(AP) — Bending to a wave of mass protests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his contentious judicial overhaul plan Monday and said he wanted “to avoid civil war” by making time to seek a compromise with political opponents.
The announcement appeared to calm some of the tensions that have fueled three tumultuous months of unrest. But it failed to address the underlying issues that have polarized the nation, and the anti-government protest movement vowed to intensify its efforts.
In his prime-time address, Netanyahu, who had previously rejected calls to delay the legislation, took a more conciliatory tone than in recent speeches. He acknowledged the deep divisions in the country and said he was hitting the pause button “to prevent a rift in the nation.”
“When there’s an opportunity to avoid civil war through dialogue, I, as prime minister, am taking a timeout for dialogue,” he said. He vowed to reach a “broad consensus” during the summer session of parliament, which begins on April 30.
He spoke after tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated outside parliament, and the country’s largest labor union launched a nationwide strike in a dramatic escalation of the mass protest movement against his plan.
Netanyahu and his religious and ultranationalist allies presented the overhaul in January just days after forming their government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history.
The proposal has plunged Israel into its worst domestic crisis in decades. Business leaders, top economists and former security chiefs have all come out against the plan, saying it is pushing the country toward an autocracy. Fighter pilots and military reservists have threatened not to report for duty, and the country’s currency, the shekel, has tumbled in value.
The plan would give Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, and his allies the final say in appointing the nation’s judges. It would also give parliament, which is controlled by his allies, authority to overturn Supreme Court decisions and limit the court’s ability to review laws.
Netanyahu has argued that the overhaul is needed to rein in a liberal and overly interventionist court of unelected judges. But his opponents say the package would damage the country’s system of checks and balances by concentrating power in the hands of Netanyahu’s allies. They also say that he has a conflict of interest as a criminal defendant.
Tens of thousands of people, largely secular, middle-class Israelis, have regularly joined mass protests against the plan.
Those demonstrations ramped up Sunday night after Netanyahu abruptly fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had urged the prime minister to put his plan on hold, citing concerns about damage to the Israeli military.
The firing sparked a spontaneous outburst of anger, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets in just one hour.
Chanting “the country is on fire,” they lit bonfires on Tel Aviv’s main highway, closing the thoroughfare and many others throughout the country for hours.
Demonstrators continued Monday outside the Knesset, or parliament, turning the streets surrounding the building and the Supreme Court into a roiling sea of blue-and-white Israeli flags dotted with rainbow Pride banners.
“This is the last chance to stop this move into a dictatorship,” said Matityahu Sperber, 68, who joined a stream of people headed to the protest outside the Knesset. “I’m here for the fight to the end.”
Israel’s main trade union, the histadrut, declared a general strike in what it said was the first time it has carried out such an action over a political issue.
The chaos shut down much of the country and threatened to paralyze the economy. Departing flights from the main international airport were grounded, stranding tens of thousands of travelers.
Large mall chains and universities closed their doors, and the union called for its 800,000 members to stop work in health care, transit, banking and other fields.
Diplomats walked off the job at foreign missions, and local governments were expected to close preschools and cut other services. The main doctors union announced that its members would also strike.
In a sign of easing tensions, the union said late Monday that it was halting the strike in response to Netanyahu’s delay.
The announcement appeared to buy the embattled Netanyahu several weeks of quiet. But it was far from clear whether the disputes could be resolved.
The country’s figurehead president, Isaac Herzog, said pausing the legislative blitz was “the right thing.”
“This is the time for frank, serious and responsible discussion that will lead urgently to calming spirits and lowering the flames,” he said.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said he was willing to hold a “genuine dialogue” under Herzog’s sponsorship.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who has pushed for quick passage of the package, said he would respect the delay but showed few signs of compromise.
“The reform will pass,” he tweeted. “No one will scare us.”
The first of a series of laws — giving the coalition control over judicial appointments — had been scheduled to pass this week.
Before Netanyahu’s speech, some 20,000 right-wing Israelis attended a counter demonstration in support of the prime minister. That demonstration also took place near parliament and passed without violence.
“They won’t steal the election from us,” read a flyer for event, organized by Religious Zionist party. Netanyahu said he was “moved” by the show of support.
Shikma Bressler, one of the leaders of the anti-government protest movement, said the campaign would continue until the legislation is canceled.
“This is just an attempt to weaken the protests in order to enact Netanyahu’s dictatorship,” she said. “Now is not the time to reduce the pressure, but to increase it.”
Dozens of protesters from rival sides faced off late Monday in central Tel Aviv. The sides, kept apart by police, exchanged insults, but there was no violence. Police used a water cannon to disperse anti-government protesters.
Israel’s Palestinian citizens have largely sat out the protests. Many say Israel’s democracy is tarnished by its military rule over their brethren in the West Bank and the discrimination they themselves face.
The Biden administration, which has been uneasy with Netanyahu and the far-right elements of his government, welcomed the announcement as “an opportunity to create additional time and space for compromise,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow this week for a bilateral Summit. As per reports, the meetings yielded no breakthrough on resolving the conflict in Ukraine.
Both leaders called for the cessation of actions that “increase tensions” and “prolong” the war in Ukraine, according to their joint statement released by China’s Foreign Ministry. The statement did not acknowledge that Russia’s invasion and military assault were the cause of ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
The leaders also urged NATO to “respect the sovereignty, security, interests,” of other countries – a reference that appeared to echo long-standing rhetoric from both countries blaming the Western security alliance for provoking Russia to invade.
Discussion of China’s murky proposal to end the war in Ukraine appeared only in the last section of their joint statement, offering no specifics about a way forward. In a warning to Western countries supporting Ukraine, it said that any settlement to the crisis must “prevent the formation of confrontational blocs that add fuel to the flames.”
China’s peace plan for Ukraine could be used as a basis to end the war, Vladimir Putin has said. But, Putin said the plan could be put forward only when they are ready “in the West and Kyiv”.
China’s plan, published last month, does not explicitly call for Russia to leave Ukraine.
Listing 12 points, it calls for peace talks and respect for national sovereignty, without specific proposals. But Ukraine has insisted on Russia withdrawing from its territory as a condition for any talks – and there is no sign that Russia is ready to do that.
In a joint news conference after talks with Xi, Putin said: “Many provisions of the Chinese peace plan can be taken as the basis for settling of the conflict in Ukraine, whenever the West and Kyiv are ready for it.” But Russia had yet to see such “readiness” from the other side, he added.
Xi Jinping has wrapped up a state visit to Moscow, where he held nearly three full days of talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The two men have a close relationship and have met 40 times now in the last decade.
Putin had long been shunned by Western leaders over the invasion. And yet in meetings with Xi before cameras, the Chinese leader praised Putin’s “strong leadership” — even encouraging Russians to support another term for their president when he stands for reelection in 2024.
Xi said he was “very happy” to be in Moscow and described talks with President Putin as “frank, open and friendly”. His visit to Russia came days after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Putin on war crimes allegations.
The New York Times summed up the visit this way: “Talk of Ukraine was overshadowed by Mr. Xi’s vow of ironclad solidarity with Russia as a political, diplomatic, economic and military partner: two superpowers aligned in countering American dominance and a Western-led world order. The summit showed Mr. Xi’s intention to entrench Beijing’s tilt toward Moscow against what he recently called an effort by the United States at the full-fledged “containment” of China.”
The International Criminal Court has reported that it has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes, accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.
According to reports, this is the first time the global court has issued a warrant against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The ICC said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of (children) and that of unlawful transfer of (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
ICC President Piotr Hofmanski said in a video statement that while the ICC’s judges have issued the warrants, it will be up to the international community to enforce them. The court has no police force of its own to do so.
The ICC said its pre-trial chamber found “reasonable grounds” that Putin “bears individual criminal responsibility” for the child abductions “for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others” and for failing to “exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts.”
If tried and found guilty, the ICC can impose a maximum sentence of life imprisonment “when justified by the extreme gravity of the crime,” according to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute, that established it as a permanent court of last resort to prosecute political leaders and other key perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities — war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The move was immediately dismissed by Moscow — and welcomed by Ukraine as a major breakthrough. Its practical implications, however, could be limited as the chances of Putin facing trial at the ICC are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.
But the moral condemnation will likely stain the Russian leader for the rest of his life — and in the more immediate future, whenever he seeks to attend an international summit in a nation bound to arrest him.
Ukraine’s human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, has said that based on data from the country’s National Information Bureau, 16,226 children were deported. Ukraine has managed to bring back 308 children.
“So, Putin might go to China, Syria, Iran, his … few allies, but he just won’t travel to the rest of the world and won’t travel to ICC member states who he believes would … arrest him,” said Adil Ahmad Haque, an expert in international law and armed conflict at Rutgers University.
Others agreed. “Vladimir Putin will forever be marked as a pariah globally. He has lost all his political credibility around the world. Any world leader who stands by him will be shamed as well,” David Crane, a former international prosecutor, told The Associated Press.
The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. The AP reported on her involvement in the abduction of Ukrainian orphans in October, in the first investigation to follow the process all the way to Russia, relying on dozens of interviews and documents.
Still, the chances of Putin or Lvova-Belova facing trial remain extremely remote, as Moscow does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction — a position it vehemently reaffirmed last week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia doesn’t recognize the ICC and considers its decisions “legally void.” He called the court’s move “outrageous and unacceptable.” Peskov refused to comment when asked if Putin would avoid making trips to countries where he could be arrested on the ICC’s warrant.
Lvova-Belova, who was also implicated in the warrants, reacted with dripping sarcasm. “It is great that the international community has appreciated the work to help the children of our country, that we do not leave them in war zones, that we take them out, we create good conditions for them, that we surround them with loving, caring people,” she said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a “historic decision, from which historic responsibility will begin.” Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador, recalled that on the night of Russia’s invasion, “I said at the Security Council meeting that there is no purgatory for war criminals, they go straight to hell. Today, I would like to say that those of them who will remain alive after the military defeat of Russia will have to make a stop in The Hague on their way to hell.”
In Washington, President Joe Biden called the ICC’s decision “justified,” and that Putin “clearly committed war crimes.” While the US does not recognize the court either, Biden said it “makes a very strong point” to call out the Russian leader’s actions in ordering the invasion.
While Ukraine is also not a member of the global court, it has granted it jurisdiction over its territory and ICC prosecutor Karim Khan has visited four times since opening an investigation a year ago. Besides Russia and Ukraine, the United States and China are not members of the 123-member ICC.
During a visit this month, ICC prosecutor Khan said he went to a care home for children 2 kilometers (just over a mile) from front lines in southern Ukraine. “The drawings pinned on the wall … spoke to a context of love and support that was once there,” he said in a statement. “But this home was empty, a result of alleged deportation of children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation or their unlawful transfer to other parts of the temporarily occupied territories. As I noted to the United Nations Security Council last September, these alleged acts are being investigated by my office as a priority. Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war,” Khan said.
And while Russia rejected the allegations and warrants, others said the ICC action will have an important impact. “The ICC has made Putin a wanted man and taken its first step to end the impunity that has emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s war against Ukraine for far too long,” said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “The warrants send a clear message that giving orders to commit, or tolerating, serious crimes against civilians may lead to a prison cell in The Hague.”
Crane, who indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor 20 years ago for crimes in Sierra Leone, said dictators and tyrants around the world “are now on notice that those who commit international crimes will be held accountable.” Taylor was eventually detained and put on trial at a special court in the Netherlands. He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years’ imprisonment.
On Thursday, a U.N.-backed inquiry cited Russian attacks against civilians in Ukraine, including systematic torture and killing in occupied regions, among potential issues that amount to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The sweeping investigation also found crimes committed against Ukrainians on Russian territory, including deported Ukrainian children who were prevented from reuniting with their families, a “filtration” system aimed at singling out Ukrainians for detention, and torture and inhumane detention conditions.
Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued a warrant for President Vladimir Putin’s arrest, it is no more than the first step in a very long process. The United Nations clearly believes there is sufficient evidence to accuse the Russian leader of war crimes in Ukraine.
The court was established in 2002 by a treaty known as the Rome Statute. This statute lays down that it is the duty of every state to exercise its own criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes. The ICC can only intervene where a state is unable or unwilling to carry out the investigation and prosecute perpetrators. In all, 123 states have agreed to abide by it, but there are some significant exceptions, including Russia.
The idea of trying people for crimes against humanity pre-dates the existence of the ICC. It began in 1945 after World War Two with the Nuremberg Trials, which were held to punish key members of the hierarchy in Nazi Germany for the Holocaust and other atrocities.
Those included Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and died by his own hand in 1987. Putin has not actually been charged with crimes against humanity, even though US Vice-President Kamala Harris has argued that he should be.
The arrest warrant is being seen as a signal from the international community that what is taking place in Ukraine is against international law. The court says the reason it is going public with these warrants is that these crimes are continuing. In doing so, it is trying to deter further crimes taking place.
US Senators Bill Hagerty and Jeff Merkley have introduced a bipartisan Senate resolution reaffirming the US’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an “integral part of the Republic of India”.
The resolution comes following a major clash between India and China in the Eastern Sector along the Line of Actual Control in six years.
China claims India’s Arunachal Pradesh as part of its territory, calling it “Southern Tibet”. The two countries fought a bloody battle in 1962 in the region.
Named after British official Sir Henry McMahon, it’s a frontier between Tibet and colonial India in the eastern sector which was negotiated during the 1914 Simla Convention. China has never recognized this boundary though.
The present de facto border, the Line of Actual Control (LAC), runs from Arunachal Pradesh in the east to Ladakh in the west.
Picture : Monday India
“This bipartisan resolution expresses the Senate’s support for unequivocally recognizing the state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of India, condemning China’s military aggression to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control,” Senator Bill Hagerty, who along with Senator Jeff Merkley introduced a resolution in the Senate, said on Tuesday.
Furthermore, the resolution commends India for taking steps to defend itself against aggression and security threats from China. These efforts include securing India’s telecommunications infrastructure; examining its procurement processes and supply chains; implementing investment screening standards; and expanding its cooperation with Taiwan in public health and other sectors.
“At a time when China continues to pose grave and gathering threats to the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, it’s critical for the US to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our strategic partners in the region — especially India,” said Senator Hagerty in a statement.
“This bipartisan resolution expresses the Senate’s support for unequivocally recognizing the state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of India, condemning China’s military aggression to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control, and further enhancing the US-India strategic partnership and the Quad in support of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific.
“America’s values supporting freedom and a rules-based order must be at the center of all of our actions and relationships around the world — especially as the Chinese government pushes an alternative vision,” said Senator Merkley.
“This resolution makes clear that the US views the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of India — not China — and commits the US to deepening support and assistance to the region, alongside like-minded international partners and donors.”
The resolution reaffirms that the US recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and pushes back against China’s claims that Arunachal Pradesh is its territory, which is a part of China’s increasingly aggressive and expansionist policies, the statement said.
The Senators’ resolution condemns additional Chinese provocations, including China’s use of military force to change the status quo along the Line of Actual Control, construction of villages in contested areas, publication of maps with Mandarin-language names for cities and features in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and expansion of Chinese territorial claims in Bhutan.
Furthermore, the resolution commends the Indian government for taking steps to defend itself against aggression and security threats from China. These efforts include securing India’s telecommunications infrastructure; examining its procurement processes and supply chains; implementing investment screening standards; and expanding its cooperation with Taiwan in public health and other sectors, the Senators said.
The announcement was surprising yet expected. The two regional powerhouses have been in talks to re-establish diplomatic relations for nearly two years. At times, negotiators seemed to drag their feet, the deep distrust between the two countries appearing immovable.
Iran’s talks with Saudi Arabia were unfolding at the same time as negotiations between Iran and the United States to revive the 2016 nuclear deal were faltering. The outcomes of both sets of Iran talks seemed interlinked – Riyadh and Washington have long walked in lockstep on foreign policy.
Picture : NBC
But a shift in regional alliances is afoot. Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the US has become strained in recent years, while China’s standing has risen. Unlike Washington, Beijing has shown an ability to transcend the many rivalries that crisscross the Middle East. China has forged good diplomatic relations with countries across the region, driven by strengthening economic ties, without the Western lectures on human rights.
Xi gave no details of the ruling Communist Party’s plans in a speech to China’s ceremonial legislature. But Beijing has been increasingly assertive since he took power in 2012 and called for changes in the International Monetary Fund and other entities it says fail to reflect the desires of developing countries.
China should “actively participate in the reform and construction of the global governance system” and promote “global security initiatives,” said Xi, the country’s most powerful leader in decades. That will add “positive energy to world peace and development,” Xi said.
Last week, Xi was named to another term in the ceremonial presidency after breaking with tradition in October and awarding himself a third-five year term as general secretary of the ruling party, putting himself on track to become leader for life.
The National People’s Congress on March 12th cemented Xi’s dominance by endorsing the appointment of his loyalists as premier and other government leaders in a once-a-decade change. Xi has sidelined potential rivals and loaded the top ranks of the ruling party with his supporters.
The new premier, Li Qiang, tried Monday to reassure entrepreneurs but gave no details of possible plans to improve conditions after Xi’s government spent the past decade building up state companies that control banking, energy, steel, telecoms and other industries.
Li’s comments echoed promises by other Chinese leaders over the past six months to support entrepreneurs who generate jobs and wealth. They have vowed to simplify regulations and taxes but have given no indication they plan to rein in state companies that entrepreneurs complain drain away their profits.
The ruling party will “treat enterprises of all types of ownership equally” and “support the development and growth of private enterprises,” Li said. “Our leading cadres at all levels must sincerely care about and serve private enterprises,” he said.
Chinese officials earlier indicated anti-monopoly and data security crackdowns that knocked tens of billions of dollars off the stock market value of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and other tech companies were ending. But entrepreneurs were rattled anew in February when a star banker who played a leading role in tech deals disappeared. Bao Fan’s company said he was “cooperating in an investigation” but gave no details.
Li said Beijing will make a priority of job creation as it tries to revive economic growth that sank to 3% last year, the second-lowest level in decades. This year’s official growth target is “around 5%.”
The premier expressed confidence China can cope as its workforce shrinks. The number of potential workers age 15 to 59 has fallen by more than 5% from its 2011 peak, an unusually abrupt decline for a middle-income country.
Li said that while China is losing its “demographic dividend” of young workers, better education means it is gaining a “talent dividend.” He said some 15 million people still enter the workforce every year. “Abundant human resources is still China’s outstanding advantage,” he said.
Abroad, Beijing also has built on China’s growing heft as the second-largest economy to promote trade and construction initiatives that Washington, Tokyo, Moscow and New Delhi worry will expand its strategic influence at their expanse.
Those include the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to construct ports, railways and other trade-related infrastructure across an arc of countries from the South Pacific through Asia to Africa and Europe. China also is promoting trade and security initiatives.
A “Global Security Initiative” issued in February said China is “ready to conduct bilateral and multilateral security cooperation with all countries.” It offered to help African countries resolve disputes and to set up a “new security framework in the Middle East.”
Also last month, Beijing called for a cease-fire in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed Chinese involvement but said success would require action in addition to words. Beijing has refused to criticize President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and has accused Western governments of provoking the invasion.
The agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia could herald the end of a blood-drenched era in the Middle East. Riyadh and Tehran have been at ideological and military loggerheads since Iran’s Islamic Revolution installed an anti-Western, Shia theocracy in 1979.
Those tensions began to escalate into a region-wide proxy war after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq spiraled into civil conflict, with both Iran and Saudi Arabia vying for influence in the petrol-rich Arab country. Armed conflict that pitted Saudi-backed militants against Iran-backed armed groups washed over much of the region in the decade and a half that followed.
In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition military campaign to quash Iranian-backed rebels triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. In Syria, Iran supported President Bashar al-Assad as he brutalized his own people, only to find his forces facing off with rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. In Lebanon too, Iran and Saudi Arabia have backed different factions, contributing to a two-decade-long political crisis that has exacted a huge economic and security toll on the tiny eastern Mediterranean country.
Diplomatic relations were officially severed in 2016 when Saudi Arabia executed prominent Shia Saudi cleric Nimr al-Nimr, leading rioters in Tehran to torch the Saudi embassy.
But a slew of economic problems triggered by the pandemic and costly wars may have eroded the appetite for conflict, and Saudi and Iranian officials say they are eager to turn the page on that dark chapter.
The détente appears to go far beyond the resumption of diplomatic relations. Saudi and Iranian officials say they will also work to reimplement a decades-old security cooperation pact and revive an even older agreement on technology, and trade.
It’s a rare piece of good news for a region still reeling from their rivalry. How that plays out – and whether it can undo the havoc wreaked by the rivalry – remains to be seen.
But analysts say that China’s growing leverage in the region helped hedge both countries’ bets, changing a now-outdated political calculus that once made Western capitals the most likely venue for watershed regional accords.
“China is now the godfather of this agreement and given China’s strategic importance to Iran, that holds tremendous weight,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst familiar with the Saudi leadership’s thinking.
Demonstrators across the nation blocked streets and major highways throughout Israel on March 16, 2023 continuing nationwide protests over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s plan to overhaul the country’s judicial system. Despite the widespread unrest, the conservative administration appeared determined to move forward with legislation that would upend Israel’s legal system by handing Netanyahu’s government full control over the country’s judiciary, with the sovereignty of the Supreme Court also at stake.
Netanyahu and his allies say the country’s unelected judges have too much power and need to be reined in. His opponents say that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, has a deep conflict of interest. They say his planned overhaul will destroy the country’s democratic checks and balances and is a poorly disguised plot to make his criminal case go away.
Picture : CNN
Last week, half a million Israelis took to the streets in the tenth consecutive week of protests against plans by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the country’s judicial system, organizers claimed. Israel has a population of just over 9 million, so if organizers’ estimates are correct, about 5% of Israelis came out to voice their opposition to the proposed reforms.
Nearly half of the protesters – about 240,000 – gathered in Tel Aviv, the organizers said. In Jerusalem, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of President Isaac Herzog’s house. They carried Israeli flags and chanted slogans including “Israel will not be a dictatorship.”
On Thursday, Herzog – whose role is largely ceremonial – urged the Netanyahu government to take the judicial overhaul legislation off the table. Protesters and critics of Netanyahu’s plan say it would weaken the country’s courts and erode the judiciary’s ability to check the power of the country’s other branches of government.
The package of legislation would give Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the power to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority. It would also give the government the power to nominate judges, which currently rests with a committee composed of judges, legal experts and politicians.
It would remove power and independence from government ministries’ legal advisers, and take away the power of the courts to invalidate “unreasonable” government appointments, as the High Court did in January, forcing Netanyahu to fire Interior and Health Minister Aryeh Deri.
Critics accuse Netanyahu of pushing the legislation in order to get out of corruption trials he is currently facing. Netanyahu denies that, saying the trials are collapsing on their own, and that the changes are necessary after judicial overreach by unelected judges.
Israel does not have a written constitution, but a set of what are called Basic Laws. “We are done being polite,” said Shikma Bressler, an Israeli protest leader. “If the laws being suggested will pass, Israel will no longer be a democracy.”
About two out of three (66%) Israelis believe the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Israel’s Basic Laws, and about the same proportion (63%) say they support the current system of nominating judges, according to a poll last month for the Israel Democracy Institute.
“The only thing this government cares about is crushing Israeli democracy,” opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said. The proposal has touched off deep political discord in Israel in recent weeks, with public turmoil reaching a fever pitch one day after Netanyahu and members of his right-wing coalition snubbed a proposal by President Isaac Herzog that was widely supported as a viable alternative to the controversial shakeup.
Herzog and protest leaders have continued to warn that political chaos gripping the nation had potential to ignite a civil war unless a compromise could be reached soon.
More than 100 UN member-states have finally agreed, following years of talks, to a draft of the first international UN treaty to protect the high seas, a fragile and vital treasure that covers nearly half the planet. After years of negotiations, negotiators from more than 100 countries completed the UN treaty – a long-awaited step that environmental groups say will help reverse marine biodiversity losses and ensure sustainable development.
Once adopted, the treaty will be legally binding on the member-states. Pending for 15 years. Aimed at conserving and ensuring the sustainable use of ocean biodiversity, this treaty’s draft was agreed upon on Saturday, a day after the original deadline, in New York after 15 years of negotiation.
Among the contentious issues was an agreement to share the benefits of “marine genetic resources” used in biotech and other industries, dragging out the talks.
In June 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had declared an “ocean emergency” at the UN Ocean Conference in Portugal, citing threats to the world’s oceans.
What are the high seas?
High seas are oceanic areas beyond the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) — beyond 200 nautical miles from the coastlines — of the countries. They are under the jurisdiction of no country.
High seas comprise more than 60% of the world’s oceans, and nearly half the planet’s surface.
Only about 1% of the high seas are currently protected.
Nearly 10% of marine species are facing the risk of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Oceans regulate global climate in — providing oxygen for human and animal life, driving weather systems and storing about 25% of the carbon dioxide generated by human activities.
The legally binding pact to conserve and ensure the sustainable use of ocean biodiversity, under discussion for 15 years, was finally agreed after five rounds of protracted UN-led negotiations.
The treaty is seen as a crucial component in global efforts to bring 30 percent of the world’s land and sea under protection by the end of the decade, a target known as “30 by 30” agreed in Montreal, Canada, in December last year.
The treaty will also oblige countries to conduct environmental impact assessments of proposed activities on the high seas.
Economic interests were a major sticking point throughout the latest round of negotiations, which began on February 20, with developing countries calling for a greater share of the spoils from the “blue economy”, including the transfer of technology.
An agreement to share the benefits of “marine genetic resources” used in industries like biotechnology also remained an area of contention until the end, dragging out talks.
What are high seas?
The high seas begin at the border of countries’ exclusive economic zones, which extend up to 370km (200 nautical miles) from coastlines. Beyond that point, the seas are under the jurisdiction of no country.
Even though the high seas comprise more than 60 percent of the world’s oceans and nearly half the planet’s surface, they have long drawn far less attention than coastal waters and a few iconic species.
Ocean ecosystems create half the oxygen humans breathe and limit global warming by absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities. But they are threatened by climate change, pollution and overfishing.
Only about 1 percent of the high seas are currently protected.
‘Victory for multilateralism’
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres commended the delegates, according to a spokesperson, who said the agreement was a “victory for multilateralism and for global efforts to counter the destructive trends facing ocean health, now and for generations to come”.
“It is crucial for addressing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution,” a UN statement said.
Greenpeace says 11 million square km (4.2 million square miles) of ocean needs to be put under protection every year until 2030 to meet the target.
“Countries must formally adopt the treaty and ratify it as quickly as possible to bring it into force, and then deliver the fully protected ocean sanctuaries our planet needs,” said Laura Meller, a Greenpeace oceans campaigner who attended the talks.
“The clock is still ticking to deliver 30 by 30. We have half a decade left, and we can’t be complacent.”
The G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting was unable to agree to a joint communique here Thursday over sharp differences on the Russia-Ukraine war between the US-led West on one side and Russia-China on the other.
Top diplomats from the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations ended their contentious meeting in New Delhi on Thursday, March 2nd with no consensus on the Ukraine war, India’s foreign minister said, as discussions of the war and China’s widening global influence dominated much of the talks.
Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said there were “divergences” on the issue of war in Ukraine that “we could not reconcile, as various parties held differing views.”
“If we had a perfect meeting of minds on all issues, it would have been a collective statement,” Jaishankar said. He added that members agreed on most issues involving the concerns of less-developed nations, “like strengthening multilateralism, promoting food and energy security, climate change, gender issues and counter-terrorism.”
Picture : Reuters
Jaishankar, who chaired two sessions of discussions at the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting on March 2, 2023 said that the twenty countries that make up the G20 were in agreement on a range of global issues. Speaking at a press meet after the meeting, Jaishankar said, “Despite the challenges of the divergent positions on the conflict in Ukraine, the G20 foreign ministers were able to come to a consensus on addressing key challenges.”
As per reports, China and Russia objected to two paragraphs taken from the previous G-20 declaration in Bali last year, according to a summary of Thursday’s meeting released by India. The paragraphs stated that the war in Ukraine was causing immense human suffering while worsening weak spots in the global economy, and affirmed the need to uphold international law and that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible.”
A summary issued by Host India stated: “The war in Ukraine has further adversely impacted the global economy. There was a discussion on the issue. We reiterated our national positions as expressed in other fora, including the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, which, in Resolution No. ES-11/1 dated 2 March 2022, as adopted by majority vote (141 votes for, 5 against, 35 abstentions, 12 absent) deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands its complete and unconditional withdrawal from the territory of Ukraine.
“Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy – constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity, and elevating financial stability risks. There were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions. Recognizing that the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues, we acknowledge that security issues can have significant consequences for the global economy.”
Host India had appealed for all members of the fractured G-20 to reach consensus on issues of deep concern to poorer countries even if the broader East-West split over Ukraine could not be resolved. While some attendees, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, chose to highlight their positive roles in addressing world crises, the divide was palpable.
The talks began with a video address to the foreign ministers by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He urged them not to allow current tensions to destroy agreements that might be reached on food and energy security, climate change and debt.
“We are meeting at a time of deep global divisions,” Modi told the group, which included Blinken, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and their Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, whose discussions would naturally be “affected by the geopolitical tensions of the day.”
Modi said: “We all have our positions and our perspectives on how these tensions should be resolved. … We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can.”
While, on the surface, this is a repeat of stated positions, what is significant is that both US and India said that the outcome document was approved by an overwhelming majority. In what marks a calibrated step forward, Washington backed Delhi’s statement that the Chair’s summary – put out by India as Chair of the G-20 — was a product of consensus on a variety of issues.
“With the foreign ministers of the Group of 20 leading economies meeting in New Delhi, host India is promoting itself as a rising superpower while leveraging its position on the global stage to bridge the gap between the West and Russia,” analysts stated.
“Despite constituting less than 1% of the U.S. population, Indian-Americans are 3% of the nation’s engineers, 7% of its IT workers and 8% of its physicians and surgeons,” wrote the popular Forbes magazine in 2008. “The overrepresentation of Indians in these fields is striking–in practical terms, your doctor is nine times more likely to be an Indian-American than is a random passerby on the street.”
Fifteen years later, in 2023, the story of the Indian Americans has grown even stronger; their successes encompassing almost all areas of American life – living the American Dream. The less than four million Indian Americans appear to be gaining prominence and have come to be recognized as a force to reckon with in this land of opportunities that they have come to call as their adopted homeland.
Picture : TheUNN
In fact, Indian Americans have for some time been considered a “model minority” in the US — they are better educated, have better jobs, are wealthier than many other immigrant populations and enjoy both political and business clout. Here’s data that points to these factors:
At a virtual interaction with Nasa scientists who were involved in the historic landing of Perseverance on Mars on March 3, US President Joe Biden remarked, “Indian-of-descent Americans (sic) are taking over the country. You (Swati Mohan), my Vice President (Kamala Harris), my speech writer (Vinay Reddy).”
Biden, who was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on January 20, is in a good place to judge that. He has created history by appointing at least 55 Indian-of-descent Americans to key positions in his administration. And of course, his vice- president, Kamala Harris, is also an American of Indian-descent.
The rise of Kamala Harris, daughter of an Indian mother, as the Vice President represents a coming-of-age of the Indian American community in the United States. Harris was born to civil rights activist parents a year before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed; this Act relaxed the quota regime that restricted foreigners. At that time, there was one Indian American lawmaker in the US House of Representatives — the Punjab-born Dalip Singh Saund, also from California.
The Senate India Caucus was created in 2004. Harris was elected to the US Senate in 2016. The following year, four Indian Americans were elected to the US House of Representatives, and more were elected to the Senate and Congress of other states. Two other persons of Indian origin — Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley — served as Governors of Louisiana and South Carolina, respectively, in that period.
In 2022, there are as many as five persons of Indian Origin have been elected to the House of Representatives: Congressmen Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ro Khanna, Dr Ami Bera, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, and Shri Thanedar, a Karnataka-born entrepreneur – have been re-elected to the US House of Representatives
Today, more Indian Americans hold public office than ever before. However, politics is far from being the only sphere in which the Indian diaspora has gained influence in the last few decades.
Historically, Indians in the US worked in medicine, science & technology, engineering and mathematics-related jobs. Some, like the Patel community from Gujarat, took to the hotel industry and grew to dominate it. Others were entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley after the digital revolution of the 1980s.
In 1997, Ramani Ayer became the CEO of the Fortune 500 financial firm The Hartford, becoming the first in the list of Indian leaders heading American businesses.
At present, 2% of the Fortune 500 companies of American origin — including Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, IBM, and MasterCard — are led by Indian American CEOs. One in every seven doctors in America is of Indian descent;
Numbering about 3.8 million, or about 1.2 per cent of the US population, the Indian diaspora in the US is the richest, most educated and among the most successful ethnic groups in that country – pulling ahead of even white Americans on most counts. More than 75 per cent of Indian Americans have arrived in the US after 1990.
Picture : Quora
Looking ahead to the 2024 Presidential Elections, there are as many as three of them are seeking their way to be on the ballot. Two of the three Republicans who have announced plans so far to enter the US presidential race are Indian-Americans. While Nikki Haley is a familiar name, surprise candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is much less well known. If President Biden seeks reelection, the current Vice President, Harris is likely ot be on the ballot as his running mate in 2024.
Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author of the book Woke, Inc., announced his presidential bid on 21 February with an appearance on a Fox News show and a video laying out his political views. He wants to launch a “cultural movement to create a new American dream” based on the “pursuit of excellence” – and he says “diversity is meaningless if there’s nothing greater that binds” people. The 37-year-old, who was born in Ohio, studied at Harvard and Yale, earned his millions as a biotechnology entrepreneur and then founded an asset management firm.
Democrat Shekar Narasimhan, founder and chairman of the AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) Victory Fund, says that while he is happy to see more Asian-Americans gain prominence in politics, he isn’t confident about Mr Ramaswamy’s ideas.
“He is a business guy and has a clean slate, but what are his promises?” Mr Narasimhan asks. “Does he care about medical care for the elderly? What are his plans for infrastructure spending? He doesn’t have fixed positions and has not articulated his policies yet.”
Indian-American Republicans are predicting a “three-way race between Mr Trump, Mr DeSantis and Ms Haley” and prefer to wait instead of forging early alliances, especially as there is still uncertainty around the former president’s legal battles.
Dr. Sampat Shivangi says that he admires Ms Haley’s aggressive campaigning style and would support her in case Mr Trump is forced to withdraw from the race. “Mr Trump has 40% ratings and Ms Haley is in single digits, but she is our candidate. Her being Indian-American is the main reason why we are close to her,” he says.
Irrespective of political differences, the Indian-American community is happy about the sharp increase in their political participation, especially over the last three election cycles, and is proud of the rise of another of their own.
“A beautiful thing is happening: Indian-Americans are coming to the forefront,” Mr Gaekwad says, adding that the latest bid could encourage more Indian-Americans to run for elections even at the local level. Even political opponents agree with that. “If our children see Americans with a name like Ramaswamy run, and a Khanna or Krishnamoorthi can win, that’s a good thing,” Narasimhan says.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley vowed on Friday to strip U.S. aid for countries that she said “hate us” if elected president. Haley said in an op-ed in The New York Post that taxpayers deserve to know where U.S. foreign aid is going and would be “shocked” to learn that much of it is supporting “anti-American” countries and causes.
She claimed that the United States has given more than $1 billion in recent years to Iraq, which she said is increasing ties to “murderous thugs” in Iran who have shouted “Death to America.” Iraq and Iran have improved their relations in recent years after a long history of being adversaries.
Haley noted that the U.S. has sent aid to Pakistan despite more than a dozen terrorist organizations residing there and China for “ridiculous” environmental programs.
“This is not just Joe Biden. It’s been happening for decades under presidents of both parties. Our foreign-aid policies are stuck in the past,” she wrote. “They typically operate on autopilot, with no consideration for the conduct of the countries that receive our aid.
She added that she is running for president to “restore our nation’s strength,” pride in the country and the public’s trust. “Backing American allies and friends like Israel and Ukraine is smart. Sending our tax dollars to enemies isn’t,” Haley said. “That’s why I will cut every cent in foreign aid for countries that hate us. A strong America doesn’t pay off the bad guys.”
Haley, who previously served as ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration and governor of South Carolina, said she often saw countries that “bashed” the United States in public and then privately “begged” it for money.
She said she supported former President Trump’s decision to cut almost $2 billion in military aid to Pakistan, but it did not go far enough. Haley became the second major Republican to launch their bid for the GOP nomination for president in 2024 earlier this month, following Trump into the race. Polling has shown Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leading in hypothetical Republican primary polls.
(AP) Top financial leaders from the Group of 20 leading economies are gathering in Bengaluru this week to tackle myriad challenges to global growth and stability, including stubbornly high inflation and surging debt.
India is hosting the G-20 financial conclave for the first time in 20 years. Later in the year it will convene its first summit of G-20 economies. The meetings offer the world’s second most populous country a chance to showcase its ascent as an economic power and its status as a champion of developing nations.
The gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors takes place just a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, setting off a cascade of shocks to the world economy, chief among them decades-high inflation. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to address the global economic impacts of the war while at the G-20 meetings.
India is among the countries treading lightly between the Western nations and Russia, eager to claim more global sway but wary of becoming embroiled in antagonisms as its economy benefits from purchases of discounted Russian crude oil.
“India has a growing leadership role globally,” Information Minister Anurag Thakur, said Wednesday, reiterating Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stance that “today’s era is not of war. Dialogues and discussions are the only way forward.”
As host of more than 200 G-20 meetings in 28 cities leading up to the summit in November, Modi is expected to use that role to burnish India’s stature as a leader in fighting climate change and to act as a bridge between the interests of industrialized nations and developing ones.
By Emma Ashford, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, and Matthew Kroenig, a columnist at Foreign Policy and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt! Greetings from sunny Cartagena, Colombia, where I’m talking about U.S. foreign policy. I’m about as far from the war in Ukraine as you can get, yet with the war’s one-year anniversary this week, Ukraine is still looming large in discussions of the United States and its global role.
Matthew Kroenig: Colombia sounds nice. I was a bit closer to Ukraine this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, and Ukraine was obviously the dominant topic on the agenda there too.
How is the war being perceived in the global south?
Picture : Foreign Policy
EA: I’d draw a pretty clear distinction between two groups of countries. First, the Western coalition that the Biden administration has pulled together, which is quite united in its continued opposition to Russia and—at least in general—its willingness to bear some costs to do so. That’s the group you undoubtedly interacted with most in Munich, and I suspect the message you heard from it was quite triumphalist, focused on the success of U.S. and European efforts to arm Ukraine and turn the tide of the war on the ground.
The second group, however, comprises a wide variety of Latin American, African, and Asian states, many of which are conflicted about their response to Ukraine. Most of them oppose the invasion itself, but they’re also wary of damaging their ties with Russia and also extremely worried about spiraling costs created by the conflict in food and energy prices globally. That’s a much more mixed picture for U.S. officials to manage.
Did I characterize the Munich crowd correctly?
In Munich, there was a kind of naive assumption that if the West just takes the right steps, everyone will fall into line.
MK: Yes and no. There seemed to be a consensus that the outcome of the war would have enormous consequences for the future of European and even global security. Accordingly, the common view was that the goal needed to be a Ukrainian victory—and for many also a Russian defeat.
The global south was, however, another major topic of conversation. People were genuinely puzzled as to how so much of the world could be agnostic on the issue of a war of aggression in Europe. The search for answers, however, was often superficial and revealed what former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls “strategic narcissism.”
The question seemed to be: “What did we do wrong?” Officials and experts wondered, for example, whether wealthy governments should have provided more COVID-19 relief. There was a kind of naive assumption that if the West just takes the right steps, everyone will fall into line. Instead, they should have showed some strategic empathy and tried to understand the issue from the perspective of the global south’s interests.
I assume you were able to see things more from that point of view in Cartagena.
EA: I think it really highlights that for all the valuable things about meetings like the Munich Security Conference, Aspen Security Forum, or World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they do often have a tendency to produce groupthink among like-minded officials and experts. I hope that some of the African and Latin American delegates in attendance were able to impress upon their European counterparts that it is hardly difficult to understand their viewpoint: They have interests, including the basic economic needs of their own populations, at stake in this conflict.
For that reason, I suspect Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s speech to the conference—in which he promised that China would shortly be presenting a peace plan for Ukraine, which Beijing has now revealed—might have been popular among some of those delegates. Of course, it seemed to be undermined almost immediately: Wang headed straight to Moscow after the conference, and U.S. officials alleged that Beijing is considering sending arms to Moscow to help its efforts in the war. So much for the appearance of Chinese impartiality!
MK: I’m glad you mentioned China and Russia because they are part of the other major grouping you left out above. The world is increasingly divided into three blocs: the free world (the United States and its formal allies in Europe and Asia), the revisionist autocracies (China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and a few less capable rogues like Syria, Eritrea, and Belarus), and the new nonaligned movement (everyone else!).
China’s plan at Munich seemed to be to try to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States. Wang’s speech talked about how Europe and China could work together, but “hysterical” Americans have lost their minds and are shooting down weather balloons. You are right that they also tried to be the good guys by offering up promises of a peace plan—never mind that they only talked to the Russians, not the Ukrainians, about the plan.
China’s posturing at the conference was undermined most by the Biden administration releasing intelligence suggesting that China was preparing to provide weapons to Russia. Nothing could have made Beijing more unpopular in Europe than indications that it was getting ready to arm Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It was similar to Biden’s attempts during the early stage of the war in Ukraine to deter actions by revealing intelligence. Let’s hope it works this time.
EA: It was innovative the first time around, but at some point, I imagine it will cease to be an effective approach. Worth a try though, I guess.
The problem with these two conflicting worldviews—Western and Russian/Chinese—is that I think the last year has mostly shown they’re both wrong. The world isn’t fully united in opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and they’re definitely not on board with the Biden administration’s democracy versus autocracy framing. But at the same time, the world is not united against the United States, and many countries in the global south and elsewhere view Russian and Chinese intentions with deep suspicion. It suggests a more diverse set of global viewpoints.
And for that reason, I was rather disappointed to see Biden double down on his triumphalist rhetoric about democracy and the war in Ukraine in his big Warsaw speech in Poland.
Shall we chat about Biden’s secret trip to Kyiv and his speech in Warsaw?
MK: Sure. Let’s start with the trip to Ukraine’s capital. I think it was a brave show of support for Ukraine. It was also conducted with amazing operational security. It caught everyone by surprise. I chatted with several senior Biden administration officials in Munich, and none of them let out a peep. I assume you were less impressed.
The United States is slouching towards a presidential election that almost nobody wants. The 2024 vote seems increasingly likely to be a re-match between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
It would be only the seventh re-match in the 59 presidential elections in American history and the first since President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Adlai Stevenson for a second time in 1956.
Voters in both major US political parties are looking for fresh faces to run for president in 2024, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. A majority of Democratic voters, at 52 per cent, do not want Mr Biden to seek a second term, while 40 per cent of Republican voters do not want Mr Trump to seek another term in 2024. Trump, who lost the presidency in 2020 and was impeached by Congress for inciting a riot at the US Capitol but ultimately acquitted by the Senate, announced he would run again in November.
Nearly making it certain, . first lady Jill Biden gave one of the clearest indications yet that President Joe Biden will run for a second term, telling The Associated Press in an exclusive interview on Friday last week that there’s “pretty much” nothing left to do but figure out the time and place for the announcement that Biden will run for US Presidency in 2024.
Although Biden has long said that it’s his intention to seek reelection, he has yet to make it official, and he’s struggled to dispel questions about whether he’s too old to continue serving as president. Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.
“How many times does he have to say it for you to believe it?” the first lady said in Nairobi, the second and final stop of her five-day trip to Africa. She added, “He says he’s not done. He’s not finished what he’s started. And that’s what’s important.”
Granddaughter Naomi Biden, who is on the trip, cheered the first lady’s comments after the interview. “Preach nana,” she said on Twitter.
Picture : USA Today
The president himself was asked about his wife’s comments just hours later in an interview with ABC News, and laughed when told of her remarks, adding, “God love her. Look, I meant what I said, I’ve got other things to finish before I get into a full-blown campaign.”
During the interview with ABC’s David Muir, Biden, 80, was asked whether he is considering his age when deciding whether to run again, to which he replied no. However, he said it is “legitimate” for people to raise concerns about it.
Biden aides have said an announcement is likely to come in April, after the first fundraising quarter ends, which is around the time that President Barack Obama officially launched his reelection campaign.
The first lady has long been described as a key figure in Biden’s orbit as he plans his future. “Because I’m his wife,” she laughed.
She brushed off the question about whether she has the deciding vote on whether the president runs for reelection. “Of course, he’ll listen to me, because we’re a married couple,” she said. But, she added later, “he makes up his own mind, believe me.”
The wide-ranging interview took place on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Jill Biden recalled her trip into the country last May to meet the besieged country’s first lady, Olena Zelenska.
President Biden said in a new interview that he has “other things to finish” before starting a “full-blown” 2024 presidential campaign. Well, apparently, someone interviewed my wife today, I heard. I gotta call her and find out,” Biden told ABC News’s David Muir when asked if he’s running again.
“No, all kidding aside, my intention … has been from the beginning to run, but there’s too many other things I have to finish in the near-term before I start a campaign,” Biden said. The president has long said he intends to run for another four years in the White House, and first lady Jill Biden gave a strong indication last week that he’ll do so.
They visited a school that was being used to help migrants who fled the fighting. Some of the families, Jill Biden said, had hid underground for weeks before making their escape. “We thought then, how long can this go on? And here we are, a year later,” she said. “And look at what the Ukrainian people have done. I mean, they are so strong and resilient, and they are fighting for their country.”
“We’re all hoping that this war is over soon, because we see, every day, the damage, the violence, the horror on our televisions,” the first lady added. “And we just can’t believe it.”
Jill Biden is the only first lady to continue her career in addition to her ceremonial duties, teaching writing and English to community college students. At 71 years old, she said she’s not ready to think about retirement. “I know that I will know when it’s enough,” she said. “But it’s not yet.”
She said she left detailed lesson plans for a substitute teacher while she was on her trip, and she’s been texting with students as she was traveling. She plans to be back in the classroom at 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, after arriving home from Africa around 3 a.m. Monday.
Education has been a flashpoint in American politics, especially with conservative activists and politicians trying to limit discussion of race and sexuality in classrooms. “I don’t believe in banning books,” she said.
She added: “I think the teachers and the parents can work together and decide what the kids should be taught.” During the interview, Jill Biden reflected on the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter, who recently began home hospice care. The Carter Center, which the former president founded after leaving the White House, was key in helping to eliminate the Guinea worm parasite in African countries.
“That’s the perfect example,” she said. “He’s such a humble man. He didn’t go out and shout, ‘Look what I’ve done.’ He just did the work.” Jill Biden recalled Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, reaching out on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration two years ago. “They called and said congratulations,” she said. “And it meant so much to me and to Joe.”
She also talked about visiting the Carters at their home in Plains, Georgia, early in Biden’s presidency. “It’s not just that here are two presidents. It’s here are two friends,” she said. “Actually four friends, who have really supported one another over the years.
“It’s legitimate for people to raise issues about my age,” he told Muir. “It’s totally legitimate to do that. And the only thing I can say is, ‘Watch me.’” Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history, would be 82 when sworn in if reelected in 2024. Biden’s age has drawn concerns from both sides of the aisle. (Associated Press writer Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.)
India abstained in the UN General Assembly on February 22nd, 2023 on a resolution that underscored the need to reach “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” in Ukraine, citing the resolution’s “inherent limitations” in reaching New Delhi’s desired goal of securing lasting peace and ending the conflict which has been raging for one year now.
The 193-member General Assembly adopted the draft resolution, put forward by Ukraine and its supporters, titled Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.
The resolution, which got 141 votes in favor and seven against, “underscores the need to reach, as soon as possible, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine in line with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” India was among the 32 countries that abstained.
The resolution called upon member states and international organizations to redouble support for diplomatic efforts to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine, consistent with the Charter.
India was among the 32 nations that abstained as the 193-member General Assembly adopted the resolution put forward by Ukraine and its supporters.
Before the UNGA vote, many countries, including the US, Germany and Ukraine, reached out to India seeking its support for the resolution that calls for Russia to end hostilities in Ukraine and demands the withdrawal of its forces.
India’s explanation
In the ‘Explanation of Vote’ after the resolution was adopted, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ruchira Kamboj said that as the General Assembly marks a year of the Ukrainian conflict, “it is important that we ask ourselves a few pertinent questions.
“Are we anywhere near a possible solution acceptable to both sides? Can any process that does not involve either of the two sides, ever lead to a credible and meaningful solution? Has the UN system, and particularly its principal organ, the UN Security Council, based on a 1945-world construct, not been rendered ineffective to address contemporary challenges to global peace and security?” Kamboj said.
“As the Ukraine conflict continues to rage, we are often asked whose side are we on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there. We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles. We are on the side that calls for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way out,” Jaishankar had said, adding that it is in the collective interest to work constructively, both within the United Nations and outside, in finding an early resolution to this conflict.
India has also consistently underlined that in the conflict, the entire global South has suffered “substantial collateral damage” and developing countries are facing the brunt of the conflict’s consequences on food, fuel and fertiliser supplies.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the emergency special session of the General Assembly that resumed on February 22 that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “an affront to our collective conscience” and said it is “high time” to step back from the brink.
“The one-year mark of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stands as a grim milestone — for the people of Ukraine and for the international community. That invasion is an affront to our collective conscience. It is a violation of the United Nations Charter and international law,” Mr. Guterres said adding that the invasion is having dramatic humanitarian and human rights consequences.
In a strong message, Mr. Guterres said the war is fanning regional instability and fuelling global tensions and divisions while diverting attention and resources from other crises and pressing global issues. “Meanwhile, we have heard implicit threats to use nuclear weapons. The so-called tactical use of nuclear weapons is utterly unacceptable. It is high time to step back from the brink,” he said.
Since Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, several UN resolutions have condemned the invasion and underlined the commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine. While most nations have condemned the Russian aggression, India has not condemned Russia’s actions, nor has it taken any known initiatives to end the war and bring peace in the region.
India, which maintains good relations with Russia, has abstained from all these resolutions on Ukraine and consistently underlined the need to respect the UN Charter, international law and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. New Delhi has also urged that all efforts be made for an immediate cessation of hostilities and an urgent return to the path of dialogue and diplomacy.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday welcomed some elements of a Chinese proposal for a ceasefire in Russia’s war on Ukraine, but said only the country where a war is being fought should be the initiator of a peace plan.
“I believe that the fact that China started talking about Ukraine is not bad, but the question is what follows the words,” Zelensky said at a press conference on Friday, The Associated Press reported.
“I think it’s correct to think that if there are thoughts that, in one way or another, correspond with respect for international law, to territorial integrity… let’s work with China on this point,” he said during a news conference in Kyiv.
China released a 12-point plan for trying to find a resolution in the conflict as the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine arrived. The plan includes points calling for respecting all countries’ sovereignty, ending hostilities, resuming peace talks and resolving the humanitarian crisis that has been created by the war.
Picture : ABC News
Zelensky said China’s plan seems to call for protecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine, noting that while it does not mention the country specifically, Ukraine’s territory is the one that has been breached. He said China’s call for nuclear security is in line with Ukrainian and international interests.
Zelensky, who said he believed China did not offer a concrete plan but some “thoughts”, also said there were parts he disagreed with. He urged Beijing not to provide Moscow with arms, but added that it was promising that China – a Russian ally – was considering brokering peace. “Our task is to gather everyone to isolate one,” he said, speaking on the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
He said he disagrees with some proposals, but Ukraine should look to work with a plan that respects international law and territorial integrity. He also reportedly said he wants to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Volodymyr Fesenko, the leader of the independent think tank Penta Center in Kyiv, told the AP that he believes Zelensky will try to work with China to prevent Beijing from increasing its ties to Russia.
U.S. officials have warned that China has sent nonlethal aid to support Russia despite officially being neutral in the conflict and is considering sending lethal aid as well. The Pentagon has warned that China will face consequences if it sends weapons or munitions to Russia. “As long as China comes up with peacemaker initiatives, it will be forced to maintain neutrality and to abstain from supplying weapons and direct military assistance to Russia,” Fesenko said.
War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. The world is a more unstable and fearful place since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022. One year on, thousands of Ukrainian civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of troops have been killed or seriously wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine—and until that date, the United States had done little to thwart it. This Friday marks one year since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. The war has killed thousands, displaced millions, and disrupted global food and energy markets—with no end in sight. To better understand how this conflict continues to shape geopolitics, and how geopolitics shapes it, Foreign Affairs is publishing an ongoing series of essays about what the war has taught us so far.
The war in Ukraine has touched almost every corner of the world — delivering death and suffering to Ukraine, an energy crisis in Europe, grain shortages in the Middle East and Africa, and compounding inflation across the globe.
“One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands,” the American president said as he stood next to Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky during his surprise visit to the Ukrainian capital, where life has returned more or less to normal since the initial Russian onslaught.
Inside Russia, all aspects of society and the economy have been warped or reoriented in a sprawling effort to support Vladimir Putin’s war effort. And while the vast number of casualties have been sustained by Russia and Ukraine, countries from Australia to Zambia have seen their own fighters killed in the war.
While the toll of the war is often described in sweeping statistics — 8 million refugees, 1,000 Russians killed in a day or $500 million in aid — over the past 12 months many groups and individuals have come to symbolize resistance to the war and resilience amid the carnage.
Millions of Ukrainians fled from their homeland in the early days of the war, with mostly women and children leaving their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers to fight the invading forces.
Leading scholars consider why some democracies have not joined the coalition against Russia, why Russian President Vladimir Putin persists despite his disastrous war, what can be learned about contemporary conflict from the battlefields in Ukraine, and more. Start reading below.
NATO was created to prevent a major war in Europe, a task it accomplished well for many decades. Apart from the brief Kosovo war in 1999, its members never had to fight together or coordinate a joint response to aggression—until a year ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. NATO’s response thus offers fresh, real-world evidence about how contemporary alliances work in practice. Despite a series of blunders, miscalculations, and battlefield reversals that would have surely seen him thrown out of office in most normal countries, President Vladimir Putin is still at the pinnacle of power in Russia.
He continues to define the contours of his country’s war against Ukraine. He is micromanaging the invasion even as generals beneath him appear to be in charge of the battlefield. (This deputizing is done to protect him from blowback if something goes badly wrong in the war.) Putin and those immediately around him directly work to mobilize Russians on the home front and manipulate public views of the invasion abroad. He has in some ways succeeded in this information warfare.
The war has revealed the full extent of Putin’s personalized political system. After what is now 23 years at the helm of the Russian state, there are no obvious checks on his power. Institutions beyond the Kremlin count for little. “I would never have imagined that I would miss the Politburo,” said Rene Nyberg, the former Finnish ambassador to Moscow. “There is no political organization in Russia that has the power to hold the president and commander in chief accountable.” Diplomats, policymakers, and analysts are stuck in a doom loop—an endless back-and-forth argument among themselves—to figure out what Putin wants and how the West can shape his behavior.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday that his country would suspend its participation in the New START agreement with the United States, throwing into question the future of the last remaining arms control accord between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. The treaty, which came into force in 2011, places limits on the number of intercontinental nuclear weapons that each country can have and was extended for an additional five years in 2021. Arms control had long been regarded as the last redoubt of constructive collaboration between Washington and Moscow.
Putin showed no signs of backing down as he used his annual state-of-the-nation address to rail against the United States and accuse Ukraine and the West of provoking the war days before the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. “They want to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on us and try to get to our nuclear facilities at the same time,” Putin said during his nearly 100-minute speech, which was met with applause from Russian lawmakers and senior officials. “In this context, I have to declare today that Russia is suspending its participation in the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Arms.”
President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday delivered a nuclear warning to the West over Ukraine, suspending a bilateral nuclear arms control treaty, announcing new strategic systems had been put on combat duty and warning that Moscow could resume nuclear tests.
Speaking nearly a year to the day since ordering an invasion that has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the depths of the Cold War, Putin said Russia would achieve its war aims and accused the West of trying to destroy Russia.
Cautioning the United States that it was stoking the war into a global conflict, Putin said that Russia was suspending participation in the New START Treaty, the last major arms control treaty between Moscow and Washington.
Responding to Putin’s announcement, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, “With today’s decision on New START, the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”
Experts said it’s too soon to interpret Putin’s remarks as heralding a new nuclear arms race, but with the treaty set to expire in 2026, the Russian leader’s announcement will further complicate diplomatic efforts to extend or negotiate a new treaty between the United States and Russia, which together hold about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
The biggest blow to democracy on a global scale was not the war itself but the fact that—despite all “never again” claims—European and Western countries in general agreed and accepted beforehand that another European nation might be deprived of its sovereignty, freedom, and independent institutions, and it might find itself militarily occupied. (If this isn’t how they felt, then they wouldn’t have evacuated their embassies in Kyiv.) President Biden vowed on Tuesday that the United States would “not tire” in its support of Ukraine, describing the American commitment to NATO and Ukraine as a battle for freedom against autocracy in a speech delivered just hours after President Vladimir V. Putin presented a radically different account of the war.
In his national address, Mr. Putin showed no sign that he would change course, instead signaling that Russians should prepare for a long war ahead. He accused the West of a “totalitarian” project to control the world under the guise of spreading liberal values, and declared Russia was suspending the one remaining nuclear arms treaty with the United States.
“They intend to transform a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation. This is exactly how we understand it all and we will react accordingly, because in this case we are talking about the existence of our country.” Defeating Russia, he said, was impossible.
In the year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Western democracies have condemned Moscow, slapped wide-ranging sanctions on it, cut back on Russian oil and gas and sent unprecedented amounts of arms and ammunition to help Ukraine defend itself.
But the world’s biggest democracy — India — hasn’t done any of that.
India has solidified ties with Moscow. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Vladimir Putin in September and called their countries’ friendship “unbreakable.” He did tell the Russian president it’s “not a time for war.” But a year on, Modi still refuses to assign blame for the violence, and has voiced more concern over the spike in global food and fuel prices triggered by the war.
Meanwhile, as Europe eschews Russian oil and gas, India has doubled down on buying Russian oil at bargain prices — much to Washington’s chagrin. And India continues to place orders for Russian-made weapons.
All this is a reminder that, a year into this war, condemnation of Russia is far from unanimous. Much of the global south actually sees the West’s focus on Ukraine as a distraction from other, more pressing issues like food security, inflation and mounting debt.
Analysts and political scientists cite four main factors shaping India’s policy toward Ukraine and Russia: History, energy, arms and influence.
Factor #1: The India-Russia relationship goes way back
“It started out as strategic sympathy for the Soviet Union, in the backdrop of India getting independence from the British. So it’s an anti-colonial experience, anti-imperialism,” says Rajeswari (Raji) Pillai Rajagopalan, a political scientist at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “And as the Cold War picked up, it became a more anti-West, anti-U.S. sentiment they shared.”
The end of the Cold War didn’t change that. Neither has the Ukraine war. India’s nationalist TV news channels often accuse the United States — rather than Russia — of doing more to ruin Ukraine.
In November, Modi’s top diplomat, S. Jaishankar, traveled to Moscow, where he stood alongside his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and called their countries’ relationship “steady and time-tested.”
Modi has called for a cease-fire in Ukraine, without condemning Russia’s attacks. Some of his political opponents say that doesn’t go far enough, and point toward India’s actions rather than its words.
“The actions that India is engaged in so far do not reflect any remorse or even mild criticism of the events in Ukraine,” says Praveen Chakravarty, a political economist affiliated with the opposition Indian National Congress party. “If anything, it seems to aid and abet.”
Factor #2: India wants cheap Russian oil
India has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. (The IMF forecasts 6.8% growth for India this year, compared to just 1.6% for the United States.) By 2030, India is forecast to be the third-largest economy in the world, behind the U.S. and China.
It’s already the third-largest oil consumer in the world. And it needs even more to fuel all that growth. But because India has few oil and gas reserves of its own, most of the oil it needs has to be imported. It’s also a relatively poor country, particularly sensitive to price.
That’s where Russia comes in. India still buys more oil from Middle Eastern countries than Russia. But its Russian share has skyrocketed. In December, India imported 1.2 million barrels of Russian crude. That’s a whopping 33 times more than a year earlier. In January, the share of Russian crude rose to 28% of India’s oil imports — up from just 0.2% before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Indian officials have defended those purchases by saying it’s their job to find bargains for their citizens. And Jaishankar, the foreign minister, has suggested it’s hypocritical of wealthier Westerners to ask them not to.
“Europe has managed to reduce its imports [of Russian gas] while doing it in a manner that is comfortable,” Jaishankar told an Austrian TV channel last month. “At 60,000 euros or whatever is your per capita income, you’re so caring about your population. I have a population at 2,000 dollars [per capita annual income]. I also need energy, and I am not in a position to pay high prices for oil.”
India basically ignored that. But the Biden administration now says it’s actually fine with that.
Earlier this month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffery Pyatt said Washington is “comfortable” with India’s approach on Russian oil. And Karen Donfried, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, said the U.S. is not looking at sanctioning India for this.
Here’s one possible explanation for Washington’s change of heart: India is buying Russian crude at deep discounts — something the West can’t do because of sanctions, or doesn’t want to do because of the optics. Then India refines that same Russian oil and exports it onward to the U.S. and Europe. So the West gets Russian oil, without getting its hands dirty.
“U.S. treasury officials have two main goals: keep the market well supplied and deprive Russia of oil revenue,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently told Bloomberg. “They are aware that Indian and Chinese refiners can earn bigger margins by buying discounted Russian crude and exporting products at market prices. They’re fine with that.”
Factor #3: Moscow is India’s biggest arms dealer
India’s military has historically been equipped with Russian and Soviet weapons. Most of those contracts date back to the Cold War, a conflict in which India was officially non-aligned but close to Moscow. So most of India’s arsenal was — and still is — Soviet-made.
By now, some those 30-something-year-old weapons are deteriorating. “Let’s just go to the [Indian] Air Force. Most of those Sukhois and MiGs [fighter aircraft] are referred to as ‘flying coffins.’ Very often Indian pilots die when they are testing, or flying, those,” says Aparna Pande, a political scientist at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “So India knows they need to be replaced.”
Indian defence experts may have been the only ones not surprised to see Russian tanks falling apart in Ukraine this past year, Pande says. They’ve been unhappy with Russian equipment for years.
So the Indian government has started replacing some of its Soviet-made aircraft and artillery with French, Israeli and American versions. But it’s a time-consuming and costly task to update India’s entire arsenal, Pande notes.
“Let’s say my entire apartment had only IKEA furniture, and now I decide, ‘OK now I want to change it, and I want West Elm.’ I cannot just replace one chair. I have to change my entire dining table and all the chairs,” Pande explains. “So what India has done [in terms of updating its weapons] is piecemeal. But those big ticket items are still Russian-made. So that’s the change which has to happen, and this is what will reduce the Russian influence.”
Despite the Indian government’s efforts to diversify, Moscow continues to be India’s biggest arms dealer — more than 30 years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Russia has reportedly supplied India with around $13 billion in weapons in the past five years alone. There’s one big reason India needs all these weapons: China.
Factor #4: India wants to prevent Putin from getting closer to China’s Xi Jinping
India’s biggest foreign policy preoccupation is not Ukraine or Russia. It’s China. The two countries share a more than 2,000-mile disputed border. Satellite imagery shows China may be encroaching on Indian territory. Soldiers clashed there in June 2020, and again this past December.
And as the West isolates Russia, India fears Putin is already looking eastward, toward Beijing. “You’re already seeing a very close Russia-China relationship emerging, even in the last few years,” says the ORF’s Rajagopalan. “So the current Indian approach is, we don’t want Russia to go completely into the Chinese fold. Because for India, China has become the No. 1 national security threat.”
Despite the Ukraine war, that’s true for Washington too. So even if Washington doesn’t like it, Biden administration officials say they understand why India has not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and they’re willing to grant India a wide berth.
They may even see India’s continued ties with Putin as useful — to try to mitigate just how far the Ukraine war drives him into Xi Jinping’s arms.
According to a new study published in the Lancet, an estimated 6.4 million physicians are needed to meet global universal health coverage (UHC) goals. America is also experiencing a significant physician shortage, and it’s only expected to get worse, a concerning situation that could lead to poorer health outcomes for many patients. Data published in 2020 by the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that the US could see a shortage of 54,100 to 139,000 physicians by 2033.
Europe is not in any better spot. More than three years into the pandemic that decimated personnel, healthcare managers and governments are scrambling to cobble together a semblance of a workforce in European countries. Europe’s healthcare worker shortfall—around 2 million—is acutely felt across the Continent.
In Greece, first responders sound the alarm over longer emergency response times due to a shortage of personnel. England lacks tens of thousands of nurses, reporting a record number of vacancies. Nurses top the list of all occupations experiencing shortages in Finland. Maternity wards in Portugal are struggling to stay open due to a lack of doctors. Some 50,000 healthcare workers in Europe have died due to Covid-19, and health worker absences in the European Region increased by 62% during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, according to WHO.
The pandemic also took a severe toll on the workers’ mental health. In some countries, over 80% of nurses reported psychological distress caused by the pandemic, and 9 out of 10 nurses planned to quit their jobs.
G20, under the leadership of India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, could offer bold solutions to this impending global healthcare crisis. While the recommendations to establish a G20 Health Preparedness Taskforce are excellent, addressing the global health workforce shortage must be a key priority in national development agendas. India can help solve the expected global physician shortage in G20 nations by investing in healthcare infrastructure and training programs. This could involve increasing funding for medical schools and postgraduate programs and improving the quality of medical education.
Additionally, India can help by expanding its role in providing medical services to underserved populations in G20 countries. This could include establishing telemedicine programs, allowing Indian doctors to provide medical care remotely. India can also work with governments in G20 nations to develop more streamlined pathways for Indian doctors to practice in those countries. Finally, India could use its public health and health systems expertise to help G20 countries develop and implement effective healthcare policies.
Here are the practical steps that G20 may take under Indian leadership:
STRENGTHEN THE MEDICAL EDUCATION FRAMEWORK
Setting up common minimum standards in the medical education of physicians, nurses, health administrators, and other allied healthcare workers among G20 nations could create a G20 medical corps that can be mobilized in the invent of emergencies due to pandemics, war, or other natural calamities. Promoting private-public partnerships and investing in new international medical schools should also be considered. We have examples of Indian universities like Manipal offering American equivalent medical education from Antigua. We also have several thousand Indian students currently completing medical education in European countries. Let G20 help execute formal agreements between G20 governments and India that define the conditions and requirements for Indian doctors to practice in those countries.
Revamping the existing guidelines for setting up medical schools and teaching methods as per future methodologies will require significant investment in e-learning tools, including remote learning, virtual classrooms, etc.
Indian medical education system is evolving and striving to reach international standards. Setting up new international medical colleges in addition to current colleges training MBBS and PG students may be considered initially. There are examples of parallel pathways in primary and secondary education in India currently offered via State syllabus in addition to ICSE or CBSE schools.
STANDARDIZING GLOBAL MEDICAL LICENSING SYSTEMS AND VISA REQUIREMENTS
Developing an online database and platform that lists the qualifications and experience of Indian doctors interested in pursuing opportunities in G20 countries would be a good start. In addition, let us work with G20 nations to create more flexible visa and work permit requirements for Indian doctors.
Furthermore, establishing a mutual recognition agreement between G20 countries and India would enable Indian doctors to practice in those countries without additional licensing exams and create standard international medical licensing guidelines. Working with G20 governments to develop and implement standardized, streamlined credentialing and licensing processes for Indian doctors and the reciprocity of national medical licenses and international clinical rotations for medical students among G20 countries should also be considered.
Facilitating and supporting the mobility of Indian doctors within the G20 countries should be promoted. We will also need to create more opportunities for G20 nations and India to collaborate on research and development initiatives.
HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY
The healthcare industry is fast-tracking the use of e-health and e-learning techniques, AI, VR simulation, and the internet of things to train, upskill and empower health workers. Telemedicine and remote patient monitoring should be encouraged among and within G20 nations involving the G20 Medical Corps, as mentioned above. The scaling-up is rapid, based on big data and analytics. These emerging technologies will also generate more demand for new skills, increasing the potential to employ more in digital healthcare delivery. Let G20 leadership help develop programs that allow G20 countries to benefit from the expertise of Indian doctors through telemedicine and other remote care services.
REBALANCING HEALTHCARE TASKS AND MANUFACTURING
As per an OECD global survey, 79% of nurses and 76% of doctors were found to be performing tasks for which they were over-qualified. Given the worldwide evidence of the poor distribution of skills, we must rationally re-organize our workforce for effective management of high-burden diseases, particularly NCDs, which are responsible for 71% of the global mortality and, unless addressed, could cost the world $30 trillion by 2030. G20 nations should also increase manufacturing and procurement of essential medical supplies domestically. Depending on China for most of your medical supplies has exposed the vulnerabilities of G20 healthcare systems during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
BRIDGING LANGUAGE BARRIER AMONG HEALTHCARE WORKERS
The newly proposed international medical and nursing students should be encouraged to be fluent in at least one or two foreign languages, which will help them bridge the language divide. For instance, several countries have similar course curriculums for nursing; however, cultural aspects sometimes need fixing. For example, Sweden and India have identical nursing curricula, and there is great potential to encourage the exchange of nurses. Still, the potential for exchange is restricted due to linguistic barriers. However, this can be easily overcome, and more conducive arrangements can be implemented to facilitate the exchange of healthcare workers.
CREATING A SUSTAINABLE AND GENDER-BALANCED WORKFORCE
Evidence points towards gender imbalance and disparities in health employment and the medical education system. According to the WHO, globally, only 30% of doctors are females, and more than 70% of nurses are females. A similar trend is seen in India, where most nursing workforce comprises women, but only 16.8% of allopathic doctors are females. As per ILO data, gender wage gaps are also a cause for concern. Therefore, we need proactive steps to create a balanced healthcare workforce that addresses the issue of gender inequity and ensures equal pay for work of equal value, a favorable working environment, and targets investments towards training the female workforce.
G20 member states under India’s leadership must increase the in-built flexibility of their health systems, showing the capacity to guarantee everyday quality healthcare for all citizens, refugees, and displaced populations. Significant investment in the future of healthcare of G20 nations is the need of this hour. The abundance of young Indian talents could help the world to minimize the expected healthcare human resource shortfall with proper training and investment. G20 countries represent two-thirds of the world’s population and four-fifths of the global gross domestic product but also a significant proportion of people left behind socially, economically, and in terms of health. Let India propose bold steps and offer solutions in healthcare to secure the future of the G20 nations.
(This story was published in The Sunday Guardian on February 11, 2023)
(Prof (Dr) Joseph M. Chalil, MD, MBA, FACHE, is an Adjunct Professor & Chair of the Complex Health Systems advisory board at Nova Southeastern University’s School of Business, Chief Strategic Officer of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI), and the publisher of The Universal News Network. He recently published a best-seller book, “Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic: Envisioning a Better World by Transforming the Future of Healthcare”.)
India is poised to become the world’s most populous country this year – surpassing China, which has held the distinction since at least 1950, when the United Nations population records begin. The UN expects that India will overtake China in April, though it may have already reached this milestone since the UN estimates are projections.
Here are key facts about India’s population and its projected changes in the coming decades, based on Pew Research Center analyses of data from the UN and other sources.
How we did this
India’s population has grown by more than 1 billion people since 1950, the year the UN population data begins. The exact size of the country’s population is not easily known, given that India has not conducted a census since 2011, but it is estimated to have more than 1.4 billion people – greater than the entire population of Europe (744 million) or the Americas (1.04 billion). China, too, has more than 1.4 billion people, but while China’s population is declining, India’s continues to grow.
Under the UN’s “medium variant” projection, a middle-of-the-road estimate, India’s population will surpass 1.5 billion people by the end of this decade and will continue to slowly increase until 2064, when it will peak at 1.7 billion people. In the UN’s “high variant” scenario – in which the total fertility rate in India is projected to be 0.5 births per woman above that of the medium variant scenario – the country’s population would surpass 2 billion people by 2068. The UN’s “low variant” scenario – in which the total fertility rate is projected to be 0.5 births below that of the medium variant scenario – forecasts that India’s population will decline beginning in 2047 and fall to 1 billion people by 2100.
People under the age of 25 account for more than 40% of India’s population. In fact, there are so many Indians in this age group that roughly one-in-five people globally who are under the age of 25 live in India. Looking at India’s age distribution another way, the country’s median age is 28. By comparison, the median age is 38 in the United States and 39 in China.
The other two most populous countries in the world, China and the U.S., have rapidly aging populations – unlike India. Adults ages 65 and older comprise only 7% of India’s population as of this year, compared with 14% in China and 18% in the U.S., according to the UN. The share of Indians who are 65 and older is likely to remain under 20% until 2063 and will not approach 30% until 2100, under the UN’s medium variant projections.
The fertility rate in India is higher than in China and the U.S., but it has declined rapidly in recent decades. Today, the average Indian woman is expected to have 2.0 children in her lifetime, a fertility rate that is higher than China’s (1.2) or the United States’ (1.6), but much lower than India’s in 1992 (3.4) or 1950 (5.9). Every religious group in the country has seen its fertility rate fall, including the majority Hindu population and the Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain minority groups. Among Indian Muslims, for example, the total fertility rate has declined dramatically from 4.4 children per woman in 1992 to 2.4 children in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available from India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS). Muslims still have the highest fertility rate among India’s major religious groups, but the gaps in childbearing among India’s religious groups are generally much smaller than they used to be.
Fertility rates vary widely by community type and state in India. On average, women in rural areas have 2.1 children in their lifetimes, while women in urban areas have 1.6 children, according to the 2019-21 NFHS. Both numbers are lower than they were 20 years ago, when rural and urban women had an average of 3.7 and 2.7 children, respectively.
Total fertility rates also vary greatly by state in India, from as high as 2.98 in Bihar and 2.91 in Meghalaya to as low as 1.05 in Sikkim and 1.3 in Goa.
Likewise, population growth varies across states. The populations of Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh both increased by 25% or more between 2001 and 2011, when the last Indian census was conducted. By comparison, the populations of Goa and Kerala increased by less than 10% during that span, while the population in Nagaland shrank by 0.6%. These differences may be linked to uneven economic opportunities and quality of life.
On average, Indian women in urban areas have their first child 1.5 years later than women in rural areas. Among Indian women ages 25 to 49 who live in urban areas, the median age at first birth is 22.3. Among similarly aged women in rural areas, it is 20.8, according to the 2019 NFHS.
Women with more education and more wealth also generally have children at later ages. The median age at first birth is 24.9 among Indian women with 12 or more years of schooling, compared with 19.9 among women with no schooling. Similarly, the median age at first birth is 23.2 for Indian women in the highest wealth quintile, compared with 20.3 among women in the lowest quintile.
Among India’s major religious groups, the median age of first birth is highest among Jains at 24.9 and lowest among Muslims at 20.8.
India’s artificially wide ratio of baby boys to baby girls – which arose in the 1970s from the use of prenatal diagnostic technology to facilitate sex-selective abortions – is narrowing. From a large imbalance of about 111 boys per 100 girls in India’s 2011 census, the sex ratio at birth appears to have normalized slightly over the last decade. It narrowed to about 109 boys per 100 girls in the 2015-16 NFHS and to 108 boys per 100 girls in the 2019-21 NFHS.
To put this recent decline into perspective, the average annual number of baby girls “missing” in India fell from about 480,000 in 2010 to 410,000 in 2019, according to a Pew Research Center study published in 2022. (Read more about how this “missing” population share is defined and calculated in the “How did we count ‘missing’ girls?” box of the report.) And while India’s major religious groups once varied widely in their sex ratios at birth, today there are indications that these differences are shrinking.
Infant mortality in India has decreased 70% in the past three decades but remains high by regional and international standards. There were 89 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990, a figure that fell to 27 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2020. Since 1960, when the UN Interagency Group for Child Mortality Estimation began compiling this data, the rate of infant deaths in India has dropped between 0.1% and 0.5% each year.
Still, India’s infant mortality rate is higher than those of neighboring Bangladesh (24 deaths per 1,000 live births), Nepal (24), Bhutan (23) and Sri Lanka (6) – and much higher than those of its closest peers in population size, China (6) and the U.S. (5).
Typically, more people migrate out of India each year than into it, resulting in negative net migration. India lost about 300,000 people due to migration in 2021, according to the UN Population Division. The UN’s medium variant projections suggest India will continue to experience net negative migration through at least 2100.
But India’s net migration has not always been negative. As recently as 2016, India gained an estimated 68,000 people due to migration (likely to be a result of an increase in asylum-seeking Rohingya fleeing Myanmar). India also recorded increases in net migration on several occasions in the second half of the 20th century.
The U.S. military shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday afternoon, the Pentagon said, while China called the downing an overreaction.
“On Wednesday, President Biden gave his authorization to take down the surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
Austin said military commanders “had determined downing the balloon while over land posed an undue risk to people across a wide area due to the size and altitude of the balloon and its surveillance payload.”
Speaking on Saturday, President Biden told reporters he gave the order on Wednesday. U.S. officials “said to me, ‘Let’s wait ’til the safest place to do it,’ ” he said. “They successfully took it down, and I want to compliment our aviators who did it,” Biden added.
The downing came shortly after the Federal Aviation Administration said it had “paused departures from and arrivals to” three East Coast airports — in Wilmington, N.C., Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Charleston, S.C. — “to support the Department of Defense in a national security effort.” Flights through these airports resumed shortly after 3 p.m.
China responds with “dissatisfaction and protest”
Picture : The Drive
U.S. and Chinese officials have given conflicting information on the balloon’s purpose. The Chinese government said the balloon is strictly used for meteorological research and accidentally went adrift into U.S. airspace. China’s foreign ministry on Saturday expressed “strong dissatisfaction and protest” over what it called the U.S.’s “use of force to attack a civilian unmanned airship.” It called the shooting down an “obvious overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.”
U.S. officials earlier this week decided against shooting down the balloon after the Biden administration said it did not pose a national security threat. The Pentagon shared reports on Friday of a second balloon, belonging to China, that could be seen floating over Latin America. Colombia’s Air Force said on Saturday that an object with characteristics of a balloon had traveled through its airspace on Friday.
The balloon traveling through the U.S. quickly became an internet celebrity as meteorologists, storm chasers and others shared sightings on social media as it continued on its path across the U.S. Others criticized the Biden administration for not taking quicker actions to stop it.
“The China balloon flying over the U.S. is a direct assault on our national sovereignty,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted on Friday. “Biden’s refusal to stop it is a dereliction of duty. From flying balloons to open borders, Biden has no regard for our national security and sovereignty.”
After its downing on Saturday, Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said it “should have been shot down before it crossed the continental United States, not after. We still don’t know what information was collected and where it was sent,” he said. “This was a dereliction of Biden’s duty, and let’s hope the American people don’t pay a price.”
Austin praised Biden’s decision to shoot down the balloon. The Canadian government assisted in the “tracking and analysis of the balloon,” according to Austin.
“Today’s deliberate and lawful action demonstrates that President Biden and his national security team will always put the safety and security of the American people first while responding effectively to the PRC’s unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” he said in the statement.
On Saturday, people shared sightings of the balloon on social media. Earlier, in South Carolina, the York County Sheriff’s Office tweeted that the balloon was more than 60,000 feet in the air and urged people not to take matters into their own hands. “Don’t try to shoot it!!” the office tweeted. “Your rifle rounds WILL NOT reach it. Be responsible. What goes up will come down, including your bullets.”
The UK has been warned that 65,000 illegal migrants are expected to enter the country this year. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may withdraw from an international human rights treaty with an aim to crack down on illegal immigration in the country. The UK PM is prepared to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in a bid to curb migrant arrivals, the Sunday Times reported.
The UK has been warned that 65,000 illegal migrants are expected to enter the country this year. According to these estimates, illegal immigration in the UK will rise by 50 per cent this year.
Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman have started working on a new immigration legislation after the warning. The new laws could be unveiled within weeks, Bloomberg reported.
The pair are also prepared to withdraw from the ECHR before the general election if judges in Strasbourg rule that the new plans are unlawful, the Times report said.
A threat to withdraw from the ECHR would draw a sharp dividing line between Sunak’s Conservatives and the opposition Labour party — underlining the prime minister’s hardline stance on immigration.
Before being elected as the Prime Minister in October last year, Rishi Sunak had vowed to fix the “broken” asylum systems in the UK and stop the illegal boat crossings from France.
He had also announced a five-step strategy to clamp down on illegal immigration, with a promise to end the government’s backlog of asylum applications by the end of next year.
More than 11,000 people have been killed and thousands injured by a huge earthquake which struck south-eastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, in the early hours of Monday morning.
The earthquake, which hit near the town of Gaziantep, was closely followed by numerous aftershocks – including one quake which was almost as large as the first.
The death toll is expected to keep rising.
Why was it so deadly?
Picture : NBC News
A number of factors have contributed to making this earthquake so lethal. One of them is the time of day it occurred. With the quake hitting early in the morning, many people were in their beds when it happened, and are now trapped under the rubble of their homes.
Additionally, with a cold and wet weather system moving through the region, poor conditions have made reaching affected areas trickier, and rescue and recovery efforts on both sides of the border significantly more challenging once teams have arrived.
One of the most powerful earthquakes to hit the region in a century rocked residents from their slumber in the early hours of Monday morning around 4 a.m. The quake struck 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.
The first earthquake was big – it registered as 7.8, classified as “major” on the official magnitude scale. It broke along about 100km (62 miles) of fault line, causing serious damage to buildings near the fault.
A series of aftershocks reverberated through the region in the immediate hours after the initial incident. A magnitude 6.7 aftershock followed 11 minutes after the first quake hit, but the largest temblor, which measured 7.5 in magnitude, struck about nine hours later at 1:24 p.m., according to the USGS.
Prof Joanna Faure Walker, head of the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London, said: “Of the deadliest earthquakes in any given year, only two in the last 10 years have been of equivalent magnitude, and four in the previous 10 years.”
But it is not only the power of the tremor that causes devastation.
This incident occurred in the early hours of the morning, when people were inside and sleeping.
The sturdiness of the buildings is also a factor.
Dr Carmen Solana, reader in volcanology and risk communication at the University of Portsmouth, says: “The resistant infrastructure is unfortunately patchy in South Turkey and especially Syria, so saving lives now mostly relies on response. The next 24 hours are crucial to find survivors. After 48 hours the number of survivors decreases enormously.”
This was a region where there had not been a major earthquake for more than 200 years or any warning signs, so the level of preparedness would be less than for a region which was more used to dealing with tremors.
How long can people survive under rubble?
Despite the mounting challenges, a structural engineer and humanitarian coordinator urged rescuers not to abandon hope as survivors could be found up to “weeks” after the massive earthquake hit the region. Kit Miyamoto, president of non-profit Miyamoto Global Disaster Relief, also praised the community in Turkey who came together and “did their part” after the quake struck.
“The community, the citizens, they’re the ones that are actually the first line of defense,” he told CNN Wednesday. “They dug up family, friends, neighbors.”
What caused the earthquake?
The Earth’s crust is made up of separate bits, called plates, that nestle alongside each other.
These plates often try to move but are prevented by the friction of rubbing up against an adjoining one. But sometimes the pressure builds until one plate suddenly jerks across, causing the surface to move.
In this case it was the Arabian plate moving northwards and grinding against the Anatolian plate.
Friction from the plates has been responsible for very damaging earthquakes in the past.
On 13 August 1822 it caused an earthquake registering 7.4 in magnitude, significantly less than the 7.8 magnitude recorded on Monday.
Even so, the 19th Century earthquake resulted in immense damage to towns in the area, with 7,000 deaths recorded in the city of Aleppo alone. Damaging aftershocks continued for nearly a year.
There have already been several aftershocks following the current earthquake and scientists are expecting it to follow the same trend as the previous big one in the region.
How are earthquakes measured?
They are measured on a scale called the Moment Magnitude Scale (Mw). This has replaced the better known Richter scale, now considered outdated and less accurate.
The number attributed to an earthquake represents a combination of the distance the fault line has moved and the force that moved it .
A tremor of 2.5 or less usually cannot be felt, but can be detected by instruments. Quakes of up to five are felt and cause minor damage. The Turkish earthquake at 7.8 is classified as major and usually causes serious damage, as it has in this instance.
Anything above 8 causes catastrophic damage and can totally destroy communities at its centre.
How does this compare with other large earthquakes?
The 9.1 magnitude quake killed about 228,000 people.
Another earthquake – off the coast of Japan in 2011 – registered as magnitude 9 and caused widespread damage on the land, and caused a tsunami. It led to a major accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant along the coast.
The largest ever earthquake registered 9.5, and was recorded in Chile in 1960.
India and Pakistan came “too close” to a nuclear conflagration during the 2019 confrontation with both sides believing the other was preparing to deploy nuclear weapons, according to former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
He recounted in his book, “Never Give an Inch”, his frantic night-time diplomatic efforts to get the neighbours to stand down after getting a call from his “Indian counterpart” warning him that he believed Pakistan was readying nuclear weapons for a strike and India was considering its own escalation.
The External Affairs Minister, during the crisis set off by the terrorist attack that killed 46 Central Reserve Police Force personnel and the Indian strike on a terrorist base inside Pakistan in Balakot in February 2019, was the late Sushma Swaraj.
“I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over in a nuclear conflagration,” Pompeo wrote.
But, he added: “the truth is, I don’t know precisely the answer either. I just know it was too close”.
He was woken up at night while he was on a visit to Hanoi with a call from his “Indian counterpart” who told him that “he believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike”.
“India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation. I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out,” Pompeo wrote.
Working with John Bolton, who was then the US National Security Adviser, from their Hanoi hotel room he “reached the actual leader of Pakistan. General (Qamer Javed) Bajwa”, he wrote.
“I told him what the Indians had told me. He said it wasn’t true. As one might expect, he believed the Indians were preparing their own nuclear weapons for deployment.
“It took us a few hours, and remarkably good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad, to convince each side that neither was to convince each side or the other was not preparing for nuclear war,” Pompeo added.
Taking credit for the de-escalation, he wrote: “No other nation could have done that, but we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome.”
He acknowledged the work of Kenneth Juster, who was the then US envoy in New Delhi, calling him “an incredibly capable ambassador” who “loves India and its people”.
Pompeo, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency before becoming the Secretary of State, recounted in the book his four years in former President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
The book subtitled, “Fighting for the America I Love”, lays out how he aggressively implemented Trump’s ‘America First’ vision.
Writing about his efforts to deepen ties with New Delhi, Pompeo wrote that he “made India the fulcrum of my diplomacy to contract Chinese aggression”.
“I chose to devote serious quantities of time and effort to make India the next great American ally,” he added. (IANS)
Newswise — BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — In the first global Human Rights Report Card issued by the CIRIGHTS Data Project, Canada and Sweden were at the head of the class with a 96, followed by New Zealand, Norway and Portugal at 94. At the bottom were Iraq with a score of 12, China at 10, and North Korea and Syria with six. Iran was marked by a shocking lack of human rights, scoring only two out of a possible total of 100.
While Binghamton University Professor of Political Science David Cingranelli has been tracking global human rights for more than 40 years, the recently launched CIRIGHTS project — a collaboration between Binghamton and the University of Rhode Island (URI) — accomplishes a long-term goal: a simple report card for a complex issue.
The score is meant to grab attention and even provoke: a necessary prerequisite for change. “People who see a report card understand what a 95 means and what a 20 means,” said Cingranelli, co-director of CIRIGHTS with Skip Mark of URI and Mikhail Filippov of Binghamton University. Mark received his PhD in political science from Binghamton in 2018.
Picture : New Arab
According to Mark, CIRIGHTS “…gives a shorthand assessment of how countries are doing when it comes to respecting human rights.” It provides 72 numerical scores that show how well every country in the world protects — or doesn’t protect — a wide variety of internationally recognized human rights. The full dataset and the 2022 report card are freely available online and can be accessed at https://cirights.com/.
More maps, additional data visualization tools and a guide explaining the scoring system will soon be added. The Human Rights Report Card will be issued annually and includes a total country score as well as individual scores in particular areas, such as gender equality.
The goal is to provide researchers, nongovernmental organizations, policy-makers, college and high school teachers, and others with an objective tool to track human rights around the world, according to Mark, director of URI’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies.
“We measure what we treasure,” said Cingranelli, also co-director of Binghamton’s Human Rights Institute. “I sincerely believe that anything we care about in this world, we measure, whether it’s how much we weigh or how fast we are at the 50-yard dash. If you don’t measure it, how could you change it?”
Ranking rights
In the 1970s, the United States passed laws banning the allocation of military and economic aid to governments that systematically violated the human rights of their citizens. But how well were those rules being followed?
“I wanted to conduct a research project to examine whether there was any relationship between the distribution of American foreign aid and other favors of American policy and the human rights practices of the potential recipients,” Cingranelli explained.
In 1982, Cingranelli began researching and scoring Latin American countries on human rights with the help of then-graduate student Thomas Pasquarello, now a professor at SUNY Cortland, and a faculty colleague. A few years later, he and another graduate student — David Richards, now an associate professor at the University of Connecticut — expanded their data collection to other parts of the world. The result: the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project, considered the gold standard in the field of human rights until the project’s end in 2013.
A gift from URI alumni Shannon Chandley and Tom Silvia has enabled the CIRIGHTS team to hire student research assistants and data specialists to update and significantly expand the original CIRI database. Sources for scoring human rights include annual human rights reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, the United Nations State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples Report and other sources. The State Department’s annual report alone often spans almost 3,000 pages, with keen observations contributed by ambassadors all over the world, Cingranelli said.
The 72 internationally recognized rights in CIRIGHTS’ database include those related to physical integrity, such as those prohibiting torture and extrajudicial killings; workers’ rights, such as fair working conditions and the right to unionize; the political rights of women and Indigenous people; and the right to a fair trial.
The scorers — often undergraduate or graduate students supervised by Cingranelli, Filippov or Mark in their seminar courses — work independently with a rigorous set of scoring guidelines and then work together to resolve differences. Using a three-point scale, 25 human rights measures were considered for this year’s pilot report card.“Our scoring guidelines lay out everything our scorers need to assess each right — a simple definition of the right, its grounding in international law and examples of what violations look like,” said Kate Sylvester, a URI graduate student. “The goal is to be as objective as we can possibly be.”
However, one country is mostly missing from the current report card: the United States. Part of that comes down to data: While Amnesty International reports on respect for physical integrity rights in the U.S., it doesn’t report on much else. The State Department report includes a much wider range of rights, but doesn’t report on itself.
Another reason comes down to objectivity, since the evaluation is done within the United States by human reviewers who have access to a wide range of sources about their own country. Essentially, Cingranelli explained, it wouldn’t be an apples-to-apples comparison.
Still, the problem may eventually be resolved. Mark plans to offer a seminar in Rhode Island that will explore the status of human rights in the United States, with the goal of establishing more comprehensive rankings of U.S. human rights. And, Cingranelli points out, nothing prevents database users from reviewing the available information and determining how the U.S. ranks on their own.
A broader look
In addition to individual rankings, CIRIGHTS’ inaugural 2022 report identifies some broad global trends in the 21st century. According to the researchers, economic rights — apart from the right to a minimum wage — have declined, along with rights associated with the ability to criticize government, electoral self-determination and an independent judiciary. Some rights, however, have seen a marked increase, such as the right to a fair trial, protection from human trafficking, women’s political rights, and freedom of domestic and foreign movement.
Ultimately, countries seem to fall into two groups: One in which human rights have improved over time, and the other in which they remained stagnant or declined. The main difference between the two groups is whether they have regular free and fair elections with universal adult suffrage, Cingranelli said.
Long term, the team plans to expand both the dataset and the scope of the report. The ultimate goal is to have a comprehensive global human rights dataset that includes every internationally recognized human right.
“The way that human rights become real is through education,” Cingranelli added. “I’m hoping that these human rights report cards will be used by people around the world, especially teachers, to learn about indicators of human rights performance and to assess the performance of their own government relative to others.”
Ashraf Ghani, the former Afghanistan President who fled the country when the Taliban grabbed power in Kabul, was “a total fraud” solely focused on his own desire to stay in power and a big hurdle in any peace talks, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.
In his book titled ‘Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,’ Pompeo claims that both Ghani and Afghanistan’s former chief executive Abdullah Abdullah were involved in corruption at the highest levels that limited the US’ ability to successfully exit the war-torn country in August 2021.
The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan on August 31, ending its 20-year-old military presence in the country.
“As negotiations accelerated, Ghani was always a problem. I met scores of world leaders, and he was my least favourite. That’s saying a lot when you have Kim (Jong-un), Xi (Jinping), and (Vladimir) Putin in the mix. Yet Ghani was a total fraud who had wasted American lives and was focused solely on his own desire to stay in power,” Pompeo writes in his book that hit the bookstores this week.
“Never once did I sense that he was prepared to take a risk for his country that might imperil his power. This disgusted me,” he writes in the book that gives a detailed account of the negotiations that the previous US administration led by ex-President Donald Trump had with the Taliban group.
The Trump administration had appointed former diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as the special envoy for talks with the Taliban.
Pompeo claims that Ghani won his reelection mainly because of massive electoral fraud. “According to the final nominal tally, Ghani had defeated the country’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah. But the truth was that Ghani simply had bribed more voters and vote counters than the other candidates had,” writes the former Secretary of State.
Pompeo says both Ghani and Abdullah were fighting about who would be the next president without regard for whether there would even be a government to lead in Afghanistan. “At General Miller’s request, I hopped a plane to Afghanistan on March 23, 2020, to tell them that they needed to find an accommodation, or I would advise President Trump that we should exit the country immediately, beginning with the elimination of the roughly USD 5-6 billion per year in foreign assistance that we were providing at the time,” he said.
This was a real threat, Pompeo notes. “While the public focus was almost always on how the aid provided security assistance, its larger purpose was to preserve civil order. It funded schools and health care, but it also meant ‘walking around money’ for local leaders. That’s a euphemism for bribery, and it’s the sad reality of both how American aid and Afghan society worked,” he said.
“My message got their attention. Eventually, we shaved off USD 1 billion in assistance to show we weren’t bluffing. In May, Abdullah essentially gave control to Ghani, and we had, at least, a head of the Afghan government,” he said.
After joining the Trump administration, Pompeo said, he assessed that Afghan low-level corruption secured a measure of stability, as it kept the country from completely unravelling, albeit at a staggering cost to the government’s credibility with its own people.
“The fact was that even Afghan’s president Ashraf Ghani and the country’s chief executive Abdullah Abdullah both led cartels that stole millions of dollars in aid money from the United States. That corruption at the highest levels limited our ability to exit successfully,” Pompeo said.
Ghani, for all his eloquence and charm, was not the leader of a war-torn, deeply divided tribal nation seeking to build the political institutions needed, he said. “He was a dim bulb in his political instincts and a Brussels-style manager in a cauldron of violence that demanded an Ultimate Fighting Championship mindset. Nor did he have much credibility among Afghan leaders, nearly all of whom had been fighting in one war or another for their entire adult lives,” Pompeo said.
Ghani’s years in the West had made him masterful at gaming American lawmakers and nonprofit organizations, he claims. “He also spent extravagantly on lobbyists. I say with no exaggeration that Ghani had more friends inside the district of Columbia than he did in Afghanistan. When I met him the first time during my CIA days, I told him straight up: ‘You’re squandering your time on K Street and Capitol Hill when you should be hustling for allies in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif,’ Pompeo wrote.
Ghani, who has been living in exile in the UAE since the Taliban took over the Afghan capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, has, in the past, vehemently defended his move of fleeing the war-torn country, saying he left to stop further “bloodshed” by the Taliban.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that a 77-year-old organisation like the United Nations (UN) needs a “refresh”, asserting that pushing for a major overhaul in the top global body is an important part of New Delhi’s foreign policy, reported news agency PTI.
‘We need change’
“The UN system was invented in 1945. Now, I tell people to show me something which is 77 years old and you feel doesn’t need a refresh. People refresh themselves, institutions need to be refreshed by other people. We need change. Large parts of the world do not believe anymore that the UN system speaks fairly for them,” said Jaishankar while addressing members of the Indian diaspora in Vienna on Sunday.
India’s push for reform
The UN officially came into existence in October 1945, after its Charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the UK, the US and by a majority of other signatories.
India has been at the forefront of efforts at the UN to push for urgent long-pending reform of the Security Council, emphasising that it rightly deserves a place at the UN high table as a permanent member.
A question of influence
“The problem is those who are occupying positions of influence obviously don’t want to dilute their influence. So how we persuade people to go along with that change when their more short-term calculations make them stick to the old system is a real problem,” said Jaishankar, adding: “Having said that, it’s something which we will persevere and it’s a very important goal for us, and our foreign policy. It won’t happen tomorrow but it will happen one day, trust me.”
Pope Benedict XVI, the first pontiff to step down since the 15th century, died on Saturday, December 31st, 2022 in Vatican City at age 95.
For several days, he had experienced declining health due to his advanced age, the Vatican press office said, with Pope Francis publicly sharing news of Benedict’s worsening condition earlier this week. Pope Francis will preside over Benedict’s funeral on Thursday at St. Peter’s Square, the Vatican said.
Born April 16, 1927, in Germany’s Bavaria, Joseph Ratzinger was a theologian by training. Following the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Ratzinger was elected his successor after serving for a quarter of a century as the Vatican’s top enforcer of orthodoxy. He was the first German pope since the 11th century.
Following the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, several international leaders expressed condolences to the Catholic Church.
Picture : Znith
Benedict broke centuries of tradition in which popes served until death, and the need to coexist with his predecessor has been a defining aspect of Francis’s tenure, coinciding with a period of growing polarization within the faith.
For traditionalists, Benedict became a symbol of opposition. Conservative figures in the church would seek audiences with him. Far-right politicians would quote him — or John Paul II — instead of Francis.
Intrigue about their relationship has been so intense that it even inspired a movie, “The Two Popes,” which imagined the two verbally sparring, and ultimately enjoying one another, in a period before Benedict’s abdication.
In a press release, the White House make known a statement from President Biden and his wife: “Jill and I join Catholics around the world, and so many others, in mourning the passing of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. I had the privilege of spending time with Pope Benedict at the Vatican in 2011 and will always remember his generosity and welcome as well as our meaningful conversation.
He will be remembered as a renowned theologian, with a lifetime of devotion to the Church, guided by his principles and faith. As he remarked during his 2008 visit to the White House, “the need for global solidarity is as urgent as ever, if all people are to live in a way worthy of their dignity.” May his focus on the ministry of charity continue to be an inspiration to us all.
The U.S. Department State said: “The United States mourns the passing of His Holiness Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus — a holy man, witness to faith, and once Shepherd of the Catholic faithful. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was a dedicated leader and was committed to interfaith dialogue. He was an advocate for vulnerable persons, including refugees, internally displaced persons, and migrants. He supported international legal measures to defend them. He was a renowned theologian within the Catholic Church for decades. We offer our deepest condolences to the Catholic faithful around the world, the Holy See, and all those whose lives were enriched by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s spiritual guidance.”
French President Emmanuelle Macron said: “Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has left us, having marked the Church with the seal of his theological erudition and working tirelessly for a more fraternal world.
Born Joseph Ratzinger in 1927, he grew up in a modest Bavarian family which taught him a love of the piano, letters, history, and the fierce rejection of any form of fascism. His parents also transmitted their deep piety to him, so much so that at the age of 7, little Joseph asked for a Missal and a priest’s chasuble as a Christmas present. But while his mind turned to the priesthood, that of his contemporaries allowed itself to be plagued by Nazism. Like all his generation, he had to submit to the Hitler Youth at fourteen, then at sixteen to military service. Ulcerated by the ambient fanaticism, the young man refused to integrate the Waffen-SS, deserted his regiment in favour of the debacle, but was recaptured, and spent six weeks in prison before the German capitulation freed him.”
German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote his condolences to Pope Francis on the death of Pope Benedict XVI: “We in Germany were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Pope Benedict XVI. His faith, his intellect, his wisdom and his humility as a human being always profoundly impressed me.
“As a fellow countryman, this Pope bore a very special significance for us Germans also beyond the bounds of the universal Roman Catholic Church. For many people across the world, the election of a Pope from the home of the Reformation and of an intellectual who had made the dialogue between faith and reason his life’s work sent an important signal.
“The unity of Christendom, inter-faith dialogue and the coexistence of religion and society were matters particularly close to his heart. He sought dialogue with Jews and Muslims and with all Christian denominations throughout the world. High theological and philosophical concepts already combined with comprehensible language in the work of Professor Joseph Ratzinger. For this reason, many people, not only Roman Catholics, found clear orientation in his writings and addresses. He faced up to people’s searching and questioning.
The British Prime Minister said: “I am saddened by the news of the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. He was a great theologian whose visit to the United Kingdom in 2010 was a historic moment, both for Catholics as well as non-Catholics of our country. My thoughts today are with the Catholics of the United kingdom and of the whole world.
For his part, King Charles III, Successor of Queen Elizabeth II, wrote the following to Pope Francis: I received with profound sadness the news of the death of your Predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. I remember with fondness my meeting with His Holiness during my visit to the Vatican in 2009. His visit to the United Kingdom in 2010 was important in strengthening the relations between the Holy See and the United Kingdom.
I also recall his constant efforts to promote peace and goodwill to all people, and to strengthen the relationship between the global Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church. My wife and I send you our continued good wishes for your own pontificate.”
Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of the Anglican Communion. In a press release, he said: “Today I join with the Church throughout the world, and especially with the Holy Father, Pope Francis, and all in the Catholic Church, in mourning the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
In Pope Benedict’s long life and ministry of service to Christ in His Church he saw many profound changes in the Church and in the world. He lived through the Nazi regime in Germany and served briefly in the Second World War. As a younger theologian and priest he witnessed first-hand the discussions of the Second Vatican Council. As a professor and then as an Archbishop he lived in a divided Germany but saw, too, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of his homeland.”
Patriarch Kirill sent a message of condolences to Pope Francis. The gesture has been interpreted by the specialized press in the Vatican as a thawing in ecclesiastical relations given the war in Ukraine. “I received with sadness the news of the death of your Predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. The many years of life of His Holiness marked a whole period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, which he led in a difficult historical period associated with numerous external and internal challenges.
Benedict XVI’s unquestionable authority as eminent theologian enabled him to contribute significantly to the development of inter-Christian cooperation, to the witness of Christ in face of a secularized world, and to the defense of traditional moral values.”
Church historian Massimo Faggioli said he believes that by approaching the world from a purely intellectual and theological perspective, Benedict’s papacy was ultimately a failure. “Because to be pope you are not the theologian-in-chief, you are the pastor-in-chief. That’s the magic of the papal office,” Faggioli said.
Yet the historian said the real legacy of Benedict’s papacy was how he ended it. “Benedict XVI’s decision to resign was a very radical interpretation of Vatican II,” Faggioli said. “Going beyond the letter of Vatican II, that was revolutionary.”
O’Connell of America magazine said that in Benedict’s final remarks to the cardinals before leaving the Vatican, he said his successor was among them. “He promised that he would give loyalty and obedience to his successor, and he respected that commitment in a total, absolute way,” the correspondent said. After Pope Francis was elected in March 2013, Benedict lived quietly in a residence on Vatican grounds.
(IPS) – The UN Charter mandates the Security Council to maintain international peace, but wars rage on and nations arm themselves with ever more lethal weapons. No wonder that the Council’s critics are so many and calls for its reform so urgent.
On December 11, 1992, with post-Cold War optimism, the UN General Assembly voted to gather comments from member states on Council reform. Eighty governments made submissions, many sharply critical.
In the thirty years since, there have been endless meetings and initiatives. Year after year, governments, scholars, NGOs, and citizen movements have advanced proposals for Council renovation. In all that time, little progress has been made.
The Council’s five Permanent Members (the P-5) are the heart of the problem. Armed with vetoes, never-ending Council membership, and many other special privileges, they perpetuate their power, protect their global interests and shield their incessant war making.
They shape international law to suit themselves. The United States, the global giant, has by far the most dominant role in the Council. But it is adverse to following the rules itself and rarely inclined towards peaceful conflict solutions. Many ask: should the foxes guard the global chicken coop?
Various powers outside the P-5 want to be elevated to the highest rank. Brazil, India, Japan and Germany have long announced that they want to join the Permanent club. They argue that they would bring fresh ideas to better “represent” world regions and promote world peace.
Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt want to belong to the exclusive club too, bringing (they say) an African voice. But (to use an African metaphor) would these new crocodiles protect the world’s little fish? It seems unlikely!
Other reformers insist on more seats (and longer terms) for the Elected Members of the Council, presently ten in number. Smaller members are very vulnerable to pressure, threats and bribes from the P-5. Further, these lesser countries manage to have only the slightest influence on the Council’s proceedings.
They are, said the exasperated Singapore ambassador, “like short-term commuters on a long-distance passenger train.” So, a simple increase in Elected Members would not be a sure bet.
Limiting the veto or abolishing it entirely would have a very positive result but, needless to say, the P-5 fiercely oppose it. Reformers have also pressed for fairer membership elections and more frequent open public meetings.
Yet (with the exception of cosmetic tweaks) the reform process constantly runs up against P-5 blocking power. Their veto can stop any reform proposal dead in its tracks. But we should not forget that the world is changing and that autocratic power in history never lasts forever!
All reform proposals reflect an idealistic notion that the Council can be changed to restrain the enormous power, appetite and influence of the strongest and richest nations. This idea is rooted in the dream of democratic institutions within nation states, that rich and poor can elect representatives and determine policy in what passes for the general interest.
Difficult as it is at the national level, how could it possibly work in the war-torn world of global politics? Might one day the P-5 Ancien Regime collapse in a great crisis, under desperate pressure from a global citizens’ movement? What would it take to set such a process in motion? It may seem impossible, but so was the French revolution. We can be skeptical, but if we want peace we must press for change. So, watch out, P-5 autocrats! Change is coming!
Authoritarian State Gives Into Protest Pressure By Dropping Its ‘Zero Covid’ Policy
An unusually outspoken wave of protests recently mobilised against the Chinese government’s stifling response to COVID-19, an exercise in social control that included strict lockdowns, causing severe hardship. The government tried to restrict the protests but then backed down and eased the rigid rules it had consistently applied since the start of the pandemic. Just after being confirmed as the all-powerful leader of the party-state, President Xi Jinping for the first time showed signs of weakness. Long deprived of agency, mobilised people have now had a taste of power. Will they keep testing the limits and trying to open up spaces?
Something unusual just happened in China: people protested against an unpopular government policy, and some even criticised the totalitarian regime. And a government famous for its intransigence was forced to back down.
Zero covid
China was the first country struck by COVID-19, and since the early days, the government’s approach has been rigid. Its ‘zero-covid’ policy of long lockdowns, forced isolation in quarantine camps and widespread mandatory testing helped keep a lid on the virus. Domestically and internationally, the government sold its approach as a triumph, comparing it to the high death toll in countries like the USA. But its approach also brought misery to communities forced into lengthy isolation and unable to access essentials.
Picture : WP
The authoritarian regime fell back on its instincts of social control and used the emergency as an opportunity to test out further repressive measures, including new surveillance tools. The state was also criticised for using the policy as a cover for a slow and inadequate vaccination rollout, exacerbated by a refusal to accept foreign vaccines because it needed to present the vaccines developed in China as part of its success story, even though these likely have little effect on the most recent variants of the disease.
The long-term implementation of zero-covid brought significant economic impacts, threatening the source of China’s global power. In its response to the pandemic, as in other spheres – including its clampdown on the tech and entertainment industries – it seemed that when faced with a choice between economic prowess and social and political control, the government consistently chose the latter.
Centrally mandated policies were often overzealously implemented at the local level, as local officials stuck to the most extreme possible interpretation of the rules: years of experience of working within state structures had taught them this was the best way to signal their loyalty.
Deeper than the pandemic
The protests weren’t the first recent expression of dissent. Small-scale online and offline protests are less rare in China than might be expected given the Chinese regime’s mission of total control. Shanghai’s April lockdown, which saw people go hungry, sparked considerable anger, expressed on social media despite the extensive efforts of the government’s well-rehearsed censorship machinery to suppress it.
Even ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) congress, the twice-a-decade peak meeting of the ruling party held in October, two protest banners were briefly hung in Beijing, and enjoyed a much longer social media afterlife. Restrictions in an Apple iPhone factory led to protests in November, suppressed with security force beatings.
But the anti-zero-covid protests were on a whole other level. The trigger was the breakout of a fire on 24 November in an apartment block in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province. This is the region where the state is engaged in a long campaign of industrial-level human rights abuses against the mostly Muslim population, which perhaps not coincidentally has also been exposed to some of the longest and strictest lockdowns.
The story that spread after the fire, in which at least 10 people died, was that a strictly enforced lockdown, including locked doors and blocked emergency exits, had stopped people fleeing the building and first responders getting in. It still isn’t clear what happened, but the story spread quickly because it spoke to something people have long been feeling: that the state was prepared to sacrifice them for the sake of zero-covid. It wasn’t the first piece of evidence. In September, 27 people had been killed in a bus crash while being transported to a compulsory quarantine centre.
The Urumqi fire was a catalyst for the expression of a shared grievance over pandemic controls, and for suppressed anger about a lot more. Anger was intensified by a victim-blaming statement from an official that the residents should have understood fire safety procedures better.
Awareness that the rest of the world has largely moved on from Chinese-style restrictions may have played a part too. In February, China’s Winter Olympics took place under strict protocols. But more recently people have seen the World Cup kicking off in Qatar with thousands sitting in stadiums and little sign of mask use, despite efforts by China’s state broadcaster to censor crowd close-ups. The fact that even other repressive global south states have moved on made it impossible to pretend China was now anything other than an outlier.
Protests started in Xinjiang and quickly spread over several days to some of China’s biggest cities, including Beijing. Protests brought hundreds of people together, large numbers given the many restrictions. Many held up blank pieces of paper, something that offered an eloquent protest symbol, communicating the almost total denial of freedom of expression. Protesters chanted a line from China’s national anthem: ‘rise up, those who refuse to be slaves’.
The Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations and the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha came together to host centennial celebrations honoring the life and message of Pramukh Swami Maharaj, spiritual leader of BAPS for more than 50 years. The event was held at the UN headquarters in New York City on December 7, 2022.
Pramukh Swami Maharaj (1921-2016) was the fifth spiritual successor of Bhagwan Swaminarayan and embodied values of faith in God and service to humanity, a press release from BAPS said.
Picture : Cover
The event was themed, The World is One Family, the event at the United Nations aimed to honor his legacy. Those present included India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ruchira Kamboj, members of the Permanent Mission of India, ambassadors and representatives of many countries, and BAPS volunteers.
Dr. Kashyap Patel, a BAPS volunteer and cardiologist at the Northside Hospital Cardiovascular Institute in Atlanta, gave a welcome address, introducing Pramukh Swami Maharaj, his humanitarian efforts for social and spiritual upliftment, and his foundational belief that the world is one family.
Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s address at the United Nations Peace Millennium Summit on August 29, 2000, was brought to life through a video presentation. In this address, he appealed to spiritual leaders worldwide to have meaningful dialogues with each other to preserve the rich diversity, to not just tolerate but to respect all religions.
The United Nations Under-Secretary-General Miguel Angel Moratinos, who holds the post of High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, echoed Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s message, saying, “The time to come together as one is now.”
Kamboj delivered the keynote address. “In the truest sense, Swamiji’s life is a message to all humanity, it is a message of oneness, a message of goodness, a message of celebrating peace, harmony, and brotherhood,” she said.
During his lifetime, Pramukh Swami Maharaj responded to more than 20 natural disasters in India and abroad, inspiring volunteers to contribute their time and money to deliver relief to more than 6 million people worldwide.
Sejal Patel, a BAPS volunteer and associate director of professional development with McKinsey, shared a first-hand account of one such instance from the 2017 Hurricane Harvey disaster that struck Texas. “The signature mark of Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s relief efforts was this… his ability to share in the suffering and to channel that empathy into a sense of urgency to provide the swift action needed to save lives and then rebuild them over time…” Patel said.
Professor Sejal Saglani, a BAPS volunteer from U.K., who is Professor of Pediatric Respiratory Medicine at the Imperial College in London, spoke about efforts made during the Covid pandemic.
“Pramukh Swami Maharaj taught me in all aspects of my life that real success comes from serving and uplifting others,” said Ria Soni, a BAPS volunteer, first-year medical student at NYU, and co-founder of Project Stree, a menstrual education organization.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a historic visit to Washington on on December 21st, leaving his country for the first time since Russia’s February invasion to address a joint session of Congress and make a direct appeal to Americans for more aid.
The visit, shrouded in secrecy until the last moment, was the first time Zelensky is known to have left his country since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion in February.
The Ukrainian president is meeting with his U.S. counterpart at the White House and addressed Congress in a special joint meeting on December 21st.
Zelenskyy’s visit was aimed at underscoring U.S. support as Russia’s war drags on. It’s his trip trip outside Ukraine since Russia launched its attack in February.
The Ukrainian leader and his allies in the Biden administration made the most of the moment, both creating and reveling in the spectacle.
Biden greeted Zelensky on the White House’s South Lawn, walked him along the edges of the Rose Garden to the Oval Office and held a press conference alongside him.
Later, before his speech to Congress, Zelensky was shown the splendor of the Capitol by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
His speech itself was punctuated by applause from members of both parties and reached its emotional crescendo as he presented a Ukrainian flag, apparently from the front lines in Donbas and signed by the troops, to the chamber.
He thanked Congress for the financial support his country has received over the 10 months of war that have ravaged the country.
“Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy, that we handle in the most responsible way,” he said, seeming to address recent doubts from some GOP members that the U.S. should continue the flow of money to Ukraine.
He noted that while Russia possesses the power to stop its aggression, Congress, presumably with its pocket purse, has the power to speed up Ukraine’s victory. That would serve as a deterrent to other countries with thoughts of invasion, he added.
“It would be naïve to wait for steps toward peace from Russia, which enjoys being a terrorist state. Russians are still poisoned by the Kremlin,” he said. The road toward peace, he said, is dependent on bipartisan support from the U.S. “This battle cannot be frozen or postponed,” he said. “It cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection.”
“I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart,” Zelensky said. “Our two nations are allies in this battle, and next year will be a turning point. I know it — the point when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom.”
The Ukrainian military has shocked the world with its ability to repel Moscow’s invasion. Russia has been dealt major setbacks and the bulk of the fighting — now largely frozen in place — has been confined to the outer reaches of Ukraine. But a new wave of Russian attacks on the electrical grid have plunged much of Ukraine into darkness, leaving millions without heat and light.
The White House sees the war in Ukraine as a struggle that simply cannot be lost, for fear that such an outcome would embolden Putin and expose American weakness to rivals and adversaries such as China and Iran.
In the closing moments at the news conference, Biden sought to reassure Zelensky, telling him, “You don’t have to worry. We are staying with Ukraine as long as Ukraine is there.”
Other organizations like the G-20 may step up to take a more prominent role in international affairs than the United Nations if the global body fails to introduce reforms in the UN Security Council, Ruchira Kamboj, the Permanent Representative of India at the United Nations, said. Speaking on the issues — reformed multilateralism and counterterrorism during the December Presidency of India at the UNSC — Ms. Kamboj said that the reformation of the United Nations is the “most complex process” of the UN system.
“It involves several aspects. It involves the reform of the UN Charter. It requires all the P-5 (permanent members of the UNSC) to be on board. It requires that no P-5 should veto the matter and all of that and much more. Also, it touches a very raw nerve. There are many who aspire to be in a reformed council but there are many who would not like to see those in the council. Therefore, the process is indeed very complex,” Ms. Kamboj said, stressing that the complexities, however, do not mean that “change cannot happen”.
Speaking on the subjects of counterterrorism and reformed multilateralism during India’s UNSC Presidency in December, Kamboj noted that the reformation of the UN is the “most complicated process” within the UN system.
Kamboj said that there is a lot of “pessimism and cynicism” about the possibility of reform of the UN Security Council as the item of reform has remained on the agenda of the UNSC for nearly three decades without any substantive progress. Prof Harsh V. Pant who moderated the session raised the possibility of “minilaterals” playing a more active role in global affairs to which Ms. Kamboj said that it is a possibility if the reform of the UNSC refuses to make any progress.
“Today, you have almost two hundred member states. Their voices are not being heard anymore. Let’s say, the voice of the voiceless, the smaller states, the countries from Africa – who hears them? Everything is being scripted for them in many ways,” Ms. Kamboj said , warning that “may be the UN will be overtaken by other institutions for example that are more democratic such as the G-20”. The envoy, however, urged not to rush to any conclusion on such possibilities.
Ambassador Kamboj said that India has been “very vocal” during its stint as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council during which the harsher waves of the pandemic were experienced worldwide along with the crisis in Ukraine. “I think we did stand out in terms of assisting our partners and friends,” the envoy said , emphasising India’s role in providing vaccines to the least developed countries and that India has not hesitated in expressing an opinion on difficult issues during the past two years.
India’s 2021-2022 stint at the UNSC will draw to a close by the end of this month when India is also serving as the President of the UNSC. Kamboj said that the reform requires not just the P-5 but also smaller groupings within the UN structure to be engaged in the broader discussion on the reform.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a historic visit to Washington on on December 21st, leaving his country for the first time since Russia’s February invasion to address a joint session of Congress and make a direct appeal to Americans for more aid.
The visit, shrouded in secrecy until the last moment, was the first time Zelensky is known to have left his country since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion in February.
The Ukrainian president is meeting with his U.S. counterpart at the White House and addressed Congress in a special joint meeting on December 21st.
Zelenskyy’s visit was aimed at underscoring U.S. support as Russia’s war drags on. It’s his trip trip outside Ukraine since Russia launched its attack in February.
The Ukrainian leader and his allies in the Biden administration made the most of the moment, both creating and reveling in the spectacle.
Biden greeted Zelensky on the White House’s South Lawn, walked him along the edges of the Rose Garden to the Oval Office and held a press conference alongside him.
Later, before his speech to Congress, Zelensky was shown the splendor of the Capitol by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
His speech itself was punctuated by applause from members of both parties and reached its emotional crescendo as he presented a Ukrainian flag, apparently from the front lines in Donbas and signed by the troops, to the chamber.
He thanked Congress for the financial support his country has received over the 10 months of war that have ravaged the country.
“Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy, that we handle in the most responsible way,” he said, seeming to address recent doubts from some GOP members that the U.S. should continue the flow of money to Ukraine.
He noted that while Russia possesses the power to stop its aggression, Congress, presumably with its pocket purse, has the power to speed up Ukraine’s victory. That would serve as a deterrent to other countries with thoughts of invasion, he added.
“It would be naïve to wait for steps toward peace from Russia, which enjoys being a terrorist state. Russians are still poisoned by the Kremlin,” he said. The road toward peace, he said, is dependent on bipartisan support from the U.S. “This battle cannot be frozen or postponed,” he said. “It cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection.”
“I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart,” Zelensky said. “Our two nations are allies in this battle, and next year will be a turning point. I know it — the point when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom.”
The Ukrainian military has shocked the world with its ability to repel Moscow’s invasion. Russia has been dealt major setbacks and the bulk of the fighting — now largely frozen in place — has been confined to the outer reaches of Ukraine. But a new wave of Russian attacks on the electrical grid have plunged much of Ukraine into darkness, leaving millions without heat and light.
The White House sees the war in Ukraine as a struggle that simply cannot be lost, for fear that such an outcome would embolden Putin and expose American weakness to rivals and adversaries such as China and Iran.
In the closing moments at the news conference, Biden sought to reassure Zelensky, telling him, “You don’t have to worry. We are staying with Ukraine as long as Ukraine is there.”
The Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations and the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha came together to host centennial celebrations honoring the life and message of Pramukh Swami Maharaj, spiritual leader of BAPS for more than 50 years. The event was held at the UN headquarters in New York City on December 7, 2022.
Pramukh Swami Maharaj (1921-2016) was the fifth spiritual successor of Bhagwan Swaminarayan and embodied values of faith in God and service to humanity, a press release from BAPS said.
Picture : Cover
The event was themed, The World is One Family, the event at the United Nations aimed to honor his legacy. Those present included India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ruchira Kamboj, members of the Permanent Mission of India, ambassadors and representatives of many countries, and BAPS volunteers.
Dr. Kashyap Patel, a BAPS volunteer and cardiologist at the Northside Hospital Cardiovascular Institute in Atlanta, gave a welcome address, introducing Pramukh Swami Maharaj, his humanitarian efforts for social and spiritual upliftment, and his foundational belief that the world is one family.
Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s address at the United Nations Peace Millennium Summit on August 29, 2000, was brought to life through a video presentation. In this address, he appealed to spiritual leaders worldwide to have meaningful dialogues with each other to preserve the rich diversity, to not just tolerate but to respect all religions.
The United Nations Under-Secretary-General Miguel Angel Moratinos, who holds the post of High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, echoed Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s message, saying, “The time to come together as one is now.”
Kamboj delivered the keynote address. “In the truest sense, Swamiji’s life is a message to all humanity, it is a message of oneness, a message of goodness, a message of celebrating peace, harmony, and brotherhood,” she said.
During his lifetime, Pramukh Swami Maharaj responded to more than 20 natural disasters in India and abroad, inspiring volunteers to contribute their time and money to deliver relief to more than 6 million people worldwide.
Sejal Patel, a BAPS volunteer and associate director of professional development with McKinsey, shared a first-hand account of one such instance from the 2017 Hurricane Harvey disaster that struck Texas. “The signature mark of Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s relief efforts was this… his ability to share in the suffering and to channel that empathy into a sense of urgency to provide the swift action needed to save lives and then rebuild them over time…” Patel said.
Professor Sejal Saglani, a BAPS volunteer from U.K., who is Professor of Pediatric Respiratory Medicine at the Imperial College in London, spoke about efforts made during the Covid pandemic.
“Pramukh Swami Maharaj taught me in all aspects of my life that real success comes from serving and uplifting others,” said Ria Soni, a BAPS volunteer, first-year medical student at NYU, and co-founder of Project Stree, a menstrual education organization.
According to a top White House official, India is not merely an ally of the United States but rather another great power and there is no other bilateral relationship that has “deepened and strengthened” faster than the one between the two countries over the last 20 years.
India will not be an ally of the United States but will be another great power, a top White House official said Thursday asserting there is no other bilateral relationship that is being “deepened and strengthened” more rapidly than between the two countries over the last 20 years.
Responding to a question on India during his appearance at the Aspen Security Forum meeting in Washington, Kurt Campbell, the White House Asia coordinator, said that in his view India is the most important bilateral relationship for the United States in the 21st century.
Picture : First India
“The fact is, I don’t know of any bilateral relationship that is being deepened and strengthened more rapidly than the United States and India over the last 20 years,” the top White House official told a Washington audience. The United States needs to invest even more of its capacity, and building in people-to-people ties, working together on technology and other issues, he said.
“India has a unique strategic character. It will not be an ally of the United States. It has a desire to be an independent, powerful state and it will be another great power. But I think there are reasons to believe that our strategic alignment is growing across the board in almost every arena,” Campbell said. There are inhibitions in both of the bureaucracies and there are many challenges, he noted.
“But I do believe that this is a relationship that should have some ambition. We should look at things that we can do together, whether it’s in space, whether it’s education, whether it’s on climate, whether it’s on technology, and really move in that direction,” he said.
“If you look over the last 20 years and look at the hurdles that have been surmounted and the depth of engagement between our two sides, it’s remarkable,” he said.
India-US relationship, he asserted, is not simply built on anxiety around China. “It is a deeper understanding of the importance of the synergies between our societies,” he said, adding that the Indian diaspora in the US is a powerful connection.
Campbell acknowledged that Indians were ambivalent when President Joe Biden and his administration decided to take the Quad to the leader level.
“There were probably voices in their bureaucracy that were against it. But when President Biden made the direct appeal repeatedly to Prime Minister Modi, they decided that this was in their interests,” he said. The US is working very constructively with its Indian partners on the major set of initiatives in Covid-19 vaccine delivery, in maritime domain awareness and education, the White House official said.
“I’m thrilled to say that Prime Minister Albanese of Australia has invited us in 2023 for a major Quad meeting that we think will extend our coordination, cooperation, not just in Southeast Asia, and the Indo Pacific as well,” he said.
“I’m very bullish on the Quad. I think it will remain an unofficial venue. But it has many lines of communication, and it’s led to strengthening and deepening of coordination between these four key maritime democracies,” Campbell said. The Quad, known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is a group of four countries: the United States, Australia, India, and Japan. (This story has not been edited by thenn.com staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Authoritarian State Gives Into Protest Pressure By Dropping Its ‘Zero Covid’ Policy
An unusually outspoken wave of protests recently mobilised against the Chinese government’s stifling response to COVID-19, an exercise in social control that included strict lockdowns, causing severe hardship. The government tried to restrict the protests but then backed down and eased the rigid rules it had consistently applied since the start of the pandemic. Just after being confirmed as the all-powerful leader of the party-state, President Xi Jinping for the first time showed signs of weakness. Long deprived of agency, mobilised people have now had a taste of power. Will they keep testing the limits and trying to open up spaces?
Something unusual just happened in China: people protested against an unpopular government policy, and some even criticised the totalitarian regime. And a government famous for its intransigence was forced to back down.
Zero covid
China was the first country struck by COVID-19, and since the early days, the government’s approach has been rigid. Its ‘zero-covid’ policy of long lockdowns, forced isolation in quarantine camps and widespread mandatory testing helped keep a lid on the virus. Domestically and internationally, the government sold its approach as a triumph, comparing it to the high death toll in countries like the USA. But its approach also brought misery to communities forced into lengthy isolation and unable to access essentials.
Picture : WP
The authoritarian regime fell back on its instincts of social control and used the emergency as an opportunity to test out further repressive measures, including new surveillance tools. The state was also criticised for using the policy as a cover for a slow and inadequate vaccination rollout, exacerbated by a refusal to accept foreign vaccines because it needed to present the vaccines developed in China as part of its success story, even though these likely have little effect on the most recent variants of the disease.
The long-term implementation of zero-covid brought significant economic impacts, threatening the source of China’s global power. In its response to the pandemic, as in other spheres – including its clampdown on the tech and entertainment industries – it seemed that when faced with a choice between economic prowess and social and political control, the government consistently chose the latter.
Centrally mandated policies were often overzealously implemented at the local level, as local officials stuck to the most extreme possible interpretation of the rules: years of experience of working within state structures had taught them this was the best way to signal their loyalty.
Deeper than the pandemic
The protests weren’t the first recent expression of dissent. Small-scale online and offline protests are less rare in China than might be expected given the Chinese regime’s mission of total control. Shanghai’s April lockdown, which saw people go hungry, sparked considerable anger, expressed on social media despite the extensive efforts of the government’s well-rehearsed censorship machinery to suppress it.
Even ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) congress, the twice-a-decade peak meeting of the ruling party held in October, two protest banners were briefly hung in Beijing, and enjoyed a much longer social media afterlife. Restrictions in an Apple iPhone factory led to protests in November, suppressed with security force beatings.
But the anti-zero-covid protests were on a whole other level. The trigger was the breakout of a fire on 24 November in an apartment block in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang province. This is the region where the state is engaged in a long campaign of industrial-level human rights abuses against the mostly Muslim population, which perhaps not coincidentally has also been exposed to some of the longest and strictest lockdowns.
The story that spread after the fire, in which at least 10 people died, was that a strictly enforced lockdown, including locked doors and blocked emergency exits, had stopped people fleeing the building and first responders getting in. It still isn’t clear what happened, but the story spread quickly because it spoke to something people have long been feeling: that the state was prepared to sacrifice them for the sake of zero-covid. It wasn’t the first piece of evidence. In September, 27 people had been killed in a bus crash while being transported to a compulsory quarantine centre.
The Urumqi fire was a catalyst for the expression of a shared grievance over pandemic controls, and for suppressed anger about a lot more. Anger was intensified by a victim-blaming statement from an official that the residents should have understood fire safety procedures better.
Awareness that the rest of the world has largely moved on from Chinese-style restrictions may have played a part too. In February, China’s Winter Olympics took place under strict protocols. But more recently people have seen the World Cup kicking off in Qatar with thousands sitting in stadiums and little sign of mask use, despite efforts by China’s state broadcaster to censor crowd close-ups. The fact that even other repressive global south states have moved on made it impossible to pretend China was now anything other than an outlier.
Protests started in Xinjiang and quickly spread over several days to some of China’s biggest cities, including Beijing. Protests brought hundreds of people together, large numbers given the many restrictions. Many held up blank pieces of paper, something that offered an eloquent protest symbol, communicating the almost total denial of freedom of expression. Protesters chanted a line from China’s national anthem: ‘rise up, those who refuse to be slaves’.
In September 2022, India became the fifth largest economy in the world by overtaking the United Kingdom, according to a recent report from the International Monetary Fund. India’s economic and political rise has both domestic and global implications and might alter the nature of the country’s foreign relations with powerful countries like the United States, China, and Russia, and vice versa. Furthermore, global events, such as the protectionist tech policies imposed by former President Trump on Chinese trade policies, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the deepening of authoritarianism in China, are forcing global realignment. Consequently, countries like India are reassessing their foreign relations with existing major powers and signaling interests and preferences vis-à-vis new emerging powers.
Picture : TheUNN
In this essay, we quantify India’s foreign relations based on news that involves the country and the top economies in the world: Australia, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, the United States, and Russia. We exploit the Global Database of Society, which is a part of the Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) Project that monitors news (broadcast, print, and digital) across the globe in more than 65 languages. Within 15 minutes of a news event breaking worldwide, the GDELT Project translates the event if it is in a language other than English and processes the news to identify the event, location, people, and organizations involved and the nature and theme of the event based on more than 24 emotional measurement packages (the largest deployment of sentiment analysis) to assess more than 2,300 emotions and themes to “contextualize, interpret, respond to, and understand global events” in near real-time.
The GDELT database lends itself to fascinating quantitative analysis of the changing nature of international relations as reflected in the news and media coverage. In our analysis, we find significant changes in India’s bilateral relations with major economies like France, China, Russia, and the United States in recent years. We also find structural breaks and major realignment in the relations of global powers vis-à-vis China since 2018.
RESEARCH METHODS
We limit our analysis to the GDELT event database that records events (such as appeals for rights, ease of restrictions on political freedoms, protest, etc.), the date of the event, and the actors involved (which could be geographic, ethnic, religious, etc.), the country of the actors, the number of mentions of the event (the higher the mentions, the more important the event), and the average media tone associated with the event, which is a numeric value that can range from -100 (extremely negative tone) to +100 (extremely positive tone), with typical values between -10 and +10 and with zero indicating a neutral event. Our analyses focus on events from June 15, 2015, to September 24, 2022.
Overall, we analyze more than 99 million events, where the major actors were from three large countries: India, China, and the United States. We also estimate an average daily tone for each of the three countries by constructing a weighted mean of the average tone of all the events recorded on that date, with the number of mentions as a weight for each event. Our primary objective is to identify the pattern of the daily weighted average tone of the events related to India, China, and the United States from 2015 to 2022. To achieve this, we fit a Bayesian regression with a cubic spline and seven knots and plot the posterior mean with 95% intervals of the weighted average daily tone.
MEDIA TONE: CHINA VS. USA VS. INDIA
Overall, we find that events related to China, an authoritarian country with severe restrictions on free media, have a relatively more positive tone than the tone of events in democracies such as India and the United States. However, since 2018, the tone of events related to China has begun a sharp downward trend. This change toward China was also observed in a 2021 Pew survey on Americans’ views toward China. It is also interesting to note a more positive trend in tone for India-related events since 2020, which remains steady and does not exhibit any sharp pattern.
(i) India’s relations with the United States, China, and Russia
In our analysis of events related to India, China, the United States, and Russia, we focus on events where the prominent actor is India. Until late 2021, events related to India and Russia had a relatively more positive tone than those associated with India and the United States. and India and China. However, since late 2021, there has been a sharp reversal in the tone of events related to India and Russia. This is most likely a direct outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
We also find that the tone of events related to India and China had a sharp reversal during the Doklam crisis in 2017 when there was a military border standoff between the Indian Armed Forces and the People’s Liberation Army of China. This was in response to the Chinese constructing a road at the trijunction area of India-Bhutan-China. The border standoff lasted more than two months and ended only when the Chinese halted the road construction and troops from both sides withdrew from Doklam. There was a short recovery in late 2018, however, from early 2019 onwards, there has been a sharp reversal in tone which worsened at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Thereafter, India-China relations have continued to remain steady but at a historic low.
Concerning events related to India and the United States, we observe that their tone was steady and continuous until the middle of 2018, after which it started to fall. This downward trend continued until 2020 (the year of U.S. elections and the start of the pandemic), after which we observe a steady rise in the tone of events related to India and the United States.
(ii) Global realignment: China v. India
In our analysis, we also reviewed events that relate India and China to the world’s top economies: Australia, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, the United States, and Russia. We include Pakistan (PAK) and Israel (ISR) for this analysis, as both countries are important actors in India’s foreign policy.
Over the entire period, the average tone of events that relate India to the major economies has remained somewhat similar, except for France and Israel, where there is a significant upward swing in the average tone after 2021. Not surprisingly, this reflects the dramatic improvements in India’s ties with Israel and France in recent years.
In contrast, since 2018, the average tone of events that relate China to the major economies has experienced a downward trend. In particular, the India-China gap in the average tone with Australia, Germany (DEU), France, and the United States widened after 2018. However, since 2020, the downward trend in the average tone of events has either reversed or remained constant. The most striking result of this analysis concerns Russia’s relations with India and China. We observe a sharp downward trend in the tone of events concerning Russia’s relations with both China and India between 2021 and 2022, which is most likely the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Broadly, the average tone of events that relate India to the major economies is higher compared to events that relate China to the major economies (in particular, Australia, Germany, France, and the United States); this gap has widened since 2018-2019. Results for Pakistan are along expected lines, as the tone of events covering its relations with China and India remain steady and unaffected by global events over time. Pakistan’s relations with China are significantly better than its relations with India, which have a systematic and significant negative tone.
CONCLUSION
The findings of our research suggest that events related to China (which has heavy-handed, authoritarian restrictions on all forms of media) have a relatively more positive tone than large federal democracies when it comes to media, such as India and the United States, which have a relatively free press. However, since 2018-2019, there has been a sharp downward trend in tone of events related to China, perhaps reflecting the changing view of China in the western world, particularly within the United States, and the former president’s political attack on China concerning its trade policy. However, in the last two years, we have observed a reversal in this trend, which could reflect an easing of the tension post-pandemic and change in the U.S. government.
When analyzing events that relate India and China to the top economies and Russia, we find a widening gap in the average tone of events. However, when it comes to Russia post-2021, there has been a sharp decline in the average tone of events for both China and India, perhaps an outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Based on the average tone of events, the findings suggest a consistent realignment of the world’s top economies in their foreign relations concerning India and China, especially after 2018. (Brookings)
The bust of Mahatma Gandhi will be placed on the “prestigious” North Lawn of the UN building, which is the first time that a sculpture of the Mahatma will be installed in the United Nations Headquarters.
Picture : The Hindu
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will inaugurate a bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations on December 14, marking the arrival of the Mahatma at UN’s headquarters during India’s presidency of the powerful 15-nation Security Council for the month of December.
India, on December 1, assumed the monthly rotating presidency of the Security Council, the second after August 2021 that India is presiding over the Council during its two-year tenure as an elected UNSC member.
The bust of Mahatma Gandhi will be placed in the “prestigious” North Lawn of the UN building, which is the first time that a sculpture of the Mahatma will be installed in the UNHQ.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will inaugurate a bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations on December 14, marking the arrival of the Mahatma at UN’s headquarters during India’s presidency of the powerful 15-nation Security Council for the month of December.
India, on December 1, assumed the monthly rotating presidency of the Security Council, the second after August 2021 that India is presiding over the Council during its two-year tenure as an elected UNSC member.
The bust of Mahatma Gandhi will be placed in the “prestigious” North Lawn of the UN building, which is the first time that a sculpture of the Mahatma will be installed in the UNHQ.
The simple ceremony will take place in the presence of UNSC members, including the five incoming new Council members — Ecuador, Japan, Malta, Mozambique and Switzerland.
The bust, made by renowned Indian sculptor Padma Shree awardee Ram Sutar, who has also designed the ‘Statue of Unity’, will be a gift from India and will be installed in the UN headquarters, which proudly displays gifts and artefacts from around the world.
Addressing reporters on the Indian presidency and the monthly program of work, Ms. Kamboj said that apart from two signature events chaired by Mr. Jaishankar in the Council on December 14 and 15 on reformed multilateralism and counter-terrorism, there will also be two side events coinciding with India’s presidency. “The first will mark the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations,” Ms. Kamboj said.
The five new members, whose two-year tenure at the Council will begin on January 1, 2023, will replace India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway and join the five permanent members China, France, Russia, the U. K., and the U.S. as well as non-permanent members Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana and the United Arab Emirates at the Security Council’s signature horseshoe table.
Notable works of art at the UNHQ include a section of the Berlin wall donated by Germany, the Soviet sculpture ‘Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares’, a life-size bronze statue of Nelson Mandela gifted by South Africa, and the ‘Guernica’ tapestry after the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso.
The only other gift from India on display at the UN Headquarters is an 11th-century black-stone statue of ‘Surya’, the Sun God, donated on July 26, 1982. The statue, dating from the late Pala period and which is currently displayed in the Conference Building, was presented as a gift by then Prime Minister late Indira Gandhi to the United Nations.
Then Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar accepted the sculpture on behalf of the United Nations. Ambassador Kamboj had told PTI in an exclusive interview that Gandhi’s legacy of non-violence and peace is enduring and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement that “this is not an era of war” speaks to that very legacy and has been widely accepted by the world.
The second side event will see the launch of a ‘Group of Friends for accountability of crimes against UN peacekeepers’, Ms. Kamboj said adding that a “more robust peacekeeping has been one of our priorities in the Security Council.”
She said that following up on Resolution 2589, which had focused on the safety and security of peacekeepers, the Group of Friends will bring the spotlight on an issue that is “fundamental, if I may say existential, to the task of peacekeepers.” As 2023 ushers in the ‘year of Millets’, India will also promote and highlight millets during the month.
Addressing reporters on the Indian presidency and the monthly program of work, Ms. Kamboj said that apart from two signature events chaired by Mr. Jaishankar in the Council on December 14 and 15 on reformed multilateralism and counter-terrorism, there will also be two side events coinciding with India’s presidency. “The first will mark the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi at the United Nations,” Ms. Kamboj said. “We will also be promoting millets”, which are “very healthy and environment-friendly”, Ms. Kamboj said.
Data shows Leicester and Birmingham have become UK’s first ‘minority majority’ cities in new age of ‘super-diversity’
England and Wales are now minority Christian countries, according to the 2021 census, which also shows that Leicester and Birmingham have become the first UK cities to have “minority majorities”.
The census revealed a 5.5 million (17%) fall in the number of people who describe themselves as Christian and a 1.2 million (43%) rise in the number of people who say they follow Islam, bringing the Muslim population to 3.9 million. In percentage-point terms, the number of Christians has dropped by 13.1, and the number of Muslims has risen by 1.7.
It is the first time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population have described themselves as Christian.
Meanwhile, 37.2% of people – 22.2 million – declared they had “no religion”, the second most common response after Christian. It means that over the past 20 years the proportion of people reporting no religion has soared from 14.8% – a rise of more than 22 percentage points.
The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said the census result “throws down a challenge to us not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our part in making Christ known”.
He added: “We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by.”
The chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said: “One of the most striking things about these census results is how at odds the population is from the state itself. No state in Europe has such a religious setup as we do in terms of law and public policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population.”
Analysis by the Guardian shows areas with a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities are also more religious. And places with a higher proportion of white people also have a bigger proportion with no religion. The places with the highest numbers of people saying they had no religion were Caerphilly, Blaenau Gwent and Rhondda Cynon Taf, all in south Wales, and Brighton and Hove and Norwich in England. They were among 11 areas where more than half the population are not religious, including Bristol, Hastings in East Sussex and Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, most of which had relatively low ethnic minority populations.
The places with the lowest number of non-believers were Harrow, Redbridge and Slough, where close to two-thirds of the populations are from minority ethnic backgrounds.
The slump in religion and emergence of minority ethnic populations as a combined majority in whole conurbations in England and Wales is revealed in data about the ethnicity, religion and language of close to 60 million people gathered in a snapshot census on 21 March 2021. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) cited differing patterns of ageing, fertility, mortality and migration as possible reasons for the change in religious profile of the countries.
Across the two countries, 81.7% of the population is now white, including non-British, down from 86% in 2011, 9.3% is Asian British, up from 7.5%, 2.5% is Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean-African and African, up from 1.8%, and 1.6% are other ethnicities.
Ushering in a new age of city-wide “super diversity”, the ONS data showed 59.1% of the people of Leicester are now from ethnic minority groups, a big change since 1991, when black and minority ethnic people made up just over a quarter of the city’s residents. Leicester’s Asian population first became well established after 20,000 people settled in the east Midlands manufacturing city after expulsion from Uganda in 1972.
Minority ethnic people also make up more than half the population in Luton (54.8%) and Birmingham (51.4%), the UK’s second largest city where 20 years ago seven out of 10 people were white. Since the second world war, Birmingham’s population has grown with immigration from the Caribbean and south Asia, as well as Gujaratis who had been in east Africa.
The mixed-race population grew by half a million people to 1.7 million over the last decade, but the rate of increase was slower than for the previous decade.
The census deputy director, Jon Wroth-Smith, said the figures showed “the increasingly multicultural society we live in” but added that despite the rising ethnic diversity “nine in 10 people across England and Wales still identify with a UK national identity, with nearly eight in 10 doing so in London”.
The figures will present a fresh impetus to policymakers to tackle embedded racial inequalities, which mean black and minority ethnic people are 2.5 times more likely to be in relative poverty and are falling faster and further below the poverty line in the cost of living crisis, according to the Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank.
(Reuters) – India began its year-long presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) this week, taking over from Indonesia at a time of geopolitical tumult and uncertainty over post-pandemic economic recovery.
Formed in the wake of the financial crisis that swept through Southeast Asian economies in the late 1990s as a forum for finance ministers and central bank governors, the G20 was upgraded in 2007 to include heads of state and governments.
During and after the 2008 global financial crisis, the G20’s coordinated efforts helped tamp down panic and restore economic growth.
The grouping comprises 19 countries cutting across continents and the European Union, representing around 85% of the world’s GDP.
The G20 also invites non-member countries, including Bangladesh, Singapore, Spain and Nigeria, besides international organisations such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, the World Bank and the IMF.
What Does G20 Presidency Entail?
The G20 does not have a permanent secretariat, and one member takes over the presidency each year to steer the grouping’s agenda that is split into two tracks – one led by finance ministers and another by emissaries of leaders of member countries.
After India, Brazil will take over the presidency of the G20, followed by South Africa in 2025.
During its term, India will hold more than 200 meetings across some 50 cities involving ministers, officials and civil society, leading up to a marquee summit in the capital New Delhi in September 2023.
The summit will be attended by around 30 heads of state and government, from G20 members and invited countries.
What Is G20’s Upcoming Agenda?
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for international cooperation to deal with global issues, outlining the country’s approach to the G20.
He said in a statement the challenges of “climate change, terrorism, and pandemics can be solved not by fighting each other, but only by acting together”.
Modi also underlined a need to “depoliticise the global supply of food, fertilizers and medical products, so that geo-political tensions do not lead to humanitarian crises”.
His statement reflects New Delhi’s stance that the conflict in Ukraine, triggered by a Russian invasion in February, must be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy.
Asked about Russia’s involvement in G20 during India’s presidency, a spokesperson for the Indian foreign ministry said that as Russia was a G20 member, “we would expect them to be participating in this process … the grouping needs to speak with one voice, particularly on important issues that are affecting the world”.
What Does The G20 Mean For India And Modi?
The timing of the summit, ahead of India’s general elections due in 2024, could help bolster Modi’s already growing reputation at home as a leader of international stature.
The 72-year-old leader also appears to have a personal rapport with many of his G20 counterparts, including U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Still, the current complex geopolitical and economic situation will make it a challenge for India and Modi to shape the international response to multiple crises.
This is a moment for India to transition from being a “rule-taker to being a rule-maker”, said Rajiv Bhatia and Manjeet Kripalani of Indian think-tank Gateway House.
“The country has not invested much in multilateral rule-making institutions like the G20, but it is never too late to start.”
China’s ruling Communist Party has vowed to “resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces,” following the largest street demonstrations in decades staged by citizens fed up with strict anti-virus restrictions, media reports here suggest.
The statement from the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission released late Tuesday comes amid a massive show of force by security services to deter a recurrence of the protests that broke out over the weekend in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and several other cities.
Picture : UPI.com
While it did not directly address the protests, the statement serves as a reminder of the party’s determination to enforce its rule. Hundreds of SUVs, vans and armored vehicles with flashing lights were parked along city streets Wednesday while police and paramilitary forces conducted random ID checks and searched people’s mobile phones for photos, banned apps or other potential evidence that they had taken part in the demonstrations.
The number of people who have been detained at the demonstrations and in follow-up police actions is not known. While reports and footage of the protests have flourished online before being scrubbed by government censors, they have been ignored entirely by the strictly controlled state media.
Jiang was installed as leader just ahead of the bloody suppression of the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and later presided over an era of breakneck economic growth during the 1990s and early 2000s while still maintaining rigid party control.
The commission’s statement, issued after an expanded session Monday presided over by its head Chen Wenqing, a member of the party’s 24-member Politburo, said the meeting aimed to review the outcomes of October’s 20th party congress.
At that event, Xi granted himself a third five-year term as secretary general, potentially making him China’s leader for life, while stacking key bodies with loyalists and eliminating opposing voices.
“The meeting emphasized that political and legal organs must take effective measures to … resolutely safeguard national security and social stability,” the statement said.
“We must resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces in accordance with the law, resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order and effectively maintain overall social stability,” it said.
Yet, less than a month after seemingly ensuring his political future and unrivaled dominance, Xi, who has signaled he favors regime stability above all, is facing his biggest public challenge yet.
He and the party have yet to directly address the unrest, which spread to college campuses and the semi-autonomous southern city of Hong Kong, as well as sparking sympathy protests abroad.
Most protesters focused their ire on the “zero-COVID” policy that has placed millions under lockdown and quarantine, limiting their access to food and medicine while ravaging the economy and severely restricting travel. Many mocked the government’s ever-changing line of reasoning, as well as claims that “hostile outside foreign forces” were stirring the wave of anger.
Yet bolder voices called for greater freedom and democracy and for Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, as well as the party he leads, to step down — speech considered subversive and punishable with lengthy prison terms. Some held up blank pieces of white paper to demonstrate their lack of free speech rights.
The weekend protests were sparked by anger over the deaths of at least 10 people in a fire on Nov. 24 in China’s far west that prompted angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by anti-virus controls.
Authorities eased some controls and announced a new push to vaccinate vulnerable groups after the demonstrations, but maintained they would stick to the “zero-COVID” strategy.
The party had already promised last month to reduce disruptions, but a spike in infections swiftly prompted party cadres under intense pressure to tighten controls in an effort to prevent outbreaks. The National Health Commission on Wednesday reported 37,612 cases detected over the previous 24 hours, while the death toll remained unchanged at 5,233.
Beijing’s Tsinghua University, where students protested over the weekend, and other schools in the capital and the southern province of Guangdong sent students home in an apparent attempt to defuse tensions. Chinese leaders are wary of universities, which have been hotbeds of activism including the Tiananmen protests.
Police appeared to be trying to keep their crackdown out of sight, possibly to avoid encouraging others by drawing attention to the scale of the protests. Videos and posts on Chinese social media about protests were deleted by the party’s vast online censorship apparatus.
A literal spark lit the blaze of protests that have spread across China over the past several days, as thousands have turned out to demonstrate against the government’s longstanding “Zero COVID” policy and its related lockdowns. Last Thursday, a fire broke out in an apartment complex in the western city of Urumqi, killing 10 people and injuring nine. Locals complained that gates, barricades, and other obstacles that had been set up to quarantine the building slowed the response of firefighters.
As CNN reports, Urumqi had been under lockdown for more than 100 days, and by Friday morning, residents were marching on a local government building demanding that the quarantine be lifted. Over the weekend and into today, the protests quickly spread to at least 16 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, and Wuhan, where COVID-19 first emerged. Protesters held up blank sheets of white paper—a symbolic protest against censorship—and in both Shanghai and Beijing called for Chinese President Xi Jinping to step down. “We don’t want a leader, we want votes,” chanted the Beijing demonstrators, as my colleague Chad de Guzman reports.
The demonstrations come at a time when China is experiencing a COVID-19 surge, hitting a one-day record of more than 40,000 cases today. But that has not cooled the fury of protesters who have watched as much of the rest of the world has opened up even as Beijing continues its draconian Zero COVID rules, under which the government aims to identify and isolate every person with the disease.
At times, the protests turned violent. Police clashed with demonstrators in Shanghai, and Ed Lawrence, a reporter for the BBC, was arrested and later released, but not before being beaten and kicked by reporters, Lawrence alleges. A spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs told CNN that Lawrence did not identify himself or “voluntarily present his press credentials.” The spokesman also said that police were trying to protect Lawrence from contracting COVID-19 from the crowd. (“We do not consider this a credible explanation,” said the BBC in a statement.)
The mere fact that the protests are taking place is surprising in China, where demonstrations are strictly forbidden and quickly crushed. That Xi’s name was raised makes the uprising even more shocking.
“Until recently, most Chinese people were very scared about the efficiency and the magnitude of the repressive organs of China, and they wouldn’t move a finger,” Jean Pierre Cabestan, emeritus professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, told Chad. But the recent protests show just how much people are “fed up with the current situation and think things have to change.”
That change is coming—albeit slowly. Today, the Chinese government announced a slight loosening of some restrictions. In Beijing, for example, officials will no longer set up blockades to prevent entry to apartment compounds where infections have been found. In Guangzhou, a recent hotspot of infections, mass testing requirements will be eased. And in Urumqi, some markets and other businesses will be allowed to reopen, CNN reports, and bus service will resume.
Still, the government does not currently plan to abandon its Zero COVID policy entirely. “Facts have fully proved that each version of the prevention and control plan has withstood the test of practice,” a government commentator wrote in the People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, according to the Associated Press.
The People’s Republic of China is under pressure from its people over President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid and lockdown policies. Thousands of people have taken to streets across China.
Some observers say that it is the most serious threat to the communist regime since the pro-democracy protests at the Tiananmen Square, where over 10,000 people were reportedly killed in a government crackdown.
This time too, China has responded with a severe crackdown on the protesters. Hundreds, including journalists covering the protests, have been detained and beaten up by the police.
(AP) — Fewer than half the people in England and Wales consider themselves Christian, according to the most recent census — the first time a minority of the population has followed the country’s official religion.
Fewer than half the people in England and Wales consider themselves Christian, according to the most recent census — the first time a minority of the population has followed the country’s official religion.
Britain has become less religious — and less white — in the decade since the last census, figures from the 2021 census released Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics revealed.
Picture : The Hindu
Some 46.2% of the population of England and Wales described themselves as Christian on the day of the 2021 census, down from 59.3% a decade earlier. The Muslim population grew from 4.9% to 6.5% of the total, while 1.7% identified as Hindu, up from 1.5%.
More than 1 in 3 people — 37% — said they had no religion, up from 25% in 2011.
The other parts of the U.K., Scotland and Northern Ireland, report their census results separately.
Secularism campaigners said the shift should trigger a rethink of the way religion is entrenched in British society. The U.K. has state-funded Church of England schools, Anglican bishops sit in Parliament’s upper chamber, and the monarch is “defender of the faith” and supreme governor of the church.
Andrew Copson, chief executive of the charity Humanists U.K., said “the dramatic growth of the non-religious” had made the U.K. “almost certainly one of the least religious countries on Earth.”
“One of the most striking things about these results is how at odds the population is from the state itself,” he said. “No state in Europe has such a religious set-up as we do in terms of law and public policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population.”
Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, one of the most senior clerics in the Church of England, said the data was “not a great surprise,” but was a challenge to Christians to work harder to promote their faith.
“We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian, but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by,” he said.
Almost 82% of people in England and Wales identified as white in the census, down from 86% in 2011. Some 9% said they were Asian, 4% Black and 3% from “mixed or multiple” ethnic backgrounds, while 2% identified with another ethnic group.
China has warned American officials not to interfere in its relationship with India, the Pentagon has said in a report to the Congress. Beginning in May 2020, Chinese and Indian forces faced off in clashes with rocks, batons, and clubs wrapped in barbed wire at multiple locations along the LAC. The resulting standoff triggered the buildup of forces on both sides of the border.
As per reports, throughout its standoff with India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), Chinese officials sought to downplay the severity of the crisis, emphasising Beijing’s intent to preserve border stability and prevent the standoff from harming other areas of its bilateral relationship with India, the Pentagon said in a report on Tuesday.
“The PRC (People’s Republic of China) seeks to prevent border tensions from causing India to partner more closely with the United States. PRC officials have warned U.S. officials to not interfere with the PRC’s relationship with India,” the Pentagon said in its latest report to the Congress on Chinese military buildup.
In a section on the China-India border, the Pentagon said throughout 2021, the PLA sustained the deployment of forces and continued infrastructure build up along the LAC. Negotiation made minimal progress as both sides resist losing perceived advantages on the border, it said.
Beginning in May 2020, Chinese and Indian forces faced off in clashes with rocks, batons, and clubs wrapped in barbed wire at multiple locations along the LAC. The resulting standoff triggered the buildup of forces on both sides of the border. “Each country demanded the withdrawal of the other’s forces and a return to pre-standoff conditions, but neither China nor India agreed on those conditions,” it said.
“The PRC blamed the standoff on Indian infrastructure construction, which it perceived as encroaching on PRC territory, while India accused China of launching aggressive incursions into India’s territory,” it added.
Since the 2020 clash, the PLA has maintained continuous force presence and continued infrastructure build up along the LAC.
The 2020 Galwan Valley incident was the deadliest clash between the two nations in the past 46 years, the report said. On the June 15th, 2020, patrols violently clashed in Galwan Valley resulting in the death approximately twenty Indian soldiers and four PLA soldiers, according to PRC officials, it said.
According to media reports, China may station aircraft carriers, large warships and submarines in its first overseas military base in Djibouti, a move that would have profound security ramifications for the Indian Navy.
Details of the base feature in the US Department of Defense’s annual report on China, which is submitted to the US Congress. The report, released on Sunday, comes less than four months after NDTV published high-resolution satellite images of the base, including a large Chinese Navy landing ship at the dock. This is the backbone of China’s amphibious assault forces.
“In late March 2022, a FUCHI II class (Type 903A) supply ship Luomahu docked at the 450-metre pier for resupply; the first such reported PLA Navy port call to the Djibouti support base, indicating that the pier is now operational,” says the US Department of Defence’s 2022 China Military Power Report. “The pier likely is able to accommodate the PLA Navy’s aircraft carriers, other large combatants, and submarines,” it adds.
This is not the first time that the United States has raised the possibility of China getting ready to deploy aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean region. In 2017, Admiral Harry Harris Jr., who was commanding the US Pacific Command, told NDTV, “There is nothing to prevent them from sailing in the Indian Ocean today.”
Since then, China has been busy developing its aircraft carriers and now has three operational ships, each with incrementally greater capability. The Indian Navy presently operates two aircraft carriers, the made-in-Russia INS Vikramaditya and the INS Vikrant which is still several months away from being fully operational.
As India takes over the presidency of the UNSC on December 1, in the final month of its two-year stint in the council, it will double down on its core agenda of pushing UN reform and countering terror, media reports suggest.
India’s Permanent Representative to UN, Ruchira Kamboj met with the United Nations General Assembly President Csaba Korosi, according to his Spokesperson Paulina Kubiak. Kubiak said the meeting took place on Monday, November 28th with India set to take the rotating presidency of the Security Council for the month of December on Thursday.
Korosi tweeted, “Today’s discussions focused on India’s presidency of the Security Council. I look forward to the month ahead,” he added.
New Delhi has advocated closer coordination between the Council dominated — and often paralyzed — by the five permanent members and the General Assembly that where the 193 UN members are represented equally.
According to the UNSC rules of procedure, the Council presidency rotates between each of the 15 members of the UNSC, in alphabetical order.
Picture : Cover
For us, in the December Presidency, our priorities will be countering terrorism for which we have very successfully built a good narrative in these past few months as well as a focus on reformed multilateralism, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj told PTI in an exclusive interview here.
India assumes the monthly rotating presidency of the Security Council from December 1, the second time after August 2021 that the country will preside over the Council during its two year tenure as elected UNSC member.
India’s 2021-2022 term on the Council ends December 31, with Kamboj, India’s first woman Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York sitting in the President’s seat at the powerful horseshoe table for the month. India will also take over the year-long G20 presidency from December 1.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will travel to New York to preside over “signature events in the Security Council on renewed orientation for reformed multilateralism on December 14 and on countering terrorism on December 15.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and President of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly Csaba Korosi are also expected to brief the UNSC meeting on December 14.
Kamboj said counter-terrorism was one of India’s top priorities when it entered the Council on January 1, 2021.
She underscored that from the eight-point action plan on combating terrorism outlined in the Security Council by Jaishankar in January 2021 to the October 2022 Special Meeting of the Counter-Terrorism Committee hosted by India during which the Delhi Declaration’ was adopted, India has been successful in demonstrating two things.
One that there can be no justification for terror, it is condemnable, it has to be called out and countries who seek to obfuscate that, seek to justify that should be called out, Kamboj said.
The second point is that all countries, importantly, should speak with a united voice. The problem (of terror) is transnational and we have to pool in our resources, knowledge and expertise to speak with a united voice, she said.
On October 28-29, the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee, currently chaired by India, organised a Special Meeting in New Delhi and Mumbai on the overarching theme of Countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes.
As an outcome of the special meeting, the Committee adopted the pioneer document Delhi Declaration’ on countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes.
The Delhi Declaration serves to focus attention on the scourge of terrorism and particularly the fact that it has raised its head in a new avatar where terrorists have been abusing, misusing virtual platforms to forward their narrative, Kamboj said.
She added that this message was taken forward in New Delhi this month through the No Money for Terror’ (NMFT) Ministerial Conference on Counter-Terrorism Financing that was addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“That was a continuation of what we have been doing, specifically where the CTC meeting in New Delhi and Mumbai left off and going forward, to complete the arc, during our term we will be having a focussed discussion on December 15 in the presence of the External Affairs Minister and other foreign dignitaries in the Council.
India has done everything that it could to fulfil the mandate of the CTC. All countries across the table, without exception, have complimented India for the Delhi Declaration, for the CTC event in Delhi and complimented the conference as being outstanding both in terms of logistics and substance. That is not insignificant and that must be noticed, Kamboj said.
Jaishankar had announced a voluntary contribution of USD 500,000 by India to the UN Trust Fund for Counter-Terrorism to augment the UNOCT’s efforts to build the capacity of member states to counter terrorism.
India is very strong on this narrative. We are very mindful that countries in Asia and Africa particularly” are facing the scourge of terrorism. “This is something that we’ll continue to keep our focus on while we’re in the Council, she said.
On December 2, Kamboj will brief the wider UN membership on the CTC meeting in New Delhi and our achievements, what that meeting achieved.
She said the issue of reformed multilateralism was among India’s key priorities as it entered the Council last year and we will keep a strong focus on that.
Kamboj said many countries have spoken that the system cannot continue as it is. It needs to be reformed. The architecture of 1945, the world of 2022, (both are) very different. It’s an anachronism the way the Security Council is configured, she said.
Kamboj underscored that India’s position is clear and well known. New Delhi wants early reform and the Security Council needs to be expanded in both permanent and non-permanent categories, improvement in working methods of the Council to make it more transparent, inclusive, improved relationship between the General Assembly and Security Council as well as the question of the veto.
India has highlighted the need for a consolidated text to serve as the basis for negotiations and this has been espoused by a majority of UN member states, Kamboj said.
With the PGA having appointed Permanent Representative of the Slovak Republic to the United Nations Michal Mlynar and Permanent Representative of the State of Kuwait Tareq M A M Albanai as co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Negotiations, Kamboj expressed hope that the discussion will lead us somewhere and hopefully move the dialogue towards achieving UNSC reform.
She stressed that when the Intergovernmental Negotiations process commences next year, India will be very active, will be reaching out to various groups and advancing discussions on UNSC reform.
India will be concluding its stint as an elected member of the Security Council next month presiding over the council for the second time during its two-year term. India last headed the Council in August 2021 with former UN Permanent Representative T.S. Tirumurti.
Consternation could be one of the reactions from New Delhi to a comment by State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel citing the reinstatement of Prime Minister Narendra’s Modi’s US visa in 2014 as part of an answer about granting sovereign immunity to Saudi crown prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
Patel’s reference to Modi’s US visa reinstatement in 2014 came during a media briefing on November 18 in the context of the now controversial sovereign immunity for MBS.
Although the MBS immunity is consistent with the US policy of affording such immunity to heads of state who might be in some serious legal jeopardy on account of their transgressions in their respective countries, Patel’s juxtaposition of Modi with MBS could be diplomatically fraught.
This is what Patel said in reply to repeated questions about the MBS immunity: “It is a longstanding and consistent line of effort. It has been applied to a number of heads of state previously, some examples, President (Jean-Bertrand) Aristide in Haiti in 1993, President (Robert) Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2001, Prime Minister Modi in India in 2014 and President (Joseph) Kabila in the DRC (the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 2018. This is a consistent practice we have afforded to heads of state.”
There is nothing objectionable about Patel’s comments on the sheer facts of what he is saying. These are just bare facts and as a spokesperson it is his duty to offer them unvarnished. However, international diplomacy, especially between Modi’s India and President Joe Biden’s America, is often fraught.
It is from that standpoint that the seeming bracketing of Modi with MBS and other strongmen could be problematic for its optics. Of course, no government, either here in America or that in India, should feel the need to finesse facts no matter how unedifying they may be.
India’s External Affairs Ministry may not necessarily respond to this merely because the assertion came in the context of MBS but Modi’s detractors, and it is a rapidly growing constituency, could cite this as yet another blot on him.
By itself sovereign immunity should be noncontroversial because countries offer it as part of the international law. In the specific context of MBS though, the immunity is rife with the prospects of being seen as the Biden administration going soft on the prime minister in a calibrated fashion at a time when the US-Saudi relations are perhaps at their most tense.
A particular sticking point has been the Saudi decision to slash oil production in an apparent alliance with Russia at a time gas prices are running so high in America. There were suggestions of the Saudis under MBS humiliating Washington by gouging oil prices.
With this as the backdrop, sovereign immunity for MBS looks at the very least curious notwithstanding the longstanding practice as cited by Patel. Of course, Patel was at pains to repeatedly insist that, “This Suggestion of Immunity does not reflect an assessment on the merits of the case. It speaks to nothing on broader policy or the state of relations. This was purely a legal determination.”
He kept saying again and again at the presser the MBS immunity was no reflection on the legal merits of the Khashoggi murder case and accusations. But it has caused a great deal of outrage among certain quarters, specifically the media.
In a statement on Twitter Fred Ryan, the Washington Post’s publisher and CEO, said yesterday that President Biden is “granting a license to kill to one of the world’s most egregious human-rights abusers who is responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”
The Biden administration made its declaration of immunity in a court filing in the lawsuit filed by Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. In a tweet Cenzig said, “Jamal died again today.”
Despite the fact that immunity is a longstanding practice, affording it to MBS has opened the door for other prospective violators of human rights who might become heads of state. (Courtesy: iNdica News)
Ahead of time, the script for the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, seemed to write itself. A grouping conceived in the heyday of globalization was meeting in person for the first time under the shadow of the new Cold War. China and Russia would clash with the United States and its allies. Ukraine would hog center stage. Indonesia made no secret of the fact that it feared that the interests of the rest of the world—sometimes dubbed the new nonalignment—would take second place.
Picture : Foregin Policy
There were moments in Bali that did conform to this script. Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to attend. Russia was at first represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who gave pugnacious press conferences in which he denounced Ukrainian fascists and brandished conspiracy theories about U.S. biolabs. Then Lavrov departed and Russia’s representation was reduced to the finance minister, effectively the junior tier of the G-20. When the missiles landed in Poland, the Indonesian president was obliged to delay a scheduled tour with journalists of a mangrove plantation, while U.S. President Joe Biden convened a war council of the G-7.
But if one takes the occasion as a whole, what is striking is how far the G-20 meeting succeeded in defying expectations.
It was, in fact, a relief that Putin chose to absent himself. It spared China and India the embarrassment of having to distance themselves from him too publicly. In Bali, there was no one who was keen to ally themselves with Russia. Ahead of the meeting, Chinese officials briefed the Western media more openly than ever before about the degree to which Moscow had left them in the dark ahead of the invasion.
This does not mean that China, India, and Brazil were going to fall in line with the United States and Europe in condemning Putin. In that crucial respect, they preserved their stance of nonalignment. But there was no hiding the fact that they regard the war in Ukraine as a threat to the world economy and are aghast at Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling.
Indonesia, which voted with the West against Russia in the United Nations, pushed for an end to the war, even if there was no unanimity. India provided the mantra that this is “not a time for war.” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey strutted his stuff as the man who brokered the U.N. grain deal.
The emerging-market nations that might once have been regarded as junior members of the G-20 demonstrated clout and independence. Unlike their European counterparts, their autonomy and influence have grown with the crisis.
Meanwhile, on the most fundamental axis of global conflict, that between the United States and China, President Xi Jinping and Biden decided to talk. After the rather reckless escalation of recent months, there seemed to be a sense that it was time to reduce tension and find new protocols for engagement.
As Xi made clear to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, this does not mean reaching for cheap headlines by spilling the beans on a private conversation with your Chinese counterpart. The Chinese may be bunkering themselves in behind the Great Firewall, but they follow what happens on our side and do not appreciate media stunts at their expense. The Biden team has less need for grandstanding and can be counted on to be more discreet. Not until the archives are opened will we have much idea of what was said in the three-hour conversation between Xi and Biden. And that is probably for the best. Discretion is a sign that things are getting serious.
The G-20 meeting ended with a leaders’ declaration, which made few new pledges but affirmed basic agreements, such as the commitment to the Paris climate accord.
None of this alters the fact that Russia’s war on Ukraine continues. The risk of escalation is serious. The tensions between the United States and China are real. China upholds its claims on Taiwan. The United States will likely continue its campaign of sanctions. Neither side has any room in domestic politics to back down. On both sides, talk of actual war is increasingly commonplace.
The two conflicts—Russia vs. West and China vs. United States—split the world. But there are also countervailing forces.
The nonaligned powers are a force to be reckoned with, more individually than as a group. But even individually they are significant players. They may be nonaligned and wary of any overt alignment with Washington, but at least, as far as Ukraine is concerned, they are not blind to the disruption caused by Putin and the risks of escalation. Clearly, both Beijing and Washington recognize the need to keep channels of communication open.
As in the Cold War, there are existential risks that require active management. If Bali is anything to go by, the G-20 may be one of the arenas in which that management takes place.
Picture : FP
The G-20 may appear like the cliché of globalization, but it was in fact born out of crisis. Its origins lie in the mishandling of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and the perception in the Clinton administration that a new forum was needed to give legitimacy to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Initially, it was a meeting of finance ministers and economic officials. The meeting was raised to the status of a head-of-government meeting in 2008, when the Bush administration was desperately trying to coordinate its response to the financial crisis.
Today, we are in crisis once again, and once again the G-20 is providing a useful forum for diplomacy, both to defuse tension and, as Indonesia insisted, to balance the claims of geopolitics against the interests of economic development.
The format works because it encompasses 60 percent of the world’s population and 80 percent of GDP but is less unwieldy than the U.N. General Assembly or the U.N.’s climate conference.
The Bali G-20 demonstrated that conducting diplomacy in an age of crisis does not mean that things are destined to blow up or fall apart.
The word “crisis” derives from the Greek and captures a moment not of disintegration or explosion but of decision, a turning point, a moment in which you face choices that define your identity. That is true on multiple fronts right now—from the war in Ukraine to U.S.-China tension to climate change. You can manage the moment by deferring, fudging the issue, accepting a further escalation, or making a choice. In Bali, we saw a mixture of all these options.
India on November 14, 2022 announced its long-term strategy to transition to a “low emissions” pathway at the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) ongoing in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, which is premised on expanding its nuclear power capacity by at least three-fold in the next decade, apart from becoming an international hub for producing green hydrogen and increasing the proportion of ethanol in petrol.
These steps, Environment Minister Bhupendra Yadav said, were consonant with India’s “five-decade journey” to net zero, or being carbon neutral by 2070 — a commitment made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Glasgow, where the 26th COP was held last year.
India on Monday released its long-term climate action strategy, detailing how it will take steps like rapidly expanding renewable energy sources and exploring a greater role for nuclear power to reach net zero emissions by 2070, but separately also turned up the heat on developed countries to do more.
Environment minister Bhupender Yadav, representing India at the UN Climate Conference (COP 27) at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, used two occasions at the summit to call on rich countries to do more: first, he said, some of them must reach net zero emissions even before 2030, and, second, they must elaborate on their immediate plans on how they plan to reach their targets since some have “turned back to fossil fuels” due to the ongoing energy crisis.
The first stance was made during the ministerial high-level roundtable on the pre-2030 ambition, where Yadav pointed out that rich nations had not met their commitments for the 2020 deadline. “So pre-2030 ambition must be measured in terms of whether countries are staying within their fair share of the carbon budget, taking note of both the historical period and in the future. By this scientific criterion, some developed countries must reach net zero even before 2030 and 2050 is not enough at all,” Yadav said in his intervention.
The other calls on rich countries to do more were articulated during the launch of India’s long-term low emission development strategy (LT-LEDS), which India released on Monday, becoming one of only 57 countries to do so.
“We also call upon developed countries to elaborate on their immediate plans on how they would achieve their targets. We see that following the current energy crisis, many have turned back to increased fossil fuels for energy security. It is not enough to say that targets for emissions reduction will be met, when the reality is that they will unequally consume even more of the carbon budget,” Yadav said.
“In a COP of Implementation, it is essential to make progress on adaptation and loss and damage. Now is the time to tell the developing world how the promise of USD 100 billion is to be met. We, at Glasgow, noted with regret that it is indeed not being met. The world would like to know how the resources for meeting the world’s adaptation needs, whose estimates are rising constantly, are to be mobilised.”
First, India has contributed little to global warming despite being home to a sixth of the world’s population; Second, India has significant energy needs for development; Third, India is committed to pursuing low-carbon strategies for development and, fourth, India need’s climate resilience.
“The LT-LEDS has been prepared in the framework of India’s right to an equitable and fair share of the global carbon budget. This is the practical implementation of India’s call for “climate justice,” he said.
Developments over recent days suggest rifts are widening over developing nations such as India and developed countries over the climate crisis action plan.
US Special Climate Envoy John Kerry said on Sunday that a few countries have resisted mentioning a global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in the official text of the COP 27, Euronews reported.
Picture : Outlook India
A senior delegate from India also said on Saturday that during meetings on mitigation work programmes (MWP) – measures that relate to lowering emissions — rich countries outlined the top 20 emitters and insisted that the measures be addressed to these.
This is key because many of the top emitters in absolute terms are developing countries like India, China and Brazil, but in per capita terms, and when historical emissions are considered, their role in the warming of the planet has demonstrably lower than industrialised western nations.
Observers also said US and other Annex 1 countries were trying to selectively push a language on 1.5°C goal that goes against principles of equity and “common but differentiated responsibilities” that were agreed upon under the Paris Agreement, and indirectly pushes all countries to embrace net zero emission goals by 2050.
“You cannot selectively use the 1.5°C goal for cover text when finance to achieve that goal has not come through. We will oppose such moves because it’s not equitable” said a member of the Indian delegation, asking not to be named.
Scientists and independent experts have already said that the 1.5 degree C goal seems practically impossible to achieve under current circumstances and the world needs to immediately cut emissions to levels last recorded in 2020, when widespread lockdowns shut industrial and civilian activity across the world for months on end.
“It’s developing countries who will face far more severe consequences if we breach the target of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Rich industrialised countries are cherry-picking language from the climate talks at COP 27 to shift the blame to poorer nations, while using all possible tricks to delink emissions reduction targets with equity and their obligation to provide scaled up finance,” said Harjeet Singh, Head of Global Political Strategy, Climate Action Network International.
INDIA’S LONG-TERM PLAN
The submission to the LT-LEDS builds on India’s nationally determined contributions (NDCs) declared at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in August, as part of the binding commitments that have to be made under the Paris Agreement.
Picture : The New YOrk Times
The NDCs articulate a net zero commitment by 2070, and vow that India will reduce the emissions intensity of its gross domestic product (GDP) by 46% from 2005 levels by 2030, and achieve about 50% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-renewable sources by the end of this decade.
The long-term plan now builds on the 2070 goal with six elements: These include: expanding renewables and strengthening the grid; exploring a greater role for nuclear energy and enhancing support for R&D into future technologies such as green hydrogen, fuel cells, and biofuels; appropriate demand-side measures such as energy efficiency improvements; rational utilisation of fossil fuel resources; enabling a focused transition towards low carbon development; and optimum energy mix complimenting national development scenarios.
The strategic transitions will be sectors including electricity, transport, urbanisation, industry, CDR (carbon dioxide removal), forests, finance and investment, research and innovation, adaptation and resilience, LiFE – Lifestyle for Environment, and international cooperation. Under electricity for example, the focus will be on expanding renewables and strengthening the grid.
On carbon removal, the focus will be on economic, technical and political feasibility of carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS), which is highly uncertain according to officials from the Indian delegation.
A transition to a low-carbon development pathway will involve costs, pertaining to the deployment of new technologies, development of new infrastructure, and other transaction costs. “In the longer term, such a transition will also have broader economic impacts. Several estimates regarding India’s financial needs exist. Many of them focus on the energy sector, including industry, buildings, and transport. Estimates vary across studies due to differences in assumptions, coverage, and modelling approaches, but fall in the range of trillions of dollars by 2050. In general, finance needs – and the domestic financing gap – are considerable, indicating a need for greater international support,” the LT-LEDS report has said.
Meeting finance needs require mobilising and scaling up financial resources internationally as well as mobilising domestic finance. International sources include multilateral and bilateral sources, dedicated climate funds, international institutional investors, and the private sector will be key.
“India’s LT-LEDS is an important statement of intent to pursue low-carbon strategies for development, and a sound beginning toward doing so,” said Navroz K Dubash, professor, Centre for Policy Research, which anchored the research for India’s long-term strategy. The strategy is firmly, and appropriately, anchored in considerations of climate equity. It calls for developed countries to undertake early net-zero and to provide adequate finance and technology in support of India’s plans for low-carbon development, CPR said in a statement.
“India’s LT-LEDS should be viewed as a living document. Future iterations should emphasize robust and transparent modelling towards net-zero by 2070, clearer identification of sectoral co-benefits and trade-offs, and more detailed discussion with states,” Dubash added.
PUSH ON FINANCE
At the ministerial that Yadav addressed earlier, India also made it clear that carbon offsets of the kind US announced on November 9, called the Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA), may not be able address climate finance needs of developing countries. “Leaving it to markets alone will not help. Markets function well in normal times, but either do not function or function very inequitably in moments of crises. We see this with the energy crisis in developed countries,” Yadav said.
Yadav called for an “ambitious flow of financial resources from various sources”, with “with developed countries playing a pivotal role in incentivising flows to developing countries so that finance-the key means of implementation- is at grant/concessional rates”.
“Access to finance and technology in developing countries is a must-have if we expect to protect our Earth and ourselves from apocalyptic changes. The commitment made by the developed countries to mobilize $100bn from diverse sources by 2020 was a meagre amount and remains unachieved till now. The current needs of developing countries are estimated to be in the order of trillions,” Yadav said.
There are several estimates of climate finance flown till now. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates the flows to be USD 83.3 billion in 2020 and USD79.9 billion in 2018, while Oxfam estimates the amount to be in the range of US$19-22.5 billion per year since 2017-18. Other estimates from UNFCCC put it at $ 45.4 billion in 2017 and $51.8 billion in 2018, the minister’s statement said.
“Evidently, there is no understanding of what really comprises climate finance. Transparency and Trust are the backbones of all multilateral discussions,” Yadav said.
Signaling the emergence of India as a significant player on the global scene, India will officially assume the Presidency of the G20 (Group of 20) countries, one of the most consequential amongst current-day multilateral bodies, on December 1st, 2022 at the conclusion of the Indonesian presidency.
Releasing the logo, theme, and website of India’s G20 Presidency, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on November 8th, 2022, “India’s G20 presidency is coming at a time of crisis and chaos in the world. The world is going through the after-effects of a disruptive once-in-a-century pandemic, conflicts, and a lot of economic uncertainty.’’
Picture : The Quint
The current G20 Summit is being organized in Bali, Indonesia from November 15-16, 2022. Heads of states from the world’s largest economies are attending – although Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided not to attend in-person. With unstable global political conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, energy issues, as well as global economic downturn, this is believed to be the most challenging G20 summit yet.
President Joe Biden is confronting competing issues at home and abroad while he’s at the Group of 20 Summit in Bali this week, using the moment on the world’s stage to lean into international support for condemning Russia’s aggression.
The G20 was conceived in 1999, while the repercussions of the Mexican peso crisis (1994), Asian financial crisis (1997) and the Russian ruble crisis (1998) were still being felt. The G20 forum was first established to respond to the global crisis, including the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, and the European debt crisis in 2011.
In a meeting of finance ministers and presidents of central banks of the G7, it was decided to expand the group and make it more representative in order to generate policies that would have a wider impact on the global economy. A group of key emerging economies was invited to a new forum of finance ministers and presidents of Central Banks. This became the G20.
The G20 was upgraded to the Summit level from the finance ministers and presidents of central banks, and became the main instrument to face the global financial crisis of 2007-’08 and beyond.
Picture : News 18
The G20 is an international forum that includes 19 of the world’s largest economies including both industrialized and developing nations, and the European Union. Its core mandate is to address the major challenges related to the global economy and financial architecture such as international financial stability, climate change mitigation, and sustainable development among others. It seeks to evolve public policies to resolve them.
Together, the G20 members represent 85% of the global gross product; 75% of international trade; two-thirds of the world population; 80% of global investments in research and development, and 60% of the world land area.
Because the G-20 is a forum, its agreements or decisions are not legally binding but they do influence countries’ policies and spur global cooperation. The G20 is small and cohesive enough to allow concrete in-person discussions to find solutions to the new challenges on the international economic and financial agenda, and is broad and inclusive enough to represent the vast majority of world economic production.
While economic and financial issues tend to lead the agenda, other areas have gained prominence in recent years. New additions include participation of women in the labour market, sustainable development, global health, fight against terrorism and inclusive ventures, among others.
The group’s stature has risen significantly during the past decade. It is, however, also criticized for its limited membership, lack of enforcement powers, and for the alleged undermining of existing international institutions. Summits are often met with protests, particularly by anti-globalization groups.
The G20 seeks to enrich the content of its dialogues by encouraging the participation of civil society through affinity groups. Each of them focuses on an issue of global importance and meets independently throughout the year. From the dialogue in the various meetings, each group delivers a series of recommendations to the G20. Currently, the affinity groups comprise of: Business 20 (B20), Civil 20 (C20), Labour 20 (L20), Science 20 (S20), Think 20 (T20), Women 20 (W20), Youth 20 (Y20).
Modi, Biden review India-U.S. ties during their meeting in Bali
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden on Tuesday reviewed the state of India-US strategic partnership including in sectors like critical and emerging technologies and artificial intelligence.
The two leaders also discussed topical global and regional developments in their meeting that took place on the margins of the G-20 summit in this Indonesian city, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said. It is understood that the Ukraine conflict and its implications figured in the discussions.
The MEA said the two leaders expressed satisfaction about close cooperation between India and US in new groupings such as Quad and I2U2.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President of USA, Joseph R Biden on the margins of G-20 Leaders’ Summit in Bali today,” the MEA said.
“They reviewed the continuing deepening of the India – US strategic partnership including cooperation in future oriented sectors like critical and emerging technologies, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, etc,” it said in a statement.
The MEA said the two leaders discussed topical global and regional developments.
“PM Modi thanked President Biden for his constant support for strengthening the India-US partnership. He expressed confidence that both countries would continue to maintain close coordination during India’s G-20 Presidency,” it said.
While the Quad comprises India, the US, Australia and Japan, the members of the I2U2 are the US, the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
India is currently part of the G20 Troika (current, previous, and incoming G20 Presidencies) comprising Indonesia, Italy, and India.
The prime minister is attending the summit at the invitation of Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Indonesia is the current chair of the G-20.
A baby born somewhere on November 15 was the world’s eighth billionth person, according to a projection by the United Nations. “The milestone is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
The world’s population reached 8 billion people on Tuesday, November 15, 2022 representing a “milestone in human development” before birth rates start to slow, according to a projection from the United Nations.
Picture : News 18
In a statement, the UN said the figure meant 1 billion people had been added to the global population in just 12 years. “This unprecedented growth is due to the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. It is also the result of high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries,” the UN statement read.
Middle-income countries, mostly in Asia, accounted for most of the growth over the past decade, gaining some 700 million people since 2011. India added about 180 million people, and is set to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation next year.
But even while the global population reaches new highs, demographers note the growth rate has fallen steadily to less than 1% per year. This should keep the world from reaching 9 billion people until 2037. The UN projects the global population will peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s and remain at that level until 2100.
Most of the 2.4 billion people to be added before the global population peaks will be born in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN, marking a shift away from China and India.
Environmental impact
Reaching an 8 billion global population “is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said in the UN statement.
Picture : Visual Capitalist
Having more people on Earth puts more pressure on nature, as people compete with wildlife for water, food and space. Meanwhile, rapid population growth combined with climate change is also likely to cause mass migration and conflict in coming decades, experts say.
And whether it’s food or water, batteries or gasoline, there will be less to go around as the global population grows. But how much they consume is equally important, suggesting policymakers can make a big difference by mandating a shift in consumption patterns.
Carbon emissions of the richest 1%, or about 63 million people, were more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity between 1990 and 2015, according to a 2020 analysis by the Stockholm Environment Institute and non-profit Oxfam International.
Resource pressure will be especially daunting in African nations, where populations are expected to boom, experts say. These are also among the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts, and most in need of climate finance. Since 1800, the world’s population has jumped eight-fold, from an estimated one billion to eight billion.
US President Joe Biden has promised there will be no “new Cold War” with China, following a conciliatory meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He also said he did not believe China would invade Taiwan.
It was the first in-person meeting between the two superpower leaders since Mr Biden took office. The pair also discussed North Korea and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the talks in Bali, a day before the G20 summit on the Indonesian island.
In a three-hour meeting held at a luxury hotel shortly after Mr Xi’s arrival, the leaders discussed a wide range of topics including Taiwan.
Claimed by Beijing, the self-governed island counts the US as an ally, and has always been a thorny issue in US-China relations.
Tensions spiked in August when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China responded with large-scale military exercises around the island, prompting fears of a possible conflict between the US and China.
A readout to Chinese state media on Monday said Mr Xi had stressed that Taiwan remained “the core of China’s core interests… and the first red line in US-China relations that cannot be crossed”.
In recent weeks US officials have warned that China may escalate plans to invade Taiwan. Reporters on Monday asked Mr Biden if he believed this to be true, and if he thought a new Cold War was brewing.
“I absolutely believe there need not be a new Cold War. I have met many times with Xi Jinping and we were candid and clear with one another across the board. I do not think there is any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan,” he said.
“I made it clear we want to see cross-strait issues to be peacefully resolved and so it never has to come to that. And I’m convinced that he understood what I was saying, I understood what he was saying.”
Mr Biden said the two leaders had agreed to set up a mechanism where there would be dialogues at key levels of government to resolve issues. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will also be visiting China soon, he said.
He added that he had made it clear to Mr Xi that “our policy on Taiwan has not changed at all. It’s the same exact position that we have had”.
Mr Biden has repeatedly said the US will defend Taiwan if it is attacked by China. It has been seen as a departure from the long-held US policy of “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan, under which it does not commit to defending the island. Officials have rowed back on his statements.
The US has long walked a tightrope over the Taiwan issue. A cornerstone of its relationship with Beijing is the One China policy, where Washington acknowledges only one Chinese government – in Beijing – and has no formal ties with Taiwan.
But it also maintains close relations with Taiwan and sells arms to it under the Taiwan Relations Act, which states that the US must provide the island with the means to defend itself.
Competition, not conflict
Besides Taiwan, Mr Xi and Mr Biden’s discussion also covered concerns over North Korea and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to readouts from both sides.
Mr Biden also raised concerns about human rights issues in China, including the treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.
Both leaders strove to signal to each other – and to the rest of the world watching their meeting – that they were aware that global stability rested on relations between their two countries, and that they would act responsibly.
In recent days Mr Biden and US officials have been at pains to signal their aim of conciliation, stressing repeatedly that the US does not want conflict with China, while maintaining a sense of strong competition.
Mr Xi appeared to be on the same page, acknowledging in the meeting’s opening remarks that “we need to chart the right course for the China-US relationship”, given that “the world has come to a crossroads”.
Later in the Chinese readout, Mr Xi said that “China-US relations should not be a zero-sum game in which you rise and I fall… the wide Earth is fully capable of accommodating the development and common prosperity of China and the United States”.
Wen-ti Sung, a political scientist who teaches with the Australian National University’s Taiwan Studies programme, noted that there were “few substantive agreements”.
Both leaders get a win, he said. “Xi shows he’s not intimidated by Biden, like US and China are true equals.”
Meanwhile Biden is given a pass on “the US pushing the envelope on Taiwan, and the two sides agreeing to improve dialogue reassures other countries”.
Political scientist Ian Chong of the National University of Singapore said: “The tone I think was overall positive. There’s some recognition that there’s common interests, and these include not letting the relationship spiral out of control.
“But I would still be somewhat cautious. Given the volatility in China-US relations, they have starts and stops.”
The former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has begun coalition negotiations on forming a government, after winning a decisive majority in Israel’s fifth election in four years with the help of ultra-Orthodox parties and a new alliance with the far right.
After a year in opposition, and years of political chaos triggered by his ongoing corruption trial, the veteran politician engineered a comeback in Tuesday’s vote. His majority means that the period of electoral deadlock is in all probability over for now, and Netanyahu – already the country’s longest serving prime minister – is set to stay in the job for at least the next four years. Back in office, the 73-year-old’s first priority will be seeking to get his trial dropped. He denies all charges.
Some of Israel’s allies abroad are concerned about the possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu will appoint far-right politicians to key positions as he forms a new government.
Jewish nationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who met with Netanyahu on Monday, is expected to become a senior Cabinet minister. He could face a boycott by the Biden administration, according to a former Obama administration official.
“I think the U.S. is likely to boycott him,” said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who worked on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks under former President Barack Obama. “I have reason to think that they are strongly considering this.”
President Biden congratulated Netanyahu in a call Monday. Neither Netanyahu’s office nor the White House mentioned the topic of Ben-Gvir.
Convicted by an Israeli court in 2007 for inciting anti-Arab racism, Ben-Gvir stoked tension with Palestinians this year when he visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, or Temple Mount, a contested religious site where there is often violence between Israeli police and Muslim worshippers. “We’re the master of the house here,” Ben-Gvir said.
Now Ben-Gvir hopes Netanyahu will appoint him as public security minister, whose duties would include policing and access at the site — though Netanyahu hasn’t announced his choice.
“Having someone who’s going to, I fear, play with matches, given this flammable piece of real estate, I think is a real danger,” Makovsky said. “I think [Netanyahu is] going to be swimming upstream if he feels that he’s going to be able to normalize the position of Itamar Ben-Gvir.”
Netanyahu has sought to calm fears, assuring his government’s policy would be “responsible” without “pointless adventures.” Ben-Gvir said in an op-ed Monday, “I have matured, moderated.”
Danny Danon, a Netanyahu ally hoping to be the next speaker of parliament, argues Israel will maintain good ties with the Biden administration because Netanyahu, not Ben-Gvir, will be in charge of that relationship.
“I think all the issue of Ben-Gvir, it’s overblown,” Danon told NPR. “We will be running the government, and we will be dealing with the important issues … and we proved in the past that we can be responsible about many of the issues, concerning foreign and domestic issues.”
Other potential members of Netanyahu’s emerging government are religious fundamentalists who support weakening Israel’s Supreme Court and have demonstrated hostility to LGBTQ rights and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, two major U.S. Jewish groups, voiced concern. So has a Democratic member of Congress, and there are U.S. news reports of top American officials raising the issue as well. And according to Israeli news reports, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates also warned that including certain far-right politicians in the Israeli government could hurt their countries’ relations, even as Netanyahu hopes to forge more diplomatic deals with Arab countries.
Sara Greenberg, who served as Netanyahu’s adviser from 2018 to 2019 on foreign affairs and worldwide Jewish communities, warned about allowing “extremism” in the upcoming Cabinet.
“Any move perceived as infringing on Israel’s democratic and pluralistic nature will have a damaging effect on Israel’s relationship with world Jewry, not to mention the free world,” Greenberg told NPR. “The strength of Israel’s democracy — and also its relationship with world Jewry — hinges on how the government portfolios are assigned and how the coalition acts.” (Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government allies could face U.S. boycott : NPR)
(AP) — “Cooperate or perish,” the United Nations chief told dozens of leaders gathered Monday for international climate talks, warning them that the world is “on a highway to climate hell” and urging the two biggest polluting countries, China and the United States, to work together to avert it.
This year’s annual U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, comes as leaders and experts have raised increasing alarm that time is running out to avert catastrophic rises in temperature. But the fire and brimstone warnings may not quite have the effect as they have had in past meetings because of multiple other challenges of the moment pulling leaders’ attention — from midterm elections in the U.S. to the Russia-Ukraine war.
More than 100 world leaders will speak over the next few days at the gathering in Egypt. Much of the focus will be on national leaders telling their stories of being devastated by climate disasters, culminating Tuesday with a speech by Pakistan Prime Minister Muhammad Sharif, whose country’s summer floods caused at least $40 billion in damage and displaced millions of people.
“Is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering,” the summit’s host, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, told his fellow leaders. “Climate change will never stop without our intervention… Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.”
El-Sisi, who called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, was gentle compared to a fiery United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said the world “is on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
He called for a new pact between rich and poor countries to make deeper cuts in emissions with financial help and phasing out of coal in rich nations by 2030 and elsewhere by 2040. He called on the United States and China — the two biggest economies — to especially work together on climate, something they used to do until the last few years.
“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres said. “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact.”
Guterres insisted, “Today’s urgent crises cannot be an excuse for backsliding or greenwashing.” But bad timing and world events were hanging over the gathering.
Most of the leaders are meeting Monday and Tuesday, just as the United States has a potentially policy-shifting midterm election. Then the leaders of the world’s 20 wealthiest nations will have their powerful-only club confab in Bali in Indonesia days later.
Leaders of China and India — both among the biggest emitters — appear to be skipping the climate talks, although underlings are here negotiating. The leader of the top polluting country, U.S. President Joe Biden, is coming days later than most of the other presidents and prime ministers on his way to Bali.
“There are big climate summits and little climate summits and this was never expected to be a big one,” said Climate Advisers CEO Nigel Purvis, a former U.S. negotiator.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was initially going to avoid the negotiations, but public pressure and predecessor Boris Johnson’s plans to come changed his mind. New King Charles III, a longtime environment advocate, won’t attend because of his new role. And Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine created energy chaos that reverberates in the world of climate negotiations, won’t be here.
“We always want more” leaders, United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said in a Sunday news conference. “But I believe there is sufficient (leadership) right now for us to have a very productive outcome.”
In addition to speeches given by the leaders, the negotiations include “innovative” roundtable discussions that “we are confident, will generate some very powerful insights,” Stiell said.
“The historical polluters who caused climate change are not showing up,” said Mohammed Adow of Power Shift Africa. “Africa is the least responsible, the most vulnerable to the issue of climate change and it is a continent that is stepping up and providing leadership.”
“The South is actually stepping up,” Adow told The Associated Press. “The North that historically caused the problem is failing.”
For the first time, developing nations succeeded in getting onto the summit agenda the issue of “loss and damage” — demands that emitting countries pay for damage caused by climate-induced disasters.
Nigeria’s Environment Minister Mohammed Abdullahi called for wealthy nations to show “positive and affirmative” commitments to help countries hardest hit by climate change. “Our priority is to be aggressive when it comes to climate funding to mitigate the challenges of loss and damage,” he said.
Monday was heavily dominated by leaders of nations victimized by climate change — not those that have created the problem of heat-trapping gases warming up the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuel. It will be mostly African nations and small island nations and other vulnerable nations that will be telling their stories.
And they are dramatic ones, droughts in Africa and floods in Pakistan, in places that could least afford it. For the first time in 30 years of climate negotiations, the summit “should focus its attention on the severe climate impacts we’re already seeing,” said World Resources International’s David Waskow.
“We can’t discount an entire continent that has over a billion people living here and has some of the most severe impacts,” Waskow said. “It’s pretty clear that Africa will be at risk in a very severe way.’’
Leaders come “to share the progress they’ve made at home and to accelerate action,” Purvis said. In this case, with the passage of the first major climate legislation and $375 billion in spending, Biden has a lot to share, he said.
While it’s impressive that so many leaders are coming to the summit, “my expectations for ambitious climate targets in these two days are very low,” said NewClimate Institute’ scientist Niklas Hohne. That’s because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which caused energy and food crises that took away from climate action, he said. (Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment)
India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov and the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow on Tuesday, during his first visit to Russia since the war in Ukraine began, and amidst a number of U.S.-based reports on a possible role for India to mediate in the conflict.
In his opening remarks, he also said that the Covid-19 pandemic, financial pressures and trade difficulties had taken a toll on the global economy.
“We are now seeing the consequences of the Ukraine conflict on top of that. There are also the more perennial issues of terrorism and climate change, both of which have a disruptive impact on progress and prosperity,” he said.
“Our talks will address the overall global situation as well as specific regional concerns,” he said.
Jaishankar arrived in Moscow on Monday evening on a two-day visit amid growing global concerns over increasing hostilities between Russia and Ukraine.
“India and Russia engage each other in an increasingly multi-polar and re-balanced world. We do so as two polities who have had an exceptionally steady and time-tested relationship. In that background, I look forward to our talks,” he said.
Dr. Jaishankar’s meeting with Manturov, who is also the Minister for Trade and Industry, focus sed on improving bilateral economic cooperation at a time when India-Russia bilateral trade has reportedly tripled, and Indian imports of Russian oil have grown more than 20 times in the past year.
Responding to a question on imports of Russian oil, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar Tuesday stated that buying oil from Moscow works to India’s advantage and asserted that he would “like to keep that going”. India’s procurement of discounted Russian crude oil has seen a massive increase in the last few months, despite rising disquiet in many Western capitals. Jaishankar’s remarks came in the backdrop of his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow.
According to the latest figures for October, Russia is now India’s largest supplier of oil, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Iraq, leaping from 43,400 barrels per day (bpd), which made up just 0.2% of total exports last year, to 9,35,556 bpd which is about 22% of the total intake this year. Indian and Russian Central banks have also been in talks in the past few months about developing the Rupee-Rouble payment mechanism that will allow them to circumnavigate U.S. and European Union sanctions on Russia over the war.
Cooperation at multilateral formats, including the UN, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), G-20, and Russia-India-China dialogues will also be on the agenda for talks. India’s steadfast refusal to vote against Russia at any of the United Nations votes on the war in Ukraine has been appreciated by Moscow, and President Vladimir Putin praised India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi twice in the past few weeks, for India’s “talented” population, and the “independent foreign policy” it has chosen. Mr. Putin also said Russia had increased fertilizer supplies to India “7.6” times after a request from Mr. Modi.
“Our meeting today, is of course, devoted to assessing the state of our bilateral cooperation; exchanging perspectives on the international situation and what that means to our respective interests,” Jaishankar said.
“Our position on the conflict in Ukraine is pretty clear. We have always emphasised on the need for return to dialogue and diplomacy. I’m sure that External Affairs Minister would certainly be reiterating. But beyond that, I cannot say what they will discuss or what not,” Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said, when asked about whether Dr. Jaishankar would speak to Mr. Lavrov about ending the war.
“Russia and India stand for the active formation of a more just and equal polycentric world order, and proceed from the inadmissibility of promoting the imperialist diktat on the global arena,” the Russian Foreign Ministry added, in a veiled reference to Western countries, which are working on the next round of economic sanctions against Russia. In a meeting last week, G-7 countries announced a coordination mechanism for efforts to support Ukraine, and France plans to host an international conference on December 13 to discuss the war.
The election of Joe Biden as president has led to a dramatic shift in America’s international image. Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, publics around the world held the United States in low regard, with most opposed to his foreign policies. This was especially true among key American allies and partners. Now, a new Pew Research Center survey of 16 publics finds a significant uptick in ratings for the U.S., with strong support for Biden and several of his major policy initiatives.
How we did this
In each of the 16 publics surveyed, more than six-in-ten say they have confidence in Biden to do the right thing in world affairs. Looking at 12 nations surveyed both this year and in 2020, a median of 75% express confidence in Biden, compared with 17% for Trump last year.
During the past two decades, presidential transitions have had a major impact on overall attitudes toward the U.S. When Barack Obama took office in 2009, ratings improved in many nations compared with where they had been during George W. Bush’s administration, and when Trump entered the White House in 2017, ratings declined sharply. This year, U.S. favorability is up again: Whereas a median of just 34% across 12 nations had a favorable overall opinion of the U.S. last year, a median of 62% now hold this view.
In France, for example, just 31% expressed a positive opinion of the U.S. last year, matching the poor ratings from March 2003, at the height of U.S.-France tensions over the Iraq War. This year, 65% see the U.S. positively, approaching the high ratings that characterized the Obama era. Improvements of 25 percentage points or more are also found in Germany, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands and Canada.
Still, attitudes toward the U.S. vary considerably across the publics surveyed. For instance, only about half in Singapore and Australia have a favorable opinion of the U.S., and just 42% of New Zealanders hold this view. And while 61% see the U.S. favorably in Taiwan, this is actually down slightly from 68% in a 2019 poll.
In most countries polled, people make a stark distinction between Biden and Trump as world leaders. Nearly eight-in-ten Germans (78%) have confidence in Biden to do the right thing in world affairs; a year ago, just 10% said this about Trump. Similar differences are found in Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, and in all nations where a trend is available from 2020 there is a difference of at least 40 percentage points.
As is the case with views of the United States as a whole, confidence in U.S. presidents has shifted dramatically over the past two decades, especially in Western Europe. In Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and France – four nations Pew Research Center has surveyed consistently – ratings for Bush and Trump were similarly low during their presidencies, while this year confidence in Biden is fairly similar to the ratings Obama received while in office.
Biden’s high ratings are tied in part to positive assessments of his personal characteristics, and here again the contrast with Trump is stark. Looking at 12 countries polled during the first year of both their presidencies, a median of 77% describe Biden as well-qualified to be president, compared with 16% who felt this way about Trump. Few think of Biden as arrogant or dangerous, while large majorities applied those terms to Trump. Assessments of the two leaders are more similar when it comes to being a strong leader, although even on this measure, Biden gets much more positive reviews than his predecessor.
High levels of confidence in Biden are also tied to favorable views of his policies, several of which have emphasized multilateralism and reversed Trump administration decisions. The current survey examines attitudes toward four of the Biden administration’s key policies and finds widespread support for all four.
A median of 89% across the 16 publics surveyed approve of the U.S. rejoining the World Health Organization (WHO), which the U.S. withdrew from during Trump’s presidency. A median of 85% also support the U.S. rejoining the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement was met with widespread criticism, and it was overwhelmingly unpopular in the surveys the Center conducted during his presidency. For example, in 2019 just 8% in France approved of Trump’s plans to withdraw support for international climate change agreements, compared with 91% who now back Biden’s reentry into the agreement.
Picture: AP News
Support for the Biden administration’s proposal to organize a summit of democracies from around the world is also widespread, with a median of 85% saying they approve. There is only slightly less support (a median of 76%) for Biden’s plan to allow more refugees into the U.S. (Biden campaigned on allowing more refugees into the country, briefly reversed his initial goal to raise the refugee cap from levels set by the Trump administration, and then walked back the reversal amid criticism.)
Although Biden’s more multilateral approach to foreign policy is welcomed, there is still a widespread perception that the U.S. mainly looks after its own interests in world affairs. More than half in most of the publics surveyed say the U.S. does not take their interests into account when it is making foreign policy decisions, although fewer feel this way in Japan, Greece and Germany.
Doubts about the U.S. considering the interests of other countries predate the Trump administration, and this has been the prevailing view – even among close U.S. allies – since the Center began asking the question in 2002.
Despite widely reported bilateral and multilateral tensions between the U.S. and many of its major allies and partners over the last four years, relatively few people describe the U.S. as an “unreliable partner.” But neither do they express great confidence in the U.S. as an ally. Across the 16 publics polled, a median of 56% say the U.S. is somewhat reliable, while just 11% describe America as very reliable.
In addition to the concerns some have about how America engages with other nations, there are also concerns about domestic politics in the U.S. The 16 publics surveyed are divided in their views about how well the U.S. political system is functioning, with a median of only 5o% saying it is working well.
And few believe American democracy, at least in its current state, serves as a good model for other nations. A median of just 17% say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow, while 57% say it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. Another 23% do not believe it has ever been a good example.
In his first overseas trip as president, Biden is preparing to attend the G7 summit in the UK and the NATO summit in Brussels. Once there, he will meet with two other leaders widely trusted for their handling of world affairs.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel actually receives slightly higher ratings than Biden: A median of 77% across the 16 publics surveyed express confidence in Merkel’s international leadership. A smaller median of 63% voice confidence in French President Emmanuel Macron.
Relatively few trust Russian President Vladimir Putin to do the right thing in world affairs, while Chinese President Xi Jinping has the lowest ratings on the survey.
These are among the major findings from a Pew Research Center survey conducted among 16,254 respondents in 16 publics – not including the U.S. – from March 12 to May 26, 2021. The survey also finds that views toward the U.S. and President Biden often differ by ideology and age.
Spotlight: How views of the U.S. vary with political ideology and age
Ideology
In many of the publics surveyed, ideological orientation plays a role in how people view the U.S. and American democracy.
People who place themselves on the right of the political spectrum are more likely to have a positive view of the U.S. in nearly every country where ideology is measured. And this general pattern has not changed much over time, with those on the right holding a more favorable view of the U.S. during the Trump and Obama administrations as well.
In 11 countries, people on the right are more likely than those on the left to say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for other countries to follow. And in a similar set of countries, they are also more likely to think the U.S. political system works well.
Overall, majorities on the left, center and right of the political spectrum approve of the policies included in the survey. However, Biden’s decision to allow more refugees into the U.S. is decidedly more popular among people on the left. In about half the countries, those on the left are also more likely to approve of the U.S. rejoining the World Health Organization.
Age
In general, favorable views of the U.S. do not vary based on age in Europe or the Asia-Pacific region. But age is a factor when it comes to confidence in the U.S. president and other world leaders.
Across most places surveyed, adults ages 65 and older are significantly more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to have confidence in Biden to do the right things in world affairs. Trust in Biden is so high overall, however, that at least half in all age groups hold this view.
Older adults also have more confidence in Merkel in half of the surveyed areas. Trust in Putin shows the opposite pattern, with younger adults more likely to have confidence in the Russian president in most of the publics surveyed.
Adults under 30 also deviate from older adults in their views of American democracy. In about half of the publics surveyed, younger adults are more likely to think democracy in the U.S. has never been a good model for other countries to follow.
Favorable views of the U.S. have rebounded
In every place surveyed except New Zealand, around half or more have a favorable opinion of the U.S. Ratings are highest in South Korea, where 77% have positive views of the U.S., and around two-thirds or more in Japan, France and the UK say the same.
These broadly positive views reflect a sharp uptick since last summer, when ratings of the U.S. were at or near historic lows in most countries. For example, in Belgium, where only a quarter had favorable views of the U.S. last year, a 56% majority say the same today.
In France, the UK and Germany, positive views have increased even since this past November and December. Surveys in these three countries found tepid views of the U.S. last December – after major media outlets had called the election for now-President Joe Biden but before his inauguration and the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by a mob of Trump’s supporters. Evaluations ranged from 40% favorable in Germany to 51% in the UK. Today, positive views have increased by double digits in all three countries, with around six-in-ten or more in each of these countries now saying they view the U.S. favorably.
In many places, favorable views of the U.S. have now rebounded to roughly the same levels that were seen toward the end of President Obama’s second term. Take France as an example: The share who have positive views of the U.S. has more than doubled since last year, from 31% – a record low – to 65%, which is comparable to the 63% who had favorable views of the U.S. at the end of the Obama administration.
Views of American democracy and foreign policy both factor into how people feel about the U.S. For example, those who think the U.S. political system is working well and those who think American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow are much more likely to have favorable views of the U.S. Similarly, those who think the U.S. is a reliable partner and who think the U.S. takes other countries’ interests into account also have more positive views of the superpower. And people who believe the U.S. is doing a good job of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic are more likely to express a positive view of the country.
Some concerns about functioning of U.S. democracy
Majorities in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands are skeptical of how the U.S. political system functions. On the flip side, majorities in South Korea, Greece, Italy, Japan, Taiwan and Spain express at least some confidence in the American system of government.
However, even among publics where majorities think the U.S. political system works at least somewhat well, this confidence is lukewarm: At most, about a fifth say the American political system functions very well. In most places surveyed, the share who say this is smaller than one-in-ten.
While attitudes are mixed about how well the U.S. political system functions, publics in the advanced economies surveyed are largely skeptical that democracy in the U.S. is a good example for other countries to follow. Across all publics surveyed, no more than about three-in-ten say the U.S. is currently setting a good example of democratic values.
Rather, majorities or pluralities say American democracy used to be a good example but has not been in recent years, and up to about a quarter reject the idea that the U.S. has ever been a good model of democracy.
Only about a third say the U.S. considers their interests in foreign policy
Despite the sharp uptick in favorable views of the U.S. and its president in 2021, most people surveyed continue to say the U.S. doesn’t take into account the interests of publics like theirs when making international policy decisions. Across the 16 publics, a median of 67% say the U.S. does not take their interests into account too much or at all, while only 34% say Washington considers their interests a great deal or fair amount.
Across the European countries surveyed, there is a fair amount of variation in this assessment. As few as 16% in Sweden say the U.S. considers Sweden’s interests when making foreign policy, but roughly half or more in Greece and Germany do. In Germany, this represents a 32 percentage point increase since 2018, when this question was last asked. Despite this uptick, replicated across many of the European nations surveyed in both years, majorities in the region say the U.S. does not consider their interests when making foreign policy decisions.
Asian-Pacific publics also tend to say Washington discounts their interests, including 85% among New Zealanders. Around seven-in-ten in Australia and South Korea, as well as 54% in Singapore, concur that the U.S. does not consider their interests when making foreign policy.
In Taiwan, which has a complicated unofficial relationship with the U.S., 51% say the U.S. does not consider their interests, while 44% say it does. Among Japanese adults, opinions are almost equally divided between people who say the U.S. takes their views into account when making foreign policy and those that say the U.S. does not. (During the survey fielding, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga visited the U.S., attending what was Biden’s first face-to-face meeting with a foreign leader since he became president.)
There have been significant increases in the shares saying the U.S. considers their interests when making foreign policy since the question was last asked during the Trump presidency. In addition to the jump in Germany, there have been double-digit increases in such sentiment in Greece, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, France, the UK and Spain. In Greece and Canada, this is the highest such reading in a Pew Research Center survey, even compared with the Obama era.
Still, the predominant sentiment, going back to 2002 when the question was first asked, is that the U.S. does not consider the interests of countries like theirs. The election of Joe Biden has not fundamentally changed that.
Most say that the U.S. is a somewhat reliable partner
Across the 16 publics surveyed, majorities or pluralities say the U.S. is a somewhat reliable partner. But in no public surveyed do more than two-in-ten say that the U.S. is a very reliable partner.
At the same time, fewer than four-in ten say the U.S. is a not too reliable partner, and in no public do more than one-in-seven say that the U.S. is a not at all reliable partner.
The sentiment that the U.S. is a very or somewhat reliable partner is highest in the Netherlands (80%), Australia (75%) and Japan (75%). But 44% in Taiwan and 43% in Greece say the U.S. is not too or not at all reliable.
Nearly all say relations with U.S. will stay the same or get better over the next few years
When asked whether relations with the U.S. will get better, worse or stay the same over the next few years, a median of 57% across the 16 publics say they will stay the same. While a continuation of current relations with the U.S. is the most common response, a median of 39% say relations will get better and only 5% say they will get worse.
The only place where a majority thinks relations with the U.S. will get better is Germany (60% say this), where attitudes about the transatlantic alliance have become increasingly pessimistic in recent years. Half of Canadians also say relations with their southern neighbor will get better over the next few years.
In 2017, when this question was asked specifically about then-newly elected President Trump and his effect on bilateral relations, the most common answer was also that they would remain the same. But back then, few said that relations with the U.S. would improve under Trump, and significant portions of the population thought they would deteriorate, including 56% in Germany who said this.
High confidence in Biden across Europe, Asia-Pacific
In the first year of his presidency, Biden enjoys positive ratings from majorities in each of the publics surveyed. Overall, a median of 74% have confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world affairs.
Confidence is particularly high in the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Germany and Canada, where about eight-in-ten or more trust Biden when it comes to international affairs. He receives his lowest ratings in Greece, South Korea and Taiwan, though more than six-in-ten in each trust his handling of world affairs.
Widespread confidence in Biden contrasts starkly with views of his predecessor. Trust in the U.S. president was historically low in most countries surveyed during Trump’s presidency. In many cases, however, the share who have confidence in Biden is not as high as the share who had confidence in Obama at the start or end of his presidency.
Germany is a good example of this pattern. In 2020, only 10% of Germans had confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs (matching a previous all-time low earlier in Trump’s presidency). Once Biden took office, confidence in the U.S. president increased by 68 percentage points in Germany, but it is still lower there than the all-time high of 93% in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. A similar trend can be seen in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Japan.
However, in Greece, confidence in the U.S. president is the highest it has been since Pew Research Center first asked this question there. A much higher share of Greeks have confidence in Biden compared with Obama in 2016 and earlier. Notably, Biden has shared a positive relationship with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and Greeks are more than twice as likely now to say the U.S. takes their country’s interests into account when making policy decisions (53%) than they were when Obama was president (20% in 2013).
Biden more trusted than Putin and Xi, less trusted than Merkel
Publics express much more confidence in Biden than in Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping. Biden also fares well in comparison with French President Emmanuel Macron, but his ratings tend to trail those of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A median of 77% have confidence in Merkel to do the right thing in world affairs. She receives somewhat higher ratings in the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, France, New Zealand and Australia than in her home country, though a large majority of Germans still express confidence in the chancellor. Of the 16 publics surveyed, Greece is the only one where fewer than half hold this view. Faith in Merkel has also increased since the summer of 2020 in six of the 12 countries where data is available for both years.
A median of 63% have confidence in Macron when it comes to his handling of world affairs. Roughly eight-in-ten or more hold this view in Greece and Sweden. As with Merkel, Macron’s ratings in his home country are positive, but more subdued than in other publics; 53% of people in France trust the French president to do what is right in international affairs.
Medians of only around one-in-five express confidence in Putin or Xi. Singapore and Greece are the only countries where more than half trust either president; 55% in both Greece and Singapore say they have confidence in Putin, and 70% in Singapore say the same of Xi.
Ratings for the Chinese president have been consistently low in many countries, particularly across the Western European nations surveyed, since this question was first asked in 2014. Opinion of Putin in these countries extends back even further and shows a similarly negative pattern there.
Biden seen as well-qualified to be president
Reflecting high levels of confidence in the U.S. president, overwhelming majorities say Biden is well-qualified for the position, and many see him as a strong leader. Very few view Biden as either dangerous or arrogant. And in most cases, these views are in stark contrast to views of his predecessor.
A median of 77% think Biden is well-qualified for his role as president, ranging from 64% in Japan to 84% in Sweden. Among many of these same publics polled in 2017, only a third or fewer saw Trump as well-qualified.
The gap between perceptions of the two American presidents is especially wide in Sweden and Germany. Only 10% of Swedes thought Trump was well-qualified to be president during his first year in office. In the current survey, 84% see Biden as qualified, a 74 percentage point difference. Among Germans, 6% thought Trump was well-qualified, compared with eight-in-ten who say the same of Biden this year.
A difference of roughly 50 points or more on this question appears in nearly every country where data is available for both leaders.
Biden and Trump are viewed the most similarly when it comes to perceptions of them as strong leaders. In 2017, relatively large shares saw Trump as a strong leader, even in countries where few had confidence in him to do the right thing in world affairs. In countries where data is available for both leaders, more people tend to see Biden as a strong leader, but in several countries, the difference is comparatively small.
Very few people across the publics surveyed think Biden could be described as dangerous (median of 14%) or arrogant (median of 13%). This is a striking difference from how Trump was viewed early in his presidency.
For example, there is an 83-point difference in the Netherlands between those who viewed Trump as arrogant (92%) and those who currently say the same about Biden (9%). Differences of roughly 80 points or more on this question can also be seen in France, Sweden, Spain, Germany and Canada.
Similarly, majorities in each country saw Trump as dangerous in 2017, while no more than 21% hold this view of Biden, resulting in differences of roughly 40 points or more in countries where data is available for both leaders.
Biden’s foreign policy agenda broadly popular across advanced economies
The Biden administration’s foreign policies included on the survey enjoy widespread popularity. Of the four policies tested, the United States’ reentry into the World Health Organization (WHO) garners the most approval, with a median of 89% saying they support the move. Support for this policy is most prevalent in Europe, where shares ranging from 86% to 94% approve of the U.S. returning to the organization. The move is also broadly popular in Canada and the Asia-Pacific.
Biden’s decision to recommit to the Paris climate agreement is also very well received. A median of 85% approve of the U.S. rejoining the accord. Across Europe, about nine-in-ten or more across six countries polled favor the move, with respondents in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK following closely behind. Shares of roughly eight-in-ten or greater are also supportive in Canada and the Asia-Pacific region.
Rejoining the accord represents a reversal from former President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement, a move that was met with widespread disapproval when Pew Research Center asked about it in 2017.
In all countries the Center surveyed both this year and four years ago, Biden’s approach is considerably more popular than Trump’s. For instance, in Spain, only 8% approved of Trump withdrawing support for international climate agreements in 2017, while 93% approve of the U.S. rejoining the Paris agreement this year, an 85 percentage point difference. In every country, rejoining the agreement is met with approval from shares at least four times as large as the shares who supported leaving it.
In addition to Biden’s reversal of Trump-era withdrawals from international organizations and pacts, his plans for the U.S. to host a summit of democratic nations earns widespread approval. Across the 16 publics polled, a median of 85% express support for the convening, and in each, eight-in-ten or more say they favor the plan.
Attitudes toward this policy among several publics are divided by views of American democracy. Among most publics surveyed, those who think the U.S. is a good example of democracy for other countries to follow support the summit more than those who think the U.S. has never been a good example. For instance, in Sweden, 91% of those who think the U.S. is currently setting a good example of democratic values approve of the U.S. convening leaders from other democracies, compared with 71% of those who doubt the U.S. has ever set a good example of democracy, a 20-point difference.
Those who view the U.S. as a reliable partner are more likely to approve of the U.S. hosting a summit of democratic nations in 13 of the publics surveyed. For example, in Germany, 89% of those who think the U.S. is a reliable partner approve of this policy, whereas only 68% of those who view the U.S. as unreliable agree, a 21-point difference.
Approval of Biden’s plan to increase the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. is also widespread. A median of about three-quarters support the change, and nowhere do fewer than six-in-ten agree with the decision. This comes as Biden reversed his initial goal to raise the refugee cap in the U.S. from the levels set by the Trump administration, but then walked back the reversal amid criticism.
In just three years, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has gone from prisoner to president-elect. After being jailed on corruption charges, the left-wing da Silva engineered a stunning political resurrection on Sunday by winning Brazil’s presidential runoff election — in a nail-biter — over right-wing incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro.
Official returns gave da Silva, who is a former two-term president, 50.9% of the vote compared to 49.1% for Bolsonaro. Da Silva will be sworn-in for a four-year term on Jan. 1st.
“I’m really happy,” said Victor Costelo, 33, who works in advertising, as he celebrated on the streets of Sao Paulo that were crowded with da Silva supporters, many of them wearing the red colors of his Workers Party. After four years of Bolsonaro, who Costelo described as an authoritarian, he said, “the next four years will be more hopeful for us.”
The extremely tight race showed how politically polarized Brazil has become in recent years. Although the balloting was largely peaceful, there were several violent incidents during the campaign with authorities reporting the killings of at least four da Silva supporters at the hands of pro-Bolsonaro fanatics.
Bolsonaro, 67, a populist in the mold of former U.S. President Donald Trump, served as an army captain during Brazil’s military dictatorship that lasted from 1964-85 and filled his cabinet with former officers. He repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the election and the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting machines and hinted that he might not accept the results if he lost.
His anti-democratic rhetoric alarmed many Brazilians, while 77-year-old da Silva promised a return to normality.
“We are going to fix the country and you are going to be happy again,” he told voters in the run-up to Sunday’s balloting.
Da Silva and Bolsonaro were the two top finishers in a first round of presidential voting on Oct. 2 that featured 11 candidates. But neither da Silva nor Bolsonaro secured more than half the votes required for an outright victory, forcing this weekend’s runoff election.
Da Silva has promised to increase the minimum wage and jump-start the economy, which has been flagging since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Brazil and caused nearly 700,000 deaths – the world’s second-highest death toll after the U.S. He has also pledged to protect the Amazon rainforest after deforestation hit a 15-year high under Bolsonaro.
Sunday’s victory was perhaps the most spectacular in da Silva’s roller-coaster political career.
After three failed runs for the presidency, da Silva was elected to the post in 2002 then reelected in 2006. As president, he oversaw an economic boom that helped lift millions out of poverty, making him an icon of the Latin American left.
However, after leaving office, Lula became ensnared in a wide-ranging bribery scandal that landed him in prison for 580 days. His political career appeared to be over. But he was released on a technicality in 2019 and launched yet another run for the presidency that quickly garnered enthusiastic support.
His victory will help consolidate a leftward shift in Latin America where, from Mexico to Argentina, the biggest countries are run by leftist presidents.
World leaders were quick to congratulate da Silva on his victory. “I send my congratulations to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections,” President Biden said in a statement. “I look forward to working together to continue the cooperation between our two countries in the months and years ahead.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a tweet that he anticipated working with the leader on mutual priorities, like protecting the environment. “The people of Brazil have spoken,” Trudeau said.
There was no immediate comment from Bolsonaro. But two of his close political allies, finance minister Paulo Guedes and Arthur Lira, president of the lower house of Congress, seemed to acknowledge that Bolsonaro had lost.
Guedes tweeted “Thank you for everything, Jair Bolsonaro.” Lira told reporters that it was time for pro-Bolsonaro forces to reach out to the other side, adding “long live democracy in Brazil.”
Da Silva, speaking at a victory rally in São Paulo, acknowledged the divided nature of the electorate and called for national unity. But he couldn’t resist crowing about his ability to come back from a political near-death, saying of his adversaries: “They tried to bury me alive, but I’m here. … Today, we are saying to the world that Brazil is back.”
A two-day meeting of the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee in India has ended with the adoption of a document committing Member States to prevent and combat digital forms of terror, notably using drones, social media, and online terrorist financing.
The non-binding document, known as The Delhi Declaration on countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes was adopted in the Indian capital on Saturday, following a series of panels that involved Member States representatives, UN officials, civil society entities, the private sector, and researchers.
The declaration aims to cover the main concerns surrounding the abuse of drones, social media platforms, and crowdfunding, and create guidelines that will help to tackle the growing issue.
“The Delhi declaration lays out the foundation for the way ahead,” said David Scharia from the Counter-Terrorism Executive Committee. “It speaks about the importance of human rights, public-private partnership, civil society engagement, and how we are going to work together on this challenge. It also invites the CTED [the Secretariat for the Committee] to develop a set of guiding principles, which will result from intensive thinking with all the partners.”
Human Rights at the core
Respect for human rights was highly stressed in the document, and during the debates. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, underscored that there must be “concrete measures to reduce these vulnerabilities while committing to protect all human rights in the digital sphere.”
In a video message, Mr. Guterres added that human rights could only be achieved through effective multilateralism and international cooperation, with responses that are anchored in the values and obligations of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Picture: Indiua TV News
Representing the Human Rights Office, Scott Campbell, who leads the digital technology team, echoed the Secretary-General, explaining that “respecting rights when countering terrorism is fundamental to ensuring sustainable and effective efforts to protect our security.”
“Approaches that cross these important lines not only violate the law, but they also undermine efforts to combat terrorism by eroding the trust, networks, and community that is essential to successful prevention and response,” he said.
Mr. Campbell argued that international law and human rights present many answers to the issue, recalling that the Member States have a duty to protect the security of their population and to ensure that their conduct does not violate the rights of any person.
Regulation and censorship
He also stressed that companies and States should be cautious when filtering and blocking social media content, as it can “affect minorities and journalists in disproportionate ways.”
To overcome the issue, Mr. Campbell suggested that restrictions should be based on precise and narrowly tailored laws, and should not incentivize the censoring of legitimate expression. He argued that they should have transparent processes, genuinely independent and impartial oversight bodies, and that civil society and experts should be involved in developing, evaluating, and implementing regulations.
During the closing session of the meeting, the Committee chairperson, Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj of India, stated that the outcome document takes note of the challenges, and proposes “practical, operational, and tactical possibilities of addressing the opportunities and the threats posed by the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes.”
She added that the global policymaking community “must be agile, forward-thinking, and collaborative” to meet the changing needs of States facing new challenges from digital terror.
Delhi Declaration highlights:
In the Delhi Declaration, Member States agree that guidelines and implemented actions should be based on international law and human rights.
Members of the Committee will draft recommendations to counter the terrorist exploitation of Information and Communications Technology, such as payment technologies and fundraising methods and misuse of unmanned aerial systems (UAS, or drones).
The body will assist Member States in the implementation of all relevant Security Council resolutions to countering the use of technologies for terrorist purposes, while respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms.
A new set of non-binding guiding principles to assist Member States in countering the digital terrorism threat will be issued, with a compilation of good practices on the opportunities offered by the same set of technologies to tackle threats.
The relevant offices will commit to deepening engagement and cooperation with civil society, including women and women’s organizations, relevant private-sector entities, and other stakeholders, and build partnerships.
(AP) — Chanting crowds marched in the streets of Berlin, Washington DC and Los Angeles on Saturday in a show of international support for demonstrators facing a violent government crackdown in Iran, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of that country’s morality police.
On the U.S. National Mall, thousands of women and men of all ages — wearing green, white and red, the colors of the Iran flag — shouted in rhythm. “Be scared. Be scared. We are one in this,” demonstrators yelled, before marching to the White House. “Say her name! Mahsa!”
The demonstrations, put together by grassroots organizers from around the United States, drew Iranians from across the Washington D.C. area, with some travelling down from Toronto to join the crowd.
In Los Angeles, home to the biggest population of Iranians outside of Iran, a throng of protesters formed a slow-moving procession along blocks of a closed downtown street. They chanted for the fall of Iran’s government and waved hundreds of Iranian flags that turned the horizon into a undulating wave of red, white and green. “We want freedom,” they thundered.
Shooka Scharm, an attorney who was born in the U.S. after her parents fled the Iranian revolution, was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” in English and Farsi. In Iran “women are like a second-class citizen and they are sick of it,” Scharm said.
Iran’s nationwide antigovernment protest movement first focused on the country’s mandatory hijab covering for women following Amiri’s death on Sept. 16. The demonstrations there have since transformed into the greatest challenge to the Islamic Republic since the 2009 Green Movement over disputed elections. In Tehran on Saturday, more antigovernment protests took place at several universities.
Iran’s security forces have dispersed gatherings in that country with live ammunition and tear gas, killing over 200 people, including teenage girls, according to rights groups.
The Biden administration has said it condemns the brutality and repression against the citizens of Iran and that it will look for ways to impose more sanctions against the Iranian government if the violence continues.
Between chants, protesters in D.C. broke into song, singing traditional Persian music about life and freedom — all written after the revolution in 1979 brought religious fundamentalists to power in Iran. They sang one in particular in unison — “Baraye,” meaning because of, which has become the unofficial anthem of the Iran protests. The artist of that song, Shervin Hajipour, was arrested shortly after posting the song to his Instagram in late September. It accrued more than 40 million views. “Because of women, life, freedom,” protesters sang, echoing a popular protest chant: “Azadi” — Freedom.
The movement in Iran is rooted in the same issues as in the U.S. and around the globe, said protester Samin Aayanifard, 28, who left Iran three years ago. “It’s forced hijab in Iran and here in America, after 50 years, women’s bodies are under control,” said Aayanifard, who drove from East Lansing, Michigan to join the D.C. march. She referred to rollbacks of abortion laws in the United States. “It’s about control over women’s bodies.”
Several weeks of Saturday solidarity rallies in the U.S. capital have drawn growing crowds. In Berlin, a crowd estimated by German police at several tens of thousands turned out to show solidarity for the women and activists leading the movement for the past few weeks in Iran. The protests in Germany’s capital, organized by the Woman(asterisk) Life Freedom Collective, began at the Victory Column in Berlin’s Tiergarten park and continued as a march through central Berlin.
Some demonstrators there said they had come from elsewhere in Germany and other European countries to show their support.
“It is so important for us to be here, to be the voice of the people of Iran, who are killed on the streets,” said Shakib Lolo, who is from Iran but lives in the Netherlands. “And this is not a protest anymore, this is a revolution, in Iran. And the people of the world have to see it.”(Follow AP’s coverage of Iran at: https://apnews.com/hub/iran)
Rishi Sunak, the leader of the Conservative Party in England met King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on October 25th, where the monarch officially asked the new leader of the governing Party to form a government, as is tradition. Sunak clinched the leadership position Monday, seen by his party as a safe pair of hands it hopes will stabilize an economy sliding toward recession, and stem its own plunging popularity, after the brief, disastrous term of Liz Truss.
In his first speech as British prime minister, Rishi Sunak warned his country that tough economic times — and tough decisions — were ahead, that mistakes had been made by his predecessors, that he would work hard to earn the people’s trust. He promised to govern with “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level,” qualities he suggested were lacking when he resigned from former prime minister Boris Johnson’s government and led a revolt against his former boss.
Rishi Sunak assumes charge of Britain and is the third prime minister of the year, tasked with taming an economic crisis that has left the country’s finances in a precarious state and millions struggling to pay their food and energy bills.
Sunak is the fifth British prime minister in six years, the third in less than two months. He is Britain’s first leader of South Asian descent, its first Hindu prime minister, and the nation’s first leader of color. He is the youngest prime minister of modern times.
He won an internal party contest to be the country’s new leader following Truss’ Oct. 20 resignation. Her tenure was the shortest ever for a British prime minister and was marked by economic turmoil. British voters elect a party, not a specific leader, meaning the ruling party has latitude to change a prime minister without calling an election. Sunak won the party contest after his challenger Penny Mordaunt dropped out of the race.
History was made as Rishi Sunak, a British citizen of Indian Heritage has been chosen as Britain’s youngest Prime Minister on Monday, October 24th, 2002. As the leader of the United Kingdom, Sunak has been tasked to steer the economically floundering nation days after his predecessor Liz Truss stepped down, conceding defeat. At age 42, he is the youngest and the first person of color to hold the post. The former Goldman Sachs analyst will be the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of Indian origin.
Rishi Sunak becomes Britain’s next prime minister after he won the race to lead the Conservative Party, leaving him with the task of steering a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer. In his first address to the people after being named Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak said it was the “Greatest privilege of my life…Will work day in and out to deliver”.
Sunak, one of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster has been asked to form a government by King Charles, replacing Liz Truss, the outgoing leader who only lasted 44 days in the job before she resigned. He defeated centrist politician Penny Mordaunt, who failed to get enough backing from lawmakers to enter the ballot, while his rival, the former prime minister Boris Johnson, withdrew from the contest saying he could no longer unite the party.
“This decision is a historic one and shows, once again, the diversity and talent of our party,” Ms Mordaunt said in a statement as she withdrew from the race just minutes before the winner was due to be announced. “Rishi has my full support.”
Sunak, the former finance minister, becomes Britain’s third prime minister in less than two months, tasked with restoring stability to a country reeling from years of political and economic turmoil. The multi-millionaire former hedge fund boss will be expected to launch deep spending cuts to try to rebuild Britain’s fiscal reputation, just as the country slides into a recession, dragged down by the surging cost of energy and food.
He will also inherit a political party that has fractured along ideological lines, a challenge that damaged the fortunes of several former Conservative leaders. Britain has been locked in a state of perma-crisis ever since it voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, unleashing a battle at Westminster over the future of the country that remains unresolved to this today.
Boris Johnson, the face of the Brexit vote, led his party to a landslide victory in 2019, only to be driven out of office less than three years later after a series of scandals. His successor Liz Truss lasted just over six weeks before she quit over an economic policy that trashed the country’s economic credibility.
Economists have questioned whether Sunak can tackle the country’s finances while holding the party’s multiple warring factions together. Rishi Sunak came to national attention when, aged 39, he became finance minister under Boris Johnson just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Britain, developing the successful furlough scheme.
Sunak’s family migrated to Britain in the 1960s, a period when many people from Britain’s former colonies moved to the country to help it rebuild after the Second World War. After graduating from Oxford University, he went to Stanford University where he met his wife Akshata Murthy, whose father is Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, founder of outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd.
The fact such a senior political leader in Britain has a family background that is nonwhite — with both his parents of Indian origin — has only become commonplace in the past handful of years. “That is a very, very recent development,” says Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that researches issues around immigration, integration, race and identity.
He says since David Cameron became prime minister, the Conservative Party has placed an emphasis on putting more ethnic minorities in senior positions inside the government. “Ethnic diversity has become a new normal at the top table of British politics,” Katwala acknowledges. “In the last five years, we’ve seen ethnic minority chancellors of the Exchequer, home secretaries, foreign secretaries at a remarkable pace. Everyone’s got used to that and everybody thinks you shouldn’t make too much of that.”
Bronwen Maddox, the chief executive of the London-based think tank Chatham House, says that one silver lining amid all the chaos of recent weeks is that it “has forced someone with economic competence to the top of the Conservative field, and it has also forced Labour, the main opposition party, to put together a platform based on a claim to financial coherence, competence, things that Labor hasn’t always been associated with in the past.”
Congratulating Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted, “I look forward to working closely together on global issues, and implementing Roadmap 2030. Special Diwali wishes to the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians, as we transform our historic ties into a modern partnership”.
Considered a centrist and pragmatic politician, he emerged in the latest leadership contest as a safe pair of hands to guide the U.K., after Liz Truss’ policy proposals around tax cuts and spending shook the government’s credibility and spooked markets.
Sunak’s rise in British politics has been nothing short of meteoric. After entering Parliament in 2015 after a career in banking, Boris Johnson appointed him just five years later as finance minister — a role formally known as chancellor of the Exchequer, the U.K.’s Treasury.
Financial markets have reacted calmly as it emerged that Rishi Sunak is set to be the UK’s next prime minister. The pound was broadly unchanged against the dollar on Monday afternoon and government borrowing costs stayed lower after Commons leader Penny Mordaunt dropped out of the leadership race.
(AP) —President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader in decades, increased his dominance on Oct. 23rd, 2022 when he was named to a 3rd term as the head of the ruling Communist Party in a break with tradition as he promoted his allies who support his vision of tighter control over society and the struggling economy.
Xi, who took power in 2012, was awarded a third five-year term as general secretary, discarding a custom under which his predecessor left after 10 years. The 69-year-old leader is expected by some to try to stay in power for life.
The party also named a seven-member Standing Committee, its inner circle of power, dominated by Xi allies after Premier Li Keqiang, the No. 2 leader and an advocate of market-style reform and private enterprise, was dropped from the leadership Saturday. That was despite Li being a year younger than the party’s informal retirement age of 68.
“Power will be even more concentrated in the hands of Xi Jinping,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong Baptist University. The new appointees are “all loyal to Xi,” he said. “There is no counterweight or checks and balances in the system at all.”
The world faces the prospect of more tension with China over trade, security and human rights after Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, awarded himself another term as leader of the ruling Communist Party.
Xi has tightened control at home and is trying to use China’s economic heft to increase its influence abroad. Washington accused Beijing this month of trying to undermine U.S. alliances, global security and economic rules. Activists say Xi’s government wants to deflect criticism of abuses by changing the U.N.’s definition of human rights.
Xi says “the world system is broken and China has answers,” said William Callahan of the London School of Economics. “More and more, Xi Jinping is talking about the Chinese style as a universal model of the world order, which goes back to a Cold War kind of conflict.”
At a Communist Party congress that wrapped up Saturday, Xi gave no sign of plans to change the severe “zero-COVID” strategy that has frustrated China’s public and disrupted business and trade. He called for more self-reliance in technology, faster military development and protection of Beijing’s “core interests” abroad. He announced no changes in policies that have strained relations with Washington and Asian neighbors.
Xi says “the world system is broken and China has answers,” said William Callahan of the London School of Economics. “More and more, Xi Jinping is talking about the Chinese style as a universal model of the world order, which goes back to a Cold War kind of conflict.”
At a Communist Party congress that wrapped up Saturday, Xi gave no sign of plans to change the severe “zero-COVID” strategy that has frustrated China’s public and disrupted business and trade. He called for more self-reliance in technology, faster military development and protection of Beijing’s “core interests” abroad. He announced no changes in policies that have strained relations with Washington and Asian neighbors.
By 2035, the Communist Party wants economic output per person to match a “medium-level developed country,” Xi said in a report to the congress. That suggests doubling output from 2020 levels, according to Larry Hu and Yuxiao Zhang of Macquarie, an Australian financial services group. Meanwhile, however, the ruling party is building up subsidy-devouring state industry and tightening control over entrepreneurs who generate wealth and jobs. That prompts warnings that economic growth that sank to 2.2% over a year earlier in the first half of 2022 will suffer. The economy faces challenges from tension with Washington, curbs on China’s access to Western technology, an aging population and a slump in its vast real estate industry.
“If top leaders take the target seriously, they might have to adopt a more pro-growth policy stance,” Hu and Zhang said in a report. Analysts are watching for details after the party’s Central Economic Work Conference in early December. Xi promised to “build China’s self-reliance and strength in science and technology.”
He gave no details, but earlier efforts to reduce reliance on the West and Japan by creating Chinese sources of renewable energy, electric vehicle, computer and other technologies have prompted complaints that Beijing violates its free-trade commitments by shielding its companies from competition. American officials worry Chinese competition might erode U.S. industrial leadership. China faces growing limits on access to Western technology, especially from the United States, which warns it might be used to make weapons. China is building its own chip industry, but analysts say it is generations behind global leaders. Beijing doesn’t appear to be trying to isolate China but wants to reduce strategic unease by catching up with other countries, said Alicia Garcia Herrero of Natixis, a French investment bank. She said that will involve increased state-led investment. “That is going to create some tension,” she said.
Xi says “external and internal security” are the “bedrock of national rejuvenation.” In a speech that used the word security 26 times, he said Beijing will “work faster” to modernize the party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army, and “enhance the military’s strategic capabilities.” China already has the world’s second-highest military spending after the United States and is trying to extend its reach by developing ballistic missiles, submarines and other technologies. Xi refused to renounce the use of force to unite Taiwan with the mainland. Xi also called for improved security for supplies of energy, food and industrial goods. The party also sees “ideological security” as a priority, which is leading to more internet censorship.
Beijing increasingly uses its economic muscle as the biggest trading partner for all of its neighbors as leverage in politics and security. China blocked imports of Australian wine, meat and other goods after its government called for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Beijing tried unsuccessfully to persuade 10 Pacific island governments to sign a security pact this year, but is making inroads with some. Police officers from the Solomon Islands are being trained in China. Beijing wants a “China-centered security system,” said Callahan.
“Beijing wants to be a world leader, and part of that, according to Beijing, is to be a leader in the hard politics of global security.” Chinese diplomats, in a trend dubbed “wolf warrior diplomacy,” are more confrontational and sometimes violent. This month, Chinese diplomats in Manchester, England, beat a protester after dragging him onto the grounds of their consulate. Diplomats have “carried forward the fighting spirit,” said a deputy foreign minister, Ma Zhaoxu. He said the diplomatic corps will “improve its fighting skills and always stand at the forefront of safeguarding national interests and national dignity.”
COVID-19: Xi gave no indication China’s “zero-COVID” strategy might ease despite public frustration with its costs. While other countries have eased travel curbs, China is sticking to a strategy that has kept infection rates low but shut down major cities. The party newspaper People’s Daily tried to dispel expectations of a relaxation once the congress ended. The strategy “must be sustained,” it argued. Public health experts say more of the elderly need to be vaccinated before the ruling party can relax the COVID-19 restrictions. That might take months. Forecasters say that means it might be the end of 2023 before controls might ease.
CLIMATE: Xi promised a “proactive and steady” approach to reducing climate-changing carbon emissions, but at the same time the ruling party is increasing coal production to avert a repeat of last year’s power shortages and blackouts. A Cabinet official said coal output will rise to 4.6 billion tons in 2025. That would be 12% more than 2021. Xi said in a 2020 speech to the United Nations that China’s emissions should peak in 2030 but didn’t say at what level. China already emits more carbon than the United States and other developed economies combined, according to Rhodium Group. China is building more coal-fired power plants, which activists warn might cause higher emissions. Meanwhile, Beijing suspended a climate dialogue with Washington in August in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to rival Taiwan.
History was made as Rishi Sunak, a British citizen of Indian Heritage has been chosen as Britain’s youngest Prime Minister on Monday, October 24th, 2002. As the leader of the United Kingdom, Sunak has been tasked to steer the economically floundering nation days after his predecessor Liz Truss stepped down, conceding defeat. At age 42, he is the youngest and the first person of color to hold the post. The former Goldman Sachs analyst will be the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of Indian origin.
Rishi Sunak becomes Britain’s next prime minister after he won the race to lead the Conservative Party, leaving him with the task of steering a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer. In his first address to the people after being named Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak said it was the “Greatest privilege of my life…Will work day in and out to deliver”.
Sunak, one of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster has been asked to form a government by King Charles, replacing Liz Truss, the outgoing leader who only lasted 44 days in the job before she resigned. He defeated centrist politician Penny Mordaunt, who failed to get enough backing from lawmakers to enter the ballot, while his rival, the former prime minister Boris Johnson, withdrew from the contest saying he could no longer unite the party.
“This decision is a historic one and shows, once again, the diversity and talent of our party,” Ms Mordaunt said in a statement as she withdrew from the race just minutes before the winner was due to be announced. “Rishi has my full support.”
Sunak, the former finance minister, becomes Britain’s third prime minister in less than two months, tasked with restoring stability to a country reeling from years of political and economic turmoil. The multi-millionaire former hedge fund boss will be expected to launch deep spending cuts to try to rebuild Britain’s fiscal reputation, just as the country slides into a recession, dragged down by the surging cost of energy and food.
He will also inherit a political party that has fractured along ideological lines, a challenge that damaged the fortunes of several former Conservative leaders. Britain has been locked in a state of perma-crisis ever since it voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, unleashing a battle at Westminster over the future of the country that remains unresolved to this today.
Boris Johnson, the face of the Brexit vote, led his party to a landslide victory in 2019, only to be driven out of office less than three years later after a series of scandals. His successor Liz Truss lasted just over six weeks before she quit over an economic policy that trashed the country’s economic credibility.
Economists have questioned whether Sunak can tackle the country’s finances while holding the party’s multiple warring factions together. Rishi Sunak came to national attention when, aged 39, he became finance minister under Boris Johnson just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Britain, developing the successful furlough scheme.
Sunak’s family migrated to Britain in the 1960s, a period when many people from Britain’s former colonies moved to the country to help it rebuild after the Second World War. After graduating from Oxford University, he went to Stanford University where he met his wife Akshata Murthy, whose father is Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, founder of outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd.
The fact such a senior political leader in Britain has a family background that is nonwhite — with both his parents of Indian origin — has only become commonplace in the past handful of years. “That is a very, very recent development,” says Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that researches issues around immigration, integration, race and identity.
He says since David Cameron became prime minister, the Conservative Party has placed an emphasis on putting more ethnic minorities in senior positions inside the government. “Ethnic diversity has become a new normal at the top table of British politics,” Katwala acknowledges. “In the last five years, we’ve seen ethnic minority chancellors of the Exchequer, home secretaries, foreign secretaries at a remarkable pace. Everyone’s got used to that and everybody thinks you shouldn’t make too much of that.”
Bronwen Maddox, the chief executive of the London-based think tank Chatham House, says that one silver lining amid all the chaos of recent weeks is that it “has forced someone with economic competence to the top of the Conservative field, and it has also forced Labour, the main opposition party, to put together a platform based on a claim to financial coherence, competence, things that Labor hasn’t always been associated with in the past.”
Congratulating Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted, “I look forward to working closely together on global issues, and implementing Roadmap 2030. Special Diwali wishes to the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians, as we transform our historic ties into a modern partnership”.
Considered a centrist and pragmatic politician, he emerged in the latest leadership contest as a safe pair of hands to guide the U.K., after Liz Truss’ policy proposals around tax cuts and spending shook the government’s credibility and spooked markets.
Sunak’s rise in British politics has been nothing short of meteoric. After entering Parliament in 2015 after a career in banking, Boris Johnson appointed him just five years later as finance minister — a role formally known as chancellor of the Exchequer, the U.K.’s Treasury.
Financial markets have reacted calmly as it emerged that Rishi Sunak is set to be the UK’s next prime minister. The pound was broadly unchanged against the dollar on Monday afternoon and government borrowing costs stayed lower after Commons leader Penny Mordaunt dropped out of the leadership race.
On Sunday, October 16th, a collection of 2,300 delegates from the Communist Party of China convened for a weeklong conference to choose China’s next leader. The victor is almost certain to be current President and General Secretary Xi Jinping, who would be the first to serve more than two terms as the Party’s leader since Mao Zedong.
As with most Chinese political events, little information has been released beforehand and the congress’ outcome will only be announced after several days of closed-door sessions. How much has been decided in advance and how much is still to be hashed out in face-to-face meetings also remains unknown.
The changes will “incorporate the major theoretical views and strategic thinking” concluded in the five years since the last congress, said the congress’ spokesperson Sun Yeli, a deputy head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department who is not well known outside party circles.
The amendment or amendments will “meet new requirements for advancing the party’s development and work in the face of new circumstances and new tasks,” Sun said.
That start date is in line with tradition – in recent decades, the party has always held its congresses between September and November. The highly choreographed affairs usually last about a week, bringing together some 2,000 delegates from across the country in a show of unity and legitimacy.
But this year’s congress is anything but conventional. Xi, who has consolidated enormous power since taking office a decade ago, is widely expected to seek an unprecedented third term as China’s top leader, breaking with convention set by his predecessors since the early 1990s.
While some have resented XI’s trampling on what few freedoms Chinese citizens still enjoyed under the one party state, others say China’s various and acute challenges require that a “strong leader is needed to keep at bay the recipes for chaos and dysfunction,” Torigian said.
Xi’s third term is a break with an unofficial two-term limit that other recent leaders had followed. What’s not clear is how long he will remain in power, and what that means for China and the world.
“I see Xi having his way at the 20th congress, mostly. It is a question of how much more powerful he will be coming out of it,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies. “He is not coming out looking weaker.”
It’s a plan years in the making, ever since Xi removed the presidential term limits from the country’s constitution in 2018. But for an authoritarian leader obsessed with stability, the months leading up to it haven’t exactly been a smooth ride.
Since coming to power, Xi has waged a sweeping anti-corruption crackdown to purge opponents, silence dissent and instill loyalty. He has revamped and secured a firm grip over the military, and other critical levers of power.
“Very often, when there are challenges, it’s not necessarily bad for the supreme leader at all,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. “In fact, authoritarian leaders like Xi thrive on challenges – and often use such crises to enhance their power.”
Indian origin congressman Ro Khanna has introduced legislation in the House of Representatives to declare Pakistan Army’s actions during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war as “genocide” and “crime against humanity”. The legislation introduced by Ro Khanna, along with Congressman Steve Chabot, recognizes that such atrocities against ethnic Bengalis and Hindus constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. “…condemns the atrocities committed by the Armed Forces of Pakistan against the people of Bangladesh from March 1971 to December 1971; recognizes that such atrocities against ethnic Bengalis and Hindus constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide; calls on the President of the United States to recognize the atrocities committed against ethnic Bengalis and Hindus by the Armed Forces of Pakitan during 1971 as crimes against humanity war crimes, and genocide,” the legislation read, a copy of which was posted by Chabot on his Twitter handle. Congressman Chabot said legislation looks to recognize that the mass atrocities committed against Bengalis and Hindus, in particular, were indeed a genocide. “The Bangladesh Genocide of 1971 must not be forgotten. With help from my Hindu constituents in Ohio’s First District, @RepRoKhanna and I introduced legislation to recognize that the mass atrocities committed against Bengalis and Hindus, in particular, were indeed a genocide,” Congressman Chabot tweeted. “We must not let the years erase the memory of the millions who were massacred. Recognizing the genocide strengthens the historical record, educates our fellow Americans, and lets would-be perpetrators know such crimes will not be tolerated or forgotten,” he added. The eight-page legislation also mentions March 28, 1971 telegram sent by United States Consul General in Dacca, Archer Blood titled “Selective Genocide”. In this message, the US Consul General wrote, “Moreover, with support of Pak military, non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people’s quarters and murdering Bengalis and Hindus. Streets of Dacca are aflood with Hindus and others seeking to get out of Dacca. Many Bengalis have sought refuge in homes of Ameri cans, most of whom are extending shelter.” Bangladesh Liberation War Affairs Minister AKM Mozammel Haque last month called the greater push for international recognition of genocide carried out on unarmed Bangalees, Bangladesh News Agency reported. Addressing a press conference in Dhaka, Haque said international recognition of the genocide of 1971 could not be realized in 51 years after independence, Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS). However, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government declared March 25 as National Genocide Day. The minister sought international recognition for March 25 as “International Genocide Day” side by side with the existing December 9. The genocide in Bangladesh began on 25 March 1971 with the launch of Operation Searchlight, as the government of Pakistan, dominated by West Pakistan, began a military crackdown on East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to suppress Bengali calls for self-determination. During the nine-month-long Bangladesh Liberation War, members of the Pakistan Armed Forces and supporting pro-Pakistani Islamist militias from Jamaat-e-Islami killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 people and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women, in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. The Government of Bangladesh states 3,000,000 people were killed during the genocide, making it the largest genocide since the Holocaust during World War II.
On the high end, Bangladeshi authorities claim that as many as 3 million people were killed; the lowest estimate comes from the controversial Hamoodur Rahman Commission, the official Pakistani government investigation, which claimed the figure was 26,000 civilian casualties. The figure of 3 million has become embedded in Bangladeshi culture and literature.
Shrinivas Dempo is not one to mince words. The president of the All India Management Association (AIMA) – the country’s apex non-profit, non-lobbying body for management professionals with over 38,000 members – is not optimistic about the current geopolitical and economic situation, even as he is hopeful about the future. “These are extremely difficult times,” he told indica in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the 5th US-India Conference jointly hosted by AIMA and Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, on October 11. “We are facing all sorts of crises – climate, energy, interest rates, foreign exchange. But when there are challenges there are also opportunities.” The 1969-born Dempo, who hails from the state of Goa in western India, is the chairman of the Dempo Group of Companies – a diversified conglomerate with interests in industries such as calcined petroleum coke, shipbuilding, food processing, real estate and newspaper publishing. The company also owns a popular football club. The theme for this year’s conference was ‘US-India Partnership: A New Paradigm in a Changed World’. In his speech, Dempo acknowledged the issues faced by the world and not just India. “We believe in the strength of people,” he said, “and together we (the US and India) can achieve.” He told indica, “With so much uncertainty, thought leaders will have to come up more ideas for our economies to collaborate. India is one of the world’s most promising nations. Our demographic dividend, our younger population is our greatest strength.” He added that the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the China-Taiwan geopolitical tensions give an opportunity for India and the US to collaborate on a higher scale. “India in the east and US in the west will play a major role in sorting out the issues.” He said collaboration is better than competition, and for that to happen, he proposed a summit where industry and academia from the two countries can come together. Dempo said the AIMA is not like other business associations, “nor are we an advocacy organization,” but added that AIMA talks about adapting better management practices. “AIMA not only addresses corporate leaders but we also manage students that are our future corporate leaders. The idea of hosting the summit is to collaborate with education institutes and work on a common theme.” Apart from hosting the US-India Conference, the AIMA delegation visited Silicon Valley tech companies to see innovation first hand and perhaps take back some lessons for Indian industry. The delegation has people from manufacturing, transportation and logistics sectors. “The dialog can evolve into specific business opportunities,” Dempo said. “When things are bad, it is the best time to get things at a good price.” He said India’s current growth rate (7% annually) can sustain for at least 30 more years and “while we cannot compare with the US, we will probably make India the best destination for investment.” He opined that the Indian government needs to pay greater attention to the tourism sector. “Tourism potential remains largely untapped, even though we have made great progress. The past need not be an indicator, but we need to focus on heritage tourism, nature tourism, ecological tourism, and much more. Infrastructure needs to be set up on a much larger scale… more hotels, better facilities.” He said in his speech that India’s industrialization and digitization has improved leaps and bounds, but “we still have a long way to go. “Indian youth today have an unprecedented opportunity to be entrepreneurs. I know the US has traditionally done well in this area and so we need greater collaboration in this field. Prime Minister Modi is bullish on Make in India and Start-up India.” Dempo has a personal connection with America. He is a graduate of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as a trustee at the university. In 2011, he made a $3 million gift to endow a professorship at Tepper called the Vasantrao Dempo Reflective Chair, to support teaching and research on India-relevant issues. There are two simultaneous reflective chair professors – one in the US and the other in India. Prof Sudhir Kekre was appointed the first such professor in 2017.
HM Nerurkar, chairman of TRL Krosaki Refractories Limited has one-line advice for new-age entrepreneurs – Silicon Valley is where you get cutting-edge tech and this is where you can learn the most. Nerurkar was a keynote speaker at the 5th US-India Conference jointly organized by the All India Management Association and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, on October 11. In an exclusive interview with indica, Nerurkar said that despite several agencies lowering India’s GDP growth forecast for 2023, “It is quite pessimistic and I believe it will be around 7 percent.” He said this is possible because India is still not an export-led economy, and India cannot suffer thanks to its domestic consumption. “I think we will still manage to retain the 7 percent GDP growth target.” Nerurkar, who has spent more than half his professional career with the Tata group, still serves on its board. He is also an advisor to several multi-billion-dollar conglomerates such as the Adani group. The soft-spoken Nerurkar earned a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP). He joined Tata Steel in 1972 and rose to becoming its managing director in charge of India and South East Asia operations. He commented on the Deloitte report that stated that India is a more challenging business destination compared to countries such as China and Vietnam. “There is some truth (in the report). Our rank is still not where it should be on ease of doing business. There are issues and the government is trying to address them.” He added that India still lacks the infrastructure needed to become a fast-growing exporting nation. “If you improve the operational efficiency and improve the export infrastructure, we can become a bigger export house.” He is an optimist, though. “I think India will not allow any opportunity to slip away at this juncture. For example, Adani group is trying to be number one. That kind of ambition and that kind of leadership was not something you have dreamt of 10 years back.” He said this is the right time for India to grab US investors, given the tension between China and the US. In his short speech at the conference, Nerurkar spoke about his ideas on the metaverse. “All of us in business and in government have to ensure that the younger generation gets training or the skill development that is appropriate for the jobs that are coming up.” (IndicaNews)
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday overwhelmingly condemned Russia’s “attempted illegal annexation” of four partially occupied regions in Ukraine and called on all countries not to recognize the move, strengthening a diplomatic international isolation of Moscow since it invaded its neighbor.
The United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn Russia’s attempts to annex four regions of Ukraine. The resolution was supported by 143 countries, while 35 states – including China and India – abstained. In addition to Russia, only four countries rejected the vote, namely Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Nicaragua. Although symbolic, it was the highest number of votes against Russia since the invasion.
India’s abstention was in keeping with its voting posture on all substantive Ukraine-related resolutions since the war began. It, however, expressed deep concern at the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, called for an immediate ceasefire, reiterated its traditional position in favor of peace, diplomacy, and dialogue, and advocated keeping diplomatic channels open.
India said it was abstaining since there were “other pressing issues” not covered adequately by the resolution. The non-binding resolution, titled “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the UN Charter”, was brought to the UNGA after the Russians vetoed a similar text condemning its referendum and annexation at the UN Security Council.
The UN resolution calls on the international community not to recognize any of Russia’s annexation claims and demands its “immediate reversal”. It welcomes and “expresses its strong support” for efforts to de-escalate the conflict through negotiation.
“It’s amazing,” Ukraine’s U.N. Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the vote as he stood next to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who said the result showed Russia could not intimidate the world. “Today it is Russia invading Ukraine. But tomorrow it could be another nation whose territory is violated. It could be you. You could be next. What would you expect from this chamber?” Thomas-Greenfield told the General Assembly before the vote.
Moscow in September proclaimed its annexation of four partially occupied regions in Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – after staging what it called referendums. Ukraine and allies have denounced the votes as illegal and coercive. Last week, in a ceremony in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin signed documents to make the eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson part of Russia. The agreements were signed with the Moscow-installed leaders of the four regions, and came after self-proclaimed referendums in the areas that were denounced as a “sham” by the West.
China and India, which have attempted to remain neutral on the conflict, parties that abstained from the vote included 19 nations in Africa. Many African countries have avoided taking sides in the war – which has been seen as a reflection of efforts to maintain longstanding trade ties, or of historic non-alignment policies.
Three of four states that were visited by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in July – Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia and Uganda – chose to abstain. Meanwhile, all four nations that featured on a recent trip by Ukraine’s own foreign minister – Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya and Senegal – voted at the UN to condemn Russia.
Dmytro Kuleba made his tour in an apparent effort to counter Russian influence in Africa, although he cut short his visit after major Ukrainian cities came under missile fire on Monday. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was grateful to the countries that did support the resolution. “The world had its say – [Russia’s] attempts at annexation is [sic] worthless and will never be recognised by free nations,” he tweeted, adding that Ukraine would “return all its lands”.
US President Joe Biden said the vote sent a “clear message” to Moscow. “The stakes of this conflict are clear to all, and the world has sent a clear message in response – Russia cannot erase a sovereign state from the map,” he said.
Dame Barbara Woodward, Britain’s ambassador to the UN, said Russia had failed on the battlefield and at the UN, adding that countries had united to defend the world body’s charter. “Russia has isolated itself, but Russia alone can stop the suffering. The time to end the war is now,” she said.
“All countries deserve respect for their sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, told the New York Times. She added that “support should be given to all efforts that are conducive to peacefully resolving the crisis.”
“India is deeply concerned at the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, including targeting of infrastructure and deaths of civilians,” said Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
China abstained on Wednesday because it did not believe the resolution will be helpful, China’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Geng Shuang said. “Any action taken by the General Assembly should be conducive to the de-escalation of the situation, to be conducive to the early resumption of dialogue and should be conducive to the promotion of a political solution to this crisis,” he said.
That’s a far cry from the US condemnation of the strikes, and Axios notes that neither statement contains “strong criticism” of the Russian missile strikes. But the “statements are the latest indicator that both countries are continuing to distance themselves from Russia as the war in Ukraine drags on,” per the story.
Both countries have provided crucial economic support to Moscow in recent months by buying more Russian oil as European nations do the opposite, notes the Times. A story at Politico, meanwhile, notes that calls are growing for India and China to make clear to Putin that any kind of nuclear strike should be off the table. The Russian leader has refused to rule that out.
Earlier, India on Monday, Oct. 10, 2022, voted to reject Russia’s call to hold a secret ballot at United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on a draft resolution to condemn Moscow’s “attempted illegal annexation” of four regions in Ukraine. Albania requested an open vote after Russia proposed a secret ballot on the resolution on Ukraine. India voted in favor of a procedural vote called by Albania. The Albanian proposal received 107 votes in favour, with 13 countries opposed to the vote and 39 abstentions. Twenty-four countries including China, Iran and Russia did not vote.
Albanian diplomat while dismissing the proposal said that “conducting secret ballot will undermine the practices of assembly.” Speaking first at the emergency meeting, Ukraine’s envoy Sergiy Kyslytsya told members states that he had already lost family members to Russian aggression. He said that around 84 missiles and around two dozen drones had deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure during Monday’s multiple attacks on Ukrainian cities, including schools and universities.
“The entire world has once again, seen the true face of the terrorist State that kills our people. Suffering defeats on the battlefield, Russia takes it out on the peaceful residents of Ukrainian cities,” he said.
The Ukrainian envoy said that voting for the draft resolution would be “for each country, for each of our citizens, for your families, for our children – a vote for justice”. He accused Ukraine of an act of terrorism in “sabotaging” Russia’s bridge to Crimea, adding that Russia could not stand by and let Ukraine act “with impunity”. This vote comes after Russia conducted large-scale strikes on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other locations on Monday, which drew condemnation from several countries.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was deeply shocked and represented “another unacceptable escalation” of the war. The strikes which have reportedly caused widespread damage to civilian areas and led to dozens of deaths and injuries showed that “as always”, civilians were paying the highest price for Russia’s invasion of February 24, the statement released by the UN Spokesperson added.
The General Assembly vote was triggered after Russia used its veto power to prevent action at the Security Council – the body in charge of maintaining international peace and security. As permanent members, China, the United States, France and the United Kingdom also hold vetoes on the council. There have been calls for Russia to be stripped of its veto power after the Ukraine invasion.
In June 2020, the Chinese and Indian militaries clashed in the Galwan Valley, a rugged and remote area along the disputed border between the two countries. Twenty Indian and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed, and debate flared about the long-term implications of the skirmishes. Some analysts believed the Sino-Indian relationship would soon return to normal, with regular high-level meetings, increased Chinese investment in India, defense exchanges, and multilateral coordination. Record-high bilateral trade and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s trip to India in March 2022 seemed to support the notion that the two countries could set aside the border dispute and keep strengthening ties. So, too, did Chinese and Indian officials’ agreement in September to pull back from confrontational positions along one of the sections of the border in the Ladakh region where the militaries had been facing off since 2020.
That appearance of rapprochement obscures real ruptures. Indian policymakers were shocked by the outbreak of the border crisis in 2020, which they blamed on Chinese aggression and which remains an ongoing source of tension and concern. India’s domestic and foreign policies have shifted in significant ways in response to the perceived threat of China, and any restoration of the prior status quo in the bilateral relationship is unlikely. For the foreseeable future, India’s approach to China has moved from what can be described as competitive engagement to one of competitive coexistence—if not “armed coexistence,” as former Indian foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale put it. Two years ago, I had suggested in Foreign Affairs that China’s actions could result in Beijing “losing India.” Now, it’s safe to say that China has lost India.
CLASHING IN THE KARAKORAM
India has perceived China as a threat since at least the late 1950s when their differences over Tibet (the Himalayan state China annexed in 1951) and their undemarcated border came to the fore. These disputes precipitated a full-blown war in 1962 that ended disastrously for India, with the loss of territory. But following a crisis in 1986–87, the border remained relatively peaceful, a state of affairs facilitated by several agreements that New Delhi and Beijing negotiated over a 25-year period. This detente also enabled broader Sino-Indian engagement, particularly in the economic and multilateral arenas. It was only after Chinese President Xi Jinping took office that the boundary situation reared up again, with military standoffs in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017, and with China and India also competing more intensely elsewhere, jockeying for position in South Asian countries and within international organizations.
Even given this context, events in Ladakh in 2020 did not just constitute another border spat. The violence crossed several thresholds, including the first fatalities in 45 years, and the first known shots fired in decades. The standoffs occurred at more locations, at greater scale, and over a longer period of time than in previous crises. India has accused China of violating the border agreements, and consequently Indian policymakers worry about the prospect of Chinese forces taking further military action. This breakdown of trust has long-term implications for the unsettled border and the broader relationship between the two countries.
Beijing has called for the border crisis to be set aside and for diplomatic, defense, and economic cooperation to resume now that Chinese and Indian troops have disengaged at some of the points of friction. But New Delhi has called for further disengagement—the standing down of troops from more flash points—and for de-escalation—that is, a reversal of the military and infrastructure buildups that have taken place on both sides of the border over the last two and a half years. China is unlikely to agree to the latter, and India will not unilaterally de-escalate. Moreover, India does not believe the border issue can be set aside. It sees peace and tranquility at the border as a precondition for a normal Sino-Indian relationship. Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not meet with Xi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in September, the first time such a meeting did not occur—a clear signal that India is not yet willing to return to business as usual with China.
The 2020 clash hardened official and public views of China in India, including among a new generation for whom the 1962 Sino-Indian war had been a distant memory. Coupled with China’s lack of transparency about the COVID-19 pandemic, the fighting on the border has left many Indians convinced that China poses an imminent and acute challenge to their country. These developments put an end to the idea that the two countries could alleviate political strains through border agreements and broader—especially economic—cooperation. They also reduced the reluctance in India, stemming from concern about provoking China, to strengthen certain kinds of military capabilities, infrastructure, and partnerships, particularly with the United States.
The appearance of rapprochement between China and India obscures real ruptures. The perception of China as an adversarial and untrustworthy actor has, in turn, produced changes at the border that will likely outlast this crisis. Both sides have beefed up their military presence at the border, with many more forward-deployed troops—the Line of Actual Control between Indian-held and Chinese-held territories now looks more like the heavily militarized Line of Control between India and Pakistan. India has also redeployed some forces from facing Pakistan or engaging in counterinsurgency operations in northeastern India toward defending the border with China. It is building up both military and dual-purpose infrastructure across the entire border region to match Beijing’s equivalent buildup. These efforts will persist regardless of any bilateral agreement to resolve the current border crisis because India will remain concerned about further Chinese attempts to seize Indian land.
The heightened concern about China has also manifested in domestic policy. The Modi government has gone from initially seeking increased economic ties with China to imposing restrictions or extra scrutiny on a range of Chinese activities in India. It does not seek to decouple from China so much as it wants to disentangle India from China—an approach designed not to eliminate economic ties but to identify and reduce India’s vulnerabilities in critical sectors. Skeptics point to record-high bilateral trade as a measure of the failure of this approach, but India’s trade with China has grown nearly 15 percent more slowly than its trade with the rest of the world over the last year. Moreover, an accurate assessment of the approach will have to wait a few years. Indian officials have placed restrictions on Chinese investment, Chinese access to Indian public procurement contracts, and Chinese companies’ or organizations’ activities in critical economic, technology, telecommunications, civil society, and education sectors. Indian state governments and state-owned companies have suspended or withdrawn from some agreements with Chinese companies. India has banned several popular Chinese apps, including the social media platform TikTok, and excluded Chinese telecommunications companies from its 5G network. And Indian enforcement authorities are targeting Chinese companies for alleged tax or data transfer violations.
Tensions with Beijing have also driven New Delhi to try to reduce India’s economic dependence on China and take advantage of other countries’ desire to do so, as well. The Modi government has moved from criticizing trade agreements on the grounds that they adversely affected Indian businesses, farmers, and workers to exploring or signing deals with Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. India is also seeking greater investment from alternate sources, not just in the West but also in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East—particularly in sectors such as solar power, pharmaceuticals, and electronics where it is trying to boost domestic production and reduce overreliance on imports from China.
On broader foreign policy choices, the border crisis has resulted in India further aligning with countries that can help strengthen its position in relation to China in the defense, economic security, and critical technology arenas. Such partners include Australia, France, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
TAKING SIDES
India has long sought to maintain its strategic autonomy, refusing to be drawn into alliances. Now, however, it is at least aligning with countries to address the threat China poses. India is willing now to cooperate more closely with the United States, even at the risk of angering China. It signed a geospatial intelligence agreement with the United States in October 2020; is conducting high-altitude exercises with the U.S. army near the Chinese-Indian border this month; has become more involved in the Indo-Pacific partnership known as the Quad (that features Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) despite Chinese and Russian objections; has participated in a range of maritime exercises with its Quad partners; signed a logistics-sharing agreement with Vietnam in June 2022; and in January 2022 reached a deal to sell BrahMos missiles (jointly developed by India and Russia) to the Philippines.
India once tiptoed around China’s sensitivities regarding perceived threats to its sovereignty. New Delhi is no longer being as deferential. Modi has publicly acknowledged calls he has made with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, a departure from his past reluctance to do so. And the Indian Air Force facilitated the Dalai Lama’s month-long visit to Ladakh in July 2022. In a departure from common practice, the Indian foreign ministry in September did not punt on a question about Xinjiang, the Muslim-majority province in the west of China. It twice noted that a UN human rights report had highlighted “the serious maltreatment of minorities” inside China. In recent weeks, the Indian government has also spoken critically about the “militarization of the Taiwan Strait,” refused to reiterate a “one China” policy (that would acknowledge Taiwan as a part of China and the People’s Republic of China as the only legal government of China) despite Beijing’s calls to do so, and urged restraint and warned against any unilateral change to the status quo after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August.
The border crisis has also encouraged India’s more receptive view of U.S. power and presence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. In recent years, New Delhi has welcomed a U.S.-Maldivian defense agreement, permitted the refueling of an American reconnaissance aircraft in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, backed the U.S.-Nepalese Millennium Challenge Corporation compact that seeks to facilitate infrastructure development, and helped block Chinese attempts to sink the security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States known as AUKUS. Moreover, India is cooperating with the United States and other partners such as Japan to offer diplomatic, security, and economic alternatives and counter growing Chinese influence in neighboring South Asian countries.
At the same time as India has drawn closer to the United States and traditional U.S. allies, its ties with China and Russia-backed groupings are stalling. The border crisis has made apparent the limitations of associations such as BRICS (featuring Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), RIC (Russia, India, and China), and the SCO. As non-Western platforms, they were useful for India when it felt ignored by the West. But today, India sees China posing a greater constraint on its regional and global interests than any Western country. Moreover, Beijing and Moscow’s efforts to reshape these associations into anti-Western platforms limit their utility for India. That does not mean India will exit these groupings—it will not want to leave a vacuum for China to fill—but it has been more concertedly deepening its own relations with countries in the “global South,” outside of any groupings with China and Russia.
NOT SO FAST
Western policymakers, however, will have to reckon with the factors that could limit the speed and extent of Indian alignment with countries such as the United States against China. For one, India prioritizes Chinese threats differently than do its partners. Even as the latter focus on maritime challenges in the Indo-Pacific, India will devote considerable attention and resources to meeting the Chinese and Pakistani challenge at its border. This continental imperative will shape India’s approach to other Indo-Pacific issues. For instance, New Delhi remains cautious about making statements about Taiwan with other countries out of a concern that they could provoke China into putting more pressure on the border or on restive Indian regions such as Kashmir and in the northeast of the country. Indian officials also do not want China to see their border dispute through the lens of U.S.-Chinese competition; Beijing’s decision to go to war with India in 1962 was motivated by its sense that New Delhi and Washington were colluding to undermine Chinese interests in Tibet.
India’s dependence on Russia as a defense trade and technology partner will also slow any swift realignment. New Delhi’s initial cautious response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was in no small part shaped by its concerns about potential Chinese escalation at the border. New Delhi has not wanted to jeopardize its military preparedness by upsetting Russia, a key defense supplier. Moreover, it does not want to push Russia from a position of relative neutrality to China’s side in the event of another Sino-Indian crisis. New Delhi also wants to give Moscow some alternatives to partnership with Beijing to delay or even disrupt the further deepening of Sino-Russian ties.
Another impediment to India’s realignment might be if its economic and technology regulations that target China deliberately or inadvertently reinforce protectionism. This could limit Indian economic and technological cooperation with Western and Indo-Pacific partners.
India may also be slow to take the right steps to address the threat posed by China in the security and economic domains due to domestic or other security priorities. It could try to buy time (or stability) with China that could curb the pace, albeit not the trajectory, of its cooperation with like-minded partners. Indian policymakers also harbor doubts about how willing and able many of its partners will continue to be to balance against China. Moreover, the Indian debate about China might have narrowed considerably, but the debate continues about how far and fast to deepen relations with the United States, in particular, and about the balance to strike between the desire for strategic autonomy and the need for alignment.
TACKING WEST With its 2020 actions at the border, Beijing has stalled, if not reversed, years of deepening Sino-Indian ties. It has also, counterproductively, facilitated the strengthening of Indian partnerships with many Chinese rivals. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, recently alluded to the broad scope of competition between the two countries, sketching a very different vision of Asia than the one proposed by Beijing. On their part, India’s partners, including the United States, have wondered to what extent India can be brought onside in an alignment against China. These countries should approach India with both pragmatism and ambition. They should have realistic expectations about what New Delhi might be able to do in the Indo-Pacific, given its border-related, regional, and domestic priorities. And they should recognize that while India will compete with China, it will not compete in exactly the same way as the United States or Japan do. But they should not have too little ambition, assuming India will reject deeper cooperation—after all, New Delhi’s traditional diffidence has turned to more willing engagement in recent years. India will steer its own ship, but it is tacking in the direction of those interested in balancing Chinese power and influence in the region and around the world.
(AP) — North Korea’s recent barrage of missile launches were the simulated use of its tactical battlefield nuclear weapons to “hit and wipe out” potential South Korean and U.S. targets, state media reported Monday, as its leader Kim Jong Un signaled he would conduct more provocative tests.
The North’s statement, released on the 77th birthday of its ruling Workers’ Party, is seen as an attempt to burnish Kim’s image as a strong leader at home amid pandemic-related hardships as he’s defiantly pushing to enlarge his weapons arsenal to wrest greater concessions from its rivals in future negotiations.
“Through seven times of launching drills of the tactical nuclear operation units, the actual war capabilities … of the nuclear combat forces ready to hit and wipe out the set objects at any location and any time were displayed to the full,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
KCNA said the missile tests were in response to recent naval drills between U.S. and South Korean forces, which involved the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan for the first time in five years.
Viewing the drills as a military threat, North Korea decided to stage “the simulation of an actual war” to check and improve its war deterrence and send a warning to its enemies, KCNA said.
North Korea considers U.S.-South Korean military drills as an invasion rehearsal, though the allies have steadfastly said they are defensive in nature. Since the May inauguration of a conservative government in Seoul, the U.S. and South Korean militaries have been expanding their exercises, posing a greater security threat to Kim.
The launches — all supervised by Kim — included a nuclear-capable ballistic missile launched under a reservoir in the northeast; other ballistic missiles designed to launch nuclear strikes on South Korean airfields, ports and command facilities; and a new-type ground-to-ground ballistic missile that flew over Japan, KCNA reported. It said North Korea also flew 150 warplanes for separate live-firing and other drills in the country’s first-ever such training.
Cheong Seong-Chang at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea said the missile launches marked the first time for North Korea to perform drills involving army units tasked with the operation of tactical nuclear weapons.
The North’s public launch of a missile from under an inland reservoir was also the first of its kind, though it has previously test-launched missiles from a submarine.
Kim Dong-yub, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, said North Korea likely aims to diversify launch sites to make it difficult for its enemies to detect its missile liftoffs in advance and conduct preemptive strikes.
KCNA said when the weapon launched from the reservoir was flying above the sea target, North Korean authorities confirmed the reliability of the explosion of the missile’s warhead, apparently a dummy one, at the set altitude.
Kim, the professor, said the missile’s estimated 600-kilometer (370-mile) flight indicated the launch could be a test of exploding a nuclear weapon above South Korea’s southeastern port city of Busan, where the Reagan previously docked. He said the missile tested appeared to be a new version of North Korea’s highly maneuverable KN-23 missile, which was modeled on Russia’s Iskander missile.
North Korea described the missile that flew over Japan as a new-type intermediate-range weapon that traveled 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles). Some foreign experts earlier said the missile was likely North Korea’s existing nuclear-capable Hwasong-12 missile, which can reach the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam. But Kim, the professor, said the missile tested recently appeared to be an improved version of the Hwasong-12 with a faraway target like Alaska or Hawaii.
North Korea released a slew of photos on the launches. One of them showed Kim and his wife Ri Sol Ju, both wearing ochre field jackets, frowning while covering their ears. Some observers say the image indicated Ri’s elevated political standing because it was likely the first time for her to observe a weapons launch with her husband.
Worries about North Korea’s nuclear program deepened in recent months as the country adopted a new law authorizing the preemptive use of its bombs in certain cases and took reported steps to deploy tactical nuclear weapons along its frontline border with South Korea. This year, North Korea carried out more than 40 missile launches.
Some experts say Kim Jong Un would eventually aim to use his advanced nuclear arsenal to win a U.S. recognition of North Korea as a legitimate nuclear state, which Kim sees as essential in getting crippling U.N. sanctions on his country lifted.
Kim Jong Un said the recent launches were “an obvious warning” to Seoul and Washington, informing them of North Korea’s nuclear attack capabilities. Kim repeated that he has no intentions of resuming the stalled disarmament diplomacy with the United States now, according to KCNA.
“The U.S. and the South Korean regime’s steady, intentional and irresponsible acts of escalating the tension will only invite our greater reaction, and we are always and strictly watching the situation crisis,” Kim was quoted as saying.
Kim also expressed conviction that the nuclear combat forces of his military would maintain “their strongest nuclear response posture and further strengthen it in every way” to perform their duties of defending the North’s dignity and sovereign rights.
South Korean officials recently said North Korea maintains readiness to perform its first nuclear test in five years. Some experts say the nuclear test would be related to an effort to build warheads to be mounted on short-range missiles targeting South Korea.
“North Korea has multiple motivations for publishing a high-profile missile story now,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul. “Kim Jong Un’s public appearance after a month-long absence provides a patriotic headline to mark the founding anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party.”
“Pyongyang has been concerned about military exercises by the U.S., South Korea and Japan, so to strengthen its self-proclaimed deterrent, it is making explicit the nuclear threat behind its recent missile launches. The KCNA report may also be a harbinger of a forthcoming nuclear test for the kind of tactical warhead that would arm the units Kim visited in the field,” Easley said.
(AP) — The exquisite golden tiara, inlaid with precious stones by master craftsmen some 1,500 years ago, was one of the world’s most valuable artifacts from the blood-letting rule of Attila the Hun, who rampaged with horseback warriors deep into Europe in the 5th century.
The Hun diadem is now vanished from the museum in Ukraine that housed it — perhaps, historians fear, forever. Russian troops carted away the priceless crown and a hoard of other treasures after capturing the Ukrainian city of Melitopol in February, museum authorities say.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its eighth month, is being accompanied by the destruction and pillaging of historical sites and treasures on an industrial scale, Ukrainian authorities say.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Ukraine’s culture minister alleged that Russian soldiers helped themselves to artifacts in almost 40 Ukrainian museums. The looting and destruction of cultural sites has caused losses estimated in the hundreds of millions of euros (dollars), the minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, added.
“The attitude of Russians toward Ukrainian culture heritage is a war crime,” he said.
For the moment, Ukraine’s government and its Western backers supplying weapons are mostly focused on defeating Russia on the battlefield. But if and when peace returns, the preservation of Ukrainian collections of art, history and culture also will be vital, so survivors of the war can begin the next fight: rebuilding their lives.
“These are museums, historical buildings, churches. Everything that was built and created by generations of Ukrainians,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said in September when she visited a Ukrainian museum in New York. “This is a war against our identity.”
Workers at the Museum of Local History in Melitopol first tried hiding the Hun diadem and hundreds of other treasures when Russian troops stormed the southern city. But after weeks of repeated searches, Russian soldiers finally discovered the building’s secret basement where staff had squirrelled away the museum’s most precious objects — including the Hun diadem, according to a museum worker.
The worker, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, fearing Russian punishment for even discussing the events, said the Ukrainians don’t know where Russian troops took the haul, which included the tiara and some 1,700 other artifacts.
Dug up from a burial chamber in 1948, the crown is one of just a few Hun crowns worldwide. The museum worker said other treasures that disappeared with Russian soldiers include 198 pieces of 2,400-year-old gold from the era of the Scythians, nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine and founded an empire in Crimea.
“These are ancient finds. These are works of art. They are priceless,” said Oleksandr Symonenko, chief researcher at Ukraine’s Institute of Archaeology. “If culture disappears, it is an irreparable disaster.”
Russia’s Culture Ministry did not respond to questions about the Melitopol collection.
Mariupol’s exiled city council said Russian forces pilfered more than 2,000 items from the city’s museums. Among the most precious items were ancient religious icons, a unique handwritten Torah scroll, a 200-year-old bible and more than 200 medals, the council said.
Also looted were art works by painters Arkhip Kuindzhi, who was born in Mariupol, and Crimea-born Ivan Aivazovsky, both famed for their seascapes, the exiled councillors said. They said Russian troops carted off their stolen bounty to the Russian-occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The invasion has also wrought extensive damage and destruction to Ukraine’s cultural patrimony. The U.N.’s cultural agency is keeping a tally of sites being struck by missiles, bombs and shelling. With the war now in its eighth month, the agency says it has verified damage to 199 sites in 12 regions.
They include 84 churches and other religious sites, 37 buildings of historic importance, 37 buildings for cultural activities, 18 monuments, 13 museums and 10 libraries, UNESCO says.
Ukrainian government tallies are even higher, with authorities saying their count of destroyed and damaged religious buildings alone is up to at least 270.
While invasion forces hunted for treasures to steal, Ukrainian museum workers did what they could to keep them out of Russian hands. Tens of thousands of items have been evacuated away from the front lines and combat-struck regions.
In Kyiv, the director of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine lived in the building, guarding its artifacts, during the invasion’s first weeks when Russian forces sought, unsuccessfully, to encircle the capital.
“We were afraid of the Russian occupiers, because they destroy everything that can be identified as Ukrainian,” recalled the director, Natalia Panchenko.
Fearing Russian troops would storm the city, she sought to confuse them by taking down the plaque on the museum’s entrance. She also dismantled exhibits, carefully packing away artifacts into boxes for evacuation.
One day, she hopes, they’ll go back into their rightful place. For now, the museum is just showing copies.
“These things were fragile, they survived hundreds of years,” she said. “We couldn’t stand the thought they could be lost.” (AP journalist John Leicester in Paris contributed. Efrem Lykatsky contributed from Kyiv. Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine)
The UN Human Rights Council, a 47-member top UN rights body has accepted the draft text presented by all European Union countries with the exception of Hungary, with 17 nations voting in favor of appointing a so-called special rapporteur to monitor Russia. Twenty-four countries abstained, while six voted ‘no’, including China, Cuba and Venezuela.
As per reports, the UN Human Rights Council agreed to monitor the rights situation in Russia, marking the first-ever resolution focused on violations inside the country.
The vote comes a few months after Russia was kicked off the council over its war in Ukraine, and marks the first time the rights body has decided to delve into the situation inside the country.
It also came less than two hours after this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was symbolically awarded to rights champions from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, three nations at the centre of President Vladimir Putin’s war.
Ahead of the vote, Russian ambassador Gennady Gatilov slammed the move, saying it was just another example of “the way in which Western countries are using the council to attain their political goals.”
‘Draconian laws’
The resolution, adopted on Putin’s 70th birthday, calls for the appointment of a special rapporteur to monitor “the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation for a period of one year”.
The rapporteur would “collect, examine and assess relevant information from all relevant stakeholders, including Russian civil society both inside and outside of the country,” and present a report in a year’s time, and another to the UN General Assembly in New York.
Luxembourg’s ambassador Marc Bichler, who presented the resolution on behalf of 26 EU countries, pointed to the years-long “deterioration as regards the human rights situation” in Russia, warning that it had “been exacerbated over recent months.”
“Recent draconian laws seeking to stifle independent media as well as undesirable organisations, severe sanctions for anyone calling into question the government, with a huge number of people who’ve been arrested at demonstrations, are just a few recent examples of the systematic repressive policies that have been documented by numerous independent sources,” he said.
While the decision was the first-ever targeting the situation inside Russia, the council has recently adopted other resolutions condemning Moscow’s war in Ukraine, and ordering a high-level probe of violations by Russian troops there.
The vote came on the 16th anniversary of the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, which several diplomats pointed to.
German ambassador Katharina Stasch was also among a number of diplomats to highlight Friday’s Nobel win, pointing out that laureate organization Memorial was “one of those organizations having been oppressed and even shut down by Russia for speaking up.”
French ambassador Jerome Bonnafont agreed, telling the council that the award “clearly shows the growing attention and concern about the dangerous downward slide” of rights in Russia.
Western countries were breathing a sigh of relief with the passage of Friday’s resolution, which came a day after they suffered a crushing defeat at the council when a first-ever attempted resolution on China was narrowly rejected.
That one — which called for a debate about a UN report warning of serious violations and possible crimes against humanity in China’s Xinjiang region — flopped after intense lobbying by Beijing. The failure indicated a shifting power balance and even raised questions about the credibility of the council itself, rights groups said.
By Ellen Knickmeyer, Chris Megerian, & Kevin Freking
(AP) — President Joe Biden effectively acknowledged the failure of one of his biggest and most humiliating foreign policy gambles: a fist-bump with the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, the crown prince associated with human rights abuses.
Biden’s awkward encounter with Mohammed bin Salman in July was a humbling attempt to mend relations with the world’s most influential oil power at a time when the US. was seeking its help in opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting surge in oil prices.
That fist bump three months ago was followed by a face slap this week from Prince Mohammed: a big oil production cut by OPEC producers and Russia that threatens to sustain oil-producer Russia in its war in Ukraine, drive inflation higher, and push gas prices back toward voter-angering levels just before U.S. midterms, undercutting the election prospects of Biden and Democrats.
Asked about Saudi Arabia’s action, Biden told reporters Thursday it was “a disappointment, and it says that there are problems” in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
A number of Democrats in Congress called on the U.S. Thursday to respond by pulling back on its decades-old provision of arms and U.S. military protection for Saudi Arabia, charging that Prince Mohammed had stopped upholding Saudi Arabia’s side of a more than 70-year strategic partnership. The relationship is based on the U.S. providing the kingdom with protection against its outside enemies, and on Saudi Arabia providing global markets with enough oil to keep them stable.
Calling the oil production cuts “a hostile act,” New Jersey Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski led two other lawmakers in introducing legislation that would pull U.S. troops and Patriot missile batteries out of the kingdom.
“What Saudi Arabia did to help Putin continue to wage his despicable, vicious war against Ukraine will long be remembered by Americans,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, adding, “We are looking at all the legislative tools to best deal with this appalling and deeply cynical action.”
The U.S. has no plans at the moment to withdraw military personnel or equipment from Saudi Arabia, State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said Thursday.
Congress and the administration were reacting to the announcement of a bigger than expected cut of 2 million barrels a day by the OPEC-plus group, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. The production cut is likely to drive up prices, bolstering the oil revenue Russia is using to keep waging its war in Ukraine despite U.S.-led international sanctions and further shaking a global economy already struggling with short energy supply.
Saudi oil minister Abdulaziz bin Salman, a half-brother of the crown prince, insisted at the OPEC-plus session there was no “belligerence” in the action.
The administration says it’s looking for ways to blunt the impact of OPEC’s decision, and notes that the cost at the pump has still dropped in recent months.
Foreign arms sales ultimately are Congress’s to approve or disapprove, a U.S. official argued Thursday, so it was up to lawmakers to choose whether to try to make good on cutting U.S. weapons to Saudi Arabia. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the government’s take on the matter.
The official called Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, and meetings with Middle East leaders there, steps toward building relations across the region, and said Biden’s meeting with the crown prince was in line with other face-to-face sessions with allies, rivals and adversaries, including Putin.
As a candidate, Biden had made a passionate promise to make the Saudi royal family a “pariah” over human rights abuses, especially Saudi officials’ killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
The U.S. intelligence community formally concluded that Prince Mohammed, who wields much of the power in Saudi Arabia in the stead of his aging father, King Salman, had ordered or approved of Khashoggi’s killing.
Biden as president disappointed rights activists when he opted not to penalize Prince Mohammed directly, citing his senior position in the kingdom and the U.S. strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia.
Then Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine worsened an already tight global oil market, driving up gasoline prices and inflation overall. Ally Israel and some in the administration argued that smooth relations between Riyadh and Washington had to be the U.S. priority.
As U.S. prices at the pump rose and Biden’s poll ratings fell further, senior administration officials began shuttling to the Gulf, seeking to soothe Prince Mohammed’s anger at Biden’s campaign remarks and the U.S. findings in Khashoggi’s killing. That led to Biden paying his first visit as president to Saudi Arabia in July, putting presidential prestige behind the attempt to get U.S.-Saudi relations, and the global oil supply, back on steadier ground.
In Jeddah, Biden stopped short of offering a much-anticipated handshake. Instead, Biden, looking frailer and more stooped in comparison with Prince Mohammed, who is in his late 30s, leaned in to offer an out-of-character fist bump. Prince Mohammed reciprocated. Any smiles on the two men’s faces as their knuckles touched were fleeting.
Critics deplored Biden’s outreach to a prince accused of ordering the imprisonment, abduction, torture and killing of those, even fellow royals and family members, who oppose him or express differing views.
Even if “you’re not willing to use the sticks with MBS, then don’t give up the carrots for free,” Khalid al Jabri, the son of a former Saudi minister of state, Saad al Jabri, said Thursday, using the prince’s initials.
The senior al Jabri accuses Prince Mohammed of sending a hit squad after him in 2018, and of detaining two of his children to try to force his return. Prince Mohammed denies any direct wrongdoing, although he says as a Saudi leader he accepts responsibility for events on his watch.
Khalid al Jabri, who like his father now lives in exile, offered an argument echoed by rights advocates, Democratic lawmakers and others:
“That is one major flaw of the Biden policy so far, that in this kind of U.S.-Saudi rapprochement, it has been lopsided, it’s been one-way concessions. And that doesn’t work for MBS.”
Saudi Arabia has made a couple of moves that benefited the U.S. since Biden’s visit. Saudi Arabia was among the intermediaries who recently won the release of two Americans and other foreigners captured by Russia as they fought for Ukraine. And OPEC-plus made a modest increase in oil output shortly after the visit. The U.S. official cited Saudi Arabia’s agreement to allow Israeli civilian overflights of Saudi territory as one gain from Biden’s trip.
The subsequent oil production cuts have far offset the earlier gains, however. Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials also have kept up outwardly warm dealings with Russian officials. And rights advocates point to a series of multidecade prison terms handed down to Saudi men and women over the mildest of free speech, especially tweets, since Biden’s visit.
By November, the Biden administration will have to decide whether to make another major concession to the prince. A U.S. court set that deadline for the U.S. to determine whether it will weigh in to agree or disagree with Prince Mohammed’s lawyer that the prince has legal immunity from a lawsuit in U.S. federal court over the killing of Khashoggi.
Lawmakers are scheduled to be out of Washington until after the Nov. 8 midterm elections and when they return will be focused on funding federal agencies for the full fiscal year through September 2023. Prospects for a lame-duck Congress taking up the bill introduced by Malinowski and the two other lawmakers are slight.
Rising gas prices would be bad news for Democrats heading into the final stretch of the midterm elections, while Republicans remain eager to capitalize on the decades-high inflation and rising cost of living, with high gas prices a constant reminder as voters fill up their tanks.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the Senate, had one of the more scathing reactions to OPEC’s announcement.
“From unanswered questions about 9/11 & the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, to conspiring w/ Putin to punish the US w/ higher oil prices, the royal Saudi family has never been a trustworthy ally of our nation. It’s time for our foreign policy to imagine a world without their alliance,” he tweeted last week.
Human rights activist Charles remembers a time when civil society was blossoming in China, and he could dedicate his time to helping improve the lives of people struggling in blue-collar jobs. Now, 10 years into President Xi Jinping’s rule, community organisations such as Charles’s have been dismantled and hopes of a rebirth crushed. Charles has fled China and several of his activist friends are in jail. “After 2015, the whole of civil society began to collapse and become fragmented,” he told AFP.
Human rights activist Charles remembers a time when civil society was blossoming in China, and he could dedicate his time to helping improve the lives of people struggling in blue-collar jobs.
Now, 10 years into President Xi Jinping’s rule, community organisations such as Charles’s have been dismantled and hopes of a rebirth crushed.
Charles has fled China and several of his activist friends are in jail.
“After 2015, the whole of civil society began to collapse and become fragmented,” he told AFP, using a pseudonym for safety reasons.
Xi, on the brink of securing a third term at the apex of the world’s most populous country, has overseen a decade in which civil society movements, an emergent independent media and academic freedoms have been all but destroyed.
As Xi sought to eliminate any threats to the Communist Party, many non-governmental organisation workers, rights lawyers and activists were threatened, jailed or exiled.
AFP interviewed eight Chinese activists and intellectuals who described the collapse of civil society under Xi, though a few remain determined to keep working despite the risks.
Some face harassment from security officers who summon them weekly for questioning, while others cannot publish under their own names.
“My colleagues and I have frequently experienced interrogations lasting over 24 hours,” an LGBTQ rights NGO worker told AFP on condition of anonymity, adding that psychological trauma from the repeated questioning has compounded his woes.
“We’ve become more and more incapable, regardless of whether it’s from a financial or operational perspective, or on a personal level.”
‘709 crackdown’
The collapse of China’s civil society has been a long process riddled with obstacles for activists.
In 2015, more than 300 lawyers and rights defenders were arrested in a sweep named the “709 crackdown” after the date it was launched — July 9.
Many lawyers remained behind bars or under surveillance for years, while others were disbarred, according to rights groups.
Another watershed moment was the adoption in 2016 of the so-called foreign NGO law, which imposed restrictions and gave police wide-ranging powers over overseas NGOs operating in the country.
“In 2014, we could unfurl protest banners, conduct scientific fieldwork and collaborate with Chinese media to expose environmental abuses,” an environmental NGO worker told AFP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
“Now we must report to the police before we do anything. Each project must be in cooperation with a government department that feels more like a supervisory committee.”
Zero-tolerance
Today’s landscape is markedly different from even a few years ago, when civil society groups were able to operate in the relatively permissive climate that started under previous president Hu Jintao.
“At universities, several LGBTQ and gender-focused groups sprung up around 2015,” said Carl, an LGBTQ youth group member, although he felt a “tightening pressure”.
By 2018, the government’s zero-tolerance of activism came to a head with the authorities suppressing a budding #MeToo feminist movement and arresting dozens of student activists.
“Activities quietly permitted before were banned, while ideological work like political education classes ramped up”, said Carl.
In July 2022, Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University handed two students official warnings for distributing rainbow flags, while dozens of LGBTQ student groups’ social media pages were blocked.
‘Like grains of corn’
Another harbinger of regression was a 2013 internal Party communique that banned advocating what was described as Western liberal values, such as constitutional democracy and press freedom.
“It treated these ideologies as hostile, whereas in the 1980s we could discuss them and publish books about them,” said Gao Yu, a Beijing-based independent journalist who was either in prison or under house arrest between 2014 and 2020 for allegedly leaking the document.
“In a normal society, intellectuals can question the government’s mistakes. Otherwise… isn’t this the same as in the Mao era?” he asked, referring to Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong.
Now, 78-year-old Gao endures social media surveillance, has virtually no income and is blocked from overseas calls or gathering with friends.
“We are all like grains of corn ground down by the village millstone,” she said.
Replacing Gao and her peers are celebrity academics who parrot hawkish nationalist ideology, while others have been forced out of their positions or endure classroom surveillance from students.
“A kind of tattle-tale culture has flourished in China’s intellectual realm over the past decade,” said Wu Qiang, a former Tsinghua political science professor and Party critic.
“Students have become censors reviewing their professor’s every sentence, instead of learning through mutual discussion.”
‘Unwinnable war’
Faced with the increasingly harsh climate, many activists have either fled China or put their work on hold.
Only a handful persevere, despite growing hostility including online bullying.
“Perhaps right now we are at the bottom of a valley… but people are still tirelessly speaking out,” said Feng Yuan, founder of gender rights group Equity.
For others, like the environmental organisation worker, it is an “unwinnable war” against nationalist trolls who claim all NGO staff are “anti-China and brainwashed by the West”.
“It makes me feel like all my efforts have been wasted,” they said.
Charles’s friends, #MeToo advocate Huang Xueqin and labour activist Wang Jianbing, have been detained without trial for over a year on subversion charges.
He believes authorities viewed their gatherings of young activists as a threat — and the threshold for prosecution is getting lower.
“The government is now targeting individuals who do small-scale, subtle, low-key activism,” he said. “They have made sure there is no new generation of activists.” (This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 4th told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that his country is ready to contribute to peace efforts in the ongoing conflict with Russia that has raged for seven months.
“I know that today’s era is not of war,” Mr. Modi told Mr. Putin had told Putin, describing global challenges like the food and energy crises that were hitting developing countries especially hard. “Today we will get a chance to discuss how we can move forward on the path of peace.”
However, NY Times reported that “After India’s prime minister said that now is not the time for war, an increasingly isolated Mr. Putin threatened “more serious” actions in Ukraine while insisting he was ready for talks.”
The war hasn’t gone Putin’s way. The Pentagon said in August that Russian casualties could be as high as 80,000, and that number has likely risen in recent months. In an effort to address Russia’s manpower problems, Putin recently announced a partial military mobilization, as well as various stop-loss measures, but things are not going well. There’s been local resistance to the draft, and tens of thousands of Russians have fled the country.
Putin also signed the annexation of four Ukrainian regions last week, despite the fact that Russia does not fully control or occupy these regions. In the time since, Ukrainian forces have recaptured territory in these areas. Recent reporting suggests that even members of Putin’s inner circle have begun to openly criticize the botched invasion, an action that can be dangerous and even deadly.
“He expressed his firm conviction that there can be no military solution to the conflict and conveyed India’s readiness to contribute to any peace efforts,” the Indian prime minister’s office said in a statement after a telephone conversation between Modi and Zelenskiy.
India is articulating its position against the Ukraine war more robustly to counter criticism that it is soft on Russia, but it still has neither held Moscow responsible for the invasion nor altered its policy on importing cheap Russian oil and coal. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
The “Prime Minister emphasized the importance India attaches to the safety and security of nuclear installations, including in Ukraine,” the statement said.
He also reiterated the importance of respecting the UN Charter, International Law, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states.
During his conversation with the Ukrainian president, Modi emphasised the importance India attaches to the safety and security of nuclear installations, including in Ukraine.
The prime minister underlined that endangerment of nuclear facilities could have far-reaching and catastrophic consequences for public health and the environment, the statement said.
The two leaders also touched upon important areas of bilateral cooperation, following up on their last meeting in Glasgow in November 2021, it said.
Ukraine and Russia have blamed each other for the attacks on the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest atomic power complex.
Also, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed treaties to absorb the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, including the area around the nuclear plant.
The International Atomic Energy Agency had said Saturday that Russia told it that the “director-general of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was temporarily detained to answer questions”.
The Vienna-based IAEA has said, “in line with its nuclear safety mandate”, it “has been actively seeking clarifications and hopes for a prompt and satisfactory resolution of this matter”.
The conversation between Modi and Zalenskyy comes a couple of weeks after the former had pressed Putin to end the conflict in Ukraine soon, saying “today’s era is not of war”. Modi had also called for finding ways to address the global food and energy security crisis.
In a bilateral meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Samakand last month, Modi had underlined the importance of “democracy, dialogue and diplomacy” while calling for an early cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.
“Today the biggest worry before the world, especially developing countries, is food security, fuel security, fertilisers. We must find ways on these problems and you will also have to consider it. We will get an opportunity to talk about these issues,” Modi had said during his meeting with Putin.
It was the first in-person meeting between the two leaders after the Ukraine conflict began in February. “I know today’s era is not of war. We discussed this issue with you on phone several times, that democracy, diplomacy and dialogue touch the entire world. We will have the opportunity to talk today about how we can move forward on the road of peace in the coming days,” Modi had said.
On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed agreements illegally incorporating the Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson into Russia. He said Moscow would “defend our land with all the forces and resources we have.” He previously hinted this could include nuclear arms. Nuclear threats are no trivial matter, but Ukraine and the world should not be intimidated. The West should respond with political and military signals of its own.
Bogus referenda
The annexation of the four oblasts came 31 weeks after Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine and four days after Russian occupiers concluded so-called “referenda” on joining Russia. Those “referenda” were illegal under international law, had no credible independent observers, and, in some cases, required people to vote literally at gunpoint. No account was taken of the views of the millions of Ukrainian citizens who earlier had fled Russian occupation.
On that flimsy basis, Putin declared Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson to be parts of Russia, even though the Russian military does not control all those territories. Indeed, the Russian army finds itself on the defensive and retreating as Ukraine presses counter-attacks. Nevertheless, on October 3 and 4, Russia’s rubber-stamp legislative bodies, the Federal Assembly and Federal Council, each unanimously approved the annexations.
Putin’s territorial grab has two apparent motives. First, he seeks to divert domestic attention from the war’s costs (including tens of thousands of dead and wounded Russian soldiers), recent battlefield reverses and a chaotic mass mobilization. He wants to sell the Russian public on the idea that Russia has gained territory, so it must be winning.
Second, he hopes to dissuade Ukraine from continuing its counteroffensive and the West from supporting Kyiv. On September 30, Putin said the four Ukrainian oblasts would be Russian “forever” and would be defended “by all the means we possess.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that attacks on the four oblasts would be considered attacks on Russia itself.
Putin has hinted at a nuclear threat, seeking to intimidate Ukraine and the West. Russian declaratory policy envisages the possible use of nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional attack on Russia “when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.” Putin seeks to put a nuclear umbrella over the territories that Russia has seized.
Putin’s Nuclear Gambit
One cannot ignore Putin’s ploy: after all, a nuclear threat is involved. But one should also understand that he has made a serious overreach.
Russia could lose this war — that is, its military could be pushed back to the lines before Russia’s February 24 invasion or even before Russia seized Crimea — and Russia’s existence would not be in jeopardy. Ukraine’s goal is to drive the Russians out of Ukraine. The Ukrainian army will not march on Moscow; indeed, the Ukrainians have been extremely judicious in conducting only a small number of attacks against targets on Russian territory (that is, Russian territory as agreed by the post-Soviet states in 1991 following the Soviet Union’s collapse).
Moscow pundits try to portray the war as a conflict with the West, which they claim aims to destroy Russia. Perhaps it feels better to be losing to the West, not just Ukraine. Still, Western leaders have made clear that, while they will support Kyiv with arms and other assistance, they will not send troops to defend Ukraine. They do not seek Russia’s demise or dismemberment; they want to see Russia out of Ukraine.
Losing the war thus would not be existential for Russia. It could well prove so for Putin, or at least for his political future. The nuclear fear arises because Putin, as he grows more desperate, may see Russia’s fate and his own as one and the same.
However, Putin likely understands that, were Russia to use nuclear weapons, it would open a Pandora’s box full of unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences, including for Russia. Moreover, more sober-minded Russian political and military officials understand those risks. Would they allow Putin to put Russia in such peril? The decision to go to war was Putin’s; losing may be existential for him, but it need not be for others in Moscow.
While minimizing nuclear risks is an understandable concern, the West also must weigh the price of acceding to Putin’s gambit. If he can use vague nuclear threats to persuade the West to accept illegal annexations following sham “referenda,” what next? Putin himself has suggested Narva, a city in NATO-member Estonia, is “historically Russian” land. If his ploy succeeds in Ukraine, might he be tempted to seize portions of the Baltic states, annex them, and declare a nuclear threat to try to secure his ill-gotten gains?
Western messaging
Putin seeks to create a new geopolitical reality in Europe, one that few, if any, others will accept. The West should respond with pointed messaging of its own, some of which has begun.
First, Washington has set the right tone. On September 18, U.S. President Joe Biden warned Putin against using nuclear weapons, saying the U.S. response would be “consequential.” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reiterated the point on September 25, noting “that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the U.S. and our allies will respond decisively.” Both correctly left the specific nature of the U.S. and allied response ambiguous. Strategic ambiguity lets Russians worry about what might happen.
Washington has sent private messages to Moscow warning against nuclear use. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley have periodically talked with their Russian counterparts and should now speak to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and to the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov. Shoigu and Gerasimov would be closely involved in any consideration of using nuclear arms. They may well have a more serious understanding of what nuclear use could entail for Russia than does Putin, and what is existential for Putin need not be existential for them.
Second, Washington and Kyiv’s other friends in the West should communicate their position to the Russian people, perhaps in a joint public statement. Such a statement should underscore that the West’s goal is not Russia’s destruction but withdrawal of the Russian army from Ukrainian territory or, at a minimum, a negotiated settlement on terms acceptable to Kyiv.
Third, Western diplomats should engage their counterparts in Beijing, Delhi, and other Global South capitals about Russia’s threat. Moscow needs to understand that any resort to nuclear weapons in a failing war against Ukraine would make Russia an international pariah.
Fourth, the West should increase military assistance so the Ukrainians can press forward and liberate more territory from Russian occupation. In particular, Washington should provide ATACMS — surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 200 miles — with the proviso, as currently applies to shorter-range U.S-supplied rockets, that they not target Russia (in its 1991 borders). But the door should be left ajar for ending that restriction should Russia escalate.
As the Kremlin continues to prosecute a war of aggression and tries to persuade the world that its annexations are legitimate, Putin has chosen to play a risky game. Western messaging should ensure that Russian political and military elites understand that the game poses serious risks as well for Russia and for them personally.
China, the world’s most populous country is expected to be overtaken by India in 2023. Moreover, by 2060 India’s population is projected to be nearly a half billion more than China’s.
(IPS) – While the world’s population of 8 billion is continuing to increase and projected to reach 9 billion by 2037 and 10 billion by 2058, considerable diversity in the population growth of countries is continuing in the 21st century.
At one extreme are some 50 countries, accounting for close to 30 percent of today’s world population, whose populations are expected to decline over the coming decades.
By 2060, for example, those projected population declines include 9 percent in Germany, 11 percent in Russia, 13 percent in Spain, 15 percent in China, 17 percent in Poland, 18 percent in Italy, 21 percent in South Korea, 22 percent in Japan, and 31 percent in Bulgaria (Figure 1).
In terms of the size of those population declines, the largest is in China with a projected decline of 218 million by 2060. Following China are population declines in Japan and Russia of 27 million and 16 million, respectively.
At the other extreme, the population of 25 countries, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, are expected to more than double by 2060. Those projected population increases by 2060 include 106 percent in Afghanistan, 109 percent in Sudan, 113 percent in Uganda, 136 percent in Tanzania, 142 percent in Angola, 147 percent in Somalia, 167 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 227 percent in Niger
With respect to the size of the populations that are projected to more than double, the largest is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with a projected increase of 165 million by 2060. DRC is followed by population increases in Tanzania and Niger of 89 million and 60 million, respectively.
In between the extremes of declining and doubling populations are 120 intermediate growth countries. They account for about 60 percent of today’s world population and are projected to have larger populations by 2060 to varying degrees.
Those projected increases in population size include 13 percent in the United States, 17 percent New Zealand, 20 percent in India, 24 percent in Canada, 29 percent in Australia, 38 percent Saudi Arabia, 58 percent Israel, 95 percent in Nigeria, and 98 percent in Ethiopia (Figure 3).
Among the intermediate growth countries, the largest expected population growth is in India with a projected increase of 278 million by 2060. India is followed by Nigeria and Ethiopia with population increases of 208 million and 121 million, respectively.
The continuing significant differences in the rates demographic growth are resulting in a noteworthy reordering of countries by population size.
For example, while in 1980 about half of the 15 largest country populations were developed countries, by 2020 that number declined to one country, the United States. Also, Nigeria, which was eleventh largest population in 1980, was the seventh largest in 2020 and is projected to be the third largest population in 2060 with the United States moving to fourth place (Table 1).
China, the world’s most populous country is expected to be overtaken by India in 2023. Moreover, by 2060 India’s population is projected to be nearly a half billion more than China’s, 1.7 billion versus 1.2 billion, respectively.
The major explanation behind the diversity in population growth rates is differing fertility levels. While the countries whose populations are projected to at least double by 2060 have fertility rates of four to six births per woman, those whose populations are projected to decline have fertility rates below two births per woman.
Europe’s current population of 744 million is expected to decline to 703 million by midcentury. By the century’s close the continent’s population is projected to be a fifth smaller than it is today, i.e., from 744 million to 585 million
About two-thirds of the world’s population of 8 billion live in a country, including the three most populous China, India and the United States, where the fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. In addition, most of those populations have experienced low fertility rates for decades.
Also, many countries are experiencing fertility rates that are approximately half the replacement level or less. For example, the total fertility rate declined to 1.2 births per woman for China and Italy, 1.3 for Japan and Spain, with South Korea reaching a record low of 0.8 births per woman.
The population of some countries with below replacement fertility, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, are projected to continue growing due to international migration. However, if international migration to those countries stopped, their populations would begin declining in a few decades just like other countries with below replacement fertility levels.
In hopes of avoiding population decline, many countries are seeking to raise their fertility rates back to at least the replacement level. Among the countries with below replacement fertility close to two-thirds have adopted policies to increase their rates, including baby bonuses, family allowances, parental leave, tax incentives, and flexible work schedules.
Most recently, China announced new measures to raise its below replacement fertility rate by making it easier to work and raise a family. Those measures include flexible working arrangements and preferential housing policies for families, as well as support on education, employment, and taxes to encourage childbearing.
Despite the desires, policies, and programs of governments to raise fertility levels, returning to replacement level fertility is not envisaged for the foreseeable future.
The world’s average total fertility rate of 2.4 births per woman in 2020, which is about half the levels during the 1950s and 1960s, is projected to decline to the replacement level by midcentury and to 1.8 births per woman by the end of the 21st century. Consequently, by 2050 some 50 countries are expected to have smaller populations than today, and that number is projected to rise to 72 countries by 2100.
As many of those countries are in Europe, that continent’s current population of 744 million is expected to decline to 703 million by midcentury. By the century’s close Europe’s population is projected to be a fifth smaller than it is today, i.e., from 744 million to 585 million.
In contrast, the populations of roughly three dozen countries with current fertility levels of more than four births per woman are expected to continue growing throughout the century.
As most of those countries are in Africa, that continent’s population is projected to double by around midcentury. Moreover, by close of the 21st century Africa’s population is projected to be triple its current size, i.e., from 1.3 billion to 3.9 billion.
In sum, considerable diversity in the growth of populations is expected to continue throughout the 21st century. While the populations of many countries are projected to decline, the populations of many others are projected to increase. The net result of that diversity is the world’s current population of 8 billion is expected to increase to 10 billion around midcentury.
(Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”)
India has abstained on a draft resolution tabled in the UN Security Council which condemned Russia’s “illegal referenda” and annexation of four Ukrainian territories.
The UNSC called for an immediate cessation of violence while underlining the need to find pathways for a return to the negotiating table.
India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj said that India was deeply disturbed by the recent turn of developments in Ukraine and New Delhi has always advocated that no solution can ever arrive at the cost of human lives.
“We urge that all efforts are made by concerned sides for the immediate cessation of violence and hostilities. Dialogue is the only answer to settling differences and disputes, however daunting that may appear at this moment,” she said.
“The path to peace requires us to keep all channels of diplomacy open,” she said, adding that Prime Minister Narendra Modi “unequivocally conveyed” this in his discussions with world leaders, including with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
She also referred to statements made by External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Ukraine during the high-level General Assembly session last week.
Referring to Modi’s remark to Putin on the sidelines of the SCO Summit in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand that “today’s era is not an era of war”, Kamboj said New Delhi sincerely hopes for an early resumption of peace talks to bring about an immediate ceasefire and resolution of the conflict.
“India’s position has been clear and consistent from the very beginning of this conflict. The global order is anchored on the principles of the UN Charter, international law and respect for sovereignty and the territorial integrity of all states. Escalation of rhetoric or tension is in no one’s interest,” she said.
“It is important that pathways are found for a return to the negotiating table. Keeping in view the totality of the evolving situation, India decided to abstain on the resolution,” Kamboj said. The draft resolution was tabled by the US and Albania which condemns Russia’s “organization of illegal so-called referenda in regions within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders.”
The 15-nation UN Security Council on Friday voted on the draft, of the 15-nation Council, 10 nations voted for the resolution while China, Gabon, India and Brazil abstained. The resolution failed to get adopted as Russia vetoed it.
The resolution declares that Russia’s “unlawful actions” with regards to the “illegal so-called referenda” taken on September 23 to 27 this year in parts of Ukraine’s regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya that are under Russia’s temporary control can have “no validity” and cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status of these regions of Ukraine, including any “purported annexation” of any of these regions by Moscow.
Earlier, Russian President Putin on Friday had proclaimed the annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
The announcement came a day after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that “any annexation of a State’s territory by another State resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the Principles of the UN Charter and international law.”
“Any decision to proceed with the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine would have no legal value and deserves to be condemned,” Guterres said.
“It cannot be reconciled with the international legal framework. It stands against everything the international community is meant to stand for. It flouts the purposes and principles of the United Nations. It is a dangerous escalation. It has no place in the modern world. It must not be accepted,” the UN chief said.
The resolution also calls upon all States, international organisations and specialised agencies not to recognize any alteration of the status of Ukraine’s regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson or Zaporizhzhya on the basis of Russia’s “unlawful actions” with regards to the illegal so-called referenda taken on September 23 to 27, and to refrain from any action or dealing that might be interpreted as recognising any such altered status.
It also decides that Russia shall “immediately, completely and unconditionally” withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders, which includes those regions addressed by the “illegal so-called referenda” to enable a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine through political dialogue, negotiation, mediation or other peaceful means.
Today, several other countries are gaining greater respect and acceptability in the comity of nations. India, certainly, is one of them. What is perhaps likely to happen is that global leadership would be a shared responsibility.
We are living in difficult times. The global community is confronted by extraordinary and unprecedented turbulence that has divided rather than united them. The world order is increasingly characterized by deep insecurity, resulting in polarization, insularity, instability, and xenophobia.
The conduct of foreign policy in such a scenario can be daunting, especially for developing countries, such as India, which needs to tread carefully, so that it might avoid being caught in the crossfire between opposing powers. New Delhi is acutely aware that a strong foreign policy, based on the pursuance of national interests, is going to be increasingly challenging. The Russia-Ukrainian war, for instance, tested India’s ability to maintain its strategic autonomy. In the process, New Delhi was able to import the S 400 missile systems and much-needed energy resources from Russia. But when it was in India’s overall interest to gently convey its misgivings to President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Modi did so, when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand.
By refusing to take sides in the Great Power rivalry, New Delhi has retained flexibility and more importantly, the ability to persuade where others have failed. Putin understood that Modi spoke as a friend and well-wisher. Quiet diplomacy is often far more persuasive than aggressive posturing.
Perceptions matter
In a deeply divided environment, India knows that the cold calculus of diplomacy needs to be based on realism, pragmatism, and perceptions. Human behaviour is largely a derivative of perceptions, which, in turn, are based on experiential evidence. This, in turn, impacts expectations and finally, output.
Consider New Delhi’s perception of Pakistan, for instance. Decades of cross-border terrorism, death of innocent civilians, the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, the disclosures of the arrested terrorist Kasab, and a whole range of other acts committed with the full support of the Pakistan government and military naturally create the perception that Islamabad is driven by an anti-India psyche. This perception is based on experience and would necessarily impact expectations. In other words, it would influence the thinking that dialogue with Islamabad would be unproductive. The output, consequently, is status quo. Indeed, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had once famously said that it was difficult to talk with someone who shakes your hand above the table, while kicking you from underneath.
India realizes that, despite global condemnation of terrorism and Islamabad’s poor track record in this regard, Pakistan enjoys emphatic support from Beijing. China has put on hold, for instance, a US proposal in the UN Security Council to designate Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) handler, Sajid Mir, as a global terrorist. China today counts for 72 per cent of major arms supplies to Pakistan. But then, US actions are equally strange. In a bizarre move recently, when Pakistan is reeling under ravaging floods, Washington supplied it with F16s.
Take the case of China. New Delhi’s perception, which is shared by the global community, is that under Xi Jinping, China has become belligerent, antagonistic, and hegemonic. Several countries, ranging from the US to Australia, recognize that a rising China would threaten the global order. Yet, they do business with them, as indeed does India. Australia’s two-way trade with China is $250 billion in comparison to $25 billion with India. In 2020, the two-way US-China goods trade was $560 billion. According to data from the Indian Commerce Ministry, bilateral trade in 2020-21 between India and the US stood at a little under $120 billion, almost equivalent with China, which stood at $115.42 billion.
China matches its economic clout with its military ambitions. The South China Sea dispute, its treatment of the Uighur Muslim population, the crushing of internal threats and dissidence, its unequivocal support to Pakistan, its wooing of India’s neighbours, and its August 2020 misadventure to alter the status quo on the border with India are prime examples of China’s perception of its national interest. New Delhi is acutely aware that it lives in a troubling and troubled neighbourhood. Credible perceptions of Beijing’s behaviour, both past and present, make it amply clear that dialogue between the two countries needs to be based on pragmatism and limited expectations.
National interest and ethics
National interest has always been the prime focus of foreign policy, especially of the Great Powers. Developing countries, on the other hand, were forced to compromise and adjust to externally imposed decisions or face dire consequences, which included the assassination of their leaders, and the replacement of their governments with a more pliable leadership. The CIA’s activities in this regard are well documented.
While no country would admit to conducting an unethical foreign policy, the fact is that national interest and ethics are not always compatible. The great champions of democracy, for instance, prefer to deal with dictatorships and autocracies and are accepting of extreme violations of human rights and civil liberties. The US involvement in Vietnam, the imposition of ruthless dictators in Latin America, regime change in Iraq, the hasty and unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, to name a few, can hardly be classified as being ethical or morally justified. Indeed, even a former British prime minister was frustrated enough to refer to the American exit from Afghanistan as “imbecilic”. Similarly, the recent visit by US President Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia to discuss with the monarchy, despite CIA reports that the Crown Prince was personally involved in the killing of the Washington Post reporter, an American citizen of Saudi descent, reflects the primacy of national interest. Ethics plays no part in this and is, at best, an inconvenience.
India realizes that in the fractured world we live in, the strength of a nation lies in its ability to safeguard its national interest. India has refused to outsource this and consequently, Is not a member of any security alliance. If there is military aggression by Pakistan and China, India needs to rely on its own resources. As part of its national interest, therefore, India needs to enhance its military capability while, simultaneously, keeping channels of communication open to ensure that armed confrontation may be avoided or entered into only as a last resort.
The safeguarding of national interest assumes that the threats to national interest are minimized and finally, eliminated. Consequently, the core emphasis of Indian diplomacy has been to win friends across the globe. This, in fact, has been the building block of Indian foreign policy since independence. It has served us well and continues to be relevant.
Leadership in a disorderly world
The world is in chaos and faces a leadership vacuum. US influence is declining, and it is no longer seen as a reliable partner. Russia appears to be teetering on the brink of collapse. China’s rise is increasingly perceived as a global threat. Europe continues to remain disunited. The UN has, for all practical purposes, lost its utility. Uncertainty hangs over the global community like a shroud. There is, consequently, anxiety as to how the prevailing disorder may be stemmed, especially in the face of multiple challenges and new threats.
Around a hundred years ago (in 1923), British philosopher Bertrand Russell had written in one of his essays, “America controls the world and will continue to do so, until Russia is prosperous and Europe united”. This prediction is increasingly coming to be proved wrong. Today, several other countries are gaining greater respect and acceptability in the comity of nations. India, certainly, is one of them. What is perhaps likely to happen is that global leadership would be a shared responsibility. During the pandemic, for instance, India established its leadership role, which earned it the title of ‘pharmacy of the world’.
On solar power, India has leapfrogged and is set to achieve ambitious targets. On the manufacture of semiconductors, recent initiatives suggest that India might well overtake China as a global supplier. At the same time, New Delhi is conscious that a successful foreign policy is entirely dependent on the number of friends it has around the globe.
These are difficult times for any county and the crafting of its foreign policy in complex and complicated terrain will be challenging. It requires patience and perseverance. As the great chess grandmaster, Alekhine, once said, “When you make your first move on the chessboard, you must already know how you plan to end the game”. A strong foreign policy requires a long-term vision, critical to which is the way a nation projects itself and is perceived by others, both in terms of domestic policies and governance, as also its conduct on the international stage and global affairs.
(Ambassador Amit Dasgupta is a former Indian diplomat. This article is based on a talk delivered by him on August 29 2022, at Christ University, Bengaluru, at an event sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. Views are personal. Read more at: https://www.southasiamonitor.org/spotlight/foreign-policy-divided-world-will-india-rise-occasion
China, the world’s most populous country is expected to be overtaken by India in 2023. Moreover, by 2060 India’s population is projected to be nearly a half billion more than China’s.
(IPS) – While the world’s population of 8 billion is continuing to increase and projected to reach 9 billion by 2037 and 10 billion by 2058, considerable diversity in the population growth of countries is continuing in the 21st century.
At one extreme are some 50 countries, accounting for close to 30 percent of today’s world population, whose populations are expected to decline over the coming decades.
By 2060, for example, those projected population declines include 9 percent in Germany, 11 percent in Russia, 13 percent in Spain, 15 percent in China, 17 percent in Poland, 18 percent in Italy, 21 percent in South Korea, 22 percent in Japan, and 31 percent in Bulgaria (Figure 1).
In terms of the size of those population declines, the largest is in China with a projected decline of 218 million by 2060. Following China are population declines in Japan and Russia of 27 million and 16 million, respectively.
At the other extreme, the population of 25 countries, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, are expected to more than double by 2060. Those projected population increases by 2060 include 106 percent in Afghanistan, 109 percent in Sudan, 113 percent in Uganda, 136 percent in Tanzania, 142 percent in Angola, 147 percent in Somalia, 167 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 227 percent in Niger
With respect to the size of the populations that are projected to more than double, the largest is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with a projected increase of 165 million by 2060. DRC is followed by population increases in Tanzania and Niger of 89 million and 60 million, respectively.
In between the extremes of declining and doubling populations are 120 intermediate growth countries. They account for about 60 percent of today’s world population and are projected to have larger populations by 2060 to varying degrees.
Those projected increases in population size include 13 percent in the United States, 17 percent New Zealand, 20 percent in India, 24 percent in Canada, 29 percent in Australia, 38 percent Saudi Arabia, 58 percent Israel, 95 percent in Nigeria, and 98 percent in Ethiopia (Figure 3).
Among the intermediate growth countries, the largest expected population growth is in India with a projected increase of 278 million by 2060. India is followed by Nigeria and Ethiopia with population increases of 208 million and 121 million, respectively.
The continuing significant differences in the rates demographic growth are resulting in a noteworthy reordering of countries by population size.
For example, while in 1980 about half of the 15 largest country populations were developed countries, by 2020 that number declined to one country, the United States. Also, Nigeria, which was eleventh largest population in 1980, was the seventh largest in 2020 and is projected to be the third largest population in 2060 with the United States moving to fourth place (Table 1).
China, the world’s most populous country is expected to be overtaken by India in 2023. Moreover, by 2060 India’s population is projected to be nearly a half billion more than China’s, 1.7 billion versus 1.2 billion, respectively.
The major explanation behind the diversity in population growth rates is differing fertility levels. While the countries whose populations are projected to at least double by 2060 have fertility rates of four to six births per woman, those whose populations are projected to decline have fertility rates below two births per woman.
Europe’s current population of 744 million is expected to decline to 703 million by midcentury. By the century’s close the continent’s population is projected to be a fifth smaller than it is today, i.e., from 744 million to 585 million
About two-thirds of the world’s population of 8 billion live in a country, including the three most populous China, India and the United States, where the fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. In addition, most of those populations have experienced low fertility rates for decades.
Also, many countries are experiencing fertility rates that are approximately half the replacement level or less. For example, the total fertility rate declined to 1.2 births per woman for China and Italy, 1.3 for Japan and Spain, with South Korea reaching a record low of 0.8 births per woman.
The population of some countries with below replacement fertility, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, are projected to continue growing due to international migration. However, if international migration to those countries stopped, their populations would begin declining in a few decades just like other countries with below replacement fertility levels.
In hopes of avoiding population decline, many countries are seeking to raise their fertility rates back to at least the replacement level. Among the countries with below replacement fertility close to two-thirds have adopted policies to increase their rates, including baby bonuses, family allowances, parental leave, tax incentives, and flexible work schedules.
Most recently, China announced new measures to raise its below replacement fertility rate by making it easier to work and raise a family. Those measures include flexible working arrangements and preferential housing policies for families, as well as support on education, employment, and taxes to encourage childbearing.
Despite the desires, policies, and programs of governments to raise fertility levels, returning to replacement level fertility is not envisaged for the foreseeable future.
The world’s average total fertility rate of 2.4 births per woman in 2020, which is about half the levels during the 1950s and 1960s, is projected to decline to the replacement level by midcentury and to 1.8 births per woman by the end of the 21st century. Consequently, by 2050 some 50 countries are expected to have smaller populations than today, and that number is projected to rise to 72 countries by 2100.
As many of those countries are in Europe, that continent’s current population of 744 million is expected to decline to 703 million by midcentury. By the century’s close Europe’s population is projected to be a fifth smaller than it is today, i.e., from 744 million to 585 million.
In contrast, the populations of roughly three dozen countries with current fertility levels of more than four births per woman are expected to continue growing throughout the century.
As most of those countries are in Africa, that continent’s population is projected to double by around midcentury. Moreover, by close of the 21st century Africa’s population is projected to be triple its current size, i.e., from 1.3 billion to 3.9 billion.
In sum, considerable diversity in the growth of populations is expected to continue throughout the 21st century. While the populations of many countries are projected to decline, the populations of many others are projected to increase. The net result of that diversity is the world’s current population of 8 billion is expected to increase to 10 billion around midcentury.
(Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”)
Russia declared the annexations after holding what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine. The upper house of Russia’s parliament voted on Tuesday to approve the incorporation of four Ukrainian regions into Russia, as Moscow sets about formally annexing territory it sized from Kyiv during its seven-month conflict.
In a session on Tuesday, October 4th, the Federation Council unanimously ratified legislation to annex the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, following a similar vote in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, yesterday.
The documents now pass back to the Kremlin for President Vladimir Putin’s final signature to formally annex the four regions, representing around 18% of Ukraine’s internationally-recognised territory.
Russia declared the annexations after holding what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine. Western governments and Kyiv said the votes breached international law and were coercive and non-representative.
Despite having passed through Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament, the Kremlin is yet to formally designate the borders of the new regions – large parts of which are under the control of Ukraine’s forces. As such, it is still unclear where Russia will demarcate its own international borders once the annexation is complete.
On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said consultations were ongoing regarding the borders of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Russia does not have full control over any of the four regions.
Ukraine made more battlefield gains on Monday, taking territory tens of kilometres (miles) behind the previous frontlines in the southern Kherson region, according to reports by Russian-installed officials.
Meanwhile its forces only control around 60% of the Donetsk region and 70% of Zaporizhzhia, while recent Ukrainian advances have also pushed the frontlines back into Luhansk, a region which Russian forces claimed full control over in July.
For India, global governance reform starts with Security Council reforms and here New Delhi got support across blocs at the General Assembly meeting from both the US and Russia, as well as other countries. It is the only country to get the backing of both Washington and Moscow.
India emerged as the voice of the South, speaking up on issues hitting them the hardest, during the high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), reclaiming the leadership role but in a changed global context with a focus on development and cooperation, trying to be a bridge between blocs in the polarized world.
The ‘New India’ “really matters more in this polarised world”, said Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, who dynamized this new avatar during the UNGA meeting last week and the many events around it, meeting over 100 leaders over six days.
If Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 speech after his election set a new course for the nation, breaking free of the ideological constraints of a self-imposed “Third Worldism” and strident Non-Aligned rhetoric, eight years later a more self-confident India has returned to its embrace of the developing countries, but with a difference, and showing them a new direction: Development rather than politics; bridge-building rather than confrontation.
At the same time, Jaishankar kept India’s anti-colonial creds but first looking inward to forge a world outlook. “We will liberate ourselves from a colonial mindset”, he told the General Assembly. “Externally, this means reformed multilateralism and more contemporary global governance”.
For India, global governance reform starts with Security Council reforms and here New Delhi got support across blocs at the General Assembly meeting from both the US and Russia, as well as other countries. It is the only country to get the backing of both Washington and Moscow.
India now has a “tailwind” on its quest for a permanent seat on the Security Council, Jaishankar said at a news conference.
It was probably the first time an Indian leader spoke at the UN about liberation from the “colonial mindset” that had informed its rhetoric and reactions. “Our rich civilisational heritage will be a source of pride and of strength”, he said.
And of the significance of India’s 75th anniversary of Independence, he said India’s people are “rejuvenating a society pillaged by centuries of foreign attacks and colonialism” — packing in a pointed reference to also invasions from around the region.
As to why “India matters more” is that in a polarised world, it is “the bridge, we are the voice, we are a viewpoint channel”, Jaishankar said at a news conference, adding, “I think for a country like India, which has so many relationships and such an ability to communicate and to find touch points for different countries and regions” makes it fit for the role.
Wide recognition.
Recognition came from France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who said at the General Assembly, “Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, was right when he said the time is not for war, it is not for revenge against the West or for opposing the West against the East. It is the time, for a collective time, for our sovereign equal states to come together with challenges we face.”
And Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard conveyed to the Security Council his country’s proposal to set up a panel with Modi and Pope Francis to find a solution to the Ukraine crisis.
There was a tendency for the West to turn the spotlight on Ukraine, leading to other more pressing issues for the developing South pushed to the sidelines. Affecting them is a plethora of crises that affect the developing countries the hardest: The Covid pandemic, the shortages of and soaring prices of food and energy, the scarcity of fertilisers, and the debt crunch.
In his General Assembly speech, Jaishankar said, “We are on the side of those struggling to make ends meet, even as they stare at the escalating costs of food, of fuel and fertilisers”.
“There is great frustration that these issues are not being heard, they’re not being given a voice” he said later at his news conference.
But “to the extent there is anybody at all who’s speaking up and voicing these sentiments” it is India, he said, and. therefore, he found his counterparts expressing the feeling that “this is a country that speaks to us”.
While India spoke up for the South, it also demonstrated that its solidarity goes beyond words, Jaishankar said.
Actions matching words
At another level, Jamaica’s Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson brought a touchingly personal testimony to India’s development cooperation with the countries of the South referring to its role in helping combat the Covid pandemic: “We actually carry ‘Vaccine Maitri’ within us”.
And, Yemen’s Foreign Minister Awad Bin Mubarak, speaking at an event on India’s role in the world on its 75th Independence anniversary, spoke of India’s food aid.
Jaishankar at his news conference attributed the success in India’s efforts to help the developing South and being recognised for it to Modi. “This has taken practical shape that under this Prime Minister, delivery is his forte”, he said.
The bilateral and multilateral aid programmes made their mark because “delivery is his forte” as it has been at home
The many programs include the International Solar Alliance, which has 121 member countries, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure and India-UN Development Partnership Fund.
India’s G 20 leadership beckons
India will be taking over the presidency of the G-20, the group of major developed and emerging economies, in December when it will have a chance to demonstrate its new outlook through its leadership.
Jaishankar said in his General Assembly address, “India will work with other G-20 members to address serious issues of debt, of economic growth, food and energy security and particularly, of environment. The reform of governance of multilateral financial institutions will continue to be one of our core priorities”.
On the most polarizing issues at the UN, Ukraine, Jaishankar made a cryptic statement that showed a shift away from its neutrality and away from Russia – or at least putting some distance from it.
With nations being asked to – or almost coerced to – pick sides, he said in his General Assembly speech, “We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles”.
(The author is a New York-based journalist who reports from the United Nations. Views are personal.) Read more at: https://www.southasiamonitor.org/spotlight/india-matters-more-seeks-be-bridge-voice-developing-world-generous-recognition-indias
(Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that his country’s military had made major, rapid advances against Russian forces and freed dozens of towns in the south and east over the last week.
“This week alone, since the Russian pseudo-referendum, dozens of population centres have been liberated. These are in Kherson, Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions all together,” he said in a Tuesday nighttime address.
Last month, referendums were held on joining Russia in four regions, and Moscow used the overwhelming vote in favour as grounds for annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. The vote was widely condemned by the West as rigged.
Zelenskiy cited eight small towns in Kherson in the south by name as recently having been recaptured. Reuters could not independently verify his statements.
A video released by the Ukraine defence ministry appeared to show the Ukrainian flag being raised over one of those communities, Davydiv Brid, in Kherson.
Ukrainian forces retook several villages in an advance along the strategic Dnipro River on Monday, Ukrainian officials and a Russian-backed leader in the area said.
In the east, Ukrainian forces have been expanding an offensive after capturing the main Russian bastion in the north of Donetsk, the town of Lyman, hours after Putin proclaimed the annexation of the province last week.
Russian forces in the Donetsk and Kherson regions have been forced to retreat in recent days and appear to be struggling to halt an increasingly Western-equipped Ukrainian army.
RUSSIAN ESCALATION
Russian President Vladimir Putin had been expected to sign on Tuesday evening a law formally annexing the four Ukrainian regions. They represent about 18% of Ukraine’s territory, and Kyiv and its Western allies annexation say is illegal and will not be recognised.
Russia does not fully control any of the four regions it claims – Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south – and the Kremlin has said it has yet to determine the final borders of the annexed territory.
Russia has escalated its seven-month war with the annexation drive, a military mobilisation and warnings of a possible recourse to nuclear weapons to protect all of its territory.
Moscow hopes a “partial mobilisation” it announced two weeks ago can help reverse a series of battlefield setbacks.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was cited by the RIA news agency on Tuesday as saying that Russia had so far called up more than 200,000 reservists out of a planned 300,000 men.
Many Russian men have fled the country rather than fight in Ukraine, however, and Russian lawyers say they are working flat out to offer advice to men who want to avoid being drafted. Some Russians are making journeys of thousands of miles by car, train and plane to escape.
Russian defense ministry maps presented on Tuesday appeared to show rapid withdrawals of Russian forces from areas in eastern and southern Ukraine where they have been under severe pressure from the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The ministry’s daily video briefing made no mention of any pullbacks, but on maps used to show the location of purported Russian strikes, the shaded area designating Russian military control was much smaller than the day before.
On the eastern front, Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed leader in Donetsk, said Russian forces were building a serious line of defence around the city of Kreminna after being pushed back.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a missile crashed into the outskirts of the Ukraine-controlled eastern city of Kramatorsk. A Reuters reporter on the scene said the missile had gouged a huge crater in the backyard of a house.
U.N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO MEET
U.S. President Joe Biden told Zelenskiy in a call on Tuesday that Washington would provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers.
Biden also reiterated that the United States would “never recognise” Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory, the White House said. Earlier, the European Union also rejected Moscow’s “illegal annexation” and urged it to unconditionally withdraw its troops.
The 193-member U.N General Assembly will meet on Monday over Russia’s annexation. The General Assembly is expected to vote next week on a draft resolution denouncing Russia’s action, diplomats said. Russia vetoed a similar resolution in the 15-member Security Council last week.
In a decree on Tuesday, Zelenskiy formally declared any talks with Putin “impossible”, while leaving the door open to talks with Moscow if it got a new leader.
The Kremlin said that what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine would not end if Kyiv ruled out talks, adding that it “takes two sides to negotiate”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said Moscow did not want to take part in “nuclear rhetoric” spread by the West, after Britain’s Times newspaper reported that NATO had warned members Putin might test an atomic weapon on Ukraine’s border.
A Western diplomat told Reuters on Tuesday NATO had not warned its members of a Russian nuclear threat. Separately, a NATO official said the alliance had not observed any changes in Russia’s nuclear posture but that NATO remained vigilant. (Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Cynthia Osterman)
(AP) — A party with neo-fascist roots won the most votes in Italy’s national election, setting the stage for talks to form the country’s first far right-led government since World War II, with Giorgia Meloni at the helm as Italy’s first female premier, media reports stated.
Italy’s lurch to the far right immediately shifted Europe’s geopolitics, placing Meloni’s euroskeptic Brothers of Italy in a position to lead a founding member of the European Union and its third-largest economy. Italy’s left warned of “dark days” ahead and vowed to keep Italy in the heart of Europe.
Right-wing leaders across Europe immediately hailed 45-year-old Meloni’s victory as sending a historic, nationalist message to Brussels. It followed a right-wing victory in Sweden and recent gains by the far-right in France and Spain.
Still, turnout in the Italian election Sunday was a historic low of 64%, and pollsters suggested voters stayed home in protest, disenchanted by the backroom deals that had created the country’s last three governments and the mash-up of parties in outgoing Premier Mario Draghi’s national unity government.
By contrast, Meloni was viewed as a new face in the merry-go-round of Italian governments and many Italians appeared to be voting for change, analysts said.
The victory of Meloni’s just 10-year-old Brothers of Italy was more about Italian dissatisfaction with the decades-long status quo than any surge in neo-fascist or far-right sentiment, said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs.
“I would say the main reason why a big chunk of (voters) … will vote for this party is simply because it’s the new kid on the block,” she said.
The election’s sharp swing to the right, “confirms that the Italian electorate remains fickle,″ said London-based political analyst Wolfango Piccoli, noting that an estimated 30% of voters went for a different party than their choice in 2018 elections.
“If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for everyone. We will do it for all Italians and we will do it with the aim of uniting the people,” said. “shechose us. We will not betray it.”
Near-final results showed the center-right coalition netting 44% of the parliamentary vote, with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy snatching 26% in its biggest win in its decade-long meteoric rise. Her coalition partners divided up the remainder, with the anti-immigrant League party led by Matteo Salvini winning 9% and Forza Italia of ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi taking around 8% of the vote.
The center-left Democratic Party and its allies had around 26% support, while the populist 5-Star Movement — which had been the biggest vote-getter in the 2018 parliamentary election — saw its share of the vote halved to 15%.
While the center-right was the clear winner, the formation of a government is still weeks away and will involve consultations among party leaders and with President Sergio Mattarella. In the meantime, Draghi remains in a caretaker role.
The elections, which took place six months early after Draghi’s government collapsed, came at a crucial time for Europe as it faces Russia’s war in Ukraine and related soaring energy costs that have hit ordinary Italians as well as industry.
A Meloni-led government is largely expected to follow Italy’s current foreign policy, including her pro-NATO stance and strong support for supplying Ukraine with weapons to defend itself against Russia’s invasion, even as her coalition allies take a different tone.
Both Berlusconi and Salvini have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. While both have distanced themselves from his invasion of Ukraine, Salvini has warned that EU sanctions against Moscow are hurting Italian industry. Berlusconi has even excused Putin’s invasion as an event foisted upon him by pro-Moscow separatists in the Donbas.
A bigger shift and one likely to cause friction with other EU nations is likely to come over migration. Meloni has called for a naval blockade to prevent migrant boats from leaving North African shores, and has proposed screening potential asylum-seekers in Africa, not Europe.
Salvini has made clear he wants the League to recapture the interior minister post, where he once imposed a tough anti-migrant policy. But he may face an internal leadership challenge, with Meloni’s party outperforming the League even in its northeastern stronghold.
On relations with the EU, analysts note that for all her euroskeptic rhetoric, Meloni moderated her message during the campaign and has little room to maneuver, given the economic windfall Italy is receiving from Brussels in coronavirus recovery funds. Italy secured 191.5 billion euros, the biggest chunk of the EU’s 750 billion-euro recovery package, and is bound by certain reform and investment milestones to receive it all.
That said, Meloni has criticized the EU’s recent recommendation to suspend 7.5 billion euros in funding to Hungary over concerns about democratic backsliding, defending autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban as the elected leader in a democratic system.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen praised Meloni for having “resisted the threats of an anti-democratic and arrogant European Union.”
Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox opposition party, tweeted that Meloni “has shown the way for a proud and free Europe of sovereign nations that can cooperate on behalf of everybody’s security and prosperity.”
Meloni is chair of the right-wing European Conservative and Reformist group in the European Parliament, which includes her Brothers of Italy, Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice Party, Spain’s far-right Vox and the right-wing Sweden Democrats, which just won big there on a platform of cracking down on crime and limiting immigration.
“The trend that emerged two weeks ago in Sweden was confirmed in Italy,” acknowledged Democratic Party leader Enrico Letta, calling Monday a “sad day for Italy, for Europe.”
“We expect dark days. We fought in every way to avoid this outcome,″ Letta said at a somber news conference. “(The Democratic Party) will not allow Italy to leave the heart of Europe.”
Thomas Christiansen, professor of political science at Rome’s Luiss University and the executive editor of the Journal of European Integration, noted that Italy has a tradition of pursuing a consistent foreign and European policy that is bigger than individual party interests.
“Whatever Meloni might be up to will have to be moderated by her coalition partners and indeed with the established consensus of Italian foreign policy,” Christiansen said.
Amid repeated holds on proposals to designate Pakistan-based terrorists under the UN sanctions regime, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that terrorism should not be used as a “political tool” and the idea that something is blocked without assigning a reason challenges common sense.
“We do believe that in any process if any party is taking a decision, they need to be transparent about it. So the idea that something is blocked without assigning a reason, it sort of challenges common sense,” Jaishankar said as he spoke to a group of Indian journalists here on Saturday after wrapping up the New York leg of his visit to the US with his address to the UN General Assembly high-level session.
He was responding to a question by PTI on the issue of repeated holds and blocks on proposals to list Pakistan-based terror group leaders under the UN sanctions regime and whether this came up in his talks with his global counterparts as he met them during the high-level General Assembly week. “We do believe that in any process if any party is taking a decision, they need to be transparent about it. So the idea that something is blocked without assigning a reason, it sort of challenges common sense,” Jaishankar said.
“It came up in some of my meetings. I also mentioned it in my BRICS intervention,” he said referring to the meeting held last week on the margins of the General Assembly between the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa group – Brazilian Foreign Minister Carlos Alberto Franco Franca, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of the Republic of South Africa Naledi Pandor.
China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, has repeatedly put holds on listing proposals by India, the US and other allies to blacklist Pakistan-based terrorists under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions regime of the Council.
Last week, China put a hold on a proposal moved at the United Nations by the US and co-supported by India to designate Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Sajid Mir, wanted for his involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks, as a global terrorist.
Last month, China put a hold on a proposal by the US and India at the United Nations to blacklist Abdul Rauf Azhar, the brother of Jaish-e Mohammed (JEM) chief Masood Azhar and a senior leader of the Pakistan-based terror organisation. Abdul Rauf Azhar, born in 1974 in Pakistan, was sanctioned by the US in December 2010.
In June this year, China had put a hold, at the last moment, on a joint proposal by India and the US to list Pakistan-based terrorist Abdul Rehman Makki under the 1267 Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council.
Jaishankar, in his UNGA address on Saturday, said that no rhetoric, however sanctimonious can ever cover up blood stains and nations who defend proclaimed terrorists in the United Nations advance neither their own interests nor their reputation, a clear reference to China and Pakistan.
“Having borne the brunt of cross border terrorism for decades, India firmly advocates a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach. In our view, there is no justification for any act of terrorism, regardless of motivation. And no rhetoric, however sanctimonious can ever cover up blood stains,” Jaishankar said in the UN General Debate.
“The United Nations responds to terrorism by sanctioning its perpetrators. Those who politicise the UNSC 1267 Sanctions regime, sometimes even to the extent of defending proclaimed terrorists, do so at their own peril. Believe me, they advance neither their own interests nor indeed their reputation,” he said.
With the Chinese Foreign Minister listening, Jaishankar had said during a ministerial meeting in the Security Council on Ukraine this week that the fight against impunity is critical to the larger pursuit of securing peace and justice. The Security Council must send an unambiguous and unequivocal message on this count.
He had said “politics should never ever provide cover to evade accountability. Nor indeed to facilitate impunity. Regrettably, we have seen this of late in this very Chamber, when it comes to sanctioning some of the world’s most dreaded terrorists.” “If egregious attacks committed in broad daylight are left unpunished, this Council must reflect on the signals we are sending on impunity. There must be consistency if we are to ensure credibility,” he said.
“We hope that reason would prevail and people, first of all, would not arbitrarily or politically block,” Jaishankar said, underlining that the message is that this is “not inter-state politics which we are talking about.”
“We are trying to get across our message that terrorism is not political. It should not be used as a political tool, its consequences should not be made political. If you go into the UN and say does everybody consider terrorism a common threat, everybody will say yes. So we are saying well, if that’s what your position is, then why don’t your policies and your actions follow up on it,” he said.
United States on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, hosted a ministerial meeting of The Quad grouping with India, Japan and Australia, the first such meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
The leaders from the Quad countries signed the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) partnership guidelines.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who is here on a 10-day official visit to the United States, said, “Given the turbulent times, it’s important that Quad goes further in constructive agenda that we’ve set for ourselves that we work together on the delivery of public goods, that our efforts and particularly what we’re signing today the HADR partnership which we discussed and finalized in Tokyo is extremely timely.”
He said there were other initiatives in the making, some a little further in the pipeline like STEM fellowship.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who lost his father overnight and is likely to rush out of New York, hosted the Quad meeting.
Blinken announced that the meeting in New York is evidence that Quad is “strong and is getting stronger”.
“Not one of us alone can do what is necessary to meet these challenges and seize these opportunities and that is the inspiration behind Quad,” Blinken told his counterparts.
“This is the first time that the foreign ministers of the Quad nations got together at the UNGA so my hope is that it will be held as a regular feature at the meetings,” Blinken added.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong talked about Australia’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient.
“Quad is a forum committed to bringing tangible benefits to the region and ensuring a region which is peaceful, stable, prosperous and where sovereignty is respected, where the countries are free to make their own choices,” Wong said.
Wong took a veiled dig at China over the country trying to dominate the Indo-Pacific and said, “No one in this room wants to see a region where countries are not able to make their sovereign choices, where any one country or any one perspective dominates.”
The Indo-Pacific region is being reshaped economically and strategically, she asserted. “We want to represent countries to navigate this period of change together. So this is the heart of the Quad,” Wong noted.
Japan Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa highlighted the importance of Quad and, in a veiled swipe at Russia and China, referred to attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by “force”. The minister stated that free and open international order based on rule of law is under threat. “It is extremely significant for us to demonstrate together to the international community our firm commitment to the UN charter and free and open Indo Pacific (FOIP),” the minister asserted. “At the same time, FOIP cannot be achieved without working together with countries in the region. I am confident that the guidelines for Quad partnership on HADR here will further strengthen our collaboration to effectively respond to disasters in the Indo-Pacific region,” the minister concluded.
(AP) — The head of the United Nations had just warned of a world gone badly wrong — a place where inequity was on the rise, war was back in Europe, fragmentation was everywhere, the pandemic was pushing onward and technology was tearing things apart as much as it was uniting them.
“Our world is in big trouble. Divides are growing deeper. Inequalities are growing wider. Challenges are spreading farther,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday morning as he opened the general debate at the 77th U.N. General Assembly. And he was, on all counts, incontrovertibly correct.
Yet barely an hour later, here were two U.N. delegates — one Asian, one African — grinning and standing in the sun-dappled lobby of the U.N. Secretariat Building, thrilled to be there in person on this particular morning as they snapped photos of each other, laughing along the way as they captured the moment.
Hope: It can be hard to find anywhere these days, much less for the people who walk the floors of the United Nations, where shouldering the world’s weight is central to the job description. After all, this is an institution that listened last year as the president of the not-yet-at-war nation of Ukraine described it as being “like a retired superhero who has long forgotten how great they once were.”
And when world leaders are trying to solve some of humanity’s thorniest problems — or, to be frank, sometimes to impede solutions to those same problems — it’s easy, from a distance, to lose sight of hope through the haze of negative adjectives.
Yet beneath the layers of existential gloom Tuesday — and this is no doubt a pandemic-exhausted group of people representing a world in a really bad mood from so many disquieting challenges — there were signs of brightness poking through like persistent clovers in the sidewalk cracks.
“For each and every one of us, the U.N. is a unique platform for dialogue and for cooperation,” Swiss President Ignazio Cassis said. Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. spoke of his country being an “optimistic” nation for whom “solutions are within our collective grasp.”
“There’s one friend of mine who is a neurosurgeon who said my problem is I’m a congenital optimist,” U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday ahead of a meeting with Guterres. “But I am optimistic. I think we can make things better.”
And David Kabua, president of the ocean-besieged Marshall Islands — a man who has little reason to express optimism these days — came to the United Nations and spoke of “this iconic hall, the symbol of humanity’s hope and aspiration for world peace, prosperity, and international cooperation.”
“As humanity strives to defend freedom and build lasting peace, the U.N.’s role is indispensable,” said South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
There were many other such moments Tuesday and Wednesday. Taken together, they are noteworthy: There seems a collective sense — echoed by leader after leader in different, sometimes oblique ways — that even when it disappoints or falters, the United Nations must be a place of hope amid the cold-eyed pragmatism.
Why is that? Part of it is the unswerving commitment since the U.N.’s very beginnings to the principle of multilateralism, a $10 word for playing nicely with each other. And to play nicely when your feuds are ancient or bloody or seemingly insurmountable — to even try — requires hope.
That’s always been true, though. There’s also something else, something unique to this year, to this moment. In the frightening early pandemic days of 2020, the U.N. General Assembly was all virtual, and leaders stayed home and made videos. Last year, despite a theme of “Building Resilience Through Hope,” the hybrid General Assembly produced spotty leader attendance and little sense of the world congregating.
Now, though the pandemic persists, the U.N. grounds are alive with people from most of the planet’s backgrounds and traditions, interacting and talking and generally doing what the United Nations was built to do — take nations and turn them into people, as the late Sen. William Fulbright
“It’s the only place in international organizations where there is this effort to define what is collectively shared,” says Katie Laatikainen, a professor of political science and international relations at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, who studies the United Nations.
“They’re working to figure out what it means to be part of the international community,” she says. “They’ve learned the language of appealing to the `we,′ and it encourages others to define the `we’ and commit to the `we.’”
Guterres made sure to infuse that sensibility as he opened the proceedings with his doom-saturated speech. He told of a ship called the Brave Commander, loaded with Ukrainian grain and — helped by the warring nations of Ukraine and Russia — headed for the Horn of Africa, where it can help prevent famine.
It flew under a U.N. flag, and Guterres said it and the dozens of ships that followed were not only carrying grain; they were carrying “one of today’s rarest commodities” — hope.
“By acting as one,” he said, “we can nurture fragile shoots of hope.”
So, no: Hope is not absent at the United Nations this week. That much is certain. It’s contained, it’s muted, it’s tentative. But it is there, gossamer though it might be — even if some might find the notion naive. “Our opportunity is here and now,” said the president of the General Assembly, Csaba Kőrösi of Hungary.
The world, after all, is not an easy place. Was it ever? The second secretary-general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, understood that. “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven,” he said, “but in order to save us from hell.”
The “abrupt and unheralded change” in India’s stand on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as reflected in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “public rebuke” of Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week, has been heard in official Washington DC with some relief and satisfaction.
Prime Minister Modi made it “clear to Putin’s face that the invasion is wrong”, said Ro Khanna, an Indian American lawmaker who has been critical of India’s refusal to condemn the invasion. Speaking at a community event on Wednesday, he went on to suggest Modi could also help in a “peaceful resolution and a ceasefire”.
Earlier the same day in New York, a senior White House official pointed to the new Indian position as testimony to the Biden administration’s strategy of just laying out the facts on Ukraine for other countries to see and judge for themselves instead of forcing them to change their stand.
“The US strategy has borne fruit insofar as you are seeing increasing signs of countries that did abstain, to include countries like India speaking out in a different way, including directly in front of Putin,” the official said. “And, you know, we’d like to see more than that, obviously, in the days ahead.”
India was among 34 countries that abstained in an UN general assembly vote in March that deplored Russia for invading Ukraine. China had also abstained.
New Delhi came under significant pressure from the US and its western allies to condemn the invasion and either stop buying Russian oil or not ramp it up, as it would enable Moscow to withstand the economic sanctions imposed on it to force it to end the war and leave Ukraine.
India did neither. Until last week. “Today’s era is not of war,” Prime Minister Modi told Putin in public remarks ahead of their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. That went much further than India’s expression of ‘grave concern’ over the killing of civilians in Ukraine’s Bucha, and call for respecting the UN charter that protects the sovereignty and integrity of all member nations.
US frustration with India’s refusal to condemn Russia and stop oil from it, had led to a rather unfortunate outburst from a senior White House official sent to New Delhi for these talks. He had warned India of “consequences”.
“I’ve been clear about India, and I think India ought to be condemning Putin and India ought not to be getting oil from Russia or China. We ought to rally the world to isolate Putin,” Khanna said on Fox News in days after the UN general assembly vote.
Khanna had gone on to say that it was time for India to choose between the US and Russia. “First, India should condemn Putin in the UN for the blatant human rights violations. Second, they need to realise, they have to pick sides,” he said, adding, “We, the United States, were with them when China invaded India. Putin wasn’t there. And it’s time for them to buy weapons from the United States, not Russia. We’ve got to look at how we can facilitate that and make that easier. We need India as an ally ultimately to contain China.” (IANS)
As the months-long Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to rage on, India on Saturday, September 24, 2022 told the United Nations General Assembly that it is on the side of peace and that it will remain firmly there. Speaking at the General Debate of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that India is on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles.
“As the Ukraine conflict continues to rage, we are often asked whose side we are on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there,” he said. “We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles. We are on the side that calls for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way out. We are on the side of those struggling to make ends meet, even as they stare at the escalating costs of food, of fuel and fertilizers,” Jaishankar added.
He also said that it is in our collective interest to work constructively, both within the United Nations and outside, in finding an “early resolution” to this conflict. In another note, Jaishankar has left the door open for a possible role for India in mediating the Ukraine-Russia war. Mexico proposed last week at the UN Security Council that a committee of Heads of state and government, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pope Francis, could help UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres end the war.
Jaishankar’s response to a question about a possible role for India in mediating an end to the Ukraine-Russia war expertly framed. He did not rule it out. But he also made it clear India is not campaigning for it. “If we can help in some way we will be obviously responsible enough to do that,” the Minister said, adding, “I think the participants know that the rest of the world knows that. Beyond that what happens that’s in the realm of diplomacy so I can’t say anything.”
Mexico has proposed that Modi should mediate between Russia and Ukraine. Foreign Minister Marcelo Luis Ebrard Casaubon suggested it officially during a meeting of the UN Security Council debate on Ukraine in New York. “Based on its pacifist vocation, Mexico believes that the international community must now channel its best efforts to achieve peace,” Casaubon said.
“In this regard, I would like to share with you the proposal of the President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to strengthen the mediation efforts of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, through the formation of a Committee for Dialogue and Peace in Ukraine with the participation of other heads of state and government, including, if possible, His Excellency Narendra Modi and His Holiness Pope Francis.”
According to media reports, Jaishankar kicked off a four-day visit to Washington DC with a first-of-its-kind public interaction for an Indian External Affairs Minister with the Indian American community: a Q&A in which he took unscreened questions from the audience, which, it must be noted, comprised largely of old fans and new fans — the moderator, for instance, repeatedly called him a “rockstar”, and his every answer was greeted with multiple round of applause, with the most excited springing to their feet.
Noting that while the global attention has been on Ukraine, Jaishankar said that India has also had to contend with other challenges, especially “in its own neighbourhood”, in an apparent reference to the unresolved standoff with China in eastern Ladakh and strained relations with Pakistan.
“Having borne the brunt of cross-border terrorism for decades, India firmly advocates a ‘zero- tolerance’ approach. In our view, there is no justification for any act of terrorism, regardless of motivation. And no rhetoric, however sanctimonious, can ever cover up blood stains,” he said.
“The United Nations responds to terrorism by sanctioning its perpetrators. Those who politicise the UNSC 1267 Sanctions regime, sometimes even to the extent of defending proclaimed terrorists, do so at their own peril. Believe me, they advance neither their own interests nor indeed their reputation,” the external affairs minister stated.
The Minister answered a range of questions from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Pakistan to Kashmir, education, health and his own experiences as a long-time career diplomat. “Very honestly, it’s a relationship that has neither ended up serving Pakistan well, nor (is it) serving American interests,” the Minister said in response to the F-16 spares, which has greatly exercised some Indian-Americans. He framed his criticism of the package in the overall context of a bilateral relationship, which he argued, has been mutually dysfunctional for both Pakistan and the US.
“It is really for the US today to reflect … the merits of this relationship,” Jaishankar added, asking what it wants with this package. For someone to say I’m doing this because it is all counter-terrorism content and so, when you are talking of an aircraft like a capability of an F-16 where everybody knows, you know where they are deployed and what is their use,” the Minister said, and added, “You’re not fooling anybody by saying these things.”
He slammed the Biden administration’s proposal to provide $450 million worth of spares and services for Pakistan’s F-16s, saying no one is fooled by claims that these highly capable fighter aircraft are meant only for counter-terrorism operations.
The Biden administration informed the US congress earlier in September that it proposed to provide $450 million worth of spares and services for Pakistan’s US-made F-16 for their “sustainment”. No new capabilities or munitions are part of the package, which, it was stated, will also not alter the military balance in the region.
The US administration claimed in the notification that these F-16s are meant for counter-terrorism operations. But Pakistan has used them for other purposes as well, most recently in an air combat with Indian fighters jets in February 2019. India later said it shot down one of the F-16 deployed.
“If I were to speak to an American policy-maker, I would really make the case (that) look what you are doing,” Jaishankar said further. “Forget about us. It’s actually not good for you what you’re doing, reflect on the history, look at the last 20 years.”
Jaishankar will have the opportunity to convey his advice to plenty of American policy-makers he will be meeting over the next few days, including his US counterpart Antony Blinken. (IANS)
An estimated 4 billion people worldwide were predicted to watch the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II on television and online, with Presidents Joe Biden of the U.S. and Emmanuel Macron of France and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attending the obsequies in London’s Westminster Abbey in person. The medieval abbey, the sublime music and military processions were all a visual and aural feast, but the event was at its heart a Christian ceremony, with the coffin placed in front of the altar and presided over by robed clergymen.
The queen’s funeral, in this sense, was not entirely representative of Britain’s increasingly secular population. Even its believers are less likely to be Christian than at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, with 2.7 million Muslims, 800,000 Hindus and a half-million Sikhs, among many other faiths. Christians, who once consisted mostly of various Protestants — chiefly members of the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Church in Wales — and Roman Catholics, have been joined by a growing Pentecostal movement and other evangelical churches, according to the BBC.
There is nothing like a royal wedding or funeral to remind us that the Church of England remains the official, established church, with the monarch as its Supreme Governor, and since Elizabeth’s death on Sept. 8, we’ve seen it in the ascendant. Yet there are also signs that the late monarch, now-King Charles III and the Church of England have recognized that the time has come to adjust.
In a landmark speech in 2012 at Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the queen said of the Church of England that “Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”
She credited the established church with having done so already. “Gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely,” she said.
The new king has endorsed those words as recently as Sept. 9, the night after his mother died, in his first televised address to the British nation as its king. “The role and the duties of Monarchy also remain,” he said, “as does the Sovereign’s particular relationship and responsibility towards the Church of England — the Church in which my own faith is so deeply rooted.”
But he continued, ”In the course of the last 70 years we have seen our society become one of many cultures and many faiths.”
Nearly 30 years ago, as prince of Wales, Charles articulated concern about other faiths and Christian denominations in modern Britain not feeling included, and controversially suggested that when he became king he should be called Defender of Faiths — plural— rather than the title Defender of the Faith bestowed on Henry VIII by the pope in 1521 and used by England’s monarchs since.
Anglicans reacted harshly to Charles’ gambit, fearing he would not be fully wedded to assuming his role of Supreme Governor of the Church of England when the time came. Even after he rescinded his statement in 2014, the moment haunted Charles. His statement on Sept. 9 came in part to reassure doubters, who then heard him proclaimed king and Defender of the Faith the next day before the Accession Council, who proclaimed him the new monarch.
Then, bit by bit, we saw more evidence of how the king and his advisers, as well as the late queen, through her funeral plans, tried to embrace other traditions.
Britain’s King Charles III and Camilla, the queen consort, leave after a Service of Prayer and Reflection for the life of Queen Elizabeth II, at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff, Wales, Sept. 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool)
The Sept. 12 service of thanksgiving for the queen’s life was held at Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral, the main church of the Church of Scotland. Representatives of other faiths were in attendance, and the Gospel was read by Mark Strange, primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the other main Protestant church in Scotland besides the Church of Scotland.
More surprising, a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans was read by Leo Cushley, the Catholic archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and included lines often interpreted as encouraging ecumenical dialogue: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
When Charles then paid a visit to Northern Ireland, more efforts were made to include the Catholic population, for whom the monarchy has long been a sensitive issue. At St. Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast — where the president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, and Taoiseach (as Ireland calls its prime minister) Micheál Martin were in attendance — Eamon Martin, the Catholic archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, offered a prayer; others were said by Methodist and Presbyterian church leaders. At a service during Charles’ stop in Wales, prayers were said by Muslim and Jewish representatives as well as representatives of several Christian denominations.
But a reception at Buckingham Palace for 30 faith leaders on Friday (Sept. 16) — before the new king met any world leaders in London for the funeral, and even before he took part in a vigil with his siblings at the lying-in-state of his mother — spoke volumes about the importance Charles assigns religion in Britain.
Charles welcomed not only the Catholic archbishop of Westminster but Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy and Imam Asim Yusuf, telling them that Britain’s sovereign has an “additional” duty — presumably in addition to being Supreme Governor of the Church of England — to protect “the space for faith itself” in Britain. This duty, he said, is “less formally recognized but to be no less diligently discharged.”
He added: “It is the duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals. This diversity is not just enshrined in the laws of our country, it is enjoined by my own faith.”
That Charles’ words were backed up by his mother was evident in the state funeral Monday. The specialness of the Church of England and of multifaith, diverse Britain was acknowledged as a procession of religious representatives entered Westminster Abbey in advance of the main funeral party: Jews, Baha’is, Jains, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Sikhs and Hindus, as well as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis; Pope Francis was represented by Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary for relations with states.
Reading prayers during the service were the Rev. Iain Greenshields, moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; Shermara Fletcher, principal officer for Pentecostal and charismatic relations for Churches Together in England; the Rev. Helen Cameron, moderator of the Free Churches; and Roman Catholic Cardinal Vincent Nichols.
This balancing act will be tested again in the next few months when the new king’s coronation takes place. By then, new coins embossed with Charles’ head will likely have been minted, with the legend “Charles DG Rex, FD”: Latin acronyms for Charles, by the Grace of God, King, Defender of the Faith. While proclaimed as that Defender, he has indeed reinterpreted what it means, even if not altering the wording as he once suggested. It looks as if the reign of King Charles III will be dedicated to offering that protection to believers.
But what of those in Britain of no faith? Soon the results of the most recent national census, of 2021, will be published, showing who believes what, and whether the nonbelievers have grown. Last time, in 2011, a quarter of the population said they had no religion. Finding a way to make them feel connected to a coronation blessed by the Church of England and replete with Christian justifications for monarchical power might be a far tougher test than organizing a procession of Buddhists, Jains and Catholics.
United States on Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, hosted a ministerial meeting of The Quad grouping with India, Japan and Australia, the first such meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
The leaders from the Quad countries signed the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) partnership guidelines.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who is here on a 10-day official visit to the United States, said, “Given the turbulent times, it’s important that Quad goes further in constructive agenda that we’ve set for ourselves that we work together on the delivery of public goods, that our efforts and particularly what we’re signing today the HADR partnership which we discussed and finalized in Tokyo is extremely timely.”
He said there were other initiatives in the making, some a little further in the pipeline like STEM fellowship.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who lost his father overnight and is likely to rush out of New York, hosted the Quad meeting.
Blinken announced that the meeting in New York is evidence that Quad is “strong and is getting stronger”.
“Not one of us alone can do what is necessary to meet these challenges and seize these opportunities and that is the inspiration behind Quad,” Blinken told his counterparts.
“This is the first time that the foreign ministers of the Quad nations got together at the UNGA so my hope is that it will be held as a regular feature at the meetings,” Blinken added.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong talked about Australia’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient.
“Quad is a forum committed to bringing tangible benefits to the region and ensuring a region which is peaceful, stable, prosperous and where sovereignty is respected, where the countries are free to make their own choices,” Wong said.
Wong took a veiled dig at China over the country trying to dominate the Indo-Pacific and said, “No one in this room wants to see a region where countries are not able to make their sovereign choices, where any one country or any one perspective dominates.”
The Indo-Pacific region is being reshaped economically and strategically, she asserted. “We want to represent countries to navigate this period of change together. So this is the heart of the Quad,” Wong noted.
Japan Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa highlighted the importance of Quad and, in a veiled swipe at Russia and China, referred to attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by “force”. The minister stated that free and open international order based on rule of law is under threat.
“It is extremely significant for us to demonstrate together to the international community our firm commitment to the UN charter and free and open Indo Pacific (FOIP),” the minister asserted.
“At the same time, FOIP cannot be achieved without working together with countries in the region. I am confident that the guidelines for Quad partnership on HADR here will further strengthen our collaboration to effectively respond to disasters in the Indo-Pacific region,” the minister concluded.
Amid repeated holds on proposals to designate Pakistan-based terrorists under the UN sanctions regime, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that terrorism should not be used as a “political tool” and the idea that something is blocked without assigning a reason challenges common sense.
“We do believe that in any process if any party is taking a decision, they need to be transparent about it. So the idea that something is blocked without assigning a reason, it sort of challenges common sense,” Jaishankar said as he spoke to a group of Indian journalists here on Saturday after wrapping up the New York leg of his visit to the US with his address to the UN General Assembly high-level session.
He was responding to a question by PTI on the issue of repeated holds and blocks on proposals to list Pakistan-based terror group leaders under the UN sanctions regime and whether this came up in his talks with his global counterparts as he met them during the high-level General Assembly week. “We do believe that in any process if any party is taking a decision, they need to be transparent about it. So the idea that something is blocked without assigning a reason, it sort of challenges common sense,” Jaishankar said.
“It came up in some of my meetings. I also mentioned it in my BRICS intervention,” he said referring to the meeting held last week on the margins of the General Assembly between the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa group – Brazilian Foreign Minister Carlos Alberto Franco Franca, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of the Republic of South Africa Naledi Pandor.
China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, has repeatedly put holds on listing proposals by India, the US and other allies to blacklist Pakistan-based terrorists under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions regime of the Council.
Last week, China put a hold on a proposal moved at the United Nations by the US and co-supported by India to designate Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Sajid Mir, wanted for his involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks, as a global terrorist.
Last month, China put a hold on a proposal by the US and India at the United Nations to blacklist Abdul Rauf Azhar, the brother of Jaish-e Mohammed (JEM) chief Masood Azhar and a senior leader of the Pakistan-based terror organisation. Abdul Rauf Azhar, born in 1974 in Pakistan, was sanctioned by the US in December 2010.
In June this year, China had put a hold, at the last moment, on a joint proposal by India and the US to list Pakistan-based terrorist Abdul Rehman Makki under the 1267 Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council.
Jaishankar, in his UNGA address on Saturday, said that no rhetoric, however sanctimonious can ever cover up blood stains and nations who defend proclaimed terrorists in the United Nations advance neither their own interests nor their reputation, a clear reference to China and Pakistan.
“Having borne the brunt of cross border terrorism for decades, India firmly advocates a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach. In our view, there is no justification for any act of terrorism, regardless of motivation. And no rhetoric, however sanctimonious can ever cover up blood stains,” Jaishankar said in the UN General Debate.
“The United Nations responds to terrorism by sanctioning its perpetrators. Those who politicise the UNSC 1267 Sanctions regime, sometimes even to the extent of defending proclaimed terrorists, do so at their own peril. Believe me, they advance neither their own interests nor indeed their reputation,” he said.
With the Chinese Foreign Minister listening, Jaishankar had said during a ministerial meeting in the Security Council on Ukraine this week that the fight against impunity is critical to the larger pursuit of securing peace and justice. The Security Council must send an unambiguous and unequivocal message on this count.
He had said “politics should never ever provide cover to evade accountability. Nor indeed to facilitate impunity. Regrettably, we have seen this of late in this very Chamber, when it comes to sanctioning some of the world’s most dreaded terrorists.” “If egregious attacks committed in broad daylight are left unpunished, this Council must reflect on the signals we are sending on impunity. There must be consistency if we are to ensure credibility,” he said.
“We hope that reason would prevail and people, first of all, would not arbitrarily or politically block,” Jaishankar said, underlining that the message is that this is “not inter-state politics which we are talking about.”
“We are trying to get across our message that terrorism is not political. It should not be used as a political tool, its consequences should not be made political.
If you go into the UN and say does everybody consider terrorism a common threat, everybody will say yes. So we are saying well, if that’s what your position is, then why don’t your policies and your actions follow up on it,” he said.
(AP) — A party with neo-fascist roots won the most votes in Italy’s national election, setting the stage for talks to form the country’s first far right-led government since World War II, with Giorgia Meloni at the helm as Italy’s first female premier, media reports stated.
Italy’s lurch to the far right immediately shifted Europe’s geopolitics, placing Meloni’s euroskeptic Brothers of Italy in a position to lead a founding member of the European Union and its third-largest economy. Italy’s left warned of “dark days” ahead and vowed to keep Italy in the heart of Europe.
Right-wing leaders across Europe immediately hailed 45-year-old Meloni’s victory as sending a historic, nationalist message to Brussels. It followed a right-wing victory in Sweden and recent gains by the far-right in France and Spain.
Still, turnout in the Italian election Sunday was a historic low of 64%, and pollsters suggested voters stayed home in protest, disenchanted by the backroom deals that had created the country’s last three governments and the mash-up of parties in outgoing Premier Mario Draghi’s national unity government.
By contrast, Meloni was viewed as a new face in the merry-go-round of Italian governments and many Italians appeared to be voting for change, analysts said.
The victory of Meloni’s just 10-year-old Brothers of Italy was more about Italian dissatisfaction with the decades-long status quo than any surge in neo-fascist or far-right sentiment, said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs.
“I would say the main reason why a big chunk of (voters) … will vote for this party is simply because it’s the new kid on the block,” she said.
The election’s sharp swing to the right, “confirms that the Italian electorate remains fickle,″ said London-based political analyst Wolfango Piccoli, noting that an estimated 30% of voters went for a different party than their choice in 2018 elections.
“If we are called to govern this nation, we will do it for everyone. We will do it for all Italians and we will do it with the aim of uniting the people,” said. “shechose us. We will not betray it.”
Near-final results showed the center-right coalition netting 44% of the parliamentary vote, with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy snatching 26% in its biggest win in its decade-long meteoric rise. Her coalition partners divided up the remainder, with the anti-immigrant League party led by Matteo Salvini winning 9% and Forza Italia of ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi taking around 8% of the vote.
The center-left Democratic Party and its allies had around 26% support, while the populist 5-Star Movement — which had been the biggest vote-getter in the 2018 parliamentary election — saw its share of the vote halved to 15%.
While the center-right was the clear winner, the formation of a government is still weeks away and will involve consultations among party leaders and with President Sergio Mattarella. In the meantime, Draghi remains in a caretaker role.
The elections, which took place six months early after Draghi’s government collapsed, came at a crucial time for Europe as it faces Russia’s war in Ukraine and related soaring energy costs that have hit ordinary Italians as well as industry.
A Meloni-led government is largely expected to follow Italy’s current foreign policy, including her pro-NATO stance and strong support for supplying Ukraine with weapons to defend itself against Russia’s invasion, even as her coalition allies take a different tone.
Both Berlusconi and Salvini have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. While both have distanced themselves from his invasion of Ukraine, Salvini has warned that EU sanctions against Moscow are hurting Italian industry. Berlusconi has even excused Putin’s invasion as an event foisted upon him by pro-Moscow separatists in the Donbas.
A bigger shift and one likely to cause friction with other EU nations is likely to come over migration. Meloni has called for a naval blockade to prevent migrant boats from leaving North African shores, and has proposed screening potential asylum-seekers in Africa, not Europe.
Salvini has made clear he wants the League to recapture the interior minister post, where he once imposed a tough anti-migrant policy. But he may face an internal leadership challenge, with Meloni’s party outperforming the League even in its northeastern stronghold.
On relations with the EU, analysts note that for all her euroskeptic rhetoric, Meloni moderated her message during the campaign and has little room to maneuver, given the economic windfall Italy is receiving from Brussels in coronavirus recovery funds. Italy secured 191.5 billion euros, the biggest chunk of the EU’s 750 billion-euro recovery package, and is bound by certain reform and investment milestones to receive it all.
That said, Meloni has criticized the EU’s recent recommendation to suspend 7.5 billion euros in funding to Hungary over concerns about democratic backsliding, defending autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban as the elected leader in a democratic system.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen praised Meloni for having “resisted the threats of an anti-democratic and arrogant European Union.”
Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox opposition party, tweeted that Meloni “has shown the way for a proud and free Europe of sovereign nations that can cooperate on behalf of everybody’s security and prosperity.”
Meloni is chair of the right-wing European Conservative and Reformist group in the European Parliament, which includes her Brothers of Italy, Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice Party, Spain’s far-right Vox and the right-wing Sweden Democrats, which just won big there on a platform of cracking down on crime and limiting immigration.
“The trend that emerged two weeks ago in Sweden was confirmed in Italy,” acknowledged Democratic Party leader Enrico Letta, calling Monday a “sad day for Italy, for Europe.”
“We expect dark days. We fought in every way to avoid this outcome,″ Letta said at a somber news conference. “(The Democratic Party) will not allow Italy to leave the heart of Europe.”
Thomas Christiansen, professor of political science at Rome’s Luiss University and the executive editor of the Journal of European Integration, noted that Italy has a tradition of pursuing a consistent foreign and European policy that is bigger than individual party interests.
“Whatever Meloni might be up to will have to be moderated by her coalition partners and indeed with the established consensus of Italian foreign policy,” Christiansen said.
The “abrupt and unheralded change” in India’s stand on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as reflected in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “public rebuke” of Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week, has been heard in official Washington DC with some relief and satisfaction.
Prime Minister Modi made it “clear to Putin’s face that the invasion is wrong”, said Ro Khanna, an Indian American lawmaker who has been critical of India’s refusal to condemn the invasion. Speaking at a community event on Wednesday, he went on to suggest Modi could also help in a “peaceful resolution and a ceasefire”.
Earlier the same day in New York, a senior White House official pointed to the new Indian position as testimony to the Biden administration’s strategy of just laying out the facts on Ukraine for other countries to see and judge for themselves instead of forcing them to change their stand.
“The US strategy has borne fruit insofar as you are seeing increasing signs of countries that did abstain, to include countries like India speaking out in a different way, including directly in front of Putin,” the official said. “And, you know, we’d like to see more than that, obviously, in the days ahead.”
India was among 34 countries that abstained in an UN general assembly vote in March that deplored Russia for invading Ukraine. China had also abstained.
New Delhi came under significant pressure from the US and its western allies to condemn the invasion and either stop buying Russian oil or not ramp it up, as it would enable Moscow to withstand the economic sanctions imposed on it to force it to end the war and leave Ukraine.
India did neither. Until last week. “Today’s era is not of war,” Prime Minister Modi told Putin in public remarks ahead of their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. That went much further than India’s expression of ‘grave concern’ over the killing of civilians in Ukraine’s Bucha, and call for respecting the UN charter that protects the sovereignty and integrity of all member nations.
US frustration with India’s refusal to condemn Russia and stop oil from it, had led to a rather unfortunate outburst from a senior White House official sent to New Delhi for these talks. He had warned India of “consequences”.
“I’ve been clear about India, and I think India ought to be condemning Putin and India ought not to be getting oil from Russia or China. We ought to rally the world to isolate Putin,” Khanna said on Fox News in days after the UN general assembly vote.
Khanna had gone on to say that it was time for India to choose between the US and Russia. “First, India should condemn Putin in the UN for the blatant human rights violations. Second, they need to realise, they have to pick sides,” he said, adding, “We, the United States, were with them when China invaded India. Putin wasn’t there. And it’s time for them to buy weapons from the United States, not Russia. We’ve got to look at how we can facilitate that and make that easier. We need India as an ally ultimately to contain China.” (IANS)
As the months-long Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to rage on, India on Saturday, September 24, 2022 told the United Nations General Assembly that it is on the side of peace and that it will remain firmly there. Speaking at the General Debate of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that India is on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles.
“As the Ukraine conflict continues to rage, we are often asked whose side we are on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there,” he said. “We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles. We are on the side that calls for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way out. We are on the side of those struggling to make ends meet, even as they stare at the escalating costs of food, of fuel and fertilizers,” Jaishankar added.
He also said that it is in our collective interest to work constructively, both within the United Nations and outside, in finding an “early resolution” to this conflict. In another note, Jaishankar has left the door open for a possible role for India in mediating the Ukraine-Russia war. Mexico proposed last week at the UN Security Council that a committee of Heads of state and government, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pope Francis, could help UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres end the war.
ate of the Anglican Communion. In a
During and after the 2008 global financial crisis, the G20’s coordinated efforts helped tamp down panic and restore economic growth.
Iran’s security forces have dispersed gatherings in that country with live ammunition and tear gas, killing over 200 people, including teenage girls, according to rights groups.
Sunak is the fifth British prime minister in six years, the third in less than two months. He is Britain’s first leader of South Asian descent, its first Hindu prime minister, and the nation’s first leader of color. He is the youngest prime minister of modern times.
Xi says “the world system is broken and China has answers,” said William Callahan of the London School of Economics. “More and more, Xi Jinping is talking about the Chinese style as a universal model of the world order, which goes back to a Cold War kind of conflict.”
“This decision is a historic one and shows, once again, the diversity and talent of our party,” Ms Mordaunt said in a statement as she withdrew from the race just minutes before the winner was due to be announced. “Rishi has my full support.”
Bronwen Maddox, the chief executive of the London-based think tank Chatham House, says that one silver lining amid all the chaos of recent weeks is that it “has forced someone with economic competence to the top of the Conservative field, and it has also forced Labour, the main opposition party, to put together a platform based on a claim to financial coherence, competence, things that Labor hasn’t always been associated with in the past.”
While some have resented XI’s trampling on what few freedoms Chinese citizens still enjoyed under the one party state, others say China’s various and acute challenges require that a “strong leader is needed to keep at bay the recipes for chaos and dysfunction,” Torigian said.
“We must not let the years erase the memory of the millions who were massacred. Recognizing the genocide strengthens the historical record, educates our fellow Americans, and lets would-be perpetrators know such crimes will not be tolerated or forgotten,” he added.
The UN resolution calls on the international community not to recognize any of Russia’s annexation claims and demands its “immediate reversal”. It welcomes and “expresses its strong support” for efforts to de-escalate the conflict through negotiation. 
China abstained on Wednesday because it did not believe the resolution will be helpful, China’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Geng Shuang said. “Any action taken by the General Assembly should be conducive to the de-escalation of the situation, to be conducive to the early resumption of dialogue and should be conducive to the promotion of a political solution to this crisis,” he said.
Western policymakers, however, will have to reckon with the factors that could limit the speed and extent of Indian alignment with countries such as the United States against China. For one, India prioritizes Chinese threats differently than do its partners. Even as the latter focus on maritime challenges in the Indo-Pacific, India will devote considerable attention and resources to meeting the Chinese and Pakistani challenge at its border. This continental imperative will shape India’s approach to other Indo-Pacific issues. For instance, New Delhi remains cautious about making statements about Taiwan with other countries out of a concern that they could provoke China into putting more pressure on the border or on restive Indian regions such as Kashmir and in the northeast of the country. Indian officials also do not want China to see their border dispute through the lens of U.S.-Chinese competition; Beijing’s decision to go to war with India in 1962 was motivated by its sense that New Delhi and Washington were colluding to undermine Chinese interests in Tibet.
“The attitude of Russians toward Ukrainian culture heritage is a war crime,” he said. 
Another watershed moment was the adoption in 2016 of the so-called foreign NGO law, which imposed restrictions and gave police wide-ranging powers over overseas NGOs operating in the country.
However, NY Times reported that “After India’s prime minister said that now is not the time for war, an increasingly isolated Mr. Putin threatened “more serious” actions in Ukraine while insisting he was ready for talks.”
The prime minister underlined that endangerment of nuclear facilities could have far-reaching and catastrophic consequences for public health and the environment, the statement said.
Referring to Modi’s remark to Putin on the sidelines of the SCO Summit in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand that “today’s era is not an era of war”, Kamboj said New Delhi sincerely hopes for an early resumption of peace talks to bring about an immediate ceasefire and resolution of the conflict.
In a deeply divided environment, India knows that the cold calculus of diplomacy needs to be based on realism, pragmatism, and perceptions. Human behaviour is largely a derivative of perceptions, which, in turn, are based on experiential evidence. This, in turn, impacts expectations and finally, output.
On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said consultations were ongoing regarding the borders of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
And of the significance of India’s 75th anniversary of Independence, he said India’s people are “rejuvenating a society pillaged by centuries of foreign attacks and colonialism” — packing in a pointed reference to also invasions from around the region.
