Home » Archives by category » World News (Page 1717)
Sudan’s police have released a statement saying clashes between two tribes in an eastern port city have killed 17 people in three days. The violence led Sudan’s new joint military-civilian council — formed just last week — to declare a state of emerge…
August 25, 2019Read More
Saudi Arabia intercepted six missiles fired by Yemeni rebels at the southern city of Jizan on Sunday, a Riyadh-led military coalition said, as the insurgents escalate cross-border attacks. The missiles fired by the Iran-aligned Huthis targeted civilia…
August 25, 2019Read More
The international trade in a social-media friendly otter has been banned, after influencers on Instagram were accused of fuelling their extinction. The smooth-coated otter, which is found in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and several other Asian countries, is increasingly being poached from the wild to become a social media accessory. Videos show the semi-aquatic creatures walking on a lead, playing with toys and looking for all the world like the perfect pet. Otter cafes, where visitors can stroke and interact with the animals, have sprung up across Japan. However, the species is under threat: according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, smooth-coated otters are vulnerable to extinction. Demand for young otters in the pet trade is listed as one of the concerns for their survival. Now, the trade in the creature will be heavily regulated after a vote by world leaders attending the 18th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES CoP18), currently being held in Geneva, Switzerland. The animal will now be listed on Appendix I of CITES which lists species threatened with extinction and prohibits commercial trade in them internationally. This will effectively make the pet trade in otters illegal unless they are bred in captivity. The craze for smooth-coated otters as novelty pets is driving the species to extinction Credit: ORIKO HAYASHI/NYTNS / Redux / eyevine Mark Simmonds, senior marine scientist at Humane Society International, said: “The ‘cuteness’ of this species may prove their down-fall in that many people, especially in Asia, now want to own them. “Hopefully this listing will also inspire further vital actions within the otters’ home ranges to ensure their survival. We commend India, Nepal and Bangladesh for bringing these proposals forward, and all the countries and conservation organizations that supported them.” Mako sharks, known as the “cheetahs of the sea”, have also been given a reprieve from commercial trade at CITES, after facing extinction because of demand for its meat and fins, and has been listed on Appendix II. Mako sharks are one of the ocean’s fastest predators and can reach speeds of up to 42mph, and jump to heights of 30ft. The species is classified as Endangered by the IUCN. The short and longfin mako shark proposal, led by Mexico and also backed by multiple countries, faced fierce opposition from countries reluctant to see CITES involvement in industrial scale pelagic fisheries. CITES Appendix II listings means international trade in the species’ meat and fins must be regulated. This will prompt regional fishing management organisations to address their woeful neglect of mako sharks caught in longline fisheries. Rebecca Regnery, Humane Society International wildlife senior director, said: “Over-fishing, including for the lucrative Asian shark fin market, is having a devastating impact on longfin and shortfin mako sharks. Securing CITES protections for these species is an important first step in stopping the brutally cruel and wasteful practice in which sharks and rays have their fins cut off their bodies, sometimes while fully conscious. “But Appendix II protection doesn’t in itself ban trade, so to secure the future for these sharks and rays, this new CITES listings needs to be the start of a whole raft of other measures aimed at cracking down on this vile trade.”
August 25, 2019Read More
Earlier this month, it was reported that Trump White House wants a new deal with Iran that would eliminate its uranium enrichment. Out of its highly developed suspicion of Iran’s intentions, the White House has stumbled on a principle that needs near-universal application if nuclear energy use is to be compatible with international security.The reason why is simple: Despite the brave talk from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about its technical capabilities to safeguard nuclear power facilities, the fact is, if plutonium or highly-enriched uranium are available to would-be bombmakers, they can be put to bomb use so quickly that other countries would be confronted with a fait accompli. We need to confront that basic fact world-wide.Decades ago, Fred Iklé reminded arms controllers in a classic 1961 Foreign Affairs article that detection is not enough. Treaties do not enforce themselves. The principal guardians of the treaty have to be willing to enforce it, and to make that manifestly clear. That means potential violators need to be convinced not only that they will be detected, but that they will come out of the experience worse than before they entered upon a treaty violation. But is that really so today for the members of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)? Realistically, what could we do with a now nuclear-armed country, even if minimally so armed? Or, what would we want to do?In thinking about enforcing a stop to the spread of nuclear weapons we rely too much on an outdated model. During the Cold War, we had a single adversary and felt threatened by any increase in its military capacity. There was no question that we would want to react strongly to any arms control treaty violation, at least if we could do so.By contrast, in the case of most past and possible future violations of nonproliferation norms, we didn’t—or don’t—feel directly threatened by their newly acquired nuclear weapons except in the more abstract sense that additional weapon states further complicate efforts to prevent nuclear wars. And in some cases, the potential violator is a friendly country whom we have no intention of punishing.So, for example, we appear ready to pounce on Iran if it crosses the line toward nuclear weapons, but would we come down on Japan? South Korea? Saudi Arabia? And if we don’t, where does that lead? Our record on enforcement of nuclear norms does not inspire confidence that we would try to reverse their actions.Consider India’s broken promise to use U.S. heavy water for peaceful uses, only to use it to make plutonium for its 1974 nuclear explosion. We did nothing in response.Nor did Israel suffer any consequences for its 1979 nuclear test off South Africa (which has now been established beyond reasonable doubt) in violation of the Partial Test Ban Treaty.In the 1980s, we ignored Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development because we thought we needed Pakistan’s help to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.When the IAEA found North Korea’s 1992 material declaration to be dishonest, we bribed Pyongyang with $5 billion in power reactors to keep it from leaving the NPT. That this deal later fell apart does not erase the weakness of the initial reaction.The 1998 Indian and Pakistani nuclear explosions triggered Glenn Amendment sanctions, but these were waived in 2001.Would it be surprising that a country contemplating crossing the line into nuclear weaponry would conclude that we are not likely to do much in response? What then?The only way to avoid being presented with an accomplished fact of a new entrant into the nuclear weapons club, and thus to preserve the enforceability of the NPT, is to, at a minimum, ban the access to nuclear explosives and the means to acquire them quickly.Commercial nuclear power does not need plutonium or highly-enriched uranium. Power reactors do need low-enriched uranium, but that enrichment should take place only in a small number of highly-trusted centers. That is basically the way the world enrichment market works today.Restricting access to fuels that are also nuclear explosives is in fact precisely what President Gerald Ford proposed in his 1976 Statement on Nuclear Power when he said we should put plutonium (then the explosive of most concern) back on the shelf until the world can cope with the proliferation consequences. Is there anyone who thinks we are there yet?Of course, we want to keep improving the IAEA’s technical detection capabilities. But current nonproliferation efforts are badly unbalanced. The answer to the problems posed by easy access to nuclear explosives does not lie in nuclear safeguards laboratories. It flows from a realistic assessment of the prospects for enforcement: To permit only those nuclear power activities whose possible misuse provides an adequate margin of protection against sudden diversion to weapons.What this means, at a minimum, for the immediate future is conditioning nuclear trade with all countries (other than the five NPT-authorized nuclear states) upon legally binding pledges not to enrich uranium or separate plutonium, and working with other suppliers to make that a universal standard.Victor Gilinsky is program advisor for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) in Arlington, VA. He served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan.Henry Sokolski is executive director of NPEC and the author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (second edition 2019). He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense in the Cheney Pentagon.Image: Reuters
August 25, 2019Read More
BERBERA, SOMALILAND—Djibouti’s role in U.S. national security has for decades been inversely proportional to its size. The tiny East African country has long been a logistical hub for the U.S. military. Its airfield helped supply U.S. forces in Somalia…
August 25, 2019Read More
Since President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative in Kazakhstan in 2013, framing it as an overland strategy to connect Asia to Europe, China’s inroads in the Western Balkans have grown more deeply entrenched. Through bridge construction…
August 25, 2019Read More
The J-20, however, is probably not designed as a dedicated air superiority fighter like the Su-57 is. Its concept of operations seems to be based on American ideas about how to operate a fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Not much is known about the sp…
August 25, 2019Read More
Pope Francis called for a global commitment to fight the fires in the Amazon as Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said on Sunday that G7 leaders were nearing an agreement on how to tackle them. The pontiff added his voice to growing international concern about the vast tracts of tropical forest ravaged by blazes in Brazil and neighbouring countries. “That lung of forests is vital for our planet,” said the pope, who is from Brazil’s neighbour Argentina, in his weekly address before thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square. Mr Macron, hosting Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, at the summit of the G7 major industrialised nations in Biarritz, said a consensus was emerging about how to put out the fires and repair the damage. Mr Macron has made the Amazon a priority of the summit, declaring it a global emergency and threatening to block a trade deal between the EU and the South American common market, Mercosur, until the fires are extinguished. The agenda prompted criticism from Mr Trump on Saturday that Mr Macron was focussing too much on “niche” issues designed to play well with French voters, such as climate change, income and gender equality and African development. Mrs Merkel came out against blocking the Mercosur trade deal over the Amazon fires but said she was in favour of treating them as an emergency. Undeterred, the French president told reporters on Sunday: “We are all agreed on helping those countries which have been hit by the fires as fast as possible.” Mr Macron said Colombia had appealed to the international community to help. “Our teams are making contact with all the Amazon countries so we can finalise some very concrete commitments involving technical resources and funding,” he added. Pointing out that France itself is “an Amazonian nation” because of its overseas department, French Guiana, he said: “The Amazon is so important … in terms of biodiversity, oxygen and the fight against climate change, that we must proceed with reforestation.” Environmental campaigners pointed out, however, that Mr Macron announced no specific plan of action or timetable. French diplomatic sources suggested that more definite measures might be announced during the concluding session of the summit on Monday. Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, who has accused Mr Macron of a “colonial mindset” in his approach to the Amazon fires, has ordered in the army to fight the blazes. On Sunday two Hercules C-130 aircraft dropped thousands of litres of water in an attempt to douse the fires but hundreds of new blazes broke out. Thousands of Brazilians took to the streets in protest against the destruction of the rainforest. Increased land clearances allowed by the far-Right Bolsonaro government to make way for crops or grazing has exacerbated the region’s worst fires in years, experts say. Even with international action, French firefighters experienced in putting out smaller blazes in the south of France pointed out that it might be impossible to extinguish the huge Amazon fires without rain. Eric Flores, fire chief of the southern Hérault region, suggested that the Brazilian army could limit the spread of the blazes by lighting controlled fires “to create barriers of deforested areas” without vegetation.
August 25, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Terms of Trade is a daily newsletter that untangles a world embroiled in trade wars. Sign up here. Two top White House officials said President Donald Trump has the authority to force American companies to leave China — as he claims, an…
August 25, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Balance of Power newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Politics on Twitter and Facebook for more.When Group of Seven leaders meet for dinner it’s always a spectacle. Not just the menu, but who sits where, who talks with whom — and who doesn’t. It seems the meal last night in the French seaside resort of Biarritz was particularly tense.Differences over Russia (U.S. President Donald Trump muses about bringing Vladimir Putin back to the group after his 2014 expulsion over the Crimea annexation) and Iran (after Trump nixed the nuclear deal last year) were wide, officials say. And now host Emmanuel Macron has thrown a further log on the fire.Word emerged today of a plane headed to Biarritz, carrying Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. He was there for a brief stop, Tehran said, and would not meet U.S. officials. Even so, just putting him in the same place as Trump is a risky move by Macron, and it appears he may not have discussed it with all his fellow leaders beforehand.It follows Trump’s musings about inviting Putin as a “plus one” to the G-7 in the U.S. next year. It’s hard to see most of the other leaders stomaching Putin coming, even as a guest rather than a club member.Coming on top of arguments over climate change, fires in the Amazon, Brexit and trade (despite a tentative U.S.-Japan deal), it’s unclear where the G-7 as an entity is headed, and, with doubts over whether there’ll be any sort of communique, if it has outlived its usefulness.If Biarritz is any indication, its days could yet be numbered.Also in BiarritzPower play | Inviting Zarif wasn’t the only move Macron made with an eye toward throwing Trump off balance. U.S. officials already suspected the French president might be trying to outwit the U.S. with his summit choreography, in part by picking a pre-summit fight with Brazil’s president – a Trump admirer not even at the G-7 – over Amazon forest fires.Doubling down | Trump acknowledged during his morning meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he’s having second thoughts on escalating the trade war with China — but not in the way you might assume. His top spokeswoman later said he meant he regretted not raising tariffs even more.Bright spot | It wasn’t all angst. The U.S. and Japan agreed in principle on a trade deal under which Japan will slash tariffs on U.S. beef, pork and other agricultural products, while continuing to face levies on its own auto exports. Trump said Japan also would purchase large quantities of U.S. wheat and corn.Brexit test | Johnson is using the G-7 to step up his campaign to convince the European Union to reopen Brexit negotiations. He had breakfast today with Trump, who described him as “the right man for the job” to take the fight to the Europeans, but it won’t be easy – while EU leaders are politely listening, they have given no indication they’re ready to give Johnson the concessions he wants.Happening ElsewhereTurkey sees its deal with the U.S. to carve out a narrow security zone in northern Syria as an opportunity to purge Kurdish fighters from a much larger section of the border region, Selcan Hacaoglu exclusively reports. A Hong Kong police officer fired a weapon, water cannons were deployed for the first time and multiple volleys of tear gas were launched in running skirmishes with protesters in the 12th weekend of unrest in the Asian financial center. While opponents in Libya’s civil war are locked in stalemate, their backers in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, both U.S. allies, are engaged in an aerial campaign that’s seen them target each other’s unmanned planes in a bid to determine the north African nation’s future.And finally …Their husbands may have spent the morning sparring, but the first ladies of the U.S. and France were all smiles as they sampled local sangria in a Basque countryside town 30 kilometers to the southeast of Biarritz. “Just an advice, don’t drink too much,” Brigitte Macron could be heard warning Melania Trump and other world leaders’ wives. It was part of a spouses’ day out that included tours of a 16th-century church and a villa built by French playwright Edmond Rostand. \–With assistance from Kathleen Hunter and Karl Maier.To contact the author of this story: Rosalind Mathieson in London at [email protected] more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
August 25, 2019Read More
Skorzeny is probably best known in the West for, in December 1944, employing about two dozen English-speaking Germans in American uniforms and driving American vehicles to penetrate American lines in an operation called Greif (“Griffin”) that spread pa…
August 25, 2019Read More
Recent Comments