President Biden thanks Kenya for coming to Haiti's aid | Miami Herald - 0 views
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President Joe Biden thanked his Kenyan counterpart in a phone call on Tuesday for agreeing to lead a multinational mission to intervene in Haiti, a day after the United Nations Security Council voted to endorse the effort.
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Kenya has been active in peacekeeping missions in Africa, he said, and “they’re known as a major part of the system and the international community. “Due to problems in the Horn of Africa involving Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, Kenya has also emerged as a major security and diplomatic partner of the United States in the region, Cheatham added. “I think the chaos has made the U.S. and Kenya grow closer. The deal to support this Multinational Security Support mission includes broader security cooperation between the U.S. and Kenya,”
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people have been surprised by Ruto’s willingness to send his forces into Haiti and she believes it’s become “a pet project” of the president.Washington, she said, “seized on the idea when it struggled to persuade other countries like Brazil and Canada to lead.”“It’s much more personal idiosyncratic rather than any kind of great deal for something that’s strategically important,” she said. “It was surprising to his own government officials.”
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Degrowth is not austerity - it is actually just the opposite | Climate Crisis | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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In this context of accelerating ecological breakdown and economic crises, the degrowth movement has steadily been gaining ground. Based on a robust body of scientific literature, degrowth proponents suggest that capitalism’s demand for unlimited growth is destroying the planet. Only degrowth policies can repair this by rapidly scaling back our material and energy use, slowing down production and transitioning to an economy focused around needs, care and the sharing of wealth.
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In the 1990s, it was reintroduced as a “missile word” against the then-dominant ideology of sustainable development and green growth: an ideology that was being used by governments and international organisations to greenwash ineffective climate politics, attacks on public services and predatory lending.
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Capitalism in the Anthropocene by Kohei Saito, a Japanese Marxist scholar, sold more than half a million copies and became a bestseller in Japan.
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The Great Pivot: Why Dem Green Energy IRA Will Steamroll Fossil Fuels and Help Save the... - 0 views
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Although it is true that Senator Joe Manchin (and, for all we know some other Dem senators) slipped some goodies into the bill for Big Carbon, those are small potatoes compared to the massive sums devoted to climate change amelioration. And, those funds come on top of billions that were in last fall’s Infrastructure Act for setting up charging stations around the country for electric vehicles, supplying schools with electric buses, and emissions reductions at ports and airports.
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American energy is no longer a level playing field. It is starkly tilted against fossil fuels, both because of price structures and because of state government policy in big important states like California and New York.
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Despite a slight uptick this year because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent high methane gas prices, coal is doomed and will decline to almost zero in this decade. Methane gas is also doomed but may last a little longer.
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UN calls on Israel to open nuclear facilities - 0 views
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The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution Monday calling on Israel to quickly open its nuclear program for inspection and backing a high-level conference to ban nuclear weapons from the Middle East which was just canceled.
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174-6 with 6 abstentions
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Those voting "no" were Israel, the U.S., Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau
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Report: Sanctions may be speeding Iran's nuclear advancement - CSMonitor.com - 1 views
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“Putting pressure is just half of the equation; [US and European officials] have succeeded with that, undoubtedly the pain on Iran is immense,” says Mr. Parsi. “But to channel the pain is a very, very different task.”
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measures have begun to bite, causing economic isolation and a precipitous fall in both oil revenues and the value of the Iranian currency. But Iran has still added thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium, and deployed a more efficient, second-generation centrifuge model; stepped up uranium enrichment levels from 5 percent to 20 percent, which is technically not too far from weapons-grade; and moved its most sensitive work to a deeply buried site impregnable to air attack.
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“it is highly unlikely that the regime will succumb to sanctions pressure … [when] no proportionate sanctions relief is put on the table by the P5+1, and capitulation is seen as a greater threat to the regime’s survival than even a military confrontation with the United States.”
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Think Again: North Korea - By David Kang and Victor Cha | Foreign Policy - 1 views
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There is no threat of war on the Korean peninsula because the United States and South Korea have deterred the regime for over six decades, or so the thinking goes. And the occasional provocation from Pyongyang -- full of sound and fury -- usually ends with it blowing up in its face, signifying nothing. So why worry? Two reasons. First, North Korea has a penchant for testing new South Korean presidents. A new one was just inaugurated in February, and since 1992, the North has welcomed these five new leaders by disturbing the peace.
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Second, North Korea crossed a major technology threshold in December, when it successfully launched a satellite into orbit. Though the satellite later malfunctioned, the North managed to put the payload into orbit with ballistic missile launch technology that is clearly designed to reach the United States. This development appears to validate former U.S. Defense Secretary Bob Gates's January 2011 claim that the regime was only five years away from fielding a missile that could threaten the continental United States. To make matters worse, Pyongyang conducted a third nuclear test in February, which appears to have been more successful than the previous two.
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North Korea today can threaten all of South Korea and parts of Japan with its conventional missiles and its conventional military. The North can fire 500,000 rounds of artillery on Seoul in the first hour of a conflict. Stability has held for 60 years because the U.S. security alliances with South Korea and Japan make it clear to the North Korean leadership that if they attacked South Korea or Japan, they would lose both the war and their country. And, for half a century, neither side believed that the benefits of starting a major war outweighed the costs. The worry is that the new North Korean leader might not hold to the same logic, given his youth and inexperience.
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Mali Is Not a Stan - By Laura Seay | Foreign Policy - 1 views
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It wasn't until Jan. 11, when France began bombing the Islamists to stop their advance on Mali's government-held south, that the rest of the world snapped to attention. And that's when the trouble began: the terrible headlines, the misleading cover art, and the bad analysis.
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African affairs are generally a low foreign-policy priority for the United States. As such, the American foreign policy establishment is not well known for its expertise on West African security crises. But France's sudden and deep engagement in Mali -- and limited U.S. support for the operation -- left most media outlets and think tanks in need of immediate explanations. Not surprisingly, this state of affairs led to a sudden proliferation of Mali "experts" pontificating on the airways and in print about a country most could not have located with ease on a map two weeks before. False claims based on limited contextual knowledge have since abounded, including one widely repeated claim that this crisis is largely a result of the Libya intervention (it's not; this happened due to domestic political crises in Mali).
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Remember all those comparisons of Afghanistan to Vietnam? The historical analogy had only very limited utility because the former's history and context had almost nothing in common with the latter's. Likewise, Mali's uniqueness means that outcomes in that country -- as well as the depth and breadth of French engagement -- will no doubt be very different.
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Obama Bid for Europe Trade Pact Stirs Hope on Both Sides - www-nc.nytimes.com - Readabi... - 1 views
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Experts cited tough economic times on both sides of the Atlantic and a perceived need among European leaders for a cause to unify their frayed union as major reasons that an agreement might be reached now, where past efforts have failed. But an even greater consideration, they said, was the growing economic might of China
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Negotiations are not expected to be easy, with entrenched interests, especially in protected sectors of the agriculture industry, fighting to maintain their subsidies and preferences. European consumers have rejected the kinds of genetically modified crops3 that are commonplace in the United States but are known across the Atlantic as Frankenfoods. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama’s announcement was applauded by leading politicians and business groups in Europe, especially here in Germany, and so far the news has not provoked the instant union opposition in the United States that free-trade talks with underdeveloped, low-wage countries do.
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In a Democratic administration, free-trade agreements are much easier to reach with higher-wage, unionized countries like those in Europe that do not spook trade unions. And the cross-pollination between American and European companies, as in the auto sector, also is expected to blunt opposition from labor groups
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European Journal of International Relations-2014-Webber-341-65.pdf.pdf - 0 views
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the future of European integration and the European Union is more contingent than most integration theories allow
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the role of domestic politics
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he extent to which Europe’s uniquely high level of political integration depends on the engagement and support of the region’s economically most powerful ‘semi-hegemonic’ state, Germany
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Senior Saudi prince says Trump shouldn't scrap Iran deal | Reuters - 0 views
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump should not scrap a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers but should take the nation to task for its "destabilizing activities" in the Middle East, said a former senior Saudi official.
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"I don't think he should scrap it. It's been worked on for many years and the general consensus in the world, not just the United States, is that it has achieved an objective, which is a 15-year hiatus in the program that Iran embarked on to develop nuclear weapons," Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to Washington and London said on Thursday.
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would like to see if the deal could become a "stepping stone" to a more permanent program "to prevent proliferation through the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East."
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Europeans agree defense plan after campaign swipes by Trump | Reuters - 0 views
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The European Union on Monday agreed a defense plan that could see it sending rapid response forces abroad for the first time, as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's criticism of allies appeared to galvanize Europe into revamping its strategy.
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"Europe needs to be able to act for its own security," French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters. "This will allow Europe to take a step towards its strategic autonomy,"
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The election of a Russia-friendly political novice as president in Bulgaria - a member of both the EU and NATO - has given further impetus to French and German efforts to improve common defense operations.
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IS 'producing weaponised mustard gas': Watchdog | Middle East Eye - 0 views
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The global watchdog tasked with destroying chemical weapons is probing more than 20 reports of the alleged use of toxic weapons in Syria since August, its chief told the AFP news agency on Friday.And, in what he called an "extremely worrying" development, Ahmet Uzumcu revealed that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) believes the so-called Islamic State (IS) group has manufactured its own mustard gas for use in Syria and Iraq.
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The OPCW is already "collecting information and analysing" it, the OPCW director general said, to see if the allegations "are credible or not in order to deepen our investigation"."The number (of allegations) is quite high. I counted more than 20," said Uzumcu, revealing that even on Thursday the Syrian authorities had sent to the OPCW fresh reports of chemical weapons use against them.
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Samples of mustard gas taken from attacks in Syria and Iraq have now been analysed by the OPCW's dedicated laboratories and "the findings do suggest that this substance may have been produced by IS itself," said Uzumcu.It was "poor quality, but still harmful ... and it was weaponised so it's extremely worrying," the OPCW chief said."Especially given the fact that there are several foreign fighters in those countries who may go back to their countries of origin one day. This requires a high-degree of vigilance within our countries," he warned.
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Are 'Water Wars' imminent in Central Asia? - Al Jazeera English - 1 views
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The overpopulated, Israel-sized Ferghana Valley has attracted the armies of Alexander the Great, Arabs, Mongols and Russian tsars. It has also spawned some of the bloodiest conflicts in the former Soviet Union, including ethnic clashes, incursions of armed Islamists and the Uzbek government's merciless crackdown on a 2005 popular revolt. The glaciers and snows of the Tian Shan mountains around the valley give birth to the Syr Darya, one of Central Asia's two major rivers, and turn the valley into a giant hothouse with nearly perfect conditions for farming. Border areas in nearby Xinjiang, China's troubled Muslim region, also depend on Tian Shan's glaciers for water. But between 1961 and 2012, the sky-scraping range whose name means "Heavenly Mountains" in Chinese, has lost 27 percent of its ice mass, the German Research Centre for Geosciences said last year. The annual loss amounts to up to 5.4 cubic kilometres of water a year, it said.
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farmers here are "ready to kill each other for water," a local mirob, or community official responsible for distribution of piped water from a communal canal, told Al Jazeera. The official, who could not give his name because of his job's sensitivity, described how over the past decade farmers have increasingly resorted to quarrels and fistfights and used their connections to officials to influence the timing and duration of water allocation to their land lots. This year, there's next to nothing to irrigate the fields with. "There's been no winter this year, so we're begging God for water," farmer Rasul Azamatov told Al Jazeera
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The Ferghana valley is a bit bigger than Israel, but lacks its proficiency in water conservation - and does not have many alternatives to farming. Cheap Chinese exports have killed local plants and factories, and the valley has become a major source of labour migration - mostly to Russia.
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Living With Nuclear Outliers - www.nytimes.com - Readability - 0 views
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The regimes in North Korea and Iran perceive integration into an international community whose dominant power is the United States as a threat to their survival. Integration might yield short-term regime-sustaining economic benefits, but it carries the risk of regime-terminating political contagion.
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Pyongyang and Tehran seized on NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya as evidence that Qaddafi had been duped by the West. Essentially, by taking down regimes in Iraq and Libya, Washington priced itself out of the security assurance market in Pyongyang and Tehran
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The trouble is that “containment” as a strategy is increasingly denounced by hard-liners in the U.S. policy debate as tantamount to appeasement, reducing the administration’s political space
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How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By Frederick Kaufman | Foreign Policy - 0 views
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in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food
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After World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian strategies -- not to mention the fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world
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Futures markets traditionally included two kinds of players. On one side were the farmers, the millers, and the warehousemen, market players who have a real, physical stake in wheat. This group not only includes corn growers in Iowa or wheat farmers in Nebraska, but major multinational corporations like Pizza Hut, Kraft, Nestlé, Sara Lee, Tyson Foods, and McDonald's -- whose New York Stock Exchange shares rise and fall on their ability to bring food to peoples' car windows, doorsteps, and supermarket shelves at competitive prices. These market participants are called "bona fide" hedgers, because they actually need to buy and sell cereals. On the other side is the speculator. The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they pleased.
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CHINASCOPE - China's National Bureau of Statistics Mentioned a New Gini Coefficient - 0 views
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The United Nations usually draws the line for alarm at 0.4. Above that number indicates a high potential for social instability. China's National Bureau of Statistics released the number 0.375 for the year 1996. It reached 0.412 in year 2000. After that, the Bureau stopped releasing the number. The report released last month only mentioned that it was a “little higher.” When questioned by a reporter, an official from the Bureau responded that “numbers like this are intended for researchers only, not for the general public.”
Benjamin Friedman | How Washington Left the Public Behind on Foreign Policy | Foreign A... - 0 views
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So political leaders -- those in Congress and those vying for the White House -- can generally buck the public on foreign policy without losing votes. It is not that politicians entirely ignore voters’ foreign policy views. But, at least compared with tax and entitlement issues, politicians have considerable rope to pursue their own agendas. Only in rare circumstances, such as very unpopular wars, do voters hold politicians to account on foreign policy.
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No state menaces U.S. borders or regularly checks U.S. military actions abroad, as the Soviet Union once did. Trade accords matter a good deal for certain industries, but most of us barely notice them. For the majority of Americans, even the war in Iraq brought little worse than marginally higher tax rates and unsettling TV images. With bigger things to worry about, such as job security and health care, Americans have little incentive to inform themselves about foreign policies; it is rational for them to remain ignorant.
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Realists and other reliable skeptics of intervention are essentially confined to the academy, while true isolationism has become virtually extinct in Washington.
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Environment Magazine - September/October 2013 - 0 views
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Environmental security is still viewed in Western countries that see climate change as a “threat multiplier” in already conflict-sensitive regions differently than in developing countries that consider security implications with regional neighbors when responding to extreme events.
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operational risk analyses that focus on environmental systems supporting overall stability
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The most crucial of these resources and critical nodes is water.
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Iran cutting sensitive nuclear stocks, much work remains: IAEA | Reuters - 0 views
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Among measures Iran is taking since the interim agreement took effect on January 20 is the dilution of its stock of higher-enriched uranium to a fissile concentration less suitable for any attempt to fuel an atomic bomb.Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), indicated that Iran had made sufficient progress in this regard to receive a scheduled March 1 installment of $450 million out of a total of $4.2 billion in previously blocked overseas funds.
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Separately, the IAEA is investigating suspicions - largely believed to be based on intelligence provided by Western states and Israel - that Iran has researched how to construct an atomic bomb, a charge Tehran denies. Iran says it is Israel's assumed nuclear arsenal that threatens Middle East peace.
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Amano said 17 IAEA member states had so far expressed interest in contributing extra-budgetary funds to help finance the IAEA's extra workload in monitoring the implementation of the Geneva agreement in Iran, but that more was needed. "We are still short of some €1.6 million ($2.21 million)," Amano said.The U.N. agency said in January it needed about 5.5 million euros from member states to pay for its increased activities in Iran. This would cover more inspectors sent to Iran and the purchase of specialized surveillance-related equipment.
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