सत्तारुढ गठबन्धनको पछिल्लो निर्णयप्रति महिन्द्र राय यादव असन्तुष्ट ‘गठबन्धनको साझा उम्मेदवार मै हुँ’
सत्ता गठबन्धनबीच कहाँ–कहाँ मित्रवत प्रतिस्पर्धा ? (सूचीसहित)
जनकपुरमा छठको तयारी पूरा
जल र सूर्यको पूजाआराधना गरिने पर्व : छठ
संविधान जारी भएको सात वर्षमा पनि संशोधन भएन नागरिकता ऐन
‘महाकवि देवकोटा गरिब थिए भन्ने हौवा मात्र हो’
बिहान मुँगको दाल उसिनेर खाँदा स्वास्थ्यलाई पाँच उत्कृष्ट फाइदा
तौल घटाउनका लागि पिउनुहोस् जिरा र मेथीको पानी, यस्ता छन् अन्य फाइदा
Friday, October 28, 2022
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
26: Xi Jinping
How Elon Musk Became a Geopolitical Chaos Agent The world’s richest man has inserted himself in some of the world’s most combustible conflicts...... While plenty of billionaire executives like to tweet their two cents on world affairs, none can come close to Mr. Musk’s influence and ability to cause trouble. ....... Starlink can beam internet service to conflict zones and geopolitical hot spots, and it has become an essential tool of the Ukrainian army. ........ He has called himself a free speech absolutist, and he is expected to take a light touch to moderating Twitter’s content. ....... Nonetheless, Mr. Musk revealed his plan 10 days later on Twitter. The Kremlin publicly supported the idea. ...... This month, Mr. Musk delivered more uncertainty to Ukraine when he said he could not keep paying for Starlink service to the country, making it seem like he was shouldering the expense. In fact, the United States, Britain and Poland have paid SpaceX for at least part of the Starlink cost ...... While he was in Aspen laying out his peace plan for the war in Ukraine, Mr. Musk also waded into unrest in Iran. ...... Starlink offered the potential to bypass the government’s blockade of land-based internet connections that had taken Iranians in many cities offline. ....... Mr. Musk also recently stepped into perhaps the world’s most delicate geopolitical hot spot: Taiwan. ...... Tesla operates a manufacturing facility in Shanghai that produces as much as 50 percent of the company’s new cars. The Beijing government tightly controls how Western companies operate in the country, and observers have long worried about how Tesla’s dependence on China could affect Mr. Musk’s political positions....... This month, Mr. Musk confirmed that he faced pressure from Beijing, when he told the Financial Times that the Chinese government had made it clear that it disapproved of his offering Starlink internet service in Ukraine. Beijing sought assurances, he said, that he would not offer the service in China.
Labour Party Comes Out Swinging at Britain’s New Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak The opposition’s lines of attack, starting with Mr. Sunak’s choice of home secretary and his wife’s wealth, gave a glimpse of where it sees vulnerabilities in the governing Conservatives. ...... It was a bracing debut for Mr. Sunak in the weekly political cage match known as prime minister’s questions ........ Mr. Starmer described a governing party out of control, bereft of ideas, with a standard-bearer who could not relate to the anxieties of ordinary people. ....... “My record is clear,” Mr. Sunak declared, looking unruffled by Mr. Starmer, as his backbenchers cheered and whooped. “When times are difficult in this country, I will always protect the most vulnerable.” ...... The minister, Suella Braverman, was appointed as home secretary, the same job from which she had been fired by Ms. Truss, ostensibly because she sent a government document on her personal email. ....... She is a popular figure on the party’s right, and her endorsement gave him crucial momentum to thwart Mr. Johnson’s efforts to catch him in the race for nominating votes. Her appointment, they said, was a simple quid pro quo.
An Era Just Ended in China Forty-four years ago, Deng Xiaoping kicked off the period of “reform and opening up” that transformed China from a poor, autarkic nation into an emerging global power. President Xi Jinping officially ended that era last week........ Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for China’s spectacular economic achievements had two main components. The first was a collective leadership arrangement within the Communist Party. Deng rejected Western-style democracy, but China’s tumultuous decades under Mao Zedong had taught him that one-man rule is dangerous. He and the party introduced partial checks and balances into politics at the highest level, including term limits. The second component was a single-minded pursuit of economic growth that, Deng famously declared, would be China’s “hard principle.” Officials throughout China dove headlong into promoting growth at all costs — bringing prosperity but also corruption, inequality and heavy industrial pollution. ......... heavily prioritizing national security over the pursuit of economic growth. ........ “National security is the bedrock of national rejuvenation, and social stability is a prerequisite for building a strong and prosperous China.” ......... If there were any remaining doubts about Mr. Xi’s intentions, he dispelled them by vowing that China would stick to its zero-Covid policy, “without wavering.” His government’s approach to the pandemic, a public health policy in name, is in reality the most powerful security tool devised by the Communist Party, restricting access to the country and controlling who can go where, underpinned by tracking apps that citizens and visitors must have on their smartphones. .......... For observers long accustomed to Deng’s growth-first ethos, Mr. Xi’s policy choice is mind-boggling. The Covid controls are angering citizens, crippling China’s economy, decimating domestic consumption, disrupting manufacturing and logistics, and repelling foreign and local investors alike. .......... and is doubling down on repression out of his instinct for self-preservation. ........ an abrupt and sweeping regulatory crackdown last year that has alarmed investors. The market backlash was intense: Within months, more than a trillion dollars in value at many of China’s most innovative companies evaporated. ........ The Trump administration’s chaotic handling of the pandemic prompted Mr. Xi to boast that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” But his triumphalism was premature. China is far from an even match with the United States in economic, military or technological power. And while American democracy is in crisis, the United States remains strong, a true superpower and a free country able to criticize and renew itself. .......... to his credit, he has confronted serious problems that his predecessors swept under the rug, particularly corruption and economic inequality. His vision of a powerful China, respected on the global stage, is warranted given his country’s size and economic clout. ........ Mr. Xi has plunged China into a vicious cycle: A hubristic and authoritarian leader, unaccountable to society and unchallenged even by his own advisers, makes poor policy choices, which add to his problems, exacerbating his fears of a revolt and leading to more repression. .......... China is the world’s second-largest economy and the biggest trading partner of dozens of countries. ....... Chinese tech companies are already expanding overseas to compensate for a restrictive home environment. ...... China under Mao and the former Soviet Union proved that absolute dictatorships fail miserably at making nations prosperous and strong. They bring only impoverishment and false security. Mr. Xi is likely to relearn those lessons in the coming years.
Xi Jinping Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap could spell years of uncertainty as problems mount around an unbound leader who has shown little inclination to share decision-making. ....... Mr. Xi fell into the same trap that has ensnared dictators throughout history: He overreached. He has concentrated more power in his hands than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, looming so completely over the country that he’s been called the “chairman of everything.” ......... He values fealty to himself as more important than competence, and subordinates compete to prove their loyalty by carrying out his policies to the extreme rather than raising harsh truths about negative consequences. ........ The over-concentration of power in Mao’s hands led to decisions such as his misguided Great Leap Forward, a campaign to greatly increase agrarian and industrial output in the late 1950s that led instead to a devastating famine, and the chaotic political violence of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. ........ After Mao’s death in 1976, Mr. Deng made leadership competition more predictable by introducing term limits and retirement ages for leading posts in the government and military and giving party institutions more authority. A pattern of decade-long reigns set in. But Mr. Deng refused to give China’s legislature and courts authority over the party. Party institutions — their members all appointed by senior leaders — proved to be pushovers for Mr. Xi. No visible resistance was raised when he engineered the abolition of presidential term limits in 2018, which could allow Mr. Xi, who is 69, to stay in power until he dies or is deposed in a power struggle. ......... And while the rest of the world has learned to live with the pandemic, Mr. Xi has stubbornly refused to loosen his zero-tolerance approach. Officials nationwide are overzealously imposing mass lockdowns and surveillance in a bandwagon dynamic that has echoes of the Great Leap Forward, when officials over-complied with Mao’s damaging directives. ........... For the first time in years, unemployment has become a serious political risk for the party, and a tanking Chinese real estate market threatens to pull down the entire economy. ........ China has militarized disputed islets in the South China Sea, threatened military action against Taiwan, picked a border fight with India and cut off many imports from Australia after that country’s government called for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Mr. Xi destroyed Hong Kong’s autonomy and has deepened China’s isolation from Europe and the United States by aligning with President Vladimir Putin of Russia just before Mr. Putin launched his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
China and Russia Are Giving Authoritarianism a Bad Name The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable. ......... Russia and China each overreached. ....... inviting a war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the Omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It’s now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people. ........... both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries. .......... Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility. ........
Xi Jinping Is a Captive of the Communist Party Too Since taking leadership of the Chinese Communist Party a decade ago, he mothballed a power-sharing arrangement among party factions, transforming one of the world’s largest political organizations into a unified whole in which his words, thoughts and visage are everywhere. Speaking in 2016, he used a phrase once uttered by Mao Zedong in describing the party as China’s “east, west, south, north and center.” .......... There is indeed an autocrat who rules modern China, but it is the party that Mr. Xi serves, not the man.
China Is Running Covert Operations That Could Seriously Overwhelm Us China has acquired global economic and diplomatic influence, enabling covert operations that extend well beyond traditional intelligence gathering, are growing in scale and threaten to overwhelm Western security agencies. ........ a “breathtaking” Chinese effort to steal technology and economic intelligence and to influence foreign politics in Beijing’s favor. ....... The pace was quickening ......... China can best be described as an intelligence state. The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking, to the point that rewards are offered to citizens for identifying possible spies and even schoolchildren are taught to recognize threats. ............ Barely visible on the world stage 30 years ago, China’s intelligence agencies are now powerful and well resourced. They are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of open societies and growing dependence on China’s economy to collect vast volumes of intelligence and data. Much of this takes place in the cyber domain .......... China’s consulate in Houston was closed by the Trump administration in 2020 after it served as a national hub for collecting high-tech intelligence. ......... China’s Intelligence Law, which was enacted in 2017, required its citizens to assist intelligence agencies. But this legislation simply formalized a situation that had already been the norm. The wider China challenge comes from organizations and actors engaged in activities that may not conform to normal concepts of espionage. .......... the United Front Work Department, a party organization that seeks to co-opt well-placed members of Chinese diaspora communities — and whose scope has been expanded under Mr. Xi. China also endeavors to entice other Western citizens. A textbook case, exposed this year, involved a British politician whose office received substantial funding from an ethnic Chinese lawyer who thereby gained access to the British political establishment. One Chinese approach is to patiently cultivate relationships with politicians at the city or community level who show potential to rise to even higher office. Another is known as elite capture, in which influential Western corporate or government figures are offered lucrative sinecures or business opportunities in return for advocating policies that jibe with Chinese interests............ Mr. Xi has stressed the need to adopt “asymmetrical” means to catch up to the West technologically. ....... The Soviet Union lost the Cold War not because of its intelligence operations — which were good — but because of the failure of its governing ideals. .......... Western policymakers and intelligence services must innovate and adapt. But they also must ensure that strategies they employ honor the ideals of freedom, openness and lawfulness that pose the greatest threat to the Chinese party-state.
No, Capitalism and the Internet Will Not Free China’s People Communist Party rule of China has been punctuated by one mass public campaign after another, each designed to commandeer Chinese minds in service of the state. ........ Their cumulative effect is one of the Communist Party’s greatest achievements: a near-perfect symbiosis between dictatorial government and subservient population. ........
The Three Blunders of Joe Biden
'काठमाडौं- ७ बाट उम्मेदवार बन्न ओलीले अफर गर्नुभएको थियो' : स्वर्णीम वाग्ले
टुकुचा अभियानले छेडेको बहस महानगरपालिका स्थानीय सरकार हो तापनि देशको राजधानीमा विकास–निर्माणका काम गर्दा संघीय सरकारसँग समन्वय हुनुपर्छ । त्यसैले टुकुचा अभियानबारे सरकार प्रमुखलाई समय–समयमा जानकारी गराउनुपर्छ । ...... भदौ ६ यता यो लेख लेखुन्जेलको अवधिमा अवैध ढंगबाट निर्माण गरिएका ५६ स्थानका १३५ संरचना भत्काइएका छन् । मेयर बालेन शाहले असोज १५ मा भनेका थिए, ‘कानुनी रूपमा अवैध ठहरिएका सबै संरचना र अनियमित तरिकाले निर्माण गरिएका तथा सार्वजनिक जग्गा मिचेर बनाइएका सबै संरचना भत्काउने कामलाई निरन्तरता दिइनेछ । त्यसका लागि कामनपाले नक्सा अनुसार वैध–अवैध यकिन गरिरहेको छ ।’ ...... नेपाल भाषामा तोरीको साग–डाँठको त्यान्द्रोलाई ‘टुकँचा’ भन्ने गरिन्छ । टुकुचा भन्ने नाम यसै शब्दको अपभ्रंश हो कि भन्ने अड्कल कतिपय अध्ययनार्थीले गरेका छन् । टुकुचा खोलाको आकार ‘टुकँचा’ सागको त्यान्द्रोजस्तै कम चौडा (साँघुरो), तर लमतन्न परेको छ । काठमाडौं महानगरको तत्कालीन सहरी भागको करिब मध्यभागबाट टुकुचा बगेको छ । ....... टुकुचा खोला चुनदेवीदेखि करिब ६.५ किलोमिटर लामो, ४ देखि ८ मिटरसम्म चौडा र ४ देखि १० मिटरसम्मको गहिराइबाट बगेको छ । सजिलोसँग खोलाको पानी बगोस् भनेर खोलामाथि बनाइएको गुम्बजजस्तो संरचना निर्माण गर्दा ठाउँठाउँमा भर्याङजस्तो छाँगा बनाइएको छ । लुकेको टुकुचा क्षेत्रमा करिब ८५ घरधुरी छन् । ...... टुकुचा खोला वर्षायाममा जता इच्छा लाग्यो उतै बग्ने भएकाले पौराणिक कालमा यसको नाम ‘इच्छुमती’ राखिएको होला । ....... जय नेपाल सिनेमा हलदेखि कमलादी मोडसम्म छोपिएको भाग खुला गर्न महानागर लागिपरेको छ । त्यस क्रममा भत्काइएका ठाउँमा टुकुचा खुला भएको छ । ........ मेयर बालेन शाहले असोज ७ गते सामाजिक सामाजिक सञ्जालमा लेखेका छन्, ‘नदीमा अदालतले अल्पकालीन आदेश दिएको छ, अदालतले टुकुचा (इच्छुमती) नदीलाई खोला भन्न सक्दैन भने नेपाललाई कसरी नेपाल देश भनेर प्रमाणित गर्छ ?’ उनले भनेका छन्, ‘हामीले टुकुचालाई न्याय दिन खोजेका हौं, त्यसलाई पुरानै लयमा फर्काउन खोजेका हौं । तर नगरवासीलाई दुःख दिने हाम्रो नियत छैन । समस्यामा परेका र कागजपत्र भएकासँग हामी छलफल गर्नर्छौं । अहिले हामी आफ्नो अभियानबाट रोकिने पक्षमा छैनौं । टुकुचामा पानी बग्न ४ मिटर छाडिनेछ भने दायाँबायाँ ४–४ मिटरको करिडोर बन्नेछ । यो काम पाँच वर्षभित्र पूरा गर्ने उद्देश्य छ ।’ ......... अदालतले स्टे अर्डर जारी गर्न थालेपछि महानगर प्रहरी प्रमुखले भने, ‘यो गतिविधि राम्रो भएन । अब महानगरलाई जनताको साथ चाहिन्छ । केही गरौं भनेको, ठूलाबडाहरू अदालत गुहार्न थाले । जसले खोलामाथि घर बनाएको छ, त्यसलाई अदालतले पनि संरक्षण गर्नु हुन्न । नक्सा पास लिएर त्यति बेला घर बनाएको भए पनि नियम अनुसार नै भत्काउन सुरु गरिएको हो । नक्सा पास लिँदैमा खोलामाथिको घर नभत्काउने हो भने टुकुचाको बाँकी भूभाग खाली गर्न कठिन हुने भयो । अदालतको आदेशविपरीत काम गर्न पनि नसकिने भयो ।’ ....... ‘टुकुचाको डुँड ऐतिहासिक–पुरातात्त्विक हो भन्नेमा शंका छैन । यो डुँड सय वर्ष पुरानो भएकाले प्राचीन संरक्षण ऐन अनुसार भत्काउन मिल्दैन । यसलाई मौलिक शैलीमै राख्नुपर्छ । दस दिन अध्ययन गर्दा पनि टुकुचाको समग्र पक्ष पत्ता लगाउन नसकिएकाले अब दसैंपछि खोलाको शिरदेखि अन्त्यसम्मै अध्ययन गरिनेछ । कतिपय ठाउँमा टुकुचा कहाँबाट बगेको छ भन्ने अत्तोपत्तो छैन ।’ ......... संस्कृतिविद् सत्यमोहन जोशीले पनि भनेका थिए, ‘उति बेला नै राजाहरूले खोलालाई बंग्याउँदा त्यसको समस्या अहिले देखिएको छ । खोला सधैं स्वतन्त्र हुनुपर्छ, तर इच्छुमतीलाई राणा र राजाकालीन समयमै खुला बग्न दिएनन् । टुकुचालाई पनि अन्य खोलाजसरी खुला र स्वतन्त्र हुन दिनुपर्छ ।’ ........... त्यति बेला सडक फराकिलो पारिएको हुनाले कलंकी भएर काठमाडौंबाहिर जाने सवारीसाधनको जाम हटेको छ । ........ स्थापितले पाँचतले घर पनि भत्काई माइतीघर मण्डला निर्माणका लागि मार्गप्रशस्त गरेका थिए । मण्डलाले आज काठमाडौंको सान राखेको छ । रत्नपार्कका टहरा पसलहरू भत्काउने समयमा पितृ किरियाकर्ममा रहेका उनी कोरा कपडामै आई डोजर चलाउने आदेश दिएका थिए । उनले ‘सार्वजनिक भलाइको काममा अहिले कसैले छेक्छ भने उसैलाई डोजर लगाउँछु’ भनेका थिए । यस्तो प्रक्रियाले गर्दा आज त्यहाँ शान्ति वाटिका बनेको छ । ....... सर्वसाधारणले रत्नपार्कमा सुगमताका साथ सार्वजनिक सवारीसाधन उपयोग गर्न पाएका छन् । यसै गरी टुँडिखेल पश्चिमको सडक फराकिलो पार्ने क्रममा स्थापितले महाकालस्थान अगाडिको साझाको फार्मेसी भवन, विश्वज्योति सिनेमा अगाडिको सडक फराकिलो पारे अनि बानेश्वर शंकर चिम उकालोको साँघुरो सडक छेउछाउ भत्काई फराकिलो पार्न डोजर नै उपयोग गरेका थिए । धोबीखोला करिडोर अवधारणा उनैले ल्याई भाइकाजी तिवारी (पछि सहरी विकासका प्रमुख आयुक्त भए) लाई त्यसको योजना र निर्माणको काम सुम्पेका थिए । आज धोबीखोला दायाँबायाँ करिडोरमा सडक सुविधा पुगी ट्राफिक व्यवस्थापनमा सहयोग भएको छ । यसै अवधारणाको अनुसरण गरी वाग्मती, विष्णुमती, मनोहरा करिडोर योजना बनाइएका हुन् । मेयर बालेन पनि यसैअनुरूप अहिले टुकुचा करिडोर सडक कार्यलाई सफलीभूत पार्न लागिपरेको बुझिन्छ । ......... तत्कालीन मन्त्रिपरिषद्को २०६५ मंसिर २ गतेको बैठकले वाग्मती–वष्णुमती–मनोहरा नदी, धोबीखोला, बल्खु–साङ्ले–महादेव खोलाका दायाँबायाँ क्रमशः २०–२० मिटर, १२–१२ र ६–६ मिटर अनि टुकुचा खोलाको ४–४ मिटर क्षेत्रभित्र कुनै पनि संरचना निर्माण गर्न रोक लगाउने निर्णय गरेको थियो । यी नदी खोला किनारमा भौतिक संरचना निर्माण गर्नुपरे अधिकारसम्पन्न वाग्मती सभ्यता एकीकृत विकास समितिको अनिवार्य रूपमा स्वीकृति लिनुपर्ने भनिएको थियो । यसै निर्णयअनुसार समितिले टुकुचा खोलाको पूर्वसम्भाव्यता अध्ययन प्रतिवेदन तयार पार्न लगाउने कार्य अगाडि बढाएको थियो । ......... जग्गा प्राप्ति ऐन–२०७६ को दफा ९(१) मा ‘नेपाल सरकारलाई सार्वजनिक हितका लागि आवश्यक पर्ने जहाँसुकैको र जतिसुकै क्षेत्रफल भएको जग्गा यस ऐनबमोजिम प्राप्त गर्ने र त्यस सम्बन्धी यस ऐनबमोजिम कारबाही गर्ने, क्षतिपूर्ति निर्धारण गर्ने पुनःस्थापना वा पुनर्बास योजना स्वीकृत गर्ने तथा अन्य आवश्यक निर्णय गर्ने अधिकार हुनेछ’ भन्ने उल्लेख छ । यस अनुसार सार्वजनिक कार्यका लागि टुकुचाको पानी देखिने गरी खुला गर्न सकिने देखिन्छ । ........ फ्रान्सको पेरिसमा आइफल टावर नजिकैको सेइन नदीलाई दायाँबायाँ पर्खाल लगाएर दुवैतिर प्यारापेट बनाई स्थानीय बासिन्दा तथा पर्यटकका लागि मनोरम वातावरण सृजना गरिएझैं टुकुचा करिडोरलाई पनि यस्तै बनाउने योजना गर्नुपर्छ । ........ मन्त्रिपरिषद्ले निर्धारण गरेको मापदण्डभित्र रहेर नियमसंगत तरिकाबाट टुकुचा अभियान सञ्चालन गर्दा मेयर बालेन शाहलाई केही तत्त्वले आपत्ति जनाए भने त्यस्तो तत्त्वलाई युवा पिँढीले नकार्नेछन् । .
चार वर्षमा चीन-नेपाल सम्बन्धमा नयाँ अध्याय थपेँ सन् २०१८ डिसेम्बरमा म महान् मिसनका लागि जिम्मेवारी काँधमा बोकी भाव व्याकुल भई भगवान बुद्ध जन्मिनु भएको हिमालयको देश नेपालमा आएँ । ....... संयुक्त रूपमा हिमालय वारिपारिको बहुआयमिक कनेक्टिभिटी सञ्चालन निर्माण गरी नेपाललाई 'भूपरिवेष्ठित देश' बाट 'भूजडित देश' मा रूपान्तरण गर्न सहयोग पुर्याउनेबारे पनि मतैक्य भएको थियो । ...... चीन र नेपाललाई जोड्ने अरनिको राजमार्गको तेस्रो चरणको मर्मतसम्भार कार्य, काठमाडौं चक्रपथको पहिलो चरणको स्तरोन्नति कार्य सफलतापूर्वक सम्पन्न भइसकेको छ । त्रिभुवन अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय विमानस्थल, गौतम बुद्ध विमानस्थल, पोखरा विमानस्थलको स्तरोन्नति अथवा निर्माण परियोजनाहरु सम्पन्न भई नेपाल पक्षलाई हस्तान्तरण गरिसकिएको छ । माथिल्लो तामाकोसी, माथिल्लो त्रिशूली ३ विद्युत् स्टेसनको विद्युतीय ग्रिडमा जोडी विद्युत् उत्पादन प्रारम्भ भएको छ । चीन नेपाल सीमा पार रेलमार्ग, विद्युतीय ग्रिड सञ्जाल आदिको संभाव्यता अध्ययन प्रारम्भ भइसकेको छ । ........ चीन नेपालको दोस्रो ठूलो व्यापारिक सहकर्मी देश हो, सन् २०२१ मा चीन नेपाल व्यापारको परिमाण १ अर्व ९७ करोड ७० लाख अमेरिकी डलर पुगेको थियो ; नेपालबाट चीनमा भएको निर्यात एक वर्ष पहिलेको सोही समयावधिको भन्दा ६३% ले अभिवृद्धि भएको थियो । चीनले नेपालबाट हुने आयात बढाउनका लागि सक्रिय भूमिका निभाएको छ र नेपालबाट आयात हुने ९८% करयोग्य वस्तुहरुमा 'सून्य भन्सार कर' को सुविधा प्रदान गरेको छ, जसमा अहिले नेपालबाट चीनमा निर्यात हुने सम्पूर्ण वस्तुहरू पर्दछन् । ........ दुई देशबीच नेपालबाट सुन्तला, जुनार तथा पशुआहार घाँस चीनमा निर्यात गर्ने बारेको सन्धीपत्रमा हस्ताक्षर भएको छ । नेपालमा सबैभन्दा बढी आर्थिक लगानी गर्ने देश पनि चीन नै हो । माथिल्लो मर्स्याङ्दी विद्युत स्टेसन, होङ्शी सिमेन्ट, ह्वासिन सिमेन्ट आदि चिनियाँ लगानीका परियोजनाहरूबाट उत्पादन प्रारम्भ भइसके अथवा छिटै हुँदैछन् । ....... चीनले प्रत्येक वर्ष एक सयभन्दा बढी नेपाली विद्यार्थीहरूलाई सरकारी छात्रवृत्ति प्रदान गर्दै आएको छ ...... विगत ४ वर्षमा चीन र नेपालबीचको शान्ति सुरक्षा क्षेत्रको सहकार्य पनि बढेको छ । दुई देशका विशेष सेनाको टोलीले 'सगरमाथाको मैत्री' नामक संयुक्त सैन्य अभ्यास गरेका थिए । ....... बहुलवादको सही कार्यान्वयन र आर्थिक भूमण्डलीकरणको समर्थन, एकलवाद, प्रभुत्ववाद र शीतयुद्धकालीन विचार शैलीको विरोध गरी बहुसंख्यक विकासशील देशहरुको साझा हित, क्षेत्रीय एवं सम्पूर्ण विश्वको शान्तिसुरक्षा र विकासका लागि सक्रिय योगदान पुर्याएका छन् । ....... सन् २०२० को प्रारम्भमा विश्वमा शताब्दीकै सबैभन्दा ठूलो महामारी फैलिन गयो ...... नेपालमा पनि सोही महामारी फैलिएपछि चीनले नेपाललाई ठूलो परिमाणमा महामारी नियन्त्रणका सामग्री र करिब २ करोड ४० लाख खोपहरू प्रदान गरेको थियो । विशेष गरी नेपालमा कोभिड–१९ को दोस्रो लहर चल्दा चीनले यथाशीघ्र नेपाललाई अक्सिजन उत्पादक यन्त्र, अक्सिजन सिलिण्डर र तरल अक्सिजन आदि सामग्री सहयोगस्वरूप प्रदान गरी हिमालय वारिपारिको स्वास्थ्य करिडोरको निर्माण गरेको थियो । ....... अर्को महिना नेपालमा पनि निर्वाचन हुँदैछ ..... पहिलो पटक राजदूत बन्दा मैले मैत्रीपूर्ण सुन्दर छिमेकी देश नेपालमा आउने अवसर पाएँ, यसलाई मैले आफ्नो सौभाग्य सम्झेकी छु । ...... भक्तपुरको जुजु धौ दहीको त्यो स्वाद, सूर्यास्त बेलाको माछापुच्छ्रे हिमालको दृश्य, दसैंको बेलामा नेपाली सहकर्मीसँग रातो टीका लगाएको त्यो न्यानो क्षण, तीजका दिन नेपाली गीतसंगीतसँगै नाचिने त्यो उल्लासपूर्ण नाच आदि म कहिले पनि भुल्न सक्दिनँ ।
सांसद कमलको प्रवेश पछि धनुषा १ मा जनमत जोडदै जनमत पार्टी
Activating Starlink …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 23, 2022
Labour Party Comes Out Swinging at Britain’s New Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak The opposition’s lines of attack, starting with Mr. Sunak’s choice of home secretary and his wife’s wealth, gave a glimpse of where it sees vulnerabilities in the governing Conservatives. ...... It was a bracing debut for Mr. Sunak in the weekly political cage match known as prime minister’s questions ........ Mr. Starmer described a governing party out of control, bereft of ideas, with a standard-bearer who could not relate to the anxieties of ordinary people. ....... “My record is clear,” Mr. Sunak declared, looking unruffled by Mr. Starmer, as his backbenchers cheered and whooped. “When times are difficult in this country, I will always protect the most vulnerable.” ...... The minister, Suella Braverman, was appointed as home secretary, the same job from which she had been fired by Ms. Truss, ostensibly because she sent a government document on her personal email. ....... She is a popular figure on the party’s right, and her endorsement gave him crucial momentum to thwart Mr. Johnson’s efforts to catch him in the race for nominating votes. Her appointment, they said, was a simple quid pro quo.
An Era Just Ended in China Forty-four years ago, Deng Xiaoping kicked off the period of “reform and opening up” that transformed China from a poor, autarkic nation into an emerging global power. President Xi Jinping officially ended that era last week........ Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for China’s spectacular economic achievements had two main components. The first was a collective leadership arrangement within the Communist Party. Deng rejected Western-style democracy, but China’s tumultuous decades under Mao Zedong had taught him that one-man rule is dangerous. He and the party introduced partial checks and balances into politics at the highest level, including term limits. The second component was a single-minded pursuit of economic growth that, Deng famously declared, would be China’s “hard principle.” Officials throughout China dove headlong into promoting growth at all costs — bringing prosperity but also corruption, inequality and heavy industrial pollution. ......... heavily prioritizing national security over the pursuit of economic growth. ........ “National security is the bedrock of national rejuvenation, and social stability is a prerequisite for building a strong and prosperous China.” ......... If there were any remaining doubts about Mr. Xi’s intentions, he dispelled them by vowing that China would stick to its zero-Covid policy, “without wavering.” His government’s approach to the pandemic, a public health policy in name, is in reality the most powerful security tool devised by the Communist Party, restricting access to the country and controlling who can go where, underpinned by tracking apps that citizens and visitors must have on their smartphones. .......... For observers long accustomed to Deng’s growth-first ethos, Mr. Xi’s policy choice is mind-boggling. The Covid controls are angering citizens, crippling China’s economy, decimating domestic consumption, disrupting manufacturing and logistics, and repelling foreign and local investors alike. .......... and is doubling down on repression out of his instinct for self-preservation. ........ an abrupt and sweeping regulatory crackdown last year that has alarmed investors. The market backlash was intense: Within months, more than a trillion dollars in value at many of China’s most innovative companies evaporated. ........ The Trump administration’s chaotic handling of the pandemic prompted Mr. Xi to boast that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” But his triumphalism was premature. China is far from an even match with the United States in economic, military or technological power. And while American democracy is in crisis, the United States remains strong, a true superpower and a free country able to criticize and renew itself. .......... to his credit, he has confronted serious problems that his predecessors swept under the rug, particularly corruption and economic inequality. His vision of a powerful China, respected on the global stage, is warranted given his country’s size and economic clout. ........ Mr. Xi has plunged China into a vicious cycle: A hubristic and authoritarian leader, unaccountable to society and unchallenged even by his own advisers, makes poor policy choices, which add to his problems, exacerbating his fears of a revolt and leading to more repression. .......... China is the world’s second-largest economy and the biggest trading partner of dozens of countries. ....... Chinese tech companies are already expanding overseas to compensate for a restrictive home environment. ...... China under Mao and the former Soviet Union proved that absolute dictatorships fail miserably at making nations prosperous and strong. They bring only impoverishment and false security. Mr. Xi is likely to relearn those lessons in the coming years.
Xi Jinping Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap could spell years of uncertainty as problems mount around an unbound leader who has shown little inclination to share decision-making. ....... Mr. Xi fell into the same trap that has ensnared dictators throughout history: He overreached. He has concentrated more power in his hands than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, looming so completely over the country that he’s been called the “chairman of everything.” ......... He values fealty to himself as more important than competence, and subordinates compete to prove their loyalty by carrying out his policies to the extreme rather than raising harsh truths about negative consequences. ........ The over-concentration of power in Mao’s hands led to decisions such as his misguided Great Leap Forward, a campaign to greatly increase agrarian and industrial output in the late 1950s that led instead to a devastating famine, and the chaotic political violence of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. ........ After Mao’s death in 1976, Mr. Deng made leadership competition more predictable by introducing term limits and retirement ages for leading posts in the government and military and giving party institutions more authority. A pattern of decade-long reigns set in. But Mr. Deng refused to give China’s legislature and courts authority over the party. Party institutions — their members all appointed by senior leaders — proved to be pushovers for Mr. Xi. No visible resistance was raised when he engineered the abolition of presidential term limits in 2018, which could allow Mr. Xi, who is 69, to stay in power until he dies or is deposed in a power struggle. ......... And while the rest of the world has learned to live with the pandemic, Mr. Xi has stubbornly refused to loosen his zero-tolerance approach. Officials nationwide are overzealously imposing mass lockdowns and surveillance in a bandwagon dynamic that has echoes of the Great Leap Forward, when officials over-complied with Mao’s damaging directives. ........... For the first time in years, unemployment has become a serious political risk for the party, and a tanking Chinese real estate market threatens to pull down the entire economy. ........ China has militarized disputed islets in the South China Sea, threatened military action against Taiwan, picked a border fight with India and cut off many imports from Australia after that country’s government called for an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Mr. Xi destroyed Hong Kong’s autonomy and has deepened China’s isolation from Europe and the United States by aligning with President Vladimir Putin of Russia just before Mr. Putin launched his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
China and Russia Are Giving Authoritarianism a Bad Name The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable. ......... Russia and China each overreached. ....... inviting a war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the Omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It’s now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people. ........... both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries. .......... Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility. ........
Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system.
....... China bet on a “zero Covid” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy. ........ if the virus mutates globally, as it did with Omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.” ......... High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling.Xi Jinping Is a Captive of the Communist Party Too Since taking leadership of the Chinese Communist Party a decade ago, he mothballed a power-sharing arrangement among party factions, transforming one of the world’s largest political organizations into a unified whole in which his words, thoughts and visage are everywhere. Speaking in 2016, he used a phrase once uttered by Mao Zedong in describing the party as China’s “east, west, south, north and center.” .......... There is indeed an autocrat who rules modern China, but it is the party that Mr. Xi serves, not the man.
And in a strange way, he is as much a captive of the party as everyone else.
............ the party’s fundamental aim: restoring China to its ancient role as a great nation worthy of its Chinese name, “Zhongguo,” “the central country.” ........ This mission has been in the making ever since the depredations China suffered at the hands of Western nations in the 19th and 20th centuries, followed by the collapse of Chinese imperial rule in 1912 and Japan’s savage wartime invasion. The Communist Party picked up the pieces of a broken nation. Mr. Xi’s power derives from the party’s nationalist goal of wiping away those past shames, restoring China’s strength and control over “lost” territories like Taiwan. Revanchism may drive President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but it is the lifeblood of the Chinese Communist Party. .......... During the Cultural Revolution, Maoist student militants ransacked the family’s home; one of Mr. Xi’s sisters died in the mayhem. Paraded publicly as an enemy of the people, his own mother was forced to denounce him. Mr. Xi eventually spent seven years exiled to the countryside as part of Mao’s exhortation to “learn from the peasants.” .......... Convinced that only the party could restore China’s strength, Mr. Xi was not corruptible by material gain, his old friend said. The question was whether he would succumb to the intoxication of power. ........ The decade under his predecessor, Hu Jintao, was one of missed opportunity, the grand mission of national restoration seemingly forgotten. Corrupt local officials governed their turf like petty tyrants, and protests raged over government heavy-handedness, rampant corruption, poor labor conditions and colossal pollution. ......... It is striking how little meaningful pushback he has encountered. Formidable as Mao was, even he encountered opposition to his destructive utopian policies. Deng Xiaoping faced resistance to his market reforms and Jiang Zemin contended with forces that wanted even greater reform. But with Mr. Xi, there has been almost no party dissent ........... The internet could have threatened centralized authoritarian rule, but Mr. Xi’s government has used algorithms, face recognition and mass electronic surveillance to more pervasively assert party power. A technology backwater for much of the 20th century, China now has the world’s most advanced techno-autocracy. ...........The systematic repression in Xinjiang is the most extreme manifestation of his obsession with preserving stability, even at the risk of international criticism and domestic suffering. The same goes for his uncompromising zero-Covid policy.
China Is Running Covert Operations That Could Seriously Overwhelm Us China has acquired global economic and diplomatic influence, enabling covert operations that extend well beyond traditional intelligence gathering, are growing in scale and threaten to overwhelm Western security agencies. ........ a “breathtaking” Chinese effort to steal technology and economic intelligence and to influence foreign politics in Beijing’s favor. ....... The pace was quickening ......... China can best be described as an intelligence state. The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking, to the point that rewards are offered to citizens for identifying possible spies and even schoolchildren are taught to recognize threats. ............ Barely visible on the world stage 30 years ago, China’s intelligence agencies are now powerful and well resourced. They are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of open societies and growing dependence on China’s economy to collect vast volumes of intelligence and data. Much of this takes place in the cyber domain .......... China’s consulate in Houston was closed by the Trump administration in 2020 after it served as a national hub for collecting high-tech intelligence. ......... China’s Intelligence Law, which was enacted in 2017, required its citizens to assist intelligence agencies. But this legislation simply formalized a situation that had already been the norm. The wider China challenge comes from organizations and actors engaged in activities that may not conform to normal concepts of espionage. .......... the United Front Work Department, a party organization that seeks to co-opt well-placed members of Chinese diaspora communities — and whose scope has been expanded under Mr. Xi. China also endeavors to entice other Western citizens. A textbook case, exposed this year, involved a British politician whose office received substantial funding from an ethnic Chinese lawyer who thereby gained access to the British political establishment. One Chinese approach is to patiently cultivate relationships with politicians at the city or community level who show potential to rise to even higher office. Another is known as elite capture, in which influential Western corporate or government figures are offered lucrative sinecures or business opportunities in return for advocating policies that jibe with Chinese interests............ Mr. Xi has stressed the need to adopt “asymmetrical” means to catch up to the West technologically. ....... The Soviet Union lost the Cold War not because of its intelligence operations — which were good — but because of the failure of its governing ideals. .......... Western policymakers and intelligence services must innovate and adapt. But they also must ensure that strategies they employ honor the ideals of freedom, openness and lawfulness that pose the greatest threat to the Chinese party-state.
No, Capitalism and the Internet Will Not Free China’s People Communist Party rule of China has been punctuated by one mass public campaign after another, each designed to commandeer Chinese minds in service of the state. ........ Their cumulative effect is one of the Communist Party’s greatest achievements: a near-perfect symbiosis between dictatorial government and subservient population. ........
The government’s nearly three-year-old zero-Covid campaign may be the worst of all.
......... It’s an affront to science and common sense, yet — reminiscent of the mindlessness of the Cultural Revolution — officials and citizens around the country go to ridiculous lengths to execute it. Entire cities are shut down even for small outbreaks, and coronavirus tests are conducted on fish and other food products, cars, even construction materials. ...... When Chengdu, a city of 21 million people, was locked down in September, residents were blocked from leaving their flats even when an earthquake struck. .......... the government now has a system that Mao Zedong could only have dreamed of, powered by data and algorithms, to monitor and control the people. ........ Chinese minds have in fact never truly been free. China has been a largely united, centralized state for most of the past 2,000 years, and similar ethics and a similar relationship between ruler and ruled have endured throughout. No fundamental change is possible; China’s lowly people are expected to merely obey. ....... He came home one night, exhausted, his face black after someone at a political rally dumped a pot of ink over his head. In an example of the helplessness and resignation of China’s people, he suggested that we just imagine that grim place had always been our home, accept our lot in life and get on with it. China’s people still live under this mentality of surrender today. ......... When I ran afoul of authorities in 2011 after criticizing the government, the police threatened me with an “ugly death” and said they would tell all of China about the absurd allegations they leveled, like tax evasion, to discredit me. I asked if China’s people would believe their lies. Ninety percent will, an officer told me. In China, where all “truth” comes from the party, he may have been right. .......... Things have only worsened in the past decade. Authorities have smothered remaining traces of independent thought, decimated Chinese civil society and cast a chill over academia, media, culture and business. ........ Western engagement with China has been driven by the pursuit of profit rather than values. Western leaders criticize Communist Party violations of human rights, free speech and spiritual freedom, but long have continued to do business with Beijing. U.S. hypocrisy about independent thought is evident in its approach to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who stands for freedom of information but whom the U.S. government is prosecuting. ........ Millions of Chinese take pride in modern China’s growing wealth and power. But this feeling of well-being is a mirage conjured by superficial material gain, constant propaganda about the decline of the West and suppression of intellectual freedom. China is in fact decaying morally under the influence of the party. In 2011, a 2-year-old girl was run over by two vehicles in southern China and left bleeding in a street. Eighteen people passed by without doing anything, some even swerving aside to avoid her. Don’t think, don’t get involved, just keep walking. The girl later died. ........Freedom relies on courage and sustained risk-taking.
But a vast majority of China’s people feel that resistance, even at the philosophical level, is impossible, and that personal survival depends on compliance. They are reduced to an anxious servility, lining up like sheep in long lines for their coronavirus tests, or scrambling for food before sudden lockdowns. ........... Freedom and individuality can never be completely suppressed. And no country, no matter how strong it appears, can truly prosper without diversity of opinion. But there is no hope for fundamental change in my country while the Communist Party is in power.The Three Blunders of Joe Biden
'काठमाडौं- ७ बाट उम्मेदवार बन्न ओलीले अफर गर्नुभएको थियो' : स्वर्णीम वाग्ले
टुकुचा अभियानले छेडेको बहस महानगरपालिका स्थानीय सरकार हो तापनि देशको राजधानीमा विकास–निर्माणका काम गर्दा संघीय सरकारसँग समन्वय हुनुपर्छ । त्यसैले टुकुचा अभियानबारे सरकार प्रमुखलाई समय–समयमा जानकारी गराउनुपर्छ । ...... भदौ ६ यता यो लेख लेखुन्जेलको अवधिमा अवैध ढंगबाट निर्माण गरिएका ५६ स्थानका १३५ संरचना भत्काइएका छन् । मेयर बालेन शाहले असोज १५ मा भनेका थिए, ‘कानुनी रूपमा अवैध ठहरिएका सबै संरचना र अनियमित तरिकाले निर्माण गरिएका तथा सार्वजनिक जग्गा मिचेर बनाइएका सबै संरचना भत्काउने कामलाई निरन्तरता दिइनेछ । त्यसका लागि कामनपाले नक्सा अनुसार वैध–अवैध यकिन गरिरहेको छ ।’ ...... नेपाल भाषामा तोरीको साग–डाँठको त्यान्द्रोलाई ‘टुकँचा’ भन्ने गरिन्छ । टुकुचा भन्ने नाम यसै शब्दको अपभ्रंश हो कि भन्ने अड्कल कतिपय अध्ययनार्थीले गरेका छन् । टुकुचा खोलाको आकार ‘टुकँचा’ सागको त्यान्द्रोजस्तै कम चौडा (साँघुरो), तर लमतन्न परेको छ । काठमाडौं महानगरको तत्कालीन सहरी भागको करिब मध्यभागबाट टुकुचा बगेको छ । ....... टुकुचा खोला चुनदेवीदेखि करिब ६.५ किलोमिटर लामो, ४ देखि ८ मिटरसम्म चौडा र ४ देखि १० मिटरसम्मको गहिराइबाट बगेको छ । सजिलोसँग खोलाको पानी बगोस् भनेर खोलामाथि बनाइएको गुम्बजजस्तो संरचना निर्माण गर्दा ठाउँठाउँमा भर्याङजस्तो छाँगा बनाइएको छ । लुकेको टुकुचा क्षेत्रमा करिब ८५ घरधुरी छन् । ...... टुकुचा खोला वर्षायाममा जता इच्छा लाग्यो उतै बग्ने भएकाले पौराणिक कालमा यसको नाम ‘इच्छुमती’ राखिएको होला । ....... जय नेपाल सिनेमा हलदेखि कमलादी मोडसम्म छोपिएको भाग खुला गर्न महानागर लागिपरेको छ । त्यस क्रममा भत्काइएका ठाउँमा टुकुचा खुला भएको छ । ........ मेयर बालेन शाहले असोज ७ गते सामाजिक सामाजिक सञ्जालमा लेखेका छन्, ‘नदीमा अदालतले अल्पकालीन आदेश दिएको छ, अदालतले टुकुचा (इच्छुमती) नदीलाई खोला भन्न सक्दैन भने नेपाललाई कसरी नेपाल देश भनेर प्रमाणित गर्छ ?’ उनले भनेका छन्, ‘हामीले टुकुचालाई न्याय दिन खोजेका हौं, त्यसलाई पुरानै लयमा फर्काउन खोजेका हौं । तर नगरवासीलाई दुःख दिने हाम्रो नियत छैन । समस्यामा परेका र कागजपत्र भएकासँग हामी छलफल गर्नर्छौं । अहिले हामी आफ्नो अभियानबाट रोकिने पक्षमा छैनौं । टुकुचामा पानी बग्न ४ मिटर छाडिनेछ भने दायाँबायाँ ४–४ मिटरको करिडोर बन्नेछ । यो काम पाँच वर्षभित्र पूरा गर्ने उद्देश्य छ ।’ ......... अदालतले स्टे अर्डर जारी गर्न थालेपछि महानगर प्रहरी प्रमुखले भने, ‘यो गतिविधि राम्रो भएन । अब महानगरलाई जनताको साथ चाहिन्छ । केही गरौं भनेको, ठूलाबडाहरू अदालत गुहार्न थाले । जसले खोलामाथि घर बनाएको छ, त्यसलाई अदालतले पनि संरक्षण गर्नु हुन्न । नक्सा पास लिएर त्यति बेला घर बनाएको भए पनि नियम अनुसार नै भत्काउन सुरु गरिएको हो । नक्सा पास लिँदैमा खोलामाथिको घर नभत्काउने हो भने टुकुचाको बाँकी भूभाग खाली गर्न कठिन हुने भयो । अदालतको आदेशविपरीत काम गर्न पनि नसकिने भयो ।’ ....... ‘टुकुचाको डुँड ऐतिहासिक–पुरातात्त्विक हो भन्नेमा शंका छैन । यो डुँड सय वर्ष पुरानो भएकाले प्राचीन संरक्षण ऐन अनुसार भत्काउन मिल्दैन । यसलाई मौलिक शैलीमै राख्नुपर्छ । दस दिन अध्ययन गर्दा पनि टुकुचाको समग्र पक्ष पत्ता लगाउन नसकिएकाले अब दसैंपछि खोलाको शिरदेखि अन्त्यसम्मै अध्ययन गरिनेछ । कतिपय ठाउँमा टुकुचा कहाँबाट बगेको छ भन्ने अत्तोपत्तो छैन ।’ ......... संस्कृतिविद् सत्यमोहन जोशीले पनि भनेका थिए, ‘उति बेला नै राजाहरूले खोलालाई बंग्याउँदा त्यसको समस्या अहिले देखिएको छ । खोला सधैं स्वतन्त्र हुनुपर्छ, तर इच्छुमतीलाई राणा र राजाकालीन समयमै खुला बग्न दिएनन् । टुकुचालाई पनि अन्य खोलाजसरी खुला र स्वतन्त्र हुन दिनुपर्छ ।’ ........... त्यति बेला सडक फराकिलो पारिएको हुनाले कलंकी भएर काठमाडौंबाहिर जाने सवारीसाधनको जाम हटेको छ । ........ स्थापितले पाँचतले घर पनि भत्काई माइतीघर मण्डला निर्माणका लागि मार्गप्रशस्त गरेका थिए । मण्डलाले आज काठमाडौंको सान राखेको छ । रत्नपार्कका टहरा पसलहरू भत्काउने समयमा पितृ किरियाकर्ममा रहेका उनी कोरा कपडामै आई डोजर चलाउने आदेश दिएका थिए । उनले ‘सार्वजनिक भलाइको काममा अहिले कसैले छेक्छ भने उसैलाई डोजर लगाउँछु’ भनेका थिए । यस्तो प्रक्रियाले गर्दा आज त्यहाँ शान्ति वाटिका बनेको छ । ....... सर्वसाधारणले रत्नपार्कमा सुगमताका साथ सार्वजनिक सवारीसाधन उपयोग गर्न पाएका छन् । यसै गरी टुँडिखेल पश्चिमको सडक फराकिलो पार्ने क्रममा स्थापितले महाकालस्थान अगाडिको साझाको फार्मेसी भवन, विश्वज्योति सिनेमा अगाडिको सडक फराकिलो पारे अनि बानेश्वर शंकर चिम उकालोको साँघुरो सडक छेउछाउ भत्काई फराकिलो पार्न डोजर नै उपयोग गरेका थिए । धोबीखोला करिडोर अवधारणा उनैले ल्याई भाइकाजी तिवारी (पछि सहरी विकासका प्रमुख आयुक्त भए) लाई त्यसको योजना र निर्माणको काम सुम्पेका थिए । आज धोबीखोला दायाँबायाँ करिडोरमा सडक सुविधा पुगी ट्राफिक व्यवस्थापनमा सहयोग भएको छ । यसै अवधारणाको अनुसरण गरी वाग्मती, विष्णुमती, मनोहरा करिडोर योजना बनाइएका हुन् । मेयर बालेन पनि यसैअनुरूप अहिले टुकुचा करिडोर सडक कार्यलाई सफलीभूत पार्न लागिपरेको बुझिन्छ । ......... तत्कालीन मन्त्रिपरिषद्को २०६५ मंसिर २ गतेको बैठकले वाग्मती–वष्णुमती–मनोहरा नदी, धोबीखोला, बल्खु–साङ्ले–महादेव खोलाका दायाँबायाँ क्रमशः २०–२० मिटर, १२–१२ र ६–६ मिटर अनि टुकुचा खोलाको ४–४ मिटर क्षेत्रभित्र कुनै पनि संरचना निर्माण गर्न रोक लगाउने निर्णय गरेको थियो । यी नदी खोला किनारमा भौतिक संरचना निर्माण गर्नुपरे अधिकारसम्पन्न वाग्मती सभ्यता एकीकृत विकास समितिको अनिवार्य रूपमा स्वीकृति लिनुपर्ने भनिएको थियो । यसै निर्णयअनुसार समितिले टुकुचा खोलाको पूर्वसम्भाव्यता अध्ययन प्रतिवेदन तयार पार्न लगाउने कार्य अगाडि बढाएको थियो । ......... जग्गा प्राप्ति ऐन–२०७६ को दफा ९(१) मा ‘नेपाल सरकारलाई सार्वजनिक हितका लागि आवश्यक पर्ने जहाँसुकैको र जतिसुकै क्षेत्रफल भएको जग्गा यस ऐनबमोजिम प्राप्त गर्ने र त्यस सम्बन्धी यस ऐनबमोजिम कारबाही गर्ने, क्षतिपूर्ति निर्धारण गर्ने पुनःस्थापना वा पुनर्बास योजना स्वीकृत गर्ने तथा अन्य आवश्यक निर्णय गर्ने अधिकार हुनेछ’ भन्ने उल्लेख छ । यस अनुसार सार्वजनिक कार्यका लागि टुकुचाको पानी देखिने गरी खुला गर्न सकिने देखिन्छ । ........ फ्रान्सको पेरिसमा आइफल टावर नजिकैको सेइन नदीलाई दायाँबायाँ पर्खाल लगाएर दुवैतिर प्यारापेट बनाई स्थानीय बासिन्दा तथा पर्यटकका लागि मनोरम वातावरण सृजना गरिएझैं टुकुचा करिडोरलाई पनि यस्तै बनाउने योजना गर्नुपर्छ । ........ मन्त्रिपरिषद्ले निर्धारण गरेको मापदण्डभित्र रहेर नियमसंगत तरिकाबाट टुकुचा अभियान सञ्चालन गर्दा मेयर बालेन शाहलाई केही तत्त्वले आपत्ति जनाए भने त्यस्तो तत्त्वलाई युवा पिँढीले नकार्नेछन् । .
चार वर्षमा चीन-नेपाल सम्बन्धमा नयाँ अध्याय थपेँ सन् २०१८ डिसेम्बरमा म महान् मिसनका लागि जिम्मेवारी काँधमा बोकी भाव व्याकुल भई भगवान बुद्ध जन्मिनु भएको हिमालयको देश नेपालमा आएँ । ....... संयुक्त रूपमा हिमालय वारिपारिको बहुआयमिक कनेक्टिभिटी सञ्चालन निर्माण गरी नेपाललाई 'भूपरिवेष्ठित देश' बाट 'भूजडित देश' मा रूपान्तरण गर्न सहयोग पुर्याउनेबारे पनि मतैक्य भएको थियो । ...... चीन र नेपाललाई जोड्ने अरनिको राजमार्गको तेस्रो चरणको मर्मतसम्भार कार्य, काठमाडौं चक्रपथको पहिलो चरणको स्तरोन्नति कार्य सफलतापूर्वक सम्पन्न भइसकेको छ । त्रिभुवन अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय विमानस्थल, गौतम बुद्ध विमानस्थल, पोखरा विमानस्थलको स्तरोन्नति अथवा निर्माण परियोजनाहरु सम्पन्न भई नेपाल पक्षलाई हस्तान्तरण गरिसकिएको छ । माथिल्लो तामाकोसी, माथिल्लो त्रिशूली ३ विद्युत् स्टेसनको विद्युतीय ग्रिडमा जोडी विद्युत् उत्पादन प्रारम्भ भएको छ । चीन नेपाल सीमा पार रेलमार्ग, विद्युतीय ग्रिड सञ्जाल आदिको संभाव्यता अध्ययन प्रारम्भ भइसकेको छ । ........ चीन नेपालको दोस्रो ठूलो व्यापारिक सहकर्मी देश हो, सन् २०२१ मा चीन नेपाल व्यापारको परिमाण १ अर्व ९७ करोड ७० लाख अमेरिकी डलर पुगेको थियो ; नेपालबाट चीनमा भएको निर्यात एक वर्ष पहिलेको सोही समयावधिको भन्दा ६३% ले अभिवृद्धि भएको थियो । चीनले नेपालबाट हुने आयात बढाउनका लागि सक्रिय भूमिका निभाएको छ र नेपालबाट आयात हुने ९८% करयोग्य वस्तुहरुमा 'सून्य भन्सार कर' को सुविधा प्रदान गरेको छ, जसमा अहिले नेपालबाट चीनमा निर्यात हुने सम्पूर्ण वस्तुहरू पर्दछन् । ........ दुई देशबीच नेपालबाट सुन्तला, जुनार तथा पशुआहार घाँस चीनमा निर्यात गर्ने बारेको सन्धीपत्रमा हस्ताक्षर भएको छ । नेपालमा सबैभन्दा बढी आर्थिक लगानी गर्ने देश पनि चीन नै हो । माथिल्लो मर्स्याङ्दी विद्युत स्टेसन, होङ्शी सिमेन्ट, ह्वासिन सिमेन्ट आदि चिनियाँ लगानीका परियोजनाहरूबाट उत्पादन प्रारम्भ भइसके अथवा छिटै हुँदैछन् । ....... चीनले प्रत्येक वर्ष एक सयभन्दा बढी नेपाली विद्यार्थीहरूलाई सरकारी छात्रवृत्ति प्रदान गर्दै आएको छ ...... विगत ४ वर्षमा चीन र नेपालबीचको शान्ति सुरक्षा क्षेत्रको सहकार्य पनि बढेको छ । दुई देशका विशेष सेनाको टोलीले 'सगरमाथाको मैत्री' नामक संयुक्त सैन्य अभ्यास गरेका थिए । ....... बहुलवादको सही कार्यान्वयन र आर्थिक भूमण्डलीकरणको समर्थन, एकलवाद, प्रभुत्ववाद र शीतयुद्धकालीन विचार शैलीको विरोध गरी बहुसंख्यक विकासशील देशहरुको साझा हित, क्षेत्रीय एवं सम्पूर्ण विश्वको शान्तिसुरक्षा र विकासका लागि सक्रिय योगदान पुर्याएका छन् । ....... सन् २०२० को प्रारम्भमा विश्वमा शताब्दीकै सबैभन्दा ठूलो महामारी फैलिन गयो ...... नेपालमा पनि सोही महामारी फैलिएपछि चीनले नेपाललाई ठूलो परिमाणमा महामारी नियन्त्रणका सामग्री र करिब २ करोड ४० लाख खोपहरू प्रदान गरेको थियो । विशेष गरी नेपालमा कोभिड–१९ को दोस्रो लहर चल्दा चीनले यथाशीघ्र नेपाललाई अक्सिजन उत्पादक यन्त्र, अक्सिजन सिलिण्डर र तरल अक्सिजन आदि सामग्री सहयोगस्वरूप प्रदान गरी हिमालय वारिपारिको स्वास्थ्य करिडोरको निर्माण गरेको थियो । ....... अर्को महिना नेपालमा पनि निर्वाचन हुँदैछ ..... पहिलो पटक राजदूत बन्दा मैले मैत्रीपूर्ण सुन्दर छिमेकी देश नेपालमा आउने अवसर पाएँ, यसलाई मैले आफ्नो सौभाग्य सम्झेकी छु । ...... भक्तपुरको जुजु धौ दहीको त्यो स्वाद, सूर्यास्त बेलाको माछापुच्छ्रे हिमालको दृश्य, दसैंको बेलामा नेपाली सहकर्मीसँग रातो टीका लगाएको त्यो न्यानो क्षण, तीजका दिन नेपाली गीतसंगीतसँगै नाचिने त्यो उल्लासपूर्ण नाच आदि म कहिले पनि भुल्न सक्दिनँ ।
सांसद कमलको प्रवेश पछि धनुषा १ मा जनमत जोडदै जनमत पार्टी
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
25: Los Angeles
An Ode to the New York Subway Overall, the subway remains far safer than other forms of transportation. Indeed, one reason New York City is much safer overall than small-town or even suburban America is that far fewer people die in traffic accidents. ......... the New York subway, with its extensive four-track system — which lets it put many local stops close together while allowing easy transfer to fast express trains — is arguably more functional than its counterparts elsewhere. ......... its main function is to make a high-density lifestyle possible. Not everyone wants to live that way, but some do. For what it’s worth, dense urban environments don’t have to be the hellscapes I suspect many Americans imagine they are. ........ The two New York neighborhoods I know best, the Upper West Side and Jackson Heights, Queens, have population densities of 61,000 and 42,000 people per square mile, respectively. ......... how life-enhancing it can be to have a huge range of services within easy walking distance. ........ not everyone wants to live in a car-based metropolis like Atlanta or Dallas, either. It’s only thanks to mass transit systems like the New York subway that the United States can offer large numbers of people an alternative to sprawl. So the subway makes America more varied in lifestyles, which enriches the nation as a whole, both culturally and economically......... neighborhoods like Jackson Heights are incredibly diverse, and living in or visiting them gives you a much wider view of humanity than most Americans ever encounter. ....... Hostility to groups that don’t look or sound like you tends to be highest when you don’t encounter people different from yourself very often......... the subway system plays a hugely positive role in the life of a city that offers things no other place in America can match.
Dnipro residents fear dark, cold winter as Russia smashes infrastructure With the elevator useless, Tetiana walked up five floors in the dark with her dachshund to a drab apartment with no candles or flashlights. Before walking the dog, she had spent the past two hours texting with relatives across the country, some of whom were also without power. “This is the first time this has happened,” said Tetiana, a middle-aged woman who declined to give her last name. “I’m in shock.” ....... (Targeting civilian infrastructure with no military purpose is a war crime.) ...... Russia’s bombing campaign, which left 1.5 million people across Ukraine without power on Saturday, has evoked scenes of European cities plunged into darkness during World War II. But in the 21st century, the tactic has upended remote work, interrupted distance schooling for children, and risks draining cellphones on which so many now rely to check on loved ones or learn of incoming rocket fire. ......... She said she regretted decades ago giving up a wood-fired stove, the use of which even today remains common in the countryside. Her family had saved food, especially for the baby, but could do little about the dropping temperatures.
Rishi Sunak Won’t Save Britain In March, Rishi Sunak was photographed filling up a car at a supermarket gas station. The purpose, of course, was self-promotion: Mr. Sunak was keen to advertise his role, as finance minister, in cutting the price of fuel. ......... The car, a modest red Kia Rio, wasn’t his (it belonged to a supermarket employee). Inside the garage, Mr. Sunak further embarrassed himself by showing he had no idea how to make a contactless payment. ........ Liz Truss’s disastrous 44-day premiership proved his warnings about economic “fairy tales” to be remarkably prescient; he commands the support of a majority of the faction-ridden Conservative parliamentary party; and his ascent — on the back of his grasp of economics — has calmed the financial markets. ......... That country, economically stagnant, regionally unbalanced, socially strafed, is in dire need of compassionate leadership. In Mr. Sunak, by conviction a devotee of small-state Thatcherism and with no visible concern for the lives of the majority, Britain is unlikely to get it. ........... it was estimated that in the absence of greater support, 1.3 million people would fall into absolute poverty. His scant plans for the worse off were deemed in The Times of London to be “insufficient, inefficient and unconservative.” The criticism was a fitting capstone for his tenure, defined by a selective and shallow concern for others.......... It’s a bad time for the country to be in dispassionate hands. Inflation stands at over 10 percent. Living standards have eroded, with Britons set to see the biggest drop in disposable income since records began. For the first time, demand for food banks is said to be outstripping supply. Energy blackouts could be coming in January. In April, after a further increase in bills, the number of people in fuel poverty could reach 10.7 million. Ambulance delays are now a palpable “threat to life.” The economy is anemic, set to have the highest inflation and lowest growth rates of the Group of 7 nations next year. ............ His attitude toward regional inequality, among the worst of any comparable developed country’s, is instructive: In office, he boasted about rigging Treasury formulas to shift resources from “deprived urban areas” into wealthier constituencies, regardless of need. .......... After 12 years in power, the Conservative Party is almost out of ideas. ........ it’s fair to assume that in the name of fiscal rectitude, he will rein in public spending and cut social protections. ....... at the outset of his tenure, one thing seems guaranteed: Mr. Sunak, conservative savior, won’t save the country.
What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root? Many Americans believe there’s something not quite right about majority rule — something threatening, something dangerous. It just feels wrong. ........ the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” and that democracy would be the ruin of American liberty. We are taught to imagine ourselves as potentially being at the awful mercy of most of our fellow citizens. ....... Our collective suspicion of majority rule rests on the legitimate observation that a majority can be as tyrannical as any despot. ........ If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals. .......... the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead. ......... If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were possible only with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination. ......... If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it. .......... Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation. ........ The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish
The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane’ The politics of the affordable housing crisis are terrible. The politics of what you’d need to do to solve it are even worse.
The Three Blunders of Joe Biden
Wonking Out: Facts, Feelings and Rural Politics
How Toni Morrison Wrote Her Most Challenging Novel
In Los Angeles, Politics Are More Complex Than a Racist Recording Indicates Recently leaked audio of Latino leaders exposed their ambition to gain power. But loyalties don’t always follow racial lines in the city’s most Latino district. ...... The audio also exposed frustrations that there weren’t more Latinos in elected office, at a time when they comprise half the city’s population. ........ In the 1980s, increasing numbers of Latino immigrants moved into South Los Angeles, fleeing Central American civil wars and Mexican economic disruption. ....... Latino residents now comprise the largest ethnic group in 10 of the city’s 15 Council districts ......... Overall, some 48 percent of Angelenos are Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau, while just under 9 percent are Black. ........ “There were gangs at every corner,” he said of those days, as he strolled the aisles of Superior Grocers on Central Avenue, speaking over piped-in Mexican country music. “You lived in fear that you would be assaulted or robbed.”
Dnipro residents fear dark, cold winter as Russia smashes infrastructure With the elevator useless, Tetiana walked up five floors in the dark with her dachshund to a drab apartment with no candles or flashlights. Before walking the dog, she had spent the past two hours texting with relatives across the country, some of whom were also without power. “This is the first time this has happened,” said Tetiana, a middle-aged woman who declined to give her last name. “I’m in shock.” ....... (Targeting civilian infrastructure with no military purpose is a war crime.) ...... Russia’s bombing campaign, which left 1.5 million people across Ukraine without power on Saturday, has evoked scenes of European cities plunged into darkness during World War II. But in the 21st century, the tactic has upended remote work, interrupted distance schooling for children, and risks draining cellphones on which so many now rely to check on loved ones or learn of incoming rocket fire. ......... She said she regretted decades ago giving up a wood-fired stove, the use of which even today remains common in the countryside. Her family had saved food, especially for the baby, but could do little about the dropping temperatures.
Rishi Sunak Won’t Save Britain In March, Rishi Sunak was photographed filling up a car at a supermarket gas station. The purpose, of course, was self-promotion: Mr. Sunak was keen to advertise his role, as finance minister, in cutting the price of fuel. ......... The car, a modest red Kia Rio, wasn’t his (it belonged to a supermarket employee). Inside the garage, Mr. Sunak further embarrassed himself by showing he had no idea how to make a contactless payment. ........ Liz Truss’s disastrous 44-day premiership proved his warnings about economic “fairy tales” to be remarkably prescient; he commands the support of a majority of the faction-ridden Conservative parliamentary party; and his ascent — on the back of his grasp of economics — has calmed the financial markets. ......... That country, economically stagnant, regionally unbalanced, socially strafed, is in dire need of compassionate leadership. In Mr. Sunak, by conviction a devotee of small-state Thatcherism and with no visible concern for the lives of the majority, Britain is unlikely to get it. ........... it was estimated that in the absence of greater support, 1.3 million people would fall into absolute poverty. His scant plans for the worse off were deemed in The Times of London to be “insufficient, inefficient and unconservative.” The criticism was a fitting capstone for his tenure, defined by a selective and shallow concern for others.......... It’s a bad time for the country to be in dispassionate hands. Inflation stands at over 10 percent. Living standards have eroded, with Britons set to see the biggest drop in disposable income since records began. For the first time, demand for food banks is said to be outstripping supply. Energy blackouts could be coming in January. In April, after a further increase in bills, the number of people in fuel poverty could reach 10.7 million. Ambulance delays are now a palpable “threat to life.” The economy is anemic, set to have the highest inflation and lowest growth rates of the Group of 7 nations next year. ............ His attitude toward regional inequality, among the worst of any comparable developed country’s, is instructive: In office, he boasted about rigging Treasury formulas to shift resources from “deprived urban areas” into wealthier constituencies, regardless of need. .......... After 12 years in power, the Conservative Party is almost out of ideas. ........ it’s fair to assume that in the name of fiscal rectitude, he will rein in public spending and cut social protections. ....... at the outset of his tenure, one thing seems guaranteed: Mr. Sunak, conservative savior, won’t save the country.
What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root? Many Americans believe there’s something not quite right about majority rule — something threatening, something dangerous. It just feels wrong. ........ the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” and that democracy would be the ruin of American liberty. We are taught to imagine ourselves as potentially being at the awful mercy of most of our fellow citizens. ....... Our collective suspicion of majority rule rests on the legitimate observation that a majority can be as tyrannical as any despot. ........ If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals. .......... the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead. ......... If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were possible only with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination. ......... If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it. .......... Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation. ........ The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish
The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane’ The politics of the affordable housing crisis are terrible. The politics of what you’d need to do to solve it are even worse.
The Three Blunders of Joe Biden
Wonking Out: Facts, Feelings and Rural Politics
How Toni Morrison Wrote Her Most Challenging Novel
In Los Angeles, Politics Are More Complex Than a Racist Recording Indicates Recently leaked audio of Latino leaders exposed their ambition to gain power. But loyalties don’t always follow racial lines in the city’s most Latino district. ...... The audio also exposed frustrations that there weren’t more Latinos in elected office, at a time when they comprise half the city’s population. ........ In the 1980s, increasing numbers of Latino immigrants moved into South Los Angeles, fleeing Central American civil wars and Mexican economic disruption. ....... Latino residents now comprise the largest ethnic group in 10 of the city’s 15 Council districts ......... Overall, some 48 percent of Angelenos are Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau, while just under 9 percent are Black. ........ “There were gangs at every corner,” he said of those days, as he strolled the aisles of Superior Grocers on Central Avenue, speaking over piped-in Mexican country music. “You lived in fear that you would be assaulted or robbed.”
25: Rishi Sunak
"with Democrats banking they can hitch Republican candidates to an unpopular supreme court decision to overturn federal guarantees of a woman’s right to abortion. Republicans, meanwhile, are laser-focused on high inflation rates, economic troubles and fears over crime. ........political forecasting has become Moore’s business since he correctly called that Donald Trump would win the national elections in 2016, against common judgment of the media and pollsters businesses. ....... this will be “Roe-vember” ........ “If I said to you six months ago, ‘you know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state and this summer by a margin of 60% they’re going to keep abortion legal’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement,” he says. ....... “If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only going to be won by a Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind.” ........ Boise, Idaho, where an incumbent Republican candidate for the board of education was endorsed by a far-right group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, and lost to an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of the climate group Extinction Rebellion. ....... Moore predicts the election will see a record turnout of younger voters whose views pundits and commentators often miss. “If you spend any time with women, the Dobbs decision struck them personally and deeply. This was a religious edict based on conservative Catholic principles.” ......... The Democratic party consultants are feeding lines that are so lame and weak. They don’t go for the jugular like a Republican would. It doesn’t inspire people at home.” ........ the biggest political grouping in the US is not Republicans or Democrats, but non-voters. This non-voter party, which is perhaps the most potentially powerful but also the most inaccessible, is the group Moore wants to reach. .......... “The non-voter party don’t see how politics benefits them, they’re disgusted with the hypocrisy, a lot are disgusted with the crazy fighting that goes on, and the craziness that Trump amped up,” Moore says, adding that when he turns on the TV in the evening he doesn’t necessarily go to a news channel but looks for a comedy. ....... it could be as simple as calling a cousin who doesn’t vote to give her reasons why, this time, it’s important and that “she can go back to non-voting after this.” ...... “Aren’t you tired of nothing getting done? All this deadlock bullshit. One way to undo this logjam is to give Democrats a chance to pass legislation and let’s see how it works out. "
Ukraine war heading for ‘uncontrolled escalation’, says Russia Moscow appears to be preparing ground for further escalation with discredited claims that Kyiv may use ‘dirty’ bomb ........ “The allegation that Ukraine is preparing to use dirty bombs in Ukraine is absurd.” ....... Kyiv and its western allies, which have been supplying Ukraine with modern weapons, intelligence and training. ........ Shoigu discussed the “rapidly deteriorating situation” in phone calls with his British, French and Turkish counterparts and also spoke by phone with the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, for the second time in three days. The Pentagon said Austin told Shoigu he “rejected any pretext for Russian escalation”. ............ “I worry there is too much motivated reasoning in dismissing possible Russian nuclear use. We don’t want it to happen, and/or we don’t see the point, therefore it won’t. But Russia faces logic of dwindling choices as it loses. Escalation of all kinds more likely.” ........... Russia accused western countries of having “essentially stolen” its gold and foreign exchange reserves via sanctions. Asked by reporters about an EU proposal to transfer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, Peskov said: “In general, a part large of our assets have been essentially stolen by specific western countries.”
New Tory leader Rishi Sunak says party facing ‘existential threat’ Incoming prime minister says Tories must ‘unite or die’ and rules out early general election ........ Ruling out an early general election, he said he would lead a government of serious Conservative values and make his first priority tackling the economic crisis. ....... Five minutes after Mordaunt’s withdrawal, Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, formally announced the result. “I can confirm that we have one valid nomination, and Rishi Sunak is elected as leader of the Conservative party,” he said. ......... had secured the backing of more than half the parliamentary party by Monday morning. ......... Sunak told MPs that his ambition was to have a “highly productive UK economy” ........ He said a stable and productive economy would be the engine that drives a well-funded health and education service and delivers on net zero, and he said it would be an “environmentally focused government.” ........ Sunak, whose parents are of Punjabi Indian heritage, will be the first person of colour to become British prime minister. ........ Benjamin Disraeli, who held the office twice between 1868 and 1880, was of Jewish heritage. At 42, Sunak is the youngest prime minister for more than 200 years. ........ His victory, in effect a coronation with not a single formal vote being cast, even by MPs
Rebels plot to replace Liz Truss with Rishi Sunak amid UK crisis among those who voted for the Conservatives at the last election, 62 per cent that party members had made the wrong choice when the race was shortlisted between Truss and Sunak, compared with 15 per cent who said they had got it right.
Rishi Sunak's rise signifies the arrival of the Indian diaspora New generations of emigrants have successfully plunged into local politics ......... The success of Rishi Sunak, former British chancellor, at winning a place in the runoff to be the next leader of the U.K.'s ruling Conservative Party and the country's next prime minister has triggered intense excitement and interest in India and among its 32 million-strong diaspora around the world. ........ The prospect of a young politician who hails from a family of Punjabi emigrants to East Africa and Britain making it to the top office of India's former colonial master has tantalized observers. ........ it should be placed in the context of growing self-confidence and self-expression among the Indian diaspora as a whole. ......... In the past few decades, numerous political success stories have emerged from among the Indian diaspora. ......... There are now seven heads of government and state from the Indian diaspora in countries ranging from Portugal, Singapore, Suriname and Guyana to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Others serve in senior executive, legislative, judicial or party roles, such as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Jagmeet Singh, head of Canada's opposition New Democratic Party. ........ Kamala Harris, for example, has credited her Indian mother from the state of Tamil Nadu as inspiration for her entry into public life in the U.S. "My mother had been raised in a household where political activism and civic leadership came naturally," said Harris. ........ Sunak has praised his in-laws, Indian information technology pioneers and philanthropists Sudha Murty and Narayana Murthy. "[Theirs] is a story I'm really proud of and as the prime minister, I want to ensure that we can create more stories like theirs here at home," he told British voters. ....... Despite facing racism and prejudice, many persons of Indian origin have displayed pragmatism and determination to prove their worth. ......... It is not a statistical fluke that the Indian diaspora is one of the richest minority communities in most developed countries, boasting of higher education levels and per capita incomes on average than other immigrant groups and even the majority ethnic groups in some host countries. ......... Since there is a direct correlation between education, wealth and political clout in democracies, the political rise of the diaspora Indian stands on strong structural foundations. .......... Another factor that is propelling the political ascendance of diaspora Indians is the formation of their own ethnic associations and lobbies. Akin to successful Jewish groups which have helped support Israel's interests worldwide, these associations of Indian-origin people are now advocating for New Delhi's interests in various countries and are having an impact on policymaking. ........ Consider the recent vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to waive potential sanctions against India over its purchase of advanced Russian weapons systems. This proposal was shepherded by California Rep. Rohit Khanna, a member of the so-called "samosa caucus" of U.S. diaspora Indians who support one another and maintain ties with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. By no coincidence, Modi is an ardent champion of the diaspora. ........... Sunak's contention that his candidacy for Britain's highest office is "not the end of the British Indian story" and that "there is lots more we can achieve" is a direct acknowledgment of a triangular connection between India, its diaspora in the U.K. and his own spectacular political surge. ........ India itself may not be taking over the world, but its civilizational progeny are definitely going places.
A dim future awaits a closed-off China Surging nationalism and heavy-handed policies have left Beijing isolated ....... China's rapid growth has been made possible by a global economy. No country has enjoyed the benefits as much as China, and Beijing cannot live in isolation from the rest of the world. ...... China's foreign and security policies, which emphasize strength, have created an atmosphere in which Beijing is willing to face off against governments with which it once had good relations, such as the U.S., Europe and Japan. The low-profile foreign policy of the Deng Xiaoping era, characterized by hiding one's claws and biding one's time, has been overwhelmed by the cries for a strong nation. ........ Also troubling is that the economic and cultural policies of Deng's "reform and opening up" strategy have been drowned out. Xi has pushed for "common prosperity," with an emphasis on economic equality. Hidden here is a political agenda to surpass the achievements of Deng, who actually brought prosperity to China. There is much opposition within the country to Xi's move to explore a return to China's socialist origins. ........ China's strict zero-COVID policy has resulted in economic exhaustion and de facto isolation, reducing person-to-person exchanges with other countries. As long as China continues to be closed off, its future does not look bright. ......... Hong Kong, once a window to the wider world, has been deprived of its freedom in the name of national security. Beijing touts the principle of "patriots ruling Hong Kong," but only patriots as defined by the Communist Party. This is the death of a free Hong Kong. .......... On the issue of Taiwan, Xi said, "Realizing China's complete reunification is, for the party, a historic mission and an unshakable commitment," stressing that "we will never promise to renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary." ......... the Chinese Communist Party is a dictatorship governing the world's second-largest economy and 1.4 billion people. The confrontation between the U.S. and China, Taiwan's status, and many other issues will have a major global impact, so there is no choice but to watch the party carefully. ........ economic achievements directly related to people's lives have been few over the past decade. The economic growth rate is also trending downward, and public dissatisfaction has surfaced in some parts of the country.
Modi is turning India's nonalignment policy into a business model Top officials advance export drive by promoting wares of state-owned arms makers ......... Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is the first career diplomat to serve as India's external affairs minister. Unlike many of his predecessors, he has also had experience in the private sector, serving as president of global corporate affairs for the Tata Group for about a year just before taking up his current role. ......... His unique background, coupled with the "Make in India" and "Atmanirbhar Bharat" drives by the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to promote foreign investment and self-reliance, respectively, are reshaping the country's foreign policy. ......... Unlike preceding administrations, the Modi government is not seeking to have one foot with the global South and one with the West in deference to the principle of nonalignment, nor is it motivated by what its developed-country partners call shared values. ..........
How Xi Jinping Remade China in His Image
"And yet, these artists “have continued to innovate, lyrically and sonically, breathing new life into the genre.” .......... a pragmatic awareness that hip-hop can provide a safer and more lucrative hustle for a lucky few. ....... “Atlanta is never going to lose.” “Any kid with 500 dollars and a … dream,” he tells Coscarelli, “can come to Atlanta and … make it.” ...... Perhaps most moving is the depiction of Marlo, an aspiring rapper and Percocet addict who practices the Yoruba religion of Ifa and sojourns to Nigeria seeking spiritual guidance, and growth. He describes the “unlikely Atlanta interloper” Brodinski, a French producer and D.J., as “slim, tattooed and stylish,” representing “a benevolent version of another common hip-hop archetype: the white ambassador — usually a writer, D.J., producer, designer or executive, who at various points in the genre’s jagged commercial development had helped to take rap to different places in the popular consciousness out of some combination of self-interest, artistic commitment and opportunism.” Coscarelli stops just shy of applying the moniker to himself, but the line is a refreshing admission of the knotty role his own whiteness plays in telling this story. .......... hip-hop is a year shy of 50 ....... Making relatively brief reference to hip-hop’s emergence in the ’70s, Coscarelli writes about Atlanta rap as if it is the messiah child that sprang from no one’s loins. ......... a culture that remains stubbornly, predominantly male. "
Shehan Karunatilaka Wins Booker Prize for ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ The Sri Lankan writer received the award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, for his second novel, which examines the trauma of his country’s decades-long civil war. ........ As a boy living through Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s, Shehan Karunatilaka thought of political violence as part of the landscape. War was a constant backdrop to daily life, more mundane than frightening at times. ......... the afterlife: a tedious, dysfunctional bureaucracy, where hordes of confused ghosts are waiting to be processed. ......... “It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster journey through life and death.” ....... The judges, who were unanimous in choosing “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” were won over by “the variety of registers it was deploying, the skill with which language was used, and the confidence with which it shifted genre,” from noir to philosophical reflections to comedy ....... Karunatilaka was born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, and grew up in Colombo, the capital. He studied in New Zealand, and went on to work and live in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He has worked as an advertising copywriter, and played guitar in an alternative rock band, Independent Square. He currently lives in Colombo, where he still writes ad copy during the day and works on his fiction in the early morning. ........ Karunatilaka wondered what processing the lingering trauma of war would feel like if the dead could speak, and thought about writing a ghost story. ...... he imagined the afterlife as a bland bureaucracy: “The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate,” he writes. ........ “Maybe that is a plausible explanation for why Sri Lanka seems to go from tragedy to tragedy, that there are all these restless spirits and ghosts wandering around, confused, not sure what they’re supposed to do, and they amuse themselves by whispering bad ideas into people’s ears” ....... a war photographer named Maali Almeida wakes up dead, without a clue as to how or why he was killed. He sets out to solve the mystery of his own murder, and figures he’s been targeted for his explosive photographs ........... is told he has “seven moons” to learn who killed him and to uncover his cache of photos ......... The novel, which was published in Britain in August by Sort of Books, an independent British publishing house, drew comparisons to magical realist works by Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.
A Secret Deal, Wishful Thinking: How the U.S.-Saudi Relationship Ruptured Ahead of President Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his administration thought it had secured pledges of increases in oil production throughout the year. The opposite happened. ........ What happened over the last half-year is a story of handshake agreements, wishful thinking, missed signals and finger-pointing over broken promises. ......... The episode is also a revealing example of how Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of its ambitious and often ruthless crown prince, appears eager to shed some of its longtime reliance on the United States, with Prince Mohammed trying to position Saudi Arabia as a powerhouse of its own. .......... “Deconstructing Saudi decision-making right now is like Kremlinology on steroids” ......... “Saudi Arabia’s refusal to stabilize global energy markets is helping bankroll Vladimir Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine.” ........ “I keep listening to, ‘Are you with us or against us?’ Is there any room for, ‘We are for Saudi Arabia and the people of Saudi Arabia’?” he said. “We will have to deliver our ambitions.”
Why Natural Gas Prices in Europe Are Suddenly Plunging A combination of full storage, lower demand and mild weather, among other factors, has eased concerns of a spike in heating and power prices — for now........ The benchmark European price of natural gas this week fell to a level that is more than 70 percent below its record high in August. One of the main reasons for the plunge in prices is that Europe, at least for now, has all the natural gas it needs. ........ over the summer, Europe went on a global buying spree ......... Special ships with huge amounts of liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., raced to Europe from the United States, Qatar and other countries (including Russia) that produce large amounts of gas. ........ many energy-hungry businesses like aluminum smelters, steel mills and fertilizer plants have at least temporarily shut down. ....... Futures prices for natural gas for delivery in January and February of 2023 are trading more than 40 percent higher than for November.
U.S. Sees Opportunity for Ukraine to Capitalize on Russian Weakness The next six weeks, before fall mud spreads, could allow Ukraine’s military to press forward in the Donbas and potentially retake Kherson, American officials said. But Russia may not be deterred. ........ The Ukrainian military has a window of opportunity to make gains against Russia’s army over the next six weeks ........ The Ukrainians defeated the Russians in the battle for Kyiv, only to see Russia grind forward during the brutal fighting in the Donbas over the summer. .......... Officers in the field agree that they are making gains, but at a high cost. ........ if Ukraine’s forces can take control of the Route 66 highway in Luhansk in the coming weeks, they can cut off a key road that Russia has been using to supply its troops in occupied areas. ....... Russia’s military is still hobbled by challenges similar to those it has faced since the start of the war. Problems with logistics have prevented Moscow from keeping soldiers adequately supplied. Communication between Russian units remains difficult, forcing them to deploy senior officers close to the front lines and hampering coordinated movements. And the reservists now being forced to the battlefields are poorly trained and badly equipped. ........ Moscow’s military can still conduct large-scale artillery operations, and Russia possesses two potential strengths: an infusion of troops from the forced mobilization Mr. Putin carried out at the insistence of key commanders and an ability to absorb large battlefield losses. ......... The Russian military has suffered a loss of equipment and soldiers that would have broken most armies in Europe. .......... Winter snow will not slow the fighting, but the mud of late fall, what Russians call rasputitsa, will. Once the ground hardens in February, around the first anniversary of the invasion, the armies can once again move more quickly. ........... Mr. Putin’s intentions for the next phase of the war are difficult to discern, and there are currently few, if any, regular contacts between American officials and their Russian counterparts. ........ major Russian offensive operations are pretty much off the table at this point ....... The dynamic of the war could change come spring. ....... The reality of modern warfare is that the winner does not get a say in when the fighting stops. Mr. Putin, officials said, is unlikely to accept defeat in the coming months.
Putin Is Onto Us Putin is now fighting a ground war to break through Ukraine’s lines and a two-front energy war to break Ukraine’s will and that of its allies. He’s trying to smash Ukraine’s electricity system to ensure a long, cold winter there while putting himself in position (in ways that I’ll explain) to drive up energy costs for all of Ukraine’s allies. And because we — America and the West — do not have an energy strategy in place to dampen the impact of Putin’s energy bomb, this is a frightening prospect.......... As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all. ........ we are going to be in for a world of hurt if Putin drops the energy bomb that I think he’s assembling for Christmas. ......... Oil in just one very large tanker can be worth roughly $250 million, so the incentives are enormous. ......... China has been taking some of the L.N.G. sold to it on those fixed-price contracts for domestic use and reselling it to Europe and other gas-starved countries for $300 a barrel of oil equivalent. ......... suppose, come December, Putin announces he is halting all Russian oil and gas exports for 30 or 60 days to countries supporting Ukraine ........ In this tight market, oil could go to $200 a barrel, with a commensurate rise in the price of natural gas. We’re talking $10 to $12 a gallon at the pump in the United States. ............ The beauty for Putin of an energy bomb is that unlike setting off a nuclear bomb — which would unite the whole world against him — setting off an oil price bomb would divide the West from Ukraine. ......... we need a robust energy arsenal as much as a military one. Because we are in an energy war!
Ukraine war heading for ‘uncontrolled escalation’, says Russia Moscow appears to be preparing ground for further escalation with discredited claims that Kyiv may use ‘dirty’ bomb ........ “The allegation that Ukraine is preparing to use dirty bombs in Ukraine is absurd.” ....... Kyiv and its western allies, which have been supplying Ukraine with modern weapons, intelligence and training. ........ Shoigu discussed the “rapidly deteriorating situation” in phone calls with his British, French and Turkish counterparts and also spoke by phone with the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, for the second time in three days. The Pentagon said Austin told Shoigu he “rejected any pretext for Russian escalation”. ............ “I worry there is too much motivated reasoning in dismissing possible Russian nuclear use. We don’t want it to happen, and/or we don’t see the point, therefore it won’t. But Russia faces logic of dwindling choices as it loses. Escalation of all kinds more likely.” ........... Russia accused western countries of having “essentially stolen” its gold and foreign exchange reserves via sanctions. Asked by reporters about an EU proposal to transfer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, Peskov said: “In general, a part large of our assets have been essentially stolen by specific western countries.”
New Tory leader Rishi Sunak says party facing ‘existential threat’ Incoming prime minister says Tories must ‘unite or die’ and rules out early general election ........ Ruling out an early general election, he said he would lead a government of serious Conservative values and make his first priority tackling the economic crisis. ....... Five minutes after Mordaunt’s withdrawal, Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, formally announced the result. “I can confirm that we have one valid nomination, and Rishi Sunak is elected as leader of the Conservative party,” he said. ......... had secured the backing of more than half the parliamentary party by Monday morning. ......... Sunak told MPs that his ambition was to have a “highly productive UK economy” ........ He said a stable and productive economy would be the engine that drives a well-funded health and education service and delivers on net zero, and he said it would be an “environmentally focused government.” ........ Sunak, whose parents are of Punjabi Indian heritage, will be the first person of colour to become British prime minister. ........ Benjamin Disraeli, who held the office twice between 1868 and 1880, was of Jewish heritage. At 42, Sunak is the youngest prime minister for more than 200 years. ........ His victory, in effect a coronation with not a single formal vote being cast, even by MPs
Rebels plot to replace Liz Truss with Rishi Sunak amid UK crisis among those who voted for the Conservatives at the last election, 62 per cent that party members had made the wrong choice when the race was shortlisted between Truss and Sunak, compared with 15 per cent who said they had got it right.
Rishi Sunak's rise signifies the arrival of the Indian diaspora New generations of emigrants have successfully plunged into local politics ......... The success of Rishi Sunak, former British chancellor, at winning a place in the runoff to be the next leader of the U.K.'s ruling Conservative Party and the country's next prime minister has triggered intense excitement and interest in India and among its 32 million-strong diaspora around the world. ........ The prospect of a young politician who hails from a family of Punjabi emigrants to East Africa and Britain making it to the top office of India's former colonial master has tantalized observers. ........ it should be placed in the context of growing self-confidence and self-expression among the Indian diaspora as a whole. ......... In the past few decades, numerous political success stories have emerged from among the Indian diaspora. ......... There are now seven heads of government and state from the Indian diaspora in countries ranging from Portugal, Singapore, Suriname and Guyana to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Others serve in senior executive, legislative, judicial or party roles, such as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Jagmeet Singh, head of Canada's opposition New Democratic Party. ........ Kamala Harris, for example, has credited her Indian mother from the state of Tamil Nadu as inspiration for her entry into public life in the U.S. "My mother had been raised in a household where political activism and civic leadership came naturally," said Harris. ........ Sunak has praised his in-laws, Indian information technology pioneers and philanthropists Sudha Murty and Narayana Murthy. "[Theirs] is a story I'm really proud of and as the prime minister, I want to ensure that we can create more stories like theirs here at home," he told British voters. ....... Despite facing racism and prejudice, many persons of Indian origin have displayed pragmatism and determination to prove their worth. ......... It is not a statistical fluke that the Indian diaspora is one of the richest minority communities in most developed countries, boasting of higher education levels and per capita incomes on average than other immigrant groups and even the majority ethnic groups in some host countries. ......... Since there is a direct correlation between education, wealth and political clout in democracies, the political rise of the diaspora Indian stands on strong structural foundations. .......... Another factor that is propelling the political ascendance of diaspora Indians is the formation of their own ethnic associations and lobbies. Akin to successful Jewish groups which have helped support Israel's interests worldwide, these associations of Indian-origin people are now advocating for New Delhi's interests in various countries and are having an impact on policymaking. ........ Consider the recent vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to waive potential sanctions against India over its purchase of advanced Russian weapons systems. This proposal was shepherded by California Rep. Rohit Khanna, a member of the so-called "samosa caucus" of U.S. diaspora Indians who support one another and maintain ties with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. By no coincidence, Modi is an ardent champion of the diaspora. ........... Sunak's contention that his candidacy for Britain's highest office is "not the end of the British Indian story" and that "there is lots more we can achieve" is a direct acknowledgment of a triangular connection between India, its diaspora in the U.K. and his own spectacular political surge. ........ India itself may not be taking over the world, but its civilizational progeny are definitely going places.
A dim future awaits a closed-off China Surging nationalism and heavy-handed policies have left Beijing isolated ....... China's rapid growth has been made possible by a global economy. No country has enjoyed the benefits as much as China, and Beijing cannot live in isolation from the rest of the world. ...... China's foreign and security policies, which emphasize strength, have created an atmosphere in which Beijing is willing to face off against governments with which it once had good relations, such as the U.S., Europe and Japan. The low-profile foreign policy of the Deng Xiaoping era, characterized by hiding one's claws and biding one's time, has been overwhelmed by the cries for a strong nation. ........ Also troubling is that the economic and cultural policies of Deng's "reform and opening up" strategy have been drowned out. Xi has pushed for "common prosperity," with an emphasis on economic equality. Hidden here is a political agenda to surpass the achievements of Deng, who actually brought prosperity to China. There is much opposition within the country to Xi's move to explore a return to China's socialist origins. ........ China's strict zero-COVID policy has resulted in economic exhaustion and de facto isolation, reducing person-to-person exchanges with other countries. As long as China continues to be closed off, its future does not look bright. ......... Hong Kong, once a window to the wider world, has been deprived of its freedom in the name of national security. Beijing touts the principle of "patriots ruling Hong Kong," but only patriots as defined by the Communist Party. This is the death of a free Hong Kong. .......... On the issue of Taiwan, Xi said, "Realizing China's complete reunification is, for the party, a historic mission and an unshakable commitment," stressing that "we will never promise to renounce the use of force, and we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary." ......... the Chinese Communist Party is a dictatorship governing the world's second-largest economy and 1.4 billion people. The confrontation between the U.S. and China, Taiwan's status, and many other issues will have a major global impact, so there is no choice but to watch the party carefully. ........ economic achievements directly related to people's lives have been few over the past decade. The economic growth rate is also trending downward, and public dissatisfaction has surfaced in some parts of the country.
Modi is turning India's nonalignment policy into a business model Top officials advance export drive by promoting wares of state-owned arms makers ......... Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is the first career diplomat to serve as India's external affairs minister. Unlike many of his predecessors, he has also had experience in the private sector, serving as president of global corporate affairs for the Tata Group for about a year just before taking up his current role. ......... His unique background, coupled with the "Make in India" and "Atmanirbhar Bharat" drives by the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to promote foreign investment and self-reliance, respectively, are reshaping the country's foreign policy. ......... Unlike preceding administrations, the Modi government is not seeking to have one foot with the global South and one with the West in deference to the principle of nonalignment, nor is it motivated by what its developed-country partners call shared values. ..........
behind the veneer of India's balancing act are trade and economic interests, particularly in terms of energy, defense, pharmaceuticals and high technology.
....... India is now poised to be the fastest-growing major economy this year, with the International Monetary Fund last week forecasting a gross-domestic product rise of 6.8%. This would be more than double the pace of China or the world as a whole at a time when developed countries look poised to enter recession. ......... the Indian finance ministry credits purchases of discounted Russian oil as a key factor in the country's strong macroeconomic performance. ........ Beyond cheap oil, India is also taking advantage of the growing geopolitical fractures to sell more arms abroad, increase space cooperation and develop markets for its pharmaceuticals. ....... Visiting Argentina last month, Jaishankar pointedly used that country's name for the Falkland Islands, Islas Malvinas. This was not just a show of solidarity with a fellow member of the global South but part of a sales pitch for the Tejas fighter jet made by state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics. Buenos Aires aims by year-end to finalize a decision between competing models, including offers for the U.S. F-16, Russia's MiG-35, and the JF-17 made jointly by China and Pakistan. ......... The Tejas is billed as an affordable alternative to the F-16 and other Western fighters, and even to the JF-17. Priced at $42 million a plane with an operating cost of around $4,000 an hour, the Tejas is the cheapest lightweight combat aircraft available. ........ The Philippines, meanwhile, earlier this year finalized a $375 million deal to buy supersonic BrahMos missiles from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), another Indian state-owned arms producer. Vietnam is also a target market for Indian defense companies. ........ Indian arms makers have other advantages besides price over their established American rivals in pitching to countries in the global South. U.S. arms makers are handcuffed by Washington's alliance policies, which fracture the world into camps. Thus the DRDO is working on a deal to sell Pinaka Mark-II guided missile systems to Armenia, a longtime Russian ally. ...... India's participation in the newI2U2
grouping with Israel, the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates also shows how economic interests are taking precedence over past ideological priorities, in this case, support for the Palestinian cause. That effort now yields little economic benefit for New Delhi while the I2U2 in July set plans for a $2 billion series of food-sector industrial parks in India and a $330 million renewable energy project in Modi's home state of Gujarat. ........ turning top government officials into business development managers charged with cultivating foreign markets is one way to advance the effort.......... India's concept of a multipolar world can be more than geopolitical balancing between global powers but also a geoeconomic endeavor carefully crafted to take advantage of different opportunities in each country.How Xi Jinping Remade China in His Image
"And yet, these artists “have continued to innovate, lyrically and sonically, breathing new life into the genre.” .......... a pragmatic awareness that hip-hop can provide a safer and more lucrative hustle for a lucky few. ....... “Atlanta is never going to lose.” “Any kid with 500 dollars and a … dream,” he tells Coscarelli, “can come to Atlanta and … make it.” ...... Perhaps most moving is the depiction of Marlo, an aspiring rapper and Percocet addict who practices the Yoruba religion of Ifa and sojourns to Nigeria seeking spiritual guidance, and growth. He describes the “unlikely Atlanta interloper” Brodinski, a French producer and D.J., as “slim, tattooed and stylish,” representing “a benevolent version of another common hip-hop archetype: the white ambassador — usually a writer, D.J., producer, designer or executive, who at various points in the genre’s jagged commercial development had helped to take rap to different places in the popular consciousness out of some combination of self-interest, artistic commitment and opportunism.” Coscarelli stops just shy of applying the moniker to himself, but the line is a refreshing admission of the knotty role his own whiteness plays in telling this story. .......... hip-hop is a year shy of 50 ....... Making relatively brief reference to hip-hop’s emergence in the ’70s, Coscarelli writes about Atlanta rap as if it is the messiah child that sprang from no one’s loins. ......... a culture that remains stubbornly, predominantly male. "
Shehan Karunatilaka Wins Booker Prize for ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ The Sri Lankan writer received the award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, for his second novel, which examines the trauma of his country’s decades-long civil war. ........ As a boy living through Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s, Shehan Karunatilaka thought of political violence as part of the landscape. War was a constant backdrop to daily life, more mundane than frightening at times. ......... the afterlife: a tedious, dysfunctional bureaucracy, where hordes of confused ghosts are waiting to be processed. ......... “It’s a book that takes the reader on a roller coaster journey through life and death.” ....... The judges, who were unanimous in choosing “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” were won over by “the variety of registers it was deploying, the skill with which language was used, and the confidence with which it shifted genre,” from noir to philosophical reflections to comedy ....... Karunatilaka was born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975, and grew up in Colombo, the capital. He studied in New Zealand, and went on to work and live in London, Amsterdam and Singapore. He has worked as an advertising copywriter, and played guitar in an alternative rock band, Independent Square. He currently lives in Colombo, where he still writes ad copy during the day and works on his fiction in the early morning. ........ Karunatilaka wondered what processing the lingering trauma of war would feel like if the dead could speak, and thought about writing a ghost story. ...... he imagined the afterlife as a bland bureaucracy: “The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate,” he writes. ........ “Maybe that is a plausible explanation for why Sri Lanka seems to go from tragedy to tragedy, that there are all these restless spirits and ghosts wandering around, confused, not sure what they’re supposed to do, and they amuse themselves by whispering bad ideas into people’s ears” ....... a war photographer named Maali Almeida wakes up dead, without a clue as to how or why he was killed. He sets out to solve the mystery of his own murder, and figures he’s been targeted for his explosive photographs ........... is told he has “seven moons” to learn who killed him and to uncover his cache of photos ......... The novel, which was published in Britain in August by Sort of Books, an independent British publishing house, drew comparisons to magical realist works by Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.
A Secret Deal, Wishful Thinking: How the U.S.-Saudi Relationship Ruptured Ahead of President Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his administration thought it had secured pledges of increases in oil production throughout the year. The opposite happened. ........ What happened over the last half-year is a story of handshake agreements, wishful thinking, missed signals and finger-pointing over broken promises. ......... The episode is also a revealing example of how Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of its ambitious and often ruthless crown prince, appears eager to shed some of its longtime reliance on the United States, with Prince Mohammed trying to position Saudi Arabia as a powerhouse of its own. .......... “Deconstructing Saudi decision-making right now is like Kremlinology on steroids” ......... “Saudi Arabia’s refusal to stabilize global energy markets is helping bankroll Vladimir Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine.” ........ “I keep listening to, ‘Are you with us or against us?’ Is there any room for, ‘We are for Saudi Arabia and the people of Saudi Arabia’?” he said. “We will have to deliver our ambitions.”
Why Natural Gas Prices in Europe Are Suddenly Plunging A combination of full storage, lower demand and mild weather, among other factors, has eased concerns of a spike in heating and power prices — for now........ The benchmark European price of natural gas this week fell to a level that is more than 70 percent below its record high in August. One of the main reasons for the plunge in prices is that Europe, at least for now, has all the natural gas it needs. ........ over the summer, Europe went on a global buying spree ......... Special ships with huge amounts of liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., raced to Europe from the United States, Qatar and other countries (including Russia) that produce large amounts of gas. ........ many energy-hungry businesses like aluminum smelters, steel mills and fertilizer plants have at least temporarily shut down. ....... Futures prices for natural gas for delivery in January and February of 2023 are trading more than 40 percent higher than for November.
U.S. Sees Opportunity for Ukraine to Capitalize on Russian Weakness The next six weeks, before fall mud spreads, could allow Ukraine’s military to press forward in the Donbas and potentially retake Kherson, American officials said. But Russia may not be deterred. ........ The Ukrainian military has a window of opportunity to make gains against Russia’s army over the next six weeks ........ The Ukrainians defeated the Russians in the battle for Kyiv, only to see Russia grind forward during the brutal fighting in the Donbas over the summer. .......... Officers in the field agree that they are making gains, but at a high cost. ........ if Ukraine’s forces can take control of the Route 66 highway in Luhansk in the coming weeks, they can cut off a key road that Russia has been using to supply its troops in occupied areas. ....... Russia’s military is still hobbled by challenges similar to those it has faced since the start of the war. Problems with logistics have prevented Moscow from keeping soldiers adequately supplied. Communication between Russian units remains difficult, forcing them to deploy senior officers close to the front lines and hampering coordinated movements. And the reservists now being forced to the battlefields are poorly trained and badly equipped. ........ Moscow’s military can still conduct large-scale artillery operations, and Russia possesses two potential strengths: an infusion of troops from the forced mobilization Mr. Putin carried out at the insistence of key commanders and an ability to absorb large battlefield losses. ......... The Russian military has suffered a loss of equipment and soldiers that would have broken most armies in Europe. .......... Winter snow will not slow the fighting, but the mud of late fall, what Russians call rasputitsa, will. Once the ground hardens in February, around the first anniversary of the invasion, the armies can once again move more quickly. ........... Mr. Putin’s intentions for the next phase of the war are difficult to discern, and there are currently few, if any, regular contacts between American officials and their Russian counterparts. ........ major Russian offensive operations are pretty much off the table at this point ....... The dynamic of the war could change come spring. ....... The reality of modern warfare is that the winner does not get a say in when the fighting stops. Mr. Putin, officials said, is unlikely to accept defeat in the coming months.
Putin Is Onto Us Putin is now fighting a ground war to break through Ukraine’s lines and a two-front energy war to break Ukraine’s will and that of its allies. He’s trying to smash Ukraine’s electricity system to ensure a long, cold winter there while putting himself in position (in ways that I’ll explain) to drive up energy costs for all of Ukraine’s allies. And because we — America and the West — do not have an energy strategy in place to dampen the impact of Putin’s energy bomb, this is a frightening prospect.......... As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all. ........ we are going to be in for a world of hurt if Putin drops the energy bomb that I think he’s assembling for Christmas. ......... Oil in just one very large tanker can be worth roughly $250 million, so the incentives are enormous. ......... China has been taking some of the L.N.G. sold to it on those fixed-price contracts for domestic use and reselling it to Europe and other gas-starved countries for $300 a barrel of oil equivalent. ......... suppose, come December, Putin announces he is halting all Russian oil and gas exports for 30 or 60 days to countries supporting Ukraine ........ In this tight market, oil could go to $200 a barrel, with a commensurate rise in the price of natural gas. We’re talking $10 to $12 a gallon at the pump in the United States. ............ The beauty for Putin of an energy bomb is that unlike setting off a nuclear bomb — which would unite the whole world against him — setting off an oil price bomb would divide the West from Ukraine. ......... we need a robust energy arsenal as much as a military one. Because we are in an energy war!
25: Diwali
#AskSadhguru Aap se milna tha. Aap se baat karna tha.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 25, 2022
Monday, October 24, 2022
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