Latest News Clips 2016.07.18

                   Bengo’s Latest News Clips             2016.07.18

1.      Scores Reported Dead in Nice, France, as Truck Plows Into Bastille Day Crowd

The New York Times   JULY 14, 2016

Truck Plows into Crowd in Nice, Killing Dozens

A truck drove into a crowd during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France, sending hundreds running for safety.

 

PARIS — A Bastille Day fireworks celebration was shattered by death and mayhem on Thursday night in the southern French city of Nice when a large truck barreled for more than a mile through an enormous crowd of spectators, crushing and maiming dozens in what France’s president called a terrorist assault. It came eight months after the Paris attacks that traumatized the nation and all of Europe.

Officials and witnesses in Nice said at least 84 people, including children, were killed by the driver of the rampaging truck, who mowed them down on the sidewalk. He was shot to death by the police as officers scrambled to respond on what is France’s most important annual holiday.

Graphic television and video images showed the truck accelerating and tearing through the crowd, dozens of victims sprawled in its path, and the bullet-riddled windshield of the vehicle. Municipal officials and police officers described the truck as full of weapons and grenades.

“The horror, the horror has, once again, hit France,” President François Hollande said in a nationally televised address early Friday. He said the “terrorist character” of the assault was undeniable, and he described the use of a large truck to deliberately kill people as “a monstrosity.”

“France has been struck on the day of her national holiday,” he said. “Human rights are denied by fanatics, and France is clearly their target.”

Mr. Hollande, who only hours earlier had proclaimed the impending end of a state of national emergency on July 26, said that the measure would be extended by three months and that additional soldiers would be deployed for security.

French officials quickly concluded that terrorism was the likely motive, as the scope of the slaughter grew clear. The use of a large commercial truck as the principal weapon of death raised new questions about how to prevent such attacks.

The officials warned residents to stay indoors and canceled all further scheduled festivities in Nice, a seaside city of 340,000, including a five-day jazz festival and a concert on Friday night by Rihanna.

“There are numerous victims,” said Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, on BFM Television. “It’s a tragic, exceptional situation.”

Witnesses described scenes of pandemonium, with conflicting accounts on social media, including a false report of hostage-taking in Nice.

“We were enjoying the celebrations when we suddenly saw people running everywhere and tables being pushed down by the movement of panic,” said Daphne Burandé, 15, who was at a bar near the beach to watch the fireworks.

“No one explained to us what was happening, and I heard some gunshots not very far away,” she said. “I waited at the bar for more information because I thought it was a false alert. But then, people were still running.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and the identity of the driver was not immediately clear, but the Nice Matin newspaper reported early Friday that he was a 31-year-old Frenchman of Tunisian origin.

2.      Japan could change pacifist constitution after Shinzo Abe victory

Prime minister wins upper house elections, giving his coalition enough seats to push ahead with controversial changes

The Guardian    11 July 2016

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has called for a debate on rewriting the country’s pacifist constitution after his Liberal Democratic party [LDP] and its allies secured a supermajority in upper house elections on Sunday.

The LDP, its junior coalition partner Kōmeitō, and several like-minded smaller parties and independent MPs now control two-thirds of the 242 seats in the upper house. The ruling coalition already has a similar majority in the more powerful lower house.

Conservative MPs have enough seats to push ahead with constitutional changes, including scrapping the war-renouncing article 9 – a prospect that has caused alarm in China and among many Japanese who value their country’s postwar pacifism. Any amendments passed in parliament would then require approval by a simple majority in a nationwide referendum.

Abe had studiously ignored the constitution issue during the upper house campaign, insisting that the election was an opportunity to reaffirm public support for his troubled economic policy, as he sought to capitalise on the lack of a credible alternative offered by the opposition.

The LDP won 56 of the 121 seats – half the upper house total – being contested, while Kōmeitō secured 14 seats. Abe had set a goal of winning a combined 61 seats.

But speaking soon after his landslide victory, Abe said his party had always been committed torewriting the postwar constitution. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper quoted him as saying that he hoped deliberations by expert panels and a deeper public debate would lead to a consensus on which parts of the constitution needed changing.

The most controversial move would be a revision of article 9 to allow Japan’s self-defence forces to act more like a conventional army. The clause forbids Japan from using force to settle international disputes and restricts its land, air and naval forces to a strictly defensive role.

Rewriting the constitution, imposed by the US occupation authorities after the second world war, has been the ideological driving force behind Abe and other conservatives who believe it unfairly restricts Japan’s ability to respond to new threats such as international terrorism, an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.

However, Abe risks losing the political capital he has built over the past three and a half years if he is seen to be neglecting the economy in favour of constitutional reform.

“The key question will be whether he can carry out structural reforms,” said Nobuhiko Kuramochi, chief strategist at Mizuho Securities. “If Abe fails to do so, despite the political freedom he has gained, that will be negative for foreign investors’ appetite for Japanese stocks.”

Xinhua, China’s official news agency, described Sunday’s election result as a threat to regional stability, as it had given MPs who support constitutional reform an unprecedented advantage.

“With Japan’s pacifist constitution at serious stake and Abe’s power expanding, it is alarming both for Japan’s Asian neighbours, as well as for Japan itself, as Japan’s militarisation will serve to benefit neither side,” Xinhua said in a commentary.

Some analysts played down the prospects for change, noting that the loose collection of pro-reform parties and independents had yet to reach a consensus on which parts of the constitution should be altered.

“It’s the first time to have two-thirds in both houses of parliament, but you can’t find any issue on which the two-thirds can agree,” said Gerry Curtis, professor emeritus at Columbia University.

But Curtis added: “With these numbers … he [Abe] is going to want to see what he can achieve. That means less attention to the economy and a lot of spinning over the constitution.”

3.      New dawn for Philippine-China relations?

The Al Jazeera   July 05, 2016

When it comes to China, what matters is development and bilateral diplomacy rather than confrontation and deterrence.

Filipino President-elect Rodrigo Duterte (right) talking to Chinese envoy Zhang Jianhua during a meeting in Davao City, southern Philippines on June 2 [EPA]

"I will ask the [Philippine] Navy to bring me to the nearest point in South China Sea that is tolerable to them and I will ride a jet ski‎. I will carry a flag, and when I reach Spratlys, I will erect the Filipino flag," declared Davao City mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, during the Philippine presidential campaign.

Not short of machismo, he even dared China, which is locked in territorial disputes with the Philippines, to a boxing match or a gun duel (Suntukan o barilan).

The tough-talking provincial mayor, who has leapt from one controversy to the other, was just proclaimed as the Philippines' 16th president.

Though only gaining the plurality of votes, the newly-elected Filipino president has been behaving like a modern king (Caudillo), giving long-winded and largely incoherent speeches, hosting spontaneous press conferences at midnight, brazenly issuing threats to critics, including the media, and swiftly consolidating support in the Philippine legislature, where he enjoys a "super-majority" support.

His penchant for provocative statements - and reputation for off-the-cuff bravado - has raised concerns that he will be a diplomatic disaster for the Philippines.

Often compared to the United States Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, many have come to question Duterte's competence to act as a steady commander-in-chief capable of handling delicate foreign relations, especially with great powers such as China and the US.

A more careful examination of Duterte's background, speeches and his key advisers, however, reveals a more pragmatic and astute leader who is intent on repairing frayed ties with China and decreasing the Philippines' excessive dependence on the US.

Shifting sands

Over the past few years, the Philippines has emerged as one of the most strident critics of Chinese assertiveness in adjacent waters.

After three decades of relatively stable bilateral relations, President Benigno Aquino of the Philippines made the unprecedented decision to take China to international court over maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

Unlike the outgoing administration, Duterte has openly called for direct talks with Chinese leadership and joint development agreements in the South China Sea.

In addition, the Aquino administration stepped up bilateral security cooperation with traditional allies, such as the US, as well as Asia-Pacific powers, such as Japan and Australia.

Under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, the Philippines granted the US military extended access to its bases in order to deter further Chinese adventurism in Manila-claimed waters.

The Philippines also struck key defence pacts, such as the Status of Forces Agreementwith Australia, paving the way for regular bilateral military exercises, and a defence equipment transfer agreement with Japan, paving the way for Tokyo to export advanced weaponry to its Southeast Asian ally.

To be fair, all these (defensive) measures were adopted in response to China's de factooccupation of the Scarborough Shoal in 2012. The contested land feature falls well within the Philippines' 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, but lies 900km away from China's nearest shoreline.

Rising tensions in the South China Sea led to a virtual collapse in bilateral communication channels as well as a dramatic decrease in Chinese investments in the Philippines.

Today, the Philippines and China have among the most toxic bilateral relationships in Asia.

Chinese President Xi Jinping hasn't held a single formal summit with his Filipino counterpart, who, in turn, has often adopted pugnacious rhetoric and demurred from deeper economic ties with China.

Calibrated unpredictability

In contrast, Duterte, who is a self-proclaimed "socialist" - with long-established ties with Filipino communists - has adopted a more conciliatory language towards China.

One of the most consistent themes in his speeches is the necessity to find a common understanding in the South China Sea.

For the newly-elected president, when it comes to China, what matters is development and bilateral diplomacy rather than confrontation and deterrence.

In one of his speeches, he went so far as satiating that if China will "build [the Philippines] a train around Mindanao, build [the Philippines] a train from Manila to Bicol ... build [the Philippines] a train [going to] Batangas, for the six years that I'll be president, I'll shut up [on the sovereignty disputes]."

  

Latest News Clips 2016.07.11

                     

1.  Britain Rattles Postwar Order and Its Place as Pillar of Stability

By New York Times    JUNE 25, 2016

LONDON — Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about an even bigger issue: Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?

Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders and ideologies around the globe.

Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration. Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in the Middle East are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism. China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous. Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.

Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining as never before to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.

Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security and economic prosperity.

Now Britain symbolizes the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the European Union weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy. It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict — even as nationalism is surging again.

 “It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former American representative to NATOwho is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”

The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“History has never set any precedent,” the new bank’s president, Jin Liqun, once wrote of the United States and its Western allies, “that an empire is capable of governing the world forever.”

2.  Ruling on South China Sea Nears in a Case Beijing Has Tried to Ignore

New York Times   6 July, 2016

BEIJING — Five judges and legal scholars from around the world presided over a hearing last fall in an elegant, chandeliered room in The Hague. Arranged before them on one side of the chamber were lawyers for thePhilippines, armed with laptop computers and notepads.

On the other side were three empty chairs.

For more than three years, China has refused to participate in the proceedings of an international tribunal considering a challenge to its expansive claims in the South China Sea, arguing that the panel has no jurisdiction to rule on the dispute with the Philippines.

But with a decision scheduled to be announced next week, Beijing seems to be getting nervous. In a show of strength, it kicked off a week of naval exercises in the South China Sea on Tuesday near the disputed Paracel Islands, where the Chinese military has installed surface-to-air missiles.

And in recent months, it has mounted an arduous campaign outside the courtroom to rebut the Philippines and undermine the tribunal, enlisting countries from Russia to Togo to support its claim to waters that include vital trade routes and may hold oil and other natural resources.

The flurry of activity is a sign of how much is at stake in what was once an obscure legal case before an obscure arbitration panel. The outcome could alter the dynamics of the South China Sea conflict, shifting it from a race to establish physical dominance over the waters to a conspicuous test of Beijing’s respect for international law and multilateral institutions.

China has pulled ahead in the physical race, dredging sand to build one island after another over the objections of its neighbors and the United States, and equipping many of the islands with airstrips and radar. But if the tribunal rules in favor of the Philippines on key issues, it could put President Xi Jinping of China on the defensive — or, some worry, push him into a corner.

“This is a matter of wider significance than the South China Sea,” said Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean ambassador at large, noting that China has signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is the basis of the Philippine complaint and the tribunal’s deliberations.

“The importance of the issue is whether international rules will be obeyed,” Mr. Kausikan said. China, he added, “cannot pick and choose which rules to follow or only comply when convenient.”

Sensing an opportunity, the Obama administration has begun a diplomatic push of its own, backing the tribunal and persuading allies to speak out for a “rules-based order at sea” and the use of international law to settle territorial disputes.

Neither Washington nor Beijing paid much attention when the Philippine foreign secretary, Albert del Rosario, began the case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013, not long after China wrested control of an atoll known as Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.

The State Department’s senior diplomat for East Asia, Daniel R. Russel, has said he was unaware of the Philippine case at the time. The Chinese leadership quickly dismissed the tribunal without extensive consultation with the foreign policy establishment, several Chinese scholars said.

     

Beijing’s position has not changed. Because the sovereignty of scattered reefs, rocks and islands in the South China Sea is in dispute, it argues, the tribunal cannot rule on competing claims to the waters surrounding them. The Convention on the Law of the Sea says nothing about the sovereignty of land.

But the Philippines has been careful to frame its complaint in a way that sidesteps the question of who has sovereignty over the islands and reefs.

For example, it has asked the tribunal to declare that nine specific reefs and rocks, including some that China has built into artificial islands, are too small to be used to assert economic rights to the waters around them, regardless of who controls them.

The Convention on the Law of the Sea allows a nation to exercise sovereignty over waters up to 12 nautical miles from its coast, and it grants economic rights over waters on a nation’s continental shelf and to 200 nautical miles from its coast. But the treaty says reefs that are entirely submerged at high tide and artificial islands cannot be used to justify any maritime rights.

3.    The Guardian view on shootings in the US: time to tackle problems shamefully ignored

Deaths at police hands and the killing of officers in Dallas highlight longstanding racial tensions and a stubborn attachment to guns

The Guardian  8 July 2016 

Before Barack Obama went to bed in the early hours of Friday – he had just arrived in Poland for a Nato summit – he delivered a statement about two fatal shootings this week by the police that were caught on video, heightening racial tensions. When the president woke, he had to deliver another statement, about five policemen shot dead in Dallas, Texas. Such is the alarming and dangerous speed of events in America as it confronts some of the most racially charged incidents for decades.

In the years after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, race in the US dropped down the news agenda, at home and abroad. But the changes won in legislation and court rulings were not matched by conditions on the ground. There were improvements for some in education and employment, but life was not visibly different for the bulk of the African-American and Latino populations. In too many major cities, segregation remained a reality. Even the capital, Washington DC, where politicians spoke grandly of freedom, equality and tolerance, remained deeply divided. It is America’s dirty little secret.

Race went back on to the news agenda in 2013 with George Zimmerman’s acquittal over the fatal shooting of the African-American teenager Trayvon Martin, and it has stayed there ever since. The police shooting of Michael Brown was followed by the deaths of other unarmed black Americans in encounters with the police. There was the appalling shooting of nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. And this week the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile; and on Friday five policemen shot dead by sniper fire, with a suspect reportedly saying he was upset about recent shootings and wanted to kill white officers.

Such cases risk inflaming racial tensions, with no end in sight until America tackles the underlying causes. It is a terrifyingly huge challenge, dodged for too long. First, there is the segregation in the cities. Second, vast inequality: in Detroit, 10% of white people live in poverty but 33% of black people. And third, the country’s stubborn attachment to guns.

President Obama, in his statement about deaths at the hands of the police, cited statistics showing minorities are more likely to be pulled over, searched or shot by officers. It was incumbent on the country to root out deep-seated racial biases, he said. Last month’s Pew Centre survey on attitudes towards race in the US highlights the gulf in views. It found 88% of blacks said the country needed to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites, with 43% sceptical that such changes would ever occur. Only 53% of whites said the US still had work to do and only 11% expressed such scepticism.

A White House led by Hillary Clinton offers a better chance of at least attempting change than one led by Donald Trump. The question is whether, against a backdrop of austerity, she has the courage to devote the billions that would be needed to make a start in addressing inequality. On guns, she has been surprisingly outspoken in saying that as president she would seek reforms. There is scope for some restrictions short of the kind of sweeping changes that happened in the UK after the Dunblane school massacre. There could be tighter checks on gun ownership, a campaign to replace the unbending leadership of the National Rifle Association and a ban on powerful automatic weapons. Why did anyone need such guns, President Obama asked on Friday.

In his late-night statement, he referred to the Black Lives Matter campaign in words that seemed prescient next day: “When people say ‘black lives matter’, it doesn’t mean that blue lives don’t matter. But right now, the data shows that black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents.”

The imperative for America is to transform that “data”, tackle problems shamefully ignored after the civil rights movement and try finally to end a centuries-old racial divide.