China's Xi sends congratulations to Suriname president-elect Simons
Xi said he attaches great importance to the development of China-Suriname relations and that he is willing to work with Simmons to promote greater development of the strategic partnership between the two countries, Xinhua reported.
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eNCA
14 hours ago
- eNCA
MAGA-style 'anti-globalist' politics arrives in Japan
Populist ideals are gaining traction in Japan, spurred by right-wing politicians running rampant elsewhere railing against "elitism", "globalism" and immigration. While Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's coalition lost its upper house majority in an election on Sunday, the "Japanese first" Sanseito party, created only five years ago, increased its seats from two to 15. Sanseito's agenda comes straight from the copybook of right-wing movements such as US President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again", the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Nigel Farage's Reform party in Britain. This includes "stricter rules and limits" on immigration and foreign capital, opposition to "globalism" and "radical" gender policies, and a rethink on decarbonisation and vaccines, and pesticide-free agriculture. Founded on YouTube, Sanseito will "bring power back to the people", party leader Sohei Kamiya, a 47-year-old former teacher and supermarket manager, wrote in the Japan Times. - Cheap labour - Surveys have put immigration far down the list of voters' concerns, who are much more worried about inflation and the economy. But for Sanseito, the influx of newcomers into Japan -- where the immigration its economy badly needs is far lower than in other developed countries -- is to blame for a host of ills from crime to rising property prices to dangerous driving. JIJI PRESS/AFP | STR "It's fine if they visit as tourists, but if you take in more and more foreigners, saying they're cheap labour, then Japanese people's wages won't rise," Kamiya said at a campaign. But he added: "We are not exclusionary. We have never called to drive out foreigners." Meanwhile online platforms have been flooded with disinformation, some of which Japanese fact-checking groups and the government have debunked. Some posts falsely claimed that foreigners leave almost $3 billion of medical bills unpaid a year, or that Chinese residents on welfare doubled in five years. At a Sanseito election rally in front of Tokyo's Shinagawa station, where orange T-shirted party workers handed out "Stop destroying Japan!" flyers, one voter told AFP she was finally being heard. "They put into words what I had been thinking about but couldn't put into words for many years," said the 44-year-old IT worker on a precarious short-term contract. "When foreigners go to university, the Japanese government provides subsidies to them, but when we were going to university, everyone had huge debts." - Moscow meddling? - Russian bot accounts have been responsible for "large-scale information manipulation", according to a much-read blog post by Ichiro Yamamoto from the Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems think-tank. This has been helped by artificial intelligence enabling better translation of material into Japanese. More understanding towards Russia -- something which was long anathema for Japanese right-wingers -- is also a theme for Kamiya. "Russia's military invasion (of Ukraine) was of course bad, but there are forces in the United States that drove Russia into doing that," Kamiya told AFP, denying he is "pro-Russia". He was forced during his campaign to deny receiving support from Moscow -- which has been accused of backing similar parties in other countries -- after a Sanseito candidate was interviewed by Russian state media. - 'Zero illegals' - As in other countries, the rise of Sanseito and its success has prompted the government to announce new immigration policies, and other parties to make promises during the election campaign. Ishiba's LDP proclaimed the goal of achieving "zero illegal foreign nationals" and said the government will strengthen the management system for immigration and residency status. Eight NGOs issued a joint statement last week, since backed by over 1,000 groups, raising the alarm on "rapidly spreading xenophobia". "The argument that 'foreigners are prioritised' is totally unfounded demagoguery," the statement said. Hidehiro Yamamoto, politics and sociology professor at the University of Tsukuba, said that populism has not caught hold before because the LDP, unlike established parties elsewhere, has remained a "catch-all party". "The LDP has taken care of lower middle-class residents in cities, farmers in the countryside, and small- and mid-sized companies," Yamamoto said. And pointing to the rise and decline of other new parties in Japan in the past, he isn't sure Sanseito will last. "You can't continue gaining support only with a temporary mood among the public," Yamamoto said.
eNCA
2 days ago
- eNCA
At least 16 killed as Bangladesh fighter jet crashes into school
DHAKA - At least 16 people, mostly students, were killed Monday when a training aircraft of the Bangladesh Air Force crashed into a school campus in the capital Dhaka, the government said. More than 100 people were also injured in the accident, with at least 83 undergoing treatment in several hospitals, the office of interim leader Muhammad Yunus said. The Chinese-made F-7 BJI aircraft took off at 1:06 pm (0706 GMT) and crashed soon after at the Milestone School and College campus. An AFP photographer at the scene saw fire and rescue officials taking away the injured students on stretchers. Yunus expressed "deep grief and sorrow" over the incident in a post on X. "The loss suffered by the Air Force, the students, parents, teachers, and staff of Milestone School and College, as well as others affected by this accident, is irreparable," he said.
Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Daily Maverick
After US funding cuts, Mozambican children died — who bears responsibility?
Last month, Spotlight and GroundUp published a two-part exposé showing how US aid cuts led to the deaths of children in Mozambique. Here, Jesse Copelyn considers what led to this tragedy and who should bear responsibility for it. After the US Agency for International Development (USAID) abruptly terminated billions of dollars in overseas aid grants, the health system in central Mozambique was left in tatters. Earlier this year, I travelled to two badly hit provinces of the country to describe the toll. In one article, I reported how thousands of orphaned and vulnerable children in Sofala province had been abandoned by their USAID-funded case workers. Many of these children are HIV-positive and had relied on case workers to bring them their medicines or accompany them to hospital. Without them, some children stopped taking their treatment and died. In a second piece, I reported how USAID had cut funding for contractors transporting medicines and diagnostic tests to health facilities in Manica province. This led to shortages of HIV drugs at hospitals in the area, which also led to the deaths of children. Amid all this chaos, I was often curious to know from people on the ground who they held accountable for this situation and who they believed needed to solve the problem. My assumption was that they would call for the Mozambican government to help them out. I was surprised to find that in the affected villages which I visited, this was far from anyone's expectation. In fact, for most it was simply unthinkable that their government could do anything to save them. 'You mentioned the government,' one community leader said after I asked whether the state should intervene. 'But even these chairs we're sitting on are stamped with USAID logos. So what help can we expect from the government?' Indeed, the more I learnt about governance in Mozambique, the more understandable this attitude became. Throughout the country, core government functions have been outsourced to a combination of foreign governments, aid agencies, interstate bodies and private companies. For instance, many of the country's essential medicines are procured by a large international financing body called the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Up until January, the transportation of these medicines to hospitals was overwhelmingly financed by US aid agencies, as were the paycheques of many health workers. Outside of the healthcare sector, the story is similar. The main highway that I travelled along to reach different villages was built and paid for by Chinese corporations and banks. To keep hydrated I relied on bottled water supplied by private companies since the taps either didn't run or produced contaminated water. In many of the impoverished rural settlements that I visited, there was virtually no state infrastructure, and people received no financial support from the government. Instead, they primarily depended on aid organisations. The country's national budget has historically been heavily supplemented by foreign bodies, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Union. (Though much of this support was suspended in 2016/17.) Even national defence has been partially outsourced. When Islamist militants began rampaging through the northern province of Cabo Delgado, the government struggled to contain it and contracted Russian and South African mercenary groups. When that failed, they authorised a military intervention by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and invited a parallel mission by the Rwanda Defence Forces. It is thus no surprise that Mozambicans have virtually no expectation that their own government will come to the rescue when facing an emergency. Instead, they look outward. As one community leader in a rural village told me, 'Here, we depend on Trump.' Cash-strapped and corrupt Mozambique has 35 million people. About 2.5-million live with HIV, the second-highest HIV-positive population in the world after South Africa. Life expectancy is well under 60. The country is extremely poor: eight in 10 people live on less than $3 per day. The government is also deeply cash-strapped. The South African government spends 10 times more per citizen than the Mozambican government does. A large chunk of its spending goes towards paying off debt. At present, Mozambique simply doesn't have the money to build an effective health system, though had it spent its limited budget reserves more effectively over the years it could have developed a health system that was at least a bit more independent of donor support. Instead, the country's budgetary resources have often been wasted on corruption. Mozambique currently ranks 146th out of 180 in the world on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. This has directly played a role in its public health woes. One clear example of this is the Tuna Bonds scandal, in which state-owned companies took out $2-billion worth of loans, backed by secret state guarantees. This was supposedly to finance large fishing and maritime security projects. In reality, much of the money was siphoned off to enrich political elites, including the then-finance minister (who is now in prison). As a result of those decisions the country was swallowed by debt. And when the extent of the corruption was publicised in 2016, the IMF pulled its financial support for Mozambique. A detailed 2021 report found this directly led to a fall in economic growth and government spending. It states: 'Comparing the three-year average of 2016-18 to the three previous years, spending on health and education fell by USD 1.7 billion – entirely due to the debt.' The country's governance crisis is further demonstrated by the political unrest that engulfed the country after the October 2024 elections, triggered by accusations of election fraud. The accusations are likely to have been overblown, but international observers said the election was not free and fair. Even during the brief week I spent in central Mozambique, signs of corruption and mismanagement filtered into my interactions with officials. For instance, before I embarked on a multiday tour of one province, government officials told me that someone from the provincial health department would need to accompany me on my trip. This was apparently to make formal introductions to district-level officials that I hadn't asked to meet. For this apparently vital service, the man would need to be paid a per diem of roughly R500 a day for two days, they said. The civil servant in question was a very senior person in the provincial health department. Despite facing a collapsing health system in the wake of the US cuts, he was apparently ready to drop everything he had going for the rest of that week to follow me around. When I explained that I wouldn't pay a government official to stalk me, I was told that saying no wasn't an option. This is unfortunately the way things are done around these parts, said a local who helped arrange the tour. (Neither GroundUp, Spotlight nor I paid the bribe, incidentally.) US responsibility Against this backdrop, it is perhaps no surprise that defenders of the current US government have often resorted to arguments about moral responsibility when justifying the decision to abruptly slash aid. It is reasonable to ask why the American taxpayer should bear any of the brunt of Mozambique's public health system when so many of its problems have been caused by the Mozambican government itself. But it's not so simple. The Mozambican civil war from 1977 to 1992 destroyed the country. The anti-communist Renamo insurgency likely received millions of dollars of support from US evangelists, despite committing numerous atrocities. It is strongly suspected that the US government also materially supported Renamo. So the US's involvement in Mozambique has not been innocent. It could be argued that its aid spending was the least the US could do to make amends for its role in the war. Moreover, Mozambique didn't develop its high level of dependency in isolation. For more than two decades the US actively took responsibility for core functions of the country's health system. Up until January, the US government continued to sign numerous contracts with local organisations, pledging millions of dollars to help run life-saving health programmes for years into the future. The health system was consequently built around these commitments. If the US was going to take that much responsibility for the wellbeing of some of the world's most vulnerable people, then it had a duty to at least provide notice before pulling the plug. Instead, it chose to slash the funds instantly, and in a manner that needlessly maximised damage and confusion. Stop-work orders were issued overnight which required that people who were doing life-saving work down their tools immediately. Organisations decided to adhere to these instructions rigidly in the hope that their funding would be reinstated. At that point the Trump administration said it was only pausing aid funding pending a review, and no one wanted to give the reviewers a reason to terminate their programmes. The consequence was complete chaos. Orphaned children in extremely rural parts of Mozambique waited for their case workers to bring them their medicines, but often they simply never came. Many of these children had no idea why they had been abandoned. When certain case workers decided to defy the stop-work order and continue their work voluntarily, they were forced to do so in secret. To add fuel to the fire, the Trump administration routinely provided contradictory information to its former recipients and to the public. The initial executive order signed in January said all foreign development assistance would be suspended for 90 days, pending a review, and might be restored after this time. Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver which stated that the suspension wouldn't apply to life-saving humanitarian services. Rubio told the public that organisations providing these life-saving services could instantly resume their work under this order. Yet the organisations themselves received different instructions from their USAID officers. Rather than immediately continuing their work, they were told to submit revised budgets that only covered life-saving services and to wait for approval. Organisations rushed to submit these budgets by the deadline. But in the end, the green light never came and their funds remained frozen. This was not only the case in Mozambique; researchers estimated that virtually no funds were released under Rubio's waiver globally. In the meantime, Rubio stated that organisations that hadn't resumed life-saving activities were clearly unable to understand instructions or were simply trying to make a political point. Later on, the organisations received explicit termination notices, ending their programmes. Despite this, US embassies and several large media outlets continued to reference Rubio's order as if it was actually implemented en masse. Even as I write this, the on-again, off-again US aid story is unfinished. This mixed messaging created an enormous amount of confusion for staff of these organisations and the recipients of their work, ultimately for no clear benefit to the American people. There was simply never any reason to act this callously towards health organisations to whom USAID had pledged its support. In contrast to the rampant corruption which has plagued the Mozambican government, these organisations were heavily audited in order to continue receiving funding. The work they were doing was clearly making a material difference to some of the poorest people on Earth. In the far-flung settlements that I visited, villagers told me about how their lives had been transformed by these organisations. Many were only put on life-saving HIV treatment because of them. Whatever arguments one may want to advance about the importance of self-sufficiency and national responsibility, none of this justifies the US government administering the aid cuts in such a callous and confusing manner. DM
