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Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts

Friday 23 June 2023

UK loses its allure and faces big investment gap


 

Big job: Sunak greets Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson outside Number 10 Downing Street. The survey underscores the challenge Sunak’s government has in reviving economic growth with a labour force that has shrunk since the pandemic. — Reuters

 

LONDON: The United Kingdom (UK) has fallen six places in the global economic competitiveness rankings because business leaders have lost confidence in the country, due in part to “government incompetence”.

The annual World Competitiveness Ranking from the International Institute for Management Development saw the UK plunge from 23rd to 29th out of 64 countries.

In a separate analysis, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) warned that years of underinvestment are holding back growth and harming ambitions to build up green industries.

It estimated the nation would have received an extra £560bil (US$720bil or RM3.3 trillion) in real terms had investment from private firms and the government stayed at the Group of Seven average since 2005.

“The UK is experiencing a debilitating case of investment phobia, and the government’s aversion to investing to seize future opportunities is stopping us from getting out of the growth doom loop we find ourselves in,” said George Dibb, associate director for the economy at IPPR.

The figures underscore the challenge Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government has in reviving economic growth with a labour force that has shrunk since the pandemic.

Political leaders from all parties are concerned about the UK’s stagnating productivity and sticky levels of inflation, which have undermined the confidence of investors both in stocks and in businesses.

In the competitiveness rank, the UK lost ground on all the key indicators, which is a worrying sign for the government, which wants to attract investment to boost growth.

Respondents said the country had become more bureaucratic, the government less efficient, and the workforce less productive.

Denmark held on to the top spot in 2023, and Ireland jumped nine places to second. Switzerland, the Netherlands and Singapore completed the top five.

“The dramatic drop in the survey indicators suggests a systemic pessimism about the future,” Arturo Bris, lead researcher on the rankings and director of the IMD World Competitiveness Centre, said in an interview. “The deterioration in business sentiment says executives are losing confidence in the country.”

More than 6,400 senior executives from across the world were interviewed for the report. Just 3% of respondents said the competency of the government made the UK an attractive destination for investment.

“Government incompetence, poor workplace culture, and restrictive immigration laws were among several reasons why the UK fared badly,” the report said.

The report also found that the UK is becoming increasingly bureaucratic, despite the government’s pledge to use “Brexit freedoms” to cut regulation. The UK fell 12 places in the bureaucracy sub-ranking from 15th to 27th, while France climbed from 44th to 41st, Bris said.

France remained less attractive than the UK, dropping five places to 33rd in the rankings. Germany fell seven places to 22nd.

The survey was conducted between February and May but reflected the political chaos of 2022, a year in which the UK got through three prime ministers and four chancellors.

The struggling economy, with inflation higher and the labour market tighter than other leading industrial nations, will have also affected sentiment badly, Bris said. — Bloomberg

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Sunday 23 October 2022

How Britain fell from grace

 

British Prime Minister Liz Truss enjoyed only seven days of full power before global economic forces effectively destroyed her government. PHOTO: REUTERS

 

 

Whatever you may think of them, the British used to enjoy the reputation of a solid, well-run and responsible nation.

A centuries-old history of peaceful political change, with none of the coups, revolutions or civil wars that seem to have afflicted most other countries worldwide. A robust parliamentary system of government in which just two political parties take their turns in holding power based on electoral procedures that produce clear-cut results and solid governments with none of the unpredictable and often unstable coalition-making that afflicts most of the rest of Europe.

To be sure, the country’s politicians have always been of variable quality. But the United Kingdom’s civil service was highly rated for its professionalism and integrity, and so was its legal system, still considered an advantage and often touted as a national asset by many countries around the world.

That’s why Britain’s sudden descent into crisis looks so surprising. In just a few weeks, the credibility of some of the most critical institutions in British national life, including the prime minister, the Treasury, the Bank of England, the ruling Conservative Party, and the nation’s asset management industry, were all torn to shreds.

The country’s currency has sunk to its lowest levels in half a century, and the risk premium international investors demand to lend money to Britain is among the highest in the industrialised world.

For the first time in modern history, the British government was forced to bow to the pressure of global financial markets and withdraw a budget it had introduced only two weeks beforehand. And in another highly unusual move, the International Monetary Fund issued a rebuke to Britain using language otherwise reserved for those who manage the economies of poor and vulnerable developing nations.

Truss versus lettuce

Consequently, British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who assumed office only last month, had to ditch her policies before these were even tried, and the speculation in London is that her days are numbered.

The influential Economist newspaper had pointed out that, if one ignores the extended period of official mourning for Queen Elizabeth II – a period during which all politics were suspended – Ms Truss enjoyed only seven days of full power before the forces of the global economy effectively destroyed her government. That, The Economist suggested, is more or less the supermarket “shelf-life of the lettuce”.

Liz Truss may never recover from this cruel jibe: a British tabloid newspaper is currently offering its readers a live video stream of a lettuce head and a photograph of the Prime Minister, accompanied by the question, “which wet lettuce will last longer?”

Britain as a whole is now the butt of international jokes. Politicians in Italy – a country that will soon get its 70th government in almost as many years – have suggested that one of their retired prime ministers may be sent to London to try his hand at managing the British because he can’t do any worse than Britain’s politicians.

Mr Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Prime Minister of Greece, a country that a decade ago had to be bailed out from national bankruptcy by global financial institutions, told Ms Truss’ government tongue-in-cheek that if they “need experience in dealing with the International Monetary Fund, we’re here to help”.

While the attention is on the UK experience, other economies and major currencies are also currently experiencing global pressure. The British pound may be down around 18 per cent to 20 per cent, but the euro is about 15 per cent weaker, and the Chinese renminbi dropped by an average of 11 per cent against the US dollar. The Bank of Japan recently spent an estimated US$21 billion (S$30 billion) trying to prop up the yen, to no avail.

However, credibility is everything in politics, finance and economics, and the UK government finally managed to lose all of these. Britain’s previously admired institutional framework and its hard-won reputation of certainty in financial policy went down the pan over the past two weeks.

And financial volatility is accompanied by political volatility. Between 1990 and 2010 – two decades – Britain was ruled by only three prime ministers. But from 2010 to now - just over one decade - the country has already known four additional prime ministers and may yet be ready for a fifth. Furthermore, no less than four politicians have served as finance ministers since January this year. These are chaotic politics Italian-style, minus the sun-drenched beaches or the delicious pasta.

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‘Cakeism’ and Brexit

How did Britain get to this sorry state? A mixture of immediate failures by the Truss administration, magnified by a much more entrenched malaise.

Ms Truss won power by resorting to the oldest trick in politics: a promise that voters can have their cake and eat it. She vowed to cut taxes and increase spending, all based on borrowing from financial markets. And she dismissed the arguments of armies of economists who pointed out that hers was not an economic policy but a fantasy.

The more she faced criticism, the more she doubled down on her promises; her pledge to cut taxes became a test of wills, which she was determined to win. So, her ill-fated budget slashed taxes much further than anyone expected and sidelined Britain’s financial regulator and the country’s civil servants.

Ms Truss quickly discovered that one should not attempt to offer a spending bonanza against the backdrop of sharply rising inflation and interest rates, a punishing global energy crisis, as well as a British current account deficit which ballooned to an unprecedented 8 per cent of gross domestic product, and all without providing any indication of how Britain intends to deal with its public finances. The Prime Minister not only ran into a flat rejection by the financial markets, she unleashed a financial rout that could only be addressed by withdrawing her entire budget.

The problem of Ms Truss was not necessarily just the financial figures she peddled but the fact that her ill-conceived budget became totemic for a more comprehensive loss of British political and economic credibility, which has been cumulative over several years. 

 

The chief culprit is Brexit, as the British withdrawal from the European Union is popularly known. The damage that Brexit inflicted on the British economy - in terms of lower growth rates, lower exports and slashed inward investment – is by now well-documented.

But a much more severe impact on British credibility has been the conduct of the country’s political elite during this divorce process from the rest of Europe. The campaign to withdraw from the EU was conducted with lies; those who supported Brexit produced made-up figures about how Britain’s trade with the rest of the world would, supposedly, more than compensate for the loss of duty-free access to European markets.

And anyone who dared contradict the Brexiters by providing actual economic facts and figures was dismissed as part of so-called “project fear”, an alleged plot by the “establishment” to keep Britain shackled to Europe.

The tactic worked not only in pulling Britain out of the EU; it also spawned an entirely new class of British politicians who believe that all they need to do is to ram their policies through regardless of what the economic realities may be and if the facts don’t accord with their views, present “alternative facts”.

During the campaign that propelled her to power, Ms Truss refused to engage in any serious discussion with the critics of her economic policy, just as Mr Boris Johnson, her predecessor as prime minister, declined to explain how Britain would thrive outside the EU. Both politicians operated on the assumption that make-believe economics can become real economics.

And the reason people like them can come to power is to be found in another negative development of British politics.

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Who chooses the party leader?

For many decades, the Conservatives and Labour – the country’s two major historic parties – were mass movements, counting millions of members. But the election of the party leaders who could then become prime ministers was left in the hands of the few, usually just the MPs in either party.

Over the past 15 years, however, mass party membership disappeared: Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, for instance, has far more paid-up members than all the political parties combined.

Yet, curiously, the choice of who gets elected as party leader was taken from MPs and given to the parties’ entire membership. The result is that an unrepresentative group of party members – in the case of the ruling Conservatives, only around 160,000 people out of a total population of 68 million – decides who would rule Britain.

If it were left to the MPs alone, Ms Truss would have got nowhere near the Downing Street residence of British prime ministers. But she won on a platform of economic fantasies sold to people who wanted to believe in the enduring myth of having something for nothing.

Ultimately, it was left to the global financial markets to confront Britain with the rude awakening it deserves by presenting the country and its daydreaming politicians with the invoice for their mismanagement.

It’s improbable that Ms Truss will ever recover from its current debacle; the only question is whether the humiliation the UK has just experienced at the hands of global financial markets will bring to an end the age of untruthful politics that has so devalued the country’s administration.

But it won’t be easy to get out of this rut. King Charles III best summed up the national mood when he recently welcomed Prime Minister Truss to an audience with “dear, oh dear!

  https://omny.fm/shows/in-your-opinion/is-the-nominated-member-of-parliament-scheme-losin

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Liz Truss takes over a Britain in decline and in severe crisis: Martin Jacques

 

 

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Wednesday 16 March 2022

My father endured secret brainwashing experiment by CIA's MK Ultra project; he came back a totally different person

 

Photo: VCG

Life-long trauma: CIA mind control program victims speak out

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Julie Tanny's father Charles Tanny Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tanny

Julie Tanny's father Charles Tanny Photo: Courtesy of Julie Tanny

Editor's Note:
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Among the victims of the CIA's MK Ultra project is the family of Julie Tanny (Tanny), whose father was coercively brainwashed as part of the Montreal Experiments in Canada back in the 1950s. The experiments were funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA. She is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against five defendants - the US government, the Canadian government, the McGill University health center, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill University, as her family was irreparably destroyed by the program. She shared her story with the Global Times (GT) in a recent interview.
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GT: You father underwent brainwashing treatment for three months in 1957 by Dr. Ewen Cameron. Why did he go?
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Tanny: My father had what's called trigeminal neuralgia, which is a pain in the side of the face that goes into the jaw. Apparently, it's excruciating because I actually know somebody who has it and just recovered from it.
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They believed at the time that it was psychosomatic. So they sent him to a psychiatrist. My father was very against it, but he did whatever he had to do to get rid of the pain because he just couldn't function.
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The doctor that he went to see was working with Dr. Cameron on this program in the hospital, which we didn't know. He put my father into the programs. We don't know what they wanted to do with him, but we do know that his treatment was different in that my father was not a psychiatric patient. That's what made him different from all the other ones.
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GT: What "treatment" did he undergo?
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Tanny: What they did was as soon as he was admitted to the hospital, they immediately put him on insulin. My father was not a diabetic. I know that the insulin put him in a coma. It was part of the sleep treatment where they put him to sleep, and after it he was interviewed by the psychiatrist, then they would take clips of some of the things he said and run them on a tape, 24-7 under his pillow. It would be going around nonstop in his head, brainwashing him basically. But what they would do was they would give him shock treatments, but not the regular shock treatments they give today. These are called Page-Russells. It was a machine invented by a Mr. Page and Mr. Russell. It was about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment. It was designed to wipe out the brain. And the tape was to replace it with different thoughts.
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I don't really know what they were trying to do, but I know in my father's case, they said they had written notes like "this is as far as we can take him" or "we have to put him back in because he still has ties to his former life." It's hard to know, but whatever they were trying to do, it wasn't good.
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GT: How did you know these details? Did your father share what they did to him with you or did you acquire the information through other means?
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Tanny: No. What happened was I was about 5 years old at the time, so I definitely remember what he was like before and what he was like after - it was two different people. My father was very engaged and very hands-on with us. All his free time was spent with his children. And after he came home, he didn't even know who we were. When we were at my mother's for dinner in 1978, when it came on the news that Mrs. Orlikow, who was the wife of a member of parliament in Winnipeg, was suing the CIA and we were all sitting around watching the news and my mother turned to my brother and said, go to the hospital and get dad's records tomorrow.
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And I was like, what are you talking about? Because no one ever told us what happened to my father or why he changed so much. The problem with that was my father had a massive stroke in 1977 and was left unable to communicate. He couldn't speak, he couldn't write, he couldn't read.
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And once I had found out about really what happened to him in 1978, it was too late to have that conversation with him. So it was never talked about. Never. Even after we found out.
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GT: How severely did this affect you and your family?
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Tanny: I think that we started off as a very happy family with the father who was always busy, building a skating rink in the backyard and taking us to the ice rink in the park across the street, and taking us to the amusement park every now and then.
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And all that, everything ended when he came back from the hospital. He came back very angry - physically violent. I asked my brother, what was it like to grow up in our house? And he said empty.
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GT: What prompted your fight for justice?
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Tanny: A lot of things happened to push us to do this. First of all, when my father had his stroke, the doctors couldn't find a reason; he didn't have a blood clot or high blood pressure. What happened to him was he had an artery that collapsed. And recent studies or pretty recent studies have shown that these particular shock treatments that my father had create heart attacks and stroke.
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My mother had to work till the day she died to support herself. And when my mother passed away, there was nothing. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after my father died. I don't know what she would have lived on had she lived longer. And I guess it's also what we should have inherited and didn't. So there are a lot of factors.
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I know that in 1992, my mother received $100,000 from the federal government, but it cost, we figured out, my mother over $2 million in cash to have helped to take care of my father.
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So what was $100,000? When a temporary short-term head of the CIA read about what had happened, he insisted that the CIA found all the victims and compensated them properly and told them this twice. And the CIA both times admitted that they should and they will, but of course they never did. And then there's just the justice of it. It's amazing to me that they've never compensated people. They've never bothered to look at the damage [such experiment] did to families.
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GT: You and the other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse in 2017. How many families are involved in the group?
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Tanny: I've never counted how many families are members, but I can tell you, as far as family members are concerned, it's got to be over 500. But there's also a lot I believe that have not come forward yet, because I'm always meeting more people.
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GT: You are the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. Do you think a class action lawsuit can exert more pressure than individual lawsuits?
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Tanny: Definitely. First of all, I always believe their strength and numbers. But also to do this, there are very few lawyers, if any, who were willing to take on the work for one client. There's so much work to be done. We were very lucky to get the lawyers that we got.
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GT: What difficulties have you met during the process of executing your lawsuit?
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Tanny: I think the first thing is the government. When Justin Trudeau came into office, one of the first things he did was create these privacy acts so that nobody could get access to any kind of information, so that nobody could sue the government.
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So, when people are trying to find medical records, he makes it very difficult because they found 1 million different ways to deny people records under really ridiculous circumstances.
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Like we know it wasn't just Dr. Cameron, it was everybody who worked at the hospital - the nurses, all the doctors. So the idea that he would have to be the lead doctor on all these cases is ridiculous. We used to go to McGill University and do research and we found out a lot of information through that research. But once we filed, they hid everything. We would get mountains of files before we filed. And once we filed the lawsuit, you go and you get a file about this thick (1 cm). It's just their way of protecting themselves, I guess.
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So for me, we've had the records for a very long time. I wouldn't read them, but we had them. But there are a lot of people who have not yet been given that information. It's difficult for them.
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GT: Are there still such experiments in Canada or the US, as far as you know?
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Tanny: We have a website and we've done things. So people have seen what we're doing. I get so many emails from people who say they're being experimented on. I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control.
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So do I think there's that going on? Sure, but not anything like the primitive way they tried in the 50s. But I do get a lot of emails. 

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US covertly experiments mind control on people across continents for decades; no official apology

 Project CIA 

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"They've taken away enough from me. I don't remember my birth name. I am not in contact with my children. It's a very degrading, devastating reality," said 72-year-old Maryam Ruhullah, an MK Ultra victim who now lives in Grand Prairie, Texas.
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MK Ultra is the code name of a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the US and its notorious spy agency the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It started on April 13, 1953 and lasted for 20 years.
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It was the height of the Cold War, and the US designed covert operation, among which was MK Ultra, aimed at developing tools that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.
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Psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy, all heinous and inhumane techniques, were clandestinely but routinely used on humans. They included citizens from the US and other countries who were unwitting test subjects, an encapsulation of immense human rights violations.
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Many experiments were conducted in Fort Detrick as a key base of operations. Many people died as a result of these experiments. Those who survived had their memories forcibly erased, forgetting their names and having their personalities irrevocably altered, and faced threats to their lives, living in fear for the remainder of their days. More than 40 years on, the physical, mental, emotional, social horrors, and injuries are still with her, Ruhullah told the Global Times.
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US mind control scheme
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The psychosis induction of Ruhullah started when she was 5 or 6 while attending a parade in London. She was then brought to the US where CIA operatives would continuously use a recording played over tape recorder to embed in her mind what they wanted her to become in her own memory.
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"I remember one time I had been given electric shock treatments and was returned to a room. When I regained a little bit of consciousness, I heard one of the hospital staff say something to the effect of: Why do they do this to her? Why are they giving her so many shock treatments?" said Ruhullah.
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Ruhullah believed that what happened to her was political because of her Iranian heritage. She was then relocated, taken away, and lived and was educated in Russia afterward. At 19, she married an American and moved to the US. Seven years later, a member of US law enforcement agency entered her house and told her she had to be put in protective custody. Although she greatly protested, she was forced to go. She was not able to contact her husband or her son who was about 6 years old at that time. It was the second time that she would be an unwilling participant in a mind control program.
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Ruhullah said she has been living somebody else's lie.
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"You remain physically drained, because there's something that drains your spirit. You cannot hold a conversation with anyone regarding a situation, because everyone that is allowed in your life goes along with the lie, either out of total indifference and complacency, or because they build an allegiance to the government that they have to continue this lie or something would happen to them."
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The CIA mind control schemes did not just remain on US soil but were extended to US allied countries including Denmark, Australia, and Canada.
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In December 2021, a Danish documentary titled The Search for Myself was released, leveling claims against the CIA that in the early 1960s it had financially aided experiments on 311 Danish children, a good number of whom were orphans or adopted. The filmmaker, Per Wennick, himself was one of them.
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Wennick told Radio Denmark that as one of the kids forced to participate in the experiment, he had electrodes placed on his arms, legs, and chest around his heart. The children were also subjected to loud and high-pitched sounds, which was "very uncomfortable."
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According to Australian media reports, the US once took the experiments to Australia in the 1960s that involved Sydney University psychology students.
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What took place in the Danish documentary and Australian media reports was just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1950 and 1964, experiments funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA as part of MK Ultra were conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Canada and were led by Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron.
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None of the Canadian patients provided consent or knew that they were being used for clandestine research purposes. So far, neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has apologized for either's role in these experiments which ruined hundreds of families.
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Julie Tanny's family is one of them. In 1957 when she was 5 years old, her father went to see a doctor as he had trigeminal neuralgia, while the doctor, who worked in cahoots with Dr. Cameron, put him into one of the many brainwashing programs.
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Tanny told the Global Times that her father was put to sleep first, then he was forced to listen to clips of some of the things he had said on a continual 24-hour loop underneath his pillow while he slept as part of the brainwashing process. Then he would be subjected to shock treatments administered using a machine called the Page-Russells, which emitted voltages about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment, and the aim was to wipe out his memory.
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Such experiments were administered on Tanny's father for three months, and he was discharged because he "still has ties to his former life." He returned home, but the happy family was soon destroyed.
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Photo: VCG
Photo: VCG
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Typical US democracy style
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Colin A. Ross, a US-based psychiatrist, wrote a book titled The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, after reading a collection of 15,000-page files from the CIA reading room. As a psychiatrist, he believes the CIA mind control programs were very abusive to innate human nature.
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Moreover, Ross calls into question the medical ethics of said CIA doctors.
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"You have to create psychiatric disorder on purpose, which is completely the opposite of the purpose of psychiatry. And the patient, the subject doesn't give informed consent. They don't have legal representation. So it completely violates all medical ethics," said Ross.
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Despite mounting public backlash and condemnation, the CIA is yet to officially apologize for the actions it took during the Cold War and after. The CIA's mind control projects are still relevant today because they provide a horrific historical narrative of intelligence misconduct in a country that keeps touting human rights and freedom.
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"The problem I have with the United States, while I'm a US citizen, is that they tend to point the finger; accuse other countries around the world of human rights violations, but they don't take responsibility for their own. So I think it's hypocritical and it's all part of geopolitical maneuvering and so on," said Ross.
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"This is the typical style of US democracy - violating human rights and committing crimes at will and then being forced to acknowledge it decades later," Aleksandr Kolpakidi, a Russian intelligence historian, told the Global Times.
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Tanny said she gets many emails from people who say they are currently being experimented on, and she believes mind control experiments are still ongoing, albeit not quite as primitive as those performed in the 1950s.
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"I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control," said Tanny.
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CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
`CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
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Seeking justice
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The CIA MK Ultra program was brought to the public's attention in 1975, and victims and their families in Canada started to fight for the responsible parties to be brought to justice and be held accountable for the lifelong pain and suffering.
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A 1980 lawsuit which dragged on for eight years made nine Canadians receive only $67,000 each from the US Department of Justice.
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Tanny's father died in 1992, the same day his wife, Tanny's mother, received compensation worth $100,000 by the Canadian government. He was among the 77 victims who received such compensation.
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But for Tanny, this was just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the whooping $2 million it took her mother to take care of her father. And her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after the death of her father.
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In 2017, she and other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse to exert more pressure on the defendants, and she keeps meeting new people who are victims of such mind control programs. Tanny has filed a request for a class-action lawsuit against the US and Canadian governments, the McGill University health center, the McGill University, and the Allan Memorial Institute, hoping this will extend compensation to family members and other victims.
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Tanny told the Global Times that they will be in court against the US government on April 26.
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Ruhullah said that she hopes the world will remember the immense suffering of MK Ultra victims by setting aside a special day.
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"I know after apartheid, they had a reconciliation council. We don't have anything like that, be it MK Ultra, be it slavery, be it the genocide of the Native Americans, in order for the individuals and the country to heal. There needs to be acknowledgment, there needs to be apologies, there needs to be compensation, and there needs to be a genuine reconciliation," said Ruhullah. 

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China showed truth about Xinjiang, but Western media chose to be blind as US practises ‘double standards’

Truths about Xinjiang the Western media won't tell 

 

Human right violators: USA,Canada, Australia, UK, EU - Racism against Asians: Forever foreigner, alien or pendatang

 

Thursday 30 September 2021

Asean nations caught in a quandary over AUKUS Pact

 https://youtu.be/SF5Or7K2YV4

South-East Asian Nations cautions over AUKUS Pact | WION USA Direct | Latest World English News

 
https://youtu.be/69ilKe8KFAg

ASEAN: Concerned Over AUKUS Alliance! QUAD Sidelined?

 https://youtu.be/ezOKGzAHLGo

Power Crunch Is Just the First Step!

 

The entry of the new trilateral defence pact in the asia-pacific region has divided South-East Asian countries and negated the quest for a zone of peace, freedom and neutrality.


AUSTRALIA’S moniker of “deputy sheriff” is back in circulation again with last week’s announcement of the Aukus trilateral military alliance involving the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The agreement, under which the US and the UK would provide Australia the technology to build nuclear-powered submarines for the first time, was declared in a joint virtual press conference by US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian PM Scott Morrison on Sept 15.

The three Anglo Saxon nations declared that the new deal is meant to protect and defend shared interests in the Indo-pacific amid “regional security concerns which had grown significantly”.

The epithet “deputy sheriff of the US” first gained infamy 22 years ago when then Australian PM John Howard used it in an interview to describe the country’s projected role in regional peacekeeping.

In an interview with The Bulletin magazine, he defined Australia as a medium-sized, economically strong regional power, “acting in a deputy role to the US in maintaining peace”.

He also said Australia had a responsibility within its region to do things “above and beyond”, bringing into play its unique characteristics as a Western country in Asia.

The remarks led to both ridicule at home and diplomatic backlash from regional leaders who rebuked

Australia for taking orders from the United States while being geographically closer to Asia. History repeats itself often, and Australia’s partnership in Aukus has brought the focus back on that lackey image.

Besides drawing indignation from China, which condemned the deal as “extremely irresponsible, narrowminded and severely damaging regional peace”, Aukus – the abbreviation representing the initials of the three countries – has also ruffled feathers within Asean and divided the 10-member grouping.

Based on the reactions over the past few days, two camps have emerged. Malaysia and Indonesia are clearly opposed to it on the grounds that it would unsettle the region. Thailand, a traditional US ally which has a close economic relationship with China, is also of the view that the security pact would undermine stability.

On the opposite side, the Philippines has taken a totally contrary stand. It has declared support, with its foreign minister Teodoro Locsin arguing that Aukus would address the imbalance in the forces available to the Asean member states and that the enhancement of Australia’s military capacity would be beneficial in the long term.

Vietnam, which recently hosted US vice-president Kamala Harris, has not commented on the pact although its spokesperson Le Thi Thu Hang offered this ambiguous response: “All countries strive for the same goal.”

Meanwhile, Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan has stated that the city state is “not unduly anxious” about the new strategic alliance because of its longstanding relationship with the three countries.

The four other countries in the grouping have been largely silent on the issue.

Malaysia was swift and forthright in making its position clear. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob warned that Aukus would spark a nuclear arms race and provoke other powers to act more aggressively in the region, especially in the South China Sea.

In his phone call to Morrison, he also raised the importance of abiding by existing positions on nuclearpowered submarines operating in Malaysia’s waters, including rules under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS) and the Southeast Asian Nuclear-weapon-free Zone Treaty (SEANWFZ).

The questions being asked now are: How will China react to Aukus? Will it intensify the arms technology race in the region by increasing military expenditure for its navy or create more missile launch facilities, also known as underground missile silos, for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS)?

That is what is being predicted by the hawks in the US military establishment, who have been consistently exaggerating China’s supposed military threat.

Among the talk is that China would boost the number of missile silos to 100 over the next two decades. For the record, the US already has at least 450 such facilities.

It is no secret that China has been building up its navy although it is still a long way from matching the marine power of the United States or the United Kingdom with just two aircraft carriers and a third still under construction. In comparison, the United States has 11 aircraft carriers and the United Kingdom two, but only one has been commissioned.

The US has 72 submarines – all nuclear-powered – compared with China’s 56, out of which only six are nuclear-powered.

With the entry of this newfangled military pact, Asean nations are now caught in a quandary. The quest for a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality in South-east Asia (Zopfan) declared on Nov 27, 1971, when the world was in the midst of a Cold War between the US and its Western allies and the USSR, looks like a distant dream today.

Zopfan was mainly aimed at preventing the world’s big powers from competing for influence and military prowess in the region.

The concept was inspired by the UN’S principles of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, abstention from threat or use of force, peaceful settlement of international disputes, equal rights and self-determination, and non-interference in the affairs of member states.

But as Dr Laura Southgate, a specialist in South-east Asian regional security and international relations, highlighted in a recent article in The Diplomat, Aukus has clearly exposed Asean’s lack of cohesion.

As she put it, driven by different threat perceptions and geo-strategic interests, it had become very difficult for Asean member nations to speak with one voice, although many states hope to maintain a balance between China and the US and its allies.

Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan likes this observation by Niccolò Machiavelli: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.” The views expressed here are the writer’s own.

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Sunday 19 September 2021

AUKUS plans to provide nuclear submarines to Australia seriously endangers nuclear non-proliferation


https://youtu.be/6XVxdoHoMBM
 
 

The world needs to prepare for the arrival of the coming nuclear submarine craze

 The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee returns to Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Georgia, U.S., Feb. 6, 2013. (Xinhua/REUTERS) 
The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee returns to Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Georgia, U.S., Feb. 6, 2013. (Xinhua/REUTERS

The US, UK, and Australia have announced the establishment of a security alliance known as AUKUS. One of the key elements of this military alliance is that Washington and London will help Canberra develop nuclear-powered submarines.

It is an act by the US and UK, two nuclear-weapon states, to secretly support and provide carriers of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear technology, and nuclear materials to Australia, a non-nuclear-weapon state, within the Anglosphere. But the move apparently runs counter to the objectives and core obligations set by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

First, the AUKUS move will lead to the proliferation of carriers of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the world. Although the nuclear-powered submarine is not a type of nuclear weapon itself, it still has the potential to carry nuclear weapons. It also belongs to an important platform for carrying WMD.

There are only six countries in the world that have nuclear submarines, including China, the US, Russia, the UK, France, and India, all of which possess nuclear weapons as well. It is clear that nuclear-powered submarines and nuclear weapons are inextricably linked with each other.b

Second, AUKUS will spread fissionable material that could be used to make nuclear weapons. The second paragraph of Article III of the NPT states that each member party to the Treaty undertakes not to provide special fissionable material to any non-nuclear-weapon state unless subject to various safeguards.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has no authority to supervise nuclear materials for submarines because of their military implications, which has objectively created conditions for Australia to make nuclear weapons. In history, Australia once planned to build up its own nuclear arsenal, while the UK conducted its first nuclear test in Australia in 1952.

Third, the partnership between the UK, the US and Australia may lead to the proliferation of uranium enrichment technology.

Washington and London's nuclear-powered submarines run on highly enriched uranium, while Canberra is rich in uranium deposits. If the US and the UK transfer the uranium-enriching technology to Australia to help it become self-sufficient in nuclear fuel, it would be no better than the international nuclear black market reported by the media in the early 2000s.

Fourth, the AUKUS move will negatively impact the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. Since Australia can openly acquire nuclear materials by developing nuclear-powered submarines, other non-nuclear-weapon states may follow suit, resulting in the endless risks of nuclear proliferation on our living planet. Therefore, James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the recent action of the three countries "a terrible precedent."

And, finally, the trilateral security partnership is almost certain to trigger a regional arms race.

Canberra's peace record in the Indo-Pacific region is not unblemished. There were Australian troops participating in unjust wars in countries such as Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Thus, Australia's enhanced underwater attack capability is no good news for its neighbors that may be forced into a vicious circle of the arms race to protect their own national security.

Looking at the latest changes in nuclear policies of the US and the UK, it is needless to say that what these countries have done has disappointed the world. US President Joe Biden once campaigned in his election campaign to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the US security policy. However, less than eight months after entering the White House, he is eating his campaign pledge.

The same is also true with the UK. In March this year, the country adjusted its nuclear strategy drastically and took a significant step backward in its nuclear arms control. It not only increased its nuclear weapon stockpile cap from 180 to 260 warheads, but moved to lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

Peace, development, and nuclear non-proliferation are what most countries in the world yearn for. The actions of the US, the UK, and Australia to challenge the bottom line of nuclear non-proliferation, won't bode well for our living world.

The author is director of Arms Control Studies Center, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
 
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Tuesday 2 February 2021

Why Europe gravitates away from US to Eastern power center: Martin Jacques

 


What will happen to Europe? Will it continue with a broadly pro-American orientation, or will it pursue an increasingly independent position?

Either way, the consequences will be far-reaching. At the heart of the West lie the US and Europe. If Europe seeks a more autonomous role, then the West will be seriously weakened.

The end of the Cold War marked a major moment in US-Europe relations. Europe was no longer dependent on the US for its defense and ever since, slowly but remorselessly, a growing distance has opened up between them. This was accelerated by two key events ̶ the US invasion of Iraq, opposed by most Europeans, and the Donald Trump phenomenon, which most Europeans found beyond the pale.

President Joe Biden wants to mend the fences and return to something closer to the pre-Trump relationship. He may have some success because, unlike Trump, Biden will seek to befriend rather than castigate Europe. But there will be no simple return to the pre-Trump era: too much has happened, too much has changed.

A recent opinion poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations across 11 European countries reveals what can only be described as a sea-change in European attitudes in the post-Trump era. Six in 10 Europeans believe that the US political system is broken and that China will become a stronger power than the US in the next10 years. A majority now want their country to remain neutral in any conflict between the US and China.

A majority of Germans believe that, after voting for Trump in 2016, Americans can no longer be trusted; across Europe likewise more people agreed than disagreed with this statement. The survey grouped the respondents into four categories. The smallest, 9 percent of the total, believed that the EU was broken and the US would bounce back. A second group, around 20 percent of the total, believed that both the US and the EU would continue to thrive. A third group, 29 percent of the total, thought that both the US and the EU were broken and declining. A fourth group, 35 percent of the total, believed that the EU was healthy, but the US was broken. The latter two groups, almost two-thirds of the total, expected that the US would soon be displaced by China.

There has clearly been a profound shift in European attitudes consequent upon the decline of the West since the 2008 financial crisis, the Trump presidency and the rise of China. These, we must remind ourselves, are very recent developments which have happened with remarkable speed. Far from reinforcing the Atlantic alliance and the relationship with the US, their main impact on Europeans has been to weaken those bonds, elicit a growing acknowledgement that the world has changed profoundly and foster a belief that Europe needs to be more independent. Of course, these trends are still young and fluid. Many conflicting forces are at work with attitudes ebbing and flowing both within and between countries. Criticism of China has grown apace in the recent period in Europe, as it has in the US. But there is one fundamental difference. While the US is bent on defending its global primacy, Europe long ago abandoned any such pretensions, thereby greatly reducing the sources of friction and animosity between it and China in comparison with the US.

The survey reveals that by far the dominant trend is toward a more independent-minded Europe, a growing skepticism about the US and a sign of recognition that China will soon become the dominant power in the world. The European leader who most symbolizes this outlook, and has pioneered this way of thinking, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The recently agreed EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, very much in Merkel's image, is a powerful demonstration of the EU's willingness to pursue its own independent relationship with China rather than following the Americans.

The trend toward a growing distance between Europe and the US will be slow, tortuous, conflict-riddled, and painful. Europe has looked westward across the Atlantic ever since Christopher Columbus. It was European settlers who colonized Northeast America and subsequently established the US. The latter was a European creation which over time was to outperform its ancestral continent. If Europe colonized much of the world, the post-1945 world order was a Western creation, with the US the dominant partner and Europe very much a junior partner. In sum, an enormous historical, intellectual, political and cultural hinterland binds the US and Europe together. But we are now in new territory. American decline means that it has increasingly less to offer Europe.

The gravitational pull of China, and Asia more generally, is drawing Europe eastward. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, Europe is becoming more and more involved ̶ first the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, then Portugal, Greece and Italy, and others over time will in all likelihood follow. What drew Europe westward is now drawing it eastward: the centre of gravity of the global economy, once in the west, is now in the east.

The author was until recently a Senior Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University and a Senior Fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University. Follow him on twitter @martjacques. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

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Europe goes its own way on China


EVER since Joe Biden won the US presidency, the rhetoric from Europe’s leaders has been filled with anticipation of a new transatlantic dawn. With Donald Trump out of the White House, Europe signalled that it would again link arms with America, bound by common ideals and a firm resolve to “save the world from its bad angels”. 


“The United States is back. And Europe stands ready,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had declared on Biden’s inauguration day. 

But given the opportunity in recent weeks to show the Biden administration it was serious about geostrategic collaboration, Europe opted instead to “show Washington the finger”, said Politico.


According to the political journal, a consensus has emerged among transatlantic strategic thinkers in recent years that the West faces two major threats to its security: old nemesis Russia and China, the global power the US sees as the much greater challenge over the long term. 


As White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: “Beijing is now challenging our security, prosperity and values in significant ways that require a new US approach.”

But Europe appears to have its own ideas, as seen in how the regional bloc has continued to pursue its own course on China in the face of American reservations. 


In late December, for example, the European Union agreed to a landmark investment pact with China, ignoring objections from across the Atlantic and requests from the Biden camp to hold off until the new administration was in office. 


Then at the the Davos World Economic Forum last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected calls for Europe to pick sides between the US and China, in a nod to the plea made by Chinese President Xi Jinping a day earlier.


While Biden is looking to group together democracies to contain China, Merkel was pointedly wary about the formation of factions.


“I would very much wish to avoid the building of blocs,” said Merkel. “I don’t think it would do justice to many societies if we were to say this is the United States and over there is China and we are grouping around either the one or the other. This is not my understanding of how things ought to be.”

 

Referring to Xi’s speech at the same forum, Merkel said: “The Chinese president spoke yesterday, and he and I agree on that. We see a need for multilateralism.”


Merkel is far from alone in Europe in not wanting to join a more robust US approach toward Beijing. Paris and Rome broadly share Merkel’s position. 


On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Merkel’s statement that the EU shouldn’t gang up on China with the US, even if it stands closer to Washington by virtue of shared values.


“A situation to join all together against China, this is a scenario of the highest possible conflictuality. This one, for me, is counterproductive,” Macron said during a discussion broadcast by Washington-based think tank the Atlantic Council.


This kind of common front against China risks pushing Beijing to lower its cooperation on issues like combating climate change, added the French president.


Macron was the first European leader to make it a point to engage with China as a European bloc by including Merkel and then-EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during a bilateral visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to France in March 2019.


Macron and European partners didn’t share the Trump administration’s outwardly aggressive stance on China, instead theorising that it was at once a “partner, competitor and systemic rival.”


And now it looks like they do not want to go back to the “old normal” either, where US led in the us-versus-them global politics.


Whether Europe’s decision to effectively de-couple from the US foreign policy agenda before Biden’s administration has really even begun is born out of a desire to achieve the dream of “strategic autonomy,” concern that Donald Trump could return in four years, or some combination thereof may not matter in the end. 


As the strategic rivalry between the US and China comes into focus, Europe is adamant to stay on the sidelines and remain neutral. – Agencies

 

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