A source in North Pyongan province, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said officers with the Ministry of State Security in Uiju County near the border with China were issued the new devices last week.

“These portable detectors are designed to track down North Koreans who use Chinese mobile phones to contact family members in South Korea,” the source said.

The brand labels of the devices have been removed and the country of origin is unclear, but the source described them as “high-performance tools with a wide detection range and fast signal capture.”

Although smartphones are available in North Korea, the government maintains strict domestic surveillance by operating a nationwide intranet and keeping the domestic and international phone networks completely separate. For ordinary citizens, making an international call is nearly impossible.

Legal international calls must go through government-monitored operators, allowing authorities to eavesdrop easily. Another exception is the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, where direct international dialing is permitted—but only for foreigners and elite officials.

Because of these restrictions, many North Koreans are unable to contact relatives who live abroad or have defected. In desperation, some residents in border regions pay steep fees to brokers to use Chinese mobile networks—usually while hiding in mountainous areas to avoid detection.

But such calls are risky. Those caught making unauthorized international calls face harsh punishment, including charges of treason and incarceration in labor camps.

Border security

Since supreme leader Kim Jong Un came to power, North Korea has ramped up border security, importing large, German-made radio signal detectors to block the inflow of outside information and prevent leaks of internal news, the source said.

Theoretically, radio signal detectors can identify the source of unauthorized communications by tracing the electromagnetic waves emitted during phone calls. Once a signal is detected, security agents can triangulate the location and track down the user.

In response to government surveillance, many residents have resorted to climbing hills or hiding in remote mountainous areas to make calls via Chinese mobile networks. The new detection devices could make such calls increasingly risky.

(Ed Jones/AFP)

The sources who spoke to RFA heard about the new handheld detectors from border guards and say the devices are a major upgrade in both speed and range.

“These are not the same detectors used in previous years,” said the source from North Pyongan. “They can pinpoint the origin of a call far more quickly and across a broader area.”

“The new handheld detectors can be used while moving, and that has people very worried,” the source added.

A second source in the province said that surveillance along the border has intensified, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, when North Korea shut down cross-border travel and commerce.

“Security cameras have been installed throughout the border zone. Locals say surveillance is tighter than ever before,” the source said.

The source added that authorities are especially targeting phone calls with relatives who have resettled in South Korea.

“Anyone caught talking about rice prices with family in the South is labeled a spy,” the source said. “The old detection systems couldn’t always pick up these calls because of their limited range.”

Anti-state crimes

Acts such as defection, smuggling, or leaking internal information to the outside world are classified as anti-state crimes in North Korea.

According to a 2024 report by the Korea Institute for National Unification, a think tank funded by the South Korean government, North Korean authorities strictly monitor and harshly punish the possession and use of Chinese mobile phones, typically sentencing offenders to reform through labor or detention in labor training camps. The report also notes that in some cases, individuals who used Chinese phones to contact South Korea were classified as political criminals and imprisoned in political prison camps.

The sources told RFA that the government has distributed the new portable detectors to State Security officials in major border areas, including the city of Sinuiju, which lies opposite the Chinese city of Dandong, the main conduit for China-North Korea commerce.

“Agents in plain clothes now patrol residential neighborhoods and wooded hillsides before dawn, carrying the devices in their pockets to scan for illegal phone signals,” the second source said.

Previously, authorities could only detect unauthorized calls that lasted more than five minutes. The new handheld detectors can identify calls as short as one minute, the source added.

Additional reporting by Jaewoo Park. Edited by Sungwon Yang and Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Hyemin Son for RFA Korean.

Photograph Source: Gotfryd, Bernard – Public Domain

This week’s lesson in journalistic ethics:

A good and honorable journalist who receives leaked information about illegal, unconstitutional, and unforgivable acts of war committed by the US government must act quickly to

1) close the leak before he learns anything more,

2) alert the world about the “security breach,” and

3) report about it in a way that makes the leak into the sole point of interest, and treats the act of war itself like a minor thing on the side.

At that point, the “anti-Trump” opposition party can step in to decry and condemn the alleged breach in communications security, without needing to dwell even for a moment on the war crimes, or the unconstitutionality of the undeclared war, or the murdered victims numbering in the dozens or hundreds.

Some things are designed and released as propaganda operations by one or another group with an interest. Other things converge out of incidental parts in ways that look like designed psyops. Both the former and the latter make us say things like, “You can’t make this shit up,” or “If this was a Hollywood script it would be rejected, it’s too on-the-nose.”

Here are three possibilities, three scenarios for what happened:

First, the Waltz-Goldberg Signal leak is the accident it appears to be, as I believe it is. The story is that the national security advisor, Waltz, accidentally included a likely-frequent contact, the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, in a chat meant for the political big wheels of Trump’s war junta only: Hegseth, Vance, Gabbard, Ratfcliffe, et al. Contrary to the impression we’ve been given, the transcript of the chat does not indicate the chat was operationally part of planning or ordering the latest mass-murder attack on Yemen, which killed 50-100 civilians. Rather, it begins with Hegseth informing a group of the regime’s major security officials (and the accidental extra man, who stays silent) that the attack has been ordered. They share their impressions. Vance’s are the most extended; he presents himself as upset that the US is paying for this action and not the “Europeans,” whose vital interests it supposedly serves. Once they hear that the bombs are dropping, they do some congratulatory back-slapping and God-thanking, with emojis.

A second possibility is that this could have been arranged as an intentional leak by one or more of the characters in the chat group itself, for example as a way of sharing their concerns about the US bearing the costs of the war (in dollars, not in human lives) and broadcasting their ideology about freeloading Europeans. (One possible motive might have been opposite that idea: that the leak puts pressure on Vance for expressing reservations about Trump’s attack order.) In any case, intended or not, the leak will serve to demonstrate the absolute impunity of all of the bastards involved, and that may be motive enough. Without a doubt, this “scandal” will raise up much of that good old Shakespearean “sound and fury” but generate no negative legal or political consequences for the chatterers and leakers. Nowadays that seems always to be the case with anything given a “-gate” suffix. In the end, it signifies nothing.

Or, third, and to me least likely, this could have been a move orchestrated by an outside party, e.g. at a place like NSA or other institutions where people have the means to fuck around with comms via Signal. Recall that Signal is favored by the CIA as a preferred means of “secure” communications for foreign dissidents and their own agents. If this was an act of sabotage or a psychological operation of some kind by elements inside the government but outside the chat group, Goldberg would no longer be the accidental recipient of the leak, but would have been chosen as such (whether he knew it or not). Returning to the second scenario, if this was an intentional leak by someone inside the chat group, again the choice of Goldberg would no longer be an accident. But even if the leak was strictly an accident by Waltz, as per official story and as seems likeliest, it’s probably not a random matter that Goldberg was on a short list of those most likely to accidentally receive such a leak. Why? Who is this guy? As a young man, the “good and honorable journalist” in our story, a US citizen, did a stint with the Israeli Defense Forces at a concentration camp, guarding Palestinian prisoners. W know this because he published an article about it. Going on to become a writer at The Atlantic, he distinguished himself as a major perpetrator of the 2002 “WMD” propaganda operation, a vast multi-track complex of lies by multiple intelligence services and friendly big-name journalists about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” held by the ruling regime in Iraq. This was essential in preparing the Bush regime’s 2003 unprovoked aggressive invasion. Goldberg remained a reliable producer of propaganda in the service of US and Israeli military-intel needs, which may be the reason why he is on Waltz’s list of Signal contacts in the first place. He was not punished and his career did not suffer from any of this; rather he was ascended to the job of Atlantic editor-in-chief. Eventually, this month, Goldberg was included, by accident or by intent, in the Signal Chat of Perfidy. Again, I lean to the the official rendering, as admitted by the White House and as is being “investigated” or condemned by the Democrats. The current pressure in all of our bifurcated media is for all of us to put out or adopt a limited number of prefabricated tropes and narratives every day. This is like a weather condition, and it is so powerful that random elements constantly converge to produce unlikely stories in ways that seem planned and convenient.

And now we know what Goldberg did when he had the leak delivered to him. What would Daniel Ellsberg have done?

Young people, return with me to a time, in the late 1960s, when xerox was a verb. The Pentagon Papers were literally typed on paper, and if you wanted copies, you needed to copy or “xerox” them. Even the best copiers were very slow.

The papers were a Pentagon-commissioned secret history for insiders, running thousands of pages, about the US involvement in the Indochina wars since 1945. Through many volumes the papers demonstrated, without any doubt, that the government had for decades continuously lied to the American public about the real reasons for the US involvement and escalating military actions in Vietnam. Given the mounting casualties (mostly the Americanm ones, although they were outnumbered by the Vietnamese dead by 20:1), and given the increasing opposition to the war among Americans and US soldiers, this was potentially explosive material.

Ellsberg had access to the papers, as a top consultant to the Pentagon who had quietly come to understand that the United States was engaged in great and unforgivable crimes. He sat on the papers for many months, using the time to make copies of the entire work. Only then did he begin to release the papers to the press and politicians, going into hiding and eluding the authorities until all of the material could be published and entered into the Congressional record. Finally, he turned himself in. The extremely serious criminal case against him was thrown out of court due to prejudicial actions by the Nixon administration.

The result of the exposure of the Pentagon papers was to help build domestic and international pressure leading to the end of the criminal US invasions of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which caused the deaths of an estimated minimum of two million people living in those countries. Indirectly, it also set off a chain of ill-advised defensive reactions from the Nixon administration that generated the only “-gate” scandal that ever had consequences: that of Watergate.

No danger today from “honorable journalists.”

The post What Would Daniel Ellsberg Have Done? Thoughts On The Waltz-Goldberg Yemen War Signal Leak appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicholas Levis.

The clarity: US president Donald Trump had supposedly given the “green light” for US military strikes on Yemen, a country upon which Congress has not declared war.

At 11:44 a.m. on March 15, someone purporting to be US Secretary of Defense posted a “TEAM UPDATE” to the Signal chat, revealing (Goldberg claims)  “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen.” Two hours later, as predicted in the “TEAM UPDATE,” US strikes on Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, began.

Goldberg’s disclosures, after the fact, triggered a combination of “circle the wagons, deny everything” and “condemnation of lax security” responses from within the administration.

Members of Congress are already calling for hearings. Not hearings on the illegal planning and execution of an undeclared war, just hearings on how a journalist got looped into sensitive internal discussions over an application not seemingly approved for use by government actors.

But let’s rewind to something just as important as the illegal US war on Yemen or lax opsec by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and other top administration officials: Donald Trump’s responsibility for the whole mess.

Trump and friends are all-in on the “unitary executive” theory, under which the president can do pretty much anything he wants because, per Article II of the US Constitution. “the executive Power shall be vested” in his office.

Over time, presidents have increasingly exploited the “unitary executive” theory to build a more “imperial” presidency. Congress, and (if Trump has his way) the courts find themselves relegated to an advisory capacity, especially but not only on foreign policy. Presidents rule as kings, using executive orders and declarations of emergency to have everything their way.

The theory and its results aren’t Trump’s inventions. He’s just building on past practice. If, as some claim, Trump aims for checkmate  and “the end of “American democracy,” the initial pawn to king 4 move was probably Harry Truman’s order for US military intervention in Korea in 1950. Congress quickly backed Truman’s play with funding, letting him get away with war by presidential order rather than congressional declaration … and it’s been a downhill roll ever since.

There’s another side to the “unitary executive” coin, though. If the president’s “executive power” extends so far, so does the president’s responsibility for both the details and the consequences. The Constitution, after all, also charges the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Apart from Goldberg, the participants in the alleged Signal chat all seem to have been chosen  by Trump — vice-president JD Vance as his running mate, the cabinet secretaries as his nominees.

If they messed up, Trump messed up. And just as he should hold them accountable, Congress should hold him accountable.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Congress to notice the emperor’s unclothed state.

The post Mixed Signal: The Other Side of the “Unitary Executive” Coin appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

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On a frigid winter morning in 2022, a stranger knocked on the door of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during Shabbat service.

Soon after he was invited in for tea, the visitor pulled out a pistol and demanded the release of an al-Qaida-linked detainee from a nearby federal prison, seizing as hostages a rabbi and three worshipers. The standoff lasted 10 hours until the rabbi, drawing on extensive security training, hurled a chair at the assailant. The hostages escaped.

“We are alive today because of that education,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said after the attack.

The averted tragedy at Congregation Beth Israel is cited as a success story for the largely unseen prevention work federal authorities have relied on for years in the fight to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings. The government weaves together partnerships with academic researchers and community groups across the country as part of a strategy for addressing violent extremism as a public health concern.

A specialized intervention team at Boston Children’s Hospital treats young patients — some referred by the FBI — who show signs of disturbing, violent behavior. Eradicate Hate, a national prevention umbrella group, says one of its trainees helped thwart a school shooting in California last year by reporting a gun in a fellow student’s backpack. In other programs, counselors guide neo-Nazis out of the white-power movement or help families of Islamist extremists undo the effects of violent propaganda.

The throughline for this work is federal funding — a reliance on grants that are rapidly disappearing as the Trump administration guts billions in spending.

Tens of millions of dollars slated for violence prevention have been cut or are frozen pending review as President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency steamrolls the national security sector. Barring action from Congress or the courts, counterterrorism professionals say, the White House appears poised to end the government’s backing of prevention work on urgent threats.

“This is the government getting out of the terrorism business,” said one federal grant recipient who was ordered this week to cease work on projects including a database used by law enforcement agencies to assess threats.

This account is drawn from interviews with nearly two dozen current and former national security personnel, federally funded researchers and nonprofit grant recipients. Except in a few cases, they spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

Dozens of academic and nonprofit programs that rely on grants from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other agencies are in crisis mode, mirroring the uncertainty of other parts of the government amid Trump’s seismic reorganization.

“We’re on a precipice,” said the leader of a large nonprofit that has received multiple federal grants and worked with Democratic and Republican administrations on prevention campaigns.

Program leaders describe a chilling new operating environment. Scholars of white supremacist violence — which the FBI for years has described as a main driver of domestic terrorism — wonder how they’ll be able to continue tracking the threat without running afoul of the administration’s ban on terms related to race and racism.

The training the rabbi credits with saving his Texas synagogue in 2022 came from a broader community initiative whose federal funding is in limbo. One imperiled effort, FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, has helped Jewish institutions across the country install security cameras, train staff and add protective barriers, according to the nonprofit Secure Community Network, which gives security advice and monitors threats to Jewish communities nationwide.

In July 2023, access-control doors acquired through the grant program prevented a gunman from entering Margolin Hebrew Academy in Memphis. In 2021, when gunfire struck the Jewish Family Service offices in Denver, grant-funded protective window film stopped bullets from penetrating the building.

“These are not hypothetical scenarios, they are real examples of how NSGP funds prevent injuries and deaths,” Michael Masters, director of the Secure Community Network, wrote this month in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post calling for continued funding of the program.

Now the security grants program has been shelved as authorities and Jewish groups warn of rising antisemitism. The generous reading, one Jewish program leader said, is that the funds were inadvertently swept up in DOGE cuts. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Jewish groups and, as one of his first acts in office, signed an executive order promising to tackle antisemitism.

Still, the freeze on grants for synagogue protections has revived talk of finding new, more independent funding streams.

Throughout Jewish history, the program director said, “we’ve learned you need a Plan B.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

For more than two decades, the federal government has invested tens of millions of dollars in prevention work and academic research with the goal of intervening in the crucial window known as “left of boom” — before an attack occurs.

The projects are diffuse, spread across several agencies, but the government’s central clearinghouse is at Homeland Security in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, often called CP3. The office houses a grant program that since 2020 has awarded nearly $90 million to community groups and law enforcement agencies working at the local level to prevent terrorism and targeted violence such as mass shootings.

These days, CP3 is imploding. Nearly 20% of its workforce was cut through the dismissal of probationary employees March 3. CP3 Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran who had fiercely defended the office’s achievements in LinkedIn posts in recent weeks, resigned the same night.

“It is a small act of quiet protest, and an act of immense respect I have for them and for our team,” Braniff wrote in a departing message to staff that was obtained by ProPublica. In the note, he called the employees “wrongfully terminated.”

Some of this year’s CP3 grant recipients say they have no idea whether their funding will continue. One awardee said the team is looking at nightmare scenarios of laying off staff and paring operations to the bone.

“Everybody’s trying to survive,” the grantee said. “It feels like this is a tsunami and you don’t know how it’s going to hit you.”

Current and former DHS officials say they don’t expect the prevention mission to continue in any meaningful way, signaling the end to an effort that had endured through early missteps and criticism from the left and right.

The prevention mission evolved from the post-9/11 growth of a field known as countering violent extremism, or CVE. In early CVE efforts, serious scholars of militant movements jostled for funding alongside pseudo-scientists claiming to have discovered predictors of radicalization. CVE results typically weren’t measurable, allowing for inflated promises of success — “snake oil,” as one researcher put it.

Worse, some CVE programs billed as community partnerships to prevent extremism backfired and led to mistrust that persists today. Muslim advocacy groups were incensed by the government’s targeting of their communities for deradicalization programs, blaming CVE for stigmatizing law-abiding families and contributing to anti-Muslim hostility. Among the most influential Muslim advocacy groups, it is still taboo to accept funding from Homeland Security.

Defenders of CP3, which launched in 2021 from an earlier incarnation, insist that the old tactics based on profiling are gone. They also say there are now more stringent metrics to gauge effectiveness. CP3’s 2024 report to Congress listed more than 1,000 interventions since 2020, cases where prevention workers stepped in with services to dissuade individuals from violence.

The probationary employees who were dismissed this month represented the future of CP3’s public health approach to curbing violence, say current and former DHS officials. They were terminated by email in boilerplate language about poor performance, a detail that infuriated colleagues who viewed them as accomplished social workers and public health professionals.

There were no consultations with administration officials or DOGE — just the ax, said one DHS source with knowledge of the CP3 cuts. Promised exemptions for national security personnel apparently didn’t apply as Trump’s Homeland Security agenda shrinks to a single issue.

“The vibe is: How to use DHS to go after migrants, immigrants. That is the vibe, that is the only vibe, there is no other vibe,” the source said. “It’s wild — it’s as if the rest of the department doesn’t exist.”

This week, with scant warning, Homeland Security cut around $20 million for more than two dozen programs from another wing of DHS, including efforts aimed at stopping terrorist attacks and school shooters.

A Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed “sweeping cuts and reforms” aimed at eliminating waste but did not address questions about specific programs. DHS “remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships,” the statement said.

One grant recipient said they were told by a Homeland Security liaison that targeted programs were located in places named on a Fox News list of “sanctuary states” that have resisted or refused cooperation with the government’s deportation campaign. The grantee’s project was given less than an hour to submit outstanding expenses before the shutdown.

The orders were so sudden that even some officials within the government had trouble coming up with language to justify the termination notices. They said they were given no explanation for how the targeted programs were in violation of the president’s executive orders.

“I just don’t believe this is in any way legal,” said one official with knowledge of the cuts.

Cuts are reshaping government across the board, but perhaps nowhere more jarringly than in the counterterrorism apparatus. The administration started dismantling it when the president granted clemency to nearly 1,600 defendants charged in connection with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The pardons overturned what the Justice Department had celebrated as a watershed victory in the fight against domestic terrorism.

Senior FBI officials with terrorism expertise have left or are being forced out in the purge of personnel involved in the Jan. 6 investigation. In other cases, agents working terrorism cases have been moved to Homeland Security to help with Trump’s mass deportation effort, a resource shift that runs counter to the government’s own threat assessments showing homegrown militants as the more urgent priority. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Without research backing up the enforcement arm of counterterrorism, analysts and officials say, the government lacks the capacity to evaluate rapidly evolving homegrown threats.

Researchers are getting whiplash as grant dollars are frozen and unfrozen. Even if they win temporary relief, the prospect of getting new federal funding in the next four years is minimal. They described pressure to self-censor or tailor research narrowly to MAGA interests in far-left extremism and Islamist militants.

“What happens when you’re self-silencing? What happens if people just stop thinking they should propose something because it’s ‘too risky?’” said one extremism scholar who has advised senior officials and received federal funding. “A lot of ideas that could be used to prevent all kinds of social harms, including terrorism, could get tossed.”

Among the projects at risk is a national compilation of threats to public officials, including assassination attempts against Trump; research on the violent misogyny that floods social media platforms; a long-term study of far-right extremists who are attempting to disengage from hate movements. The studies are underway at research centers and university labs that, in some cases, are funded almost entirely by Homeland Security. A stop-work order could disrupt sensitive projects midstream or remove findings from public view.

“There are both national security and public safety implications for not continuing to study these very complicated problems,” said Pete Simi, a criminologist at Chapman University in California who has federally funded projects that could be cut.

One project never got off the ground before work was suspended.

Six months ago, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, announced the Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism Research Center of Excellence as a new hub for “understanding the phenomenon” of extremist violence.

Work was scheduled to start in January. The website has since disappeared and the future of the center is in limbo.

Other prevention initiatives in jeopardy at the Justice Department include grant programs related to hate crimes training, which has been in demand with recent unrest on college campuses. In the first weeks of the Trump administration, grant recipients heard a freeze was coming and rushed to withdraw remaining funds. Grant officers suggested work should cease, too, until directives come from the new leadership.

Anne Speckhard, a researcher who has interviewed dozens of militants and works closely with federal counterterrorism agencies, pushed back. She had around 200 people signed up for a training that was scheduled for days after the first funding freeze. Slides for the presentation had been approved, but Speckhard said she wasn’t getting clear answers from the grant office about how to proceed. She decided to go for it.

“I think the expected response was, ‘You’ll just stop working, and you’ll wait and see,’ and that’s not me,” said Speckhard, whose International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism receives U.S. funding along with backing from Qatar and private donations.

As the virtual training began, Speckhard and her team addressed the murkiness of the Justice Department’s support in a moment that drew laughter from the crowd of law enforcement officers and university administrators.

“We said, ‘We think this is a DOJ-sponsored training, and we want to thank them for their sponsorship,’” Speckhard said. “‘But we’re not sure.’”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Hannah Allam.

Dr. Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, writes in a new blog that hotter, drier conditions, coupled with gusty winds, are contributing to these winter fires. She notes that state and federal policymakers should ensure that adequate funding and resources are available to deal with wildfires so fire-damaged communities can recover.

“The Trump administration’s mass layoffs of thousands of forest service employees, combined with federal funding freezes that affect wildfire mitigation and prevention projects, are their own red flag warnings going into this year’s fire season,” writes Cleetus. “Across the board, indiscriminately cutting staff and budgets at agencies such as NOAA, USDA and FEMA that contribute to predictive data and wildfire risk mapping, firefighting, and disaster response and recovery will only make things more unsafe for everyone.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“It is remarkably dangerous to treat economic policy like a reality TV show. This jobs report could signal a rapid turn in the labor market. We went from perhaps the strongest labor market in half a century to one marked by uncertainty in almost every sector. While we are not likely to pick up much of the effect of the DOGE cuts, we should see some impact, particularly on the hiring side. Many businesses have put hiring plans on hold; this is especially true in the healthcare sector, but we could see similar trends with state and local governments, universities, and other sectors that rely on federal support. It is not out of the question for job growth to be close to zero in February, and we may also see a modest uptick in the unemployment rate.”

Baker’s full analysis appears below. Read it online here.

February 2025 Jobs Preview: What to Expect in the Jobs Report

The February employment report is the first of the Trump administration. While we are not likely to pick up much of the effect of the DOGE cuts, we should see some impact. Remember, the reference period is the week/pay period that includes the 12th. This is before most of the firings went into effect, and there was no noticeable uptick in the unemployment insurance claims at that point (although we did see an uptick later in the month).

However, we are likely to see an effect on the hiring side. Many businesses have put hiring plans on hold, as they wait to see what DOGE will try to cut and what the courts will uphold. This is especially the case in the healthcare sector, which had been the largest source of job growth in the recovery, averaging over 50,000 new jobs a month in the last year. A large portion of the funding for hospitals, doctors’ fees, and nursing homes comes from Medicaid and other programs that may be in DOGE’s crosshairs. As a result, we can expect employers in the sector to be very cautious in taking on new workers.

There is a similar story with state and local governments, which also were a leading source of job growth in the last year. They are concerned that they will not be seeing federal grants that had been promised. Universities are also looking at large cutbacks in federal support and feel the need to be cautious about hiring.

With the key sectors supporting job growth sharply slowing hiring, job growth is likely to be close to zero in February. This may also lead to a modest uptick in the unemployment rate, as people entering the labor force or losing jobs find themselves unable to find new ones. The unemployment rate may tick up to 4.1 percent, or even 4.2 percent.

Sharp Slowing in Immigrant Employment

The new population controls make it difficult to do year-over-year comparisons (the data are not seasonally adjusted) of employment of immigrants, but it is possible to do a crude workaround to get ballpark numbers. If we assume that the increase in the number of people identified as Hispanic or Asian added by the population controls are immigrants, and we apply the employment-to-population ratio for immigrants to this number, we can get a rough estimate of the increase in employment that is due to the population controls.

The new population controls added a total of 2,121,000 people identified as either Hispanic or Asian. Applying the 63.0 percent employment-to-population ratio to this number implies that it added 1,336,000 to the employment number for non-native workers in January. Correcting for this, employment of non-native workers would have been 727,000 higher in January 2025 than in January 2024. The year-over-year increase had been well over 1,000,000 for most months in 2024, peaking in February at 1,694,000.

With this adjustment, the year-over-year figure is likely to show a far smaller increase in February, due both to Trump’s deportation threats and also the sharp slowing in immigration by the change in the Biden administration’s policy last June.

Wage Growth Could Slow

The strong labor market of the Biden years led to healthy wage growth, which was translating into strong real wage growth in the last year and a half as inflation slowed. The unemployment rate will still be low in February, even if there is a modest uptick, but workers fearful about future job prospects may be reluctant to push for pay increases. The monthly data on wages are erratic, but it is likely we will see some evidence of slowing wage growth in the February report.

Share of Unemployment Due to Voluntary Quits

One of the measures reflecting workers’ confidence in the state of the labor market is their willingness to leave a job before they have a new one lined up. This measure had already been relatively low given the near 4.0 percent unemployment rates we have been seeing, but that could reflect the fact that workers were relatively satisfied with their jobs after massive shifting in 2021-2023. We may see a notable fall in this number from the 13.2 percent share in January.

Hours and Productivity

The index of aggregate weekly hours fell 0.2 percent in January. This was due to a possibly weather-related (or LA fire related) reduction in the length of the average workweek. With weak employment growth, we are likely to see at best a modest increase in aggregate weekly hours in February.

This would ordinarily imply a good story for productivity growth, which has been strong since the pandemic. However, the most recent data on consumption, trade, and housing imply weak and possibly negative GDP growth for the quarter. We are still early in the quarter, but if the economy is actually shrinking, we are not likely to have a strong quarter for productivity.

Manufacturing and Construction

These highly cyclical sectors are both likely to show weakness in February. Manufacturing employment had already been trending slightly downward, losing 105,000 jobs over the last year, as high interest rates took a toll on durable goods purchases and investment.

Construction has also weakened in recent months, adding an average of just 6,000 jobs a month since September, down from 18,000 a month in the prior 12 months. Employment could turn negative in February as housing remains weak, the factory construction boom has peaked, and many projects in both the private and public sector are put on hold.

Weak Job Growth in Most Sectors

With the health care and state and local government sectors both likely showing weak growth in February, it is difficult to see what sectors can pick up the slack. Retail added a very strong 34,300 jobs in January, but this was likely a fluke of seasonal adjustment as fewer workers hired for the holiday season meant that fewer were laid off in January.

Restaurant employment may see a bounce back after being depressed by the LA fires and unusually bad weather in January. Employment in professional and technical services is likely to be weak, as many companies put hiring plans on hold. There could be a good story for the temp help sector as employers look to get additional labor without making long-term commitments.

Uncertainty Takes a Big Hit to Labor Market in February

Apart from the pandemic, most of us have probably never seen such a rapid turn in the labor market as we are likely witnessing now. We went from perhaps the strongest labor market in half a century to one marked by uncertainty in almost every sector. Perhaps we will get a clearer picture of the economy’s direction in the months ahead, but for now, much is up in the air and it is not a good environment for businesses to make plans.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

He misses the point as usual. The warrants have nothing to do with that. They are about bringing those wanted for the most grievous war crimes to justice.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak then said that the move was “deeply unhelpful”, adding: “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defence and the terrorist group Hamas.”

Even Biden was singing off the same hymn-sheet saying there is “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas” and that what’s happening in Gaza is not genocide…. a hymn of praise for Israel almost.

Of course there is no moral equivalence. As the world has witnessed, Israel’s crimes are a thousand times greater than Hamas’s and are allowed to continue without let-up, courtesy of the US and UK who dutifully carry on supplying the ordnance and weaponry. It still hasn’t penetrated enough Washington and Whitehall skulls that it is the Palestinian resistance who are exercising their lawful right to self-defence – using “armed struggle” if necessary – against Israel’s illegal military occupation, brutal 17-year blockade and decades-long murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246).

Furthermore Hamas are just as legitimate as any Israeli administration having been democratically elected under the scrutiny of international observers, a result immediately rejected at the time by the UK, Israel and the US because it didn’t happen to suit their evil purpose in the Middle East.

And why are Hamas proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK? Only because a group of Israel’s pimps and stooges among Westminster’s political elite say so. It would be interesting to take a vote on what the people who put them there actually think, now they know the horrendous situation in Gaza and the West Bank and the long history leading up to it. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to proscribe Likud, Netyanyahu’s terrorist party?

Cameron also claims it’s a mistake to draw moral equivalence because Palestine is not regarded as a state. Again, he isn’t paying attention. 146 of the 193 UN member states recognise Palestine, including Ireland, Norway and Spain who announced recognition just a few days ago. 11 of these are EU states, so what is Cameron drivelling about?

Fortunately, a cross-party group of 105 MPs and Lords has called on the UK Government “to do all it can to support the International Criminal Court” after Prime Minister Sunak’s remark that its decision to seek arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders was “deeply unhelpful”. In a letter addressed to Foreign Secretary Cameron they say “there is mounting evidence that Israel has committed clear and obvious violations of international law in Gaza and we strongly believe that those responsible must be held to account”. They call on the Government “to take a clear stance against any attempts to intimidate an independent and impartial international court…. The Court, its Prosecutor, and all its staff must be free to pursue justice without fear or favour”.

One of the organisers, MP Richard Burgon, said: “At every stage, our Government has failed to fulfil its moral duty to do everything it can to help save lives and prevent suffering in Gaza. It must not fail again. It must back the ICC in ensuring that there is no impunity for war crimes and it must stand up to those seeking to impede justice.”

Almost straightaway Sunak, in a surprise move, called a general election for 4 July. This means that MPs immediately cease being MPs but ministers continue in office until a new government is formed. For the next 6 weeks, then, Sunak’s crew continue to rule without being accountable to the House of Commons and could do a lot of damage. So this is a doubly dangerous time for our nation.

Meanwhile Cameron and his ignorant friends seem to think the Gaza war only started as recently as October 7. He plays up the release of 134 Israeli hostages when, on October 6 Israel was holding 5,200 Palestinians captive, including at least 170 children, and since then has abducted some 7,350 more. Why do we never hear from Cameron about the Palestinian hostages/prisoners?

And how many Palestinians had Israel killed before October 7? Answer: 10,651 slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to Oct 7, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.

Israel’s friends in the West like to think of Netanyahu as the leader of a Western style democracy that shares our values. Actually he’s the head of a nasty little ethnocracy with vicious apartheid policies and a 76-year record of terrorism, pursuing an extended military campaign aimed at occupying and annexing another people’s lands and resources, and showing no respect whatsoever for British values or international norms of behaviour.

So, putting aside for a moment our dislike of Hamas’s methods, shouldn’t we be asking our politicians to explain why exactly Hamas must be eliminated and the Palestinians’ homeland pulverised in the process, seeing as it is they who are under illegally military occupation and they who have the ultimate right of self-defence?

It’s easy to see where Cameron is coming from. After 3 months of genocide in Gaza, he denied Israel had broken international law. He also said it was “nonsense” to suggest that Israel intended to commit genocide. Asked if he thought Israel had a case to answer at the ICJ, he said: “No, I absolutely don’t. I think the South African action is wrong, I think it is unhelpful, I think it shouldn’t be happening…. I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack on October 7. But even if you take a different view to my view, to look at Israel, a democracy, a country with the rule of law, a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law, to say that that country, that leadership, that armed forces, that they have intent to commit genocide, I think that is nonsense, I think that is wrong.”

So says this self-declared zionist and key stooge for Israel, one of many at Westminster who are desperate to maintain the shady US/UK-Israel alliance. Do Sunak, Cameron & co really want victory for the genocidists? It seems they do. Because they’ve pledged their undying adoration and support for that rotten apartheid regime and now the world has seen it for what it really is and their position is turning sour.

On the face of it the Hamas trio — Haniyeh, Sinwar and Dief — with competent legal representation seem likely to survive the legal process. And although many are questioning why arrest warrants are being considered for them at the same time as the mega-maniac Netanyahu there is reason to hope that, if they do come to trial, a lot of bad stuff about Israel, the US and the UK will come out. The world will then be much wiser and the ‘axis of evil’ behind it all will collapse under the weight of its own lunacy.

The UK general election will likely rid us of Sunak, Cameron and the rest of the Tory nitwits. But sitting in the waiting room is Labour’s Keir Starmer, another Israel stooge. Yes, the zionists have all angles covered.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Jura was abducted from his home in Pétion-Ville on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Monday, March 18, according to news reports. That same day, gangs attacked several homes in the area, leaving at least 10 dead.

On Tuesday, Jura confirmed his kidnapping in a brief phone call with the secretary-general of the Haitian group SOS Journalists, Guy Delva. Delva told CPJ that he called Jura’s cellphone, and one of the kidnappers answered.

“I asked to speak to Jura, and he said ‘Okay’ and passed the phone to him,” Delva told CPJ. “He spoke in a calm and serious tone.” The journalist told Delva he was doing well and taking steps to get out of the situation.

The kidnappers also contacted Jura’s family, according to a post by Jean Peguy, a lawyer and former presenter of the “Moment of Truth” program on Radio Signal FM, which cited a relative of the journalist. CPJ was unable to confirm further details about the kidnapping, and messages to Peguy did not receive an immediate response.  

“We are very concerned by the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Haiti and its impact on everyone in the country, including the journalists trying to keep the public informed,” said Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “Those holding journalist Lucien Jura must release him immediately. Journalists should not be used as pawns.”

Jura is an independent commentator on current events and is considered to be one of the country’s most prominent journalists. CPJ was not able to confirm whether his work was related to his kidnapping.

Jura began his journalism career at the prominent television station Télémax and Radio Signal FM, according to Peguy’s post. Jura later served as presidential spokesman during the administration of Michel Martelly and Jovenel Moïse. Jura also published a book in 2000 about his experience in public service.

The kidnapping came amid weeks of chaos and violence in Haiti as police clashed with armed gangs seeking to consolidate their power, forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry earlier this month. Haiti has not had a president since the assassination of Moïse in 2021.

Several reporters have been injured while reporting on the latest violence, including freelancer Jean Marc Jean, who lost an eye when he was struck in the face by a tear gas canister fired by police.

At least six Haitian journalists have been murdered in direct reprisal for their work since Moise’s assassination. CPJ has also documented half a dozen kidnappings of journalists in recent months. Haiti was ranked as the world’s third-worst nation in CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, which measures where killers of journalists are most likely to go unpunished.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Russians began voting on the first day of a three-day presidential election that President Vladimir Putin is all but certain to win, extending his rule by six more years after any serious opponents were barred from running against him amid a brutal crackdown on dissent and the independent media.

The vote, which is not expected to be free and fair, is also the first major election to take place in Russia since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin, 71, who has been president or prime minister for nearly 25 years, is running against three low-profile politicians -- Liberal Democratic Party leader Leonid Slutsky, State Duma Deputy Speaker Vladislav Davankov of the New People party, and State Duma lawmaker Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party -- whose policy positions are hardly distinguishable from Putin’s.

Boris Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old anti-war politician, was rejected last month by the Russian Central Election Commission (TsIK) because of what it called invalid support signatures on his application to be registered as a candidate. He appealed, but the TsIk’s decision was upheld by Russia's Supreme Court.

"Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today," European Council President Charles Michel wrote in a sarcastic post on X, formerly Twitter. "No opposition. No freedom. No choice."

The first polling station opened in Russia's Far East. As the day progresses, voters will cast their ballots at nearly 100,000 polling stations across the country’s 11 time zones, as well as in regions of Ukraine that Moscow illegally annexed.

By around 10 a.m. Moscow time, TsIK said 2.89 percent of the 110 million eligible voters had already cast their ballots. That figure includes those who cast early ballots, TsIK Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova said.

Some people trying to vote online reported problems, but officials said those being told they were in an electronic queue "just need to wait a little or return to voting later."

There were reports that public sector employees were being urged to vote early on March 15, a directive Stanislav Andreychuk, the co-chairman of the Golos voters' rights movement, said was aimed at having workers vote "under the watchful eyes of their bosses."

Ukraine and Western governments have condemned Russia for holding the vote in those Ukrainian regions, calling it illegal.

Results are expected to be announced on March 18.

The outcome, with Putin’s foes in jail, exile, or dead, is not in doubt. In a survey conducted by VTsIOM in early March, 75 percent of the citizens intending to vote said they would cast their ballot for Putin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer.

The ruthless crackdown that has crippled independent media and human rights groups began before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was launched, but it has been ratcheted up since. Almost exactly one month before the polls opened, Putin's most vocal critic, opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, died in an isolated Arctic prison amid suspicious circumstances as he served sentences seen as politically motivated.

Many observers say Putin warded off even the faintest of challengers to ensure a large margin of victory that he can point to as evidence that Russians back the war in Ukraine and his handling of it.

Most say they have no expectation that the election will be free and fair, with the possibility for independent monitoring very limited. Nadezhdin said he would recruit observers, but it was unclear whether he would be successful given that only registered candidates or state-backed advisory bodies can assign observers to polling stations.

“Who in the world thinks that it will be a real election?" Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said in an interview with Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL, ahead of the vote.

McFaul, speaking in Russian, added that he's convinced that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and other democracies in the world will say that the election did not offer a fair choice, but doubted they will decline to recognize Putin as Russia's legitimate president.

“I believe that is the right action to take, but I expect that President Biden is not going to say that [Putin] is not a Russian president. And all the other leaders won't do that either because they want to leave some kind of contact with Putin,” he said.

Before his death, Navalny had hoped to use the vote to demonstrate the public's discontent with both the war and Putin's iron-fisted rule. He called on voters to cast their ballots at 12 p.m. on March 17, naming the action Noon Against Putin.

Viral images of long lines forming at this time would indicate the size of the opposition and undermine the landslide result the Kremlin is expected to concoct. The strategy was endorsed by Navalny not long before his death and his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has promoted it.

“We need to use election day to show that we exist and there are many of us, we are actual, living, real people and we are against Putin.... What to do next is up to you. You can vote for any candidate except Putin. You could ruin your ballot,” Navalnaya said.

How well this strategy will work remains unclear. Moscow’s top law enforcement office warned voters in the Russian capital on March 14 against heeding calls to take part in the action, saying participants face legal punishment.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Todd Prince, Current Time, and AP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Photograph Source: Carnaval.com Studios – CC BY 2.0

With recent polls giving Donald Trump a reasonable chance of defeating President Biden in the November elections, commentators have begun predicting what his second presidency might mean for domestic politics. In a dismally detailed Washington Post analysis, historian Robert Kagan argued that a second Trump term would feature his “deep thirst for vengeance” against what the ex-president has called the “radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country,” thereby launching what Kagan calls “a regime of political persecution” leading to “an irreversible descent into dictatorship.”

So far, however, Trump and the media that follow his every word have been largely silent about what his reelection would mean for U.S. foreign policy. Citing his recent promise of “a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods,” the New York Times did recently conclude that a renewed trade war with China “would significantly disrupt the U.S. economy,” leading to a loss of 744,000 jobs and $1.6 trillion in gross domestic product. Economic relations with China are, however, but one piece of a far larger puzzle when it comes to future American global power, a subject on which media reporting and commentary have been surprisingly reticent.

So let me take the plunge by starting with a prediction I made in a December 2010 TomDispatch piece that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.” I added then that a “realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could be all over except for the shouting.”

I also offered a scenario hinged on — yes! — next November’s elections. “Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair,” I wrote then, “a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Back then, of course, 2025 was so far off that any prediction should have been a safe bet. After all, 15 years ago, I was already in my mid-60s, which should have given me a “get-out-of-jail-free” card — that is, a reasonable chance of dying before I could be held accountable. But with 2025 now less than a year away, I’m still here (unlike all too many of my old friends) and still responsible for that prediction.

So, let’s imagine that “a far-right patriot,” one Donald Trump, does indeed “capture the presidency with thundering rhetoric” next November. Let me then don the seven-league boots of the historical imagination and, drawing on Trump’s previous presidential record, offer some thoughts about how his second shot at an America-first foreign policy — one based on “demanding respect for American authority” — might affect this country’s global power, already distinctly on the decline.

As our Lonely Planet Guide to a country called the future, let’s take along a classic study former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in retirement in 1997. Drawing on his view that Eurasia remained the “central basis for global primacy,” he argued that Washington had to do just three things to maintain world leadership: first, preserve its position in Western Europe through the NATO alliance; second, maintain its military bases along the Pacific littoral to check China; and finally, prevent any “assertive single entity” like China or Russia from controlling the critical “middle space” of Central Asia and the Middle East. Given his past record and current statements, it seems all too likely that Trump will indeed badly damage, if not destroy, those very pillars of American global power.

Wrecking the NATO Alliance

Trump’s hostility to alliances in general and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in particular is a matter of historical record. His hostility to NATO’s crucial mutual-defense clause (Article 5) — requiring all signatories to respond if one were attacked — could prove fatal. Just days after his 2018 sycophantic summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump, “Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?”

Weighing his words with uncharacteristic care, Trump replied: “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question.” He then offered what could, in a second term, prove a virtual death sentence for NATO. “Montenegro,” he said, “is a tiny country with very strong people…They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War Three.”

Since then, of course, Putin has invaded Ukraine and the Biden White House has rallied NATO to defend that frontline European state. Although Congress approved a massive $111 billion in aid (including $67 billion in military aid) for Ukraine in the war’s first 18 months, the Republican-led House has recently stalled President Biden’s request for an additional $67 billion critical to Kyiv’s continued resistance. As the campaign for his party’s nomination gathers momentum, Trump’s pro-Putin sentiments have helped persuade Republican legislators to break with our NATO allies on this critical issue.

Keep in mind that, right after Russia invaded in February 2022, Trump labeled Putin’s move “genius,” adding, “I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” Last September, after Putin thanked him for claiming that, were he still president, he could end the war in 24 hours, Trump assured Meet the Press: “I would get him into a room. I’d get Zelensky into a room. Then I’d bring them together. And I’d have a deal worked out.”

In reality, a reelected Trump would undoubtedly simply abandon Ukraine, at best forcing it into negotiations that would be tantamount to surrender. As formerly neutral nations Finland and Sweden have rallied to NATO and alliance stalwarts like Britain and Germany make major arms deliveries to Ukraine, Europe has clearly labeled Russia’s invasion and war an existential threat. Under such circumstances, a future Trump tilt toward Putin could swing a wrecking ball through the NATO alliance, which, for the past 75 years, has served as a singular pillar in the architecture of U.S. global power.

Alienating Allies on the Pacific Littoral

Just as NATO has long served as a strategic pillar at the western end of the vast Eurasian land mass, so four bilateral alliances along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines have proven a geopolitical fulcrum for dominance over the eastern end of Eurasia and the defense of North America. Here, the record of the first Trump administration was, at best, mixed. On the credit side of history’s ledger, he did revive“the Quad,” a loose alliance with Australia, India, and Japan, which has gained greater coherence under President Biden.

But only time spared Trump’s overall Asian diplomacy from utter disaster. His obsessive personal courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, marked by two meaningless meetings and the exchange of 27 mash notes, failed to produce any sign of Pyongyang’s (nuclear) disarmament, while weakening America’s alliance with long-standing ally South Korea. Although Japan’s prime minister obsequiously paid court to Trump, he battered that classic bilateral alliance with constant complaints about its cost, even slapping a punitive 25% duty on Japanese steel imports.

Ignoring the pleas of close Asian allies, Trump also cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving the door open for China to conclude its own Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with 15 Asia-Pacific countries that now account for nearly a third of Beijing’s foreign trade. Another four years of Trump’s “America first” diplomacy in the Pacific could do irreparable damage to those key strategic alliances.

Further south, by using Taiwan to both confront and court Chinese President Xi Jinping, while letting the Philippines drift toward Beijing’s orbit and launching a misbegotten trade war with China, Trump’s version of Asian “diplomacy” allowed Beijing to make some real diplomatic, economic, and military gains, while distinctly weakening the American position in the region. Biden, by contrast, has at least partially restored it, a strengthening reflected in a surprisingly amicable San Francisco summit last November with President Xi.

In South Asia, where the bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan dominates all diplomacy, President Trump trashed a 70-year military alliance with Pakistan with a single New Year’s Day message. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years,” Trump tweeted, “and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools… No more!” Since then, Pakistan has shifted decisively into Beijing’s orbit, while India now plays Moscow and Washington off against each other to its economic advantage.

Just as Trump’s posture toward Europe could swing a wrecking ball through the NATO alliance in a second term, so his mix of economic nationalism and strategic myopia could destabilize the array of alliances along the Pacific littoral, toppling that second of Brzezinski’s three pillars for American global power.

That “Assertive Single Entity” in Central Asia

And when it comes to that third pillar of U.S. global power –- preventing any “assertive single entity” from controlling the “middle space” of Eurasia — President Trump failed woefully (as, in fact, had his predecessors). After announcing China’s trillion-dollar Belt & Road Initiative in 2013, President Xi has spent billions building a steel grid of roads, rails, and pipelines that crisscross the middle space of that vast Eurasian landmass, an enormous new infrastructure that has led to a chain of alliances stretching across central Asia.

The power of China’s position was manifested in 2021 when Beijing helped push the U.S. military out of Afghanistan in a deft geopolitical squeeze-play. More recently, Beijing also brokered a breathtaking diplomatic entente between Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, stunning Washington and many Western diplomats.

Trump’s Middle East policy during his first term in office was focused solely on backing Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, cancelling a nuclear agreement with Iran, seconding his marginalization of the Palestinians, and promoting Arab recognition of Israel. Since the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and Netanyahu’s devastating assault on Gaza’s civilian population, President Biden’s reaction was skewed in an almost Trumpian fashion toward Israel, with a consequent loss of influence in the wider region. And count on one thing: an incoming Trump administration would only compound the damage.

In short, Beijing is already toppling the third pillar of American global power in that critical “middle space” of Eurasia. In a second Trump term, an unchecked Chinese diplomatic and economic juggernaut could arguably grind that pillar into rubble.

Africa in the “World Island”

In fact, however, no matter what Brzezinski might have thought, there are other pillars of world power beyond Eurasia — above all, Africa. Indeed, Sir Halford Mackinder, the author of the global geopolitical analysis that deeply influenced the former national security adviser, argued over a century ago that the locus of global power lay in a tri-continental combination of Europe, Asia, and Africa that he dubbed “the world island.”

In the age of high imperialism, Europe found Africa a fertile field for colonial exploitation and, during the Cold War, Washington added to that continent’s suffering by making it a superpower surrogate battleground. But Beijing grasped the human potential of Africa and, in the 1970s, began building lasting economic alliances with its emerging nations. By 2015, its trade with Africa had climbed to $222 billion, three times America’s. Its investments there were then projected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025.

Recognizing the strategic threat, President Barack Obama convened a 2014 summitwith 51 African leaders at the White House. Trump, however, dismissed the entire continent, during a 2018 Oval Office meeting, as so many “shithole countries.” The Trump administration tried to repair the damage by sending First Lady Melania off on a solo trip to Africa, but her bizarre colonial outfits and ill-timed administration cuts in foreign aid to the continent only added to the damage.

In addition to a storehouse of natural resources, Africa’s chief asset is its growing pool of human talent. Africa’s median age is 19 (compared to 38 for both China and the U.S.), meaning that, by 2050, that continent will be home to a full one-third of the world’s young. Given his fraught record with the region, Trump’s second term would likely do little more than hand the whole continent to China on a gold-plated platter.

South of the Border

Even in Latin America, the situation has been changing in a complex fashion. As a region informally incorporated into the American imperium for more than a century and suffering all the slights of an asymmetric alliance, its increasingly nationalist leaders welcomed China’s interest in this century. By 2017, in fact, Chinese trade with Latin America had hit a substantial $244 billion, making it — yes! — the region’s largest trading partner. Simultaneously, Beijing’s loans to Caribbean countries had reached a hefty $62 billion by the end of the Trump administration.

Except for drug interdiction and economic sanctions against leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, the Trump White House generally ignored Latin America, doing nothing to slow China’s commercial juggernaut. Although the Biden administration made some diplomatic gestures toward the region, China’s trade rose relentlessly to $450 billion by 2022.

Reflecting a bipartisan indifference in this century, a reelected President Trump would likely do little to check China’s growing commercial hegemony over Latin America. And the region would undoubtedly welcome such indifference, since the alternative — along with draconian moves at the U.S.-Mexican border — might involve plans to fire missiles at or send troops to knock out drug labs in Mexico. The backlash to such unilateral intervention amid panic over immigration could cripple U.S. relations with the region for decades to come.

Fading American Hegemony

In the world that a second Trump term might face in 2025, American global power will probably be far less imposing than it was when he came into office in 2016. The problem won’t be that this time around he’s already appointing advisers determined to let Trump be Trump or, as the New York Times put it recently, who are “forging plans for an even more extreme agenda than his first term.” By every significant metric — economic, diplomatic, and even military — U.S. power has been on a downward slide for at least a decade. In the more unipolar world of 2016, Trump’s impulsive, individualized version of diplomacy was often deeply damaging, but on at least a small number of occasions modestly successful. In the more multipolar world he would have to manage nearly a decade later, his version of a unilateral approach could prove deeply disastrous.

After taking his second oath of office in January of 2025, President Trump’s “thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal,” might indeed fulfill the prediction I made some 15 years ago: “The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred W. McCoy.

A study published last week shows Bangladesh’s intensifying monsoons come with a staggering death toll, both in the immediate aftermath of the flooding itself, and, more significantly, in the months that follow. The true scale of the toll has not been fully captured by local officials, aid organizations, or the international research community. 

The same is likely true for other parts of the world that experience recurrent climate disasters. “In the climate and health field, we often evaluate the health effects of specific acute events because it’s easier to account for all the other potential factors that could be confounding the association,” said Lara Schwarz, an epidemiologist at University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. But a focus on the short-term obscures the larger picture. “Most climate events don’t occur only once and are likely to harm vulnerable populations over and over, through years, decades, and generations,” she said. 

In the new study, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and San Francisco, found that flooding contributed to the deaths of 152,753 infants — defined as children 11 months old and younger — in Bangladesh in the three decades between 1988 and 2017. The researchers used health surveys conducted by the United States Agency for International Development to collect data on more than 150,000 births over the course of the 30 years. They compared that data against high-resolution maps of major floods over that time span and found a stark difference in mortality risk: There were 5.3 more infant deaths per 1,000 births in flood-prone areas than in non-flood-prone areas. The authors extrapolated from this finding to estimate how many infant deaths, overall, were attributable to flooding in Bangladesh over the time period they studied. 

Infants are an especially vulnerable subset of the population, and changes in infant health can reflect the prevalence of health issues in the wider population. “Death is the most severe health outcome,” said Schwarz. “The increased risk of infant mortality suggests that populations living in a flood-prone region may also be at higher risk of other adverse health problems such as improper nutrition, water-borne diseases, and poor mental health.”

The majority of the deaths were likely linked to three flooding-related conditions. The first, diarrheal disease, often spreads when flooding overwhelms local sanitation infrastructure and causes drinking water supplies to be contaminated. Cholera, one of the most common and deadliest water-borne bacterial diseases, is a particular concern in poor countries where sanitation infrastructure is underdeveloped. Flooding also contributes to outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, because standing water creates ample breeding ground for mosquitoes. Finally, flooding turns agricultural fields into bogs and can lead to massive crop losses, which contribute to existing food insecurity in Bangladesh. Babies are extremely vulnerable to hunger. The Lancet, a leading medical journal that publishes an annual analysis of the impacts of climate change on human health around the world, has identified bacterial and vector-borne diseases and malnutrition as top areas of concern. 

Drownings and other injuries from the flooding also led to a small percentage of the deaths, the study’s authors told Grist. All of the health-related risks posed by flooding, from the first drowning to the last case of dengue, were exacerbated by socioeconomic factors like food security, family income, vaccination history, access to medical care, and the condition of local infrastructure such as sewage systems and drinking water treatment facilities.

The authors of the study told Grist that their results indicate that the risks of environmental health hazards are shifting as climate change worsens. Government health agencies and researchers often collect information on the immediate public health impacts of a single extreme weather event. But, because a warmer world also means a world plagued by more frequent and intense disasters, communities are being affected by extreme weather repeatedly. The long-term, cumulative health consequences of events that occur on a yearly or sometimes even more frequent basis are not well understood by the scientific community. And as such, the world has a flawed understanding of the true human cost of extreme weather.

“We need to understand this kind of long-term impact in the context of climate change because communities are going to be repeatedly and systematically exposed to these hazards,” said Tarik Benmahria, an environmental health researcher at University of California, San Diego, and one of three authors of the Bangladesh study. “These types of issues used to be exceptional by definition,” he added. “They’re not anymore.”

The method used by the researchers to determine the burden of flooding on communities in Bangladesh over multiple years, Schwarz said, “has the potential to be applied to evaluate the long-term effects of other climate exposures.” Extreme heat, hurricanes, and drought, to name a few of the environmental disasters being exacerbated by climate change, can also have compounding health effects that occur weeks, months, even years after the event takes place. If future research pinpoints how and when these effects occur, it could potentially save lives. “The approach is very relevant to other areas of the world that are vulnerable to recurrent climate hazards,” Schwarz said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden death toll of flooding in Bangladesh sends a grim signal about climate and health on Dec 11, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Amidst accusations from both the Russian and Ukrainian sides that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine has been wired for detonation or could be deliberately attacked during the current war there, one absolute truth remains: nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous.

In a time of national crises in multiple countries, increasing natural disasters and a worsening climate emergency, nuclear power is demonstrating that it is a liability rather than an asset.

Each nuclear reactor contains a lethal radioactive inventory, in the reactor core and also in the fuel pools into which the irradiated fuel is offloaded and, over time, densely packed. Casks also house nuclear waste offloaded from the fuel pools. Zaporizhzhia is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe with at least 2,204 tons of highly radioactive waste within the reactors and the irradiated fuel pools.

Depending on the severity of what transpires, any or all of this radioactive fuel could be ignited.

Amidst the unpredictability caused by the “fog of war", there remain many unanswered questions that have led to rumor and speculation:

Has the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in fact been wired for detonation and whose interests would be served by blowing up the plant?

Why is there an exodus of both Russian and Ukrainian plant personnel?

Will the sabotage of the downstream Kakhovka dam that resulted in catastrophic flooding, also lead to an equally catastrophic loss of available cooling water supplies for the reactors and fuel pools?

Will the backup diesel generators, frequently turned to for powering the essential cooling each time the plant has lost connection to the electricity grid, last through each crisis, given their fuel must also be replenished, potentially not possible under war conditions?

None of these threats would make headlines if Zaporizhzhia was instead home to a wind farm or utility scale solar array. This perhaps explains the rush now to downplay the gravity of the situation, with claims in the press that a major attack on the plant would “not be as bad as Chornobyl” and that radioactive releases would be minimal and barely travel beyond the fence line.

This is an irresponsible dismissal of the real dangers.

After the massive explosion at Chornobyl, the graphite moderator used in the reactor fueled the fire, with the smoke further lofting radioactive fallout far and wide. This has led to an assumption that major fires and explosions at Zaporizhzhia would result in less serious consequences since the reactor designs are not the same as Chornobyl’s.

However, if the uranium fuel in the Zaporizhzhia reactors or irradiated fuel storage pools overheats and ignites, it could then heat up the zirconium cladding around it, which would ignite and burn fiercely as a flare at temperatures too hot to extinguish with water. The resulting chemical reaction would also generate an explosive environment. The heat of the release and detonation(s) could breach concrete structures, then loft radioactive gas and fallout into the environment to travel on the weather.

Fallout could contaminate crucial agricultural land, potentially indefinitely, and would include Russia, should prevailing winds travel eastward at the time of the disaster.

And while Europe allows an already too high 600 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg) of radioactive cesium in food, contaminated food supplies from Ukraine that read at higher levels after a nuclear disaster could be exported to countries with even weaker standards, including the US where the limit is an unacceptable 1200 Bq/kg. But will those consuming such foodstuffs be counted among the victims of such a nuclear disaster?

The true numbers of those harmed by the Chornobyl disaster will never be known due to institutional suppression and misrepresentation of the numbers and the absence of record-keeping in the former Soviet countries affected. Therefore, to describe a major nuclear disaster at Zaporizhzhia either as “worse than” or “not nearly as bad as” Chornobyl is too broad and speculative without looking at the specifics.

Those specifics depend on whether the disaster involves hydrogen explosions such as happened at Fukushima, or fires resulting from a bombing raid or missile attack, which could disperse more radioactivity further. It would also depend on whether all six reactors suffered catastrophic failures, whether all of the fuel pools were drained and caught fire and whether the storage casks were breached.

It would further depend on which way the wind was blowing, and if, when and where it subsequently rained out a radioactive plume, all factors that influenced where the Chornobyl radioactive fallout was deposited.

If Zaporizhzhia comes to harm, each side in the conflict will likely hold the other responsible. But ultimately, the responsibility we all share is to reject the continued use of a technology that has the potential to wreak such disastrous consequences on humanity.

Zaporizhzhia is in the news now almost every day. The propaganda may be deliberately alarmist, but the basis for the alarm is very real or it would not be the subject matter for headline-getting in the first place.

The reason is simple. Nuclear power is the most dangerous way to boil water. It is unnecessary, expensive, and an obstacle to renewable energy development. It is intrinsically tied to the desire for — and development of —nuclear weapons, the use of which could be the other lethal outcome in this war.

It is time to see sense. Calling for a no-fire zone around Zaporizhzhia is not enough. We must call for no nuclear power at all.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Old-fashioned AM radio was an information lifeline for many in Aotearoa New Zealand during last month’s Cyclone Gabrielle when other sources wilted without power.

Now a little-known arrangement that puts proceedings of Parliament on the air has been cited as a threat to its future. But is a switch-off really likely? And what’s being done to avoid it?

“Government websites are a waste of time. All they’ve got is a transistor radio — and they need to actually provide a means for these people who need the information to damn well get it,” Today FM’s afternoon host Mark Richardson told listeners angrily on the day the cyclone struck.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: Threat to AM radio emergency updates
• Other Mediawatch reports

He was venting in response to listeners without power complaining online information was inaccessible, and pleading for the radio station to relay emergency updates over the air.

Mobile phone and data services were knocked out in many areas where electricity supplies to towers were cut — or faded away after back-up batteries drained after 4-8 hours. In some places FM radio transmission was knocked out but nationwide AM transmission was still available.

“This will sharpen the minds of people on just how important . . . legacy platforms like AM transmission are in Civil Defence emergencies,” RNZ news chief Richard Sutherland told Mediawatch soon after.

“We are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces in terms of broadcasting infrastructure for this country as a result of this,” he said.

Future of AM questioned
But while Gabrielle was still blowing — the future of AM was called into question.

On February 15, Clerk of the House David Wilson told a Select Committee he might have to cut a $1.3 million annual contract to broadcast Parliament on AM radio after 87 years on air.

The next day The New Zealand Herald’s Thomas Coughlan reported “radio silence could come as soon as the next financial year on July 1 unless additional funding is found in the next Budget in May”.

In last Sunday’s edition of RNZ’s programme The House (also paid for by the Office of the Clerk), Wilson explained his spending cannot exceed his annual appropriation.

He said costs have gone up and the AM radio contract might have to go to make ends meet.

RNZ reporter Phil Pennington discovered for himself how handy AM transmission was when he was dispatched from Wellington to Hawke’s Bay when Cyclone Gabrielle struck.

Several times on the road he had to switch to AM when FM transmission dropped out.

Sustainability issue
“It puts a huge question mark on its sustainability because the money that the Clerk pays for us to broadcast Parliament underpins the entire network,” RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson told Pennington this week.

“It is an irony that at a time when New Zealand has had one of its biggest lessons about the importance of AM, it also has this challenge around its viability,” Thompson said.

It was also a time when the funding of RNZ is under review after the collapse of the government plan for a new public media entity with an annual budget of $109 million. RNZ’s current annual budget is $48m.

“It puts a lot of pressure on us as an organisation. We won’t be able to pick up the ($1.3m) cost. The parliamentary contract is a significant contributor to RNZ being able to maintain the AM network nationally,” Thompson said.

“If that money is not available, closing the network is not going to be feasible. This is such an important asset for New Zealand — a truly critical information lifeline. We will have to find a way of keeping it going,” he said.

Some RNZ Morning Report listeners were alarmed by question marks over AM’s future.

“I live in Central Hawke’s Bay. AM is the only strong signal. Do not stop broadcasting on that frequency. We love you, stay with us,” Cam said.

Questions over AM network’s funding despite its essential status in disasters https://t.co/Ie9KUBL8Sd

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) March 1, 2023

FM off air in Gisborne
“RNZ FM was off air in Gisborne for two days during Gabrielle. But RNZ on AM kept going. It absolutely must be kept,” Gisborne’s Glen said.

There are in fact two AM networks run by RNZ.

One broadcasts RNZ National from transmission sites all over the country.

The other carries Parliament and is broadcast from fewer transmission sites and on a range of frequencies in different parts of the country. It also airs programmes for customers including religious network Southern Star.

Iwi broadcasters and some commercial broadcasters also use RNZ sites to broadcast locally.

When RNZ shut AM transmission down in Northland last November, the government urgently injected $1.5 million to upgrade the aging sites.

At the time, Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty said radio was “a critical information channel to help reach New Zealanders in an emergency”.

Other AM sites
He said Manatū Taonga/the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, NEMA, and RNZ were all “collaborating to develop criteria for future decisions about other AM sites to make sure communities are able to stay connected and access critical warnings and guidance in emergencies”.

Clearly it is a problem if an important national emergency service owned and run by the public broadcaster can be  jeopardised by pressure on a fixed budget at the discretion of Parliament’s Clerk.

When RNZ’s Phil Pennington asked NEMA to comment on the future of the AM network this week, his request was referred to Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson.

Jackson is also the Minister of Māori Development, which oversees Māori Broadcasting, including for Te Whakaruruhau o nga reo Irirangi, the umbrella group of iwi radio broadcasters around the country. Jackson was the chair of Te Whakaruruhau before he entered Parliament again in 2017.

After the government scrapped the plan for a new public media entity last month, Jackson will have to go back to cabinet with a new plan to address RNZ’s future funding.

Jackson was one of the ministers on the ground in the regions hit by Cyclone Gabrielle and overseeing the  emergency response — and was unavailable for interview on Mediawatch this week.

Citing Northland
His office supplied a statement citing that intervention in Northland last year.

“AM transmission is a key priority for the government. Officials from Manatū Taonga, NEMA and RNZ are working closely to ensure radio services (including AM transmission) are always available for people in an emergency,” it said.

“Long-term work to develop funding approaches is also underway to ensure RNZ’s AM transmission strategy continues — and the minister is considering this as part of a package to strengthen public media and will be returning to cabinet with proposals soon,” the statement said.

Before Gabrielle, provisions for AM broadcasting would have been low on the list for reporters scrutinising the minister’s latest cabinet plan for RNZ’s funding.

After Gabrielle, it will be one of the first things they look for.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Beijing is watching the development closely, with a spokesman calling on Tokyo and Delhi to “do more to enhance mutual trust” in the region.

The maiden Veer Guardian 2023 exercise, delayed for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is taking place from Jan. 16-26 at Hyakuri and Iruma air bases outside Tokyo. 

In 2019, Japanese and Indian air forces conducted a joint exercise codenamed Shinyuu Maitri in India, but it focused on mobility and tactical interoperability rather than combat.

The Indian Air Force has brought to Veer Guardian a contingent of four Su-30 MKI, two C-17 Globemasters and an IL-78 tanker, it said in a Twitter post.

Japan contributed three Hikotai Mitsubishi F-2A/B fighters in addition to a number of F-15J/DJ Eagles and Hiko Kyodogun Eagles.

Shunji Izutsu, chief of staff of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF), told a news conference that the exercise would “improve the tactical skills of the JASDF, promote mutual understanding between the Japanese and Indian air forces, and further deepen defense cooperation.”

“Japan and India are in a special strategic global partnership relationship,” he said, adding that “India is a like-minded country” to Japan.

The two countries are part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, a security grouping between the U.S., Australia, India and Japan.

Beijing has repeatedly criticized the grouping, calling it an attempt to create a NATO-style alliance in Asia- Pacific.

Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday that both Japan and India “should do more to enhance mutual trust in the security sphere between regional countries and act in the interest of peace and stability in the region."

‘Ambitions instigated by U.S.’

China’s hawkish media outlet the Global Times quoted Chinese observers as saying that “both Japan and India are being lured by the U.S. to join its Indo-Pacific strategy in containing China.”

The Chinese analysts played down both India and Japan’s capabilities, saying “if a conflict breaks out involving either Japan or India, neither country is likely to have the strategic will or sufficient capability to enter combat.”

Japan has grown increasingly aware of China’s expanding clout in the region. 

Last month, Tokyo released its national security and defense strategies, in which China was identified as an unprecedented “strategic challenge.”

Japan also supports the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy which points out that China’s “coercion and aggression spans the globe, but it is most acute in the Indo-Pacific.”

Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada was in Washington last week to take part in the first Japan-U.S. Security Consultative Committee to discuss further strengthening deterrence and response capabilities of their military alliance.

Tokyo plans to boost its counterattack capabilities, especially because of the potential risks of conflict over Taiwan, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

China has increased its air incursions into areas in the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea, making air deterrence one of the priorities for, said Collin Koh, a regional military analyst based in Singapore.

“China has become more and more a common threat for countries in the region,” noted Koh, Research Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

He added that since the Shinzo Abe administration, Japan has reached out further eastward, and to India, with more bilateral joint exercises in the pipeline.

The most recent exercise – Dharma Guardian-2022 – was conducted between the two armies in Belgaum, India.

Since 2012, Indian and Japanese maritime forces have also trained together in a series of Japan-India Maritime Bilateral Exercises (JIMEX).

This time two air forces are conducting “various aerial combat drills,” said the Indian Ministry of Defense.

“They will undertake multi-domain air combat missions in a complex environment and will exchange best practices,” it said.

The combat exercise would also help Japan to learn more about the Russian-origin Su-30MKI aircraft that India has brought to the drills, according to Collin Koh.

China’s J-16 fighter jet is also a developed version of Russia’s Sukhoi Su-30, so the exercise would offer “a valuable opportunity” for the JASDF, as well as for the U.S. and NATO partners, to simulate Russian and Chinese fighter aircraft. 

China’s Global Times, however, quoted experts as saying that “the Su-30MKI is specially customized for India, and the versions imported by China are different from the Indian version.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

"Japan in December adopted a set of three security and defense strategy documents that break from its exclusively self-defense-only stance. Under the new strategies, Japan vows to build up its counterstrike capability with long-range cruise missiles that can reach potential targets in China, double its defense budget within five years and bolster development of advanced weapons." —Asahi Shimbun

"U.S. officials have welcomed Japan's willingness to take on more offensive role, while experts say it could also help widen cooperation with Australia, their main regional defense partner." —Asahi Shimbun

Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida comes to Washington on Friday, January 13. Unlike Japan, his summit with President Joe Biden will not garner much press attention here in the United States, but it marks a signal moment in Japan's rise in military power and in the implementation of the Biden Administration's National Security Strategy. The Strategy, which prioritizes Chinese and Russian challenges to the so-called "rules-based order", a euphemism for U.S. primacy which is rife with contradictions, prioritizes the centrality of alliances to U.S. global power, stating that "our alliances and partnerships around the world are our most important strategic asset."

The revitalized 70-year-old U.S.-Japan alliance has renewed importance in enforcing U.S. defense of Taiwan and resisting the expansion of Chinese influence across the South China/West Philippine Sea. This Sea is the geopolitically critical expanse of ocean across which 40% of world trade—including Middle East oil which fuels East Asian economies—flows. Similarly, further integration of the Japanese and U.S. economies and technological resources are encompassed by the alliance and seen as essential to the power and wealth of both nations.

Prime Minister Kishida has stated that the summit will be a "very important" opportunity to "demonstrate at home and abroad the further strengthening of the Japan-U.S. alliance." The alliance is not a new development. In 1952 the Mutual Security Treaty (AMPO in Japanese) was secretly imposed on Japan as a condition for ending the postwar military occupation. Since then, contrary to Japan's "peace constitution," the island nation has served as the center of the United States' hub and spokes Asia-Pacific alliance structure. It reinforced the Cold War containment doctrine in Asia, and in the 21st century it plays a critical role in containing and managing China's rise and its challenge to U.S. regional hegemony.

Misconceptions About the Peace Constitution and the Growth of Japan's Military

Misconceptions about Japan's "Peace Constitution" abound. The document's Article 9, which has been fervently defended by most Japanese, states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes." It goes on to commit that "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."

Yet, in the tradition of law being what those with power say it is, the Japanese Diet (parliament) and courts have been "elastic" in their interpretation of Article 9. Over recent decades, Japan's military spending has grown to $50 billion a year and is about to be doubled. Japan currently ranks as the world's eighth greatest military spender, well behind China, but significantly ahead of U.S. allies like Israel, Italy, Australia, and Canada.

In addition to its major role in drafting Japan's postwar constitution, U.S. occupation forces identified and empowered the country's post-war ruling elite. In the 1930s and 40s Japan's elite was divided by the "militarists" who aimed to win "the whole melon", completely destroying and replacing U.S. and British Asia- Pacific colonial empires with their own. The militarists were opposed by more sober-minded members of the elite who understood the folly of the "militarists'" ambitions and sought to expand the Japanese empire under the umbrella of U.S. and British imperial power. It was this latter camp that the U.S. occupation brought to power. Their descendants have ruled Japan almost continually since then via the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. (The successes of the occupation of Japan provided the model for the George W. Bush Administration's ambitions in Iraq.)

During the Korean War, to protect the rear flank of its military bases across Japan, occupation forces led the Japanese government to take its initial steps in what was to become its military, euphemistically branded as the "Japan Self Defense Force" (SDF). In 1952, what had been a minimal national police force was renamed the National Safety Force and expanded to 110,000 personnel. Two years later the Safety Force was rechristened the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, shattering essential constitutional restraints. Over time the SDF would grow, as did its capabilities and regional roles.

Until recent decades, the U.S. and Japanese militaries operated with a division of labor. The SDF was responsible for guarding Japan and the more than 100 U.S. military bases and installations across the Japanese archipelago, including the massive Yakota Base in the Japanese capital and the massive concentration of bases in Okinawa which have transformed Japan into an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" for the United States. Washington's "responsibility" has been to ensure "peace" through the exercise of its regional hegemony. This has included defense of Japan via "extended deterrence," Washington's nuclear umbrella over Japan, which has also served as a check on the nuclear ambitions of segments of the Japanese elite and military.

Given strong Japanese pacifist commitments as a consequence of the country's disastrous 15-year war of aggression (beginning with the 1931 invasion of China, not the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor), the military and the elite have pursued a "salami strategy" by expanding the Japanese military and its roles one slice at a time. Boiling frogs might be the better analogy. By 1989 the SDF moved to increase its capacities for overseas military deployments under cover of participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations from Cambodia and East Timor to Haiti and South Sudan. Tokyo came under enormous pressure in 1991 when popular opposition prevented the SDF from joining the "coalition of the willing" in the first Gulf War. But soon thereafter Chinese military potential as manifested in the 1996 Taiwan crisis and growing fears of North Korea's nuclear weapons program spurred greater Japanese military commitments. A month after Chinese military forces bracketed waters around Taiwan with demonstration missile strikes, and in the wake of Okinawan protests that shook the U.S.-Japan alliance to its core, also in 1996 Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and President Bill Clinton signed the Japan-U.S. Joint Declaration on Security Alliance for the 21st Century.

Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi invoked Japan's "responsibilities as a member of the international community" as necessitating Maritime Self Defense Force operations to provide logistical support to U.S. forces in the form transporting supplies, especially oil, across the Indian Ocean. And in 2003, this time under cover of a U.N. resolution for Iraqi reconstruction, a small SDF force was dispatched to Iraq with U.S. guarantees that they would not suffer casualties.

While it added nothing to the U.S.-led war, it was designed to whittle away at popular Japanese resistance to sending SDF forces into war zones. In 2017, Japan joined a revitalized QUAD alliance (U.S., Japan, Australia, and India) and has since participated in joint naval operations with the U.S. and partner nations in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf, and over the past year it has signaled its willingness to join the U.S. in battle in the event of a war for Taiwan. Today the Japanese military is anything but inconsequential with more than 300,000 troops, an Air Self Defense Force comprised primarily of advanced U.S. fighters, and a Maritime Self Defense Force of 155 ships including destroyers and helicopter carriers, some of which can double as aircraft carriers. Japan's rockets can reach Beijing and Pyongyang as well as Mars. It has intelligence satellites, and the Kishida government is in the process of committing to develop precision conventional first-strike attacks against North Korea and China.

At last count, Japan possessed 47 tons of weapons-grade plutonium in its stockpiles, and it has long been assumed that it is just "a turn of a screwdriver" away from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. Sheila A. Smith writes in Japan Rearmed that "the Japanese government has never argued that Article 9 would prevent the nuclear option." And in 1996 the lead author of Japan's Defense White Paper stated that for 30 years the SDF has believed that it has the right to deploy tactical nuclear weapons (which can be as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs). It was, he simply said, a right that the SDF had yet to exercise. In times past, U.S. diplomats have sought to influence Chinese policy decisions by threatening to rescind the nuclear umbrella over Japan, opening the way for Tokyo to become a rival nuclear power.

Responding to China's Rise and North Korea's Nukes and Missiles

With memories of Japan's brutal WWII conquests and military/colonial occupations, Asian nations—especially China and Korea—have been wary of Japanese militarism and rearmament. However, China's rise, replacing Japan as the world's second wealthiest country, the military buildup the Chinese economy has made possible, and North Korea's nuclear and missile programs came as a massive shocks to the Japanese people and establishment. They have spurred and provided the political rationale for Tokyo's near total abandonment of Article I, its military buildup, and the expanding alliance with the United States.

In part, it's an identity crisis that dates back to the Japanese elites' response to Admiral Perry's 1853 "opening" of Japan with his Black warships. The Meiji restoration, which overthrew the shogunate and created modern Japan, opted to integrate many dimensions of Western civilization, methods, and ambitions as it began to identify more with the West than the East. Throughout the 20th century, most Japanese viewed China as poor and backward, and there were complex feelings, including guilt, about their nation's brutal invasion and colonization of much of China. Ironically, China's industrial modernization under Deng Xiaoping was largely fueled by Japanese technologies and investments.

Despite this modern history of cooperation, the 2012 right-wing Japanese initiative to purchase the uninhabited Senkaku/Diaoyu islets which lie in the East China Sea between Japan and China triggered intensifying military tensions between Beijing and Tokyo. These uninhabited rocks are claimed by both nations and could potentially influence a struggle for control of Okinawa and the waters leading to Taiwan. Japanese and Chinese naval and air forces have conducted almost daily provocative operations around and over the islets to reinforce their claims. A collision or other accident could easily spark a military escalation, which in turn could precipitate U.S. intervention on Japan's behalf in order to fulfill its alliance Treaty obligations.

In the face of China's growing military power and North Korea's increasing military capabilities, Tokyo has repeatedly increased its military budget, breaking what was the long-honored spending cap of 1% of its GDP for the SDF. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—who ruled from 2012 to 2022 and was the son of the accused Class A war criminal and later Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi—pressed the expansion of the Japanese military and unsuccessfully prioritized the elimination of Article 9, constitutional limitations be damned.

In mid-December, without national debate, Prime Minister Kishida—Abe's successor—appears to have shattered the last vestiges of Article 9 restrictions. In the last month he has committed to doubling Japan's military expenditures. In the words of Japan's newspaper of record, Asahi Shimbun, the Kishida Cabinet adopted new versions of three major security policies: the National Security Strategy, the Defense Strategy, and the Defense Capability Enhancement Plan. As Asahi Shimbun editorialized, "the centerpiece of his new defense strategy is the possession of the ability to strike enemy bases, which…entails the risk of triggering a Japanese action that is seen as a pre-emptive strike in violation of international law. The policy shift could also risk provoking military countermeasures from potential enemies and heighten tensions in the region."

Japan has played the role of prized and largely obedient Asia-Pacific ally, even secretly allowing for the U.S. to introduce nuclear weapons into its Japanese bases despite Japan's three non-nuclear principles (not to possess, manufacture or allow introduction of nuclear weapons). At the same time, its ruling elite is proceeding with an awareness that there is no permanence between friends and enemies. In the words of Sheila A. Smith, Japan has been preparing for "the U.S. abandonment of its longstanding maritime dominance in Asia [which] would leave Japan open to greater Chinese pressure." This fear may be taking on greater traction as the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives threatens to cut Pentagon spending by $75 billion. Via its coalition building and joint operations with other Indo-Pacific naval powers, Tokyo is laying the foundations for a possible new 21st century alliance structure to restrain China

Common Security Diplomatic Alternatives

All of this is taking place in the context of spiraling arms races and provocative military activities in East Asia and more broadly across the Indo-Pacific. China responded to December's massive increase in U.S. military spending by sending a wave of 71 warplanes and 7 warships across the medial line in the Taiwan Strait. Subsequently, a Chinese warplane intercepted a U.S. spy plane threatening a collision as it came within 10 feet of the American aircraft.

Responding to renewed and massive U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which include the toppling of the North Korean regime, Kim Jung Un launched dozens of missiles near South Korean and Japanese waters and claims to have tested a new ICBM rocket engine capable of reaching the United States. In response, the right-wing Yoon government in Seoul and the Biden administration are meeting to deepen their nuclear weapons collaborations. Meanwhile, deeper into Asia, Chinese and Indian forces came to blows again in their contest to control oxygen-thin heights in the Himalayan mountains.

Were the stakes not so high, these reckless demonstrations of power could be compared to Mafia battles for street cred. Just as there are rules for the games of Mafia struggles for power, there are also diplomatic rules and international law designed to prevent catastrophes in great power and other international competitions. Not the least is the United Nations charter which obligates states to "refrain….from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state", and requires that international disputes be resolved by peaceful means. These rules were further enhanced in the 1980s by the common security commitments that no nation will seek to enhance its security by jeopardizing that of other nations. Common Security served as the paradigm on which the Cold War was brought to an end prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and it defined Euro-Atlantic relations throughout the 1990s, the first decade of the post-Cold War era.

Today, across the Indo-Pacific, as well as in the escalating Ukraine War, humanity stands an accident or miscalculation away from the calamity of nuclear war. It is past time for the U.S., Japan, China, and the Koreas to pursue their national interests—including human survival—by backing away from and reversing their dangerously spiraling military confrontations and embrace common security diplomacy and solutions. With necessity being the mother of invention, as it faces possible massive cuts in U.S. military spending by the newly-installed GOP majority in the House of Representatives, the Biden Administration could proactively get ahead of the curve. It could renew appeals for Common Security diplomacy and solutions, urging great and lesser power collaborations—including reversal of the dangers of the climate emergency—instead of pursuing primacy.

Rather than pouring military fuel on the fire, the U.S. and Japan, each of which faces major economic and social challenges, should cease encouraging Taiwanese independence and encourage what would be difficult and extended Taiwanese-Chinese negotiations over the self-governing island's future. As in the days that immediately followed the brief Biden-Xi summit, the two great powers could ratchet down the number and intensity of their provocative military exercises.

Much as the 1924 naval agreement between the U.S., Japan, and Britain ensured more than a decade of relative peace across the Pacific, today's Asia-Pacific powers could agree to collaborate in securing South China/West Philippine sea lanes, encourage ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a regional code of conduct, and share the Sea's vast resources. The U.S., South Korea, and Japan could reengage diplomacy with North Korea by signaling a willingness to reduce and then halt their escalating tit-for-tat military operations and press for a resumption of a version of the Six-Party Talks of the first decade of this century.

Reprising the words of a Japanese-American prophet, Yoko Ono, "War is over if you want." Solutions are known. The question is if we have the will to secure them.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Joseph Gerson.

In the midst of World War II, on November 10, 1942, Winston Churchill said of the war: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The year 2022 was disappointing for the stated American goal of reducing the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, which rose by 1.5%. In contrast, China’s emissions fell by 0.9% and Europe, despite the Putin energy crisis decreased its output by 0.8%.

The Inflation Reduction Act has $369 billion in it to promote green energy.

The Biden administration and U.S. civil society organizations and private companies, however, laid the groundwork for potentially impressive U.S. progress through the rest of this decade. That is, 2022 may have been the end of the beginning.

The Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed a little over a year ago contained $7.5 billion for zero- and low-emission buses and ferries, and another $7.5 billion for a nation-wide network of electric car chargers. It contains $105 billion to upgrade and expand public transportation, which will mean fewer people dependent on automobiles. Even the monies dedicated to improving port and airport infrastructure have a mandate to reduce congestion and carbon emissions.

While initially Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump-era holdover, was dragging his feet on electric vehicle purchase, he caved to pressure from the administration and Congress and has agreed to purchase at least 66,000 battery-electric vehicles through 2028 as part of a 106,000 vehicle purchase plan. He is also expanding USPS parking structures and putting in electric chargers. All environmentalists would have been pleased if he would move even faster. Still, there are only 1.7 million EVs on the road in the US (up from 400,000 in the second quarter of 2018), and 66,000 would be 4% of all those existing electric vehicles. The more EVs are bought, the more the price of the batteries will fall and the more their efficiency will increase. Automobile costs are expected to fall over the next decade as a result, and big government purchases will be very helpful.

This year, 18% of new car registrations in California were electric, and about 6% in the country as a whole. That is a big increase from almost zero just a few years ago. All the big auto firms are betting the farm on going electric, and with Biden administration help are building billions of dollars worth of new battery plants. It will take a few years for this build-out to come to fruition, but when it happens, it will be like opening the floodgates.

There are only 229 coal-fired power plants left in the U.S. In November, President Joe Biden pledged to close them all. Despite the energy crisis, nearly 6% (11,778 megawatts) of U.S. coal-fired generation capacity is expected to shut down in 2022. If we can double that rate of closure every year for the next ten years, they will all be gone by 2032, which is a reasonable expectation. The cost of solar-wind-battery generation will fall over that period, making coal prohibitively expensive. In fact, coal is already expensive, costing about 6 cents a kilowatt hour to generate electricity. That does not count all the health and climate damage it does. If that were figured in, it would be more like 80 cents a kilowatt hour. In contrast, wind and solar are roughly 4 cents a kilowatt hour and have been falling. In very sunny states solar could be as little as 2 cents a kilowatt hour.

Battery storage capacity is also increasing rapidly throughout the states, which can cover at least some high-demand periods. California is up to 3 gigawatts, with plans for more.

The Inflation Reduction Act has $369 billion in it to promote green energy. The Biden Administration is letting leases for offshore wind farms. $4 billion in bids were let for New York and New Jersey alone, and over $700 million for installations off the coast of California. Likewise, Houston and New Orleans have their eyes on this energy source. Off the coast of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico the shelf is shallow enough so that wind turbines can be anchored to the sea bottom. The Pacific is so deep off California that firms will have to put up floating wind turbines, of a sort that have been installed off the coast of Scotland. The U.S. has lagged behind on offshore wind as an energy source, having almost none right now. But in two years, that will begin changing. One advantage of offshore wind is that winds blow more steadily out at sea and so those turbines can take up some of the slack from solar panels, which go dark at sundown.

We are on the verge of an amazing new, low-carbon America. CO2 emissions will be with us for years to come, but by 2030 perhaps we can start talking about the beginning of the end.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest oil companies in the United States, posted respective third-quarter profits of nearly $20 billion and $11.2 billion on Friday as American consumers continue to face high prices at the pump, intensifying outrage from advocates and lawmakers who say the corporations are actively fleecing the public.

"It's no surprise that after months of extreme price gouging, Chevron and Exxon raked in a whopping $73 billion in profits so far this year," said Jordan Schreiber, director of energy and environment at Accountable.US. "But, instead of providing badly needed relief to consumers, they spent over $32 billion to enrich their wealthy shareholders while forcing American families to foot the bill."

"Make no mistake," Schreiber added, "Big Oil has launched an all-out war on American consumers this year, needlessly extracting every last dime out of working and middle-class people."

Exxon's record-shattering $19.7 billion in profit from July to September, bolstered by surging gas exports, is three times higher than what the company reported during the same period last year, an indication that the company has benefited handsomely from energy market chaos that has driven up costs for households in the U.S. and across the globe.

Bloomberg reported Friday that "Exxon has overtaken Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. in market value and is now back in the S&P 500 Index's top 10 stocks for the first time since 2019."

"Shareholders have been the main beneficiaries of Exxon's post-pandemic comeback," the outlet noted. "At the beginning of the year, Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods reactivated share repurchases that had been on hold for more than half a decade. The $15 billion-a-year buyback program is about the same cash outlay as Exxon's dividend, already the second-largest in the S&P 500 Index."

During Friday's earnings call, Woods said that "there has been discussion in the U.S. about our industry returning some of our profits directly to the American people."

"That's exactly what we're doing in the form of our quarterly dividend," Woods added, a remark that drew immediate mockery and outrage—including from the White House.

Chevron's third-quarter profit figure was its second-highest on record and nearly double the $6.1 billion it reported during the same time last year.

The U.S. oil giants' banner earnings numbers came 24 hours after the European energy behemoths Shell and Total reported huge third-quarter profits, sparking fresh calls for a windfall profits tax to return some of the gains to consumers struggling to heat their homes and afford other necessities ahead of the winter season.

Earlier this week, the U.S. gas giant Valero reported a 500% profit increase.

"Think Big Oil isn't price gouging consumers? Think again," tweeted the Groundwork Collaborative, pointing to the latest earnings figures.

While U.S. President Joe Biden has criticized oil companies for raking in massive profits at the expense of consumers, he has thus far declined to endorse a windfall profits tax, opting instead to demand voluntary action from fossil fuel executives.

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, argued on social media earlier this week that such a passive approach won't be enough to stop corporate profiteering.

"One thing is clear: they won't stop until someone makes them," wrote Owens, who along with her Groundwork colleagues has been tracking corporate earnings calls and reports throughout the year.

In a column for the Boston Globe Wednesday, Owens observed that "executives are admitting to the strategy of keeping prices high because it means bigger profits for their companies and massive payouts to their shareholders."

"The need for urgent action is undeniable—but you don't have to take the word of watchdogs or critics," Owens continued. "Corporations themselves are admitting to profiteering at the expense of American consumers. And one thing is clear: These companies won't stop doing the 'inflation dance,' as one CEO called it, until we change their tune."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was among the progressive members of Congress demanding legislative action following the latest batch of earnings reports.

"Big Oil is raking in obscene profits while gouging Americans at the pump," Warren tweeted Thursday. "Putin's war in Ukraine is driving up prices, giving oil companies a massive windfall, and lining investor pockets with stock buybacks. We must crack down on corporate price gouging."

Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Friday that "it's past time for Congress to put an end to this madness."

"A windfall profits tax with rebates to taxpayers would offset the pain at the pump and limit Big Oil's egregious rip-offs. Even Shell's CEO, Ben van Beurden, acknowledges that it makes sense for governments to tap the industry to aid struggling consumers," said Weissman. "Oil and gas executives, and lawmakers, should follow this rare bit of common sense from an executive at an industry that has done so much damage to our planet and consumers."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Despite total borrowings reaching $11.1 billion, the Auckland Council Group’s latest results show it has managed to weather the worst of the storm created by the covid pandemic.

But the super city’s statement to the NZX shows it will face some tough times ahead as it seeks to balance its next budget.

In June the council with New Zealand’s largest Pacific population — almost 250,000, more than 15 percent of the city’s total of 1.7 million — agreed to defer $230 million in capital works over the next three years to address a $150 million per annum shortfall in its operating costs.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Auckland’s covid recovery

South Auckland projects affected included a new Flat Bush multi-use centre, the upgrade of the Papakura park and ride and the Ōpaheke Park sports fields.

Auckland Council finance and performance committee chairperson Desley Simpson said a number of projects were impacted on by the cutbacks, but increases in revenue and operational savings meant it was now in a stronger position.

“The key point we considered when preparing our Recovery Budget last year was to provide significant support to the economic recovery of Auckland,” Simpson said.

“This proved to be crucial, with our ongoing capital investment programmes helping to counterbalance some of the anticipated economic pressures in Auckland, as well as supporting future infrastructure growth needs for the region.”

Council’s results ‘positive’
The council’s debt increased $757 million to $11.1 billion in the 12 months to June 30, while its revenue grew by $361 million to $5.7 billion.

Manurewa-Papakura ward councillor Angela Dalton said the council’s latest results were positive.

“I think considering the last few years we’ve had, they are pretty good,” she said.

“But I think the future budgets are going to be really tough for us and we are looking at some challenging times ahead.”

Dalton said the results need to be looked at in the context of the Auckland Council Group’s total asset base, which grew by $9.7 billion to $70.4 billion in the past year.

“Considering the huge drop in revenue we’ve faced we’ve still been able to build our city and work on capital projects like the Central Interceptor and City Rail Link. They are the big game changers for Auckland.”

Some council projects were delayed, but it still spent $2.3b on capital works, including over $1b on transport-related assets, $815m on water, wastewater and stormwater and $384 million on other assets.

Climate change funding juggle
Simpson said whoever won Auckland’s mayoral race would have to juggle funding for climate change initiatives, infrastructure and transport spending, community facilities and parks and reserves.

She said while some projects that were deferred might be brought back from the brink, some may be consigned to political history.

“We’ve come through the worst period any Auckland Council has had to deal with. But it’s not going to get any easier.”

Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s final budget was announced in June and included $600 million for new bus services, funding for electric ferries and buses and completion of key links in the city’s cycling network.

The budget’s climate change package will be funded by a targeted rate, generating $574m over 10 years, with plans to seek a further $482m in funding from the government and other sources.

• The political campaign for mayor is being keenly contested with a Pacific candidate, Fa’anānā Efeso Collins, narrowly leading opinion polls for the October local body elections.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ on Air. Asia Pacific Report is an LDR partner.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

"We have long since arrived at the point at which civil disobedience by scientists has become justified."

"These are decent people who know more than anybody else about how deep in the shit we are, and are taking this kind of action."

That's according to an article published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change by five climate scientists—Stuart Capstick, Aaron Thierry, Emily Cox, Steve Westlake, and Julia K. Steinberger—and political scientist Oscar Berglund, who focuses on civil disobedience and social movements.

The half-dozen scientists, who have all participated in and supported groups engaged in civil disobedience pushing for action "to secure a livable and sustainable future," argue that now is the time for scientific experts to intensify their activism efforts.

"What we say in the article is that getting involved in this kind of thing can actually add weight to the message that this is a crisis; that these are decent people who know more than anybody else about how deep in the shit we are, and are taking this kind of action—nonviolent direct action, civil disobedience," Berglund told The Guardian.

"We have a kind of what we call epistemic authority here: People listen to what we are saying, as scientists, and it becomes a way of showing how serious the situation is, that we see ourselves forced to go to these lengths," the University of Bristol lecturer added.

"Many already accept a role for scientists in advocacy," the paper states, noting that around two-fifths of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors have signed petitions or letters demanding action, and a quarter of them have joined protests.

The article asserts that "to press for more meaningful efforts, and to push back against the negligence and bad faith tactics that frustrate this, a legitimate next step for scientists is to participate in peaceful civil disobedience."

"We argue that this is justified on the basis that it is effective as a strategy for change, it strongly communicates the urgency of the climate crisis, is a reasonable and ethical activity for scientists to undertake, and is revealing of the barriers to climate action," the authors wrote.

The scientists referenced the historic effectiveness of civil disobedience, pointing out that "the IPCC concludes with 'high confidence' that collective action connected to social movements has played a substantial role in pressuring governments to create new laws and policy."

The two-page call to action even cites one of the youth climate movement's top leaders:

Civil disobedience by scientists has the potential to cut through the myriad complexities and confusion surrounding the climate crisis in a way that less visible and dispassionate evidence provision does not, sending a clear signal that scientists believe strongly in the evidence and its implications. When those with expertise and knowledge are willing to convey their concerns in a more uncompromising manner than through papers and presentations, this affords them particular effectiveness as a communicative act. This is the insight of Greta Thunberg when she calls on us to "act as you would in a crisis."

The paper makes a case that civil disobedience by scientists is justified because previous avenues for pushing policymakers to act more boldly—including phasing out fossil fuels—have failed and the climate emergency is having and will continue to have such sweeping negative impacts.

"For decades, scientists have tried to sound the alarm through other means," the article notes, "but years of delay and obfuscation by decision-makers mean that severe consequences are already unfolding around the world, with little time remaining to avoid even more far-reaching and long-lasting harm."

"The climate crisis is epitomized by destructive impacts on large numbers of people; it is pervaded by injustice, and exacerbated through obstruction by powerful institutions, including the conditions set by legislators," the document stresses.

Responding to the counterargument that scientists participating in civil disobedience "risks undermining the integrity of science," the authors wrote that the separation of science and politics is "based on historical precedent" and "we need to ask how well these inherited norms are serving us in a time of existential environmental crisis."

They declared that "the widespread notion that sober presentation of evidence by an 'honest broker' to those with power will accomplish the best interests of populations is itself not a neutral perspective on the world; it is instead conveniently unthreatening to the status quo and often rather naive."

The scientists also acknowledged that "the personal risks associated with civil disobedience vary dramatically with people's circumstances," and "there are many frontline activists who have lost their lives protesting and resisting in defense of people and planet."

"To be able to engage in disruptive protest in relative safety is a privilege held by citizens living in comparatively liberal societies," they wrote. "For those in such a fortunate position, the opportunity exists to press for action, while helping to shape the nature of protest activity and reducing the barriers to participation by others."

The article—which follows a global mobilization of scientists pushing for climate action in April, including through acts of civil disobedience—was welcomed by others in the scientific community.

"This paper is absolutely great," said Fernando Racimo of the GLOBE Institute at Denmark's University of Copenhagen. "Plus, unlike other papers, it appears to have the uncanny ability to print itself and find its way into various faculty lounges of my university."

Sebastian Berger, an assistant professor of sustainable development at the University of Bern in Switzerland, similarly pledged to spread the article, tweeting, "Fresh [off] the press and straight into my undergraduate syllabus."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Record-breaking extreme heat and historic droughts continued to wreak havoc in China and Europe on Wednesday, highlighting the life-threatening reverberations of the global climate emergency and underscoring the need to rapidly transition away from its primary driver: fossil fuels.

"There's no question that there will be some loss of crops."

Chinese government officials recently declared a nationwide drought emergency for the first time in nearly a decade. An emergency notice issued Tuesday warned that the fall harvest is under "severe threat" and urged local authorities to ensure the careful use of "every unit of water."

During what is usually flood season, "we have dry season water levels, or below typical dry season water levels," Even Pay, an agricultural analyst at Trivium China, told The Guardian on Wednesday. "The conditions are very, very extreme and there's no question that there will be some loss of crops." Also, she added, "I think we're going to start to see reports of livestock farmers getting hit."

In addition to imperiling food production, a shortage of rain during China's longest and most intense heatwave since record-keeping began in 1961 is exacerbating forest fires and causing rivers and lakes to dry up—reducing drinking water supplies, limiting hydropower-generated electricity, and disrupting shipping.

Large swaths of China have been baking since June 13. After more than 70 days of scorching temperatures, there is little relief on the horizon.

"China's National Meteorological Center downgraded its national heat warning to 'orange' on Wednesday after 12 consecutive days of 'red alerts,'" Reuters reported, "but temperatures are still expected to exceed 40°C (104°F) in Chongqing, Sichuan, and other parts of the Yangtze basin."

Amid record-low precipitation in the basin and soaring temperatures that are increasing evaporation, the Yangtze River's water levels have fallen to half of their historic average. Tributaries of the world's third-largest river, which provides drinking water to 400 million people, have also been harmed by extreme heat and a monthslong decrease in rainfall throughout the basin.

With hydropower capacity sharply curtailed and demand for air conditioning surging, rolling blackouts have become common. Last week, factories in Sichuan, a province where 94 million people rely on hydropower to meet over 80% of their energy needs, reduced production or shut down completely after being ordered to ration electricity.

"Sichuan is a major manufacturing hub and the curbing of electricity to factories has had global impacts, affecting suppliers of Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, Intel, and Apple, as well as pesticide and solar panel manufacturers," Grist reported Tuesday. "On Monday, companies were asked to continue rationing electricity until Thursday."

As Bloomberg noted recently, "The extreme weather in China is worsening a global power crunch and squeezing commodity supplies at a time when nations are struggling to cope with the upheavals caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

Although the ongoing crisis underscores why swiftly eliminating the burning of fossil fuels and ramping up clean energy is necessary, it is poised to ironically lead to more greenhouse gas pollution as China looks to offset drought-induced cuts to hydropower by increasing coal production.

As for protecting its grain harvest, China is turning to geoengineering. Agriculture Minister Tang Renjian said last Friday that "authorities will 'try to increase rain' by seeding clouds with chemicals and spraying crops with a 'water retaining agent' to limit evaporation," the Associated Press reported.

China is far from alone in experiencing dangerously hot and dry conditions this summer.

A study published Tuesday found that Europe is in the midst of its worst drought in at least 500 years. According to the latest report from the European Drought Observatory, 47% of the continent is under a warning for soil moisture deficits, and 17% is in a state of alert because vegetation is affected.

"The severe drought affecting many regions of Europe since the beginning of the year has been further expanding and worsening as of early August," the report said, adding that abnormally hot and dry conditions are likely to keep pummeling parts of western Europe and the Mediterranean until November.

Weeks of extreme heat across much of Europe have sparked wildfires, damaged crops, and led to thousands of deaths. As in China and the United States, blistering temperatures have also intensified historic droughts, causing rivers and reservoirs to shrivel with adverse effects on electricity generation and shipping routes.

"People always thought that water is unlimited, but it really isn't," José Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian government's disaster monitoring center, recently told Reuters.

According to Grist:

Hydropower is the largest source of clean energy in the world, but last year dry spells in places like the southwestern United States, China, and Brazil created significant disruptions in the supply, and the International Energy Agency predicts that global hydropower expansion will slow down this decade. Brazil, which in 2021 sourced 61% of its electricity from hydropower, had to cut water flows into hydroelectric dams to a 91-year low during its drought that year.

Drought-induced power shortages "could easily be used as an argument to build more coal plants," warned Li Shuo, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace in Beijing. But a summer of extreme weather across the globe may also encourage more robust climate action, she added.

Preserving a habitable planet depends in large part on cooperation between the U.S. and China—the world's leading emitters of carbon dioxide.

The prospects for green collaboration, however, have dimmed in the weeks since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) provocative trip to Taiwan, a breakaway province that China considers part of its territory.

In response to Pelosi's visit, which was followed by a larger congressional delegation to Taiwan, Beijing canceled climate talks with Washington.

Mark Beeson, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney who studies global climate politics, told Reuters Wednesday that if the current manifestations of extreme weather in both countries "don't focus minds, it's hard to know what will."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Xi made an unannounced visit to China’s far-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) on July 12-15, where he emphasized “social stability and lasting security as the overarching goal” of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies, according to a July 15 report by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Xi’s visit to Xinjiang was his second in eight years to the region, where Chinese authorities have detained up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in internment camps since 2017.

Locals have reportedly been subjected to severe human rights abuses, torture and forced labor, as well as the eradication of their linguistic, cultural and religious traditions in what the United States and several Western parliaments have called genocide and crimes against humanity.

Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and expert on the Xinjiang region, said Xi’s statements were “a very significant affirmation that Beijing’s policy was correct and that it should continue to be implemented.

“It’s a statement of defiance and of pride,” Zenz told RFA. “Basically he is signaling that nobody can interfere into China's ethnic policy in Xinjiang and that Beijing’s red lines are firmly upheld.”

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that China has asked United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to bury a report into Xinjiang, which she visited in May.

The letter authored by China expressed “grave concern” about the Xinjiang report and aims to halt its release, Reuters said from Geneva, where four sources told the news agency that China began circulating it among diplomatic missions from late June and asked countries to sign it to show their support.

Xi 'will eradicate the remaining few'

In a July 16 tweet thread, James Millward, a history professor at Georgetown University who specializes in Central Asia, noted Xi’s contention that “Chinese civilization is the root of the cultures of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang” in a speech after his trip to describe the relationship of non-Han Chinese people in the XUAR to zhonghua, or Chinese identity.

“In Xi's speech at the Third Xinjiang Forum in September 2020 (and in other speeches around that time) a different phrase was used,” Millward wrote. That phrase was: “All ethnic groups in Xinjiang are family members linked to Chinese bloodlines.”

“I pointed out at the time that by evoking ‘blood’ and ‘family member’ this phrase indirectly implied a genetic relationship between the Central Asian peoples now ruled by the [Chinese Communist Party] and ‘zhonghua,’ i.e., Chinese people,” he wrote.

Millward also notes that Xi’s comment about the necessity of educating and guiding officials and the masses “to correctly recognize Xinjiang history, especially history of ethnic development” indicates that China is now stressing that various ethnic groups “are all Chinese, developed from and as part of what Xi calls the ‘zhonghua’ (now ubiquitous as generic, ahistorical cultural term equivalent to the western-language term ‘China’).”

Chinese analyst Ma Ju said Xi went to Xinjiang in preparation for the CCP’s 20th Congress in autumn, where Xi likely will be reappointed for a third term as party general secretary, and the People’s Congress convening next March. 

“Xi Jinping’s statements made after his visit to the region indicates that he will eradicate the remaining few and careful cultural figures after getting rid of the Uyghur elites,” Ma told RFA. “This is an eradication campaign. They will continue this eradication campaign just like getting rid of the civilization of other nations [non-Han peoples] in Chinese history.”

Rahima Mahmut, U.K. director of the World Uyghur Congress, said events such as the staged dancing of Uyghurs for Xi’s visit was orchestrated for propaganda purposes.

“This happens quite often,” she said. “It is the same not only for officials from the central government, but also for local officials. The Uyghur students and performers are forced to welcome such officials. The staged dancing of Uyghurs was meant to show the world that Uyghurs enjoy normal happy lives.”

But Mahmut also said it was “frightening” to see photos and videos of the Chinese president with mostly elderly Uyghurs around him, and young men nowhere to be seen.

“Where did the Uyghur young men go? The truth is most young Uyghur males have faced enforced disappearance. They are either in the camps or prisons. This is quite clear,” she said.

Following Xi’s visit to the XUAR, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told RFA that the U.S. would continue to work “to promote accountability for the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government’s use of forced labor, as well as its ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”

Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alim Seytoff.

President Biden has set out on his travels to Saudi Arabia. The implications of the trip for the intertwined issues of human rights and energy policy are dire.

Saudi bombs have "indiscriminately killed and injured civilians," according to Human Rights Watch—more than 18,000 to date.

The Saudi Arabia visit represents a 180-degree turn for Biden, who once called Saudi Arabia a "pariah" while campaigning for president. (A side note—"pariah" is an offensive slur directed at Dalits, who are the most oppressed in India's caste hierarchy, and public figures in the U.S. and worldwide would do well to refrain from using such terms in the future.)

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been bombing neighboring Yemen as part of their intervention in an ongoing civil war. Saudi bombs have "indiscriminately killed and injured civilians," according to Human Rights Watch—more than 18,000 to date.

Upwards of 20 million Yemenis are facing severe hunger because of the conflict. Human Rights Watch calls it "the largest humanitarian crisis in the world." While the conflict is now on pause because of a UN-mediated truce, that neither provides any assurance that the war won't resume, nor that Saudi Arabia will face accountability for its war crimes.

At home, the Saudi government jails and tortures dissidents, among other severe human rights violations. Saudi dissidents aren't safe outside the kingdom either—Saudi agents murdered prominent dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a resident of the United States, at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Fossil Fueled Dictators

By meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Biden is sending a message to dictators worldwide that the U.S. is perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to their atrocities if it suits U.S. business and geopolitical interests. As I have documented elsewhere, Biden has done the same thing with the murderous Modi government in India.

In Saudi Arabia, these business and geopolitical interests include oil. Biden's discussions with the Saudi government will include "ensuring global energy and food security," the White House says. Presumably, Biden wants to persuade the kingdom to increase oil production and help lower global oil prices.

The supreme irony in Biden urging Saudi Arabia to increase oil production is that it's in response to a global oil supply crunch and price surge partly (though not entirely) attributable to the war in Ukraine, started by another petro-dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Russia is the world's third largest producer of oil (after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia), second largest producer of gas (after the U.S.), and the world's largest gas exporter and second largest oil exporter. Effectively, oil and gas revenues are funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, another global human rights catastrophe that has resulted in almost 4,000 civilian deaths to date.

Continuing to fund the Russian war machine by buying Russian gas is obviously unacceptable. By the same standard, it's equally unacceptable to fund the Saudi war in Yemen, and reward Saudi human rights violations, by buying Saudi oil.

In fact, the oil and gas industry is tied to violent, repressive governments worldwide.

In Indonesia, Exxon has been implicated in death squad killings and torture by Indonesian military personnel working as private security for the company.

In Nigeria, oil and gas extraction by Shell and other corporations has had horrific environmental justice impacts in the Niger Delt, especially on Indigenous Ogoni peoples. When the Ogoni peoples have resisted peacefully, they have been violently repressed and criminalized. Nine Ogoni leaders, including prominent writer Ken Saro Wiwa, were executed by the Nigerian state in 1995 on trumped-up charges, because they dared to publicly challenge the oil and gas industry.

Fossil Fueled Fascism at Home

If we are to avoid using our oil and gas purchases to enrich repressive governments, or corporations benefiting from their repression, should we ramp up domestic oil and gas production instead?

The short answer is no. The U.S. is already the world's largest oil and gas producer, and planned expansion of production in the U.S. (or anywhere else) is inconsistent with a safe future for humanity, something even the pro-fossil fuel International Energy Agency acknowledges. And an increase in domestic production, which the Biden administration is pushing for, won't even help reduce gas prices in the short term.

Not to mention, our own federal and state governments in the U.S. routinely violate human rights in defense of Big Oil.

My former colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I authored a 2020 report documenting the systematic industry-funded effort to pass "critical infrastructure" laws in the states to criminalize peaceful protest against fossil fuel infrastructure. These laws are now on the books in 17 states—the original 13 states with these laws at the time our report was published have since been joined by Arkansas, Kansas, Montana, and Ohio.

However, this isn't only a problem of "red states" going rogue. Even in the absence of a "critical infrastructure law," law enforcement in the Democratic-governed state of Minnesota, joined by Federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP), unleashed violent repression against peaceful Indigenous-led protests opposing Enbridge Corporation's Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline.

The U.S. Justice Department has shown no interest in investigating the proliferation of "critical infrastructure" laws and their threat to First Amendment rights. However, they have been more than eager to charge Jessica Reznicek, a peaceful water protector at Standing Rock, with "terrorism"—charges that weren't brought against anyone in the violent fascist mob who participated in the coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

Evidently, the Trump-era DOJ felt encouraged to pursue terrorism charges in the Reznicek case because of a congressional letter urging a crackdown on protests against fossil fuels. Signatories to the letter include members of Congress with ties to the fascist January 6 mob, such as Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar from Arizona, Mo Brooks from Alabama, and Louie Gohmert from Texas.

Disgracefully, the Biden-era DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland has not reversed course, but has doubled down on pursuing terrorism charges against Reznicek.

Climate Protection is Democracy Protection

Besides being a threat to the planetary climate and to air and water quality in communities adjacent to its operations, the oil and gas industry is closely connected to anti-democratic politics. As we've seen from the examples of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and the U.S., one form this takes is support for—and dependence on—authoritarianism, violence, and repression.

An industry that takes advantage of the lack of political power of marginalized communities to turn their homelands into sacrifice zones in its quest for production and profits is, by definition, dependent on repression for its existence. In recent years, growing resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure in the U.S. has prompted the industry to seek further state repression and criminalization of its opponents.

The fossil fuel industry poses serious threats to planetary systems, public health, and democracy. The only way to free ourselves permanently from these threats is to end our dependence on this industry by transitioning to renewable energy—not by legitimizing fossil fuel autocrats overseas.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Basav Sen.

France’s abolition of the status of an overseas minister has received mixed reactions in both France and its overseas territories, with a pro-independence Tahitian member of the National Assembly condemning the “bad signal”.

The position was abolished in yesterday’s government reshuffle and replaced with a minister delegate, a post given to Jean-Francois Carenco.

He will work alongside Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.

• READ MORE: New Caledonia’s Backès joins French government in citizenship post
• Other New Caledonia politics reports

A French Polynesian member of the French National Assembly, Moetai Brotherson, said the change of of status “sends a bad signal to the overseas territories”.

“We remember the way Mr Darmanin sent forces to Guadeloupe. We also remember the declarations [against independence] in New Caledonia,” he said.

Brotherson said the new representatives were unknown to French Polynesia and New Caledonia, adding he would rather have a single minister exercising full power over the overseas territories.

Negative reactions also came from the French right-wing opposition’s Marine Le Pen as well as overseas territory officials.

Newly elected MP in favour
However, a newly elected New Caledonian French National Assembly member and anti-independence politician, Nicolas Metzdorf, said he supported this new move.

“An association of overseas territories minister and minister of interior is excellent news for our territories,” he said.

“It is a demonstration that Emmanuel Macron considers the overseas territories in the same way as mainland France.”

Darmanin and Carenco are set to tour all of the overseas territories, starting with a visit to Reunion on Thursday.

Darmanin said he put the institutional questions of New Caledonia at the top of his priorities.

“I think of the subject of ecology but also institutional questions,” he said.

“I think of New Caledonia and the Ministry of the Interior that has for a long time pondered on the subject with many colleagues there. There is a clear need for two ministers to take care of the overseas territories.”

Resigned after one month
The previous minister, Yael Braun-Pivet, resigned last month after just one month in office to successfully run for the presidency of the French National Assembly.

Carenco was Secretary-General of New Caledonia in 1990 and 1991.

Last December, New Caledonia voted against independence in the third and final referendum under the Noumea Accord.

The vote was boycotted by the pro-independence side which refuses to accept the result as the legitimate outcome for the indigenous Kanak people to be decolonised.

It regards the rejection of full sovereignty at the ballot box as the Noumea Accord’s failure to entice the established French settlers to join it to form a new nation.

However, the anti-independence camp says the three “no” votes are the democratic expression of the electorate to remain part of France.

Paris wants to draw up a new statute for a New Caledonia within France and put it to a vote in New Caledonia in June 2023.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Wunna Maung Lwin, foreign minister of the State Administration Council, as the junta regime is called, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in eastern China’s Anhui province during the Myanmar diplomat’s March 31-April 2 visit.

Wunna Maung Lwin was appointed to his position after the Myanmar military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi more than 13 months ago. He was barred by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from attending a February meeting of regional organization’s foreign ministers in Cambodia.

Analysts said that Wunna Maung Lwin’s meeting with Wang Yi signals Myanmar’s desire for deeper economic ties to its ally China, as it struggles to repress widespread opposition to its rule that has left thousands dead. Beijing meanwhile wants to get its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Myanmar moving forward.

Beijing now seems more willing to side with the junta, as it had done with previous military regimes in Myanmar, political analyst Sai Kyi Zin Soe said.

“China is consistently focused on the One Belt, One Road Initiative,” he said. “They may have something to do economically at present. They must also have many plans to invest in Myanmar, so they seem to be looking at what they can get out of it."

Chinese investments in Myanmar under the BRI, a trillion-dollar infrastructure program, have been hampered by ethnic unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-coup turmoil. China especially wants its main infrastructure project in Myanmar — the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor — to be completed so that it has a direct route from Yunnan province to the Indian Ocean oil trade.

Wang Yi told Wunna Maung Lwin that China would support the junta’s efforts to safeguard independence and territorial integrity and find a path to development that suits Myanmar's situation, according to a report by China’s official Xinhua news agency. He also said China was ready to deepen exchanges and cooperation in all fields.

Zin Mar Aung, foreign minister of Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG), said the Chinese government’s move to invite the junta’s foreign minister on an official visit raises questions about Beijing’s support for Myanmar citizens.

“It’s a very disappointing development,” she said. “It is questionable whether China has reversed its previous position when it said Beijing will stand by our people in the return of power to the people. Has it now taken a one-sided approach? Is Beijing standing on the other side against the Myanmar people?”

So far, China has been in contact only with the State Administration Council and has yet to formally engage with the NUG.

Sun Guoxiang, Beijing's special envoy for Asian affairs met with Wunna Maung Lwin in Myanmar in August 2021. Afterwards, Sun said he would work with the international community to help bring about social stability and democratic change in the Southeast Asian country.

When the Chinese Communist Party held an online conference of political parties in Southeast Asia in September 2021, the National League for Democracy, Myanmar’s ruling party until it was overthrown by the military, was invited to attend, but could not participate in discussions.

‘Main thing is economics’

China-based Myanmar observer Hla Kyaw Zaw said the Chinese government gives priority to its economy.

“It is true that China had invited [Wunna Maung Lwin], but it was for its own interests,” she said. “China also wants democracy in Myanmar for stability, and it has said it will render all the help it can.”

“The main thing is economics,” she said. “In the past, there were matters agreed upon during the time of Aung San Suu Kyi. Parts of the Silk Road project undertaken by Myanmar seem to have stopped, and China wants them to resume.”

In a statement following the visit between Wunna Maung Lwin and Wang Yi, the junta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called for the implementation of joint projects between the two countries, the opening of a Myanmar consulate in Chongqing in central China, and the addition of new border crossings between the two countries.

The ministry also said the two foreign ministers discussed the implementation of a Five-Point Consensus, an agreement between Myanmar’s military ruler and ASEAN countries at a meeting held after the coup.

Major General Zaw Min Tun, the junta’s spokesman, said the regime had no further comments on details of talks between the two foreign ministers.

“We already have issued a statement. I have nothing else to say,” he said.

Prashanth Parameswaran, a fellow with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program in Washington, said China believes that it is in its interest to increase its public support for the increasingly isolated Myanmar military regime.

“But this support will not be cost-free for Myanmar,” he said. “The key question is what China will ask for in return for increased support, and Wang Yi’s comments suggest what this could entail, whether it be advances on infrastructure projects or diplomatic support for other issues.”

Jason Tower, the country director for Myanmar U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, said that China is betting that the Myanmar military will not relinquish power.

“The problem, though, is that the junta has no possible pathway towards achieving stability in the country,” he told RFA. “Over the longer term this means that China will be placing its economic plans for Myanmar far out of reach by continuing to support the junta in this way.”

The potential consequences of China’s backing of the junta could have negative consequences throughout the region, Tower said.

“If Beijing moves forward with this level of support for a genocidal military with no popular legitimacy, it risks undermining any hopes of maintaining a strong friendship with the Myanmar people,” he said.

“This could produce a regional crisis of tragic proportions as revolutionary actors will double down, and as the junta will fall back on the only tool it has available to sustain itself, which is brutal violence,” he said.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ye Kaung Myint Maung.

The reports, which were published on March 3 on Tengritagh (Tianshan), the official website of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government, are largely a dry recitation of judicial statistics for the year. But scholars and analysts say the numbers represent a shift in strategy to use more official but still corrupt means to prosecute Uyghurs and other members of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Public prosecutors, who collectively are known as the Procuratorate, detained nearly convicted more than 44,600 people in 28,490 cases involving about 12,900 different crimes, according to a work report read by Li Yongjun, who is the head of the XUAR People’s Procuratorate, at the fifth session of the 13th People’s Congress of the XUAR on Jan. 24.

Li noted that “the construction of a safe Xinjiang was effectively promoted.”

In a readout of the 2021 work report, Chief Justice Bahargul Semet said that the region’s courts handled 668,900 cases. Of those, 606,200 were closed to public review. The top-level Supreme Court, meanwhile, took up 5,820 cases — 5,271 of which were closed.

German researcher Adrian Zenz, who has documented China’s abuses against the Uyghurs, said the number of cases and investigations in Xinjiang courts has nearly doubled since 2018.

That, and the fact that Uyghur-language translations are also increasing during trials, shows that, “Beijing’s oppression in the region is shifting from mainly re-education to sentencing large numbers of Uyghurs to prison terms,” Zenz said.

“Uyghurs are not released from the camps, but instead shifted into prisons,” he said.

“Xinjiang continues to hide how many ‘criminals’ are sentenced each year,” he said. “It stopped reporting this figure in 2018. This unfortunately indicates that the state is concealing its strategy of shifting Uyghurs from re-education camps to prisons to the outside world.”

Teng Biao, an academic lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, who is an expert on China’s judicial and legal systems, told RFA that that courts have become a tool of repression in Xinjiang.

‘Numbers are shocking’

Ilshat Hassan, a U.S.-based analyst and vice chair of the World Uyghur Congress’s executive committee, said he was shocked by the numbers of cases mentioned in the two court reports.

“This [new information] confirms these numbers, because there are so many people who still have yet to be sentenced, who are being detained indefinitely,” he said. “They have committed no crime that would see them sentenced.

“Even those Uyghurs who have been sentenced have committed no crime,” he said. “As a matter of fact, China is extralegally detaining Uyghurs in concentration camps. These numbers [in the 2021 work reports] represent just one small fraction of reality. Even so, the numbers are shocking.”

Hassan suggested that the figures are a testament to the increased repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang in 2021, noting that many of the cases were related to “counter-terrorism” and “stability maintenance,” which are indicators of repression.

“The numbers are very large, which shows the scope of the genocide,” he said. “We cannot see any clear details about these cases, because China is keeping them secret. What we do know is that many Uyghurs have disappeared or gone into concentration camps without having gone to trial, without anything from the courts.”

In her readout, justice Bahargul said that courts operated by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a state-owned economic and paramilitary organization, handled 80,800 cases, 71,000 of which are now closed.

The corps, which also is known as Bingtuan, has been sanctioned by the U.S. for its involvement in human rights violations against Uyghurs.

That the Bingtuan tried such a high number of cases on behalf of the XUAR’s Supreme Court shows the significance of the role that the XPCC is playing in repressing the Uyghurs, Hassan said.

“In particular, the Bingtuan is responsible for a large number of these [cases],” he said. “The Bingtuan is being used in the repression of the Uyghurs in carrying out a genocide against them.”

China is believed to have held 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in the region.

The report from the People’s Court also noted the rise in court cases handled online.

Hassan of the World Uyghur Congress said there are problems with putting the legal process online.

“Looking at this in theory, the judge and the accused will not meet one another face-to-face,” he said. “That will have an influence on the judge’s verdict in the case.”

“In China, in a context where there is no independent law, the verdict of the judge or the court is simply not taken into account in a large number of cases, and instead the word of the government organs or party organs behind them is what actually counts,” he said. “This situation is widespread in China.”

In her readout, Bahargul said the political role of the courts is to strictly and firmly rule by law and to maintain stability by paying close attention to ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and other acts of violence and terrorism, and always to ensure a high-pressure environment.

Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mihray Abdilim and Alim Seytoff.