Citizen Cartwright

China loans pushing poorest countries 'to brink of collapse'

A dozen of the developing countries most indebted to China are eating into their tax revenue and draining their foreign currency reserves to repay loans to the world's biggest government lender, says The Associated Press.

 

The countries in AP’s analysis — Angola, Congo, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Kenya, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Zambia — have as much as 50 percent of their foreign loans from China and most are devoting more than a third of their government revenue to paying off their foreign debt.

 

Harvard economist Ken Rogoff says, “China has moved in and left this geopolitical instability that could have long-lasting effects.”

And behind the scenes is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its "extreme secrecy" about how much money it's lent and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help, says AP. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been forced to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that put China at the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

 

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement to AP, disputes the notion that China is an unforgiving lender and echoes previous statements putting the blame on the Federal Reserve’s increase in interest rates. It says that if it's to accede to IMF and World Bank demands to forgive a portion of its loans, so should those multilateral lenders, which it views as U.S. proxies. 

Drug shortages

Thousands of patients are facing delays in getting treatments for cancer and other life-threatening diseases as drug shortages in the United States approach record levels, says The New York Times.

There are 238 items on the drug shortages list of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. 

 

“This is, in my opinion, a public health emergency,” says Dr. Amanda Fader, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a president-elect of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology, “because of the breadth of the individuals it affects and the number of chemotherapy agents that are in shortage right now.”

White House officials and members of Congress are grappling with an opaque and sometimes interrupted supply chain and quality and financial issues that are leading to manufacturing shutdowns, the Times says. They’re examining the underlying causes of the faltering generic drug market, which accounts for about 90 percent of domestic prescriptions.

 

Some shortages, like those of weight-loss drugs, are the result of high demand, while others have been attributed to overprescribing, including for antibiotics, or a lack of investment in potential alternatives.

The Biden administration has assembled a team to find long-term solutions for shoring up the pharmaceutical supply chain as the United States remains heavily reliant on medicines and drug ingredients from India and China. 

 

Officials have been debating possible measures including tax incentives for generic drugmakers and greater transparency around generic drug quality. The current incentives favor drugmakers with the lowest prices, which includes those that might cut corners — leading to disruptive plant shutdowns if the FDA requires a fix. 

 

The FDA, which employs a team of about 10 people who do the day-to-day work of mitigating and reporting drug shortages, has said it's seeking authority from Congress to get additional information about the drug manufacturing and supply chain.

 

Four Senate bills with bipartisan sponsorship could help get generic drugs to market more quickly by addressing tactics or loopholes causing delays, the Times says.

White House presses tech CEOs on AI, Congress races to get up to speed

Vice President Harris and other officials met at the White House on Thursday with the leaders of Google; Microsoft; OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot; and Anthropic, an AI start-up, as the Biden administration rolls out initiatives to ensure that rapidly evolving AI technology improves lives without putting people’s rights and safety at risk.

 

President Biden — who himself has tried out ChatGPT, according to officials —  stopped by the meeting.

 

“What you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger,” he told the CEOs.

 

The administration announced on Thursday an investment of $140 million to establish seven new AI research institutes. And the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to issue guidance in the next few months on how federal agencies can use AI tools. 

 

The administration also announced an independent commitment by top AI developers to participate in a public evaluation of their systems in August at the Las Vegas hacker convention DEF CON. 

 

Meanwhile, "The planet’s fastest-moving technology has spurred Congress into a sudden burst of action, with a series of recent bills, proposals and strategies all designed to rein in artificial intelligence,” says Politico.

 

But "nobody on Capitol Hill agrees on what to do about AI, how to do it — or even why,” Politico says. “Longtime congressional inattention is compounded by a massive knowledge gap.”

 

“There is a mad rush amongst many members to try to get educated as quickly as possible,” says Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. 

 

"While it’s somewhat unusual for the tech industry to want new regulations, the software lobby is eager to see Congress pass rules for AI,” Politico says. "That desire stems in part from a need to convince clients that the tools are safe — Chandler Morse, vice president for corporate affairs at software giant Workday, called 'reasonable safeguards' on AI 'a way to build trust.' But it’s also driven by fear that inaction in Washington would let less-friendly regulators set the global tone.”

It’s the 30th World Press Freedom Day

Since it was established by the U.N. General Assembly, "we have seen substantial progress towards achieving a free press and freedom of expression around the world,” says the United Nations. "The proliferation of independent media in many countries and the rise of digital technologies have enabled the free flow of information.”

 

"However, media freedom, safety of journalists and freedom of expression are increasingly under attack, which impacts the fulfillment of other human rights,” the U.N. says.

 

Reporters Without Borders says its World Press Freedom Index, issued annually on the May 3 anniversary, "spotlights the rapid effects that the digital ecosystem’s fake content industry has had on press freedom.”

 

Of the 180 countries ranked for 2023, Norway is first for the seventh year in a row. “Unusually – a non-Nordic country is ranked second, namely Ireland,” which pushes Denmark down to third, Reporters Without Borders says.

 

The United States is 45th (ouch), down three places from last year, because of the "environment for journalists (especially the legal framework at the local level, and widespread violence) despite the Biden administration’s efforts. The murders of two journalists (the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Jeff German in September 2022, and Spectrum News 13’s Dylan Lyons in February  2023) had a negative impact on the country’s ranking.”

 

The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide has reached a 30-year high as of the end of last year, says The Wall Street Journal, citing data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

 

World Press Freedom Day coincides with WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich’s fifth week of detention in Russia, the paper says.

 

Let’s take a minute to honor the reporters who risk their lives to report the facts. For a number of years I was an active volunteer for Amnesty International, to help people like this, who have the kind of courage I do not. 

Lack of trust in the news

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to a study of the way misrepresentation and underrepresentation of disadvantaged communities undermines their trust in news. The study was conducted by the Reuters Institute Trust in News Project.

The study’s report uses data from 41 focus groups in Brazil, India, Britain and the United States. 

The report looks at "how differences along lines of race, caste, religion, class, and place may point towards distinct needs and expectations around news and how this intersects with people’s sense of trust in important ways,” the institute says. 

In Brazil, the study focused on black and mixed-race audiences; in India, on audiences from marginalized castes or tribes and Muslim audiences; in Britain on working-class audiences, and in the United States on African American and rural audiences.

Although there were differences in the way study participants saw the world and criticized news media for their coverage of people like them, there were many commonalities in frustrations about news across these groups, the institute says. Most saw news media as not only out of touch but at times as an especially harmful force that did damage to their communities, either through neglecting them entirely or exploiting them, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, or sensationalizing in divisive and polarizing ways.

News media as an institution, especially in Britain, the United States and India, often were seen as an extension of systems aligned to serve those in power — systems many felt excluded from, the institute says.

It is "worth underscoring how similar issues have been raised by study after study after study for a very long time,” the institute says. In 1968, the report notes, the Kerner Commission critiqued similar distortions and inaccuracies in U.S news media.

An article on the report by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab says the report’s authors are clear that "though trust is thorny and multifaceted, there are opportunities for newsrooms to improve their standing in underserved communities. Those opportunities include relentlessly rooting out bias and inaccuracies, telling a 'more complete story' through news coverage that’s more positive and relevant, diversifying newsroom staffs, and being more engaged and present where people live and work.”

 

The take-home message of Reuters' report, to me, is the fundamental, systemic, long-time nature of this problem in countries with very different histories and economics.

 

I ran out of time working on this item yesterday because I was searching online for an update on solutions journalism — a U.S. media effort in recent years to focus not just on identifying problems, but on solutions to them. For example, The New York Times ran for several years a Fixes section, on "solutions to social problems and why they work.” 

 

An example of a Fixes article is titled “India’s barefoot lawyers,” from 2017. The Times’ summary of the article says: “In India's rural villages, few people seek the protection of law because lawyers are distant and expensive. Now paralegals are coming to help.”

 

The Times closed down its Fixes section in 2021. A list of the Fixes articles is here.

 

If you come across information on ways media are trying to address the problems Reuters points out, please let me know.

Good news on global population, health, climate solutions

Let’s end the week with good news from Future Crunch.

— The nonprofit Club of Rome has published a follow-up to its seminal 1972 Limits to Growth study, saying its long-feared "population bomb" may never go off. 

Global population will peak at 8.6 billion in 2050 and decline to 7 billion by 2100 if current trends continue, the group estimates. 

— Tuberculosis deaths in Africa dropped 26 percent between 2015 and 2021, the World Health Organization says. 

“African countries have made remarkable progress against TB. The question is no longer about whether we can end TB, but how fast we must act to reduce the disease burden, save lives and maintain a high momentum towards a TB-free world,” says Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.

— "Bangladesh isn't just ground zero for climate disaster,” says Future Crunch. "It's also a hotspot for solutions, where a mix of technology and community have resulted in cyclone-related mortality declining more than 1,000-fold in the past 40 years.”

"I tell my American friends, 'You should send your skeptics to Bangladesh! The awareness of climate change here is the highest in the world,'“ says Saleemul Huq, director of the Bangladesh-based International Center for Climate Change and Development. "But we have gone through the doom and gloom phase. That's yesterday's news in Bangladesh."

‘Epic’ win for climate justice at UN

The countries of the United Nations led by the island nation of Vanuatu adopted on Wednesday what they say is a historic resolution calling for the U.N.’s highest court to strengthen countries’ obligations to curb climate change.

Vanuatu Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau says the consensus vote at the General Assembly, co-sponsored by about 130 nations, is “a win for climate justice of epic proportions.” 

The United States did not support the resolution. "We believe that diplomacy – not an international judicial process – is the most effective path forward for advancing global efforts to tackle the climate crisis," says a senior Biden administration official.

Vanuatu, in the south Pacific, has been slammed by powerful climate-fueled cyclones, including two this month that have left 10 percent of its population in evacuation centers.

Pacific island law students are celebrating the vote, four years after they suggested the resolution to Vanuatu officials.

Bangladesh's foreign secretary calls the resolution's passage a "defining moment" that can help bridge the gap between climate finance promises made to vulnerable countries and what's delivered.

It could take the International Court of Justice about 18 months to issue an advisory opinion that could clarify financial obligations countries have on climate change; help them revise and enhance national climate plans submitted to the Paris Agreement; and strengthen domestic policies and legislation, Reuters says.

Netanyahu delays Israel judicial overhaul amid mass protests

The political factions opposed to Prime Minister Netanyahu have started setting up negotiating teams Tuesday after he paused the judicial overhaul plan that had set off unprecedented street protests, The Associated Press reports.

In recent weeks, Netanyahu had been unyielding in his pursuit of the overhaul, even as protests drawing hundreds of thousands erupted across the country, says The New York Times. On Sunday, he fired his defense minister, who’d spoken out against the plan.

That sent civil unrest to new heights, with work stoppages hitting hospitals, airports and schools and dissent increasing in the military.

“When there is a possibility of preventing a civil war through dialogue, I, as the prime minister, take a timeout for dialogue,” Netanyahu said in a speech announcing the postponement.

Netanyahu’s political skills enabled him to take power for the first time in 1996, defeating Shimon Peres after overcoming a 20-point deficit in the polls, says a Times analysis. And his ability to bounce back returned him to power, first in 2009 and then again late last year, despite a corruption trial.

But his decision to stay in politics despite being investigated, charged and tried for corruption led to a rift between him and more moderate allies, leaving him few potential coalition partners except among the far-right and ultraconservative parties.

That made him beholden to his allies’ priorities, including "profound judicial change,” says the Times.

Critics say Netanyahu has his own reasons for trying to undermine the judiciary: to derail his prosecution, an accusation he denies. But it was Netanyahu’s coalition allies, Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman, who drove the judicial overhaul in recent weeks, not Netanyahu himself, the Times says.

Beyond the judiciary, Netanyahu’s coalition partners are also undermining some of the foreign policy goals that most preoccupy him, including establishing ties for the first time between Israel and Saudi Arabia, strengthening the bond he helped create in 2020 between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and encouraging the United States to help Israel target Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

Netanyahu has put himself in an impossible bind, says a senior U.S. official, telling American officials and the Israeli public that he was looking for compromise, and yet trying to hold together the right-wing coalition members whom he needs to remain in power — and who refused to back down.

But late Monday, as news that Netanyahu had backed away spread in Washington, the question turned to how long he could last, says yet another Times article. His reputation for political skill and the ability to press for compromise has been tarnished, several officials say. The chances that his fragile, bare majority will hold seem slim.

Here is a compilation of experts’ views on what’s happening, by The Atlantic Council.

U.S. is 15th in World Happiness Report 2023

But it ranks 34th in the “happiness gap” between the top and bottom halves of the U.S. population, says this year’s report, from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a global initiative for the United Nations.

The top ten countries of the 156 ranked are:
• Finland (for the sixth year in a row)
• Denmark
• Iceland
• Israel
• Netherlands
• Sweden
• Norway
• Switzerland
• Luxembourg
• New Zealand

“The ultimate goal of politics and ethics should be human well-being,” says Jeffrey Sachs, a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and one of the authors of the report. “The happiness movement shows that well-being is not a ‘soft’ and ‘vague’ idea but rather focuses on areas of life of critical importance: material conditions, mental and physical wealth, personal virtues, and good citizenship. We need to turn this wisdom into practical results to achieve more peace, prosperity, trust, civility – and yes, happiness – in our societies.”

Amid 'boom times for doom times,' what the latest climate report actually says

The Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest report on Monday.

Also on Monday, Vox ran “Against doomerism.” 

“Pessimism is understandable given the chaotic state of the world as we see it presented to us,” says Vox. "But it badly understates both the amazing material and political progress humanity has made over the past couple of centuries, and especially in the last few decades; and the realistic hope we should have for a future that won’t simply continue, but continue to get better.”

Let’s look at what the IPCC itself says in its latest report on what we humans need to do about climate change. 

The IPCC press release headline is "Urgent climate action can secure a liveable future for all.”

It begins: "There are multiple, feasible and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today.
 
“'Mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action will not only reduce losses and damages for nature and people, it will also provide wider benefits,'” said IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee. 'This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”’

"In 2018, IPCC highlighted the unprecedented scale of the challenge required to keep warming to 1.5°C. Five years later, that challenge has become even greater due to a continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions.  The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change. 

"More than a century of burning fossil fuels as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use has led to global warming of 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. This has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world. 

"Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards. More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. In every region, people are dying from extreme heat. Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to increase with increased warming. When the risks combine with other adverse events, such as pandemics or conflicts, they become even more difficult to manage.

"In this decade, accelerated action to adapt to climate change is essential to close the gap between existing adaptation and what is needed. Meanwhile, keeping warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors. Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C. 

"The solution lies in climate resilient development. This involves integrating measures to adapt to climate change with actions to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions in ways that provide wider benefits.

"For example: access to clean energy and technologies improves health, especially for women and children; low-carbon electrification, walking, cycling and public transport enhance air quality, improve health, employment opportunities and deliver equity. The economic benefits for people’s health from air quality improvements alone would be roughly the same, or possibly even larger than the costs of reducing or avoiding emissions.

"Climate resilient development becomes progressively more challenging with every increment of warming. This is why the choices made in the next few years will play a critical role in deciding our future and that of generations to come.

"There is sufficient global capital to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions if existing barriers are reduced. Increasing finance to climate investments is important to achieve global climate goals. Governments, through public funding and clear signals to investors, are key in reducing these barriers. Investors, central banks and financial regulators can also play their part.

"There are tried and tested policy measures that can work to achieve deep emissions reductions and climate resilience if they are scaled up and applied more widely. Political commitment, coordinated policies, international cooperation, ecosystem stewardship and inclusive governance are all important for effective and equitable climate action.”

We can do it. Let’s.