# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
China and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) said last week that they had agreed on a draft framework for negotiating a legally binding code of conduct designed to prevent clashes in the strategic South China Sea (SCS).

Details of the agreement reached weren't disclosed, but many believe it is a definite sign of progress on reaching a final code of conduct that the parties committed to 15 years ago.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said the text of the framework would remain secret for now, and Philippine officials said it would be submitted to foreign ministers for consideration in August.

Until recently, progress has been slow amid disputes over the body of water that China claims virtually in its entirety. China has wrangled with ASEAN countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei over the resource-rich SCS in a bitter territorial spat that has flared on and off for decades. China has claimed most of the sea, through which around $5 trillion in maritime trade passes every year, while the other countries have competing claims.

In an attempt to bolster its assertions, Beijing has been carrying out land reclamation projects and building artificial islands by piling sand on top of reefs and coral atolls. On top of these man-made islands, it has been constructing airstrips and ports, which many suspect could be used for military purposes. The US also believes that China's island-building could threaten navigation within the disputed area.

Hayton: 'I think the process of these discussions is a useful confidence-building measure. The fact that everybody sits around the table and talks and argues about these things is much better than not talking'

In a DW interview, Asia expert Bill Hayton says he remains skeptical about the possibility for the two sides to reach a mutually acceptable agreement soon. Still, he stresses that the process of these discussions is a useful confidence-building measure, and that talking and arguing about their disputes is much better than not talking.
DW: The situation on the Korean Peninsula now seems to dominate international headlines and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS) seem to have vanished from the agenda. What is your view on it?
Bill Hayton: I believe there are a few things going on at the same time. One is that China has been engaging in a charm offensive in Southeast Asia and is not doing anything that is going to upset its Southeast Asian neighbors.

Things have been quiet for almost three years now. Since tensions flared up between China and Vietnam after the controversial deployment of an oil rig by the Chinese in disputed waters, China seems to have behaved itself much better. I think Beijing recognized that it lost quite badly from that incident and since then it hasn't done anything like that again.

At the same time, China has been building these massive islands in the region. Maybe that's absorbing all its energy. When the islands are finished, we might see a return to a more assertive behavior.

Another thing to observe is that China also has a territorial dispute with Japan and is putting a lot more effort into the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands row. Historically, it's never tried to have both fronts active at the same time. Usually when one is active, the other is less active. And that seems to be what's happening at the moment.

We also have a crucial Chinese Communist Party congress this year and maybe the authorities there don't want to upset regional stability ahead of the key event. Furthermore, China is trying to get people to support its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, which is another reason why it probably wants to keep things quiet at the moment.

Some claim that China has already achieved what it wanted to achieve in the South China Sea, and that's the reason why the situation is a bit calmer now. What is your take on this?
I think this argument is definitely at least partly valid. The Chinese already occupy the Paracel Islands; they are building their bases there.

They are also building artificial islands in the SCS, but they haven't finished with the construction yet. These are going to be very powerful bases. Many experts seem to think that they want to build on Scarborough Shoal as well. And that would make it the third point of the iron triangle in the SCS.

The Chinese have lots of reasons for wanting to build those islands. Some of them have to do with territory and national narrative, while others include things like wanting to hide their nuclear submarines in the SCS or project power near the straits of Malacca to prevent the Americans from blocking their supply routes in the case of a war.
President Donald Trump's administration has sent confusing signals on how it will approach the SCS disputes. It has so far done almost nothing in terms of concrete action. How then do you assess US commitment to push for a solution to the issues and counter China's growing influence in the region?
I would like to point to the recent controversy surrounding the movement of the US aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which was supposed to sail to the Korean Peninsula but didn't go there according to the initially announced timeframe. It reached its destination later. Apparently it could have taken a shorter route through the SCS, but chose not to and circumvented it.

It left people wondering whether this was also a kind of a gesture toward China to get them to work harder on North Korea.

I think what the Trump administration is doing is causing a lot of uncertainty to Southeast Asian states. They had certainty when it came to US policy under the previous Barack Obama administration.

They wanted more US engagement, but they had at least some solid sense of what the Americans were prepared to do.

But now they don't know how strong Trump's commitment to them is, and whether he is prepared to put all their interests on one side and focus only on North Korea. That seems to be what's happening at the moment.

Given the uncertainty, the countries there are also considering whether they would have to rely on other players like Japan, which is increasing its engagement, for instance by providing ships, financial support and holding joint exercises, among others.
Countries like Vietnam appear to be getting increasingly closer to the US and Washington has also eased some of the sanctions put in place against the communist regime there. How is the Vietnamese government viewing the Trump presidency and US policy?
One thing Vietnam is obviously doing is rebuilding its relationship with China. They have been holding bilateral talks and begun repairing their ties. The fact that they are both communist regimes also helps. Party-to-party links are much more cordial and allow them to engage in far amicable discussions than in the case of government-to-government talks.

But Vietnam is also building up its military and buying an array of armaments, including submarines that could prove quite a threat to Chinese ships. So they're trying to do two things simultaneously: build friendly ties with Beijing while bolstering military capabilities, in a way that they could pose a significant military threat if they ever came to a confrontation.
It's reported that China and the ASEAN last week reached an agreement on a draft framework for a code of conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea. What is the significance of this development?
I don't think the framework itself is going to lead to anything soon. But I think the process of these discussions is a useful confidence-building measure. The fact that everybody sits around the table and talks and argues about these things is much better than not talking.

But there are a couple of reasons why I don't think there will be an agreement. One is I believe that China retains the desire to build on Scarborough Shoal at some point. And therefore it won't sign a deal that would hinder it from doing so.

The other thing is that China hates the idea of being legally bound by an agreement, but that's what the Southeast Asian states want. For them there's no point signing a code of conduct if it doesn't have any teeth. And so they want to have some sort of an instrument to control China's behavior and China doesn't want its behavior controlled.

Another area of disagreement is that China is trying to basically limit the applicability of this code of conduct to the Spratly archipelago, while others like Vietnam and the Philippines want to also include the Paracels and Scarborough Shoal. There seems to be no movement so far toward reconciling these differences.
Bill Hayton is an expert on Asia at the British think tank Chatham House. He is the author of "The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia" published by Yale University Press and named as one of The Economist's books of the year in 2014. The interview was conducted by Rodion Ebbighausen.

Beijing's island-building in the South China Sea

Ecological impact

The Philippines filed a formal plea at the UN last year, challenging Beijing's territorial claims. Manila said China's reclamation activities are causing "irreversible and widespread damage to the biodiversity and ecological balance of the South China Sea." It also claimed that the destruction of coral reef systems is estimated to cause economic losses valued at $100 million annually.

Author: Gabriel Domínguez

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South China Sea dispute - Long way ahead for China, ASEAN | Asia | DW | 22.05.2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
China and ASEAN have recently agreed to a framework for a code of conduct aimed at preventing clashes in the South China Sea. But will it lead to a legally binding agreement that puts an end to the territorial dispute?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
China and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) said last week that they had agreed on a draft framework for negotiating a legally binding code of conduct designed to prevent clashes in the strategic South China Sea (SCS).

Details of the agreement reached weren't disclosed, but many believe it is a definite sign of progress on reaching a final code of conduct that the parties committed to 15 years ago.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said the text of the framework would remain secret for now, and Philippine officials said it would be submitted to foreign ministers for consideration in August.

Until recently, progress has been slow amid disputes over the body of water that China claims virtually in its entirety. China has wrangled with ASEAN countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei over the resource-rich SCS in a bitter territorial spat that has flared on and off for decades. China has claimed most of the sea, through which around $5 trillion in maritime trade passes every year, while the other countries have competing claims.

In an attempt to bolster its assertions, Beijing has been carrying out land reclamation projects and building artificial islands by piling sand on top of reefs and coral atolls. On top of these man-made islands, it has been constructing airstrips and ports, which many suspect could be used for military purposes. The US also believes that China's island-building could threaten navigation within the disputed area.

Hayton: 'I think the process of these discussions is a useful confidence-building measure. The fact that everybody sits around the table and talks and argues about these things is much better than not talking'

In a DW interview, Asia expert Bill Hayton says he remains skeptical about the possibility for the two sides to reach a mutually acceptable agreement soon. Still, he stresses that the process of these discussions is a useful confidence-building measure, and that talking and arguing about their disputes is much better than not talking.
DW: The situation on the Korean Peninsula now seems to dominate international headlines and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS) seem to have vanished from the agenda. What is your view on it?
Bill Hayton: I believe there are a few things going on at the same time. One is that China has been engaging in a charm offensive in Southeast Asia and is not doing anything that is going to upset its Southeast Asian neighbors.

Things have been quiet for almost three years now. Since tensions flared up between China and Vietnam after the controversial deployment of an oil rig by the Chinese in disputed waters, China seems to have behaved itself much better. I think Beijing recognized that it lost quite badly from that incident and since then it hasn't done anything like that again.

At the same time, China has been building these massive islands in the region. Maybe that's absorbing all its energy. When the islands are finished, we might see a return to a more assertive behavior.

Another thing to observe is that China also has a territorial dispute with Japan and is putting a lot more effort into the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands row. Historically, it's never tried to have both fronts active at the same time. Usually when one is active, the other is less active. And that seems to be what's happening at the moment.

We also have a crucial Chinese Communist Party congress this year and maybe the authorities there don't want to upset regional stability ahead of the key event. Furthermore, China is trying to get people to support its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, which is another reason why it probably wants to keep things quiet at the moment.

Some claim that China has already achieved what it wanted to achieve in the South China Sea, and that's the reason why the situation is a bit calmer now. What is your take on this?
I think this argument is definitely at least partly valid. The Chinese already occupy the Paracel Islands; they are building their bases there.

They are also building artificial islands in the SCS, but they haven't finished with the construction yet. These are going to be very powerful bases. Many experts seem to think that they want to build on Scarborough Shoal as well. And that would make it the third point of the iron triangle in the SCS.

The Chinese have lots of reasons for wanting to build those islands. Some of them have to do with territory and national narrative, while others include things like wanting to hide their nuclear submarines in the SCS or project power near the straits of Malacca to prevent the Americans from blocking their supply routes in the case of a war.
President Donald Trump's administration has sent confusing signals on how it will approach the SCS disputes. It has so far done almost nothing in terms of concrete action. How then do you assess US commitment to push for a solution to the issues and counter China's growing influence in the region?
I would like to point to the recent controversy surrounding the movement of the US aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which was supposed to sail to the Korean Peninsula but didn't go there according to the initially announced timeframe. It reached its destination later. Apparently it could have taken a shorter route through the SCS, but chose not to and circumvented it.

It left people wondering whether this was also a kind of a gesture toward China to get them to work harder on North Korea.

I think what the Trump administration is doing is causing a lot of uncertainty to Southeast Asian states. They had certainty when it came to US policy under the previous Barack Obama administration.

They wanted more US engagement, but they had at least some solid sense of what the Americans were prepared to do.

But now they don't know how strong Trump's commitment to them is, and whether he is prepared to put all their interests on one side and focus only on North Korea. That seems to be what's happening at the moment.

Given the uncertainty, the countries there are also considering whether they would have to rely on other players like Japan, which is increasing its engagement, for instance by providing ships, financial support and holding joint exercises, among others.
Countries like Vietnam appear to be getting increasingly closer to the US and Washington has also eased some of the sanctions put in place against the communist regime there. How is the Vietnamese government viewing the Trump presidency and US policy?
One thing Vietnam is obviously doing is rebuilding its relationship with China. They have been holding bilateral talks and begun repairing their ties. The fact that they are both communist regimes also helps. Party-to-party links are much more cordial and allow them to engage in far amicable discussions than in the case of government-to-government talks.

But Vietnam is also building up its military and buying an array of armaments, including submarines that could prove quite a threat to Chinese ships. So they're trying to do two things simultaneously: build friendly ties with Beijing while bolstering military capabilities, in a way that they could pose a significant military threat if they ever came to a confrontation.
It's reported that China and the ASEAN last week reached an agreement on a draft framework for a code of conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea. What is the significance of this development?
I don't think the framework itself is going to lead to anything soon. But I think the process of these discussions is a useful confidence-building measure. The fact that everybody sits around the table and talks and argues about these things is much better than not talking.

But there are a couple of reasons why I don't think there will be an agreement. One is I believe that China retains the desire to build on Scarborough Shoal at some point. And therefore it won't sign a deal that would hinder it from doing so.

The other thing is that China hates the idea of being legally bound by an agreement, but that's what the Southeast Asian states want. For them there's no point signing a code of conduct if it doesn't have any teeth. And so they want to have some sort of an instrument to control China's behavior and China doesn't want its behavior controlled.

Another area of disagreement is that China is trying to basically limit the applicability of this code of conduct to the Spratly archipelago, while others like Vietnam and the Philippines want to also include the Paracels and Scarborough Shoal. There seems to be no movement so far toward reconciling these differences.
Bill Hayton is an expert on Asia at the British think tank Chatham House. He is the author of "The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia" published by Yale University Press and named as one of The Economist's books of the year in 2014. The interview was conducted by Rodion Ebbighausen.

Beijing's island-building in the South China Sea

Ecological impact

The Philippines filed a formal plea at the UN last year, challenging Beijing's territorial claims. Manila said China's reclamation activities are causing "irreversible and widespread damage to the biodiversity and ecological balance of the South China Sea." It also claimed that the destruction of coral reef systems is estimated to cause economic losses valued at $100 million annually.

Author: Gabriel Domínguez

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
South China Sea dispute - Long way ahead for China, ASEAN | Asia | DW | 22.05.2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
China and ASEAN have recently agreed to a framework for a code of conduct aimed at preventing clashes in the South China Sea. But will it lead to a legally binding agreement that puts an end to the territorial dispute?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Terrorism is an old phenomenon. To figure out how to end it, it's worth sorting through what's changed, which precedents can inform future responses, and what past failures can teach for the way forward.

Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

A&Q is a special series that inverts the classic Q&A, taking some of the most frequently posed solutions to pressing matters of policy and exploring their complexity.
March alone saw a string of major terrorist attacks around the world-including in Ivory Coast, Belgium, Pakistan, Iraq, and Turkey-that together killed more than 100 people. The drumbeat of attacks seems horrifyingly constant, and underscores the fact that nearly 15 years since the United States launched its so-called global war on terror, victory is nowhere in sight.

So what would it take? Why haven't the many counterterrorism policies tried in various countries around the world, ranging from major wars to tightened surveillance to Twitter counterpropaganda to outright repression, seemed to have made the problem less severe? Is it true, as Foreign Policy suggested recently, that when it comes to fighting terrorism, the international community is out of ideas? Or, with ISIS steadily losing territory in Iraq and Syria even as it lashes out at the West, is the current campaign to some degree working?

Terrorism is an old phenomenon, and it's one various countries around the world have absorbed and dealt with in various ways. In considering how to approach the current problem of terrorism around the world, it's worth asking what's really new about it, which precedents can inform future responses, and what past failures can teach for the way forward.

ANSWER
The problem of terrorism is getting worse worldwide.
QUESTION

Where? Since when? And by what measure?

Historically speaking, terrorism is rare, and mass-casualty terrorist attacks rarer still. In terms of the sheer number of individual attacks committed in, for example, the United States and Europe, terrorism has actually declined significantly from its 1970s peak. (At the time, left-wing and right-wing terrorist groups were active throughout Europe; the United States had a particular problem with Puerto Rican nationalists.)

The U.S. has been especially safe from terrorism since September 11; the highest-casualty terrorist attack in the country since then occurred in San Bernardino in 2015, and yielded a death toll of 14 people. Overall the death toll from terrorism in the United States from 2004 to 2014, the most recent decade for which data was available, was 56, far below the toll of the 1990s, when 218 people died in terrorist attacks in the United States, 168 of them killed in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

Still, the number of terrorist incidents worldwide, and the number of fatalities they cause, has jumped alarmingly in recent years, driven largely by events in just five countries-Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria. As the State Department reported based on figures through 2014, "The number of terrorist attacks in 2014 increased 35 percent and total fatalities increased 81 percent compared to 2013," partly due to the increasing lethality of some individual attacks. "In 2014, there were 20 attacks that killed more than 100 people, compared to two such attacks in 2013."

On the other hand, no one really agrees on the definition of "terrorism"-there's a reasonable degree of consensus that terrorism consists of politically motivated attacks by non-state actors, but it's not clear where "terrorism" ends and acts of "insurgency" or "civil war" begin. As John Mueller and Mark Stewart pointed out recently: "[V]irtually any violence perpetrated by rebels in civil wars is now being called terrorism. ... Before 9/11, terrorism was, by definition, a limited phenomenon. ... If terroristic violence became really sustained and extensive in an area ... the activity was generally no longer called terrorism, but rather war or insurgency." They concluded: "The post-9/11 conflation of insurgency with terrorism makes it seem that the world is awash in terrorism, something that stokes unjustified alarm outside war zones, where terrorism remains a quite limited hazard."

Even with this expansive definition, less than 7 percent of violent deaths worldwide are the result of terrorism; as Micah Zenko pointed out in Foreign Policy last year, "Citizens of several Central American and Caribbean countries are still more likely to be the victim of homicide than Iraqis or Syrians are from terrorism."

ANSWER
The key difference now is ISIS. Al-Qaeda was scary, but they never had their own quasi-state. For a terrorist group to rule this much territory is unprecedented.
QUESTION

In what way? Knowing whether ISIS is an unprecedented terrorist group once again crucially depends on defining "terrorism." The basic tactic has been employed by any number of organizations throughout history. ISIS is not the first formerly ragtag guerrilla organization to violently occupy a great deal of territory; Mao Tse-Tung's communist fighters used terrorism in the early stages of the Chinese civil war before overthrowing Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist government in 1949.

As a government, ISIS is not the first to impose brutally harsh rule on the people under its control-the Taliban in Afghanistan was known for many of the same practices, including beheadings and public executions, and the current government Saudi Arabia uses the tactics too. ISIS has shown an ability to export violence to civilians beyond its territory-countries from Iran to Cuba have done the same. And there is even recent precedent for a government based on a cult-like figure claiming divine qualities and intent on global domination. As the terrorism scholar Brian Michael Jenkins pointed out recently:

In 1881, when an Islamic cleric in what was then called 'the Sudan,' declared himself to be the Mahdi-the successor to the Prophet Muhammad and leader of a universal jihad that commanded the loyalty of all humankind-the alternative to obedience was death. The Mahdist State ended at the start of the twentieth century, its global ambitions never realized.

One thing ISIS does excel at is amplifying the perception of the threat it poses to Westerners, and Americans in particular. Actually killing Westerners is only a small part of how it does this. Terrorism "works" in part by drawing attention to the political cause that motivates it. Electronic media, including social media, magnify and spread this effect, and ISIS has proven adept at using it, from distributing horrifying beheading videos to strategically claiming responsibility for attacks, such as the San Bernardino shooting, in which the attackers' direct links to ISIS are unclear.

The ISIS-inspired attacks Europe has seen recently show that the group isn't all talk. But it's worth remembering that this, too, we've seen before. In 1988, suspected Libyan intelligence agents blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people onboard and 11 on the ground. More recently, al-Qaeda has pulled off mass-casualty attacks in Europe, including the Madrid train bombings of 2004, which killed 192 people, and the London transportation bombings of 2005, which killed 56.

ANSWER
Right, but ISIS has a stated intention to continue attacking the West. If we do want to protect the West from terrorist attacks, we need to tackle terrorism at its root-in the Middle East.

QUESTION

Is the Middle East itself really the root of the terrorism problem for the West? Certainly, as European and American history shows, "terrorism" as a whole is not a Middle Eastern invention. Which is of course not to say that there aren't currently terrorists in the Middle East; ordinary Iraqis and Syrians are their primary victims.

But terrorist violence continues to take many forms around the world. In the United States, for example, "non-jihadist" terrorists have killed more people than jihadist terrorists in the years since 9/11. The New America Foundation has tallied up deaths from terrorism in the United States in the nearly 15 years since those attacks and found a total of 93. Forty-five of these were attributable to jihadist violence; 48 the organization classified as "far right-wing attacks," like the Charleston Church shooting of 2015. One of the worst mass-casualty attacks on European soil in recent years, prior to last year's Paris attacks, occurred in 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, many of them children, in Norway after having, in the BBC's words, "railed against what he saw as a Marxist Islamist takeover of Europe."

The New America analysis also shows that aspiring jihadist terrorists in the United States since 9/11 are, unlike the 2001 hijackers, almost never foreign invaders dispatched from overseas. Among people charged over the past decade and a half in the U.S. with crimes related to jihadist terrorism, the majority were American citizens, either U.S.-born or naturalized. The 2005 London bombings were carried British citizens. The Paris attackers were mainly French and Belgian nationals. So proposals to restrict immigration as a solution to terrorism, for example, aren't actually directed at where much of the threat comes from.

ANSWER
But ISIS's leadership is based in the Middle East-specifically in Iraq and Syria. If we just kill ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his inner circle, the whole organization will collapse around him.
QUESTION

How much does ISIS depend on Baghdadi? He is hugely important as a spiritual leader within the organization and as self-described commander of the faithful. But it's not clear how much he actually directs the group's day-to-day operations; last year, he was reported incapacitated in an airstrike, and ISIS was able to make significant territorial gains even so. Moreover, ISIS's own propaganda details its strategy of giving fighters "complete tactical autonomy" and encourages "isolated actions of self-radicalized people, who have absolutely no direct contact with ISIS, and yet who consciously act in its name." These individuals don't necessarily need Baghdadi himself in order to conduct attacks.

There's also no clear answer to what happens when you remove the leader of a militant organization. The tactic has helped hasten the end of terrorist groups like Japan's Aum Shinrikyo and Peru's Shining Path; on the other hand, targeting the leaders of Hamas, as Israel has been doing for many years, has yet to break up that group. There are cases in which removing a group's leadership can actually increase the violence of its activities amid succession struggles or decreased discipline among rank-and-file fighters.

ANSWER
That implies that the real solution may be online. ISIS has attracted thousands of foreign fighters to its cause; what the U.S. needs really needs to do is battle ISIS's ability to spread its ideology on the Internet.
QUESTION

How do people get "radicalized" anyway? No one really knows how it happens, or to whom; one of the only things terrorism scholars agree on is that there is no "profile" of a typical terrorist. In an article examining the criminal backgrounds of some ISIS recruits in Europe, Joby Warrick and Greg Miller of The Washington Post noted that, while ISIS's ideology certainly can inspire violence, sometimes the violence comes before ideology. They wrote that "some European officials say the perpetrators in the most recent attacks appear to be part of a new wave of recruits that are not 'radical Islamists' but rather 'Islamized radicals'-people from society's outer margins who feel at home with a terrorist organization noted for beheading hostages and executing unarmed civilians."

Much has been made of ISIS's ability to recruit and radicalize new members online. But here, too, it's not always clear which way the causal relationship runs. No doubt ISIS appeals to audiences in a variety of ways-from emphasizing its supposed Islamic utopia to promoting gory videos. But what we know about the Paris and Brussels attackers emphasizes the importance of in-person relationships to recruitment. It's not an accident that many of them came from the same neighborhoods in Brussels or were even related to each other.

As Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University's Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative, told me recently, recruitment has more to do with relationships than with passive absorption of propaganda on Twitter. "I think regardless of whether they're operating online or offline, these networks act in a similar way and they're offering similar things," he said, including a sense of belonging and commitment.

* * *

The answers to terrorism aren't easy, because the questions are hard.

What makes anybody pick up a weapon? There's no one reason for everyone. What type of person does it? There's no one type. What does ISIS really want? Depends on which member of ISIS you ask.

Still, the history of terrorism shows that various terrorist campaigns throughout history have ended, and the reasons vary. Sometimes they've ended through political negotiations, as when Northern Ireland's Irish Republican Army agreed to relinquish its weapons in exchange for political representation. Sometimes they've ended through extensive policing and disruption of the leadership, as Italy's Red Brigades did in the 1970s. And sometimes, the former "terrorists" actually win and gain political power, as Mao's communists did in China.

Previous generations of terrorist groups have been defeated, even though in many cases the defeat has taken decades. Today's terrorist groups may have different goals, but why should they be any different in that respect? Alternatively, what happens if they win?
Maybe there's an answer we haven't considered yet. Drop your thoughts into an email to hello@theatlantic.com.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Kathy Gilsinan is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering national security and global affairs.

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How Should the World Respond to Terrorism?

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Terrorism is an old phenomenon. To figure out how to end it, it's worth sorting through what's changed, which precedents can inform future responses, and what past failures can teach for the way forward. A&Q is a special series that inverts the classic Q&A, taking some of the most frequently posed solutions to pressing matters of policy and exploring their complexity.

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Almost the entire population of Gaza has been forced to flee their homes. Famine is a growing threat, as millions of trapped people face violence and starvation. This war on civilians must end immediately.

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The Norwegian Refugee Council is an independent humanitarian organisation helping people forced to flee. Today, we work in both new and protracted crises across more than 40 countries, where we pro...

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Iranian elections; European Parliament demands investigation into Ethiopia killings; concerns over Sri Lanka's counterterrorism bill; Venezuela confiscating passports; US anti-immigrant bill; migrant children denied education; inequality gap in Nigeria; & PNG escaped prisoners found dead.

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Border restrictions in the Western Balkans and a deal with Turkey led to a significant decline in arrivals by sea to Greece of asylum seekers and other migrants, while boat migration from North Africa to Italy remains steady. By March, over 28,000 people had made the crossing in 2017, while more than 900 died or went missing in the attempt.

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Crisis response - Amnesty International Australia

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Palm oil - we all know about its impacts on the environment and the habitat of the orangutan but what about the appalling appalling human rights abuses?

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Interesting case of what can follow from a small foreign aid grant matched with private funding:

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Interesting case of what can follow from a small foreign aid grant matched with private funding:

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In 2007, Kenya's mobile network giant Safaricom started M-Pesa, a money transfer service. That ended up changing how Kimari helps her parents - changing many aspects of her life, and much about Kenya.

In Africa the mobile phone is ubiquitous - the continent has skipped over landlines and gone straight to mobile. Smartphones are becoming more popular, but a vast majority of phones are basic $25 models. All apps with wide reach in Africa work via SMS.

Nearly all Kenyan households have a mobile phone, and in nearly all those households, at least one person has an M-Pesa account.

This has made a difference. Access to M-Pesa "increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2 percent of Kenyan households, out of poverty," a recent study estimated. Almost all the affected households were female-headed - and therefore, the most vulnerable.

M-Pesa is available to any Safaricom customer. But it's only useful if there's a nearby agent who can accept or disburse cash.

The network has grown to 150,000 agents. Tavneet Suri and William Jack, researchers who work with Innovations for Poverty Action, took advantage of its uneven growth by tracking Kenyans' incomes in areas that added agents between 2008 and 2010. They also studied incomes in areas with no agent growth.

They followed both groups through 2014. Places that went from zero to six M-Pesa agents ended up with 22 percent fewer female-headed households living in extreme poverty than areas of the same size where no new agents came in.

Since researchers couldn't randomize the spread of M-Pesa's agents, the study can't prove that it was access to M-Pesa that caused incomes to rise. It's possible that both things were caused by something else. But it's unlikely.

How could mobile money raise incomes?

"When bad stuff happens, people reach out to friends and family," said Suri, a Kenyan who is an associate professor of applied economics at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. "That's what M-Pesa helps them do." Before, if a child needed medicine or a bike broke down, people could ask nearby relatives or friends for help. But often, it wasn't enough. Household consumption dropped by 7 percent to 10 percent after such emergencies.

With M-Pesa, people can reach out anywhere in Kenya. Earlier research by Suri and Jack found that M-Pesa expanded people's support networks, providing a cushion in emergencies.

Their new research shows that M-Pesa has a long-term effect on poverty. It helped women graduate from subsistence agriculture to small business, perhaps because having an M-Pesa account gives a woman her own money, rather than her husband's or parents', and a greater sense of agency.

The researchers also note other ways M-Pesa could have made a difference. It provides a secure way to save money, which can then be invested in goods to sell. It facilitates commerce by making payments easier and safer. And when people feel less vulnerable, they take more risks, for example, switching professions.

M-Pesa is a commercial service, of course. But it couldn't have happened without foreign aid. The British aid agency financed small early pilot projects that tested a mobile money service; they also gave Nick Hughes, the head of global payments at Vodafone, a $1.3 million grant to develop the system, which Vodafone then matched.

It was one of the most successful foreign aid investments ever.

M-Pesa is a beginning. Mobile money is spreading - 100 countries have it, although nowhere else is it as widespread and successful as in Kenya. It's also a platform for other innovations that lead to other ways to help people live better.

One of those is pay-as-you-go. Most rural Africans light their homes at night with kerosene lamps. Kerosene is dangerous, expensive and unhealthy. It doesn't even provide much light. Solar power is clean, healthy and bright, and once you have the equipment, it's free. But even where solar lighting is available, many people stay with kerosene because they can buy a day's worth. They can't pay the upfront cost of a solar lighting system.

M-Pesa makes it possible to sell a day's worth of solar power. A company that does this is M-Kopa. For a basic solar home system - which supplies energy for includes five phone chargers, three lights, a flashlight and a radio - the customer makes a $30 down payment (still too much for many people), then pays 50 cents per day for a year through M-Pesa, which is less than the daily cost of kerosene. If the customer falls behind, M-Kopa turns off the system until the account is up to date. After a year, the customer owns the system; the energy is free after that.

M-Kopa manufactures its equipment, but "kopa" doesn't mean "solar." It means "loan" - and that's the innovation. When the system is paid off, M-Kopa offers the customer other pay-as-you-go products: a rainwater tank to save time and money on water, an efficient stove that saves on fuel, a smartphone.

Angaza takes this further. The company doesn't make consumer products. Instead, it works with other manufacturers to put pay-as-you-go technology into theirs. That paves the way for more innovation - for example, a solar battery stick that can power a pesticide sprayer for a small farm.

Another huge advance: M-Pesa has brought millions of people into the formal banking system. If you don't have a bank account, it's hard to save money and impossible to get reasonable credit.

Before M-Pesa, very few Kenyans had bank accounts, for many reasons. Formal financial transactions involve paperwork and bureaucracy. Rural people don't live near banks. The poor lack credit histories and traditional collateral.

M-Pesa has given rise to an alternative. Customers who go to M-Pesa on their phones now find an option called M-Shwari. It's a bank that offers two types of savings accounts; deposits are held by the Commercial Bank of Africa, pay high rates of interest and are insured.

Savers can also get small 30-day loans in seconds, starting at $10. Kimari has taken more than a dozen loans so far. Her repayment record helps increase her loan limit - now at $380 - as do her savings with M-Shwari.

What about credit scores? Know-your-customer due diligence? Normal banks find this to be too much work for small accounts or loans. But M-Shwari can use M-Pesa's data, which reveals, for example, whether a customer paid utility bills on time. M-Shwari evaluates new customers' credit by examining their M-Pesa purchases of small advances of airtime.

M-Shwari began its service in November 2012 and acquired 12 million customers in its first three years - in a country with 10 million households.

Safaricom says that most M-Shwari users have no other bank account. All over the world, poverty experts wrestle with how to bring the poor into the formal banking system. Kenya has done it practically overnight.

But danger lurks when credit is hassle free and tempting. Loans are so easy to get that the reason most often cited for getting the first one was " no reason." The most common use of the money after that was for household expenses, which indicates that customers are using M-Shwari to get through the month, a dangerous strategy. M-Shwari charges a 7.5 percent "facilitation fee" - an astronomical interest rate on a 30-day loan (but lower than what is charged by the loan sharks who are often the alternative). And many customers do not understand the consequences of default, which include extra charges, loss of their M-Shwari savings up to the loan amount or a negative listing by the credit bureau.

In March, Kenya's government began selling government bonds (paying 10 percent interest, tax free) exclusively over mobile phones. Before, bond buyers needed a bank account; the minimum investment was $5,000. Now anyone can invest as little as $30 - and then trade the bond on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. The bonds raise money for the government, of course, but they also promote savings in a country with one of the lowest savings rates in the world. A $1.5 million test offering sold out and closed early, and a major offering is scheduled for June.

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Opinion | In Kenya, Phones Replace Bank Tellers

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In 2007, Kenya's mobile network giant Safaricom started M-Pesa, a money transfer service. That ended up changing how Kimari helps her parents - changing many aspects of her life, and much about Kenya. In Africa the mobile phone is ubiquitous - the continent has skipped over landlines and gone straight to mobile.

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Anti Slavery Australia - Working to Abolish Slavery

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Anti-Slavery Australia - Working to abolish slavery. Learn about it and find help here.

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The students, who call themselves daigou, or purchasing agents, are highly attuned to Chinese tastes and move quickly, sometimes creating spikes in demand in Australia and clearing out stores of specific products before shopkeepers know what hit them. Some analysts estimate that daigou sent as much as $600 million in Australian products to China last year.

But their success has also drawn scrutiny, with officials in both China and Australia examining whether they are paying required taxes and complying with other regulations.

The business is in many ways a byproduct of China's huge interest in a different kind of Australian product: international education, considered one of the nation's top exports, worth $15 billion a year. Nearly a third of the 450,000 foreign students in Australia are from China, and the figure is growing.

Peter Cai, a fellow at the Lowy Institute, a think tank in Sydney, said the students had become a powerful force helping Australian products break into China. "Just through the daigou's own personal networks, they enable a new market for a small- and medium-sized business in Australia," he said.

"I think we're almost entering a new phase of the China-Australia economic relationship" requiring greater understanding of the Chinese market, he added, and the students provide that understanding.

Chinese purchasing agents first appeared in Europe, buying and shipping luxury goods like handbags for China's growing middle class. But the trade has shifted to Australia in recent years as the Chinese student population in Australia has expanded and consumers in China have grown more anxious about food and product safety.

Worries over infant formula, for example, surged in 2008 when six babies died and more than 300,000 children fell ill from drinking Chinese milk products that had been tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical. Many in China turned to imported milk powder in response, but reports of distributors or retailers adulterating it with Chinese formula prompted consumers to directly seek supplies from overseas.

"There'd be huge amounts of infant powder, 900-gram cans, that were being bought off the supermarket shelves here and put in mailbags and sent to China via students," said John Droppert, a senior analyst at Dairy Australia, an industry group. "Pallet loads were just disappearing because people were putting it in the post and sending it to China."

Chinese students in Australia say as many as eight in 10 of them are involved in the daigou business. Some are just trying to make ends meet with occasional sales. Others have managed to build significant export businesses. They mail their products to customers in China or ship them to Hong Kong, where traders can carry them across the border to avoid mainland tariffs.

"Shopping for others is like buying for myself; it gives me the same pleasure," said Uki Shao, 18, a business major in Melbourne who described herself as the "best daigou at my college." She sells brand-name items like Pandora jewelry, Michael Kors accessories and Aesop lotions and said her main challenge was persuading customers that her products were not fake.

"Sometimes, I have to take a video and post it on WeChat to show I'm in Australia," she said, referring to the dominant messaging app in China, which the students also use to process payments.

The trade has grown so fast in recent years that Australian companies now hold events to meet with Chinese students and show them their products. Many work with retailers in China, too, but they are careful not to bypass the daigou in Australia, whose endorsements and personal networks they covet.

Van Diemen's Land Company, the Tasmanian dairy giant, began shipping thousands of liters of fresh milk to China every week but said in February that it intended to work closely with " the all-important daigou channel " to promote sales.

The students can often be found in the aisles of Chemist Warehouse, a major drugstore chain, with smartphones in hand, ticking off items on shopping lists while filling suitcases full of products such as concentrated cranberry extract, marketed by the Australian natural health company Blackmores as promoting urinary tract health.

Mario Tascone, the chief operating officer of Chemist Warehouse, said the daigou favored the company's stores because they offered competitive prices and could fill large orders. The chain also sells directly on the Chinese e-commerce platform TMall, but many customers prefer to place their orders with students.

"They trust the daigou more," said Scarlett Liang, 18, an accounting and economics student at Trinity College in Melbourne. "They want to be convinced of the authenticity of the product."

The larger daigou businesses often buy in bulk directly from a manufacturer like Blackmores at a discount and then sell supplies to smaller student operators at a markup.

Express delivery companies that specialize in shipping to China are now dotted throughout major Australian cities to keep up. One of the more popular companies, Chang Jiang International Express, which describes itself as a "direct train from Australia to China," sends about 400 tons of products to mainland China each month, according to its operations manager, Lu Wang.

Recently, fresh fruit has been in demand. "Each year in cherry season, the Chinese start asking for more Australian cherries," said Angel Nie, 20, a student who studies politics at the University of Melbourne."They're very expensive, but the Chinese say, 'I just want fresh and full-of-vitamin cherries.'"

But Ms. Nie said she dropped out of the business last year because she was not paying taxes, never obtained any licenses and worried it was "kind of like smuggling."

Because most payments are processed on WeChat and other Chinese platforms, the authorities in Australia rely on students to declare the income themselves. Some daigou also offer lower prices by evading Chinese import duties, and there are occasional reports of arrests in China.

"There's quite a few that have grown into quite substantial operations, and there'd be quite a lot where they're perhaps flying under the radar," said Paul Drum, the head of policy at CPA Australia, the national association of accountants.

Last year, the Agriculture Department said it was investigating individuals suspected of shipping infant formula to China without meeting export requirements. Small exports of baby formula are legal, but shipments over 10 kilograms must come from registered export companies with health certificates and meet Chinese import regulations, a spokesman said.

Daigou on student visas in Australia are also permitted to work only 40 hours every two weeks. Running an informal export business in excess of those hours may violate the terms of their visas, according to Rachel Drew, a partner at the law firm Holding Redlich.

But Ms. Zhang expressed confidence that the market would continue to expand even as regulators caught up and Australian companies established new channels to sell directly to Chinese customers.

"Everyone's got family and friends, and therefore their own customers," she said. "That's why there are so many daigou around."

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China Craves Foreign Goods. Students in Australia Supply Them.

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The students, who call themselves daigou, or purchasing agents, are highly attuned to Chinese tastes and move quickly, sometimes creating spikes in demand in Australia and clearing out stores of specific products before shopkeepers know what hit them. Some analysts estimate that daigou sent as much as $600 million in Australian products to China last year.

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Christine Lagarde: How growth policy can reduce inequality

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Christine Lagarde explores how to reduce inquality.

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We need to reset the global operating system to achieve the SDGs. Here's how

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A recent study found that 80% of the world's countries are failing their targets for child mortality, maternal mortality, access to water and access to sanitation.

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Eight men have the same wealth as 3.6bn of the world's poorest people. We must rebalance this unjust economy

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The world could see its first trillionaire in 25 years, yet 1 in 10 of us still earns less than $2 a day. We need to break this cycle for the benefit of humanity.

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Across the world, 1 in 5 adults have no formal schooling

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Research from Pew Research Center looking at formal schooling across the world, highlighting the gaps that exist.

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The hidden discrimination facing disabled people across the world

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Roberto Saba explores the extent of discrimination faced by people with disability.

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Thatcher, Reagan and Robin Hood: a history of wealth inequality

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High rates of wealth inequality are bad for social cohesion, political inclusion and crime. Fortunately, history provides some clues to how we might tackle it.

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Why reducing inequality could be a matter of survival

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Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank looks at continued issue of global inequalities.

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climate change and disaster risk reduction

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The Sendai Framework: Underwriting the Sustainable Development Goals

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Late into the night of 17 March 2015, now more than two years back, Member States, after a marathon negotiation session, finally agreed upon the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

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Setting the SDGs in motion: 4 lessons from 15 years of action

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Global Goals can be a powerful catalyst of human progress. They make people's shared aspirations tangible and trackable, directing our attention forward and focusing minds on what unites us. This is one the main lessons learned from 15 years of action to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the world's first broadly defined Global Goals.

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Updated May 04, 2017 00:16:16

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has signalled his intention to reignite a long-running debate over revising the country's war-renouncing constitution, citing regional security concerns as one reason behind the push.

Speaking at an annual rally on constitutional revision organised by his own ruling party earlier this week, Mr Abe said the time had come "to show the people, with confidence, our vision for the future of [Japan] and what an ideal constitution should look like".

However the question of whether to reform the US-drafted document - which celebrates its 70th anniversary today - has been a highly divisive issue in Japan for almost as long as it has existed.

What's the big deal?

The constitution's most notable and controversial feature is Article 9, which officially prevents Japan from going to war, or maintaining an army of any kind.

While some Japanese think Article 9 should be updated to reflect the challenges the country now faces, including China's actions in the South China Sea and North Korea's nuclear ambitions, most do not want the pacifist spirit of the text to be altered, and some even fear what that change may bring.

On the more nationalist side, it's sometimes argued that the post-war constitution is a legacy of Japan's defeat in World War II, and that it imposed the United States' world order and values on the country.

"This is still politically very charged, a very emotional issue for many people," said Yuki Tatsumi, a senior associate and director of the Japan program at the Stimson Centre in Washington DC.

"There are very, very vocal groups in Japan that strongly believe that if you touch one word in Article 9, that is the beginning of the slippery slope."

While Mr Abe is yet to shed light on what changes his government will specifically be pushing for, draft revisions released by his Liberal Democratic Party in 2012 included an emergency article and the right to self-defence.

But Ms Tatsumi doubts the policy of official pacifism will be changed.

"Proponents of the revision are really looking to make sure that what Article 9 says is a little bit more aligned to the reality that Japan has," she said.

Is now the right time?

While the article prevents Japan from maintaining an army, it still has a modern army of sorts in the form of the Japan Self-Defence Forces (JSDF), and Ms Tatsumi says providing clarity on this issue could be a focus of the debate.

However the role of the JSDF is itself controversial - laws passed by the Japanese parliament in 2015 that made it possible for the force to fight overseas sparked huge protests.

Ms Tatsumi said those recent security bills, which allowed for limited changes to how Article 9 is interpreted, may cause problems for Mr Abe on his quest for proper constitutional change.

"In a sense, passing [the security bills] actually took some of the justification away from the Abe Government's strong desire to revise Article 9," she said.

"That legislation had actually taken care of the minimum that Japan would be needing to do both internationally but also in the region of contingencies, in support of US military operations.

"I'm doubtful that the Government has a strong case in trying to push the constitutional revision at this time."

Alternatively, in the face of increasingly bellicose rhetoric from North Korea, a growing sense of insecurity may shift the views of some people previously ambivalent about the constitution issue.

"When there's a clear and present security challenge - and you almost get exposed to that daily with North Korea's all kinds of crazy behaviour - you start thinking differently about your own safety and your own security," Ms Tatsumi said.

So it's just about security?

Well, that's where things get a little hairy.

Likely to muddy the waters of any debate is Mr Abe's link to the Nippon Kaigi, a ultra-nationalist lobby group that has been pushing to reform Article 9 for decades.

Mr Abe's connection to the group came under the spotlight most recently in March, when it was revealed that he and his wife were involved with an Osaka kindergarten set up by the Nippon Kaigi, where children are allegedly indoctrinated in nationalist principles.

The head of the school was the leader of the Osaka branch of the Nippon Kaigi, and it has been alleged that he received government land for the kindergarten at a reduced rate.

Some members of the secretive organisation have a revisionist view of Japan's modern history - they see World War II as Japan's attempt at liberating East Asia, and deny some war-time atrocities committed by Japan.

While Mr Abe's connection to the group is public knowledge, Ms Tatsumi says the leader's approach to the constitution debate is likely to remain pragmatic.

"If [Abe] really wanted to ram through the constitutional revision, or much wider changes in the defence legislation, he had the numbers to do so ... But at the end of the day he chose not to go that way," she said.

"[The Government is] sensing that there is this intangible red line that the Japanese public will not let the Government go over, and I think they will continue to stay within that boundary."

Ms Tatsumi says that 'red line' is whether to allow the JSDF to conduct the types of operations that the United States conducts in the Middle East, which may require them to use force.

"Japanese people have been quite proud that their defence forces have not had to fire a shot to kill the citizens of other countries up to this point, even with their participation in UN peacekeeping operations," she said

"I think they would very much like to continue to keep it that way."
ABC/AP
Topics: world-politics, unrest-conflict-and-war, japan, korea-democratic-people-s-republic-of, korea-republic-of, china

First posted May 03, 2017 09:26:58

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Japan's anti-war constitution up for debate

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Updated May 04, 2017 00:16:16 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has signalled his intention to reignite a long-running debate over revising the country's war-renouncing constitution, citing regional security concerns as one reason behind the push.

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Updated April 13, 2017 21:23:07

The Shivaji Nagar slum, in east Mumbai, is situated next to the city's biggest dump.

Many of the families who call it home make a meagre living picking through its piles for anything of value to sell.

But a group of children is being taught gender and civic rights through a program part funded by Australia.

Upset with squalid toilets, they decided to raise their voices.

One teenager, Sayenna Sinhe, explains that the group wrote to civic authorities.

"For one month no action was taken on the issue," Sayenna said through coordinator Sara Hasan.

"They [the children] went back again and they told them that nothing has happened.

"After that... steps were taken."

The charity helping them, Apnalaya, was started in the 1970s by Australia's then consul-general to Mumbai, Tom Holland.

Its driving force for 40 years has been its British-born president, Annabel Mehta.

"The problems in India are so vast," Ms Mehta said.

"Even though the economy is improving, there's huge amounts of work to be done."

Ms Mehta is also the mother-in-law of Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar.

He raises money for the charity and is effusive in his praise for her work.

"They [the children] are unpolished diamonds right now, and she's helping them become polished diamonds and achieve what they want to be in life," Tendulkar told Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during a trip this week to Mumbai.

Mr Turnbull met some of the participating children and described the work as "an example of empowerment".

"Remember girls, you can do anything," he told them.

Australian aid funding supports a range of Apnalaya's programs, including the girls' portion of Gender Through Sport, setting up a training office and establishing a female-run creche in the slums to allow mothers to go to work.

It has also purchased two paper plate-making machines and taught disabled residents to use them, so they can earn a living.

Australian aid funding small-scale projects directly

Since 2015, the Coalition Government has cut more than $1 billion in foreign aid.

Australia's aid budget is now at the lowest level it has been in eight years, at just 0.2 per cent of gross national income (GNI).

But Ms Mehta says small-scale direct aid can still have a meaningful impact.

"This is where I think the Australians have been lovely... because we can come to them with something that maybe isn't of immediate appeal to others," she said.

"But it seems that your government is responsive to helping these sorts of things."

Topics: charities, community-and-society, international-aid-and-trade, relief-and-aid-organisations, india, australia

First posted April 13, 2017 20:57:49

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Australian aid helps advance civic, gender rights in India

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Updated April 13, 2017 21:23:07 The Shivaji Nagar slum, in east Mumbai, is situated next to the city's biggest dump. Many of the families who call it home make a meagre living picking through its piles for anything of value to sell.

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As entrances go, Misao Sato's is as inconspicuous as they come. After he walks unannounced on to the shop floor at his company's headquarters near Tokyo Bay, there is no standing on ceremony, no greetings yelled above the din of the machinery. Employees in blue overalls simply acknowledge the arrival of the president of the Kikanshi printing company with a nod and a smile, and return to work.

Founded a year after the end of the second world war, Kikanshi has grown from producing political pamphlets to a multi-million pound business, with newspapers that reach a readership of more than a million. At lunchtime, however, Sato quietly takes a seat alongside his employees in the staff canteen; this evening, he will squeeze on to a packed train for the journey back to the modest home he shares with his wife in the commuter belt north of Tokyo.

Sato wouldn't have it any other way. Having joined Kikanshi straight from high school at the age of 18, he epitomises Japan's "modest" business executives. "My door is literally open all of the time," the 60-year-old says. "The management and staff work very closely together. We decide what to do as a group; we don't like doing things in a top-down style. We're not that kind of company."

Sato's pay packet suggests the company's evenhanded approach runs deeper than mere gestures. Despite his decades of service, he earns just over twice the average monthly salary of his 150 full-time staff, and only 1.2 times that of his highest-earning employees. "In fact," he says with a smile, "if you factor in overtime, there are people here who take home more than I do."

Sato may be an extreme example, but studies show the same egalitarian ethic runs deep in Japanese corporate culture. According to a recent survey of global wealth by Credit Suisse, Japan is the most equal major economy in the world in terms of wealth distribution - with Russia the most unequal.

"Together with Japan's high average wealth, this relative equality means few adults have assets below US $10,000 [£7,800]," the report stated. "The proportion of the population with wealth above US $100,000 is seven times the global average."

In addition, the median salary of chief executives at Japanese firms with revenues of more than 1 trillion yen (£7.1bn) is one-tenth that of American CEOs, and less than one-fifth that of their counterparts in Britain, according to research by the advisory company Towers Watson. Most CEOs of firms listed on Japan's Nikkei 225 stock average earn less than 100 million yen (£715,000) a year.

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Unassuming boss Misao Sato (right)

Japan's performance in wealth distribution is more remarkable given the size of its population. While Scandinavian countries are regularly held up as models of egalitarianism, they have far fewer people to worry about. Japan's population of 127 million, though predicted to shrink dramatically in the coming decades, dwarfs that of Sweden's 9.6 million and Norway's 5.08 million.

The postwar rise in living standards brought other benefits: universal health insurance and health outcomes that are among the best in the world, and an enviable life expectancy of 87 years for women and 80 for men. Infant mortality is among the lowest in the world. And while the country fares poorly in international comparisons of English-language ability, Japanese children lead the world in literacy and numeracy.

And yet, at a time when leading economists and epidemiologists alike are hailing the importance of tackling inequality across the world, the edifice of Japanese-style egalitarianism is beginning to crumble.

Rapid depopulation, coupled with a rise in the number of people aged 65 or over, have presented recent governments with a policy conundrum they have yet to solve: how a shrinking workforce can meet a national bill for social security and healthcare that is expected to balloon in the coming decades.

Meanwhile, large sections of Japan's young are rejecting the traditional "safe but stifling" corporate path their parents and grandparents accepted without a murmur, in favour of gig economy jobs that offer more freedom - but much less security. Have they decided that Japan's vision of an equal society is not all it's cracked up to be?

When the bubble burst

The roots of Japan's record on wealth distribution lie in national humiliation. To turn a crushing wartime defeat into economic success, postwar governments struck a deal with a war-weary population that would serve both parties well for the best part of half a century: hard work and self-sacrifice would be rewarded with a job for life, incremental salary rises, bonuses and seniority-based promotions.

The quid pro quo worked seamlessly until Japan's asset-inflated bubble burst in the early 1990s, ushering in a period of stagnation that, a quarter of a century on, continues to haunt the world's third-biggest economy. Having powered Japan through its period of breakneck economic development, the dutiful " salaryman " suddenly became dispensable.

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Japan's new work-life balance scheme demands staff be let off at 3pm on the last Friday of each month. Photograph: Aluxum/Getty Images

Under the guise of corporate restructuring - risutora - middle-aged employees considered surplus to requirements were superannuated in an unprecedented breach of the postwar employment deal. Joblessness rose to almost 6% and the suicide rate topped 30,000 a year - one of the highest in the world.

Yet even Japan's worst downturns have been free of the social unrest, mass unemployment and knee-jerk austerity that created deep social fissures in countries like Britain. In 2009, at the height of the country's worst economic performance since the war, some commentators compared the low crime rates and high level of social cohesion in Japan with the glaring inequalities in the west, and wondered if it was appropriate to talk about a Japanese recession at all.

Violent crime is a rarity on the streets of major cities here, and on any given Friday evening, restaurants and bars are crammed with well-dressed office workers. Even during the post-bubble era of restructuring layoffs, unemployment stayed comparatively low: in February this year, it was at its lowest level for more than two decades, at 2.8%.

But the concept of lifetime corporate employment is fading fast. In shunning - or having being denied - the same opportunity to step on to the career escalator, millennials and women (who accounted for 68% of non-regular workers in 2015) are now filling part-time or temporary jobs across a host of sectors that have one thing in common: pay levels far below those of full-time employees.

According to the latest OECD study of Japan's economy, after adjusting for type of job and educational attainment, the wage gap between full- and part-time workers is 45% for men and 31% for women. Single-income households are seven times more likely to be in poverty if the breadwinner - usually the husband - is a non-regular employee. Yet while the low pay and poor conditions offered by the non-regular job market are hardly attractive options for anyone, more and more salaried workers are still seeking ways to break free of Japan's corporate shackles.

Death from overwork

Arguably the most important domestic news story of the past year was a labour standards office ruling that the suicide of Matsuri Takahashi, a 24-year-old employee of the advertising giant Dentsu, was due to karoshi, or death from overwork. In the period leading up to her death, Takahashi had been working 105 hours' overtime a month.

Dentsu was not alone in wringing every last drop from its employees. In the wake of the labour office's ruling, Japanese media ran editorials decrying companies for placing profits above the health and wellbeing of their employees.

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Dead tired: a recent report says one in five Japanese workers is at risk of death from overwork. Photograph: Alamy

In its first white paper on karoshi published last year, the government confirmed the growing human toll exacted by the prevailing work culture of devotion and self-sacrifice, warning that one in five Japanese workers was now at risk of death from overwork. The report added that approximately 21.3% of Japanese employees work an average of 49 or more hours each week, well above the 16.4% reported in the US, 12.5 % in Britain and 10.4% in France.

Compelled to take action by the public outcry that followed Takahashi's death, the government is now poised to introduce a cap on overtime at 100 hours a month - a limit some critics believe will do little to address the problem.

In the postwar era, union members rising through the ranks to take management jobs helped ensure wealth was more evenly distributed throughout Japan. But in return, employees became the properties of their companies - to be moved, given pay cuts during lean times and, as the karoshi problem proves, made to work punishingly long hours. These days, the expectation of a gently upwards career trajectory and a decent standard of living in retirement is often not enough reward for such sacrifices.

The government is poised to introduce a cap on overtime at 100 hours a month

Like many salarymen in their 40s, Hiroyuki Ito was destined to see out his working days at the company he joined as a graduate when, two years ago, he suddenly walked away from his job as a sales rep for a major food manufacturer.

"I had reached the point where I knew I didn't want to spend my entire career there, but I was so busy that I could never find the time to think about what else I could do," says Ito. "So I took a gamble and quit before I had found another job."

The 47-year-old took a six-month break to travel and spend more time at home with his wife and three children before working, for no pay, for a consultancy startup where he is now a full-time sales employee. "I had to make a decision: would I give myself completely to my old company and let them decide my future, or take a chance and decide for myself?

"In Japan, if you go to a good university and land a job at a prestigious company, you tend to think that you've made a success of your life. But I had this nagging thought that for all the stability, I wasn't doing something I genuinely enjoyed. I have far less money now, but at the same time my life is completely free of stress."

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The issue of overworked employees caused a media storm in Japan. Photograph: Alamy

Ito completed his transformation after attending a retraining course at the Institute of Social Human Capital in Tokyo, where about 150 discontented employees - two-thirds of them men - come to pursue the professional dreams denied to them in their former jobs.

"By the time a staff employee is their late 50s they have become experts at one thing but don't know much about anything else, and then suddenly they are 60, on a reduced salary and staring retirement in the face," says Matsuhiko Ozawa, who opened the institute four years ago after quitting his job as an advertising executive in his 40s. "It can be incredibly stressful."

The school adopts an unorthodox approach to reprogramming men and women more attuned to the hierarchy-based conventions of company life. In one exercise, small groups of students eat lunch together while blindfolded - a handicap Ozawa says encourages them to communicate using their four remaining senses. Business cards are banned, and students are given nicknames in an attempt to wean them off corporate rituals they once used to quickly establish the professional pecking order.

Given Japan's extraordinary longevity statistics, Ozawa believes employees approaching the twilight of their careers should instead be preparing for a second career. "Our task is to stop them before they reach the point where they have lost the will to do something new, and help them work out what they're going to do with the rest of their lives," he says.

"If you retire from a company at 60, you could easily have 30 years of life left. People are beginning to ask: what can I do to make those years enjoyable and productive? The cost of living is high, particularly in Tokyo. Most of the people I meet here can't afford to sit around doing nothing."

Walking a tightrope

Teruko Watanabe sips from a glass of iced tea at a western Tokyo diner and laughs at the idea that, at 57, she is ready for a career change.

As one of the growing number of workers on temporary contracts hired to fill openings at everything from convenience stores and restaurants to auto plants and offices, she represents the new - and troubled - face of Japan's labour market demographic.

"The reason I've never been offered a staff job is that I and other temporary workers are dispensable," says Watanabe, who has worked, one three-month contract at a time, for the same energy company for 18 years. "We are the buffer between companies and tough economic times."

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A soup kitchen set up for local homeless people in 'Square Park', Osaka. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Her two adult children have left home but she must now juggle work with looking after her 87-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia. Their home in western Tokyo is paid for, but food and utility bills, commuting expenses and the costs associated with caring for her mother mean Watanabe has little left over from her monthly salary of just over 200,000 yen (£1,430) a month. "I just about get by," she says, "But in a way I am lucky. There are lots of other temporary workers who are far worse off than me."

Regarded as a source of cheap labour during the economic slump of the early 2000s, contract and other non-regular workers now comprise about 40% of Japan's workforce. Their wages, particularly among younger people, are well below those of full-time staff - creating a two-tiered labour market that experts say is contributing to rising levels of poverty in one of the world's wealthiest countries.

An estimated 3.5 million Japanese children - one in six of those aged up to 17 - are from households classed as experiencing "relative poverty" ( defined by the OECD as those with incomes at or below half the median national disposable income). Japan's relative rate of poverty has risen over the past three decades to 16.3%, while the rate in the US, though still higher at 17.3%, has fallen.

"Perhaps some people envy me for being a free agent," Watanabe says. "But while temp workers like me have fewer responsibilities, we have absolutely no security."

Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has promised to do more to narrow the gap in pay and benefits between regular and contract employees, in an attempt to raise productivity and consumer spending. But companies have so far failed to heed his calls for significant pay rises.

As she contemplates retirement on a basic state pension, and with next to no savings, Watanabe bristles at the suggestion that Japan has anything to teach the rest of the world about equality.

"I feel like I'm walking a tightrope," she says. "If become ill or lose my job for some other reason, I'll fall off straight away. And there will be no safety net to catch me."
Over the coming year, the Guardian's Inequality Project will shed new light on issues of inequality and social unfairness around the world. Read all of our coverage here. To get in touch, email us at inequality.project@theguardian.com.

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Equality in Japan: is this vision of a fairer society too good to be true?

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As entrances go, Misao Sato's is as inconspicuous as they come. After he walks unannounced on to the shop floor at his company's headquarters near Tokyo Bay, there is no standing on ceremony, no greetings yelled above the din of the machinery.

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Malaria vaccine campaign: IGOs, NGOs, MNC

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Malaria vaccine campaign: IGOs, NGOs, MNC

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Three African countries have been chosen to test the world's first malaria vaccine, the World Health Organization announced Monday. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will begin piloting the injectable vaccine next year with young children, who have been at highest risk of death.

The vaccine, which has partial effectiveness, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives if used with existing measures, the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, said in a statement. The challenge is whether impoverished countries can deliver the required four doses of the vaccine for each child.

Malaria remains one of the world's most stubborn health challenges, infecting more than 200 million people every year and killing about half a million, most of them children in Africa. Bed netting and insecticides are the chief protection.

Sub-Saharan Africa is hardest hit by the disease, with about 90 percent of the world's cases in 2015.

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Ghana, Kenya and Malawi chosen to test world's first malaria vaccine in huge trial on young children

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Three African countries have been chosen to test the world's first malaria vaccine, the World Health Organization announced Monday. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will begin piloting the injectable vaccine next year with young children, who have been at highest risk of death.

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Updated April 10, 2017 09:27:00

What does India want? To be counted.

India is the world's fastest growing major economy. By 2050 it will be the planet's most populous nation.

As it attempts economic transformation, India needs everything from infrastructure to energy and education - the latter two imports which already dominate its trade with Australia.

But more than any material demands, what India wants is recognition - as a country poised to become the world's third largest economy, and a power in its own right.

As Malcolm Turnbull visits India for meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and business leaders, he is talking up the "tremendous opportunity" the nation's growth represents for Australia.

Taken for granted?

When Indian and Australian politicians stand up to give speeches in each others' countries, you bet on hearing "India and Australia have much in common ...".

Perhaps. But "cricket, Commonwealth and curry" as an old adage went, is not how 21st century India sees itself, or its relationship with Australia. (Perhaps with the exception of wanting to remain the number one Test team).

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to make India a great power, one which commands international respect in its own right, not merely as a balance to regional rival China.

His path to this goal is India's burgeoning youth - he wants to train and skill them to make and do things which are globally valued, and in doing so lure foreign investment in India and transform the nation's economy.

"He [Prime Minister Modi] has changed the way Indians look at themselves," said Dr Anirban Ganguli, director of the Government-aligned think tank, the Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation.

Emerging from postcolonialism

This might seem simple, but openly courting foreign investment the way Mr Modi has represents a significant shift in postcolonial India.

"Earlier, we were very ambiguous in this - 'should we, shouldn't we?' - and I think this was due to our colonial past," Dr Ganguli said.

"There's this national sense that we don't want to be exploited."

Following centuries of mercantilism under British rule, in 1947 newly-independent India turned away from trade, opting for a planned economy on the socialist principle of self-reliance.

Dr Ganguli says this explains India's notoriously bureaucratic restrictions on commerce and foreign investment, which only began to be dismantled in the 90s.

"So I think there was a lot of ambiguity, and it didn't allow us to clearly state, 'What is it that we want?' as you've asked me," he said.

For the Government to foster risk-taking entrepreneurship, provide incentives for start-ups and actively encourage foreign companies to set up shop in India is significant, he said.

Where does Australia fit?

Mr Modi's answer to the exploitation fear is to encourage skilled manufacturing and services - to move India's goods and services exports higher up the value chain from garments or call centres.

"[Prime Minister Modi] has used this term, 'human resource superpower,' in terms of economy and manufacturing," Dr Ganguli said.

"It is this young India, this new India which needs training, which needs opportunity.

"[There is] this huge emphasis on skilling the population - where Australia plays, or expected to play a great role."

Foreign students are a $20 billion business for Australia. Last year 61,000 Indian students headed Down Under, making Australia the second-most popular destination for Indians behind America.

Critical for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Education Minister Simon Birmingham is enabling Australia's institutions to reach further into India, where they can teach those who lack the means to study abroad.

Mr Birmingham said Australia's focus is now shifting to "how it is we can help Prime Minister Modi and the Indian government to skill some 400 million people by 2020".

Foreign educators are still not allowed to set up campuses under their own name in India, but partnerships and collaboration agreements are proliferating.

Mr Birmingham said Australia will make the case for easing restrictions.

"Enhanced mutual recognition of Australian qualifications as well as better access for Australian education and training providers into India, to help them meet their targets to build their capacity and their economy," he said.

And what about turning the lights on?

Mr Turnbull will meet Adani chairman Gautam Adani while in India.

Mr Adani's board is due to decide this month whether to proceed with the controversial $21 billion Carmichael coal mine in Queensland's Galilee basin.

The project has state and federal Government support in Australia and the company says it will help provide cheap power for Indians still living without electricity.

But environmental protesters have threatened to disrupt construction and the plan to import coal runs contrary to India'sOffice of Fair Tradingstated goal of coal self-sufficiency.

Asked on Sunday if he will be promoting the project, Mr Turnbull replied "we'll certainly be talking about the importance of energy exports to India".

"As you know India has a massive program of expanding electrification across the country and Australian coal has a very big role to play in that," he said.

The nuclear option

It is two years since India and Australia signed a supply treaty. This visit is expected to herald the first Australian uranium shipments to India under that deal.

When Resources Minister Matthew Canavan visited India last month, he told the ABC that he was "very confident" uranium sales were finally set to begin.

"I know of some very well-developed and keen interest," Mr Canavan said.

India's external affairs ministry too says it expects shipments to begin this year.

A free trade agreement, which former prime minister Tony Abbott hoped to have in force already, remains a long way off. Agriculture the main sticking point.

Security and defence ties

Mr Modi is also increasingly willing to be a "strategic partner" to countries like Australia, Japan and the United States.

Dr David Brewster, from the Australian National University's National Security college has previously argued that India's willingness to engage indicates an increasingly outward-looking country which can help balance China's rising military might.

"Both Canberra and Washington are both very keen to build their engagement with India, because India is seen as a major power and an emerging power in Asia.

"And what's more a democracy and I think that's very important," he said.

Last year, a small contingent of Australian special forces travelled to India for their first ever exercise with Indian commandos.

It is expected Mr Turnbull and Mr Modi will agree to expand military cooperation, currently focused on Indian ocean naval exercises.

Understanding aspiration

India's challenges are enormous. Even if the mission to skill its emerging labour force is successful, those workers will have to contend with increasing automation threatening the jobs they have been trained for.

India is not China. Its Office of Fair Trading proclaimed status as the "world's largest democracy" also means it takes the Government far longer to implement the changes it desires, and often they come with compromise.

But change, usually described in India simply as "development" is what the nation's vast aspirational population want - a chance to create something better than what they have grown up with.

This is becoming the way India's politicians appeal to voters, and understanding that aspirational shift in the Indian psyche will be critical for countries like Australia.

Topics: world-politics, international-aid-and-trade, business-economics-and-finance, government-and-politics, education, globalisation---economy, india, australia

First posted April 10, 2017 07:48:38

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'Tremendous opportunity' for Australia as India seeks power in its own right

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As Malcolm Turnbull visits India, the world's fastest growing economy is looking beyond its regional neighbours and old colonial relationships to become a global power in its own right, seeking international recognition on its way to being the world's third largest economy.

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IT IS Saturday lunchtime, and about 30 trucks are parked at each of the customs posts on either side of the bridge across the broad Uruguay river that marks the border between Argentina and Uruguay. Both countries are members of Mercosur, a would-be customs union that also embraces Brazil and Paraguay. In theory, internal borders should not exist in Mercosur. In practice, customs, sanitary inspections and other paperwork mean that the trucks are delayed for up to 24 hours, says Oscar Terzaghi, the mayor of Fray Bentos, on the Uruguayan side.

This represents an improvement. For three years before 2010, access to the bridge-the shortest land route between the two capitals, Buenos Aires and Montevideo-was blocked by Argentine environmentalists with the support of the country's president, Cristina Fernández. They claimed that a planned paper mill at Fray Bentos would pollute the river. The dispute ended only when the mill was operating and the International Court of Justice ruled that there was no evidence of pollution.

For the past half-century, Latin American politicians have talked incessantly about regional integration. But they have struggled to make it happen. Despite a big increase in trade agreements among Latin American countries this century, the share of their exports that stays within the region has remained stubbornly around 20%, according to a new report from the World Bank. That is low compared with Canada and the United States (35%), East Asia (50%) and 18 core members of the European single market (60%).

There are several reasons for this. Many Latin American economies are small, produce similar things and are separated by huge distances, all factors that tend to discourage trade. That is bad news: trade boosts economic growth, by increasing efficiency and by the "learning" that comes from exporting to other markets or importing more sophisticated goods. And after six straight years of economic weakness, Latin America is casting around for new sources of growth.

Some of the centre-right governments that have recently come to power in South America are keener on open trade than their left-wing predecessors, especially in Mercosur. Unfortunately, the biggest gains in efficiency and learning might come from more trade with the United States, something Donald Trump seems uninterested in. But there are other things the region can do to help itself.

There is much talk in South America of "convergence" between Mercosur and the Pacific Alliance, a free-trading group comprising Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Next month in Buenos Aires, foreign ministers from both will meet for the first time. Yet the groups have different rules and philosophies; merging them is a technical and political impossibility. One option would be to use ALADI, a 1980 integration treaty, to harmonise and improve existing preferential agreements, says Enrique Iglesias, a Latin American elder statesman.

The easiest gains lie in tackling bureaucratic obstacles to trade. Susana Malcorra, Argentina's foreign minister, says that with her Mercosur counterparts she has identified 80 such obstacles, such as conflicting norms and standards, which they will try to do away with. They have pledged to unify border posts where there are two, as on the river Uruguay. Better transport links and open-skies agreements are essential, too. Transport costs in South America are unusually high.

The World Bank argues that regional and global integration go hand in hand. Mr Trump has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; the Pacific Alliance hopes to resurrect it without the United States, linking its members to Asia. Mercosur retains fairly high external tariffs and has few trade deals with others. It is making a fresh effort to conclude long-stalled talks with the EU; an agreement would provide a "road map and a corset" for liberalisation, says Ms Malcorra. But without Britain, the EU is even less likely to offer the market access Mercosur wants for its farm exports.

The rhetoric of integration masks often-shameless protectionism by business, especially in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. This has bred cynicism. The problem, says Roberto Bouzas, a trade specialist at San Andrés university in Buenos Aires, is how to translate the abstract demand for integration into a concrete political agenda backed by organised interests, and find leaders willing to carry this out.

There is a flicker of hope. For the first time, says Ms Malcorra, there is "a very determined attitude from all the presidents". Unfortunately, the region's governments are politically weak. But they know they must rekindle growth, and that regional integration will help.

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Bello: There has never been a better time for Latin American integration | The Economist

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IT IS Saturday lunchtime, and about 30 trucks are parked at each of the customs posts on either side of the bridge across the broad Uruguay river that marks the border between Argentina and Uruguay. Both countries are members of Mercosur, a would-be customs union that also embraces Brazil and Paraguay.

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With just over two months under his belt as president, Donald Trump's time in office has been marked by a frenzied pace on domestic issues, with harsh new immigration and explosive health care debates in the foreground. With less hysteria, but equally disconcerting, is a chaotic approach to foreign policy that departs from the long-standing practice of advancing human rights and democratic values overseas.

Through words and now actions it is clear the Trump administration intends to severely downplay - if not eliminate - the promotion of human rights from its approach to foreign policy. This is a wholesale retreat from the position of every U.S. administration since Jimmy Carter's. Although there have been inconsistencies and even policies adopted that were antithetical to human rights, every administration has championed their advancement. This norm has become an integral part of U.S. foreign policy not only because supporting human rights, good governance, and the rule of law has enhanced the lives of countless people around the globe, but because it has also been in the U.S. national interest.

Far from being the check on this agenda that many had hoped for, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been one of its primary enablers. Although his moves have not been particularly dramatic, an accumulation of smaller steps sends a clear and dangerous signal, especially with bigger ones waiting in the wings.

First, Washington's press corps, and the news media more generally, has been subject to frequent vitriolic attacks. This disdain for the media doesn't stop at the White House gates. Tillerson has thus far done very few public events, avoided reporters, and limited daily media briefings. On his recent trip to Asia, Tillerson chose only one journalist, from a minimally critical media outlet, to accompany him - unlike previous secretaries, who traveled with a much larger group. Other journalists had to fly commercial, creating logistical hurdles so steep that many couldn't make the trip.

Dodging the media or attacking it outright impedes U.S. policy objectives while eroding long-standing commitments to a free press. By rejecting the vigorous debate and discussion that the media brings, the Trump administration is legitimizing an approach used by repressive leaders around the world as they evade media engagement that can help bring a deeper understanding of policymaking to a wider public. Conducting diplomacy solely in private decreases the cost of abuse. Repressive leaders no longer have to respond to public criticism - as was the case earlier this week during Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi 's White House visit.

Second, the release of the State Department's annual Human Rights Report is usually a public event hosted by the secretary of state, whose involvement signals the important place human rights occupies in U.S. foreign policy. This year, however, the report was released quietly without an appearance or even a comment from the secretary. Instead, an anonymous State Department official hosted a background briefing by phone and told reporters that the secretary didn't need to be there because "the facts in this report speak for themselves." In fact, it was the secretary's absence that spoke for itself, suggesting that the State Department will be virtually silent when it comes to repression, abuse, and exploitation by foreign governments.

Third, the Trump administration's proposed 2018 budget seeks to severely cut foreign assistance and funding for multilateral institutions. Initial reports that Tillerson was fighting to save the foreign aid budget turned out to be utterly incorrect. The White House budget director, Mike Mulvaney, also left no room for doubt about the administration's intention: "This is a hard-power budget," he said, "[a]nd that was done intentionally. The president very clearly wants to send a message to US allies and potential adversaries that this is a strong power administration." Cuts to foreign aid instead say that helping marginalized populations - assisting those whose human rights are most at risk - is not only inconsequential for U.S. national security, but is of little concern to the American people. It's a clear, grim message: The promotion of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law is a waste of time.

Fourth, under the guise of leveling the playing field for U.S. businesses, Congress gutted rules - with Trump's blessing - that would require oil and mining companies to disclose payments to foreign governments. These rules, besides promoting better governance, are important to prevent or mitigate grand corruption - wholesale theft of national wealth - the sort of massive stealing that empowers rights abusers and affects basic social services. The move downgrades the bipartisan priorities of good governance, transparency, and anti-corruption, despite strong evidence that economic growth and investment opportunities are riskier and more limited in a climate of opacity.

Fifth, the Trump administration is considering withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, primarily because of its treatment of Israel. For all the council's flaws, it has successfully documented and exposed a wide range of human rights issues that have been of concern for many U.S. policymakers and lawmakers. These include the council's unprecedented U.S.-led statement criticizing China's crackdown on journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders and the 2012 North Korea Commission of Inquiry. In the end, pulling out of the council rather than working to make it more effective only decreases the avenues for making U.S. contributions to progress on human rights.

Finally, an obvious example that the Trump administration's foreign policy is primed to dispense with human rights considerations is last week's decision to lift the human rights conditions attached to the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Bahrain. These conditions, attached by the Obama administration, were an effort to provide leverage to Bahraini government reformers over the hard-liners, who have been deeply hostile to moving toward a more reform-minded and tolerant governing approach. But now, as the Trump administration looks for new ways to confront Iran, the decision to lift conditions could amount to a warning for Iran while signaling to governments throughout the region that stifling opposition and aggressively silencing dissent will not be a hurdle for U.S. support. The expectation that this administration will soon move forward with arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria - again, without any conditions or consideration for human rights concerns - shows unmistakably that good governance and universal values are no longer part of the security calculus.

For decades, a values-based approach to foreign policy has been a core tenet for Republicans and Democrats alike, with democratic and human rights principles seen as pillars of prosperity rather than as constraints. But now, over the course of fewer than 100 days, Trump and his closest advisors have made clear their disdain for that approach. Instead they have signaled their intent to turn campaign proposals and rhetoric that exclusively advance the narrow interests of some to the exclusion of others into both policy and law.

The response to Trump's aggressive actions and rhetoric is growing. Many organizations are activating their networks and opposition to these actions, and new groups are being formed every day. The media are forging ahead - determined to uncover the truth and hold the White House to account. More than 1,000 foreign and civil service staff expressed internal dissent about Trump's initial executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim majority nations, while other U.S. officials are using public speeches to offer their own response, veiled as it may be. Key political appointees are finding their footing, and members of Congress - on both sides of the aisle - are starting to be explicit about their rejection of the White House's attempts to undermine fundamental rights.

Traditional U.S. allies are also responding. Washington-based diplomats and U.N. dignitaries are visiting Capitol Hill, making the case for continued U.S. engagement and a robust foreign aid budget. They are encouraging a more humane approach to immigration, refugee settlement, and the need to maintain global alliances.

Building common ground to contain the Trump administration's assault on human rights values is essential to undercutting the new foreign-policy normal the White House wants Americans to accept. This is neither a progressive agenda nor a conservative one - it is a bipartisan one that requires a collective recognition that going it alone would make Americans less safe and less prosperous. Instead of allowing human rights to be sidelined, let's all get to work defending and maintaining this foundational pillar of U.S. foreign policy.

Photo credit: RALPH FRESO/Getty Images

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Trump's Damning Global Retreat on Human Rights

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With just over two months under his belt as president, Donald Trump's time in office has been marked by a frenzied pace on domestic issues, with harsh new immigration and explosive health care debates in the foreground.

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At the site of a Nazi massacre in northern Italy where many children were killed, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left no doubt that Russia would have to change its Syria policy and sever its ties to Iran and Hezbollah. Such defiance of Moscow would not have been expected a few days ago. Since the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, Tillerson has reflected the Trump administration's dramatically changed stance on the war. Intentions of rapprochement with Russia have been replaced with a course of confrontation.

Tillerson of course knew that this change would be backed by key Western foreign ministers. Italy, Great Britain, France, Japan, Canada and Germany had no choice but to condone the military strike in Syria and the new approach to the conflict there. In principle, everyone agreed that Russia must maneuver out of the impasse that has been created with President Bashar al-Assad's government. But when looking at the subtleties, the situation became less clear, as the G7 foreign ministers could not reach an agreement on potential new sanctions.

How long will this current American stance last? That was the question looming over the summit in Lucca. After all, Tillerson has changed his tone on Syria several times in the past week. Despite expressing opposition to intervention during his election campaign, President Donald Trump ended up attacking Syria anyway. His secretary of state made a far-reaching statement in Italy, basically vowing that the US would attack anyone and make anyone accountable who has harmed innocent people. Washington would thus be acting as world police - even without permission, if need be.
Back to interventionism
Trump seems to be picking up where former US president George W. Bush, an opponent of the so-called "axis of evil," left off. The last Republican president even wanted to go to war with Iraq, something Trump criticized as a great mistake. Now, Trump and Tillerson seem to be willing to take on Russia, North Korea and even China. Threats of "unilateral measures" can be interpreted as an energetic, bold approach or seen as a dangerous game of provocation.

DW's Brussels correspondent Bernd Riegert

Fellow Western foreign ministers likely disagree with much of the Trump doctrine now taking shape.

Tillerson should probably not count on practical support, meaning troops or money, from the West to implement his Syria policy. The other nations' agreement amounts to no more than lip service. None of the other six G7 nations wants to be dragged into a bloody conflict like the one in Syria. It is highly unlikely that renewed confrontation with Russia will open an opportunity for a political peace process in Syria, as desired by German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel. Would Russian President Vladimir Putin actually intervene and then suddenly drop his support for Assad? That is unlikely to happen immediately, but perhaps in the near future, when Assad is no longer useful to him. The Russians will also wait to see whether US foreign policy will stabilize or whether yet even more sudden changes are in store.
Still no strategy
There is still no adequate explanation as to why Trump has shifted his stance from "America first" to "America everywhere." Many observers in Washington believe his daughter was behind this change of heart. Ivanka, a Trump whisperer who exercises a great deal of influence as an advisor, may have appealed to her father's moral side to make use of America's unique position. Others suggest that this is a domestic diversionary tactic, as the president wants to prove that Russia did not influence the US election and his campaign team's connections to Moscow were innocent.

What happens next? Trump's spokesman in the White House has not ruled out further military strikes in Syria if Assad's regime continues to use barrel bombs - something he still does on a regular basis. Will the US actually initiate a large-scale military intervention in Syria? What will Trump ultimately demand from Washington's allies in Europe and NATO? How will the US behave in the explosive conflict with North Korea if Pyongyang's mad leader conduct another nuclear weapons test as expected? American foreign policy raises many important questions, but an actual strategy remains unclear.
Have something to say? Share your comments below. The thread will remain open for 24 hours after publication.

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Opinion: Trump's new doctrine makes US the world police | World | DW.COM | 11.04.2017

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At the site of a Nazi massacre in northern Italy where many children were killed, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left no doubt that Russia would have to change its Syria policy and sever its ties to Iran and Hezbollah. Such defiance of Moscow would not have been expected a few days ago.

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This map shows the estimated net immigration (inflows minus outflows) by origin and destination country between 2010 and 2015.

Blue circles = positive net migration (more inflows). Red circles = negative net migration (more outflows). Each yellow dot represents 1,000 people.

Hover over a circle to see that country's total net migration between 2010 and 2015. Click a circle (or tap the circle twice on mobile) to view only the migration flows in and out of that country.

Country-to-country net migration (2010-2015)
The data for this map comes from the U.N. Population Division, more information on how it was calculated at the bottom of the post.
Immigration: the new Godwin's Law

If you're not familiar with Godwin's law, it is an old internet adage that states, " As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1. "

Lately, I've found a similar principle applies to immigration. No matter what topic is being discussed online, if the conversation goes on for long enough, someone will inevitably tie it back to immigration.

Immigration has always been an important and frequently debated issue. And for many current events, the connection with immigration is clear, for example: terrorism / ISIS, the Brexit, Donald Trump and this year's presidential race, the refugee crisis. But at some point in the last year or two, I started noticing immigration being mentioned in connection with all sorts of topics I never would have expected.

To see what I mean, here are some of the topics I've posted about where immigration came up in discussion, either in the comment section of the post or on social media:

Why is immigration suddenly the cause / result / solution of everything? (Not meant rhetorically. If you have a good answer, I'd love to know.)

Who is migrating from where to where?

For a topic that comes up as often as immigration, I've found the debate to be really lacking in factual information. Hopefully this map is helpful is clearing up at least the simple, basic statistics: how many migrants are there? Where are they coming from? And where are they going?

Please keep in mind, these numbers are only estimates. You can find the full details of how they were calculated at the bottom of the post.

That said, here are a few of the pieces I found interesting.

Syria

Between 2010 and 2015, the net migration from Syria to Sweden was more than Syria's net migration to the rest of Europe and the Americas combined.

Many Middle Eastern countries have been criticized for allegedly accepting few Syrian refugees. In Qatar and the UAE, the net migration appears to actually be negative. Though of the Middle Eastern countries that are accepting Syrian refugees, the numbers they are dealing with are orders of magnitude higher than in the West.

The United Kingdom / Brexit

In the Brexit debate, the loudest arguments in favor of leaving the EU have been about immigration. What strikes me as interesting is how small a portion of the UK's net immigration is actually coming from Europe.

Australia

Australia, another country where immigration has become a highly charged political issue, jumps out as an interesting case.

By these estimates, Australia's net immigration is negative with every country in the world, except for a small positive immigration balance with Sudan. Australia is the only country in the world to have significant positive net immigration with the US.

United States

Last month, I posted a map visualizing 200 years of US immigration (inflows only). I would have liked to do the same with US emigration, which may be the more interesting direction since it is not nearly as well known. Unfortunately the US does not keep good emigration records and the best data I've managed to find goes back only a few decades. So, I don't foresee being able to make a historical US emigration map.

Still, I think it's pretty interesting to see what US net immigration flows look like in the present.

As mentioned above, according to these estimates, the US has significant positive net immigration with only one other country, Australia. The country with which the US has the largest negative net immigration is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Mexico. Though the amount by which Mexico leads is down substantially compared to a decade ago. Illegal immigration in particular has fallen off sharply, as demonstrated by this time series of border apprehensions from Pew Research.

When US immigration is viewed by region, the area that really stands out is Asia, which now accounts for just as much US immigration as North + South America (Mexico included).

Immigration between the US and Mexico is particularly complex, since it involves both legal and illegal immigration as well as temporary laborers, deportations, and a large number of people living in immigration detention facilities. For that reason, America's true net migration with Mexico is uncertain, and may actually be much lower than what's shown here. If you believe Pew's estimates, net migration with Mexico is now actually negative: more people are migrating from the US to Mexico than vice versa.

Immigration perceptions

Wherever you stand politically on immigration, you have to admit, it's pretty strange how rarely basic stats like these enter the debate. For all the discussion in the US about border fences and immigration limits, the simple question of "how many immigrants are there?" hardly ever even comes up.

Public opinion about immigration was likely a deciding factor in Britain's decision to exit the EU. And it may very well determine who becomes the next US president. Yet the majority of Brits and the majority of Americans misestimate the size of their country's immigrant population by a multiple.

The data for this map comes from the UN Population Division's estimates for Total Migrant Stock - the number of global migrants, broken down by country of residence and country of origin. The numbers are not fully consistent. In some cases, they represent foreign citizens and in others they represent foreign born. See the dataset itself for the full set of footnotes.

To convert those figures into immigration estimates, I took the difference between the migrant stock in 2015 and that in 2010. Since some of that difference is due to mortality, not immigration, I adjusted the 2010 numbers down assuming an annual mortality rate of 0.8%, the global average.

The map was made in Javascript using D3, three.js, and MapboxGL.

View the map as a Youtube video or embed the interactive version using the HTML below.
My latest project, Elementus, aims to bring transparency to the cryptocurrency market. Check out our blog for some crypto-related data visualizations.

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All the World's Immigration Visualized in 1 Map

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Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn63.9KsharesThis map shows the estimated net immigration (inflows minus outflows) by origin and destination country between 2010 and 2015. Blue circles = positive net migration (more inflows). Red circles = negative net migration (more outflows). Each yellow dot represents 1,000 people.

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Making Trade an Engine of Growth for All: The Case for Trade and for Policies to Facilitate Adjustment

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The role of trade in the global economy is at a critical juncture. Increased trade integration helped to drive economic growth in advanced and developing economies in the latter part of the 20th century.

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Fears that Donald Trump's arrival in the White House is threatening a new era of protectionism have prompted a joint defence of trade from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

Warning that the role of trade in the global economy was at a critical juncture, the three multilateral bodies said the opening up of markets had been good for growth but admitted that action was needed to help "left behind" individuals and communities.

Their report said technological change rather than trade was mainly responsible for the job losses in certain sectors in the west but accepted that the surge in protectionist sentiment in hard-hit communities was justified.

It noted that "adjustment to trade can bring a human and economic downside that is frequently concentrated, sometimes harsh, and has too often become prolonged. It need not be that way. With the right policies, countries can benefit from the great opportunities that trade brings and lift up those who have been left behind."

Trump campaigned on an overtly protectionist manifesto, pledging to withdraw the US from a regional trade deal - the Trans-Pacific Partnership - and serving notice on Mexico and China that they could face swingeing tariffs.

The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO said in their joint report that the anti-trade mood had been evident long before last year's US presidential election but said this had followed a long period when trade had brought benefits to both developed and developing countries.

"The opening of trade over the past several decades has helped to drive global economic growth, lifting incomes across advanced, emerging and developing countries. However, a prolonged period of disappointing economic growth and inadequate attention to those left behind by forces such as trade, globalisation and technology has spurred increased scepticism over open trade in some quarters.

"Countering this by better communicating the benefits of trade, and better sharing these benefits with those affected by trade-related dislocations, are critical to restoring strong, inclusive global growth."

The IMF and the World Bank will hold their spring meetings in Washington next week, when both organisations are expected to stress the importance of combating protectionism and of ensuring the benefits of growth are more evenly distributed.

The WTO has been struggling since 2001 to complete the Doha Round of trade liberalisation talks, a complex multilateral negotiation involving more than 160 countries.

The three organisations said they wanted to stress the "role of supporting domestic policies and prompt attention to those individuals and communities at risk of being left behind. Key policy initiatives such as training, temporary income support, job search assistance and targeted trade adjustment assistance are important. Approaches beyond labour market policies - such as education, housing and regional policy - are also needed."

While acknowledging that bilateral and regional trade deals had a role to play, the report said a strong global trading system based on the WTO was critical. "Strong, well-enforced trade rules help to promote competition and to reassure citizens that international trade is evenhanded."

The IMF said in a separate report that workers were receiving a substantially smaller share of national income than in the 1980s, blaming technological change and globalisation for 75% of the decline.

In a chapter from its forthcoming World Economic Outlook, the IMF said half of the four percentage point fall in labour's income share was due to rapid progress in information technology and the potential to automate routine tasks.

It added that technology was twice as important as globalisation in reducing labour's share of income but said the ability of firms to outsource production to lower-cost countries had eroded workers' bargaining power.

The IMF said rising inequality had accompanied the shift in national income away from labour and towards capital. Middle-income jobs had been hollowed out and the benefits of growth had gone increasingly to the owners of capital.

"As the global economy continues to struggle with subpar growth, an increasing recognition that the gains from growth often have not been broadly shared has strengthened a backlash against economic integration and bolstered support for inward-looking policies," the IMF said, adding that rising inequality created social tension and led to slower growth.

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Free trade warning - IMF, WTO and World Bank say it must be defended

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Fears that Donald Trump's arrival in the White House is threatening a new era of protectionism have prompted a joint defence of trade from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

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World Press Freedom Day: Persecuted journalists

Macedonia: Tomislav Kezarovski

He was considered to be southern Europe's single political prisoner. Tomislav Kezarovski was inconvenient because he cited internal police reports and investigated the unresolved death of another journalist. In October 2013 in a questionable trial, he was sentenced to four-and-a-half year's imprisonment and upon appeal, to two year's house arrest. He is now writing a book about his time in jail.

Author: Sabrina Pabst

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World Press Freedom Day: Persecuted journalists He was considered to be southern Europe's single political prisoner. Tomislav Kezarovski was inconvenient because he cited internal police reports and investigated the unresolved death of another journalist. In October 2013 in a questionable trial, he was sentenced to four-and-a-half year's imprisonment and upon appeal, to two year's house arrest.

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Venezuela

For the first time in its 69-year history, a member of the Organization of American States has said it will leave. Caracas accuses the bloc of being a pawn of the US, claiming protesters are attempting a US-backed coup.

Venezuela has announced that it plans to leave the Organization of American States (OAS) in response to international criticism of the administration's violent crackdown on its political opponents.

Seventeen members of the 34-nation OAS bloc, including the United States, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, voted on Wednesday to hold a special meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the Venezuelan crisis.

Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez had earlier threatened to leave the group if that meeting at the Washington headquarters went ahead, calling it an infringement on Venezuela's sovereignty.

Rodriguez said the OAS' action was taken to "intervene and take custody of our country, something that fortunately will never happen."

Julio Borges, president of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, called the announcement "proof of the self-inflicted coup d'état."

"It is the proof of fear of a vote," he said.

Violent clashes between anti-government protesters and security forces claimed a 23rd life in capital, Caracas, on Wednesday, according to some sources. According to Venezuelan officials, 28 people have died so far this month. The latest death occurred when a 20-year-old man was hit in the head with a tear gas canister fired by the National Guard at a protest, the opposition mayor of the capital's Chacao district said.

Venezuela on the brink

Mother of all protests

Last September saw some 1 million Venezuelans march on Caracas. The opposition hopes April 19 protests - "the mother of all protests" to coincide with Maduro's fourth annivesary - will be even bigger. Meanwhile, the international community looks on with concern. The Organization for American States is mulling a suspension for Venezuela unless it calls elections to emerge from "dictatorship."

Author: Kathleen Schuster

Hundreds of thousands protest
Hundreds of thousands of protesters have hit the streets over the past month, demanding elections to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

Maduro's opponents have called for the release of jailed activists, humanitarian aid to help offset shortages of food and medicine, and autonomy for the opposition-led legislature.

Up to 32 people have died in widespread protests

The protests were originally triggered by a decision by the government-loyal Supreme Court to strip the opposition-controlled National Assembly of its last vestiges of power. That decision was later reversed amid a barrage of international condemnation.

Maduro has accused the opposition of seeking a violent coup with underhanded US support, like the unsuccessful 2002 coup attempt against former President Hugo Chavez.

Withdrawal from the OAS officially takes two years, but Foreign Minister Rodriguez said Venezuela would immediately stop participating in the bloc. Venezuela would be the first country to withdraw from the group since its founding in 1948. Caracas owes the OAS an estimated $10.5 million (9.6 million euros) in unpaid annual dues.

OAS members have steadily increased pressure on Venezuela since Secretary General Luis Almagro issued a 75-page report in March accusing Maduro's government of systematically violating human rights and standards of democracy enshrined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter, to which Venezuela is a signatory.

DW recommends

Audios and videos on the topic

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Venezuela to quit OAS regional bloc as 23rd protester dies | News | DW.COM | 27.04.2017

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Venezuela For the first time in its 69-year history, a member of the Organization of American States has said it will leave. Caracas accuses the bloc of being a pawn of the US, claiming protesters are attempting a US-backed coup.

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Kristalina Georgieva, a former head of EU humanitarian affairs and vice-president of the European commission, has been appointed chief executive of the World Bank.

The Bulgarian, who recently lost out in the race to become UN secretary general, will report to the bank's president, Jim Yong Kim, who was reappointed for another five-year term last month. Although the title of CEO is newly created, Georgieva will effectively replace Sri Mulyani Indrawati, formerly the bank's managing director and chief operating officer, who was appointed Indonesian finance minister in July.

Georgieva's appointment follows upheaval at the institution, which has faced a backlash against globalisation driven by concern that the rich and western states have been the biggest beneficiaries of free trade. A shakeup of the bank's management and organisation by Kim has also faced opposition from some staff.

Announcing Georgieva's appointment, Kim emphasised her background as a European commissioner for humanitarian aid: "Kristalina is a globally recognised leader with a proven track record in improving the lives of those most in need."

Georgieva, who will begin her appointment in January, is currently European commission vice-president for budget and human resource, a post in which she oversees a €161bn (£144bn) budget. She served in a number of positions at the World Bank between 1993 and 2010, including director of sustainable development.

Kim added: "As humanitarian aid commissioner, Kristalina established herself as a global champion for the concept of resilience. Helping countries manage global shocks and threats is at the core of the World Bank Group's efforts to end poverty and boost shared prosperity."

Georgieva, who forged a reputation as an effective administrator in her EU role, was a late entrant in the race to become UN secretary general, which was won by António Guterres of Portugal. Highly regarded by observers at a time when Russia was insistent the next secretary general should come from eastern Europe, she was widely seen as close to the west.

Before the bank's annual meeting with the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC this month, it warned that inequality posed a major threat to its ambition of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030.

The bank said the number of people living on less than the international poverty line of $1.90 a day had continued to fall despite the sluggishness of the global economy. It added, however, that faster growth and a range of anti-inequality measures would be needed to meet the twin goals, set by Kim, of reducing global poverty to 3% and boosting the income of the bottom 40% of each country's population.

Kim has indicated that his second term will focus on promoting economic growth through private-sector investment infrastructure, as well as boosting education and health programmes.

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World Bank appoints Kristalina Georgieva as chief executive

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Kristalina Georgieva, a former head of EU humanitarian affairs and vice-president of the European commission, has been appointed chief executive of the World Bank. The Bulgarian, who recently lost out in the race to become UN secretary general, will report to the bank's president, Jim Yong Kim, who was reappointed for another five-year term last month.

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Saudi Arabia has been voted onto the UN women's rights commission in a secret ballot - a move branded "shocking" and "absurd" by critics.

At least five European Union states reportedly cast their ballots for the Middle Eastern kingdom, where women still do not have the right the right to drive and were only allowed to stand as candidates and vote in municipal elections first the first time, two years ago.

It will now serve a four year term on the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which claims to be dedicated to the "promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women".

RothnaBegum, a women's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch told The Independent it was "shocking".

"How can Saudi Arabia seek to promote women's rights globally, when at home they continue to severely discriminate against women through the male guardianship system?" she said.

The guardianship system means that women in Saudi Arabia remain permanent legal minors. Ms Begum said that as a result they are required to seek permission from a male guardian "to travel abroad, marry, or be released from prison, and may be required to provide guardian consent to work or get health care".

She also pointed out that w omen cannot drive or apply for a driving licence in the conservative country. Earlier this month, the country got into hot water after images of the first girls' council meeting emerged - with 13 men in attendance, but no women.

Hillel Neuer, director of UN Watch, UN Watch a non-governmental organisation (NGO) whose stated mission is "to monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter", also called appointment "absurd", while award-winning author and columnist Mona Eltahaway was equally appalled, and referred to the appointment as a "disgrace".

The Human Rights Foundation, a New York-based NGO, called the country a "dictatorship".

The dictatorship of Saudi Arabia has been elected to the @UN women's rights commission. https://t.co/DzXmziVa1a
- HRF (@HRF) April 24, 2017

Canadian Conservative MP Michelle Rempell called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to condemn the appointment.

"Where is the credibility of the United Nations as a whole if we're putting countries like Saudi Arabia on the women's rights commission?" she said.

Saudi Arabia is also a member of the Human Rights Council, which it will serve on until 2019.

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Outrage after Saudi Arabia appointed to UN women's rights council

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Saudi Arabia has been voted onto the UN women's rights commission in a secret ballot - a move branded "shocking" and "absurd" by critics. At least five European Union states reportedly cast their ballots for the Middle Eastern kingdom, where women still do not have the right the right to drive and were only allowed to stand as candidates and vote in municipal elections first the first time, two years ago.