Latest News Clips 2016.05.23

1.      Taiwan President Takes Cautious Line on China at Inauguration

The New York Times    MAY 20, 2016

Guests listened as President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan gave her inauguration speech in Taipei on Friday. Credit Isaac Lawrence/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

TAIPEI — Taiwan’s new president called on China to look beyond the divisions of history for the benefit of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, as she pledged in her inauguration speech on Friday to promote local industry and push the island’s global trade links to help revive a stagnant economy.

But President Tsai Ing-wen’s call got a cool reception from the island’s powerful neighbor. Even before she took office, Beijing had begun putting pressure on Taiwan’s new leader, who is more skeptical of ties with China than her predecessor was.

Ms. Tsai, who was elected by a large margin in January, is Taiwan’s first female president. A former law professor and trade negotiator, she won top office without the benefit of a politically powerful male relative, unlike most of Asia’s other female leaders.

Her inauguration speech was closely watched around the region, particularly in Beijing, for signs of how she will lead and her stance on relations with China.

Ms. Tsai offered few surprises in her address outside Taiwan’s Presidential Office in central Taipei. She emphasized domestic issues, like the need to change Taiwan’s pension, education and judicial systems, provide better job opportunities for young people, protect the environment and ensure food safety.

“The people elected a new president and new government with one single expectation: solving problems,” she said.

President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan calls on China to “set aside the baggage of history” in her inaugural speech on Friday.

In discussing the relationship with China, she steered a cautious line between the demands of her base in the Democratic Progressive Party, which has traditionally supported Taiwan’s independence, and China’s longstanding threats of force to block any move to formalize such a position.

Chinese officials have indicated that they want Ms. Tsai to accept the so-called 1992 Consensus that Taiwan and the mainland are part of one China, each side with its own interpretation of what that means. That understanding formed the basis of the warming ties between the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, in Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party over the past eight years.

Ms. Tsai acknowledged the history of discussions between the two sides on Friday, though she stopped short of endorsing the consensus.

The 1992 meetings between unofficial representatives of the two sides were “done in a spirit of mutual understanding and a political attitude of seeking common ground while setting aside differences,” she said. “I respect this historical fact.”

The foundations of cross-strait relations, she said, are the 1992 talks and the 20 years of negotiations that followed; the constitutional system of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name; and the island’s democratic principles.

“The two governing parties across the strait must set aside the baggage of history, and engage in positive dialogue, for the benefit of the people on both sides,” she said.

In a lengthy statement released Friday afternoon by Xinhua, China’s official news agency, the country’s Taiwan Affairs Office noted Ms. Tsai’s comments but said she did not go far enough. The statement said the “Taiwan authorities’ new leader” had “adopted a vague attitude, and didn’t clearly acknowledge the ’92 Consensus.”

It called her remarks “an incomplete examination paper.”

Ms. Tsai has pledged to maintain the cross-strait status quo, but she is expected to take a much warier approach to relations with China than did her predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalist Party.

Under Mr. Ma, trade and contacts with China expanded, but voters in Taiwan grew concerned about the mainland’s growing influence over the island. That contributed to the defeat of the presidential candidate from Mr. Ma’s Nationalist Party and its loss of control of the legislature.

Taiwan has been separately governed since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island after his Nationalist forces lost China’s civil war to Mao’s Communists. Mainland China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and says they must eventually be unified.

The Taiwan Strait has been a tinderbox at times over the past half-century, but the last eight years saw a period of détente, as Mr. Ma promoted deepening ties between the two sides. Still, the Pentagon warned last week that China’s military capabilities have grown dramatically and that its defense budget is now about 10 times that of Taiwan’s.

Since Ms. Tsai’s election, China has taken steps indicating that it would take a much more aggressive approach to her government and renew its challenges to Taiwan’s limited international recognition. (Taiwan is recognized by 22 states, including the Vatican.)  

2.       Egypt Air Was Aware of Threats to Security, Including One Scribbled on Plane

The New York Times  MAY 21, 2016

 

Relatives of an EgyptAir cabin crew member at her funeral service in Cairo on Saturday.CreditAyman Aref/European Pressphoto Agency

CAIRO — In an eerie coincidence, the EgyptAir jetliner that plunged into the Mediterranean on Thursday was once the target of political vandals who wrote in Arabic on its underside, “We will bring this plane down.”

Three EgyptAir security officials said the threatening graffiti, which appeared about two years ago, had been the work of aviation workers at Cairo Airport. Playing on the phonetic similarity between the last two letters in the plane’s registration, SU-GCC, and the surname of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, some workers also wrote “traitor” and “murderer.”

The officials, who were interviewed separately and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the airline’s security procedures because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the graffiti had been linked to the domestic Egyptian political situation at the time rather than to a militant threat. Similar graffiti against Mr. Sisi, a former general, was scrawled across Cairo after the military ousted the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013.

Since then, the airline has put into effect a variety of new security measures in response to Egypt’s political turmoil, jihadist violence and other aviation disasters like the crash of a Russian plane that killed 224 people in October. EgyptAir has fired employees for their political leanings, stepped up crew searches and added extra unarmed in-flight security guards. Three such guards died in Thursday’s crash of Flight 804.

Whether those moves were sufficient remained an open question on Saturday as experts pored over data emitted by the plane in its final minutes for clues as to what had brought it down. The French air accident investigation authority confirmed that the data showed that several smoke alarms had been activated while the plane plunged toward the sea.

But they cautioned that the signals, sent by a monitoring system on board the Airbus A320 jetliner, did not offer enough information to conclude what had caused the crash.

“These are not messages that enable us to interpret anything,” said Sébastien Barthe, a spokesman for France’s Bureau of Investigations and Analysis. “If there is smoke, it means that there is potentially a fire somewhere, but it doesn’t tell us where the fire is, and it doesn’t help us establish whether it is something malevolent or something technical.”

In an audio message released Saturday, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the official spokesman of the Islamic State and the head of a unit dedicated to external attacks, denounced the American-led military campaign against the group but did not mention the EgyptAir crash.

EgyptAir’s security procedures last came under scrutiny in March when a passenger on a domestic flight pretended to be wearing an explosive vest and forced the plane to land in Cyprus. The crisis was resolved within hours when the man, later determined to be psychologically troubled, surrendered. The Egyptian authorities were quick to post surveillance videos that they said showed he had been searched before boarding the flight.

Among the 66 people on Thursday’s flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris were three EgyptAir in-flight security personnel — one more than the normal team of two for reasons that were not entirely clear.

3.      The vegetable oil that fuels a $50 billion business

CNN      May 18, 2016

 (CNN)Before you set foot outside your home each day, you've more than likely washed and eaten with this ubiquitous oil.

As the most widely-used vegetable oil worldwide, palm oil is found in everything from soap and shampoo to cereal, bread and cosmetics. About half of all packaged products sold in supermarkets contain palm oil, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Palm oil's popularity has skyrocketed in recent years. It's the most efficient source of vegetable oil, and its high yield makes it cheap to produce. It remains solid at room temperature, making it an incredibly versatile commodity. Demand has been increasing since the 1970s, making it a valuable and profitable business already worth $50 billion a year, and projected to rise to $88 billion by 2022.

The large scale production of palm oil, however, is linked to massive deforestation in Southeast Asia, leading to extensive carbon emissions and contributing to global warming.

Sustainable palm oil

The increase in palm oil plantations, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia, has seen an onslaught of fires used to clear land at the expense of the tropical rainforest. In 2015, the cloud of smog from the fires was so intense in one Indonesian province that thegovernment declared a state of emergency.

In addition to environmental consequences, entire communities have been displaced all over the world, according to a group of representatives from the Forest Peoples Programme, an NGO promoting forest peoples' rights. The group have just toured Europe, hoping to sway EU officials and investors that they must boycott companies not adhering to sustainable palm oil production.

In 2004, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was created after various groups raised concerns about environmental impacts in palm oil production. Today, the RSPO has set established international standards for palm oil production, including labeling of products adhering to sustainable parameters. Members include producers, environmental groups and manufacturers of goods containing the oil.