Sunday, February 19, 2023

In Russia's push into Africa, Sudan is the strategic prize

Analysis: Russia's inroads into Africa serve to counterbalance threats to its influence on the international stage, with Sudan Moscow's most significant foothold.



Analysis
Giorgio Cafiero
16 February, 2023

While the West continues imposing stringent sanctions on Moscow while trying to make Russia a global pariah nearly one year into the Ukraine War, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been busy visiting African capitals.

His two latest visits to Africa, which came within ten days of each other, underscore the continuation of Russia’s positive relationships with many governments in the Global South notwithstanding Western efforts to further weaken and isolate Moscow.

On 8 February, Lavrov arrived in Sudan shortly after visiting Mali, Mauritania, and South Africa. While in Khartoum, Russia’s chief diplomat took advantage of an opportunity to thumb his nose at the US and other Western powers.

“We discussed the need to coordinate within international institutions, reform the (UN) Security Council, and build a multipolar world,” announced Lavrov at a press conference.

"Russia currently has a strong base of operations in Mali and the Central African Republic; but with deeper ties to Sudan, it could connect these footholds into its own arc of influence"

His visit was important to Moscow’s efforts to bolster its relationship with Sudan’s military against the backdrop of Western pressure on the African country to establish civilian rule. Although nothing too tangible resulted from the Sudanese leg of Lavrov’s latest African tour, it highlighted the critical role that Sudan plays in Russia’s Africa foreign policy as Moscow makes more inroads into the continent.

“Sudan is a big prize strategically for Russia in Africa,” Cameron Hudson, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Africa Program, told The New Arab. “Russia currently has a strong base of operations in Mali and the Central African Republic; but with deeper ties to Sudan, it could connect these footholds into its own arc of influence.”

In a TNA interview, Dr Samuel Ramani, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, identified Sudan as Russia’s “most significant foothold” in East Africa.

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“It is true that Russia has managed to make forays toward Ethiopia over the common support for sovereignty in the Tigray war and they’ve maintained their alliance with Eritrea, which is strengthened by the fact that Eritrea is the only African country that’s consistently voted for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations. But the economic and security depths to these partnerships are quite limited. So, Sudan is their most important partner in that region.”

At the end of the Cold War, Moscow lost Soviet client states in Ethiopia and South Yemen. Ever since, Moscow has sought new opportunities to achieve a resurgence in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. Sudan serves these Russian interests.

Moscow’s flagship project is in Port Sudan, located on Sudan’s Red Sea coast. In 2017, Moscow and Khartoum signed an agreement to establish a Russian naval base at this seaport through which 90 percent of Sudan’s imports arrive.


A view of the Russian Navy frigate RFS Admiral Grigorovich (494), anchored in Port Sudan in 2021. [Getty]


Signed toward the end of Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s three decades in power, this agreement permitted the Russians to construct the base, reportedly with Emirati assistance, which would be capable of hosting Russia’s nuclear-powered ships and leased to the Russians for a quarter of a century.

But with the Biden administration putting pressure on Khartoum to not move forward with the project, it has been frozen since mid-2021. “The Russians are hoping that a relationship with a friendly warlord like [Rapid Support Forces commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (a.k.a. Hemedti)] could lead to a revival of that project,” explained Dr Ramani.

"Russia is increasingly presenting itself as providing an alternative to the traditional western-led models of development and diplomatic relations"

Hudson told TNA that “with the potential of a naval base on Sudan’s Red Sea coast, Russia could project influence into the Arabian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and feed its growing network across Africa”.

Economic interests in Sudan’s natural resources, chiefly gold, are important to Russia’s agendas in the country. Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent implementation of Western sanctions, the Russians have worked with the Sudanese military’s leadership to smuggle gold out of Sudan.

According to a CNN report, as of last summer the Russians had extracted billions of dollars worth of gold from Sudan, bypassing the government in Khartoum and depriving the African country of badly needed state revenue to the tune of hundreds of millions of USD.

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Countering Western pressures


Stronger relationships with countries in the Global South such as Sudan help Moscow counter Western-led efforts aimed at squeezing and isolating Russia. “In the eyes of the Kremlin, the Lavrov visit allows Moscow to credibly demonstrate to the international community that it’s still a player in geopolitics,” Colin P. Clarke, the director of policy and research at the Soufan Group, told TNA.

“In other words, Russia has not been completely shut out of dealing with other countries because of its invasion of Ukraine, it still has friends, particularly in Africa.”

Moscow “wants to show that such NATO policies do not have much heft outside of Europe,” said Dr Gregory Aftandilian, a non-resident fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and a senior professorial lecturer at American University, in an interview with TNA.

“Visits by Russian officials to non-European countries like Sudan fit this pattern…Sudan is an important geo-strategic country in Africa with mineral resources and a substantial coastline on the Red Sea that is attractive to Russia.”


Protesters stand atop a United Nations armoured vehicle as they demonstrate carrying a Russian flag in Ouagadougou on 2 October 2022. [Getty]

The larger picture

The deepening of Russian-Sudanese relations must be understood within the context of Moscow’s quest to further establish itself as a great power with growing clout across the African continent. Against the backdrop of huge challenges which Russia faces in Ukraine, such inroads into Africa serve to counterbalance real threats to Moscow’s influence on the international stage.

In African countries such as Mali, perceptions of France and the US as neo-colonial powers have offered Moscow opportunities to move in and build new relationships and counterterrorism partnerships via the Wagner Group.

Russia’s message to these governments is that Moscow stands in defence of their sovereign rights and, unlike the West, will sell arms to these states without attaching strings concerning domestic governance.

"As long as secondary sanctions aren't imposed, Sudan is going to maintain an equilibrium and a balance between NATO and Russia"

When Bashir ruled Sudan and the West worked to isolate his regime over the situation in Darfur and other sources of tension, Russia used its veto power at the UN Security Council to undermine those Western efforts.

Today, as Washington, London, and Paris try to influence Sudan’s political transition toward democracy, Moscow is appealing to Sudan’s military by stressing its position that no outside actor should interfere in Sudan’s internal issues.

“Russia is increasingly presenting itself as providing an alternative to the traditional western-led models of development and diplomatic relations,” Hudson told TNA. “To the extent that Russia has a strategy in Africa, it seems simply as a foil to Western interests.”

The implications for US interests in Africa are significant. Nonetheless, the White House does not appear to have a coherent set of policies aimed at reversing rising Russian influence in Sudan or other African countries.

“The US desperately needs a strategy to counter Russia in Africa but unfortunately the Biden administration has been somewhat quiet on how it plans to deal with Moscow’s moves on the continent,” according to Clarke’s assessment.

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If the Biden administration sees Russia’s relationship with Sudan as increasingly problematic from the standpoint of Western efforts to squeeze Moscow, it is worth considering possible actions that Washington might take against Khartoum.

Although the US has at least not yet imposed secondary sanctions on Sudan over Russia’s gold mining activities, Washington possibly doing so later could cause some difficulties for Khartoum as it carefully navigates tensions between the West and Moscow while seeking to avoid being locked in NATO and Russia’s struggle against each other.

“As long as secondary sanctions aren’t imposed, Sudan is going to maintain an equilibrium and a balance between NATO and Russia,” Dr Ramani told TNA.

Time will tell how long Khartoum can continue striking this delicate balancing act as East-West bifurcation accelerates and the Ukraine War shows no signs of ending any time soon.

Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics. Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero
Roger Stone Tweets, Then Deletes, Fake Soros Conspiracy Photoshop To Attack DeSantis Aide

By Hunter Walker
February 17, 2023 12:56 p.m.

The looming GOP primary is leading to some wildly conspiratorial right-on-right violence.

Ron DeSantis is widely expected to launch a White House bid, and the Republican Florida governor has begun to take preemptive, incoming fire from former President Trump and his allies. On Monday night, Roger Stone, the far-right former Trump adviser and infamous political dirty trickster, used a fake photoshopped image to attack one of DeSantis’ top aides, Christina Pushaw.

In a tweet, Stone shared a picture that — at first glance — appeared to show Pushaw alongside billionaire financier George Soros.

“Ron DeSantis’s Ukrainian Handler and her real boss.…” Stone wrote.


Soros, who donates to progressive causes, has long been a fixture of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the far right that paint him as a nefarious global force. There’s a lot to unpack here, but, first off, the picture was a fake.


John Cardillo, a former host on the ultra-conservative cable channel Newsmax, quickly debunked Stone’s photo by tweeting it side by side with what appeared to be the original image of Pushaw that it was taken from. In the real photo, Pushaw was standing with Cardillo, not Soros.




Cardillo was a prominent pro-Trump pundit. However, more recently, his social media posts have taken a turn, criticizing the former president while boosting DeSantis.

Stone, who did not respond to a request for comment, is no stranger to disinformation. He was a particularly influential figure in the 2020 election denial movement and was present in Washington D.C. as protests against Trump’s loss turned violent on Jan. 6, 2021. Soon after posting the image, Stone began to receive a steady stream of messages noting it was fake. He deleted his tweet a few hours later.


Pushaw, who also did not respond to a request for comment, is an interesting figure in her own right. She came into DeSantis’ orbit in early 2021 after writing an article on a right-wing website that attacked one of the governor’s critics and pressing for a job with his team. She became the governor’s press secretary in May 2021. Last August, as speculation about a potential presidential bid ramped up, Pushaw left his office to join his reelection campaign team.

During her stint with the governor, Pushaw has become one of DeSantis’ most high-profile allies. She has earned a reputation for brawling with reporters and Democrats on Twitter, often using incendiary rhetoric. Pushaw was influential in promoting the use of the term “groomer,” which had become popular in QAnon circles to target individuals who its conspiracy theorist adherents believed to be pedophiles. Pushaw employed the term as a catch-all slur for critics of DeSantis’ legislation that prohibited discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. During her time with DeSantis, Pushaw has also helped connect him with far-right figures, including election deniers and anti-vaccine conspiracists.

Prior to joining DeSantis’ team, Pushaw worked in Eastern Europe, including for Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and Ukrainian politician who is currently imprisoned under conditions that have been decried by international observers. Last year, after being contacted by the Justice Department, Pushaw belatedly registered as a foreign agent for work she did for Saakashvili between 2018 and 2020. At the time, DeSantis criticized coverage of Pushaw’s foreign lobbying as a “smear.”

Stone’s tweet seemingly referenced Pushaw’s past foreign work. The right has become increasingly critical of the U.S.’s relationship with Ukraine as America has provided financial and military aid to that country in its ongoing conflict with Russia.

While it was just a small social media spat, the episode is a telling one. When Trump announced his re-election bid last November, he was the only major Republican candidate in the field. On Wednesday, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s U.N. ambassador, threw her hat into the ring and became his first real, official rival.

As the field becomes more crowded and some Republicans break from Trump, there is surely going to be more intra-right-wing infighting. And, with conspiracy-minded political brawlers like Stone and Pushaw involved, those fights are likely to push the boundaries of both taste and facts. In other words, it’s going to get ugly out there.


Hunter Walker (@hunterw) is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo. He is an author and former White House correspondent whose work has appeared in a variety of publications including the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and New York Magazine. He can be reached at hunter@talkingpointsmemo.com
Raquel Welch was a 'stealth' Latina until she wasn't — a reflection of the times

“She was in a complicated space about it,” scholar Brian Herrera said of Welch’s ethnicity. “And she arrived in a transitional period of how Latinos are understood in U.S. culture.”

Actress Raquel Welch was born Jo-Raquel Tejada; her dad was Bolivian. Her trajectory represented "the complexity of the Latino experience," says film historian Luis I. Reyes. Hulton Deutsch / Corbis via Getty Images




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Feb. 17, 2023, 10:58 AM MST
By Raul A. Reyes

When Raquel Welch died this week at 82, condolences and tributes poured in from around the globe. The star of “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) and “The Three Musketeers” (1973) was lauded for her work on film, in television and on Broadway.

But another throughline of Welch’s life was her complicated relationship with her heritage. Like many Latinas, Welch faced challenges as she navigated her personal and professional life — and her connection to her background often reflected the times.


Jo-Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago in 1940. Her father, Armando Tejada, was a Bolivian-born aeronautics engineer, while her American mother could trace her roots back to the Mayflower.

Like many immigrants of his generation, Welch's father believed that assimilation was the only way to survive in the U.S. He banned speaking Spanish at home, and raised his family in La Jolla, California, removed from other Latino families.

“In a way he didn’t have a choice. There was a sense of shame on his part, of the confusion and the prejudice around against Latinos,’’ Ms. Welch said in a 2002 New York Times interview. “So he suffered a great deal. I suffered some. My suffering is more of a kind of psychological feeling of not knowing who I am.’’

Hollywood legend Raquel Welch dies at 82
FEB. 16, 2023

By the time she set her sights on Hollywood, Welch was a divorced mother of two, pursuing her career with her first husband’s surname. Even this compromise was initially not enough. When she signed with 20th Century Fox, the studio suggested that she change her first name to Debbie because Raquel sounded too ethnic.

“You just couldn’t be too different,” Welch said in her Times interview. She recalled that in her breakthrough role in “One Million Years B.C.,” her hair was dyed blond. “It’s a marketing thing.”

John Richardson and Raquel Welch in "One Million Years BC." 
Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images

“Back then everyone changed their names to fit the image they were trying to sell, or to fit the image the studios were trying to sell,” said Luis I. Reyes, author of “Viva Hollywood,” a comprehensive history of Latinos in film. “But there was a bias against what you would call foreign-sounding names.”

He compares Welch to other stars like Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn who altered their names for their careers.

If Welch did not actively promote her Latina identity when she first achieved fame, it’s largely because that was an unknown concept in the 1960s. Terms like “Hispanic” and “Latino” were not in general use at the time, and Hispanic Heritage Month would not exist until 1988.
'In a complicated space' about her heritage

Brian Herrera, an associate professor at Princeton, describes Welch as “a stealth Latino.”

“Her heritage was always there, always visible, and it was not a secret. Yet she was not locked into it,” Herrera said. Long before the media presented performers as Latino, he said that many Latinos were aware that Welch was “one of us.”

“She was in a complicated space about it,” Herrera said of Welch’s ethnicity. “And she arrived in a transitional period of how Latinos are understood in U.S. culture.”

While she was renowned as a sex symbol, Welch played a wide variety of roles. As the civil rights movement was flowering, she made history with her interracial love scenes in “100 Rifles” (1969), with the African American actor Jim Brown. She portrayed a transgender character (“Myra Breckinridge,” 1970); a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease (TV’s “Right to Die,” 1987); and a wealthy widow ("Legally Blonde," 2001).

In real life, Welch also became what the Hollywood Reporter termed an “unlikely heroine in the fight for actors’ rights,” when she successfully sued MGM Studios for breach of contract in 1981. She won $10 million after being fired from the film “Cannery Row” at 40 and being replaced by Debra Winger, who was 15 years younger. This was a landmark legal victory against sexism and ageism in the entertainment industry.
Raquel Welch at the Emmy Awards in 1987.
Bob Riha Jr / Getty Images


Blazing a path of 'Latino fusion'


It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Welch reclaimed her ethnic identity. “Latinos are here to stay,’’ she said at the National Press Club in 2002. “As citizen Raquel, I’m proud to be Latina.’’

When Welch did her interview later that year with The New York Times, it was widely regarded as her “coming out” as Latina. By then, she had been in Hollywood for nearly 40 years. “I’m happy to acknowledge it (my heritage) and it’s long overdue and it’s very welcome,” she said. “There’s been a kind of empty place here in my heart and also in my work for a long, long time.”


Welch’s belated embrace of her roots is not unlike that of some assimilated Latinos, who may not explore their heritage until adulthood. For Welch, this sparked a career renaissance, as she went on to perform in Latino-themed projects like “Tortilla Soup” (2001), “American Family” (2002) and “How to Be a Latin Lover” (2017). In 2001, she received an Imagen Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors the contributions of Latinos to the entertainment industry.

“She rediscovered her roots, embraced her roots when the times changed,” said the entertainment journalist and podcast host Jack Rico. “There must have been layers she had to work through, a kind of suppression of self that she didn’t need or want to hide anymore. And the market was certainly ready for her.”

Raquel Welch accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 
16th Annual Latino Media Image Awards in 2001. 
Lucy Nicholson / AFP via Getty Images

Had Welch pursued her career from the start as a Latina, Rico mused, she might have had a career more like Rita Moreno. But although Moreno became the first Latina to win an acting Oscar for “West Side Story” in 1962, he pointed out that Moreno usually played supporting roles. In contrast, he said, “from the beginning, Welch was an icon. She achieved classic, one-of-a-kind genuine Hollywood stardom, which is an incredible feat.”

After her passing, the National Hispanic Media Coalition praised Welch, noting that she “broke the stigma of Hollywood’s typical blonde bombshell,” and that she ultimately honored her identity by fighting typecasting standards that were set early in her career.

Author Luis I. Reyes believes that Welch deserves to be remembered as a uniquely American star.

“She went through a lot of stages in her career. She blazed a path so that someone like Ana de Armas could play Marilyn Monroe," he said. "She really represented the Latino fusion of contributions to American culture, and the complexity of the Latino experience.”


Raul A. Reyes
Raul A. Reyes, a lawyer, is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly and the Huffington Post.

HER LATINO  CHARACTER APPEARED IN WESTERNS

    

 

A Doodle Reveals da Vinci’s Early Deconstruction of Gravity

Long before Galileo and Newton used superior mathematics to study a fundamental natural force, Leonardo calculated the gravitational constant with surprising accuracy.



A mysterious triangle on Page 143 of The Codex Arundel notebook seemed to show Leonardo deconstructing gravity. Credit...The British Library

By William J. Broad
Feb. 17, 2023

When Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting a masterpiece or dreaming up flying machines, he was pondering the mysteries of gravity. The Renaissance thinker considered himself as much a man of science as an artist and spent untold hours exploring how the “attraction of one object to another” could affect such things as the flight of birds and the fall of water.

Now, scientists have discovered that Leonardo did detailed experiments that sought to illuminate the nature of gravity a century before Galileo and some two centuries ahead of Newton’s making its investigation an exact science. The scientists’ study of his gravitational ideas and experimentation was published earlier this month in the journal “Leonardo.”

“Nothing could stop him,” Morteza Gharib, an author of the paper and a professor of aeronautics at California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “He was far ahead in his thinking. It could not wait for the future.”

Z. Jane Wang, a professor of physics at Cornell University who has studied some of da Vinci’s pioneering analyses but was not involved in the current paper, said the new study revealed a man determined to find an iron law of nature that would shed light on the overall dynamics of falling objects.

“It’s not enough” to call the polymath an artist, Dr. Wang said. More accurately, she added, he was “a quintessential” man of the Renaissance, which gloried in the revival of not only art and literature but also science and explorations of nature.

Leonardo has long been famous for his technical ingenuity and versatility, for his sketches of flying machines and fighting vehicles. He also made advances in geology, optics, anatomy, engineering and hydrodynamics, the arm of science that explores the behavior of fluids.

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of da Vinci, reports that as a close observer of nature, he gave much attention to how birds shift their center of gravity as they twist, turn and maneuver in the wind. He also said that Leonardo realized that gravitational attraction kept the seas from falling off the earth.


A self-portrait of da Vinci from around 1512.Credit...Pictures From History/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

Dr. Gharib said he learned of Leonardo’s gravity experiments while examining an online version of The Codex Arundel, named after a British collector, the Earl of Arundel, who acquired it early in the 17th century. Da Vinci composed the collection of hundreds of papers between 1478 and 1518 — that is, between the ages of 26 and 66 — the year before his death. The papers now reside in the British Library. The collection features his famous mirror-writing as well as diagrams, drawings and texts covering a range of topics in art and science.

What caught Dr. Gharib’s eye is what he calls “a mysterious triangle” near the top of Page 143. Its strangeness lay in how Leonardo’s sketch showed an adjoining pitcher and, pouring from its spout, a series of circles that formed the triangle’s hypotenuse. Dr. Gharib used a computer program to flip the triangle and the adjacent areas of backward writing.

Suddenly, the static image seemed to come to life. “I could see motion,” Dr. Gharib recalled. “I could see him pouring stuff out.” It was a eureka moment that unveiled Leonardo’s precocious experiment.

The effects of gravity are typically seen as causing something to fall straight down — be it a dropped ball or Newton’s apocryphal apple. In gazing at Leonardo’s drawing, Dr. Gharib realized that he had managed to split the effects of gravity into two parts that revealed an aspect of nature normally kept hidden.

The first effect was the natural downward pull. The second was added when the holder of the pitcher moved it along a straight path parallel to the ground, pouring out sand or something else along the way. In the drawing, Leonardo noted where the movement of the pitcher had begun, labeling it with the capital letter A. Then, to show the falling material, he added a series of vertical lines going down from the triangle’s top line, the series getting longer as the pitcher moved farther and farther from its starting point. Their growing lengths defined the hypotenuse.

The setup turned gravity’s hidden nature into visible increments. The pitcher experiment, Dr. Gharib said, revealed that gravity was a constant force that resulted in a steady acceleration — a steady gain in speed. Leonardo illustrated the gain as the pitcher’s contents falling lower and lower over time. He succeeded in deconstructing gravity.

Video

 

Researchers at CalTech recreated Leonardo’s pitcher experiment using ball bearings to demonstrate the “equalization of motion.”CreditCredit...CalTech


The researchers say Leonardo wrote in the codex that he witnessed fast-moving clouds from which pellets of hail had fallen, which they believe inspired the experiment.

Dr. Gharib said “the fascinating part” of Leonardo’s feat was that it let him estimate a constant of nature, the gravitational constant, represented today in physics by the letter G. The constant quantifies the exact strength of gravity’s pull and thus how quickly it can accelerate an object.

Despite the crudeness of his experimental setup 500 years ago, da Vinci, Dr. Gharib said, was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 percent of the modern value.

“It’s mind boggling,” Dr. Gharib said. “That’s the beauty of what Leonardo does.”

The researchers say that Galileo and Newton could better address the gravitational question because they had better tools of mathematics and better ways of measuring time precisely as objects fell.

Dr. Gharib agreed with Dr. Wang in seeing da Vinci as far more than an artist and suggested that his fame as a pioneering scientist could skyrocket if more technically knowledgeable experts probed The Codex Arundel and other sources. In his biography, Mr. Isaacson reports that more than 7,200 pages of Leonardo’s notes and scribbles survive to this day.

Dr. Gharib said that he hesitated to peer more deeply into The Codex Arundel lest he find himself tempted to focus exclusively on the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. “I’m like a kid in a toy store,” he said. “I’m afraid of even looking at it.”

He said many art historians had examined The Codex Arundel — but not scientists. “It’s an open book they haven’t looked at yet, haven’t spent time exploring,” he said. “There are so many other things to be discovered.”

William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer. He joined The Times in 1983, and has shared two Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont Award. @WilliamJBroad

UN Secretary-General Calls For Radical Transformation Of Global Financial System To Tackle Pressing Global Challenges

UN Secretary-General calls for radical transformation of global financial-
system to tackle pressing global challenges, while achieving sustainable
development

UN Chief reiterates call for G20 countries to agree on $500 billion annual stimulus
for Sustainable Development Agenda

17 February 2023, New York - With the failure of the global financial system to effectively cushion the impacts of current global crises on the Global South — the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the ongoing climate emergency — the UN today called for the urgent need for a significant increase of finance for sustainable development.

“Today’s poly-crises are compounding shocks on developing countries – in large part because of an unfair global financial system that is short-term, crisis-prone, and that further exacerbates inequalities,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the occasion of the launch of the SDG Stimulus released today.

“We need to massively scale up affordable long-term financing by aligning all financing flows to the SDGs and improving the terms of lending of multilateral development banks,” stressed the Secretary-General. “The high cost of debt and increasing risks of debt distress demand decisive action to make at least $500 billion dollars available annually to developing countries and convert short term lending into long term debt at lower interest rates.”

A financial system that works for all
Halfway to the 2030 Agenda deadline, progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – our roadmap out of crises – is not where it needs to be. To reverse course and make steady progress on the Goals, the SDG Stimulus outlines the need for the international community to come together to mobilize investments for the SDGs – but, in so doing, create a new international financial architecture that would ensure that finance is automatically invested to support just, inclusive and equitable transitions for all countries.

The current global financial system – originally created to provide a global safety net during shocks – is one in which most of the world’s poorest countries saw their debt service payments skyrocket by 35% in 2022. The “great finance divide” continues to proliferate, leaving the Global South more susceptible to shocks. Developing countries don’t have the resources they urgently need to invest in recovery, climate action and the SDGs, making them poised to fall even further behind when the next crisis strikes – and even less likely to benefit from future transitions, including the green transition.

As of November 2022, 37 out of 69 of the world’s poorest countries were either at high risk or already in debt distress, while one in four middle-income countries, which host the majority of the extreme poor, were at high risk of fiscal crisis. Accordingly, the number of additional people falling into extreme poverty in countries in or at high risk of entering debt distress is estimated to be 175 million by 2030, including 89 million women and girls.

Even prior to the recent rise in interest rates, least developed countries that borrowed from international capital markets often paid rates of 5 to 8 per cent, compared to 1 per cent for many developed countries.

SDG Stimulus Offers

The SDG Stimulus aims to offset unfavorable market conditions faced by developing countries through investments in renewable energy, universal social protection, decent job creation, healthcare, quality education, sustainable food systems, urban infrastructure and the digital transformation.
Increasing financing by $500 billion per year is possible through a combination of concessional and non-concessional finance in a mutually reinforcing way.

Reforms to the international financial architecture are integral to the SDG Stimulus. As highlighted in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, financing sustainable development is about more than the availability of financial resources. National and global policy frameworks influence risks, shape incentives, impact financing needs, and affect the cost of financing.

The SDG Stimulus outlines three areas for immediate action:
First, tackle the high cost of debt and rising risks of debt distress, including by converting short-term high interest borrowing into long-term (more than 30 year) debt at lower interest rates.
Second, massively scale up affordable long-term financing for development, especially through strengthening the multilateral development banks (MDB) capital base, improving the terms of their lending, and by aligning all financing flows with the SDGs.
Third, expand contingency financing to countries in need, including by integrating disaster and pandemic clauses into all sovereign lending, and more automatically issue SDRs in times of crisis.

Central role of International Financial Institutions
The international financial institutions remain at the heart of this agenda. Of immediate urgency, there are three important ways in which the Multilateral Development Banks can act.

First, the MDBs must massively expand the volume of lending, including concessional lending. This can be achieved through increasing their capital bases, better leveraging of existing capital and implementing recommendations of the G20 Capital Adequacy Framework Review, and re-channeling Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) through MDBs. As long as countries remain in need of urgent resources the SDG Stimulus will also call for a new round of SDRs.

Second, MDBs must improve the terms of their lending, including through longer-term lending, lower-interest rates, more lending in local currencies, and the inclusion of all vulnerable countries in lending programmes.

Third, MDBs – as well as all public and private actors – must explicitly incorporate the SDGs into their framing, their operations and all stages of the lending process and disaster and pandemic clauses must be integrated into all debt contracts to provide immediate relief in times of crisis.

This means adopting a transition approach, which aligns investments with the SDGs while also considering specific country and development contexts, and the trade-offs that may be involved on the path towards a more resilient, just, and inclusive global economy. At the national level, the UN also stands ready to support, including through supporting the development and application of SDG-aligned Integrated National Financing Frameworks (INFFs).

Member States – including the Group of Twenty (G-20) – must play their part. It is clear that the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatment (CF) has failed. The SDG Stimulus calls for providing immediate relief to all countries in need, including through debt suspensions, re-profilings, exchanges and write-downs where necessary, as well as the creation of a permanent mechanism to address sovereign debt distress.

As underscored by the UN Secretary-General, the SDG Stimulus, while ambitious, is achievable: “Investing in the SDGs is both sensible and feasible: it is a win-win for the world, as the social and economic rates of return on sustainable development in developing countries is very high.”

But to make this happen, “urgent political will to take concerted and coordinated steps to implement this package of interconnected proposals in a timely manner is critical.”

Bretton Woods 2.0 is sorely needed, both to fulfil the function for which it was originally designed for and to prepare the world, and its vulnerable people, as we head into uncertain terrain.

The link to the SDG Stimulus is here.

© Scoop Media

Update on Race, College Admissions and Public Opinion

POLLING MATTERS

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on how Harvard and the University of North Carolina use race in college admissions is expected by early June. Informed expectations are that the high court will find against the two universities and rule that race cannot be considered as a factor in admissions.

The use of race or other ascriptive characteristics in college admissions (and in many other situations in American society) has a long history. Most selective colleges in the past explicitly took such characteristics (religion, ethnic background, gender) into account in their admissions policies. It was only in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s that most Ivy League schools began to admit students with the ascriptive characteristic of being female. Highly selective schools admitted few Black students until after World War II.

The general trend of U.S. history has been to remove such considerations in making hiring and admissions decisions, under the force of law.

Harvard and U.N.C. argue that the situation today has become more complex, and that taking race or other ascriptive characteristics into account in an affirmative way, without bans or explicit quotas, has a net-positive effect on all students involved.

This diversity argument centers on the assumption that admitted students help educate, socialize and stimulate other students on campus. Admitted students augment faculty, staff and college resources as contributors to the overall college experience. Exposure to and interaction with students who have different backgrounds and life experiences benefit not only the students themselves but their peers and society in the long run.

As U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued before the Supreme Court, “College is the training ground for America’s future leaders,” and, it follows, a diverse student body with wide differences in student backgrounds, experiences, interests and perspectives provides a positive and important element of this training.

This is a complex argument (as evidenced by the testimony before the Supreme Court). We know that the American public agrees in principle with the idea that diversity on college campuses is good. But, and this is key, the public does not agree in practicality that colleges should achieve this objective by using race as a factor in admissions decisions.

  • In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, for example, 58% of respondents supported programs whose goal is to increase the racial diversity of students on college campuses. But in the same poll, 62% said race and ethnicity should not be considered at all in college admissions.
  • Washington Post/Schar School poll found that 64% of Americans think “programs designed to increase the racial diversity of students on college campuses” are “a good thing.” Yet almost the same percentage support the Supreme Court’s banning colleges and universities from considering a student's race and ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions.
  • Plus, Gallup’s historical trend question includes the diversity justification in the description of the “take race into account” argument and still has found consistently that the majority are opposed to the idea. (“Which comes closer to your view about evaluating students for admission into a college or university -- applicants should be admitted solely on the basis of merit, even if that results in few minority students being admitted (or) an applicant's racial and ethnic background should be considered to help promote diversity on college campuses, even if that means admitting some minority students who otherwise would not be admitted?”)

In short, the argument from selective colleges that increased diversity on campus is a good thing resonates positively with Americans, while the majority of Americans do not support explicitly increasing the probability of admission for applicants with certain diverse racial or ethnic characteristics as a mechanism to achieve that objective.

On this latter point, as I summarized in a 2018 review, “The most important conclusion from all of these data is that Americans do not like the idea of colleges using race and ethnicity as a factor in decisions on college admissions.” And research continues to support this conclusion.

  • Gallup polling in 2016 showed that less than 10% of Americans said race or gender should be “major factors” in college admissions decisions. By contrast, 73% said high school grades should be a major factor and 55% said the same about standardized test scores. Americans also did not think that parental alumni status or athletic ability should be major factors in admission decisions.
  • Pew Research last year listed eight factors and asked Americans how important each should be in college admissions decisions. Seventy-four percent said race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions, and 82% said the same about gender.
  • A March 2022 national survey conducted by Selzer Research for Grinnell College asked Americans, “In order to expand access to college for racial minorities, do you think a college or university should or should not be allowed to take a person's race into account when deciding whether to admit that person as a student?” About two-thirds of Americans -- 68% -- said “should not.”

A November 2020 vote on the issue in the blue state of California reflects the attitudes about race and college admissions evidenced in national polling. Fifty-seven percent of California voters rejected a proposal to repeal an earlier ban on the use of race in admissions to public universities in that state.

Americans’ support for diversity on campuses while at the same time opposing taking race into account in college admissions decisions reflects an important consideration in the analysis of public opinion. The public’s conceptual agreement with a principle or underlying value does not necessarily lead to agreement with specific suggestions for addressing that principle or value in practical terms. A somewhat similar example is provided by Gallup polling on public perceptions of the optimal role of government in providing healthcare for Americans. Americans support the argument that the U.S. government should ensure that everyone has access to healthcare. But they oppose the most obvious way to bring that about -- a government-run healthcare system.

Consideration of Race as a Compensatory Factor

There is also an argument that increasing the probability that applicants with certain racial and ethnic characteristics are admitted to selective colleges is justified as a compensatory mechanism -- serving to redress the lasting effects of previous epochs in American history, when individuals with these characteristics suffered the extraordinary harms engendered by the institutions of slavery and state-sponsored segregation.

Gallup data show that Americans recognize the lasting negative impact of the nation’s history of slavery on Black Americans today. But Gallup data and other research show that Americans are opposed to the idea of cash reparations to compensate for those practices.

These responses in reference to the more general situation of economic reparations suggest that the compensation/redress for past harms argument would not change Americans’ underlying opposition to the idea of taking race into account in college admissions.

Bottom Line

The admissions policies of Harvard, U.N.C., and presumably most other selective colleges continue to be out of sync with the views of the American public. These attitudes persist despite other evidence showing that Americans applaud, in theory, the value of diversity on college campuses and the need to recognize the continuing negative impact of the nation’s discriminatory history.

College officials can contend that the public doesn’t fully understand the nuances of the situation or that public opinion need not be a relevant factor in their policymaking. But ultimately, the public controls the levers of government at the state and national level, and of course the lifeblood of colleges -- their students -- comes from the general public population. So it may be useful for colleges to spend time understanding the complexities of American public opinion and in turn to provide broader and more convincing arguments to the public to support the college’s conviction that it is appropriate and justifiable to consider race as a factor in their admissions policies. This will be particularly important if, as predicted, the Supreme Court rules that such considerations are unlawful under the Constitution.

Colleges and universities face a number of challenges today, including declining enrollments, a growing partisan divide in how they are perceived, and increasing pressure from some state governments over aspects of their curricula and their faculty. Dealing with the aftermath of an adverse Supreme Court decision will potentially provide another addition to this list.

AUTHOR(S)

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is a Gallup Senior Scientist. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well. Twitter: @Frank_Newport
When TikTok fame builds schools: The story of Dora Moono Nyambe

Joseph Schmitt/Thomson Reuters Foudation

Popular Zambian TikTokker Dora Moono Nyambe sits with students at her school in Mapapa, Zambia in this undated photograph. Ms. Nyambe's TikTok fanbase donated almost $500,000 to build a school in Zambia.

Dora Moono Nyambe, a Zambian teacher, used TikTok to share videos of daily life in her village and drew millions of followers. Thanks to the donations from her fans, she plans to bring education to hundreds of rural African children.

By Nita Bhalla Thomson Reuters Foundation
February 17, 2023|LUSAKA, ZAMBIA

When Zambian teacher Dora Moono Nyambe started posting videos on TikTok three years ago, she had to ask her daughter’s friend how to use the popular social media platform.

Today, Ms. Nyambe has amassed 4 million TikTok followers with colorful videos of daily life in her village of Mapapa – and raised almost $500,000 to bring education to hundreds of marginalized rural children.

“I had no idea when I first started using TikTok – so I just started showing how life in the village was,” Ms. Nyambe told the Thomson Reuters Foundation via video call from the Zambian capital Lusaka.

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“How we lived under the thatch roof, how we cook on an open fire, and how we used to teach under a tree as there was no proper school for the children. The response was overwhelming – people were so interested.”

Ms. Nyambe started a crowdfunding appeal in 2020 with the aim of building a school for the children of Mapapa located 280 km (175 miles) north of Lusaka.

While some critics have accused her of using media that exploits the lives of vulnerable people to generate donations or publicity, Ms. Nyambe said the impact of her work should judge her.
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In three years, she has founded a charity called “Footprints of Hope” and built a school that has 350 children and 24 teachers. It has 12 classrooms, a kitchen, a dining hall, dormitories, and a science laboratory.

The TikTok star – who has 13 adopted and 150 foster children – has also installed four water boreholes in Mapapa, and hired teachers to work in schools in neighboring villages.
Teen pregnancies, child brides

While nearly 72% of Zambian children complete primary school, there are considerable regional disparities that mask the lack of education in many rural areas, according to the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF).

Girls are more disadvantaged than boys and have higher dropout rates in upper primary and secondary grades due to factors like teenage pregnancy, child marriage, and a lack of menstrual hygiene facilities in schools, UNICEF adds.

Almost 1 in 3 Zambian girls becomes a mother by age 18, according to government data. A similar percentage are married by the time they reach adulthood, according to the campaign group Girls Not Brides.

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Ms. Nyambe, who is not originally from Mapapa, said she visited the village in late 2019 to see a friend’s family and was shocked by the number of children who were out of school, and the high rates of early marriage and teen pregnancies.

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“As a teacher, as a human being, I felt I had to do something to bring education to these children,” said Ms. Nyambe.

With her savings and her then-five adopted children, Ms. Nyambe moved to Mapapa, bought a plot of land, and started teaching the village children under a tree in the hope that she would eventually be able to build a school.

Soon she began documenting her life on TikTok: creating videos of her cooking or dancing with her students, buying food for her children, and having conversations with them about issues from climate change to child marriage.

“I just tried different things and the TikTok posts seemed to get a lot of likes and comments ... people wanted to know more and wanted to help me,” said Ms. Nyambe.
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Dealing with online accusations

Ms. Nyambe’s videos now attract tens of thousands of views – even drawing the attention of U.S. popstar Meghan Trainor, who shared one of Ms. Nyambe’s videos of the school dormitories set to Ms. Trainor’s hit song “Made you look.”

Ms. Nyambe’s charity funds the school, and also supports rural children through food distribution, clothing drives, and health assistance.

A book titled “Under a Zambian Tree” documenting her journey was released on Feb. 7, with proceeds of the first 5,000 copies going towards her charity. ​

Ms. Nyambe said she has had to negotiate with villagers to allow their children to attend school and has rescued many girls from child marriages – often having to reimburse the families for the cost spent on their weddings.

The former English teacher has faced online abuse, with some accusing her of “charity porn” and exploiting the students for personal gain.

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Ms. Nyambe said much of the negativity came from people in Zambia who said she was a fraud or painting a bad image of the southern African country.

“Most comments are positive, but on almost every post, there will be a comment where I am accused of being a scammer, stealing money, or exploiting the children,” she said.

“The trolling used to bother me a ton. But with everything comes growth. ... I know I am not using the children and if people came to Mapapa, they would see it, too.”

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Another impending challenge is a possible ban of Chinese-owned TikTok in the United States, from where she gets most of her followers and donations.

Ms. Nyambe said she planned to grow her following on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube and wants the school to become more financially self-sufficient through activities like raising chickens and planting kitchen gardens.

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But she cannot imagine leaving TikTok behind.

“There is no way I would have been able to achieve what I have if it wasn’t for all the TikTokers who have supported me,” said Ms. Nyambe.

This story was reported by Thomson Reuters Foundation

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2024 Republicans are done with the Affordable Care Act. It might not be done with them.
Updated Feb 17, 2023
REUTERS/Randall Hill/

Republican presidential hopefuls are firing up crowds with attacks on President Biden’s age, his spending and border policies, and “wokeness” writ large. But one go-to applause line from the last several campaigns has gone missing: Obamacare.

The 2024 Republican primary is likely to be the first in which the Affordable Care Act is treated as settled law over a decade into its embattled existence.

“I would be surprised if it isn't,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, told Semafor. “I haven't seen any evidence that people are looking to relitigate at this point a 12-year-old law.”

It’s a dramatic shift from 2016, when GOP candidates vying for the White House regularly trashed Obamacare, and 2020, when President Trump was leading efforts to overturn the law in court.

With Obamacare repeal no longer a unifying goal, it’s not clear where candidates will end up positioning themselves on access to health coverage. Trump and Nikki Haley made no mention of health care in their announcement speeches.

We reached out to seven current and possible candidates with a detailed list of questions about their positions on the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid. Only New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu responded, saying through a spokesman that “a repeal to the Affordable Care Act cannot happen until a viable, free market solution is on the table that lowers costs and reduces government bloat.”

Joseph Zeballos-Roig
JOSEPH'S VIEW

It may be possible to skate through the Republican primaries without getting into too much detail on health care. But Republicans will have to address the issue sooner or later.

Democrats have only grown more confident running on protecting the ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare and are clearly signaling they will be major issues in the general election.

In addition to Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence’s ACA repeal attempts in the White House, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis voted to repeal the ACA as a GOP congressman and was part of a conservative faction that resisted an early repeal-and-replace plan in 2017 until it allowed insurers in some states to raise prices for people with pre-existing conditions whose coverage lapsed.

Haley and DeSantis also rejected expanding Medicaid in their states through the law as governors. Sununu reauthorized his own state’s Medicaid expansion, with some changes.

Biden already seems eager to make Republicans pay a political price for blocking Medicaid dollars. “The only reason Medicaid expansion hasn’t happened here is politics,” he said at an event in Florida last week.

For their part, Republicans appear less interested in pursuing major health care reform again after failing to undo Obamacare and overhaul Medicaid, wary of the enormous political backlash it generated at the time.

“Healthcare has always been this big complicated minefield that if you say the wrong thing, you get hurt politically,” Chris Pope, a senior healthcare fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, told Semafor. “I think that is the dominant mood among Republicans.”

So far leading Republicans have mostly talked about more incremental ideas that are less polarizing, like more price transparency for hospital services, along with some conservative mainstays like work requirements for Medicaid.

Pence tweeted out an op-ed by former Trump health official Seema Verma this week calling for Medicare and Medicaid to pay hospitals a fixed amount based on a patient’s diagnosis, a favorite of many health care wonks.

The America First Policy Institute, a think-tank organized by Trump administration veterans, released a platform last year that did not include repealing Obamacare, but called for changes like encouraging telemedicine, giving states more flexibility with Medicaid programs, and expanding access to more barebones coverage outside of the ACA.

James Capretta, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, described the ideas in play as relatively modest.

“American health care is a $4.3 trillion supertanker,” he told Semafor. “This is like a flea on the side of the supertanker.”

But Democrats will have ways to force the debate back to the ACA. Under President Biden, Democrats in Congress beefed up the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies, which have lowered premiums and pushed the uninsured rate down to record lows. They expire in 2025, setting up a general election fight over whether to continue them that’s so far flown under the political radar.

One health care expert who’s worked with past Republican presidential campaigns said the GOP shouldn’t cede health care debates to Democrats.

“What’s going to be important is for Republicans to have a constructive agenda on reducing the cost of health care and not merely avoid the issue because it's politically challenging,” Avik Roy, a former health care adviser to Mitt Romney, told Semafor.

Title iconROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Some conservatives see an opportunity to go on offense against Biden’s boost to ACA subsidies by framing them as a corporate giveaway.

“We don't think health insurance companies should get the vast majority of the revenue from taxpayers,” Brian Blase, a former Trump healthcare adviser, told Semafor. “We think they should have to compete for consumer dollars.”

Shelby Talcott contributed reporting.