the fiscal-conservative populist from Nueva Sinagoga who declined the confidence-and-supply deal in 1754AN, spent the last term attacking the government from the crossbench. She led the "Read the bill" campaign against the National Resilience Fund in 1757AN and pressed her Public Order bill against paramilitary displays, which the Assembly defeated in 1759AN, before campaigning that autumn alongside the Civic Governance Alliance, now a party of government, on a platform of scrutiny she summed up as "Two Ballots. No Blank Checks." She returns as the most prominent independent Alduria sends to the Cortes.
"A coalition is not a conviction," Gándara said of the bloc's end. "They rented their votes to a government, and the tenants have been evicted. I kept mine, and I still read the bill." Around her, talk has begun of a looser arrangement: several of the Aldurian independents returned in 1759AN share her preference for scrutiny over allegiance, and she is said to be drawing them toward a personal caucus, not a party, that would speak with one voice on the public accounts. Whether it forms at all, and what it might be called, remains unsettled.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Aldurian Independent Coalition, the twelve-strong bloc that sustained José Manuel Montero's government for five years, was all but wiped out at the 1759AN election for backing the Humanists and quietly dissolved early in 1760AN, its Coordinator Émile Bouchard losing his seat. The new Cortes seats fifty independents but the Federal Accord's majority needs none of them, and the crossbencher who refused the Humanist deal, Piti Gándara, who campaigned with the Civic Governance Alliance on a platform of "no blank checks", emerges as Alduria's leading independent, rumored to be gathering like-minded members into a loose caucus.
A Fall From 372 Seats to 293 Marks the Party's Sharpest Decline on Record
José Manuel Montero Becomes Leader of the Opposition After a Decade as Premier
Both Federal Capital District Seats Fall, Among Them the Chief Whip Daniela Ferrer
Carolina Mendez, the Outgoing Speaker, Loses Her Alduria Seat
Sofia Laurent's Ten Oportian Republicans Sit on the Opposition Benches Too
Down but Still the Largest Single Party, the Humanists Weigh Their Next Move
Cárdenas, FCD -- The Federal Humanist Party took its place on the opposition benches of the 14th Cortes Federales shorn of seventy-nine seats, its Speaker, and its Chief Whip, in the steepest defeat the party has suffered in a generation, and José Manuel Montero set about leading in opposition the Assembly his party governed for the last two decades.
The party that had opened every Cortes since 1739AN returned 293 of the 801 seats, down from 372, and finished 108 short of a majority.[8] It remains the largest single party in the chamber, but the Federal Accord of three parties facing it commands 448, and the arrangement that had sustained Montero for five years on the votes of Aldurian independents is gone.
The defeat carried away the deputies who had run the party's business. The Humanists lost both seats of the Federal Capital District, among them the Chief Whip Daniela Ferrer, who had built the confidence-and-supply arrangement that held the last government together, and Daniel Valkory, Jr., the party's veteran deputy for the capital. In Alduria, the outgoing Speaker Carolina Mendez lost the seat she had held through the last Cortes.
Montero, Premier since 1749AN and caretaker since the election, gave way to the Federal Accord when the Assembly gave the new Government its confidence on 15.I.1760AN, and now leads the opposition in full. He had told King Sinchi Roca II he could not command the chamber and stepped back rather than prolong the formation.[9]
The benches he leads are not the party's alone. Beside the Humanists' 293 sit the ten deputies of the new Republican Party of Oportia under Sofia Laurent, returned at Oportia's first federal election, and the roughly fifty independents who owe allegiance to neither side. Together against the Accord's 448 they make the opposition, the place the parties now in government held for the last term.
For a party built to govern, the question is what it does when it does not. With its former Speaker and its Chief Whip both gone from the chamber, the Federal Humanists open the Cortes rebuilding from a reduced bench, the largest single party in an Assembly they no longer run.
THE FEDERAL ACCORD OPENS THE YEAR WITH ITS LEAD INTACT AS THE COST OF LIVING TOPS VOTERS' CONCERNS
IOP/NBC News vote-intention graphic for the first regular poll of 1760AN, conducted 21-23.I.
On a Fresh Ballot the Alliance Leads the Humanists 38 to 32
Half the Country Approves the New Government and a Third Disapproves
Cost of Living Is the First Concern of 41 Percent, Well Ahead of Housing
Piti Gándara Debuts Third Among the Leaders, a Point Above the Premier Himself
Premier Gonçalves Opens Above Water, Montero Underwater in Opposition
Housing, Jobs, and the Public Debt Trail the Cost of Living Among Public Worries
Cárdenas, FCD -- The first regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 21-23.I, finds the Federal Accord opening its term with the lead it won in the autumn intact, and the cost of living the concern voters most want it to answer.[10]
Asked about the new government, half the country approved of the Federal Accord administration and a third disapproved, 50 percent to 34, with the rest holding no view. The reading settles a little from the honeymoon the coalition enjoyed at the turn of the year, when the Institute's first post-election survey put approval at 54 to 33, but it leaves the Gonçalves government comfortably in positive ground before it has passed a single law.
The poll's clearest finding is what the country wants that government to do first. Asked to name their leading concern, 41 percent said the cost of living, well ahead of housing on 18, the wider economy and jobs on 15, and the public debt on 12, the last sharpened by the NAX€200 billion of recovery borrowing the debt brake has left frozen. The pattern tracks the numbers behind the recovery: joblessness has held at 8.7 percent, and a cost-of-living index of 106.2 and housing affordability that slipped again to 98.1 have left households feeling little relief.[11]
The leaders divide as the parties do. Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves opens his premiership at a net plus 11, down from the plus 30 he carried as the Accord's candidate, and Elena Svensson remains the best-liked leader in the Federation at plus 17, while José Manuel Montero, newly in opposition, stands at minus 9, the lowest of the major leaders. The poll's surprise is Piti Gándara, the Aldurian independent who refused the Humanist deal and now sits at the head of an enlarged crossbench: she debuts at a net plus 13, third among all the leaders tested and a point above the Premier himself, though more than half the country still holds no view of her. Nicolás Arreola, the Institute's director, cautioned that a new government's first poll tends to flatter it, and that a fresh independent's numbers are the softest of all.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The first regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 21-23.I, finds the Federal Accord opening its term with its autumn lead intact: the Alliance leads the Federal Humanist Party 38 to 32 on a fresh ballot, and half the country approves the new government to a third who disapprove. The cost of living is the leading concern of 41 percent of voters, ahead of housing and the public debt; Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves opens his premiership on a net positive rating, José Manuel Montero trails in opposition, and the Aldurian independent Piti Gándara debuts third among the leaders tested.
NATIONAL PARTY VOTING INTENTION If a general election were held today, which party would you support? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 21-23.I.1760AN
GOVERNMENT APPROVAL Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Federal Accord government is doing? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 21-23.I.1760AN
Response
Percentage
Change Since Post-Election Poll
Approve
50.0%
▼ −4.0%
Disapprove
34.0%
▲ +1.0%
No Opinion
16.0%
▲ +3.0%
Net Approval
▲ +16.0%
▼ −5.0%
Most Important Issue
MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING THE FEDERATION What is the most important issue facing the Federation today? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 21-23.I.1760AN
Issue
Percentage
The cost of living
41.0%
Housing
18.0%
The economy and jobs
15.0%
The public debt
12.0%
Other / No opinion
14.0%
Confidence in the Government
CONFIDENCE IN THE GOVERNMENT % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 21-23.I.1760AN
Question
Confident
Not confident
Unsure
Will the government govern effectively?
52.0%
37.0%
11.0%
Will the coalition last a full term?
47.0%
42.0%
11.0%
Party Leader Favorability Ratings
PARTY LEADER FAVORABILITY RATINGS % of registered voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 21-23.I.1760AN
DIRECTION OF THE FEDERATION Do you think the Federation is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 21-23.I.1760AN
Five Bills Make Up the Government's First Package for the Federal Assembly
Cost-of-Living Relief and Housing Reform Lead the Accord's Social Agenda
A Universal Child Wealth Account and a Wealth Tax Go First to Independent Costing
Fiscal Credibility Was the Civic Governance Alliance's Price for Signing
Renewables and Enterprise Carry the Federal Consensus Party's Fingerprints
Montero Calls the Program Spending the Federation Cannot Afford to Keep
Cárdenas, FCD -- After weeks of negotiation among its three parties and with the outside interests aligned with each of them, the Federal Accord has settled the legislative program it will lay before the 14th Cortes Federales, a first package of five bills led by cost-of-living relief, housing reform, and a budget that sends its two most expensive ideas out for independent costing before it commits to either.
The package is the work of a three-party government that must balance three constituencies at once. Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves's Alliance, which holds the Premiership and most of the economic and social departments, drove the cost-of-living and housing bills. Its partners each set a price. The Civic Governance Alliance, holding the Vice-Premiership and the Treasury, wanted a budget the government could defend in public and pay for in fact; the Federal Consensus Party, with the Interior and research portfolios, pressed its priorities on energy and enterprise. Between them the three hold 448 of the 801 seats in the Federal Assembly.
The social half of the package is the plainest. The Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 raises the family allowance and adds a household establishment grant, and writes in an annual uprating that protects the value of wages, pensions, and benefits against inflation. The National Housing Reform and Expansion Act, 1760 carries the coalition's pledge to make housing more affordable, and the Clean Government and Elections Act, 1760 delivers the integrity and election commitments the parties signed up to in the autumn.
The centerpiece is the budget, and the one that took the most negotiating to settle. The General Appropriations and Taxation Act, 1760 funds the Federation and folds in the government's structural measures: a single-registration permitting regime for enterprise and a duty to pay small suppliers promptly, a scaling-up of the Frontera Program, and a target of raising renewable energy to sixty percent of national generation, a definition the Consensus Party won that leaves the burning of biomass out of the count. Two of its measures are not legislated outright but referred for costing: a universal child wealth account that would open a locked, progressively endowed account for every newborn, and a tax on the largest fortunes to help pay for it. Both go to the independent Federal Budget and Costing Office, the watchdog the same budget creates to put a public price on every major bill, and neither is to be voted before that Office reports.
That referral was the bridge that let the Civic Governance Alliance sign. The government inherits an economy still working off the Alexandrium crash and the recession that followed it, with the last NAX€200 billion of the recovery's borrowing frozen behind the debt brake and a recovery that has reached Punta Santiago on the coast faster than the mining towns of the interior.[12]"We will not ask the country to trust numbers we have not shown it," Vice-Premier Elena Svensson said of the costing referral. "A government that means to be believed on the cost of living begins by being honest about the cost of everything else."
The program answers the priorities the King set from the Throne at the opening of the session, and the government means to bring it to the Hopper in the weeks ahead, where its majority will meet the enlarged crossbench of the independent Piti Gándara and an opposition that has already found its line of attack.[13]José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the package promised more than the Federation could keep. "They have written a wish list and called it a program," Montero said. "A child's account here, a new tax there, a grant for every household, and not one honest word about where the money is to come from once the emergency borrowing runs out. We will hold them to every figure."
Federico de Almagro y Strong, the Vice-President and Secretary of Defense until the Humanists lost office and a figure of the party's Humanist Vanguard, put the opposition's temper more bluntly. "Let us not dress it up. We are the Opposition now, so we oppose," Strong said. "It is a government motion, and we are against it. Every account they will not show, every sum this recovery cannot pay, every soft promise with no coin behind it, we will make them answer for, on the floor and in the country. The Humanists have never learned to lose quietly, and we do not mean to start now. Viva el humanismo, carajo."
The Government Heard the Crossbench Before Its First Bills Entered the Federal Chamber as Proposed Legislation
Gándara Brings Her Scrutiny Case Into the New Legislature
Living Costs, Housing, the Budget, and Clean Government Are on the Table
Fifty Independent Deputies Form a Distinct Crossbench in the Enlarged Assembly
Gándara Campaigned on Her "Two Ballots. No Blank Checks." Slogan
Consultation Leaves Gándara Outside Any Confidence-and-Supply Arrangement with the Government
Cárdenas, FCD -- The Federal Accord took the plans that became its first bills to the independent deputies for crossbench scrutiny, meeting Piti Gándara and other independents before the program reached the 14th Cortes Federales. The consultation put the new government's opening package across the table from the crossbench without turning it into a coalition partner or a confidence-and-supply arrangement.
The meeting came after the Accord's three parties had agreed their program and formed a government. The Alliance for a Just Nouvelle Alexandrie, the Civic Governance Alliance, and the Federal Consensus Party hold 448 of the 801 seats in the enlarged Federal Assembly, enough to form a majority. The 50 independent deputies nevertheless remain a distinct parliamentary force, and the government's decision to hear them before presenting its package made scrutiny part of the program's opening politics rather than an afterthought.
Gándara brought her scrutiny case into the conversation. An independent member for Alduria, she held her seat at the 1759 general election after refusing the Aldurian confidence-and-supply arrangement with the former Federal Humanist Party government. She returned to the 14th Cortes as the most prominent independent Alduria sends, having campaigned alongside the CGA on the promise "Two Ballots. No Blank Checks." Several other Aldurian independents were said to share her preference for scrutiny over allegiance, and she was said to be drawing them toward a loose personal caucus rather than a party; whether it forms remains unsettled.[14]
The meeting placed the Accord's program beside Gándara's stated scrutiny of public accounts. The coalition could table its package with its own majority, while her position left the independents free to hear the government, examine its promises, and retain their votes. The consultation did not settle how any independent would vote. It made the crossbench part of the public account of the bills as they entered the Cortes.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Before the Federal Accord introduced its first domestic bills, the government met Piti Gándara and other independent deputies to discuss the program that became its cost-of-living, housing, budget, and clean-government legislation. The three coalition parties hold 448 of 801 seats, but the 50 independents remain a distinct force in the enlarged Assembly. Gándara, an independent Aldurian deputy who campaigned on "Two Ballots. No Blank Checks.", remained outside the government and any confidence-and-supply arrangement. The bills were introduced from 2 to 19.II.1760AN and remain proposed; no debate or outcome is included.
SANPANTUL DRAFTS A REFERENDUM TO PARTITION ITS NEW TERRITORIES AND FORM A CONFEDERATION
Sanpantul's flag. The state is drafting a referendum on reorganizing its newly acquired territories and forming a confederation.
Drafters Have Set No Date, and the Referendum Remains a Proposal
It Would Reorganize the Lands Çakaristan Ceded to Sanpantul Last Year
Northern Paryan, Azad Pashana, and Beneluccas Would Become Separate States
South Beneluccas Would Be Granted Its Own Autonomy Within the Union
Every State, Sanpantul Included, Would Reconstitute as the Great Tonugawa
Sanpantul Itself Would Dissolve Into the Confederation the Plan Proposes
Sanpantul -- The Sanpantul State has begun drafting a referendum that would remake the map of the territories it gained a year ago, and, with them, the shape of the state itself.
The lands in question are the Paryan and Yarumo territories, which Çakaristan ceded to the Sanpantul State at the close of 1759AN, extending Sanpantul across a stretch of the archipelago that had been Çakari ground. The cession enlarged the state at a stroke, and the question the referendum now poses is how the enlarged state should be governed.
Under the proposal, still at an early stage, the annexed territories would be divided into Northern Paryan, Azad Pashana, and Beneluccas, with South Beneluccas granted its own autonomy.[16] The partitioned territories and the state's existing lands would then be reconstituted together as a loose confederation to be called the Great Tonugawa, a settlement that would fold the Sanpantul State itself into the union it proposes rather than rule the new territories from the old capital.
No date has been set for the vote, and the plan remains a draft. What it sketches is a state choosing, within a year of doubling its reach, to remake itself as a confederation of the parts rather than hold them as conquests, a course whose outcome would redraw the political map of that corner of the archipelago.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Sanpantul State is drafting a referendum that would reorganize the Paryan and Yarumo territories Çakaristan ceded to it at the close of 1759AN, dividing them into Northern Paryan, Azad Pashana, and Beneluccas, granting South Beneluccas its own autonomy, and reconstituting all the states, the Sanpantul State among them, as a loose confederation called the Great Tonugawa. The proposal remains at an early stage, with no date set for the vote.
The SPA has surveilled Constancian life since its establishment
Petropolis, Imperial State of Constancia -- The State Protection Authority has once again warned Constancians of the danger of foreign malign influence circulating through agents and fifth columnists. The warning followed a public press conference at which arrested spies were shown to the media, held for intending to circulate lies and libels to destabilize the Constancian people's loyalty to their Basileus; the spies were all foreigners, though a few Constancians have also been taken in for questioning as persons of interest and likely collaborators. "We are grateful for the unceasing diligence of our security services and loyal Constancians," the authority said.
The Director-General has advised Constancians to report anything suspicious for investigation immediately, as the Free State of Constancia, Azad Eura and other insurgent and terrorist movements keep government security forces busy and on guard. "A secure Imperial State begins with you," he said.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Constancia's State Protection Authority has again warned of foreign malign influence, presenting arrested foreign spies at a public press conference and taking a number of Constancians in for questioning as suspected collaborators. Its Director-General, Daniyal Simranzadeh al-Osman, urged citizens to report anything suspicious as the Free State of Constancia, Azad Eura and other movements keep the security forces on guard.
The Concord Alliance Military Assistance Mission to Anglien began drawing down when Anglien's constitution was certified in VII.1759AN, and is due to finish within six months of the general election of 12.XII.1759AN.[17] The mission has wound up its military functions, and the Commissioner of Peace who certified that election, the alliance's senior civilian officer in the duchy, has closed his office with the end of the transition. The security the alliance held in trust now passes to the institutions it helped stand up: the Diet elected in the autumn and the Boerhaaf government it seated.
For Natopia, the drawdown ends the largest and longest of the Concord commitments in Anglien. Natopian forces led the garrison through the occupation's collapse and the years of reconstruction that followed, and the winding-down of the mission marks the point at which the alliance judges the duchy able to keep its own order.
What the alliance leaves behind is meant to be financial rather than military. The reconstruction grants that carried Anglien through the transition are to give way to the endowment the Concord Council approved on 24.XI.1759AN.[18] The fund will pay the duchy four to five percent of its market value annually, and its first transfer, of 4.25 percent, falls due this year. Five of the seven Concord states subscribed the capital, and Natopia put up the bulk of it. Aerla's subscription was confirmed on 20.I.1760AN. Nouvelle Alexandrie, one of the two largest donors to the reconstruction, declined to subscribe in II.1759AN and offered non-capital support instead.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Natopian garrison in the Free Duchy of Anglien is drawing down toward completion within six months of the 12.XII.1759AN election, the last military element of the Concord Alliance mission that expelled the Nü Krantisk Rapskaff occupation and carried the duchy to self-government. As the Commissioner of Peace closes his office and the security passes to the new Boerhaaf government, the alliance's reconstruction grants are to give way to the Bliven Fund endowment, capitalized by five Concord states led by Natopia; Nouvelle Alexandrie declined to subscribe in II.1759AN.
The Shahanshah ordered national mourning. A naval vessel in the harbor of Çatalyokuş fired a twenty-one-gun salute at the moment of his death, and flags across Çakaristan were lowered to half-mast. In his last days the Khan gathered the House of Çakar and, witnesses said, stayed lucid to the end, leaving instructions for the succession to both the throne and the House; no successor had been named.
Known as the "Conqueror of Mountaintops," Çakar was born on 12.III.1667AN in Šer-Ku-Riž, the second son of a leader of the Hasani rebellion against the Kingdom of Krasnocoria. He came to prominence as a diplomat and strategist in the Sylvanian National Awakening of 1687AN to 1689AN, uniting the Crescent Brothers against the failing Krasnocorian kingdom, and was entrusted by the Sultan with the mission to Kendall Isle that became his khanate. He was appointed Khan on 22.XI.1689AN and held the title until his death.
Over the decades that followed he turned a frontier outpost into a settled province, integrating the west and south of the island and repopulating its emptied east, and opened the Khanate to refugees during the Arboric Civil War in neighboring Barikalus while keeping its Hasani character. At home he built roads, schools, and clinics; the Khan Amir Bridge on National Highway 7 carries his name.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Amir Çakar, the "Conqueror of Mountaintops" who founded the Kendall Khanate on Kendall Isle and ruled it for more than seventy years, died on 19.II.1760AN at the Khan Palace in Çatalyokuş at the age of 93. The Shahanshah ordered national mourning, a naval vessel fired a twenty-one-gun salute, and flags across Çakaristan were lowered to half-mast; the Khan left succession instructions to the House of Çakar, which has not yet named his successor.
THE FEDERAL ACCORD ADVANCES ITS PROGRAM AS ITS BILLS GO BEFORE THE CORTES
Solar generation and grid infrastructure. The government has directed the National Energy Commission to shorten certification and connection queues for renewable projects.
In Its First Weeks the Government Starts Delivery on the Accord's Promises
Elena Lopez de Gautier Speeds Grid Connections for Renewable Projects
The National Economic Council Will Track the Price of Essentials and Publish the Results
Housing Opens Federal Land and Widens Existing Grants for Affordable Building Ahead of the Bill
The Premier Tightens the Ministerial Code and Opens the Lobbyist Register
José Manuel Montero Says the Government Is Filling the Silence While Its Program Stalls
Cárdenas, FCD -- With its five-bill program before the 14th Cortes Federales, the government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves of the Alliance for a Just Nouvelle Alexandrie has begun governing alongside the Assembly's consideration of its legislative program. Its first weeks have brought a run of departmental orders, policy guidelines, and program launches within existing authority, translating the coalition's promises into administrative action while the program's legislative progress remains outside this snapshot.
The measures use the Executive authorities identified in the Proclamation of Punta Santiago: the policy guidelines the Premier sets under Article 44, the departmental orders a Secretary may issue within the competence of the department under Article 48, and the resolutions the Council of State adopts at its weekly meetings. Article 47 leaves the establishment, organization, and competence of departments and agencies to Acts of the Cortes.[20] The bills remain the route for changes that require legislation, while the government can act within existing authority.
The Premier has stood up a standing committee under the National Economic Council to publish a regular reading of the price of essentials and to follow the delivery of the government's economic promises across departments. The committee carries no money of its own and adds nothing to the cash relief the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 would pay; its remit is prices, delivery, and public reporting.
The Premier has also set a policy guideline, adopted by resolution of the Council, tightening the code of conduct that binds ministers and ordering the government's register of lobbyists and consultants published in full. It is work the government can do to itself at once, ahead of the clean-government bill that would hold the wider system to the same standard.
José Manuel Montero (Federal Humanist Party), the Leader of the Opposition, said the measures did not answer his concern. "A directive here, a committee there, a register they were always going to publish," Montero said. "This is a government filling the silence while its bills go nowhere, and it will be judged on what passes this chamber, not on what it announces to the newspapers." The opening weeks have produced four fronts: energy connections, price monitoring, housing delivery, and clean-government administration, while the program's legislative progress remains outside this snapshot.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:With its five-bill program before the 14th Cortes Federales, the government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves has opened its term by using existing executive authorities. Elena Lopez de Gautier, the Secretary of Energy and Environment, has ordered the National Energy Commission to speed renewable grid connections; the Premier has set up a National Economic Council committee to track the price of essentials; the Housing Secretary Mayani Guacanagari has widened grants and opened federal land for building; and a Council resolution has tightened the ministerial code and opened the lobbyist register. Each addresses a promise also found in the legislative program, whose progress is outside this snapshot. José Manuel Montero said the government was filling the silence while the program stalled.
Constancian Intelligence Received Reports Naming Georgiou President Pro Tempore of the Free State in 1706AN
Her Own Record Calls Her the Alleged Leader; the Movement's Record Says Its Chief Executive Is Unknown
She Sought Asylum in the Federation After Her Sister Viktoria Was Abducted in Punta Santiago
Viktoria's Dental Records Were a Partial Match to a Body Landed at Avey in 1690AN
Of Four Police Authorities Sent the Pathologists' Reports, Only Constancia Did Not Reply
Aerla Has Listed Both the Free State and Azad Eura as Terrorist Organizations Since 1753AN
Cárdenas, FCD -- Constancia's State Protection Authority named the Free State of Constancia on 12.II.1760AN, listing it alongside Azad Eura among the insurgent and terrorist movements that keep the Imperial State's security forces on guard.[21] Constancian intelligence attached one name to the leadership of that movement, and it did so in 1706AN. Maria Georgiou is ninety-nine years old, and she sought asylum in Nouvelle Alexandrie after her elder sister was taken off a street in Punta Santiago.
Georgiou was born in Vey on 10.X.1660AN, one of three daughters of two electricians contracted to the Honourable Company.[22] She was six when the Constancian government evacuated her family in the Katabasis of the Loyalists, ahead of the orbital bombardment that destroyed the city; her parents died on the march. The sisters were reunited outside Aqaba in 1667AN through a company agency and given bursaries to the Euran University the year after. Georgiou read Euran literature and took a post as assistant librarian at the Aqaba Public Library.
She followed her elder sister Viktoria, a harpist, to Natopia in 1682AN and to Punta Santiago in 1687AN, where a Constancian exile community had gathered.[23] Viktoria became an organizer, and grew concerned by the purported influence of a State Protection Authority cell operating out of the Imperial Constancian Consulate-General in the city. She came to prominence in 1688AN in the counterprotests over the release of Christina Aguilar, a media figure and a niece of the Autokrator, whom Aldurian police freed after twelve hours once they confirmed she carried a Constancian diplomatic passport. The consulate-general's spokesperson strenuously denied intervening.
On 12.IV.1688AN, masked men took Viktoria Georgiou outside the Hotel du Babkha, put her into a minibus, and drove away; advocacy groups filed a missing persons report. Her younger sister applied for asylum in the Federation.
In X.1690AN, fifty-six fuel drums declared as chemical waste were landed at Avey, a Zeedic port that has been under New Alexandrian administration since 1701AN, where dockworkers reported the smell coming off the freight. Each drum held a body. Thirty-two of the dead had been dissected with something approaching surgical precision, and none of the fifty-six had fingers or toes.
Pathologists' reports went on 1.XI.1690AN to police authorities in Alduria-Wechua, Constancia, Floria, and Natopia. Florian investigators returned no match, while the Aldurian ministry found none at the federal level before circulating the file to municipal forces. The Imperial Natopian Constabulary reported that dental records held by a private clinic in Lindström for Viktoria Georgiou were a partial match to a body catalogued as Subject Seventeen. From Constancia, no reply came.
The case of all fifty-six passed on 19.XI.1690AN to a joint commission of officers from Zeed's Second Directorate and the State Protection Authority, which has answered no request for information in the sixty-nine years since. Viktoria Georgiou's death remains uncertified, the litigation still before the courts in Punta Santiago. Her case was publicized in 1694AN in a dossier of alleged Raspur Pact atrocities issued by the Azad Eura coalition. Aerla has listed both that coalition and the Free State itself as foreign terrorist organizations since 12.V.1753AN.[24]
Reports reached the State Protection Authority in 1706AN, during the Great Vanic Revolt and the Vanic Insurgency, that Maria Georgiou had been elected or designated President Pro Tempore of the Free State on the strength of her sister's martyrdom, and that she had sat in its Assembly of the Nation since 1685AN. Those reports are the basis on which she is named; her own record calls her the alleged leader, and the movement's record says its chief executive is unknown. Eight years before they reached Petropolis, the Federation had fought beside Constancia in Operation Paramount, the occupation that the Free State's own record says doomed it.
No date of death is entered for Georgiou, whom NBC was unable to reach. The Department of State declined to comment on the internal affairs of an allied state, repeating the line it gave in 1759AN, that the Federation keeps the closest relations with Constancia and full confidence in its institutions.[25] The State Protection Authority did not respond to questions.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Constancian intelligence attached one name to the leadership of the Free State of Constancia in 1706AN, and it belongs to a ninety-nine-year-old woman living in the Federation. Maria Georgiou sought asylum in Nouvelle Alexandrie after her sister Viktoria was abducted in Punta Santiago in 1688AN, weeks after the counterprotests that made her prominent; Viktoria's dental records were later a partial match to one of fifty-six bodies landed at Avey, a case that passed to a joint commission including the State Protection Authority and has gone unanswered for sixty-nine years. Both sides of that naming are hedged in the record: the designation is called alleged, and no chief executive of the movement is known.
Federal Assembly Sets Aside Five Minutes for Felicitations Under Speaker Magüana
Cárdenas, FCD -- Crown Princess Sayari, 38, is expecting twins with her husband Prince Janus, 38, the Royal Household and the Imperial Household of Natopia said in a pair of statements this morning. Birth is anticipated in the closing months of 1760AN. Both are well, the statements said, and the household has asked for the courtesies it asked for five years ago.
The two texts were issued at nine o'clock, one at the Palace of Carranza in Cárdenas, the other by the Imperial Household in Lindström. That pairing is itself a repetition: the households announced the Princess's first pregnancy on the same clock in 1755AN, and in the same words about privacy.[26] What is new is the number.
Natopia has its own standing in the announcement, and it does not come only through the marriage. The Princess's mother, Empress Clara, has reigned in Natopia since 20.XII.1752AN, and the Princess stands second in line to that throne behind her brother Nathan, so the twins, when born, enter the Natopian succession as they do the New Alexandrian one. Prince Janus belongs to the House of Eadric and kept his Natopian citizenship when he naturalized as a New Alexandrian in 1750AN.
Prince Inti, born at the Palace of Carranza on 23.XII.1755AN, keeps his place as second in line to the throne behind his mother.[27] The twins, when born, will follow him at third and fourth. Under the Proclamation of Punta Santiago and the Succession to the Throne Act, 1700, precedence in the direct line runs by order of birth and takes no account of sex, so which of the two stands third will be decided by the order in which they arrive.
That is the whole of the immediate constitutional business. Both children will be born into the House of Inti-Carrillo and carry the Inti-Carrillo name, as their brother does; the Royal Marriages Act, 1750 governs the household established around the Princess, and the Regency Act, 1750 would apply only in circumstances the household called remote. One older instrument waits further out. The Treaty of Dynastic Separation of 1721AN was made on the King and Empress's marriage, so that no one person could ever hold both crowns. It requires any grandchild of theirs who stands to inherit both thrones to choose one and renounce the other before acceding to either. Nothing is asked of a child until then, and no new legislation is required.
María Teresa de Valencia, Lord Steward of the Royal Household, took questions at the Palace of Carranza for eleven minutes. She confirmed that the Princess will keep her public engagements through the spring, that she will stop traveling outside the Federation from VIII.1760AN on medical advice, and that a twin pregnancy at 38 is followed more closely than a single one. "The Princess has been told what any woman in her position would be told, and she has agreed to all of it," de Valencia said. Asked whether the household knew the sex of either child, she said that it did, and that it would not be saying.
The King and the Empress issued a joint statement through the household press office. "Five years ago we called this news a cause for quiet joy in both our houses," the statement read. "We say it again, and gladly. We ask for our daughter what we asked for then, which is quiet."
Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves issued the Government's congratulations from Government House shortly before eleven. "The Government extends its warmest congratulations to the Crown Princess and to Prince Janus, and to both families," he said. Ferreira Gonçalves offered the same courtesy in 1755AN from a campaign stop, as Leader of the Opposition. José Manuel Montero, who was Premier on the morning of that announcement and is now Leader of the Opposition, answered in four sentences from his party's rooms. "I congratulated the Princess once before, from a very different office, and I mean it exactly as much today," Montero said. "There is no politics in this."
Speaker Orocobix Magüana told the Federal Assembly from the chair that felicitations would take the first five minutes of business on 7.III.1760AN, the arrangement the Cortes made on the 1755AN announcement. The Chamber of Peers made a matching arrangement under Lord Anglés.
Reaction from Lindström was brief. The Imperial Household acknowledged the announcement and conveyed the Empress's congratulations to her daughter, and said that no Natopian celebrations would be arranged before the birth. The twins will be born into three citizenships, as their brother was: New Alexandrian, Natopian, and, through their mother's membership of the Order of the Holy Lakes, Hurmu's.
Well-wishers were at the gates of the Palace of Carranza by half past nine. The household repeated its standing request that flowers be left at Federation Park rather than at the gates. The Federal Gazette is expected to carry the formal proclamation in its next issue.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Royal Household and the Imperial Household of Natopia confirmed on 6.III.1760AN that Crown Princess Sayari, 38, is expecting twins with Prince Janus of the House of Eadric. Birth is anticipated late in 1760AN. Prince Inti, born in 1755AN, remains second in line; the twins will stand third and fourth in the order they are born, since the Succession to the Throne Act, 1700 fixes precedence in the direct line by birth alone. King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara repeated their 1755AN words, "a cause for quiet joy in both our houses." Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves and José Manuel Montero, who held each other's offices at that announcement, both sent congratulations. No legislation is required.
The Final Contingent Marched Out a Day Before the Treaty's Six-Month Deadline
Defense Minister Marten Dijkstra Received the Keys at the Compound Gate
The Treaty of Johannsessbuurg Ends With the Withdrawal, but Natopia's Recognition of the Duchy Survives It
Okkerse Says Anglien Will Join No Standing Alliance
No Advisory Arrangement Under Article VII Has Been Negotiated
Boerhaaf's Government Has Not Said What It Will Do With the Grounds
Johannsessbuurg, Anglien -- The flag of Natopia came down over the garrison compound in the northwestern quarter of Johannsessbuurg shortly after nine on the morning of 11.III.1760AN, and the last 140 Natopian soldiers in the Free Duchy of Anglien marched out through its gate an hour later, a day inside the deadline the Treaty of Johannsessbuurg set for their departure.
The treaty required the garrison, which once numbered up to 1,800, to leave within six months of the duchy's first election under its permanent constitution, held on 12.XII.1759AN. With the last contingent gone, the compound's extraterritorial status lapsed and the grounds passed, with their fixed installations, to the Free Duchy. The treaty itself ended with the withdrawal, without further act by either side, as its ninth article provides.[28]
The Minister of Defense, Marten Dijkstra of te Verzetsbond, received the keys from the garrison's last commander, Brigadier Octave Ferrault, at the gate. The Anglian flag was raised over the compound for the first time since it was built. "For more than five years the deterrent at the edge of this city belonged to someone else," Dijkstra said. "From today the duchy keeps its own guard, and it keeps it with soldiers it trained." The Anglian Ducal Guard, raised from the resistance in 1754AN, was trained by the Natopian-led Concord Alliance assistance mission, whose own mandate ended in 1759AN.[29]
Ferrault said his soldiers were leaving a city the Natopian Expeditionary Force had first entered in the clearing operations of 1754AN, and that they did not mind being the last of it. "Some of the men who march out today came in with the first landings," he said.
The Minister of External Affairs, Sanne Okkerse, said the end of the treaty would not be followed by any new alliance. "We accepted a guarantee for a fixed term, and the term is over," she said. "Anglien will join no standing alliance. What we keep is the friendship, and the recognition the Empire gave us in the first article of the treaty, which outlives the rest of it."[30] The constitution allows its non-alignment article to be changed only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber and approval at a national referendum.[31] Sovereign Duke Edgard III had long called the treaty "a temporary scaffolding rather than a permanent condition."[32]
Article VII of the treaty leaves room for separate advisory, training, or technical arrangements between the two states, provided none revives the Natopian guarantee of the duchy's defense. A residual Natopian advisory presence in the Ministry of Defense was contemplated as an arrangement of that kind, but no terms have been negotiated.[32] Okkerse said any such arrangement would come to the Diet first.
The withdrawal completes the drawdown that began after the constitution was certified in VII.1759AN, and ends the last military strand of the Concord Alliance presence that at its height numbered about 8,000.[32] Families on the streets around the compound watched the march from their doorsteps. "We have had soldiers at the end of the road for five years," said a shopkeeper whose stall faces the gate. "Now we will see what they put there instead." The government of Klaes Boerhaaf has not said what it will do with the compound.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The last 140 Natopian soldiers left the garrison compound in Johannsessbuurg on 11.III.1760AN, a day inside the six-month deadline the Treaty of Johannsessbuurg set after the 12.XII.1759AN election. The compound passed to the Free Duchy of Anglien, and the treaty ended with the withdrawal, leaving only Natopia's recognition of the duchy in force. Defense Minister Marten Dijkstra received the keys; External Affairs Minister Sanne Okkerse said Anglien will join no standing alliance. No advisory arrangement under the treaty's seventh article has been negotiated, and the government has not said what it will do with the grounds.
THE ACCORD PRESSES TO TURN NATOPIA'S RECOVERY ORDERS INTO LASTING NEW ALEXANDRIAN INDUSTRY
Manufacturing work in Nouvelle Alexandrie. The government wants recovery orders to produce lasting investment in domestic industry, technology, and skilled employment.
The Government Convenes the Joint Economic Council in Cárdenas
It Wants Natopia's One-Off Recovery Orders Turned Into Lasting Factories and Jobs
Premier Gonçalves Leads for the Federation, With Iñiguez at Treasury and Fitzgerald at State
The Accord Also Moves to Settle the Financing Terms It Reserved on Taking Office
It Is the Government's First Move Abroad, Answering the Throne Speech's Call for Friendship
Cárdenas, FCD -- The government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves has convened the Natopian and New Alexandrian Joint Economic Council in Cárdenas with a pointed task. Where the coalition's transition team had first floated a wider program of two-way trade, the government has recast the plenary around durability, since goods and services already move freely between the two under the Raspur Pact. Its aim is to turn the Lindström recovery, under which Natopia and its partners are buying New Alexandrian output, into lasting investment that builds industry inside the Federation rather than simply filling its order books for a season.
The Lindström Protocol, negotiated through the Joint Economic Council and signed in the caretaker weeks by the outgoing government of José Manuel Montero, points a stream of Natopian and allied money into the Federation: orders for New Alexandrian firms, purchases of New Alexandrian Alexandrium at a protected floor price, private capital for the Regions, and a bond backstop. The Accord honored the framework on taking office, but with reservations, reserving decisions on borrowing, bank subscriptions, and regulated approvals to New Alexandrian authorities.
What the government wants from the plenary is durability. Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez has cast the task as converting one-off purchases into plant, technology, and skilled work that remain when the orders end, so that the recovery leaves factories and supply chains on New Alexandrian soil rather than a burst of demand that fades. "An order book empties; a factory stays," Iñiguez said. "We are grateful for the confidence our partners have shown, and we are asking that the recovery leave New Alexandrians building these things themselves, not only selling into a good year."
The plenary is also where the Accord means to settle the financial terms it kept in its own hands. The reservations it entered on taking office now come due: the Cárdenas meeting is the Accord's chance to fix how the recovery's private capital and bond backstop are drawn down without ceding the levers it kept.
Premier Gonçalves leads for the Federation as the Council's co-chair by office, with Iñiguez and Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald alongside him. The Joint Economic Council, standing since 1738AN, holds its plenary in Lindström and Cárdenas by turns and its ministerial committee each quarter; with Lindström having hosted at the close of 1759AN, the plenary falls this year to Cárdenas.
The move is one the government can make without a bill. The conduct of foreign economic policy rests with the Council of State, and steering an existing framework is not a statute; any binding treaty that followed would still go to the Federal Assembly for ratification. The plenary answers the fifth of the priorities the King set out at the opening of the 14th Cortes Federales, security and friendship abroad, and lets the Accord show movement on the economy while its domestic bills sit before the chamber. In opposition, the Federal Humanists noted that it was their caretaker government that secured the Lindström commitments, and said they would judge the Accord on whether it came home with lasting investment or only a communiqué.
Whether Natopia will agree to build in the Federation rather than only buy from it is the question the Cárdenas plenary opens rather than answers. The recovery's demand is real; whether it leaves anything standing when the orders end is what the government has sent its Treasury and its diplomats to Cárdenas to settle.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves has convened the Joint Economic Council with Natopia in Cárdenas. With goods already moving freely under the Raspur Pact, the aim is not market access but durability: turning the one-sided Lindström recovery of Natopian orders, Alexandrium purchases, and capital into lasting New Alexandrian industry, and settling the borrowing, bank-subscription, and approval terms the Accord reserved on taking office. Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez framed the goal as factories that stay when the orders end; Premier Gonçalves leads as co-chair with Iñiguez and Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald. It needs no legislation, though any binding treaty would go to the Federal Assembly; the Federal Humanists, who secured the original commitments, said they would judge the result.
Noticias Incógnito -- She is the Inti-blessed baby of the palace, the culinary princess who cooks for her dormmates and files her own field notes from the highlands. He is nineteen years her senior, a silver-templed heir of the Almagro money whose surname has sat in the front row of Humanist power for three generations -- until this year, when it fell out of it. Princess Phaedra turned thirty this month. The man the Parap set keeps seeing at her elbow is pushing fifty. So who, exactly, is Felipe-Maximillian de Almagro? And what does the House of the Sun want with the House that just lost everything?
Let us be clear about what this is and is not.
This is not an engagement. The Royal Household has announced nothing, confirmed nothing, and -- as is its unbroken habit where the youngest princess is concerned -- said nothing at all. What this is, is a season of sightings. A recurring companion at a gallery opening in Cárdenas. A reserved table for two at a Parap supper club that does not take reservations for anyone. A tall, well-tailored man of a certain age, walking a half-step behind Princess Phaedra out of a lecture hall and declining, with practiced ease, to be photographed.
"She has never hidden a friendship in her life, and she is not hiding this one," said one figure in the princess's university circle, who asked not to be named. "What she is not doing is explaining it. There is a difference, and she knows exactly what it is."
The man nobody wrote down
Here is the strange part. For a family this powerful, Felipe-Maximillian de Almagro is a ghost.
And Felipe-Maximillian? He held nothing. Ran for nothing. Signed nothing you can find in a gazette. Born in 1711AN to the Beaufort branch of the clan, Humanist-schooled in Raspur alongside his elder brother Raoul, he grew up to become the one thing an Almagro almost never is: private. A man of the family's counting-houses rather than its committee rooms, of the Company ledgers that had carried the Almagro fortune for generations and the North Lyrican estates where it is kept, never once of its ballots -- and, when the guns spoke, a quartermaster besides, holding a commission in the Federal Commissariat Service that fed and supplied the Federal Forces on the strength of the same mercantile instinct. The money, like the blood, is partly Constancian -- the senior Almagros carry a foreign crown's nationality by descent, a detail nobody thought worth a headline until one of them began keeping company with the sovereign's daughter. And where his grandfather led the party's technocrats and his father threw in with its hardliners, Felipe-Maximillian took no side at all. At forty-nine he has no wife, no seat, and -- until a princess started smiling at him across the Cárdenas party circuit -- no page in anyone's story.
"There is always one," a veteran of the party's Beaufort machine told this paper, dryly. "Every great Humanist house keeps a son back from the fire. The one who holds the money while the others hold the offices. Felipe-Maximillian is that son. He is the quietest rich man in the Federation."
Nineteen years, and a throne room between them
Do the arithmetic the palace would rather you didn't.
The princess was born in 1730AN, the fifth and last child of King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara. Felipe-Maximillian was born in 1711AN, and was a grown man of nineteen by the time she arrived. The King himself was forty-one the year his youngest daughter was born; the man now seen at her side is forty-nine.
None of which, her defenders are quick to say, is anyone's business but hers. Princess Phaedra is thirty years old, a published field researcher, the founder of her own foundation, and by every account the most independent-minded of the "younger trio" of royals raised at the Palace of Chinchero. If she has chosen the company of an older, cultured, unhurried man of means, that is a choice a great many women make and few are asked to defend on the front page.
But she is not a great many women. She is a daughter of the House of the Sun, and the man at her elbow is a son of the House of Almagro, and in this Federation those two names do not simply have dinner.
The house that just lost everything
Consider the timing, because everyone in Cárdenas already is.
Weeks ago the Federal Humanist Party -- the Almagros' party for three unbroken generations -- suffered the steepest defeat in a generation, driven from a government it had held since 1739AN and sent to the opposition benches under José Manuel Montero. The Federal Accord took power. Fred Strong walked out of the defense ministry. For the first time in living memory, no Almagro, and no ally of the Almagros, sits in the Council of State.
And it is precisely now that a bachelor of the dynasty -- the discreet one, the one with the ledgers and no fingerprints -- turns up on the arm of the sovereign's favorite child.
"I make no accusation," said a Humanist strategist who has known the family for thirty years, choosing each word like a man crossing a river on stones. "I observe only that a family which has just lost the government has found its way, very suddenly, very quietly, into the drawing rooms of the King. Draw your own map. I have drawn mine."
The romantics tell a softer story: that the two met where the counting-house meets the kitchen -- his commissariat and her beloved National Gastronomy Institute of Nouvelle Alexandrie, for the army marches on its stomach; that Felipe-Maximillian -- heir to an Almagro line of collectors and antiquities patrons -- has been circling the same Parap galleries and cultural charities the princess loves for years, that the two share a taste for old books, older recipes, and older art, and that the timing is the cruelty of coincidence rather than the cunning of a house. Perhaps. This paper has learned never to bet against love. It has also learned never to bet against an Almagro.
What the palace isn't saying
We put every question in this article to the Royal Household. We received, in reply, the silence that is itself a kind of answer -- the same courteous nothing the palace has offered every time the youngest princess's private life has been raised, and offers still.
So we are left, as ever, with the sightings. A man declining a camera. A princess declining to explain. Nineteen years, a fallen dynasty, and a throne room's worth of history sitting unspoken between the soup and the second course.
Noticias Incógnito will be watching. We suspect we will not be watching alone.
THE ACCORD'S PRICE COMMITTEE FINDS ESSENTIALS OUTPACING THE HEADLINE RATE AS RELIEF WAITS ON THE CORTES
Bread and cooking oil feature in the essentials basket tracked by the National Economic Council's price committee.
The National Economic Council Publishes Its First Regular Reading of Essential Prices
Food and Domestic Energy Rose Faster Than the 2.4 Percent Headline Rate
The Recovery in the Aggregate Has Not Yet Reached the Family Shopping Basket, the Committee Finds
Premier Gonçalves Pairs the Price Reading With a Cross-Department Delivery Scorecard
Treasury Secretary Iñiguez Warns a Monitor Is Not Relief
José Manuel Montero Calls It a Number Where the Cortes Needs a Law
Cárdenas, FCD -- The government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves has published the first regular reading of the price of essentials from the committee it stood up under the National Economic Council, and its central finding is that the food and household energy New Alexandrians buy every week are still rising faster than the headline rate of inflation. The reading lands while the government's Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 sits before the Cortes, and it gives the cost-of-living argument a government number in place of a promise.
The committee tracks an essentials basket, a fixed list of staple foods and domestic energy that is the same range of goods the relief bill would tax at a reduced rate. It read 112.7 against a base of 100 set in 1757AN, a rise of 4.6 percent over the year, while the general rate of consumer-price inflation the Statistics Bureau reports held at 2.4 percent. The gap is the committee's point. A family does not buy the average of all prices; it buys bread, cooking oil, electricity, and heating, and those have climbed at nearly twice the headline pace.
The reading came with the committee's first delivery scorecard, which sets the promises in the government's economic program against what has actually been done. It marks three fronts as moving by administrative action: the Energy and Environment department's order to speed grid connections for stalled renewable projects, the Housing department's opening of federal land and widened building grants, and the tightened ministerial code and published lobbyist register the Premier set by Council resolution. It marks the measures that would put money in household pockets as pending, because they wait on legislation the Cortes has not yet passed.
By design, the committee carries no money of its own and pays out nothing. Its remit, set when the Premier created it, is prices, delivery, and public reporting, and it adds nothing to the cash relief the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 would provide. The Act, still at its first stage in the 14th Cortes Federales, would cut the rate of value-added tax on the same basket of essentials, pay an energy rebate through Social Security, and tie pensions and core benefits to the cost of living. None of that takes effect until the bill becomes law.
Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez presented the reading as the case for the government's bill rather than a substitute for it. "Measuring a price does not lower it," Iñiguez said. "What this reading does is tell New Alexandrians the truth about their own shopping, and tell the Cortes exactly where the relief has to land. The number is the argument for the law, not a replacement for it." He noted that the wider recovery is real, with unemployment down over the year and confidence rising, and said the essentials line was the part of it households had yet to feel.
José Manuel Montero (Federal Humanist Party), the Leader of the Opposition, said the government had produced a measurement where the chamber needed a statute. "They have counted the problem to the decimal point," Montero said. "A family cannot eat an index. We were promised relief, and what has arrived is a committee and a chart, while the bill that would actually cut the bills sits waiting. Pass it, or stop announcing the delay."
The committee sits under the National Economic Council, the forum in which the Premier and the Council of State weigh economic policy, and it reports under the policy guidelines the Premier sets rather than any new statute.[33] It is work the government can do within the authority it already holds, and the reading is one the Accord can point to while its domestic bills sit before the chamber. Whether the number becomes relief now rests with the Cortes.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves has published the first reading from the price-and-delivery committee it set up under the National Economic Council. Its essentials basket of staple food and domestic energy read 112.7 on a 1757AN base, up 4.6 percent over the year, against a 2.4 percent headline inflation rate, the committee's evidence that the recovery has not yet reached the family shopping basket. A companion delivery scorecard marks energy, housing, and clean-government measures as moving by administrative action and the cash relief as pending on the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760, still before the Cortes. Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez called the reading the case for the bill, not a substitute; José Manuel Montero said the government had produced a number where the Cortes needed a law.
The Federal Assembly gave the bill its third reading on 14.IV.1760AN and passed it by 466 votes to 297, with 38 abstentions.[34] The Chamber of Peers concurred four days later by 61 to 47, with 10 abstentions, and the King signed the Act into law on 22.IV, to have effect for the whole of 1760AN.
The three governing parties of the Federal Accord, holding 448 of the 801 seats, held together on the division, joined by eighteen independents, thirteen of them the bloc led by Piti Gándara that again voted with the Government. The whole of the Federal Humanist Party, the largest party in opposition, voted against, casting all 293 of its votes as noes.
The Act carries forward the tax rates in force at the close of 1759AN and lays no new tax on the Regions. Within that settlement it strengthens four direct taxes on the largest bases: a minimum effective rate of fifteen percent on the profits of companies with a turnover above NAX€750 million, a higher band on estates and gifts above NAX€10 million, a levy on the liabilities of the largest financial institutions directed to the housing program, and a higher rate of the tax on idle land. Better collection of taxes already owed funds an equivalent cut in the tax on low earners.
In coordination with the government's Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760, still before the Cortes, the budget applies a reduced value-added tax rate of five percent to a basket of essential food and domestic energy, met within the envelope by the strengthened direct taxes.
Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez, who tabled the budget for the Council of State, presented it as a settlement that shared the common burden by the ability to pay. "We have asked the most of those best able to bear it, and used what that raises to take the weight off the household and the low earner," he told the Assembly. "This budget funds relief without widening the deficit, and it will stand for the year."
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the Government had chosen higher taxes and a larger state over restraint. "They have written the largest budget in the Federation's history and called it prudence," he said. "We voted against it to the last deputy, and we will hold them to every figure in it."
With the budget enacted, the housing and cost-of-living bills that make up the rest of the Government's first package remain before the Cortes, their divisions still to come.
THE SECOND IOP/NBC POLL FINDS THE ACCORD'S LEAD NARROWING AS APPROVAL COOLS
IOP/NBC News vote-intention graphic for the second regular poll of 1760AN, conducted 20-22.IV.
The Alliance Leads the Humanists 36 to 32 on a Fresh Ballot, Down From Six Points in I
Government Approval Remains Positive but Its Net Reading Falls to Plus 7
Cost of Living Still Leads the Concerns, but Housing Gains Ground
Piti Gándara Draws Level With Elena Svensson as the Best-Liked Leader
Confidence in the Coalition Slips as Voters Turn Against the Federation's Direction
This IV Reading Is a Snapshot of a Cooling Government, Not a Forecast of Its Fate
Cárdenas, FCD -- The second regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 20-22.IV, finds the Federal Accord still ahead on a fresh ballot but no longer carrying the six-point margin recorded in I. Approval remains above water while confidence in the coalition and the country's sense of direction have weakened.[35]
The government's approval reading is still positive, but the cushion is thinner. Forty-seven percent approve of the Federal Accord administration and 40 percent disapprove, leaving a net approval of plus 7, down from plus 16 in I. The change is not a collapse in support for the governing parties on the ballot; it is a cooling of the public's judgment on the government now in office.
The cost of living remains the leading concern at 39 percent, down two points from I, while housing rises to 21. The economy and jobs register 17 percent and the public debt 13, with 10 percent naming another issue or offering no opinion. The order is unchanged at the top, but the housing figure closes some of the gap that left the government's first bill package, led by the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 and the National Housing Reform and Expansion Act, 1760, facing a single dominant demand.
The confidence measures show why the approval number needs a second reading. Forty-nine percent think the government will govern effectively, against 41 percent who lack confidence, while only 43 percent think the coalition will last a full term and 47 percent disagree. Both measures are weaker than in I, and the second question is now negative.
The leaders' table produces the poll's clearest personal result. Elena Svensson and independent deputy Piti Gándara each post net favorability of plus 14, putting Gándara level with the Vice-Premier at the top of the tested field. Gándara's favorable rating rises to 30 percent as her no-opinion share falls to 54, while Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves slips to plus 5 and José Manuel Montero to minus 13. The numbers measure standing in this poll; they do not determine who will win a future election or how any deputy will vote.
For the first time in the 1760AN series, more respondents say the Federation is headed in the wrong direction than the right one. The right-direction reading falls to 44 percent and the wrong-direction reading rises to 48, with 8 percent offering no opinion. The IV poll therefore records a country less certain about the government's durability and more doubtful about the path ahead, even as the governing Alliance retains a four-point ballot lead.
The IOP's comparison is a snapshot, not a prediction. Nicolás Arreola, the Institute's director, cautioned that a single quarter's cooling is not a verdict on the government's future, only a reading of the public mood as its program begins. The Accord has put its first domestic bills into the 14th Cortes Federales,[36] and the poll records the public mood around that program; it does not settle the debate or the fate of any bill.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The second regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 20-22.IV, finds the Alliance still ahead of the Federal Humanist Party 36 to 32 on a fresh ballot, but with its lead narrowed from six points in I. Government approval remains positive at 47 to 40, a net plus 7 against plus 16 in I; the cost of living remains the top concern while housing rises. Piti Gándara draws level with Elena Svensson at net plus 14, confidence in a full coalition term turns negative, and direction of the Federation flips to 44 right against 48 wrong. The reading is a snapshot of a cooling government, not a forecast of an election or a bill's fate.
NATIONAL PARTY VOTING INTENTION If a general election were held today, which party would you support? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 20-22.IV.1760AN
GOVERNMENT APPROVAL Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Federal Accord government is doing? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 20-22.IV.1760AN
MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING THE FEDERATION What is the most important issue facing the Federation today? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 20-22.IV.1760AN
Issue
Percentage
The cost of living
39.0%
Housing
21.0%
The economy and jobs
17.0%
The public debt
13.0%
Other / No opinion
10.0%
Confidence in the Government
CONFIDENCE IN THE GOVERNMENT % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 20-22.IV.1760AN
Question
Confident
Not confident
Unsure
Will the government govern effectively?
49.0%
41.0%
10.0%
Will the coalition last a full term?
43.0%
47.0%
10.0%
Party Leader Favorability Ratings
PARTY LEADER FAVORABILITY RATINGS % of registered voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 20-22.IV.1760AN
DIRECTION OF THE FEDERATION Do you think the Federation is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 20-22.IV.1760AN
Nouvelle Alexandrie Economic Dashboard (Month IV, 1760)
Published by the Nouvelle Alexandrie Statistics Bureau.
The recovery stalled in the first quarter of 1760AN, and the downturn reasserted itself from one quarter to the next. Output fell at an annualized 4.4%, against a decline of 1.6% in the previous quarter, while the year-on-year decline narrowed to 1.8% from 2.0%, its third straight improvement. Unemployment rose to 9.0% from 8.7%, and consumer confidence fell 4.2 points to 75.2. Support arrived with the Lindström Recovery Protocol, the framework the caretaker government of Montero and Natopian Chancellor Marco Lungo III signed at the close of 1759AN: Natopian orders for New Alexandrian output began their run across the first half of the year, and a Natopian strategic-reserve purchase of refined Alexandrium, which the protocol sets at no less than NAX€2,150 a gram, added demand that lifted the Fontainebleau reference price by NAX€95.15 to NAX€2,090.24 a gram, still below the reserve's floor. The framework is external demand and private investment rather than New Alexandrian borrowing. The Federal Accord government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves, which won the confidence of the 14th Cortes on 15.I and took office for the balance of the quarter, has honored the protocol. The public accounts kept climbing even as growth faltered. With the Recovery Act's emergency authorities expired at year-end, no further borrowing was drawn under it, but the ordinary deficit carried public debt higher, to 68.5% of output, past the 65% mark of the Act's own debt brake, while the quarterly deficit narrowed to 4.0% of GDP from 4.4%. The NAX€200 billion the brake had held back, and the emergency powers that lapsed with the year, both remained before the Cortes, where the new government's budget had since become law on 22.IV and its housing and cost-of-living bills had yet to be decided. Households felt the squeeze in prices: the cost-of-living index rose again to 106.6, though housing affordability improved to 98.5. One caveat applies to the headline output figure: the first quarter runs four months where the fourth quarter of 1759AN ran three, so quarterly output of NAX€12.46 trillion reads high against the prior quarter chiefly for that reason, and the annualized growth rate is the better guide to the quarter's pace.
Outlook (forecast): real GDP growth is projected near 4.6% (annualized) next quarter, with unemployment near 8.8%. These are model projections, superseded by next quarter's actuals.
The Federal Assembly gave the bill its third reading on 2.V.1760AN and passed it by 472 votes to 295, with 34 abstentions.[34] The Chamber of Peers concurred by 58 to 52, with 8 abstentions, and the King signed the Act into law on 8.V.
The Act rebuilds the Housing Justice Act, 1757, a measure Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves and Yuiza Bohi'o had brought in the 13th Cortes Federales that never became law, for a coalition that now includes the Federal Consensus Party, which had withheld its support from the earlier bill over the effect of rent regulation on building. The reply the new Act makes is to lead with supply and to bind each protection for tenants to the building of new homes. It was tabled for the Council of State by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mayani Guacanagari, and co-sponsored by the Treasury and by Research and Development, so that all three governing parties stood behind it. The whole of the Federal Humanist Party in opposition voted against.
On the side of supply, the Act puts the National Homebuilding Drive on a standing footing in place of the emergency authority that lapsed at the close of 1759AN, with a target of not fewer than 500,000 new homes, not less than two-fifths of them built in the interior and the producing Regions whose recovery had lagged the coast, and public, cooperative, and community housing rising toward 50,000 homes a year. It makes permanent the rule that a federal permit neither granted nor refused within sixty days is deemed granted, replaces separate federal approvals with a single concurrent review, provides for a national model building code a Region may adopt and for the type-approval of factory-built designs, and releases surplus federal land for housing against an affordable share.
On the side of protection, a federal standard of affordability and of security of tenure is set, administered by the Regions, under which a tenant may be removed only on stated grounds and a rent may not rise in a year by more than consumer prices and any margin the Secretary sets, with newly built homes exempt from the limit for twenty years so that the standard does not deter building. The Act restores a means-tested credit for first-time buyers, raised to NAX€35,000, gives a sitting tenant the first offer when a landlord sells, and caps the property-backed securities a bank may hold at fifteen percent of its assets, answering the banking crisis of 1753 and taking up a limit the Federal Consensus Party had first pressed in 1751AN.
Secretary Guacanagari presented the Act as a reform that builds its way to lower rents rather than legislating them down. "We have put a spade in the ground before we put a cap on the rent, and tied the one to the other," she told the Assembly. "A protection that is not matched by a home built is a promise the market breaks; this Act matches them market by market."
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the rent limits would do the harm the supply measures were meant to prevent. "You do not make a home cheaper by making it less worth building," he said. "They have dressed rent control in the clothes of a building program, and the building is what will suffer."
With the housing reform enacted, the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760, the last of the Government's first package, remains before the Cortes, its division still to come.
King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara Will Travel Together on a Single Joint Progress Abroad
The Tour Opens and Closes in Cárdenas, Departing in Crescentis (VII)
Twelve Cities Abroad Fill an Itinerary of the Federation's Friends and Partners
Three of the Twelve Stops Fall in Natopia, Where the Empress Herself Reigns
A Project Begun Under Montero's Government and Carried On by the Gonçalves Government
Crown Princess Sayari Remains at Home Through the Progress
Cárdenas, FCD -- The Royal Household announced on 9.V.1760AN that King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara will leave Cárdenas in Crescentis (VII) on a joint goodwill tour, a progress through twelve cities abroad meant to renew the Federation's friendships and partnerships.
The tour is to open abroad at Huyenkula, the capital of Hurmu and seat of the Order of the Holy Lakes, the sovereign order among whose member houses both royal families are counted. Hurmu keeps to a settled neutrality and stands apart from the alliance blocs, and the Household cast the opening call as one of friendship and dynastic courtesy rather than of alliance. The King's mother, Queen Mother Abigail, herself of the Order, is to join the royal party for that opening leg and return to the Federation from there.
Planning for the progress began in the last year of the government of José Manuel Montero, conceived to knit the Federation's alliances closer and shore up its standing among its friends, and the Government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves took it up on coming to office in Novarum (I). Montero, now Leader of the Opposition, welcomed the tour his own government had set in motion. "This was my Government's undertaking, and I am glad to see it carried through," Montero said. "The friendships of the Federation belong to no one party. We wish Their Majesties a safe journey and a warm welcome."
The progress is a joint one in more than name. Empress Clara, the King's wife, has reigned in Natopia in her own right since 1752AN; three of the twelve stops, Tirlar, Redquill in the demesne of Neridia, and the Imperial capital at Lindström, fall within Natopia itself, and the tour carries her home as often as it carries her abroad. The Treaty of Dynastic Separation of 1721AN leaves the marriage that joins the two houses intact in everything but the succession itself, where it keeps the two crowns forever apart, and the Household presented the tour as an expression of the union it protects.
The itinerary threads the Federation's alliance networks, taking in partners from both the Raspur Pact and the Concord Alliance, from Aerla, Vegno and Western Corum to Natopia, Constancia and the Benacian Union, together with the reconstructed Free Duchy of Anglien. Apart from the opening call at Huyenkula, the eleven allied and partner stops take in nearly the whole of the Federation's standing partnerships in a single progress.
Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who advised the tour, tied it to the last of the five priorities the King had set from the Throne, the pledge to keep the Federation "secure and true to its friends.""A nation that keeps faith at home does not want for friends abroad," Fitzgerald said, echoing the Speech. "The King and the Empress will carry that faith to twelve cities, and renew it with the friends and allies who have kept it with us."[37]
Crown Princess Sayari, the heir apparent, will remain in the Federation while her parents travel; the Household confirmed in Ventaris (III) that the Princess, who is expecting twins late in the year, will keep to the Federation from Estivis (VIII) on medical advice.[38] The first leg follows the departure from Cárdenas in Crescentis (VII).
The Federal Assembly gave the bill its third reading on 4.V.1760AN and passed it by 475 votes to 294, with 32 abstentions, the widest support from independents of the three bills.[34] The Chamber of Peers concurred by 56 to 54, with 8 abstentions, the closest division of the package, and the King signed the Act into law on 10.V.
The Act answers the cost of living on which the general election of 1759 was fought, legislating the relief the Alliance had promised in its People's Deal. It was tabled for the Council of State by the Secretary of Social Security and National Solidarity Ana Yuisa Caguax, and co-sponsored by the Treasury and by Trade and Industry. Its cost is met from the appropriation of the General Appropriations and Taxation Act, 1760 and not by new borrowing, the undertaking the Government gave on the confidence of the Assembly. All three parties of the Government voted for it, and the whole of the Federal Humanist Party in opposition voted against.
On the price of essentials, the Act halves the rate of value added tax, to five percent, on a basket of basic food and domestic energy defined and published each year by the Treasury, and requires that prices be shown by the unit and in full, so that a rise cannot be hidden in a smaller package or a fee added after the fact. It makes a direct payment toward the cost of household energy to households of low and middle income, and revives as standing law the family allowance uplift and the household establishment grant that had lapsed with the recovery. It sets a lock that holds the value of pensions and benefits against inflation, as the federal minimum wage was already held.
The Act establishes the Federal Consumer Protection Agency, an independent body the Department of Trade and Industry had named but never been given, to review concentrated markets and recommend the remedies competition requires, to make it simple for a household to change its energy, banking, or communications supplier, and to lower the cost of medicines through reference pricing and common purchase for the public programs.
Secretary Caguax presented the Act as the promise of the election written into law and paid for from within the budget. "We told the country we would take the tax off the shopping basket and the bill for the heating, and pay for it out of what we raise, not what we borrow," she told the Assembly. "This is that promise kept, and a watchdog to see the saving reaches the shelf."
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the relief was a payment the country would meet twice, once in tax and again in a new agency. "They cut a tax with one hand and build a bureaucracy with the other," he said. "The saving is printed on the label; the cost is buried in the estimates."
With the relief enacted, the Government's three economic bills are all now law, their cost met, on the Government's account, from within the budget rather than by fresh borrowing.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II granted Royal Assent on 10.V.1760AN to the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760, the last and most closely fought of the Federal Accord's three economic bills. The Federal Assembly passed it on 4.V by 475 votes to 294, its widest independent support, and the Chamber of Peers concurred by just 56 to 54. Answering the cost of living on which the 1759 election was fought and funded from the budget rather than by borrowing, the Act halves value added tax to five percent on essential food and home energy, makes direct energy payments and revives the family allowance and household establishment grant, locks pensions and benefits to inflation, and establishes the Federal Consumer Protection Agency. Secretary Ana Yuisa Caguax called it the promise of the election kept; Leader of the Opposition José Manuel Montero called it a cost the country would meet twice.
THE COMING ROYAL TWINS WILL RESHAPE THE NEW ALEXANDRIAN LINE OF SUCCESSION
Crown Princess Sayari and Prince Janus with their four-year-old son, Prince Inti, Duke of Vilcabamba, in 1760AN. Their expected twins would follow Inti in the New Alexandrian line of succession.
Crown Princess Sayari Remains First in Line as Heir Apparent
Her Son Prince Inti Stands Second in the Line
The Twins Will Enter the Line at Third and Fourth Once They Are Born
Order of Birth Alone Decides Which Twin Stands Third, Not Sex
Prince Nathan Stands Fifth Even as He Remains the Designated Heir to Natopia
The Crown Passes to the Monarch's Eldest Child Regardless of Sex
Cárdenas, FCD -- Somewhere in the closing months of 1760AN, two children are expected in Cárdenas who would take their places, within hours of each other, as the third and fourth people in line to the New Alexandrian throne.
The Royal Household confirmed in Ventaris (III) that Crown Princess Sayari, the heir apparent, is expecting twins with her husband, Prince Janus.[39] Their arrival would be the first change at the top of the line in five years, since the birth of the Princess's own son in 1755AN.
At the head of the line stands Sayari, the King's eldest child and the woman who is to become the Federation's first queen regnant. Behind her comes her only child so far, Prince Inti, born in 1755AN, who is second. The two places behind him are already held open for the twins, because in the New Alexandrian order the heir's own descendants come before the heir's brothers and sisters.
Behind those reserved places sit the King's other children. Prince Nathan, his second child, stands fifth, and Princess Urpi, his third, sixth. None of them loses a claim when the twins are seated, and no act of the Cortes is needed to make the change, for the order follows the law already on the books.
The rule underneath all of it is absolute primogeniture, by which the crown passes to the monarch's eldest child without regard to sex. It is set in the Proclamation of Punta Santiago and worked out in the Succession to the Throne Act, 1700, whose order of precedence the full line of succession carries down through more than forty names.[40] The Crown Modernization Act, 1756 confirmed the sex-neutral rule and struck the last of the old religious bars to the throne. It is why the order in which the twins are born, and not their sex, will settle which of them stands third.
The one real complication sits with Prince Nathan, who is at once fifth in the New Alexandrian line and the designated heir to the throne of Natopia, where the Crown Princess's mother, Empress Clara, reigns in her own right. The Treaty of Dynastic Separation of 1721AN keeps the two crowns from ever resting on one head: every child of the house sits in both lines under ordinary law, and only someone who actually stood to inherit both would have to give one up. The choice falls due only on the day it would arise, and not before.
The twins would be born into an unusually wide inheritance. Through their mother they would hold New Alexandrian and Natopian citizenship, and a third standing through the Order of the Holy Lakes, the sovereign order of Hurmu whose membership the New Alexandrian house holds by descent from the King's mother, Queen Mother Abigail. One dignity waits further off still. The imperial title of Emperor of the Alexandrians descends by its own instrument, the Letters Patent on the Alexandrian Imperial Dignity of 1758AN, issued the same day as the Rothborne Settlement that settled the titular Caputian and Hamland crowns, but deliberately held apart from it. By the Letters Patent the dignity is set to pass to Empress Clara and, after her, to Sayari; from Sayari it is declared inseparable from the Crown of Nouvelle Alexandrie in perpetuity, borne by its monarchs and passing neither with Natopia nor with the titular crown of Caputia. Whoever of the family one day wears the New Alexandrian crown would carry that imperial style with it.
María Teresa de Valencia, the Lord Steward of the Household, said the arrangements had been settled long before there was any announcement to make. "The line is not something the family decides; it is something the law records," she said. "Our part is only to see that the record is kept correctly, whichever child arrives first."
The Crown Princess is to keep to the Federation from Estivis (VIII) on medical advice, and the Household has said it will make no further announcement before the birth. Until then the two places near the top of the line wait to be filled, in an order that no one yet knows.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:With twins expected to Crown Princess Sayari and Prince Janus late in 1760AN, the line of succession to the New Alexandrian throne is set to change at its top for the first time in five years. Sayari remains heir apparent and her son Prince Inti second; the two places behind him are held for the twins, who would enter at third and fourth by the order of their birth, with Prince Nathan fifth and Princess Urpi sixth. The order follows absolute primogeniture under the Proclamation of Punta Santiago and the Succession to the Throne Act, 1700 and needs no new legislation. Nathan remains the designated heir to Natopia under the Treaty of Dynastic Separation, which keeps the two crowns separate.
Kim won the presidential vote of 1.V with 48.1 percent, or 7,585,293 ballots, against 34.6 percent for the Conservative Bloc's David Neylan, a margin of thirteen points. The Aerlan Labor Party's Isabelle Woulfe took 14.9 percent and the Nazarene Bloc's Franklin Hanneen 2.4 percent. The National Electoral Commission certified the result the next day, and Neylan conceded on 2.V.
The Assembly that convened with Kim tells a narrower story. In a chamber enlarged to 121 seats, the Democrats hold 64, down 6 from the last Assembly, while Neylan's Conservatives climbed 10 to 35 on gains in the Nazarene northeast and the agrarian lands of Transcaledonia. Most of what the Democrats shed went not to the Conservatives but to the new Aerlan Labor Party, which took 9 seats on its first outing; the Hatayyian Democratic Party holds 6, the Ranentsian Independence Party 4, and the Nazarene Bloc, all but collapsed, 3. Kim keeps his majority, but a slim one: at 64 of 121 seats the Democrats sit just above the 61 needed to command the chamber, their comfortable Reformist margin of the past decade much reduced.
The new President is a creature of Aerlan public administration rather than of its party machine. Born in Noursala to parents of Taesongean descent, Kim trained as an urban planner, served as Mayor of Bergen, and sat in the Assembly for Jacques Parish before announcing his run in 1757AN to succeed the term-limited Thomas Guthrie. He campaigned on universal bus and rail fares, bringing the railroads into public ownership, and abolishing conscription. In Aerla the President is both head of state and head of government, elected for five years and limited to two terms; there is no separate premier.
Kim confirmed continuity where it mattered most abroad, keeping Lucas Kessler as Minister of Foreign Affairs, the post from which Kessler negotiated the Noursala Arrangement with Nouvelle Alexandrie and steered Aerla into the alliance. The Assembly reconfirmed him 83 to 36, with two abstentions.
In his inaugural address, delivered before the Assembly, the High Court, and invited guests, Kim set a governing tone drawn less from a program than from the republic's founding. "In an era where democratic rights across Micras become evermore scarce with each passing year, I am eternally thankful for Aerla being one of the exceptions," he said. He named public transport as his first domestic priority: "High-speed rail has been an item on the legislative agenda for decades. It is time for it to become a top government priority."
For New Alexandrian readers the result lands close to home. Aerla is a partner in the same alliance, and its capital sits on the itinerary the Royal Household has announced for the King and Empress's goodwill tour. One point of daylight remains: Aerla is a subscriber to Anglien's Bliven Fund, which Kim supports as a contribution to a regional ally and which Nouvelle Alexandrie has declined to join.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Alexander Kim of the Aerlan Democratic Party was inaugurated the fifth President of Aerla on 20.V, opening the Eighth National Assembly. He won the 1.V vote with 48.1 percent to 34.6 for the Conservative David Neylan, a thirteen-point margin, with the Aerlan Labor Party third. In the 121-seat Assembly the Democrats hold 64, down 6, keeping a reduced majority but losing ground mostly to the new Labor party. Kim succeeds the term-limited Thomas Guthrie, kept Lucas Kessler at Foreign Affairs, and made high-speed rail and universal transit his opening priorities. Aerla is a Concord Alliance partner and a close New Alexandrian ally.
Ingrid Halvorsen took office as the inaugural Director. The Office is to cost every appropriation and tax measure the government brings forward, publish evidence notes on the choices before the Cortes, evaluate whether programs deliver what they were funded to deliver, and design the detail of any tax the Cortes refers to it. By its statute it makes no recommendation and takes no side, costing and evaluating the public finances and leaving the choice of policy to the chambers.
The Office reconstitutes the Federal Budget Office the Cortes created in 1746AN to give the chambers independent costings of the bills before them, widening that remit from the costing of legislation to the costing of the whole budget. Its Director is appointed by the Speaker of the Federal Assembly on the recommendation of the Budget and Finances Committee, for a fixed term of six years, and may be removed only by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly for cause, a tenure meant to hold the office clear of the government of the day. It is the twin of the Federal Debt Review Board, which watches the debt on a separate appointment.
Speaker Orocobix Magüana, who made the appointment, said the Federation had needed such an office for a long time. "The chambers vote the money; they have never had a scorekeeper of their own to tell them what it buys," he said. "Now they do, and it answers to them, not to the Treasury."
Director Halvorsen said the Office would guard its distance from the parties. "We will give the Cortes the number and the working behind it, and we will give the same number to every side," she said. "Our job is the arithmetic, not the argument." The Office drew welcome from both the government and the opposition on the day it opened, each side expecting its figures to support that side's reading of the budget.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Federal Budget and Costing Office opened in Cárdenas on 24.V.1760AN, the independent scorekeeper the General Appropriations and Taxation Act created to cost the whole federal budget and report to the Cortes without taking a side. Ingrid Halvorsen took office as inaugural Director. The Office costs every appropriation and tax measure, publishes evidence notes, evaluates programs, and by statute recommends nothing. It reconstitutes the Federal Budget Office first written in 1746AN; its Director is appointed by Speaker Orocobix Magüana on the recommendation of the Budget and Finances Committee for a fixed six-year term. Halvorsen said its job was "the arithmetic, not the argument."
FOREIGN ORDERS AND NEW SEAPLANES POINT TO A GROWING NEW ALEXANDRIAN AVIATION SECTOR
Civil-aircraft maintenance. Foreign aircraft orders and a domestically built rescue amphibian feature in the expansion of Nouvelle Alexandrie's aviation sector.
Vegno Aeronautica Wins Its First New Alexandrian Orders, Breaking Javelin Industries' Long Domestic Hold
Trans Micras Airlines Takes the Widebodies; Chaski Air Orders the Narrowbodies
Petrel's Shearwater Amphibian Joins the Federal Coast Guard
Planners Weigh a New Nueva Aurora Airport to Relieve the Crowded Highland Field at Parap
Javelin Says It Welcomes the Competition and Points to Its Own Order Book
Cárdenas, FCD -- New Alexandrian civil aviation is expanding on several fronts at once, from the airframers that build its aircraft to the fields they fly from. A foreign manufacturer has won its first orders in the market for the country's larger aircraft, long held by a single domestic builder, a home-grown seaplane builder has put a new rescue aircraft into federal service, and planners are weighing a new airport for the constrained highlands. Together they are the clearest signs in years that the sector is expanding fast.
Vegno Aeronautica, a foreign airframer, has won its first New Alexandrian orders, the first time a manufacturer from abroad has broken the grip that Javelin Industries has kept on the market for the country's larger aircraft for generations. Trans Micras Airlines, the Cárdenas-based carrier, has ordered widebodies for its longer routes, while the low-cost carrier Chaski Air has taken narrowbodies for its shorter routes. The orders do not displace Javelin, which still builds the great majority of the country's larger airframes, but they open that market to a second serious supplier for the first time in living memory.
Javelin Industries said it welcomed the competition and pointed to its own order book, which remains the largest in the country. The company has supplied New Alexandrian carriers, the armed forces, and the aviation authority for decades, and its designs still dominate the four principal hubs at Cárdenas, Punta Santiago, Parap, and Lausanne-Carrasquillo.
Away from the mainline fleets, the island Regions, which reach the mainland only by air and sea, and the highland interior are served by a distinct market of small aircraft, and there the news is a home-grown one. Petrel Aeronáutica, the New Luthorian builder of seaplanes and short-field aircraft, has delivered a search-and-rescue version of its Shearwater amphibian to the Federal Coast Guard for the rescue role over the Captive Sea. The firm, held by the Rennick family since it began as a marine works, builds to order for the island and highland carriers, chief among them Aerolíneas Isleñas, the island specialist based at Nuevo Corcovado that flies the largest fleet of Petrel types in the country.
"We build for the places the big jets cannot reach, the short water and the short grass," said Elspeth Rennick, the firm's managing director. "An amphibian that can put down on open sea to lift a crew off a sinking boat is not a glamorous aircraft, but it is the one the islands need, and it is the one we know how to build."
The busiest of the mainland fields has become a problem of its own. The highland airport at Parap, among the highest in Micras, is hemmed in by terrain and has little room to grow, and planners are weighing a new field, provisionally named Nueva Aurora, to take the pressure off. The neutral megahub at Lausanne-Carrasquillo, which also houses the Raspur Pact's Assembly, continues to widen its role as the country's gateway for international traffic.
The whole sector answers to the Federal Aviation Agency, the authority that certifies aircraft and carriers and runs the air-traffic and safety services. Which of the country's builders and carriers comes out ahead is a question the year has opened without answering: Javelin still holds the largest order book, Vegno has a foot in the door, and Petrel keeps turning out the small aircraft the islands cannot do without.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:New Alexandrian aviation is expanding on several fronts. Vegno Aeronautica has won its first orders in the country, taking widebodies to Trans Micras Airlines and narrowbodies to Chaski Air and breaking Javelin Industries' long domestic hold; Javelin said it welcomed the competition. Petrel Aeronáutica has delivered a search-and-rescue Shearwater amphibian to the Federal Coast Guard for the Captive Sea, and planners are weighing a new Nueva Aurora airport to relieve the crowded highland field at Parap.
A NEW SLATE OF ALEXANDRIAN AMBASSADORS PRESENTS ITS CREDENTIALS ABROAD AS THE ACCORD RESETS ITS DIPLOMACY
Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald, whose department oversees the Federation's newly appointed ambassadors.
The Government Cleared the Diplomatic List It Inherited and Named Its Own Ambassadors
Every One of the New Envoys Was Appointed in 1760AN
Envoys Take Up Posts at the Benacian Union, Natopia, Shireroth, and Constancia
Two Ambassadors Are Kept from the Previous Slate
Special Envoys Are Expected to Follow Later in the Year
Cárdenas, FCD -- A new slate of Alexandrian ambassadors has presented its credentials at courts across Micras over recent weeks, the Government of the Federal Accord's foreign service taking up its posts and giving the government's diplomacy a settled shape after the general election of 1759.
Not every post changed hands. The government kept two ambassadors from the previous slate at their courts, Beatriz Salazar at Anglien, in place since 1754AN, and Aukasisa Pumacaja at Bassaridia, since 1758AN, a continuity the Secretary of State said was owed to the standing of the two missions rather than to any change of policy.
The Secretary of State, Gabrielle Fitzgerald, said the appointments set the government's priorities abroad. "An ambassador is the government's word in another capital," she said. "We have sent people who know their brief, to the places where our trade, our security, and our friendships are decided."
Charlotte Beaumont, presenting her credentials at Natopia, said the oldest of the Federation's partnerships would be her first charge. "Nothing we do abroad matters more than what we do with Natopia," she said. The resident missions are expected to be joined later in the year by a separate set of special envoys, carrying briefs that cut across them.
The Agency is the enforcement half of the relief the Government passed last month. When it opens it is to review concentrated markets and recommend the remedies competition requires, make it simple for a household to change its energy, banking, or communications supplier, and bring down the cost of medicines through reference pricing and common purchase for the public programs. It is an independent statutory body that reports to the Cortes each year rather than to a department, and it works alongside the Antitrust and Market Competitiveness Bureau of the Department of Trade and Industry.
The Act gives the Government up to a year from the Royal Assent of 10.V to bring the Agency into being, and the Government said it would not use the whole of it. Its head is to be appointed by the Speaker of the Federal Assembly on the recommendation of the Budget and Finances Committee, for a fixed term of six years and removable only by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly for cause, the same arm's-length appointment the Cortes wrote for its new budget office. The Secretary of Trade and Industry, Jacqueline Betancourt, will lay the Agency's reports before the Cortes.
Secretary Betancourt said the Government wanted the Agency working while the relief was still new. "The tax comes off the shopping basket now; the Agency is how we make sure the saving reaches the shelf and stays there," she said. "We are not going to leave it a year in a drawer."
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the Government was staffing a bureaucracy it had not shown the country it needed. "They have found the money for the offices before they have found a single price the market would not have settled on its own," he said. The Federal Humanist Party voted against the relief and its agency when the bill passed.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Government began standing up the Federal Consumer Protection Agency on 18.VI.1760AN, fixing the day the watchdog created by the Cost of Living Relief Act is to open and opening the search for its head. When it opens the Agency is to police concentrated markets, make it simple to switch energy, banking, and communications suppliers, and cut medicine costs through reference pricing. An independent body reporting to the Cortes, its head is appointed by the Speaker on the Budget and Finances Committee's recommendation for a six-year term, the same appointment as the new budget office. Secretary of Trade and Industry Jacqueline Betancourt said the Government would not "leave it a year in a drawer"; Leader of the Opposition José Manuel Montero called it a bureaucracy the country had not been shown it needed.
The Navy's flagship, the Susa-class carrier HMS Imperio del Sol, led the line at the home of the Navy's Euran Fleet, and the cadets of the Royal Naval Academy of Punta Santiago paraded ashore. Six of the Navy's nuclear-powered Susa-class ships are now in service, and the light carrier HMS Proclamacion, in service since 1712AN, sailed in the line as well. The review put the Navy's new unmanned surface and undersea vessels on public view, and the doctrine of Distributed Sea Denial the Federation has built around them, in which cheap networked craft are meant both to contest a sea and to screen the fleet's own carriers and surface groups.
The vessels are part of Force 1760, the defense modernization program that has governed the Federal Forces since fiscal year 1756AN, authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, 1755. Succeeding the Force 1752 initiative, the buildup that had enlarged the force, the program has held defense spending steady at about two percent of the Federation's output and set out to consolidate and sustain what the buildup delivered rather than to expand it further. The Secretary of Defense, Rafael Escalante y Durán, said the review showed the idea the program had been built on. "We did not set out to build a bigger fleet; we set out to make the fleet we have count," he said. "Our carriers now sail behind a screen of unmanned craft an adversary cannot count, and cannot afford to hunt down one by one."
The King, reviewing the line from the deck of the Imperio del Sol, said the Federation owed its peace to the fleet that kept its coasts. "The sea has always been our first frontier and our first defense," he said. Officers said the review would be held again, the first entry in a tradition the Navy has not kept before.
The review drew naval attachés from friendly states and a crowd along the Punta Santiago waterfront.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Federal Navy held the first Federal Fleet Review off Punta Santiago on 24.VI.1760AN, with King Sinchi Roca II reviewing the fleet as Commander-in-Chief, an occasion the Federal Forces mean to keep as a tradition. The flagship, the Susa-class carrier HMS Imperio del Sol, led the line at the home of the Euran Fleet and the Royal Naval Academy of Punta Santiago. The review put the Force 1760 modernization program and the Navy's new unmanned vessels on public view, with their doctrine of Distributed Sea Denial. Secretary of Defense Rafael Escalante y Durán said the Federation had set out not to build a bigger fleet but to make the one it has count.
THE ACCORD NAMES SPECIAL ENVOYS TO REASSURE ITS RASPUR PACT ALLIES
The flag of the Raspur Pact. The government appointed three special envoys on 8.VII.1760AN to reaffirm the Federation’s commitments to its allies.
The Council of State Appoints the Envoys Under Its Standing Power, Without a Bill Before the Cortes
Three Special Envoys Will Steady the Federation's Standing Across the Raspur Pact
One Will Press the Pact's Stalled Institutional Revival at the Assembly in Lausanne
Another Is Named Envoy to the Community of Goldfield, the Pact's Inner Economic Union
Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald Instructs a Slate Her Own Wing Did Not Design
The Coalition's Left Says Its Promised War-Powers Oversight Again Went Unwritten
Cárdenas, FCD -- The Federal Accord government named three Special Diplomatic Envoys on 8.VII.1760AN to reassure Nouvelle Alexandrie's Raspur Pact allies that the Federation's commitments to the alliance stand. The slate leans toward continuity, and its emphasis sits closer to the Council of State's Pact-supporting wing than to its skeptics.
The Council of State appoints Special Diplomatic Envoys to international organizations, the Raspur Pact among them, and the three names fill and extend that standing roster.[41] No bill went before the Cortes; the power is the Council's own, exercised at its weekly meetings.
The most prominent of the three posts, Special Envoy for Raspur Pact Affairs, went to General (retired) Aurelio Sandoval, a former officer of the Grand Army of the Federation who sat on the Pact's Joint Military Council before it fell dormant. His charge is the revival of the alliance's lapsed institutions, work now centered on the Raspur Pact Parliamentary Assembly seated at Lausanne. Ambassador Inés Rocafuerte, a career diplomat, takes up a second post as envoy to the Community of Goldfield, the economic union of Raspur Pact states, Nouvelle Alexandrie among them, that binds its members' currencies and finances more closely than the alliance at large. The third, Special Envoy for the Peacebuilding Fund, went to Ambassador Beatriz Solano and covers the Federation's contribution to the fund, the largest of any Pact member.
The roster's stress on reassurance tracks the position long held by Defense Secretary Rafael Escalante y Durán, a retired general identified with keeping the Federation's obligations to its allies, more than the diplomacy-first line associated with Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald. As a deputy Fitzgerald wrote the Federal Military Deployment and Oversight Act, 1730 and moved three times to redirect spending away from the Force 1752 initiative; Escalante commanded New Alexandrian forces on the Allied Mission and has resisted calls from the left for neutrality or withdrawal. The two hold State and Defense in the same Cabinet, and the coalition has not settled the argument between them.[42]
The envoys are instructed through Fitzgerald's department. "They go to keep the Federation's word to its partners," she said. "What that word commits us to, and for how long, remains for the Cortes to weigh."
The appointments arrived without the stronger legislative oversight of war powers that the Alliance's left had pressed during the coalition talks and that never entered the Federal Accord agreement. Deputies on the government's own left noted that the condition had again gone unwritten.
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, dismissed the slate. "You do not need three new envoys to tell our allies that we remain their allies," said Montero, of the Federal Humanist Party. "This is a government announcing letters while its bills sit in committee."
The envoys carry no new treaty power; any binding agreement they helped reach would still go to the Federal Assembly for ratification. Their appointment comes four days before King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara leave Cárdenas on a goodwill tour of allied and partner capitals.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Federal Accord government named three Special Diplomatic Envoys on 8.VII.1760AN to reassure Nouvelle Alexandrie's Raspur Pact allies of the Federation's commitments, an appointment the Council of State makes under its standing power, without a bill. The continuity-minded roster, closer to Defense Secretary Rafael Escalante y Durán's position than to the diplomacy-first line of Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald, covers the Pact's institutional revival, the Community of Goldfield, and the Peacebuilding Fund. The coalition's left noted that its promised legislative oversight of war powers again went unwritten, and Opposition Leader José Manuel Montero called the slate announcement politics.
A small crowd gathered at the palace gates for the send-off, and Crown Princess Sayari, the heir apparent, saw her parents away before the party boarded. The King and the Empress travel together throughout the tour; their first call abroad is at Huyenkula, the capital of Hurmu and the seat of the Order of the Holy Lakes, the sovereign order among whose member houses both royal families are counted. From there the itinerary runs on through eleven further cities before the return to the capital.
The King's mother, Queen Mother Abigail, departed with the party for the opening leg. A member of the Order in her own right, whose late mother had served as its Chancellor, the Queen Mother is to travel only as far as Huyenkula before returning to the Federation while the King and Empress continue.
The royal party flies aboard Condor One, with the escort found by the Federal Guards Service. The Royal Household has described the progress as a renewal of the Federation's friendships rather than the opening of any new commitment, and no treaty or accession is to be signed on the journey.
Crown Princess Sayari, who is expecting twins later in the year, remains in the Federation for the whole of the tour; the Household confirmed in Ventaris (III) that the Princess would keep to the Federation from Estivis (VIII) on medical advice.[44] Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who advised the tour, saw the party off at the palace. "Their Majesties carry the goodwill of the whole Federation with them," she said. "They go to keep faith with friends who have kept it with us, and they will be very welcome wherever they call."
Hurmu holds to a settled neutrality and belongs to no alliance bloc, and the Royal Household cast the visit as one of faith and kinship rather than a matter of alliance. Both the New Alexandrian and the Natopian royal houses are counted among the member houses of the Order of the Holy Lakes, whose seat at Huyenkula gave the leg its character. The New Alexandrian house holds its place in the Order by descent from the Queen Mother herself, so that her homecoming stood at the heart of the visit.
The royal party was received on 13.VII by Prince Utas, First Secretary of State of Hurmu and the King's first cousin, and lodged at the Palace of the Elenaran. The Queen Mother was reunited there with Prince Utas's mother, Princess Mariette, her sister-in-law, who has long made her home in Hurmu to be near her son. Both Ladies of the Holy Lakes and both long widowed, the two women were bound alike to the late Prince David, the one his sister and the other his wife, and kept close company throughout the visit.
At the headquarters of the Micras Treaty Organization at Huyenkula, the party was received at luncheon by Secretary-General Túpac Mendoza, a New Alexandrian who had introduced the Convention of Huyenkula to the organization's General Assembly in 1755AN, and by Deputy Secretary-General Aabraham Jahanbani, also from Hurmu. It was to that convention, the humanitarian instrument on the conduct of war drafted in the city and held in joint depositary by the Organization and the Order, that the King turned. Nouvelle Alexandrie has never acceded to it. The King said the Federation meant to change that. "The ideals set down in this city are already our own, and it is time we put our name to them," he said. "I have asked my government to bring our accession forward." Were the Federation to accede, it would become the convention's first state party. Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who advised the tour, is to carry the matter to the Cortes on the party's return.
When the King and Empress flew on toward Noursala in Aerla, the Queen Mother did not travel with them. She and Princess Mariette went instead to Kaupang, in Hurmu's lake country, where Prince David had died in 1721AN and lies buried in the Chapel of the Ancient Lakes; his mother, Li Naomiai, a former Chancellor of the Order, was laid in the same grave the year after. For the Queen Mother the grave holds her brother and her mother; for Princess Mariette, her husband and his mother. The two widows kept a private hour there before the Queen Mother returned to the Federation.
The Royal Household described the leg as it had described the tour, a renewal of old friendships and no new commitment save the one the King had named at the Convention's own house. From Huyenkula the King and Empress travel on to the partners of the Concord Alliance and the Raspur Pact before the return to Cárdenas.
Aerla, located in northern Keltia, came late to the Federation's alliances: it acceded to the Concord Alliance in 1752AN as the sixth member, while the Federation has been a founding member since 1734AN and remains the largest economy.[45] The Royal Household cast the call as a renewal of that friendship rather than the making of a new one, the theme it had set for the whole tour, "Faith Kept, Friends Renewed."
When famine threatened the distant Grand Duchy of Lac Glacei, Aerla raised an expeditionary relief force, and the Federation's sealift carried it across the ocean to reach the country. That effort, the Aerlan-Glaceian Famine Prevention Mission, ran from 1753AN until it closed at the start of this year.[46] At Noursala the alliance keeps its newest and smallest coordination office, opened the year Aerla joined and now home to a forward post of Keltia Command, the Federation-led command for the region.[47]
The visit came two months after Aerla renewed its own government. President Kim, the fifth to hold the office, was elected on 1.V.1760AN and took office on 20.V, succeeding Thomas Guthrie, whom a two-term limit had barred from standing again.[48] The tour had been planned under one Aerlan president and carried out under his successor, a point the Royal Household was content to make: the friendships of the Federation, it has held throughout, belong to states and not to the governments of a season.
About two-thirds of Aerlans belong to the Aerlan Nazarene Church, a sui iuris church of some thirteen million faithful, led by the Patriarch of Mount Kane and in full communion with the Holy See of St. Natsanet of the Autocephalous Nazarene Church of Alexandria, one of the Federation's principal churches.[49] Senior clergy attended the state reception for the royal party. Neither sovereign belongs to that church: the King holds the Intian faith of his house and the Empress the Bovic faith of Natopia. The communion between the two churches binds the two countries, if not their crowns.
The two states' first treaty, the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of 1722AN, long known by the city's name, granted mutual missions, rights of overflight, and visa-free travel; it carries no provision of trade, and none has been added since. The King had seen Noursala before, on the 1752AN state visit that brought Aerla into the alliance and took in the University of Noursala.[50] One courtesy from that visit is still outstanding: he had invited Aerla's president to make a reciprocal visit to the Federation, and no date for it has ever been set.[51]
The city lends its name to a harder matter as well. Under the Noursala Arrangement of 1751AN, Martina Vásquez, a former New Alexandrian legislator caught up in the Pact of Shadows scandal, lives an indefinite house-arrest exile in the city. Aerla declined to extradite her, and the Federation dropped its extradition request in return for her cooperation with the inquiry.[52] Nouvelle Alexandrie pays a standing sum, now NAX€4.1 million a year, toward the arrangement, which was negotiated for Aerla by Lucas Kessler, still President Kim's foreign minister.[48] The government made no public mention of it during the visit; the two states have long kept it apart from the business of the alliance.
One difference is more openly held. Aerla subscribes to the Bliven Fund, the endowment for the reconstruction of Anglien that the Federation declined to join in 1759AN and that makes its first transfer this year.[53] It sat beside the friendship the visit renewed rather than unsettling it. "Aerla came into our alliance as a friend, and a friend is what the Federation means to stay," the King said at Noursala. "We have kept faith with one another before now, and we will keep it again." From Noursala the King and Empress fly on to Cossa, in Vegno, the next of the alliance's partners on the route.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara called at Noursala, the capital of Aerla, on 18.VII.1760AN, the second stop of the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760 and its first to a partner of the Concord Alliance. President Alexander Kim, elected weeks earlier in succession to the term-limited Thomas Guthrie, received the royal party in his native city. The Royal Household framed the call as a renewal of a young but active friendship, recalling the Aerlan-Glaceian Famine Prevention Mission the Federation's sealift had carried and the communion between Aerla's Nazarene church and one of the Federation's own, and held to its word that no new treaty would be signed. Noursala also lends its name to the 1751ANNoursala Arrangement, under which the exiled New Alexandrian legislator Martina Vásquez is held under house arrest in the city at a standing New Alexandrian cost, a matter the two states keep apart from the alliance, and the allies differ over the Bliven Fund for Anglien, which Aerla subscribes to and the Federation declined. From Noursala the tour flies on to Cossa in Vegno.
In 1738AN, early in his reign, the King made one of his earliest state visits to Cossa, traveling with his wife, then Queen Adelaide. On its second day, in the Grand State Room of the Dilemma Palace, Vegno signed its accession to the Concord Alliance, the first state to join the pact after its founders.[54] The alliance had been founded seven years earlier by Natopia, Nouvelle Alexandrie, and Oportia, and Vegno's admission was its first expansion. Empress Clara, who was at the King's side in 1738AN as his consort, returns now as a sovereign who reigns in Natopia in her own right.
Since then, the first friend has become a central one. A Vegnese, Silvio Gianni Linard, holds the alliance's Secretary-Generalship, and Cossa is home both to a Concord Alliance coordination office and to the alliance's Apollonia Command. The Federation holds the Deputy Secretary-Generalship in Jacqueline d'Alessio y Venegas. The two countries are partners twice over, in the Concord Alliance and in the wider Raspur Pact to which it belongs. The tie reaches into commerce as well: earlier this year the Vegnese airframer Vegno Aeronautica won its first New Alexandrian orders, widebodies for Trans Micras Airlines and narrowbodies for Chaski Air, the first time a foreign builder had opened the market for the Federation's larger aircraft, long held by Javelin Industries alone.[55]
The Dilemma Palace, the seat of the Vegnese presidency, gave the setting; its Grand State Room had witnessed the accession two decades before. The state reception itself, in the manner of the tour's other stops, was a matter for the host government, and the ministers of the Government of Vegno attended alongside President Visciglia.
The 1738AN visit had left more than a signature. Alongside the accession, the Federation and Vegno concluded three bilateral agreements: the Cultural Heritage Protection and Exchange Agreement, the Green Technology Development Accord, and the Digital Innovation Partnership, the last of them founding a joint research center in Cossa that still stands. The Royal Household pointed to those undertakings as the substance of a friendship it had come to renew rather than to enlarge.
As at Huyenkula and Noursala, the Royal Household described the Vegno call as a renewal of an old friendship and not the making of a new commitment, and no treaty was signed at Cossa. "When I first came to this city, the alliance was three names on a page," the King said. "I have come back to see how far those three names have carried." Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who advised the tour, remained in Cárdenas. From Cossa the King and Empress fly on to Johannsessbuurg in the Free Duchy of Anglien.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara called at Cossa, the capital of Vegno, on the third leg of the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760, received by President Antonio Visciglia. For the King it was a return to the city where, more than twenty years before, his first state visit had seen Vegno accede to the Concord Alliance, the pact's first expansion beyond its founders. Vegno is today a central member of the alliance and holds its Secretary-Generalship in Silvio Gianni Linard. Empress Clara, who had traveled to Cossa in 1738AN as Queen Adelaide, returned as a reigning sovereign. The Royal Household cast the visit, as it had the earlier stops, as a renewal of an old friendship rather than a new commitment, and no treaty was signed.
THE THIRD IOP/NBC POLL FINDS THE ACCORD'S LEAD WIDENING TO SIX AS APPROVAL RISES
IOP/NBC News vote-intention graphic for the third regular poll of 1760AN, conducted 19-21.VII.
The Alliance Leads the Humanists 37 to 31, Up From Four Points in IV
Government Approval Rises to a Net Plus 11, Up Four Points From IV
Cost of Living Still Leads the Concerns While Housing Eases Slightly
Elena Svensson Moves Back Ahead as the Best-Liked Leader
Voters Are Now Evenly Split on the Federation's Direction After Tilting Negative in IV
This VII Reading Is a Snapshot, Not a Forecast of the Government's Fate
Cárdenas, FCD -- The third regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 19-21.VII, finds the Federal Accord widening its ballot lead. Net approval is up four points on IV, and voters are now divided 46 to 46 on the Federation's direction.[56]
Forty-nine percent approve of the Federal Accord administration and 38 percent disapprove, a net approval of plus 11, up from plus 7 in IV and still short of the plus 16 recorded in I. The change is in the public's judgment of the government in office; the party vote shifts by a single point.
The cost of living remains the leading concern at 37 percent, down two points from IV, while housing eases to 20 from 21. The economy and jobs register 18 percent and the public debt 14, with 11 percent naming another issue or offering no opinion. Since the IV poll, the Government's National Housing Reform and Expansion Act, 1760[57] and Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760[58] have become law, completing the package that began with the General Appropriations and Taxation Act, 1760.[59] The poll asks what worries voters, and the cost of living still comes first.
The confidence measures also improve. Fifty-one percent think the government will govern effectively, against 39 percent who lack confidence. Voters are now at 45 to 45 on whether the coalition will last a full term, after a negative 43 to 47 reading in IV.
Elena Svensson leads the tested field at net favorability of plus 16, ahead of independent deputy Piti Gándara, whose net favorability is unchanged at plus 14. Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves rises four points to plus 9, and José Manuel Montero slips to minus 15. The numbers measure standing in this poll; they do not determine who will win a future election or how any deputy will vote.
Voters are evenly divided on the direction of the Federation, with 46 percent saying right direction and 46 wrong direction, and 8 percent offering no opinion. In IV the reading had turned negative for the first time in the 1760AN series, at 44 right and 48 wrong.
Nicolás Arreola, the Institute's director, again cautioned that a single quarter's reading is a snapshot of the public mood, not a verdict on the government's future.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The third regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 19-21.VII, finds the Alliance leading the Federal Humanist Party 37 to 31 on a fresh ballot, a six-point margin against four in IV. Government approval is 49 to 38, a net plus 11 against plus 7 in IV; the cost of living remains the top concern. Elena Svensson moves back ahead at net plus 16, confidence in a full coalition term is now evenly split, and direction of the Federation stands at 46 right against 46 wrong. The reading is a snapshot of the public mood, not a forecast of an election or a bill's fate.
NATIONAL PARTY VOTING INTENTION If a general election were held today, which party would you support? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 19-21.VII.1760AN
GOVERNMENT APPROVAL Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Federal Accord government is doing? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 19-21.VII.1760AN
MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING THE FEDERATION What is the most important issue facing the Federation today? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 19-21.VII.1760AN
Issue
Percentage
The cost of living
37.0%
Housing
20.0%
The economy and jobs
18.0%
The public debt
14.0%
Other / No opinion
11.0%
Confidence in the Government
CONFIDENCE IN THE GOVERNMENT % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 19-21.VII.1760AN
Question
Confident
Not confident
Unsure
Will the government govern effectively?
51.0%
39.0%
10.0%
Will the coalition last a full term?
45.0%
45.0%
10.0%
Party Leader Favorability Ratings
PARTY LEADER FAVORABILITY RATINGS % of registered voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 19-21.VII.1760AN
DIRECTION OF THE FEDERATION Do you think the Federation is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 19-21.VII.1760AN
As Empress of the Natopians, Clara signed the rescript of XIII.1753AN that authorized the Natopian-led intervention, which expelled the Nü Krantisk Repüblik from the duchy in 1754AN. During the occupation her father publicly called on her by name to act.[60]
Now 95, the Duke spent his adult life in Natopia as Duke of Triegon and consort to Empress Vadoma I, holding his Anglian title as a heraldic dignity until the intervention.[61][62] He arrived by Natopian Navy vessel after the capital was secured and has kept his court in Johannsessbuurg since. Under the constitution ratified in 1759AN he is a ceremonial head of state.[62]
In 1758AN, by letters patent issued as titular Emperor of the Alexandrians, the Duke named Clara his successor to that dignity. After her it passes to Crown Princess Sayari, and from Sayari onward it is held with the Crown of Nouvelle Alexandrie.[61]
Before the reception the King and Empress laid a wreath at Plein fonn Versoening, the square built on the site of the demolished Governing Board complex, whose memorial wall carries the names of those killed under the occupation. The Duke then received the party in the Throne Hall of the Palace of the Crown, where the Charter of Anglien was promulgated in 1754AN, and gave a state dinner that evening in the State Dining Room.
Prime Minister Klaes Boerhaaf, Chancellor Hendrik Braam, and the Speaker of the Diet, Marta Svensdottir, attended with members of the Council of Ministers. Among them was Minister of External Affairs Sanne Okkerse, who, as an émigré in Natopia during the occupation, had pressed the Anglian case at the Empress's court before the rescript was signed.[63] Ambassador Beatriz Salazar, who has headed the Federation's embassy in the city since 1754AN, also attended.
"My daughter signed the rescript that brought me here," the Duke said at the dinner. "It is a better thing to receive her at my own door.""I signed it as Empress," Clara replied. "I have come as your daughter."
On 20.II.1759AN, during the Recession of 1757, the Federation declined to subscribe to the Bliven Fund, the endowment Anglien's transitional government designed to carry the duchy past the end of the reconstruction grants. Five Concord states capitalized the fund instead, Natopia supplying 84 percent, and it makes its first transfer this year, 4.25 percent of its value. The Federation had invested around 12 billion Anglian marks in the Aquaria nuclear new-build in 1757AN. Its Treasury and Federal Bank have undertaken to advise the fund's board on custody and audits.[66] Neither the King nor the Duke raised the fund in public, and the Royal Household said the matter rested with the Federal and Anglian governments.
As at the tour's earlier stops, no treaty was signed, and from Johannsessbuurg the King and Empress fly on to Tirlar, the first of three stops in Natopia.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara called at Johannsessbuurg on the fourth leg of the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760, where the Empress's father, Sovereign Duke Edgard III of Anglien, received them at the Palace of the Crown. As Empress of the Natopians, Clara had signed the 1753AN rescript that authorized the intervention ending the occupation of the duchy. Anglien's Prime Minister and cabinet dined with the royal party. The visit fell in the first payout year of the Bliven Fund, which the Federation declined to join in 1759AN; the Royal Household said the matter rested with the Federal and Anglian governments.
Neither the royal party nor the crowd noticed at the time, according to the police. Officers of the Anglian Ducal Guard found the device while clearing the square after the ceremony, and the King and Empress were told that evening, after the state dinner at the Palace of the Crown. The police made no announcement until after the arrest.
The suspect, a man from Johannsessbuurg whose name has not been released, was detained on 1.VIII, the first anniversary of the constitution's entry into force, by the Special Operations Bureau, the joint intervention unit of the police and the Ducal Guard. The inquiry drew on the protective intelligence staff of the Federal Royal Guards, the New Alexandrian unit charged with protecting the King.[68][69][70] Police said he had belonged to an NKR study group before the liberation and had kept in contact with former members, but that they had found no sign of an organized network behind the attack. He has not been charged, and no lawyer acting for him had commented by 2.VIII.
"We treated it as an attempt on the lives of the King and Empress from the moment it was found," Director-General Jan-Hendrik Velsink of the Ducal Police Service said in a statement. "We believe he acted alone."
The Royal Household said the tour would keep to its published itinerary. The royal party is scheduled to reach Tirlar on 3.VIII.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Anglian police said on 2.VIII that they had arrested a man over a hand grenade thrown toward King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara during the wreath-laying at Plein fonn Versoening in Johannsessbuurg on 24.VII, which failed to detonate. Police say the suspect, detained after a joint Anglian and New Alexandrian inquiry, once belonged to an NKR study group and acted alone; he has not been charged. The Royal Household said the tour continues as planned.
Rosamund gave a state reception for the King and Empress that evening, attended by Chancellor Lungo and by officers of the Government of Northern Arboria, which sits in the city.[76]"We have been guests together in four capitals," the Empress said at the reception. "In Tirlar it is my turn to be the host."Charlotte Beaumont, appointed the Federation's ambassador in Lindström this year, was among the guests.[77]
Princess of Arboria since 1743AN, Rosamund is 87. She first left Constancia as a girl, on her father's Great Tour of 1687. Jaime Augusto Joaquin Primo de Aguilar, Autokrator of Constancia at the time, called at Tirlar on that progress as well as at Lindström, Redquill, and Cárdenas.[78][79] In 1700AN, at a ceremony in Tirlar, her mother vested her as Duchess of Mar Sara and declared her heiress to the principality.[74][78] In 1706AN she married Prince Utas, the King's first cousin, who received the royal party at Huyenkula on the tour's opening leg.[78][80]
Operation Sacred Ground, part of the Elijahn Restoration, was launched on 2.VIII.1752AN. Clara, then Regent for her mother, Empress Vadoma I, oversaw its operational planning.[81] Rosamund guaranteed the operation's costs, from her own funds where needed, and the Government of Northern Arboria had merchant shipping procured and marshaled at Tirlar for the maritime corridor. A New Alexandrian contingent, Task Force "Thorgils", served in the operation.[82]
The two crowns pass separately under the Treaty of Dynastic Separation, signed at Vista de Nada in Lindström on 15.III.1721AN. The King, heir to the Federation at the time, married Princess Adelaide, as the Empress was known before her accession, five months later. The treaty makes their eldest child, Crown Princess Sayari, heir to the Federation, and their second, Prince Nathan, heir to Natopia after his mother.[83]
Natopia and the Federation are allies in both the Raspur Pact and the Concord Alliance, which the two states founded with Oportia on 9.X.1731AN as the Tripartite Treaty Organization.[84][85]
No agreements were announced at Tirlar. The royal party travels next to Chryse in the Benacian Union and returns to Natopia afterward for Redquill and Lindström.
Afterward they crossed to the island of Botha to visit the Bothan Institute, the girls' school Ayesha founded in the Palace of Botha in 1704AN.[94] She died at the palace in 1747AN.[95] Princess Darya, daughter of the Khan of Raspur and wife of the couple's son Prince Nathan, was a pupil there.[96]
On the last day the royal party took the high-speed train to Goldfield,[97] the capital of Ransenar, where King Cosgrach received them.[98] In 1706AN, when Ransenar's Congress was searching for a monarch, the foreign candidates it sounded out included the future Empress Vadoma I, Clara's mother, who signaled she might accept, and the King's grandfather, King Manco Cápac I, who turned it down. Congress settled instead on Ruadh Aldric, whose candidacy Nouvelle Alexandrie and the Benacian Union both helped fund. His son Cosgrach, head of the House of Aldric, has reigned since 1752AN.[99]"My grandfather turned this crown down, and my wife's mother came close to taking it," the King said in Goldfield. "It is a pleasure to meet the man who wears it."
Goldfield is one of the three seats of the Community of Goldfield, the economic union whose members include the Benacian Union, Nouvelle Alexandrie and Natopia.[100] No agreements were announced during the visit. The royal party returns to Natopia for Redquill, in Neridia.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara spent four days in the Benacian Union. First Consul Lors Bakker-Kalirion received them in Chryse, where they toured cultural institutions from the era of Ayesha al-Osman, lunched with her son Ardashir Kalir, and spent a day with the King's sister, Princess Sofia, and her twin sons. In Goldfield, King Cosgrach I of Ransenar received them; Ransenar's Congress had once sounded out both their families for its crown. The tour returns to Natopia.
THE KING AND EMPRESS VISIT THEIR SON-IN-LAW'S FAMILY AT REDQUILL, WHERE THE KING'S AUNT RECEIVES THEM
King Sinchi Roca II greets his aunt, Princess Nayaraq, at the reception hosted by Prince Janus in Redquill on 11.VIII.1760AN. Prince Elian and Empress Clara join the family gathering, three days before Nayaraq and Elian’s 75th wedding anniversary.
Prince Janus Hosts His Wife's Parents While Crown Princess Sayari Stays Home Expecting Twins
Princess Nayaraq, 96, Is the King's Aunt and the Eldest Daughter of Manco Cápac I
Visit Falls Three Days Before Nayaraq and Prince Elian's 75th Wedding Anniversary
Redquill Houses the Neridian Commodities Exchange for Raspur Pact Trade
Treaty of 1721AN Makes Any Grandchild Who Could Inherit Both Crowns Renounce One
Constancia's Great Tour of 1687AN Also Called at Redquill
Redquill, Natopia -- King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara reached Redquill on 11.VIII.1760AN as guests of their son-in-law, Prince Janus, at the second of the three Natopian stops on the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760.[43] Crown Princess Sayari, his wife, remained in the Federation, where she has stayed on medical advice since the start of Estivis (VIII) while she expects twins.[101]
Redquill is a deep-water port on the island of Neridia and the ceremonial capital of the Most Serene Union of Dos Gardenias. The union was home to the largest Alexandrian population before the Federation was founded.[102] The city houses the Neridian Commodities Exchange, where commodities from continental resource extraction zones are bought and sold and prices are set for Raspur Pact members.[103]
Janus gave a reception for the King and Empress that evening. His grandparents, Prince Elian of Neridia and Dos Gardenias and Princess Nayaraq, both 96, received the royal party with him.[104] Nayaraq, the Princess Royal, is the younger sister of the King's late father, King Sinchi Roca I, and King Manco Cápac I's eldest daughter. For decades she was Senior Lady-in-Waiting to the Empress's mother, the late Empress Vadoma I. The visit fell three days before her 75th wedding anniversary; she and Elian married at Dos Gardenias on 14.VIII.1685AN, and their own first children, Prince Nathan and Princess Ayllu, were twins, born the next year.[105]
The King spoke briefly at the reception. "Sayari asked us to carry her love to Redquill," he said. "She has promised to bring the children here herself."
A major in the Natopian Army, Janus, 38, is posted to its strategic planning staff, where his work includes liaison with allied militaries. He took New Alexandrian citizenship in V.1750AN and married the Crown Princess that XII.[106] Their son, Prince Inti, born on 23.XII.1755AN, is second in line to the New Alexandrian throne, and the twins will follow him.[107]
In Natopia the Crown Princess stands second in the line of succession, after her brother, Prince Nathan. Under the Treaty of Dynastic Separation, any grandchild of the King and Empress who could inherit both crowns must renounce one before acceding to the other.[108]
No agreements were announced at Redquill. The royal party travels next to Lindström, the Natopian imperial capital and the last of the three Natopian stops.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara visited Redquill in Neridia as guests of their son-in-law, Prince Janus, while Crown Princess Sayari stayed home expecting twins. Janus's grandparents, Prince Elian and Princess Nayaraq, the King's aunt, received the party. The tour continues to Lindström.
With Crown Princess Sayari at home expecting twins, the couple were received by their second child. Empress Vadoma I, Clara's mother, made Nathan Prince of Lindström, the title Natopia gives its heir apparent, at a ceremony in the city on his nineteenth birthday, 8.VII.1743AN. The title comes with estates around the city. Nathan, now 36, holds a squadron leader's commission in the Natopian Spacefleet and keeps his Lindström residence at Vista de Nada Palace.[110]
Nathan and Darya gave a private dinner for his parents at Vista de Nada that evening. The treaty that divides the two successions was signed in the palace.[111] At the dinner, Nathan said: "My mother was born in this house. It is good to have her home for a night."[112]
Earlier in the day, the Empress and the King went privately to the Imperial Mausoleum at Vista de Nada, where Vadoma I was buried in 1752AN after her state funeral at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Calf. She lies beside her father, Emperor Nathan II, under a marker that reads "She gathered the flock."[113] The King attended that funeral with the Empress and their five children.[114] The Imperial Household gave no further details of the visit.
The King also called at Concord House, the former Silverlight Palace, which the Concord Alliance acquired in 1734AN as its headquarters.[115] The alliance began in Lindström, where the Empress's mother, Vadoma I, and the King's father, Sinchi Roca I, signed the Tripartite Pact that created its forerunner in 1731AN.[116] The alliance's Secretary-General, Silvio Gianni Linard of Vegno, received him there.
Chancellor Marco Lungo III met the King at the Chancellery Building as the window for Natopia's recovery orders entered its final month. Lungo signed the Lindström Recovery Protocol in the city with the then Premier, José Manuel Montero, on 29.XV.1759AN. Under it, Natopian state buyers and private firms were to order NAX€320 billion worth of New Alexandrian infrastructure, manufactured goods and defense work between Novarum (I) and Estivis (VIII) 1760AN, and Natopia would buy 30 metric tons of Alexandrium at a floor price of NAX€2,150 a gram.[117] The government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves has since pressed for the orders to leave lasting industry in the Federation.[118] Neither government gave a figure for the orders placed so far.
No agreements were announced at Lindström. The royal party travels next to Petropolis in Constancia.
Manco Cápac made his first state visit to Constancia in Marittima (VI) 1718AN, a week of calls from Astérapolis to Petropolis, Aqaba and Nivardom. The visit came about because Giakoumis had remarked over dinner that, though the two countries were neighbors, no King of Nouvelle Alexandrie had ever paid the Imperial State a return visit.[119] The Basileus left with him aboard Condor One at the end of it, bound for the Federation. Over Passas, a missile brought the aircraft down, and everyone on board was killed. The Confederacy of the Dispossessed claimed the attack. Giakoumis was 125, and his body was flown back to Petropolis for a state funeral.[120]
Constancia had sheltered Manco Cápac long before that visit. When the Wechua Sorrow began, he spent five years in exile there, and his government-in-exile sat at Nivardom. His youngest daughter, Princess Urpi, was born during that exile.[121]
A decree from Giakoumis II, read at the ceremony, gives the ground on which the statue stands to Nouvelle Alexandrie in perpetuity. The decree calls the statue a mark of solidarity between two good neighbors and a sign that those who brought down Condor One did not prevail. The Federation's ambassador, Mateo Alarcón, a treaty lawyer by training, accepted the deed.[122] The Department of State said the transfer would go before the Cortes for approval.
At the dedication, the King said: "My grandfather came to Constancia as an exile and left it as a friend. He and the Basileus made their last journey together. It is right that they should keep each other company here."
Rosamund, as Princess of Arboria, had received the couple at Tirlar two weeks earlier.[123] In 1759AN, diplomatic sources described a contest of precedence between the siblings' courts at the Summit on Zeed, which sources close to the Imperial household disputed.[124]
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II dedicated a statue of Manco Cápac I in Petropolis, beside the shrine of Basileus Giakoumis; the two died together when Condor One was shot down in 1718AN. Giakoumis II and the Autokráteira Rosamund received the King and Empress Clara together, and a decree gave the statue's ground to Nouvelle Alexandrie in perpetuity. The tour continues to Rusjar.
ZEED IS PROMISED AN EQUAL SHARE OF AVEY'S PORT REVENUE AND ₦60 BILLION FROM NATOPIA IN RUSJAR
Zeed's announced share of Avey's net port revenue rises to 50 percent from 1761AN. Natopia's separate ten-year pledge remains subject to Frenzy approval.
Sinchi Roca II Tells Zeed's National Assembly the Revenue Split Will Be Equal From Next Year
Talks to Open on Avey's Future Before Its Hundred-Year Term Ends in 1801AN
Clara, Speaking for Chancellor Lungo's Government, Pledges ₦60 Billion Over Ten Years
About Half Will Seed a Wealth Fund Owned by Zeed
Rusjar Airport, Irrigation and a Shared Avey-Rusjar Railway Take the Rest
Royal Couple Lay a Wreath at Avey's War Memorial
Rusjar, Zeed -- King Sinchi Roca II told Zeed's National Assembly in Rusjar on 20.VIII.1760AN that his government would give the Commonwealth of Zeed an equal share of the net revenue from the port of Avey, which Nouvelle Alexandrie has administered since 1701AN, and would open talks on the port's future. Empress Clara, speaking for the government of Chancellor Marco Lungo III of Natopia, then pledged ₦60 billion over ten years for Zeed's development. President Vivek Jarkhanda and Prime Minister Hypatia Damarion received the couple for the tenth stop of the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760.[43]
The King spoke for the government of Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves, whose Council of State approved the measures before the tour left Cárdenas. Under them, Zeed's share of the port's net revenue, 35 percent under the Avey Port Authority Corporation's charter, rises to half from next year. That share already makes up about 12 percent of the Commonwealth's budget, and the port carries about 78 percent of Zeed's international trade by volume.[125] Part of the Federation's own share will go toward the railway between Avey and Rusjar that Zeed's development plans propose.[126]
The two governments will also open talks on the port's future before the hundred-year term runs out in 1801AN, through the Joint Oversight Commission, which already reviews the port's revenue distributions. Any change to the enclave's terms will go to the Federal Assembly for ratification.
The Empress announced the Natopian pledge at a luncheon given by President Jarkhanda after the address. About half of the money will seed a national wealth fund owned by Zeed and run by a board with a Zeedic majority, on the model of the Bliven Fund, which Natopia largely capitalized for Anglien.[127] An Imperial Constancian Government strategy paper for Zeed suggests putting a substantial share of the country's resource revenue into a national wealth fund.[128] The rest will go to the international airport at Rusjar that Zeed's development plans call for, and to irrigation and water works for Zeed's interior, which suffers periodic droughts, with training for the Zeedic staff who will run the new works.[126][129] Part of the money will also go toward the Avey-Rusjar railway, channeled through the development bank of the Community of Goldfield, to which both countries belong.[130] The Frenzy must still approve the spending.
The Empress said: "Zeed's future should be built in Zeed and owned by Zeed. That is how the fund in Anglien works, and it is how this one will work."
The arrangement at Avey dates from the Third Euran War, when New Alexandrian paratroopers landed near the port in 1699AN.[131] The 1701 Armistice of Alduria City that ended the fighting placed Avey under the Federation's protection "for a period of one-hundred years" and bound Zeed to join the Raspur Pact.[132] Raspur Pact occupation of Zeed ended in 1716AN.[133] The revenue split was contentious at first.[125]
In the Assembly, the King said: "For sixty years we have held Avey under the terms of a war. It is time we held it together, under the terms of a friendship."
On 19.VIII, the day before the address, the couple laid a wreath at Avey's Monument to the Fallen, dedicated in 1746AN to the casualties of Operation Lightning Dawn, in which Avey came under attack in 1745AN and New Alexandrian and Zeedic forces fought side by side.[134]
While the King was at the Assembly, the Empress toured the Rusjar Mechanical Machine-Building Plant, the main target in Zeed of Operation Lightning Dawn. The plant built armored vehicles for Western Natopian forces between 1717AN and 1721AN.[135]Neridia Defense Industries builds the Natopian Defense Force's Cougar and Ocelot armored vehicles under license from the plant.[136]
Damarion's government said it welcomed both packages and would name its delegation to the Avey talks. The royal party travels next to Corum Electric, in Western Corum.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Nouvelle Alexandrie will split Avey's net port revenue equally with Zeed from next year, help fund an Avey-Rusjar railway and open talks on the port's future, King Sinchi Roca II told Zeed's National Assembly in Rusjar. Empress Clara, for Chancellor Marco Lungo III's government, added ₦60 billion over ten years from Natopia; about half will seed a wealth fund that Zeed will own. The tour continues to Corum Electric.
She gave it on behalf of her father, Sovereign Duke Edgard III of Anglien, who conferred it on the advice of Prime Minister Klaes Boerhaaf's government. It names the battalion's pursuit of an ambush cell and its part in the final assault north of Bahira, and a streamer reading "Bahira 1756AN" was fixed to the battalion's colors. Electra, the regiment's colonel, took the salute.
Queen Electra records Science With Sparks with King Sinchi Roca II as her guest.
The battalion was reactivated in X.1754AN and joined Western Corum's counterinsurgency contingent in Anglien, which served under the Concord Council's stabilization framework.[137][138] The contingent and the Anglian Ducal Guard led the response when the Nü Krantisk Rapskaff (NKR) underground rose on 14.VII.1756AN. Before dawn that day a cell ambushed a Guard convoy on the Bahira-Shelsa road and killed eleven Guard soldiers. Two days later the battalion's drones led the pursuit in which nine of the cell's eighteen members died. The Surge ended on 4.IX with a combined Guard and West Corumian assault on a farmstead north of Bahira, where the underground's leader, Maich Grohndgraß, was killed. Two of the battalion's soldiers were shot dead by snipers in the Bahira interior.[139]
At the presentation, the Empress said: "Two soldiers of Western Corum died in my father's country. Anglien is in their debt, and it will not forget them." She also asked for a minute of silence for the eleven Guard soldiers killed on the Bahira-Shelsa road.
The stop came a month after a grenade was thrown toward the King and Empress during their wreath-laying in Johannsessbuurg. It failed to explode, and police said the man arrested once belonged to an NKR study group and acted alone.[140]
After the ceremony the royal party was shown the drones and quadwalkers that Western Corum used in the Mount Bijaro Campaign[141] and later in Anglien.[138] Western Corum is keeping the battalion as an operational unit, at first to test new equipment and tactics.
The King and Empress had last been in the hall on 9.IV.1753AN, when Electra, then six and already Queen, signed the Concord Alliance Treaty for Western Corum with a pen her mother, Queen Mina II of East Zimia and the Wallis Islands, had used at East Zimia's own accession in 1751AN. At that visit the King also announced the engagement of his niece, Princess Rosaura, to Prince Farrukhān of Molivadia.[141] A year after the signing, Electra was a bridesmaid at the wedding of the King and Empress's daughter, Princess Urpi.[142]
At a state dinner on 22.VIII, the King thanked the Corum Electric Corporation, which sent emergency generators and electrical equipment to Nouvelle Alexandrie after the 1757 Cajamarca micrasquake, and invited the Queen to Cárdenas and to Cajamarca. After the earthquake, Electra had said she wanted to visit "once the situation has stabilised enough for [her] to not get underfoot."[143]
"When the lights went out in Cajamarca, Corum sent the power to turn them back on," the King said. "The Queen would never be underfoot in our country. She would be our guest." Electra replied: "Like a coqui, I'm quite small; so while I can make a bit of noise, at least I won't take up a lot of space! No promises about the rain, though..." No date was announced for the visit.
The King gave the Queen a restored print of Last Night on Botha and production papers from the Hans Backovic Archive and Film Institute. Electra has named the Caputian-New Alexandrian director Hans Backovic as a major influence on her own films.[144] Before the royal party left, she recorded an episode of Science With Sparks, the children's science program she created and has presented on Mondovision since 1751AN, with the King as her guest.[145]
TL;DR:Empress Clara presented an Anglian citation from her father, Sovereign Duke Edgard III, to the West Corumian battalion that helped break the St. Aldric's Day Surge and lost two soldiers in Anglien. At a state dinner, King Sinchi Roca II thanked Corum Electric for its generators after the Cajamarca earthquake and invited Queen Electra to visit. She recorded an episode of Science With Sparks with him. The tour ends at Southman, in East Zimia and the Wallis Islands.
Nouvelle Alexandrie Economic Dashboard (Month VIII, 1760)
Published by the Nouvelle Alexandrie Statistics Bureau.
Output grew at an annualized 4.6% in the second quarter of 1760AN, against a contraction of 4.4% in the first, and the year-on-year rate turned to growth of 0.3% from negative 1.8%. Unemployment fell to 8.8% from 9.0%, and consumer confidence rose to 93.1 from 75.2. Two more bills of the Federal Accord government's economic package became law in the quarter: the National Housing Reform and Expansion Act, 1760 on 8.V, which puts the National Homebuilding Drive on a standing footing, and the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 on 10.V, which makes direct energy payments to households of low and middle income, revives the family allowance and locks pensions and benefits to inflation. The relief Act's cost is met from the appropriation of the General Appropriations and Taxation Act, 1760 and not by new borrowing, the undertaking the Government gave when it sought the confidence of the Assembly. Under the budget, which received Royal Assent on 22.IV and has effect for the whole year, a reduced value-added tax rate of 5% applies to essential food and domestic energy. The order window of the Lindström Recovery Protocol ran to the end of the quarter, and the Fontainebleau reference price of Alexandrium rose to NAX€2,097.41 a gram, still below the NAX€2,150 the protocol sets for Natopia's reserve purchase. Public debt rose to 69.0% of output from 68.5% even as the quarterly deficit narrowed to 2.8% of GDP from 4.0%. Living costs had not yet eased: the cost-of-living index rose to 107.0 and housing affordability slipped to 96.0. One caveat applies to the output level. The growth rate is seasonally adjusted, and unadjusted quarterly output of NAX€12.48 trillion is slightly above the first quarter's NAX€12.46 trillion.
The King spoke of the gravnoughtZimia at a state dinner in the palace that evening. When the 1757 Cajamarca micrasquake struck, the ship was on its way to New Hempton; Southman sent it to Nouvelle Alexandrie instead for the emergency airlift, and rescue teams from East Zimia followed.[148]"A ship that was going somewhere else came to us instead," the King said. "Nobody in Southman thought that order needed a debate," Queen Mina said. "You were the first King of your country to visit us, and I am glad your journey ends with us." At a dinner in the same palace in 1751AN, the King had thanked the kingdom for hosting Raspur Pact forces during Operation Aglaia.[147]
On 2.IX the royal party visited the headquarters of the alliance's Corum Command, which East Zimia hosts in Southman.[149] Prince Hans, Grand Admiral of the East Zimian and Wallisian War League, escorted the King and Empress as senior officers briefed them on the alliance's watch around Corum.[150] The King asked about the drones and quadwalkers he had been shown in Corum Electric City three days earlier. Clémence Arnaud, ambassador in Southman since earlier in the year, was with the royal party on both days. She came up through the Department of State's relief operations.[151]
The royal party flies home to Cárdenas on 3.IX, 39 days after it left the Palace of Carranza on 12.VII, having visited the twelve cities of its announced itinerary in ten states.[43] In Petropolis a decree of Giakoumis II gave the ground beneath the new statue of Manco Cápac I to Nouvelle Alexandrie, a transfer the Department of State said would go before the Cortes for approval.[152] At Rusjar the King, for his government, offered Zeed an equal share of the net port revenue of Avey from next year and agreed to open talks on the port's future. Any change to the enclave's terms needs the ratification of the Federal Assembly. On behalf of Natopia's government, the Empress pledged ₦60 billion for Zeed's development, a sum the Frenzy must still approve.[153]
The tour ends ahead of the birth of Crown Princess Sayari's twins, which the Royal Household expects in the closing months of the year.[154]
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara made the last of the twelve stops of the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760 in Southman, received by Queen Mina II nearly nine years after East Zimia and the Wallis Islands signed the Concord Alliance Treaty there. That evening the King recalled the gravnought Zimia, which Southman diverted from New Hempton to the Cajamarca relief, and on 2.IX the royal party visited the alliance's Corum Command. They fly home to Cárdenas on 3.IX, with Crown Princess Sayari's twins due before the year is out.
Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves (DSP/AJNA) said the government would bring both to a vote. "The King gave the Federation's word in Huyenkula, and our ambassador accepted the deed in Petropolis, both on the government's advice," he said. "Now the Cortes decides, and I expect it to say yes." The equal share of Avey's net port revenue that the King offered Zeed in Rusjar does not need a vote. The Council of State approved it before the tour left, and only a change to the enclave's terms would go to the Federal Assembly.[157]
That point drew the sharpest reply. Leader of the Opposition José Manuel Montero (FHP), whose government began planning the tour, said the Federal Humanist Party would vote for the accession and the Petropolis transfer. He objected to the Avey decision. "We want a better partnership with Zeed as much as anyone," he said. "But half of Avey's revenue is a decision for the Cortes, and deputies heard about it from Rusjar."
Fred Strong (FHP), a former Vice-Premier and Secretary of Defense, raised the grenade thrown at the royal couple during the wreath-laying in Johannsessbuurg on 24.VII, which did not explode and was found only after the ceremony. The Anglian police said nothing about it until they had made an arrest on 1.VIII.[158]"Someone got close enough to throw a grenade at the King and the Empress, and we only learned of it once the police had made an arrest," Strong said. "I want the Federal Guards Service to tell the Cortes how that happened and what it has changed."
The Civic Governance Alliance, a partner in the governing Federal Accord, will back the Petropolis transfer but wants the full deed laid before deputies first, said Tomás Iñiguez (CGA), the Secretary of the Treasury and the party's floor leader. "We'll support it," he said. "But the Federation would hold that ground forever, and deputies ought to read the whole deed before they vote."
Yuiza Bohi'o (WPP/AJNA), the Secretary for Administrative Coordination and Efficiency and leader of the Wakara People's Party, welcomed the accession and pointed to its timing. The convention was introduced at the Micras Treaty Organization in 1755AN, when Montero was Premier. "This has been sitting on the table since 1755AN," she said. "Of course we'll vote for it."
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The day after the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760 ended, Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves said the Convention of Huyenkula accession and the Petropolis deed would go to the Cortes. The FHP backed both but objected that Avey's revenue share was decided without a vote, and Fred Strong asked how a grenade came within reach of the King and Empress.
DRIED PASTA JOINS THE ESSENTIALS BASKET AT HALF THE STANDARD RATE OF VALUE ADDED TAX
Dried pasta joins the essentials basket at a reduced VAT rate of 5 percent from 1.X.1760.
Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez Lays a Revised Basket Before the Cortes
Dried Pasta Will Be Taxed at 5 Percent From 1.X.1760AN
Casa Barilla, the Federation's Largest Pasta Maker, Had Lobbied for the Reduction
Casa Barilla Says It Will Pass the Whole Cut On to Shoppers
Other Pasta Makers, Among Them Agrifoods, Will Also Benefit
Cárdenas, FCD -- The Secretary of the Treasury, Tomás Iñiguez, on 9.IX.1760AN added dried pasta to the essentials basket that the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760 taxes at a reduced rate of value added tax. The revised basket was laid before the Cortes Federales the same day. From 1.X.1760AN, dried pasta will carry value added tax at 5 percent, half the standard rate.[159]
Under the Act, which received Royal Assent on 10.V.1760AN, the Secretary of the Treasury defines and publishes the basket, confines it to essential food and domestic energy, and reviews it each year. In choosing its contents the Secretary must have regard to the goods that weigh most in the cost of living of households of low and middle income.[159] The Treasury said that dried pasta met that test as a staple of household meals across the Federation, citing the finding of the National Economic Council price committee that essentials had risen faster than headline inflation.[160]
Casa Barilla, the Federation's largest pasta maker, had pressed the Treasury for the change during the year.[161] Its chief executive, Shirley Barilla, said the company would pass the whole reduction on to shoppers. "Pasta is what families eat at the end of the month, when the money runs short," she said. "It belongs in the basket."
The change also lowers the tax on the pasta lines of other producers, among them Agrifoods, whose consumer products division sells dried pasta under its own brands.[162]
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez added dried pasta to the essentials basket of the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760, so from 1.X.1760AN it will be taxed at 5 percent, half the standard rate. Casa Barilla, which pressed for the change, says it will pass the whole cut on to shoppers.
BANK OF SAINT ANDRE CONSORTIUM OPENS A NAX€60 BILLION WINDOW FOR THE FEDERATION'S REGIONAL LENDERS
Federal Bank Approves the Lindström Bank Window Terms
Preferred Equity Goes to Qualifying Regional Lenders, Not to Banks Already in Resolution
Treasury Confirms No Federal Guarantee, Budget Line, or Assembly Vote Is Involved
Governor Martel's Supervisors Will Vet Each Lender Before Any Money Is Paid In
Regional Banks Expect the New Capital to Reopen Business Lending in the Manufacturing Regions
Cárdenas, FCD -- A consortium led by the Bank of Saint Andre, the Natopian maritime lender, has opened the NAX€60 billion bank window of the Lindström Recovery Protocol, and will subscribe preferred equity in regional lenders across the Federation under the supervision of the Federal Bank. The Federal Bank approved the window's terms on 11.IX.1760AN, and the consortium said the first subscriptions would follow once supervisors had cleared each applicant.
The window had been one of the last pieces of the Lindström framework still on paper. When the Protocol was signed on 29.XV.1759AN, the bank window appeared in it only as a proposal under Federal Bank supervision, and regulated bank subscriptions were left for review after the caretaker government handed over to Premier Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves.[163] Institutions already in resolution are excluded. The money is meant for lenders that remained solvent through the downturn but have too little capital to lend, the kind of regional institution that came under strain in 1758AN, when the Caisse Régionale de l'Alduria was wound up and its sound business sold to Quipu Bank.
Under the terms the Federal Bank approved, each lender applies to the Bank's Division of Regional Financial Institutions, set up under the Comprehensive Financial Stabilization Act, 1749, which examines its books before the consortium may buy its shares. Governor Lucienne Martel said the review would be the same one supervisors apply to any new capital. "This is private money, and it will be supervised as strictly as public money would be," Martel said. "No institution receives a single écu from this window until our examiners are satisfied it can use the capital to lend."
The Treasury published the disclosure that Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez of the Civic Governance Alliance had promised before he took office, when he said any public exposure under the Protocol would be made known before it was authorized.[163] According to the disclosure, the window carries no federal guarantee and no line in the budget, and it needs no vote in the Federal Assembly. Preferred equity ranks ahead of ordinary shares for dividends but carries no vote in the running of the lender.
Luis Aramburu, the Bank of Saint Andre's chief executive, said the consortium would be judged on whether credit returned to the Regions. "Our business is financing ports, trade and the infrastructure that serves them, and much of that business runs through New Alexandrian regional banks," Aramburu said. "Those banks have the customers and the projects. What they have lacked is capital."
Regional bankers told NBC they expected the first applications from lenders in the manufacturing Regions, where small manufacturers and contractors have found credit hardest to obtain since the downturn. The Federal Bank did not say how many lenders had applied or how quickly the NAX€60 billion would be drawn. The window forms part of the Protocol's third investment platform, the one covering finance, digital services and aerospace.
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the window had been negotiated by his caretaker government and that the Accord was now delivering it. Iñiguez said it had taken eight months to put Federal Bank supervision and the public disclosure in place before any money moved.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:A Bank of Saint Andre-led consortium has opened the NAX€60 billion bank window of the Lindström Recovery Protocol, subscribing preferred equity in solvent regional lenders under Federal Bank supervision. Institutions in resolution are excluded, and the Federal Bank's Division of Regional Financial Institutions must clear each lender first. The Treasury disclosed that the window carries no federal guarantee, no budget line, and no Assembly vote. Governor Lucienne Martel promised strict supervision, and chief executive Luis Aramburu said the aim was to restore regional lending. José Manuel Montero said the window was negotiated by his caretaker government.
The council's ministerial committee of economic ministers and central bank governors met in Lindström for its quarterly session. The new window is half the size of the first, which scheduled NAX€320 billion of orders between Novarum (I) and Estivis (VIII) and closed at the end of that month.[164] Natopian buyers pay for the orders.
Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez of the Civic Governance Alliance led the New Alexandrian delegation. He repeated the case he made at the council's Cárdenas plenary in Ventaris (III), and said the government had asked for a larger part of the new orders to go to companies that manufacture inside the Federation, rather than to Natopian firms with New Alexandrian subsidiaries.[165] The council's communiqué did not say whether that request was met. "The first window kept factories open through the worst of the year," Iñiguez said. "The second has to do more than that. We want these orders to leave behind jobs and capacity that stay here when the window closes."
A spokesperson for the government of Chancellor Marco Lungo III said Natopia regarded the renewal as an investment in its own supply chains. "Natopian buyers need what New Alexandrian industry makes," the spokesperson said. "The second window is smaller because the emergency is smaller, and that is good news for both countries."
TL;DR:The Natopian-Nouvelle Alexandrie Joint Economic Council has opened a second NAX€160 billion window of Natopian orders for New Alexandrian infrastructure, manufactured goods and defense output, running from Aureoris (IX) into early 1761AN. It is half the size of the first window, which closed at the end of Estivis (VIII). Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez sought a larger share for firms that manufacture in the Federation, and the communiqué did not say whether he got it. Natopia said the smaller window reflected a smaller emergency.
Humanists Are Raising Money After Falling to 293 Seats at the 1759AN Election
Rival Families Who Fell Out Over Freight in 1742AN Now Meet Again in the Humanists' Donor Lists
Punta Santiago, Alduria -- Members of the Barilla and Kerularios families, who own two of the Federation's best-known companies, are among the largest donors to the Federal Humanist Party since its defeat at the 1759AN general election, according to filings published by the Federal Elections Commission on 6.X.1760AN.
Ottavio Barilla, chairman of the pasta maker Casa Barilla, and his daughter Shirley Barilla, its chief executive, each gave the most that an individual may give under the Federation's contribution limits. George Lahaye Kerularios, chairman of Kerularios & Company, and his son Maximinus Lahaye Kerularios, its chief executive, did the same.[166] Neither company appears in the filings, and Kerularios & Company has a policy against direct political donations.[167]
The Humanists governed the Federation from 1739AN until the Federal Accord took office in I.1760AN. The party lost 79 seats at the election and now holds 293, and José Manuel Montero leads it as Leader of the Opposition.[168] The Humanists voted against the Federal Accord's budget, whose higher rates fall on the largest companies and estates,[169] and against the Cost of Living Relief Act, 1760, the law under which Casa Barilla won its tax cut on dried pasta.[170] A party spokesperson said the donations would pay for its research staff and for organizing in the Regions it lost.
The Barillas came to the party later than older Humanist houses such as the Valkory family and the Almagro family.[171] Since the party went into opposition, the Barilla and Kerularios families have competed to fund its rebuilding. Their companies first fell out over freight during the Port Wars of 1742.
"We give to the Humanists because we believe in what they stand for," Shirley Barilla said. "Who else gives is their business." A spokesperson for the Kerularios family declined to comment.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Filings with the Federal Elections Commission show members of the rival Barilla and Kerularios families each giving the most the law allows to the Federal Humanist Party, which is rebuilding in opposition after falling to 293 seats. Neither company appears in the filings, and Kerularios & Company has a policy against political donations.
The Federal Assembly carried the clean-government bill on 7.X.1760AN by 473 votes to 298, with 30 abstentions.[172] The three governing parties voted for it as a bloc, joined by 25 of the 50 independents, among them the 13 who follow Piti Gándara. The Chamber of Peers concurred on 17.X by 55 votes to 53, with 10 abstentions, and made no amendment. The Act came into force with the Assent.
Under the Act the Auditor-General is nominated by the Speaker on the recommendation of the Assembly's Committee on Appointments rather than by the Secretary of the Treasury, can be removed only by a two-thirds vote, and reports to the Cortes alone. The Committee of Ethics in Government leaves the Presidential Office as an independent statutory body under a Commissioner appointed on a three-fifths vote of the Assembly for a single six-year term, with the power to compel documents and testimony, and the Ministerial Code of Conduct becomes law. A public register of party accounts and large donations will stay open the year round, with large gifts disclosed the day they are received and every donation traced to its true source. The register and the new rules on political action committees take effect on a day the Federal Elections Commission appoints, no later than 20.X.1761AN.
The Act is the Civic Governance Alliance's third bill for the reform. Its Clean Government Act, 1750 stalled for four years without reaching a vote, and the Clean Government and Political Reform Act, 1754 fell in the Assembly by 260 votes to 438 in 1755AN. The Federal Humanists, then in government, said they did not dispute the bill's purpose but voted it down because the anti-corruption commission it proposed would duplicate the Anti-Corruption Agency, and pledged instead to widen that agency's mandate.[173] The new Act proposes no anti-corruption commission; it moves the Audit Office out of the Treasury and makes the existing ethics office independent. All 293 Humanist deputies voted against it, and the Republican Party of Oportia abstained.
"Last time we were told we were building something the country already had," said Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez (CGA), who brought the 1754AN bill and co-sponsored this one with Francisco Gabaza of the Federal Consensus Party. "So we built nothing new. We moved the auditor out of my own department and gave the ethics office the power to ask for the papers."
The aviation Act, signed on 19.X, authorizes the Federation to join the Convention on Civil Aviation, the one ancillary treaty of the Micras Treaty Organization it had not ratified. It grants foreign carriers the first six freedoms of the air on condition that their countries return them, and withholds the seventh through the tenth, which would have let foreign airlines fly between New Alexandrian cities or serve the Federation on routes that never touch their own countries. The Assembly passed it on 7.X by 728 votes to 22, with 51 abstentions, and 250 of the 293 Humanists voted for a Government bill for the first time in this Cortes. The Peers concurred on 16.X by 86 to 22, with 10 abstentions.[172]
Secretary of State Gabrielle Fitzgerald must now deposit the instrument of accession with the Organization at Huyenkula. The Act comes into force on a day she appoints, no earlier than that deposit.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:King Sinchi Roca II granted Royal Assent on 20.X.1760AN to the Clean Government and Elections Act, 1760, a day after signing the Convention on Civil Aviation Accession Act, 1760, so that all five bills of the Federal Accord's opening program are now law. The clean-government Act, carried 473 to 298 in the Assembly and 55 to 53 by the Peers, moves the Federal Audit Office from the Treasury to the Cortes, gives the ethics office power to compel evidence, puts the Ministerial Code into law and provides for a year-round register of party donations, to open no later than 20.X.1761AN. It is the Civic Governance Alliance's third bill for the reform; every Humanist deputy voted against. The aviation Act authorizes the Federation to join the Convention on Civil Aviation, granting the first six freedoms of the air and withholding the rest.
THE FOURTH IOP/NBC POLL FINDS THE ACCORD'S LEAD EASING TO FIVE AS APPROVAL STAYS NEAR PLUS 10
IOP/NBC News vote-intention graphic for the fourth regular poll of 1760AN, conducted 16-18.X.
The Alliance Leads the Humanists 37 to 32, Down From Six Points in VII
Government Approval Stays Near Its VII Level at a Net Plus 10
Cost of Living Still Leads the Concerns as Housing Eases and the Jobs Concern Edges Up
Elena Svensson Stays Ahead as the Best-Liked Leader
Slightly More Voters Doubt Than Expect the Coalition to Last a Full Term
This X Reading Is a Snapshot, Not a Forecast of the Government's Fate
Cárdenas, FCD -- The fourth regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 16-18.X, finds the Federal Accord still ahead on a fresh ballot, but with its lead down a point from VII. Net approval is within a point of its VII reading, and voters are close to evenly divided on the Federation's direction.[174]
Forty-eight percent approve of the Federal Accord administration and 38 percent disapprove, a net approval of plus 10, down from plus 11 in VII. Disapproval stays at 38 percent; approval is a point lower and no opinion a point higher, at 14 percent.
The cost of living remains the leading concern at 37 percent, the same as in VII. Housing is down to 19 from 20, while the economy and jobs rise to 19 from 18. The public debt registers 14 percent, with 11 percent naming another issue or offering no opinion. The reduced 5 percent rate of value added tax on dried pasta, added to the essentials basket on 9.IX, applies from 1.X, about two weeks before the poll's fieldwork.[175] The poll asks what worries voters, and it does not measure the effect of any single measure on prices.
The confidence measures slip slightly. Fifty percent think the government will govern effectively, against 40 percent who lack confidence. Voters are at 44 to 46 on whether the coalition will last a full term, after the 45 to 45 reading in VII.
Elena Svensson leads the tested field at net favorability of plus 15, down from plus 16 in VII. Independent deputy Piti Gándara stays at plus 14. Marcos Ferreira Gonçalves slips to plus 8, and José Manuel Montero recovers two points to minus 13. The numbers measure standing in this poll; they do not determine who will win a future election or how any deputy will vote.
The Federation's direction splits 46 percent right to 47 wrong, with 7 percent offering no opinion. In VII the two readings were level at 46 each.
Nicolás Arreola, the Institute's director, again cautioned that a single quarter's reading is a snapshot of the public mood, not a verdict on the government's future.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The fourth regular IOP/NBC News poll of 1760AN, conducted 16-18.X, finds the Alliance leading the Federal Humanist Party 37 to 32 on a fresh ballot, a five-point margin against six in VII. Government approval is 48 to 38, a net plus 10 against plus 11 in VII; the cost of living remains the top concern. Elena Svensson stays ahead at net plus 15, confidence in a full coalition term is 44 to 46, and direction of the Federation stands at 46 right against 47 wrong. The reading is a snapshot of the public mood, not a forecast of an election or a bill's fate.
NATIONAL PARTY VOTING INTENTION If a general election were held today, which party would you support? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 16-18.X.1760AN
GOVERNMENT APPROVAL Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Federal Accord government is doing? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 16-18.X.1760AN
MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING THE FEDERATION What is the most important issue facing the Federation today? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 16-18.X.1760AN
Issue
Percentage
The cost of living
37.0%
Housing
19.0%
The economy and jobs
19.0%
The public debt
14.0%
Other / No opinion
11.0%
Confidence in the Government
CONFIDENCE IN THE GOVERNMENT % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 16-18.X.1760AN
Question
Confident
Not confident
Unsure
Will the government govern effectively?
50.0%
40.0%
10.0%
Will the coalition last a full term?
44.0%
46.0%
10.0%
Party Leader Favorability Ratings
PARTY LEADER FAVORABILITY RATINGS % of registered voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 16-18.X.1760AN
DIRECTION OF THE FEDERATION Do you think the Federation is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? % of registered New Alexandrian voters Margin of error: ±2.2% Survey conducted 16-18.X.1760AN
Tamara Huanca Moreno, a Professor of Consumer and Competition Law, Is Named the Agency's First Head
The Budget and Finances Committee Backed Her by 27 Votes to 15 After an Eleven-Hour Hearing
Humanist Deputies Seydlitz and Strong Pressed Her on Cost and on Independence
She Told the Committee She Would Not Soften a Finding That Names a Large Firm
Unit Pricing Comes First, Written So a Shop With One Till Can Follow It
Speaker Orocobix Magüana Appointed Her for Six Years
Cárdenas, FCD -- By the time the Budget and Finances Committee put the question, late on the evening of 14.XI.1760AN, Tamara Huanca Moreno had been at the witness table for most of eleven hours, and had been asked a dozen different ways whether the Federation needed her at all.
The committee recommended her by 27 votes to 15. The next morning the Speaker of the Federal Assembly, Orocobix Magüana, appointed her the first head of the Federal Consumer Protection Agency, the watchdog set up by the Cost of Living Relief Act. The Government has said the Agency will see that the tax cut on essentials reaches the shelf.[176] She holds the post for six years, and only a two-thirds vote of the Assembly, for cause, can remove her.[177] It is the same route by which Magüana named Ingrid Halvorsen Director of the Federal Budget and Costing Office on 24.V.[178] The 15 votes against came from the Federal Humanist Party, which voted as one against the Act in Sementis (V) and has argued since that the country will pay for the Agency twice.[179]
Huanca Moreno, 51, has taught for nineteen years on the Faculty of Law at the University of Punta Santiago, where she is Professor of Consumer and Competition Law. Before that she spent eight years as an economist in the Antitrust and Market Competitiveness Bureau of the Department of Trade and Industry, the unit the Act now directs the Agency to work alongside.[177] Her last project there was a survey of shelf prices for flour, cooking oil, and infant formula in eleven cities, which found the same packet selling at prices up to a third apart inside a single Region. Her textbook on unit pricing, Price by the Measure, grew out of that survey, and the Act's unit-pricing rule, which requires the price of essential food and energy to be shown by a standard unit of quantity, is now hers to write and enforce.[180] She belongs to no party and has never stood for office.
The chair, Rosalinda Tupa Villegas of the Alliance, opened the hearing by reading out the tenure clause. "Six years, and two-thirds to remove," she said. "The Cortes wrote it that way so the head of this Agency would never need the Government's leave to say what she finds. Our job today is to learn whether she will say it."
In her opening statement Huanca Moreno said the Agency's first work would be the dull part. "A family cannot compare a price it cannot read," she said. "Before we review a single market, the label on a bag of rice has to tell you what a kilo costs, in every shop, in the same way."
The Humanist questioning began with cost. Emmanuel Philibert Seydlitz (FHP), who sits for the Isles of Caputia, asked what the new rules would mean for a grocer with one till on an island the supply boat calls at twice a week. "Every rule you write is a form somebody fills in, and the man who fills it in is not a lawyer," he said. "He puts the hour it costs him on the price of the bread, and the household you mean to protect pays for its own protection." He said the Act funds the Agency from existing departmental appropriations rather than new money,[181] and asked which other office would go short to pay for it.
Huanca Moreno said the unit rule would be written for the smallest shop first. "If a grocer with one till cannot follow it with a pencil and a shelf card, I have written it badly, and I will rewrite it," she said. On the money, she said the Agency would publish what it spent each year beside what it found.
Federico de Almagro y Strong (FHP), the former Vice-President, turned the chair's point about independence around. A body that answers to no minister, he said, can become a weapon for whichever majority chose its head, and he asked whether she would go easier on firms the Accord counted as friends. She said she would not soften a finding for anyone. "If the number is the number, it goes in the report," she said. "If the largest firm in a market is charging the most for the same packet, the report will name it, whoever sits in the Council of State."
Strong then asked whether the Agency would end up setting prices in the shops itself. "It will not. Apart from reference prices for medicines, the Act does not let me set a price, and I would not ask it to," she said.[182]
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said after the vote that the Humanists had voted against the office. "Professor Huanca Moreno is plainly able, and that was never the question," he said. "The question is why a country that has just been promised cheaper bread is paying for a new agency to check the price of it."
Magüana signed the appointment on the morning of 15.XI. "The committee has done its part under the Act," he said. "She answers to the Cortes now."
The Agency must report to the Cortes each year, and each report goes before the chambers through the Secretary of Trade and Industry, Jacqueline Betancourt, who said on 18.VI, when the Government opened the search for the Agency's head, that it would not leave the Agency a year in a drawer.[177][176] Asked during the hearing where the first report would begin, Huanca Moreno answered: "With the price of a kilo of rice, in eleven cities. Then we will see who is charging what, and why."
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Speaker Orocobix Magüana appointed Tamara Huanca Moreno, a professor of consumer and competition law at the University of Punta Santiago and a former economist in the Department of Trade and Industry's antitrust bureau, head of the Federal Consumer Protection Agency on 15.XI.1760AN, after the Budget and Finances Committee recommended her by 27 votes to 15 following an eleven-hour hearing. Humanist deputies pressed her on what the Agency will cost shops and households and on whether it can stay independent; she said unit pricing comes first, written for the smallest shop, and that a report will name any firm the numbers point to. She serves six years and can be removed only by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly for cause.
CROWN PRINCESS SAYARI GIVES BIRTH TO TWINS, A SON AND A DAUGHTER
Residents gather outside the Palace of Carranza following the birth of Prince Pachacútec and Princess Anahí.
Born at the Palace of Carranza on 9.XII.1760AN, the Twins Will Be Known as Prince Pachacútec and Princess Anahí
Pachacútec, Born First, Stands Third in Line to the Throne; His Sister Anahí Stands Fourth
Mother and Both Children Are Well, the Royal Household Says
Their Maternal Grandparents, King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara, Waited at the Palace for the Births
Bells Ring in Lindström as Natopia Marks the Births
Cárdenas, FCD -- Crown Princess Sayari, 38, gave birth to twins, a son and a daughter, at the Palace of Carranza in Cárdenas on 9.XII.1760AN. The son was born first and the daughter a few minutes after him. In a statement that evening the Royal Household said mother and both children were well. Prince Janus, their father, had been with the Princess throughout. His family, the House of Eadric, issued its own statement from Neridia soon afterward.
The Royal Household announced the names the next morning. The son will be known as Prince Pachacútec and the daughter as Princess Anahí. María Teresa de Valencia, the Lord Steward of the Royal Household, said the Princess and Prince Janus had chosen both names themselves before the birth.
The births came within the closing months of the year, as the household had said in III that they would. The Princess had stopped traveling outside the Federation from VIII on medical advice.[183] Twins are not new to Prince Janus's family: his grandmother, Princess Nayaraq, had twins as her first children in 1686AN.[184]
Because Prince Pachacútec was born first, he stands third in line to the throne, behind his mother and his brother, Prince Inti, and Princess Anahí stands fourth. The Succession to the Throne Act, 1700 gives precedence to the elder child without regard to sex.[185] Both children belong to the House of Inti-Carrillo from birth. Like their brother, they hold three citizenships from birth: New Alexandrian, Natopian, and that of Hurmu, which comes through their mother's hereditary membership of the Order of the Holy Lakes.[186]
King Sinchi Roca II, back in Cárdenas since the end of the Royal Goodwill Tour of 1760, waited at the palace with Empress Clara, who had come from Lindström for the birth. Both had been at the palace for Prince Inti's birth on 23.XII.1755AN.[187]"Our family is larger by two tonight, and Inti has a brother and a sister," the King and the Empress said in a joint statement. "We thank the country for its patience, and we ask for a little more of it."
In Lindström, the Imperial Household of Natopia announced the births within the hour. It had arranged no celebrations before the birth, and the bells of the capital were rung the next morning. Prince Nathan, the Crown Princess's brother and heir to the Natopian throne, sent his congratulations to his sister. The twins enter the Natopian succession through their mother, who is second in line to that throne behind him.[183]
By the next morning a crowd had gathered at the palace gates. At midday on 10.XII the batteries above Cárdenas fired the salute they had fired for Prince Inti, and the bells of the Basilica of Saint Alexandra of Cárdenas rang again.[187][188] The household again asked that flowers go to Federation Park rather than the gates, and the proclamation of the births is due in the next Federal Gazette.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Crown Princess Sayari, 38, gave birth to twins at the Palace of Carranza in Cárdenas on 9.XII.1760AN. The son, Prince Pachacútec, was born first and stands third in line behind his mother and his brother, Prince Inti; his sister, Princess Anahí, stands fourth. Mother and children are well. King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara waited at the palace, and Natopia's Imperial Household marked the births in Lindström.
THE BLIVEN FUND'S FIRST TRANSFER REACHES THE ANGLIAN TREASURY, PAID OUT BY A MINISTER WHOSE PARTY CAMPAIGNED AGAINST THE FUND
The Bliven Fund, approved by the Concord Council in 1759AN, made its first transfer to the Anglian treasury on 8.XIII.1760AN.
The Endowment Paid 4.25 Percent of Its Market Value to the Treasury, as Its Rules Set for the First Year
By the Fund's Own Founding Ratio, the Sum Is Roughly an Eighth of a Year's Government Spending
Finance Minister Joost Veenstra Says Every Mark Will Be Published
His Party, te Landbond, Ran Against the Fund as the Old Establishment's Instrument
Former Minister Catrin Halvordssen, Whose Ministry Designed It, Says the Transfer Answers the Campaign
Natopia Supplied 84 Percent of the Capital; Nouvelle Alexandrie Subscribed None
Johannsessbuurg, Anglien -- The Bliven Fund made its first transfer to the treasury of the Free Duchy of Anglien on 8.XIII.1760AN, paying out 4.25 percent of its market value, the share its rules set for the first year. The minister who paid it out belongs to a party that spent last year's election campaign calling the fund a captured instrument of the old establishment.
The endowment was capitalized by five Concord Alliance states at roughly three times the duchy's annual government spending, and is meant to replace the reconstruction grants that ended with the transition.[189] By that founding ratio, a transfer of 4.25 percent comes to roughly an eighth of what the Anglian government spends in a year. The fund is invested entirely abroad and draws a share of its market value rather than a fixed sum, so later transfers will rise and fall with its returns. It is planned to pay out until about 1784AN.[189]
The Minister of Finance and Reconstruction, Joost Veenstra of te Landbond, announced the transfer at the ministry. His party carried the interior bailiwicks of Bahira and Shelsa in the election of XII.1759AN on the charge that the transitional government had captured the reconstruction money, and it named the Bliven Fund, drawn up inside the ministry he now runs, as the means.[189] Asked whether he still held that view, Veenstra said the question was no longer who designed the fund but who watched it. "The money is in the treasury now, and the treasury answers to the Diet. Every mark of it will be published, and the first place anyone will look is Bahira and Shelsa," he said.
The fund's board, which has an Anglian majority and seats directors nominated by the alliance until 1765AN, published its accounts alongside the transfer; its rules require it to publish the portfolio and its fees each quarter.[189] The statement was issued in the board's name.
Catrin Halvordssen, the transitional government's Minister of Finance and Reconstruction, whose ministry drew up the plan that went to the Concord Council in 1757AN, said the transfer answered the campaign against it. "For a year we were told this money would vanish into the capital," she said. "It has arrived in the treasury, on the day and at the rate written down three years ago, and the people who said otherwise are the ones paying it out."
The transfer comes nearly ten months after the last Natopian soldiers left the garrison compound in Johannsessbuurg, ending the alliance's military presence in the duchy.[190]
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:The Bliven Fund made its first transfer to the Anglian treasury on 8.XIII.1760AN, paying 4.25 percent of its market value, roughly an eighth of a year's government spending by the ratio on which it was capitalized. Finance Minister Joost Veenstra, whose party te Landbond campaigned against the fund as the old establishment's instrument, said every mark would be published; former minister Catrin Halvordssen, who designed it, called the transfer an answer to that campaign. Natopia supplied 84 percent of the capital; Nouvelle Alexandrie subscribed none.
NATOPIA BUYS NAX€100 BILLION OF THE FEDERATION'S FIRST RECOVERY BONDS
Private Investors Took NAX€150 Billion of the NAX€250 Billion First Issue
Treasury Says the Issue Priced Inside the Protocol's Yield Cap
The Fifteen-Year Bonds Remain New Alexandrian Public Debt, Repaid by the Federation
Issue Falls Inside the Borrowing That the Supplementary Appropriation Act Authorized in Aureoris (IX)
Montero Says Selling Federal Debt to Natopia Does Not Make It Cheaper
Cárdenas, FCD -- Private investors bought NAX€150 billion of the Federation's first recovery bonds, and Natopia took the remaining NAX€100 billion of the NAX€250 billion issue, the Treasury said on 16.XIII.1760AN. No bond was issued when the Lindström Recovery Protocol was signed in 1759AN; this is the first.
The fifteen-year bonds were sold under the Protocol's backstop, under which Natopia offered to buy authorized New Alexandrian recovery bonds that private investors do not take, up to NAX€250 billion.[191] The Treasury said the issue priced inside the cap of 0.75 percentage points above equivalent Natopian government debt but did not publish the final yield. The rest of the backstop remains available for any further issue the Cortes authorizes.
The Supplementary Appropriation Act, 1760, which raised the federal borrowing limit in Aureoris (IX), authorized the issue as part of borrowing the Treasury already needed to cover lower tax receipts. The bonds remain New Alexandrian public debt and will be repaid by the Federation.
Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez of the Civic Governance Alliance said the issue showed the Federation could borrow at a reasonable cost while its economy recovered. "Three écus in five came from private buyers, and that is the number I watch," Iñiguez said. "The backstop did what it was built to do. It meant we never had to sell this debt in a hurry or at any price the market chose to name."
José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the purchase changed who held the debt but not how much of it there was. "Selling our bonds to Natopia does not make them cheaper to repay," Montero said. "It makes our recovery a little more dependent on decisions taken in Lindström."
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Private investors bought NAX€150 billion of the Federation's first NAX€250 billion recovery-bond issue, and Natopia took the remaining NAX€100 billion under the Lindström Recovery Protocol backstop. The fifteen-year bonds priced inside the Protocol's yield cap and remain New Alexandrian public debt. The issue falls within borrowing the Supplementary Appropriation Act, 1760 already authorized. Treasury Secretary Tomás Iñiguez welcomed the private demand; José Manuel Montero, the Leader of the Opposition, said the debt was no cheaper for being sold to Natopia.
The Johannsessbuurg Man Arrested on 1.VIII Is Named for the First Time
He Faces Two Counts of Attempted Murder and One of an Attack on the Constitutional Order
His Is the First New Prosecution Brought Before the Court That Succeeded the NKR Tribunals
Prosecutors Say He Acted Alone and Do Not Allege Membership in a Proscribed Group
His Lawyer Says He Will Plead Not Guilty
No Trial Date Has Been Set, and the Royal Household Declines to Comment
Johannsessbuurg, Anglien -- Prosecutors in Anglien charged Wouter Dekkersz, a 34-year-old warehouse clerk from Johannsessbuurg, on 10.XIV.1760AN with trying to kill King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara by throwing a hand grenade toward them as they laid a wreath at Plein fonn Versoening on 24.VII. The King and Empress were in the duchy on the fourth leg of the Royal Goodwill Tour, and Clara had been received by her father, Sovereign Duke Edgard III, the same day.[192] The grenade, wrapped in cloth, landed short of the ceremonial area and did not explode.[193]
The charge sheet, filed with the Court for Crimes Against the Constitutional Order, names Dekkersz for the first time. He has been held since the Ducal Police Service's Special Operations Bureau detained him on 1.VIII. He faces two counts of attempted murder, one for each of the royal couple, and one count of an attack on the constitutional order under Chapter X of the constitution, which sets out the duchy's militant-democracy provisions and created the court as the permanent successor to the Special NKR Tribunals.[194] It is the first new prosecution brought before the court since it took over the Tribunals' jurisdiction in IV.1760AN.[195]
The court's chief prosecutor, Ilse Vermaat, said the constitutional count reflected where and when the grenade was thrown, in the square named for the duchy's reconciliation, during the visit of a sovereign the duchy had invited. "An attack on guests of the Free Duchy, at that place, is an attack on the order the constitution protects," she said.
Prosecutors do not allege that Dekkersz belonged to an organization proscribed under the National Recovery Act. Police said on 2.VIII, the day after his arrest, that he took part in an NKR study group before the liberation and kept in touch with former members, but found no organized network behind the attack.[193] Vermaat said prosecutors had likewise found no organized network. Director-General Jan-Hendrik Velsink of the police had said on 2.VIII that the force believed he acted alone.[193]
Dekkersz's lawyer, Femke Roos, said her client would plead not guilty to all three counts. "My client is charged with the gravest crime this court can try, on the strength of a device nobody saw thrown," she said. "The prosecution will have to prove every step of that, and we will hold it to every one." She said he had made no statement to the police beyond confirming his name.
The inquiry drew on the protective intelligence staff of the Federal Royal Guards, the New Alexandrian unit that protects the King.[193] The Royal Household said it would not comment on a case before an Anglian court. No trial date has been set.
▸ OOC: Story Summary & Impact Assessment
TL;DR:Anglian prosecutors charged Wouter Dekkersz, 34, of Johannsessbuurg on 10.XIV.1760AN with two counts of attempted murder of King Sinchi Roca II and Empress Clara and one count of an attack on the constitutional order, over the grenade that failed to explode at the Plein fonn Versoening wreath-laying on 24.VII. It is the first new prosecution before the Court for Crimes Against the Constitutional Order. Prosecutors say he acted alone and allege no membership in a proscribed group; his lawyer says he will plead not guilty. No trial date has been set.
^The general election result, the failed Montero formation, the commissioning of Ferreira Gonçalves as formateur, and the signing of the Accord were reported in NBC Newsfeed/1759.
ANGLIEN'S FIRST COMPETITIVE ELECTION SEATS A BOERHAAF GOVERNMENT
0|Political Stability:
THE FEDERAL ACCORD TAKES POWER AS THE KING OPENS AN ENLARGED 14TH CORTES
SANPANTUL DRAFTS A REFERENDUM TO PARTITION ITS NEW TERRITORIES AND FORM A CONFEDERATION
CONSTANCIAN GOVERNMENT WARNS OF FOREIGN ENEMY INTERFERENCE
KHAN AMIR ÇAKAR, FOUNDER OF THE KENDALL KHANATE, DIES AT 93
ROYAL HOUSEHOLD CONFIRMS CROWN PRINCESS SAYARI IS EXPECTING TWINS; THEY WILL STAND THIRD AND FOURTH IN LINE
AERLA ELECTS ALEXANDER KIM PRESIDENT AS THE DEMOCRATS HOLD A NARROWED ASSEMBLY
FOREIGN ORDERS AND NEW SEAPLANES POINT TO A GROWING NEW ALEXANDRIAN AVIATION SECTOR
THE KING AND EMPRESS LEAVE CÁRDENAS ON THE ROYAL GOODWILL TOUR, BOUND FIRST FOR HUYENKULA
EMPRESS CLARA WELCOMES THE KING TO HER OWN COUNTRY AT TIRLAR
THE BENACIAN UNION HOSTS THE KING AND EMPRESS FOR FOUR DAYS IN CHRYSE AND GOLDFIELD
THE KING AND EMPRESS VISIT THEIR SON-IN-LAW'S FAMILY AT REDQUILL, WHERE THE KING'S AUNT RECEIVES THEM
ZEED IS PROMISED AN EQUAL SHARE OF AVEY'S PORT REVENUE AND ₦60 BILLION FROM NATOPIA IN RUSJAR
EMPRESS CLARA HONORS THE WEST CORUMIAN BATTALION THAT FOUGHT IN ANGLIEN
THE GRAVNOUGHT ZIMIA IS REMEMBERED AT SOUTHMAN, LAST OF THE TWELVE STOPS ON THE ROYAL GOODWILL TOUR
