Archive for May 2017

Jeremy Corbyn presents a grave danger to this country

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Jeremy Corbyn presents a grave danger to this country


WITH his beard, allotment and eccentric fondness for unusual manhole covers Jeremy Corbyn has always tried to present himself as some sort of kindly uncle or lovable grandad.

Source: Daily Express :: Comment Feed http://ift.tt/2qCwVg5

100 years old and still monopolising this space...

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100 years old and still monopolising this space...


POLITICS is not a game, so with only a week to go before the election, I have been asking the leaders of the political parties to explain their policies in terms we game-players will understand.

Source: Daily Express :: Comment Feed http://ift.tt/2rVJeYQ

The Supreme Court protects a Mexican immigrant from deportation

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The Supreme Court protects a Mexican immigrant from deportation

“WE HAVE some bad hombres here”, Donald Trump said in his third debate with Hillary Clinton, “and we’re going to get them out”. Ridding America of undocumented immigrants with criminal records is, rhetoric aside, not terribly far from Barack Obama’s position; he prioritised the deportation of people found guilty of violent and drug-related crimes. In practice, though, Mr Trump’s recent crackdown has ushered in a new era where none of the 11m unauthorised immigrants living in America feels especially secure. Mr Trump’s get-tough policy received two quite different messages from federal courts on May 30th. One, from the Supreme Court, limited executive discretion in the realm of deportation without ever naming Mr Trump. The other, from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, upheld the deportation of a longtime Hawaii businessman and father of three while at the same time condemning the 45th president’s stance on immigration as “contrary to the values of this nation and its legal system”.

The unanimous decision from...Continue reading

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Work begins on Africa’s tallest building

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Work begins on Africa’s tallest building

COULD Nairobi, Kenya’s traffic-clogged capital, be the next Dubai? Two large Dubai-based investors, Hass Petroleum and White Lotus, seem to think so. On May 23rd they formally started construction of what they claim will be Africa’s tallest building. Out of a vast hole in the ground in Upper Hill, a neighbourhood full of government offices, will rise two towers, the taller some 300 metres high and named “The Pinnacle”. (For comparison, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building, is 828 metres high). One will contain a hotel; the other, some 150 swanky apartments (or “residences”). A helipad will jut out of the roof of the taller tower, allowing the truly plutocratic to be whisked in over the traffic jams from the airport.

The investment is a fillip for Kenya. Much of Africa is in economic trouble. In 2016, according to the IMF, annual GDP growth across the continent sank to just 1.4%, the lowest rate in 20 years. Yet Kenya, which depends less on oil...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2qppSXg

Migration from Eritrea slows

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Migration from Eritrea slows

IN JERIF, a district of Khartoum, young Eritreans listen to Tigrinya pop music in dimly lit restaurants, or watch football at an oppressively hot community centre supported by their government. They are mostly male, and almost all have fled compulsory, indefinite military service on behalf of their despotic government. Most are working, or waiting for relatives to send money, so they can leave for Europe.

But the lads in Jerif will find their journey harder than their predecessors did. The number of Eritreans successfully completing each stage of the trip across the Sahara and the Mediterranean via Sudan appears to have declined in recent years. Border crossings fell by almost two-thirds to 9,000 between 2010 and 2016, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency (the real figures will be far higher, however: plenty of Eritreans get into Sudan undetected). A smuggler says he sent 150 migrants from Khartoum to Libya and Egypt last year, down from 300-400 in 2014 and 2015....Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2qFnWKv

The triumph of Iran’s liberals

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The triumph of Iran’s liberals

WHILE the leader of the free world bopped with sword-waving Arab princes and denounced the ancient Persian enemy, Iranian voters on the other side of the Gulf danced for detente. Men and women packed the streets countrywide, revelling most of the night. They were celebrating the re-election of President Hassan Rouhani. They cheered his vision of opening Iran to the West and his success in trouncing Iran’s isolationists and hardliners, championed by Ebrahim Raisi, who mustered only 38% of the vote on May 19th against Mr Rouhani’s 57%. In local elections on the same day, the hardliners were beaten in all Tehran’s 21 seats.

Defeat is growing familiar to the hardliners. The last time they won was in the parliamentary election of 2012, and that they owed to a mass boycott by reformists. This time the hardliners campaigned particularly hard because they sensed they were not only picking a president, but also, perhaps, the next supreme leader (a more powerful post). The incumbent, Ayatollah...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2raRN0Z

What did Donald Trump achieve in the Middle East?

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What did Donald Trump achieve in the Middle East?

AS DONALD TRUMP set off on his first foreign trip since taking office, to the world’s most unstable and dangerous region, some observers were worried. As it turned out, though, the Middle Eastern leg of Mr Trump’s nine-day maiden voyage was one of the less tumultuous periods of his presidency so far. Nonetheless, with a further tilt towards Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis, and against Iran and the Shias, the president has increased, not smoothed, the tensions that so bedevil the area.

In Riyadh, where he arrived on May 20th, Mr Trump attempted to reset his relationship with the Muslim world, strained by his own Islamophobic rhetoric. “I think Islam hates us,” he said last year, after calling for a blanket ban on Muslims entering America. But in a speech on May 21st he declared that the fight against extremism is “a battle between good and evil”, not “between different faiths”. Blaming most of the region’s problems on terrorism, he urged his audience of Sunni Muslim leaders to...Continue reading

Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2qFtTXJ

Writer wanted

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Writer wanted

Writer wanted: The Economist is looking for a writer to cover the Arab world, based in Cairo. Candidates should send a CV, a cover letter and a 600-word original article that could run in our Middle East and Africa section to cairocorrespondent@economist.com. Deadline for entries is 23rd June.



Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2qV1alh

A provincial shuffle shows the power of China’s president

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A provincial shuffle shows the power of China’s president

IMAGINE an American election in which two-thirds of the senators and three-quarters of the state governors up for re-election are defeated. It would be a landside to end all landslides. (When Ronald Reagan won 98% of the electoral-college votes in the presidential election of 1984, only four Senate seats changed hands out of 33 races). Yet this is the level of turnover happening now at the provincial level in China, without the democracy: ballot papers dropped ceremoniously into large red boxes create a mere semblance of it.

Since the start of 2016 China’s president, Xi Jinping, has replaced 20 of the Communist Party’s 31 provincial secretaries, as the most powerful leaders at that level are known. He has also shuffled 27 of the provincial governorships (governors are second-in-command). For local leaders, April was the cruellest month: ten jobs changed hands. By the autumn, almost every province will have felt the effects—including Hong Kong, where a new leader was named in March....Continue reading

Source: China http://ift.tt/2rUm4iG

In China, even schoolchildren are told to catch spies

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In China, even schoolchildren are told to catch spies

CHINA’s government regards spy-catching as a game for everyone. In April the municipal government of Beijing started offering rewards of up to 500,000 yuan ($70,000) for finding one. It called on citizens to be on their guard against agents attempting to “infiltrate, subvert, split or sabotage China”. Also last month, an official publishing house produced new books for primary-school children to mark the country’s second “National Security Education Day”. They included fun games such as “Find the spy”. State media said this was part of an effort to mobilise students of all ages as “a huge counter-spy force”.

It is not known whether this approach has secured important leads. But in recent days official newspapers have been crowing about a reported victory for China’s counter-intelligence efforts. On May 20th the New York Times said that between 2010 and 2012 China had uncovered a network of some 20 agents, planted deep within...Continue reading

Source: China http://ift.tt/2rUKiJU

Megaprojects threaten Hong Kong’s iconic dolphins

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Megaprojects threaten Hong Kong’s iconic dolphins
Not entirely in the pink

“THE dolphin is clever, cute, kind, active and inoffensive. Exactly the character of Hong Kong.” So said a local member of a committee appointed by China to oversee the end of British rule over Hong Kong in 1997. The body had decided that the pink dolphin, a rare type sometimes seen cavorting in the territory’s harbour, would be a mascot of the handover festivities. Since then, however, the animal’s fate has not been an encouraging portent of the territory’s post-colonial progress. Hong Kong’s dolphins are in perilous decline.

They belong to a type of dolphin that lives off China’s shores called sousa chinensis, or the Chinese White (though they are grey when born and pinkish as adults). They prefer the brackish water of estuaries, where they are threatened by fishing and water-polluting factories. In Hong Kong there is a different danger: the relentless building of megastructures, including one of...Continue reading

Source: China http://ift.tt/2rUvY44

Turmoil in Washington, DC clouds Virginia’s governor race

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Turmoil in Washington, DC clouds Virginia’s governor race

IN VIRGINIA, the only state in the Old Confederacy carried by Hillary Clinton last year, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor is trying not to talk about the president. Ed Gillespie, an establishment Republican who worked for George W. Bush and was chairman of the Republican National Committee, is one of three candidates vying for the Republican nomination in the primary on June 13th. But he seems to have little to say about the controversies dogging Donald Trump's new administration.

They include the Republican replacement for Obamacare that could choke off health funds to the Virginia countryside, a Republican Party bulwark; Mr Trump’s firing of James Comey, who made his name as a federal prosecutor in Richmond; and a proposed federal budget that would mean fewer Navy shipbuilding contracts for a Virginia yard and less cash for a cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, gateway for the first English settlers in the early 1600s.

That is not surprising. A recent poll by the Washington...Continue reading

Source: United States http://ift.tt/2qwUn2m

Emmanuel Macron confronts Vladimir Putin

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Emmanuel Macron confronts Vladimir Putin

FOR a republican country, the welcome could scarcely have been more royal. Exactly 300 years after a young Louis XV hosted Peter the Great at the Chateau de Versailles, on a trip to admire French imperial splendour, France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, chose the same setting for talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The gold leaf on the palace shimmered in the spring sunlight. Plume-helmeted guardsmen lined the red carpet as Mr Putin stepped from his limousine. But if the symbolism on May 29th was friendly, the meeting itself hinted at an inner steeliness to the 39-year-old French president and diplomatic novice.

After two hours of talks, Mr Macron described the encounter as “extremely frank and direct”, which is as close as diplomatic jargon gets to admitting that things were tense. With Mr Putin standing by his side, in the centre of the chateau’s long gallery of paintings depicting glorious French battles, Mr Macron warned that his “red line” in...Continue reading

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