Lam also said her government foresees a fiscal deficit over the next couple of years or so.

Since August, the Hong Kong government has unveiled three rounds of economic relief measures amounting to HK$20 billion (US$2.55 billion).

The pledge for a fourth round comes after gloomy statistics revealed how battered retailers were along with increasing unemployment as a result of half-year-long social unrest.

She said the HK government had about HK$1.1 trillion in fiscal reserves to weather pressures from bruising Sino-US trade disputes and prolonged anti-government protests. The government is on track for the first fiscal deficit in 15 years for the 12 months ending in March, Lam said.

Lam said she hoped violent incidents will stop as soon as possible to give the economy a chance to recover.

The CE’s call came after violence returned to the city’s streets over the weekend after about a fortnight of peace.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the weekly Executive Council meeting on Tuesday, Lam said the United States’ Hong Kong-related legislation was totally “unacceptable” and “unnecessary”, and would  have a negative impact on Hong Kong’s economy.

She regretted US President Donald Trump’s move last week to sign the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law, saying Hong Kong residents’ freedom had already been guaranteed.

Lam said the piece of legislation would undermine the international community’s confidence in Hong Kong, noting that thousands of American enterprises, which had their regional headquarters in the city, were also opposed to the Act for fear of economic uncertainties.

Lam said the SAR government would follow the Foreign Ministry’s countermeasures, including barring US military from Hong Kong ports.

To help Hong Kong’s economy recover, the SAR government is helping Hong Kong businesses to explore options in Thailand and other ASEAN countries.

Earlier, Lam and Thailand’s deputy prime minister Somkid Jatusripitak had signed a memorandum of understanding that included a plan to pursue a free trade deal.

Bruno Le Maire, France’s Finance Minister, vowed what he called a “strong European riposte” on Trump’s proposed tariffs – as much as 100 percent on approximately $2.4 billion in imported goods, included beloved wines, cheeses and certain designer clothes.

“This is not the behavior we expect from the United States vis-a-vis one of its principal allies, France, and, in a general manner, Europe,” Le Maire said, speaking on France’s Radio Classique. He called the proposed tariffs “unacceptable.”

Agnes Pannier-Runacher, a junior French economy minister, was even more unflinching in her remarks. “We need to be pugnacious,” she said Tuesday, speaking to France’s Sud Radio.

The Trump administration’s proposal, announced late Monday, comes in retaliation to an earlier French tax on certain U.S. tech firms, including Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. (Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive officer, also owns The Washington Post).

Known as the “GAFA,” the tax entails 3% of the annual revenue that those four firms earn in France. It has long been a point of contention between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, who initially enjoyed a relatively drama-free relationship. They have butted heads, however, ever since Macron failed to convince Trump to preserve the Iran deal in 2018, a signature policy achievement of the Obama administration.

“They’re our companies, they’re American companies,” Trump said. “If anyone is going to take advantage of the American companies, it’s going to be us. It’s not going to be France.”

Trump also disparaged controversial remarks about NATO that Macron made last month as “very, very nasty.” In an interview with the Economist, the French president described what he called NATO’s “brain death,” which he couched largely as a function of diminished American support under Trump.

Macron had struggled to find broad E.U. support for his digital tax, so France’s threat of a “strong European riposte” to the U.S. on its behalf is unclear.

“In this, as in all other trade related matters, the European Union will act and react as one,” said Daniel Rosario, the European Commission’s spokesman for trade and agriculture, speaking to reporters in Brussels on Tuesday.

Rosario said that the E.U. would “seek immediate discussions with the United States on how to solve this issue amicably.”

The Trump administration’s announcement had an immediate impact on the markets on Tuesday morning. Shares in Hermès, the French luxury brand known for handbags and silks, dropped by roughly 2%; those of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH fell by 1.5%.

Graphika, a cyber intelligence firm, yesterday pulled back the curtain on the online effort to target mostly British politicians, celebrities and journalists with a trove of documents appearing to detail key U.S.-U.K. trade negotiations. Graphika’s report comes as the documents emerge as a key point of debate in the runup to the election. The opposition Labour Party is using classified documents initially disseminated on Reddit in October to make the case that the future of the popular state-run National Health Service is at risk under a post-Brexit trade deal with the United States.

Ben Nimmo, the director of investigations at Graphika, says the campaign identified to spread the documents “certainly resembles” a foreign influence operation. Such an operation “raises the risk” of foreign interference in the British elections, Nimmo told me in an interview.

Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is running against Prime Minister Boris Johnson, garnered broad media coverage when he unveiled the documents during a debate and news conference last month. But researchers found the same documents were posted online and garnering little attention on sites like Reddit in October and early November – despite posters’ best efforts to get them in front of an audience.

The trade documents were first posted on Reddit by a user called Gregoratior, who made grammatical errors similar to those made by Secondary Infektion, a disinformation campaign emerging from Russia identified by researchers earlier this year. Then a Twitter user known as @gregoratior began tweeting a Reddit post linking the document to senior U.K. politicians and media figures. The account appeared to go to great lengths to attract an audience for the documents, including tweeting at public figures such as actress Bette Midler. Twitter has since suspended the account.

The overall campaign appears to have had little success in swaying public figures to amplify the documents via social media, but it serves as a cautionary tale as the British and 2020 U.S. election loom closer. Researchers warn that public figures with large social media followings could be increasingly targeted in order to amplify controversial messaging.

“Influencers, politicians, journalists need to be aware of the fact that they are going to be personally targeted by information operations,” Nimmo told me.

Influence operations don’t just throw their information “to the wind,” Nimmo said. They increasingly take a targeted approach, trying to identify people who may help amplify their message. In this instance, the actors conducting the campaign appeared to think the best targets were opposition politicians. Their tweets appeared to have an anti-Johnson and anti-conservative sentiment, Nimmo told me, and the actors largely tagged politicians challenging Johnson.

The actors also jumped around various social networks, a tactic Nimmo said is becoming more common as large tech companies including Twitter and Facebook step up their defenses. “They’re trying much harder to hide,” Nimmo told me. “The recent information operation have been less effective and have had less reach than what we saw in 2016 because they know the platforms are searching for them.”

Nimmo said it wasn’t immediately clear whether the actors behind the campaign were Russian or just trying to imitate previous Russian information campaigns.

“Either way, it looks like someone was trying to use leaks to influence the election debate,” Nimmo said.

The researchers also don’t know how the Reddit poster initially obtained the leaked documents. Reuters, which first reported on Graphika’s research, was unable to independently confirm that the documents were genuine. Labour and the British government declined to comment on the report to Reuters.

Graphika’s research is surfacing as questions are mounting about whether tech companies are doing enough to identify foreign influence operations. But the operation would have been very difficult for the social media titans to detect because only a small number of accounts produced a low volume of posts, Nimmo said.

Twitter said it suspended the @gregoratior account for violating its rules against spam. “Posting spammy content is a violation of the Twitter Rules and we take aggressive enforcement action when we identify this content on our service, in line with our commitment to improving the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough said in a statement to The Technology 202.

Reddit said it was looking into Graphika’s findings. “The integrity of our site is of paramount importance and we are investigating these findings,” Reddit spokeswoman Leigh Ann Benicewicz said in a statement. “We are always evolving our approaches to detecting malicious and coordinated activity and will continue to be open with our community and investigators on these issues.”

“In some ways, I like the idea of waiting until after the election for the China deal, but they want to make a deal now and we will see whether or not the deal is going to be right,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, the first day of the alliance’s 70th anniversary summit.

Dow Jones industrial average futures slid roughly 250 points, or 0.9%, after the Trump comments, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 futures were down roughly 0.7%. U.S. markets were already off to a rocky December after disappointing manufacturing and construction data, coupled with Trump’s Monday announcement that he would reimpose tariffs on steel and aluminum from Brazil and Argentina.

For much of the protracted trade war with Beijing, Trump has contradicted himself on when a deal might be reached or how willing he is to come to the table. The next deadline is Dec. 15, when a new set of U.S. levies would hit roughly $160 billion in Chinese goods. People familiar with the talks told The Washington Post last month that those tariffs would disappear if a deal was brokered beforehand.

In October, Trump said the United States and China had reached a “phase one” deal, marking the first tangible achievement in the long-running economic clash that’s affected hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and which analysts projected would stunt global trade and cost American jobs. With the preliminary deal, Trump said Beijing had agreed to roughly double its purchase of U.S. farm goods to more than $40 billion a year, open its financial services market, tighten its intellectual property protections and refrain from using currency as a trade weapon.

On Tuesday, Trump also derided recent comments made by French President Emmanuel Macron – in which Macron described the “brain death” of NATO due to lack of American support – as “very very nasty” and “very disrespectful.”

“I would say that nobody needs NATO more than France,” Trump said. “That’s why I think when France makes a statement like they made about NATO, that’s a very dangerous statement for them to make.”

Just the day before, Trump threatened new tariffs of up to 100% on $2.4 billion in French products, including wine, cheese and yogurt. Trump’s top trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, said the levies came in response to a French digital services tax that the U.S. determined is discriminating against American Internet companies.

Two Indonesian Military (TNI) personnel were injured in the incident.

“Our team at the crime scene discovered that the explosion was allegedly caused by a smoke grenade,” Jakarta Police chief Insp. Gen. Gatot Eddy Pramono told a press briefing.

He said the device exploded at around 7:15 a.m. along the northern end of the monument park across the Home Ministry on Jl. Medan Merdeka Utara.

The ministry is located around 400 meters from the State Palace.

Teams from the police’s Gegana bomb squad and the Indonesia Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (Inafis) were still investigating the site of the explosion to determine how the smoke grenade came to be at the park.

Gatot said that members of the public could continue with their daily activities in the area, which the police had already cleared during an initial sweep.

“This is just a smoke grenade, don’t exaggerate this. The grenade could belong to our [security] personnel, [who] left it there,” Gatot said, stressing that it was an “ordinary” accident.

The two TNI personnel injured in the blast were identified as Sgt. Maj. Fajar and Chief Pvt. Gunawan, who have been taken to the Gatot Subroto Central Army Hospital for treatment.

“Fajar sustained injuries to his left hand, because he was holding the smoke grenade when it went off. Meanwhile, Gunawan’s injuries were lighter, [and] he was able to call for help,” said Jayakarta Military District Commander Maj. Gen. Eko Margiyono.

Eko added that the two victims were at morning exercises with other TNI personnel when the incident occurred, adding that some units held regular exercises at the park on Tuesday mornings.

“This [incident] is nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. (kuk)