The US is set to open the second-largest embassy in the world in the hills above Beirut. The embassy, costing $1bn and more than 43 acres in size, highlights America's commitment to the Middle East, but its focus on security and its fortress-like appearance has also prompted some criticism, with locals criticising embassy staff for failing to use local amenities. Embassies became increasingly security-conscious after the Islamic Jihad Organisation bombed the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, unraveling much of the building. This led former admiral Bobby Ray Inman to propose guidelines for the building and design of diplomatic buildings.
Israel's recent airstrikes in Gaza using "proportional response" tactics aimed solely at Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have been highly strategic in nature. Israel is trying to ensure that Hamas, which is a larger Islamist militant group, stays out of this conflict. Since Hamas has a much larger arsenal of rockets, which can paralyze life in Israel much more efficiently, Israel wants to weaken PIJ, funded by Iran, and drive a wedge between two Iranian allies on its borders. This strategy seeks to set back Iranian efforts to use its proxies to advance its regional ambitions and indirectly attack Israel and America.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was invited to attend an Arab Summit in Saudi Arabia last week, reflecting a trend of belated reconciliation in the Middle East between adversaries following years of conflict and rivalry. The shift has accelerated since the region's main Sunni and Shiite Arab powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively, agreed to restore diplomatic ties in March this year in a deal brokered by China. This new dynamic is being driven by the interests of US allies, which want to minimise polarisation, boost economic growth and counter the influence of Iran and Turkey.
Air strikes attacked Khartoum, the capital of Sudan on Thursday, as fighting continues to escalate and displace nearly one million people. Observers suggested the air strikes were carried out by the Sudanese army on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) aligned with the army, while a police reserve force also battled the RSF on the ground. The current conflict comes after a series of disputes over plans for the RSF to join the army and the future chain of command under an internationally backed deal towards a political transition towards civilian rule. The UN has launched a $3bn aid appeal for the country.
From Renaissance ideals to Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, architects and urban planners have created some of the most famous cities with specific ideals in mind. The author mentions an 8th century Kyoto, which had a grid system modeled from China's Chang'an (modern-day Xi'an), long before Manhattan existed; a scaled-down version was made of Nara, the capital before it; the city had temples, shrines, and delicate gardens to the city's backdrop of mountains. 15-minute cities were polarizing in the UK due to their association with low-traffic neighborhoods; Blooming with parks, temples and huge statues, Ramesses II's Pi-Ramesses, was built on the banks of a now-dry branch of the Nile, but was little more than a lost city buried under Egyptian fields for 3,000 years. In the wake of Europe's Black Death, Renaissance idealists harked back to Roman and Greek settlements, developing the concept of the Ideal City. Architects such as Maverick Filarete named his pioneering, star-shaped prototype the Sforzinda. Lastly, urban planner Ebenezer Howard sought a way for normal working-class families to escape the city, leading to garden cities such as Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City that influenced the capital cities of New Delhi and Canberra.
Leaders from the world’s seven largest advanced economies are gathering in Japan for the G7 summit, but not China, the country responsible for a significant share of global growth. The leaders are expected to condemn China’s use of trade attacks against neighbours and also note China’s framing of the G7 as an outmoded, Western, order. Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has invited leaders from Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam and Comoros to the G7 meeting in an attempt to engage with countries that will be pivotal in determining China’s future role in global order.
As G7 leaders arrive in Japan, the group is expected to take a strong stance against China's use of trade as a tool to allow them to attack opponents and to threaten Taiwan. Beijing's campaigns using economic leverage against countries such as Japan, South Korea and Australia have won it few friends, however, analysts note that while Hong Kong is likely to be on the G7 agenda, the delegates may be hesitant to put too much pressure on Beijing. The G-7 summit will be followed by the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore where US allies are expected to push Washington to clarify its intentions in the South China Sea, following the US decision to sail a warship close to China's controversial artificial island-building activities and ahead of an international court ruling on China's vast territorial claims in the area. Pompeo is not attending, raising concerns that the machinery of US defence and foreign policy cannot quickly adjust to cope with the changes a Trump administration would bring.
Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, has written an opinion piece for The Telegraph in which he emphasised the importance of maintaining the unity of the G7 in the face of a range of geopolitical, environmental, and health challenges. Suga listed issues ranging from the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, as well as the regional situations involving Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific, and called for the G7 nations to take a united, multilateral approach to combat them.
Researcher Troel Arboll, an Assyriologist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, believes romantic kissing might not be an innate human behavior, instead developing in complex societies as a learned mating behavior. "Kissing doesn't seem to be universal across all cultures. It coincides with increased complexity of social interactions," he said. A report in Science on Thursday discusses a new perspective on the ancient history of kissing with a theory that romantic kissing developed in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia.
Half of world’s largest lakes, reservoirs losing water: Study
Al Jazeera
23-05-19 05:33
More than half of the world's large lakes and reservoirs have decreased in size since the early 1990s, with climate change being the leading cause, according to a new study published in the journal Science. The decline has been driven by unsustainable human water consumption, temperatures rising and resulting in greater water loss to the atmosphere, dam construction, changes in rainfall and run-off, and sedimentation. Climate scientists had anticipated that dry areas would become drier and wet areas would become wetter with climate change, but significant loss of water is also being experienced in more humid areas. The researchers based their findings on satellite data collected between 1992 to 2020 of nearly 2,000 large lakes across the globe.
Global actors have been seeking their own solutions to the Ukrainian conflict, given concerns of differing views within the Group of Seven, the bloc composed of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the US. While Western states have vowed to provide huge amounts of military aid to Ukraine, countries elsewhere have been pushing for cessation of hostilities and a negotiated peace. Many politicians hope to give diplomatic initiatives a chance and have put forward peace plans with Russia and Ukraine. This includes China’s initiative, as China has significant leverage over Russia, but it has been deemed by analysts as working to preserve Russia’s advantage and undermine Ukraine, whereas Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has touted a nonaligned “peace club” to mediate a truce, irritating Washington DC further when accusing the West of helping to fuel the conflict with its shipments of weapons.
The connection between police defunding and anti-capitalist environmentalism has become apparent in the US after the deadly beating of a black man by five black police officers and the shooting death of an environmental activist in Atlanta. Numerous protests have been sparked across several cities with the overarching theme of systemic disruption in policing and environmentalism. Political ideology campaigns in these instances illustrate the desire for the elimination of the current systems that govern American society and the global economy. For instance, Defend the Atlanta Forest, a group that set up the “autonomous zone,” tweeted, “Police work for capitalism, to protect profit and bottom lines, not for us. It’s no coincidence that the funders of #CopCity (a new police training centre) are the major corporations & wealthy families of Atlanta.”
The connection between environmentalists and the free market is of a long pedigree, yet often overlooked. Capitalism’s notion of constant need for growth coupled with socialism’s poor track record for environmental management creates a stable ground for both ideologies to coexist. Indeed, common antagonism towards capitalism runs through both defunding the police and environmental movements.
It is key for the US to recognise that it is currently under attack at a systemic level. Until a peaceful and unified resolution can be reached, the American society will continue to face social and economic challenges stemming from standoffs between different political ideologies.
Chevron's $5bn acquisition of Noble Energy in 2020 inaugurated a new era for the Middle East, in which security and economic issues took precedence over historical grievances, opening an opportunity for the US to exert beneficial influence. However, the Trump administration had only a few months left in office to take advantage of this opportunity. The equivocal attitude of the succeeding Biden administration towards both energy issues and America’s role in the region may jeopardize this opportunity. Nonetheless, the collision of energy and geopolitics that supported the Abraham Accords in 2020 signals a new era in the Middle East with opportunities and challenges for the United States. Chevron’s new Israel page on its website represents this progress as there is no effort to mask the connection through a Noble subsidiary. Therefore, there could be appetite for expanding the Accords in the future under more forward-looking U.S. leadership.
Sudanese civilians are facing mass looting by armed factions amid ongoing fighting between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Army, according to witnesses. Although the RSF is dominant on the ground in the capital, Khartoum, and the army frequently uses air strikes, police are reported to have vanished from the city following the outbreak of fighting on 15 April. Civilians have subsequently been “attacked in our homes and losing everything,” said one government employee. Both the army and the RSF accuse the other group of looting and have released videos to back their claims. The fights erupted over plans for the RSF to join the army, disrupting political transition. So far, the fighting has displaced over 700,000 people internally and caused an estimated 200,000 to flee to neighbouring countries.
Over a million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan so far, including 250,000 refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been battling in Sudan for weeks, with hundreds of people killed. Approximately 843,000 Sudanese people have been displaced internally. Refugees have also migrated to Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan, neighbours with their own poorly-funded humanitarian crises. Since the Sudanese conflict began, Egypt has taken in around 110,000 refugees, with approximately 5,000 arriving there each day. In addition, those that have approached the UNHCR "are in a distressed state having been exposed to violence or traumatic conditions in Sudan, and having suffered arduous journeys," said UNHCR spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh.
Syria’s return to the Arab League, with President Bashar al-Assad attending the summit in Saudi Arabia, represents an important shift in how regional actors view the survival of al-Assad’s government as well as a pragmatic move. Arab states see Syria’s crisis as an Arab problem and need to pursue strategies to mitigate the conflict’s toxic and destabilising impacts on the region, including drug trafficking networks, refugee crises, weakened border security, and Iran’s intensified role in Syria. The Arab consensus is that addressing Syria’s problems requires engaging with Damascus. Although some Arab states, such as Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco, still maintain that al-Assad’s government is illegitimate, Riyadh used its influence on the Arab and Islamic world to persuade them not to obstruct Syria’s re-entry. Experts suggest that without Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members being able to invest in Syria, Damascus is unlikely to distance itself from Iran.
The world is seeing a rise in "parametric" insurance as developing countries are hit by worsening drought, storms and heatwaves due to climate change. In these schemes, if conditions reach a predetermined threshold beyond which they are considered extreme, there is no need to prove losses as payments to policyholders can be made within a few days. Paramount insurance payouts are on the rise, with Swiss RE reporting a jump of 40% between 2021 and August 2022. Insurance analysts predict the market, currently worth about $11.7bn, could reach $29.3bn by 2031. However, some industry experts question whether such products will be financially viable in the long term, predicting too-frequent payouts would increase premiums. While these type of insurer-backed schemes in developing regions are often still reliant on charities, NGOs, national governments or wealthier nations, there is an aspiration that policyholders one day cover more if not all of the premium. However, the urgency of the situation and frequency of extreme weather events could make that difficult.
Hong Kong's Wong Chun-ting and Doo Hoi-kem have been handed a “decent” mixed doubles draw for the World Table Tennis Championships in Durban. The No 6 seeds will avoid facing a pairing from China, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan before the semi-finals, if they make it that far. Hong Kong’s men’s team coach Liu Guodong believes “a top-eight spot or even a medal is achievable.” Wong and Doo are expected to face Indian pair Sathiyan Gnanasekaran and Manika Batra, the world No 5, in the quarter-finals, before a potential face-off with the tournament’s top seeds Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingsha in the last four.
Spotify, the leading audio streaming service, reported that revenue in Q2 increased 23% YoY to €2.3bn ($2.67bn), better than the €2.18bn estimated by analysts. Subscriber growth also beat expectations, with a net addition of 7 million premium subscribers, bringing the total user figure to 232 million, an increase of 30% YoY. However, the company's net loss increased from €394m a year ago to €418m. Spotify also announced its acquisition of SoundBetter, a platform which connects music creators and producers with professionals for hire.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has said that more than one million people have been displaced by five weeks of fighting in Sudan, with a quarter of a million people becoming refugees. The violence began in April when disagreements between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, escalated. Both men had held the top positions on Sudan’s 2019 ruling council for two years and staged a military coup two years later. The fighting centres on disputes over the plans for the RSF to be absorbed into the army and about the chain of command in a new political transition. The conflict has killed hundreds of people and half of Sudan’s population needs humanitarian aid, with over $3bn needed this yearalone to provide assistance inside the country and for those that flee across its borders. The tension between the two groups has also reached the western region of Darfur, with rivalries taking an intercommunal dimension in the region.
