Pregnant women struggle to find care after Pakistan's floods
 

RIAZAT BUTT and  SHAZIA BHATTI
Mon, October 17, 2022 

RAJANPUR, Pakistan (AP) — The first five months of Shakeela Bibi’s pregnancy were smooth. She picked out a name, Uthman, made him clothes and furniture. She had regular checkups at home and access to medicine. Then an ultrasound revealed the baby was upside down. The doctor told Bibi to take extra care and rest.

And then came this summer’s massive floods. Bibi’s home in the southern Pakistani city of Rajanpur was inundated.

When she spoke to The Associated Press last month, she was living in a camp for displaced families. With her due date approaching, she was afraid over the possibility of a breech birth with almost no health care accessible.

“What happens if my health deteriorates suddenly?” Shakeela said. She has a blood deficiency and sometimes low blood pressure, but she said she can’t have a proper diet in the camp. “I’ve been in a camp for two months, sleeping on the ground, and this is making my situation worse.”

Pregnant women are struggling to get care after Pakistan’s unprecedented flooding, which inundated a third of the country at its height and drove millions from their homes. There are at least at least 610,000 pregnant women in flood-affected areas, according to the Population Council, a U.S.-based reproductive health organization.

Many live in tent camps for the displaced, or try to make it on their own with their families in flood-wrecked villages and towns. Women have lost access to health services after more than 1,500 health facilities and large stretches of roads were destroyed. More than 130,000 pregnant women need urgent care, with some 2,000 a day giving birth mostly in unsafe conditions, according to the United Nations.

Experts fear an increase in infant mortality or health complications for mothers or children in a country that already has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Asia. They also warn of dangerous, long-term repercussions for women, such as an increase in child marriage and unwanted pregnancies because of the disruptions in the lives and livelihoods of families.

Rasheed Ahmed, a humanitarian analyst at the U.N. Population Fund, said the health system was already poor before, and he warned now of “death, disability, and disease” if the health of pregnant women is ignored.

“The biggest shortage is female health care workers, medical supplies and medicine,” he said. “Resources are another challenge. What are the government’s priorities? Are they willing to spend the money?”

At camps in the flood-hit towns of Fazilpur and Rajanpur, pregnant women told the AP they had received no treatment or services for their pregnancies since arriving at the camps nearly two months ago. Clinics handed out medicines for minor ailments, but nothing for mothers-to-be. The next day, after the AP visited a local medical center to alert their plight, female health workers went to check on the women and distribute calcium sachets and iron supplements.

Shakeela Bibi and her family eventually left the camp, taking their tent with them and setting it up close to their wrecked home. Authorities gave them a month’s worth of flour, ghee, and lentils. She is now past her due date, but doctors have assured her that her baby is fine and don’t think she will need a Caesarian.

Perveen Bibi, an 18-year-old who is five months pregnant and not related to Shakeela, said the lack of health facilities in the camp forced her to travel to a private clinic and pay for an ultrasound and check-up. But she was prescribed medicine she can’t afford to buy.

“I used to have a good diet, with dairy products from our livestock,” she said. The family had to sell their livestock after the floods because they had no place to keep them and no way to feed them.

“We need female doctors, female nurses, gynecologists,” said Bibi, who has one daughter and is expecting a boy. She had a son around a year ago, but he died a few days after his birth. “We can’t afford ultrasound or IV. We’re just getting by.”

In the camps, families of five, seven or more eat, sleep, and spend their days and nights in one tent, sometimes with just one bed between them. Most sleep on floor mats. Some survivors only have the clothes they fled in and rely on donations.

Outdoor taps are used for washing clothes, washing dishes, and bathing. The pregnant women said there were shortages of clean water and soap. They were scared of infections because of open defecation at the camps. A bathroom was set up, but it has no roof and tents surround it.

Amid the devastation, organizations and individuals are doing what they can — the UNFPA is delivering supplies for new-born babies and safe delivery kits across four flood-hit provinces.

A Karachi-based NGO, the Mama Baby Fund, has provided 9,000 safe delivery kits, which include items for new-borns, across Sindh and Baluchistan provinces, as well as antenatal and postnatal check-ups for 1,000 women. The Association for Mothers and Newborns, also based in Karachi, has provided more than 1,500 safe delivery kits, mostly in Sindh.

Ahmed from the UNFPA says pregnant women have different needs to the rest of the displaced population, needs that aren't being met by state efforts.

“The government’s response is very general, it’s for the masses. It’s about shelter, relocation," Ahmed said. “I’ve heard about women miscarrying because of mental stress, the physical stress of displacement and relocation,"

The health crisis triggered by the flooding will reverberate among women because it will take long to rebuild health facilities and restore family planning, according to Saima Bashir from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.

“Women and young girls are very vulnerable in this situation,” said Bashir. She pointed to increasing reports of child marriage.

Even before the floods, 21% of Pakistani girls were married before the age of 18, and 4% before the age of 15, according to U.N. figures.

The rate is increasing for several reasons. Some parents marry off their daughters as a way to obtain financial support from the boy's family so they can rebuild their homes. Others fear for the safety of their girls in displaced camps and believe marrying them off will protect them from abuse or secure their future. Also, the destruction of schools in the floods closes off other options; some girls who would have gotten an education or possibly gone on to work will stay at home instead.

In the next few years, those girls will get pregnant, Bashir said, especially given limited access to contraception.

“There will be more unwanted pregnancies,” she said. “This is ... compounding this crisis, and it’s adding to the population.”

A pregnant woman lies in her hospital bed for treatment after fleeing her flood-hit home, in Larkana District, of Sindh, Pakistan, Sept. 8, 2022. Pregnant women are struggling to get care after Pakistan’s unprecedented flooding, which inundated a third of the country at its height and drove millions from their homes. The UN says around 130,000 pregnant women in flood-hit areas require urgent healthcare and more than 2,000 are giving birth every day, most in unsafe conditions. 

(AP Photo/Fareed Khan, File)

Crude awakening: Public can now see full scope of global oil and gas reserves

M.A. Jacquemain - Yesterday 

Rise in renewables hasn’t slowed fossil fuels
Duration 4:10
View on Watch

Arecent survey of the world’s fossil fuel reserves has revealed that burning what is left of global supplies would produce emissions on a scale far higher than what was previously estimated.

The analysis, the first ever registry of global oil and gas reserves, determined that combustion on that level would release more than seven times the emissions allowable on our remaining “carbon budget” — the emission quota past which climate targets will no longer be met.

A collaboration between Carbon Tracker and the Global Energy Monitor, the registry uses comprehensive data gathered from more than 50,000 mines and oil fields across 89 countries, accounting for three quarters of global fossil fuel production.

“These tools for the first time provide an open source of information on carbon in the ground, an essential step toward reining in fossil fuel production and reining in climate change,” Ted Nace, the executive director of Global Energy Monitor, told The Weather Network (TWN).


Construction cranes stand silhouetted by the sunset at the Golden Pass LNG Terminal in Sabine Pass, Texas, on April 14, 2022. Golden Pass LNG, a joint venture between ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum, began as an import terminal and construction seen today will create export capability. (The Washington Post/ Getty Images)

The registry is the first database on fossil fuel production and reserves that is available to the public, and the first to track the impact this remaining supply promises to have on the carbon budget.

While much of the data recorded here has been available to the fossil fuels sector, making the information public will be a game-changer to climate analysts.

“Oil companies are not lacking in information. One of the key parts of OPEC's strategy has always been to keep a tight lid on information about reserves in the OPEC countries; by controlling information, you have more leverage to dictate prices,” Nace said.

“But this leaves global civil society — tens of thousands of NGOs, academics, activists, media organizations — suffering from information poverty, effectively paralyzing or at least diminishing substantive public discourse,” he added.

The research estimates that burning all of the remaining global supply would produce more than 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with the United States and Russia alone holding enough reserves to exceed the carbon budget.

Though, as the registry notes, “the most potent source of emissions is the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, which produces approximately 525 million tons of carbon emissions each year.”

Watch below: Electric vehicles are only green if the power charging them is green too  Duration 4:55   View on Watch

The analysis also determined that about 80 per cent of oil reserves in this country would have to be left in the ground for Canada to achieve Net Zero by 2050.

Such findings reflect similar research from a year ago which showed that most carbon reserves must stay in the ground, with oil and gas production slowing by three per cent annually up to 2050, if the target of 1.5°C of warming is to be met.

“We know we have an overhang of carbon, and that overhang is far in excess of what we could burn to safely meet climate targets,” Robert Schuwerk, executive director of Carbon Tracker’s North America Office, told TWN.

“What the registry is going to be able to do is show that these are not isolated decisions that should be made without consideration of the wider climate context,” Schuwerk added.

Power to the People: From a devastating oil spill to solar energy success

This emphasis on the supply side of the combustion equation is often ignored. Even the Paris Agreement “does not mention fossil fuels, despite the fact that such fuels account for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions,” according to the registry.

The registry will give policymakers and other analysts the tools they need to make informed decisions about the production side of the fossil fuel sector — including new builds like the Bay du Nord project off the coast of Newfoundland, which was recently greenlit by the Liberal government.

“The aim of the registry is to get not just that big picture at country level, but to drill down to the field level where decisions about licensing, project sanctions, development, and continued operation are made,” said Schuwerk.

The registry may force governments to pause in the future before rubber stamping projects like Bay du Nord.

“These tools will open up new ground for research and action by civil society and governments,” added Ted Nace. “What we're aiming to do is to empower a lot more voices.”

Thumbnail image: Aerial photo taken on Dec. 12, 2021, shows workers inspecting an oil well at Jidong Oilfield in north China's Hebei Province. (Liu Mancang/Xinhua via Getty Images)

ABOLISH PRISONS
Hurricane Ian brings renewed focus to 'life and death' struggle for prisoners during a disaster

N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY
Mon, October 17, 2022 at 9:53 AM·8 min read

The day before Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida, attorney Rene Suarez was preparing to help his client get out of jail in downtown Fort Myers.

He had secured an offer for probation so that his client would be released after a hearing. But when Ian struck, the courts closed, leaving her and many others who haven't been convicted of a crime stuck in a facility in a mandatory evacuation zone.

Although Lee County officials issued an evacuation order Sept. 27, the sheriff's office decided not to evacuate its two jails before the storm made landfall the next day.

It wasn't until a week after the storm that Suarez, whose office near the jail flooded and lost internet access, was able to speak to his client, who described poor sanitary conditions in the downtown jail and a rationing of water that was so severe she had gotten a urinary tract infection.

But until the courts reopened, Suarez couldn't get her out of jail.

"There should be some kind of a mechanism to get people in front of judges that have offers on the table that would get them out of jail, but they don't. And it's not just her," Suarez said. His client asked to remain unnamed for fear of retaliation; USA TODAY confirmed her identity through jail records.

Another local criminal defense attorney, Danielle O’Halloran, told USA TODAY their clients also said that officials were rationing water and that the jail may have experienced flooding.

While multiple spokespeople for the jail denied those claims to USA TODAY, advocates say there has long been the need for better emergency planning for jails and prisons ahead of disasters.

"We need to proactively change these systems. It's literally a matter of life and death," said Jenipher Jones, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild's Mass Incarceration Committee.
What are prisons and jails required to do?

As high winds and rising waters knock out electricity and running water, people in jails and prisons can be left without clean drinking water, food, medication, functioning toilets and air conditioning for days after a storm, said Alex Smith, a volunteer with Fight Toxic Prisons, an organization that campaigned for evacuations, stockpiling and mass releases ahead of Hurricane Ian.

"All of these things can increase the spread of disease and can increase people succumbing to preexisting conditions," he said. "There are also many elderly people who are incarcerated. It's often disabled people, often poor people, often people of color who are incarcerated in the first place. All of those groups are more likely to see increased health risks, due to lack of medical care."

While states or counties may have standard practices, there is no national mandate to develop emergency plans, which leaves decisions about preparation and evacuation to corrections departments, sheriff's offices and other local officials.

During Hurricane Irene in 2011, for example, inmates were not evacuated at New York's Rikers Island, Mother Jones reported. Nor were they evacuated from a South Carolina state prison or three city jails in Virginia during Hurricane Florence in 2018, according to the outlet.

'WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?' The graying of America's prisons

Homes and businesses are devastated after Hurricane Ian on Sept. 30 in Fort Myers Beach, Fla.

Before Ian struck, about 2,500 inmates were evacuated from more than 20 facilities in Florida to other locations that were "better equipped to weather the impacts of the storm," the Florida Department of Corrections, which operates state prisons, said Sept. 28.

In Charlotte County north of Fort Myers, the jail saw some damage and flooding from Ian. Though it wasn't in an evacuation zone, the jail had problems with electricity, water and fan units that were ripped from the roof, officials said.

In Lee County, the Fort Myers jail was in the mandatory evacuation zone, but officials did not evacuate.

The Supreme Court ruled that under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, prisons cannot be deliberately indifferent to the safety and well-being of the people in their care, Jones said. The National Institute of Corrections, part of the Department of Justice, offers state and local correctional agencies a guide to emergency planning, which includes a checklist for assessing a prison's readiness to deal with natural disasters.

But because there is no federal requirement, there are few legal standards to hold those running prisons and jails responsible when things go wrong, said Wanda Bertram, communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative.

"Typically, that stuff has to happen via the court," Bertram said. "And, sadly, one of the trends over the last 20 years is that there's been a clamp down on states and the federal government allowing incarcerated people to sue based on neglectful treatment."
'Conflicting stories' after Hurricane Ian

According to Lee County's 2018 emergency management plan, if there is a 10% chance of a 6-foot storm surge, the areas in "Zone A" – which included the jail – should be evacuated. On Sept. 27, the storm surge for Lee County was predicted to be between 5 and 10 feet, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Inmates at the main jail were relocated to higher floors in preparation for the storm surge, said Julie Martin, a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail.

"The conflicting stories I've been getting from clients that are currently in custody is that they don't have water in the jail meaning they have toilets that flush, they don't have drinkable water," O’Halloran said last week. "Some of them even claimed that the first floor of the jail took on water."

MOST STATES DON'T HAVE UNIVERSAL AIR CONDITIONING IN PRISONS: Climate change, heat waves are making it 'torture'

When asked why the jail didn't evacuate, as advised in the county's plan, Anita Iriarte, another sheriff's office spokesperson, declined to comment specifically.

Iriarte, however, disputed the attorneys' claims and told USA TODAY that inmates were offered "an acceptable amount of water." While water pressure at the jail "became critically low," inmates were given water containers to flush toilets and some were later relocated to an inland facility after the storm, she said.

The downtown Fort Myers jail was not flooded or damaged, and there were no injuries, Martin said.
Disaster plans must be 'thoughtful and realistic'

When Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans in 2005, a lack of planning led to thousands of inmates being trapped for days without food, water and ventilation, some locked in cells with chest-high water contaminated with sewage in the Orleans Parish Prison, according to reports from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.

During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, more than 8,000 people were left behind in four Texas prisons, according to an estimate from The Nation.

The National Lawyers Guild collected reports of "unconstitutional conditions" from prisoners in Texas who described flooding, toilets not functioning, and inadequate food and water. The group outlined them in a letter to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which denied such claims in interviews with multiple media outlets.

Homes are surrounded by floodwaters caused by Hurricane Ian on Sept. 29, in Fort Myers, Fla. Climate change added at least 10% more rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm shows.

"We had several people who were saying that they had water in their cell up to their knees," said Azzurra Crispino, co-founder of Prison Abolition Prisoner Support, which helped the National Lawyers Guild collect the reports. "And then even after the water receded, there were folks that were saying that the mold had gotten to the point where there were entire walls that were just covered in black."

Part of the problem with regulating disaster preparedness is that the prison system is not centralized, said Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. Federal and state governments could step in by tying funding to emergency response plans that include evacuation protocols, Kendrick said.

Kendrick said it's crucial that the plans are "thoughtful and realistic" and take into account the needs of the most vulnerable populations, including those who are older, have disabilities, or preexisting health conditions.

THERE ARE 'NO EASY FIXES' IN FLORIDA: But could Hurricane Ian's havoc bring a call for better planning?

"Research has shown that most prisons don't really have well-thought-out evacuation plans," she said. "Evacuation planning is a very complicated process and really needs to involve people who have expertise in dealing with natural hazards and emergency planning, and it can't just be something that like a prison or a jail just throws together at the last minute."

Kendrick also suggested including a provision in local plans to allow jails to release people who are awaiting trial until the disaster passes. Longer term, as climate change brings worse natural disasters, officials need to rethink where jails and prisons are located, Kendrick said, noting that prisons have been built near hazardous waste sites and areas at high risk for flooding.

"Those actions also kind of set these facilities up for even more problems when there's a natural disaster," she said.

Jones, of the National Lawyers Guild's Mass Incarceration Committee, suggested the United States adhere to international human rights standards concerning the treatment of imprisoned people, known as the Mandela rules that "would immediately elevate the standards and the conditions of prisons."

"Ultimately," she said, "a reexamination of how we incarcerate and whether we incarcerate at all is a core solution."

Contributing: The Associated Press

Contact Breaking News Reporter N'dea Yancey-Bragg at nyanceybra@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @NdeaYanceyBragg

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hurricane Ian: What happens to jails and prisons during a disaster?

Congress probes Jackson water crisis as city and state spar




 Mayor Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), right, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, second from right, and Jim Craig of the Mississippi State Health Department, second from left, listen as Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, left, speaks about work being done, during a visit to the City of Jackson's O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility in Ridgeland, Miss., Friday, Sept. 2, 2022. Jackson's water system partially failed following flooding and heavy rainfall that exacerbated longstanding problems in one of two water-treatment plants. 

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)


MICHAEL GOLDBERG
Mon, October 17, 2022 

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Congress is investigating the crisis that left 150,000 people in Mississippi's capital city without running water for several days in late summer, according to a letter sent to Gov. Tate Reeves by two Democratic officials.

Reps. Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, and Carolyn Maloney, of New York, sent the letter Monday requesting information on how Mississippi plans to spend $10 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act and from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and $429 million “specifically allotted to enhance the state’s water infrastructure.”

The letter indicates “the start of a joint investigation" by the House Homeland Security and the Oversight and Reform committees into a crisis that deprived Jackson's 150,000 residents of running water for several days in late August and early September, Adam Comis, a staffer for the committee, told The Associated Press.

Thompson's district includes most of Jackson, and he chairs the Homeland Security Committee. Maloney chairs the Oversight and Reform Committee.

Jackson has had water problems for years, and the latest troubles began in late August after heavy rainfall exacerbated problems in the city’s main treatment plant, leaving many customers without running water. Jackson had already been under a boil-water notice since late July because the state health department found cloudy water that could make people ill.

Running water was restored within days, and a boil-water notice was lifted in mid-September, but the letter to Reeves says “water plant infrastructure in the city remains precarious, and risks to Jackson’s residents persist.”

The pair of congressional Democrats requested a breakdown of where the state sent funds from the American Rescue Plan Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including “the racial demographics and population sizes of each” community that received aid. They also requested information on whether Jackson has faced “burdensome hurdles” to receive additional federal funds. The letter asked Reeves to provide the requested information by Oct. 31.

Mississippi has not yet announced how it will spend American Rescue Plan Act money for water projects. Cities and counties had a Sept. 30 deadline to apply for funding.

According to the letter, which was first reported on by NBC News, Oversight Committee staff learned in a briefing with Jackson officials that the state attempted to limit funding to Jackson for its water system. The state allegedly planned to “bar communities of more than 4,000 people from competing for additional funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” the letter says.

In their letter, Thompson and Maloney also referenced reporting by the AP that Reeves had a hand in delaying funds for water system repairs in Jackson and claimed to have blocked funds. Reeves’ office did not immediately respond to AP’s request for comment on the letter.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice in January that Jackson’s water system violates the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. In September, federal attorneys threatened legal action against the city if it did not agree to negotiations related to its water system. Lumumba said the city was working with the federal government on a plan to fix the water system.

Failure by city and state officials to provide Jackson residents with a reliable water system reflects decades of government dysfunction, population change and decaying infrastructure. It has also fueled a political battle between GOP state lawmakers and Democratic city officials.

That acrimony continued after the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency announced Friday that it is seeking a private contractor to run the Jackson water system for one year. The agreement would be funded by the city of Jackson, according to the proposal released by MEMA.

In a news release Monday, Reeves said his office was told by city officials that Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is planning to “functionally end the city’s cooperation" by “refusing to participate in the process of selecting a water operator.”

“Although politics is clearly his priority, we are simply trying to ensure that Jackson water does not fail again,” Reeves said. “Ultimately, it may fall to the city council to rein in this radical gambit.”

The rancor ensued even though MEMA wrote that it requested a private contractor “in unified command with the City of Jackson.”

Reeves threatened to pull state assistance if the city didn't change course. City officials were communicating they “no longer desire state assistance and insist on going it alone,” Reeves said.

In a statement, Lumumba retorted that the city had been “‘going it alone’ after years of asking for state support” and that Jackson “has made no mention of ending the City’s cooperation” with state and federal officials. The mayor said the city would not agree to the request for a private contractor until it had an opportunity to revise the language in the proposal.

"The City, with support from those who truly are invested in the repair and maintenance of the water treatment facilities, will have the final say," Lumumba said. "We look forward to productive conversations that lead to an actual agreement instead of a headline.”

___

Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg.

Liz Truss Under Threat: How UK Tories Get Rid of Their Leaders


Kitty Donaldson
Mon, October 17, 2022 

Liz Truss’s UK premiership hangs in the balance after she was forced to abandon large swathes of her economic agenda and ditch her chancellor following a market rout.

Read More: Hunt to Set Out UK Fiscal Plans as Tories Move Against Truss

Amid the fallout, the opposition Labour party has opened up a record lead in opinion polls and Truss herself has posted the worst approval ratings ever for a UK leader.


Tory MPs are openly moving against the 47-year-old prime minister even though party rules in theory offer her protection from a leadership challenge for a year. What happens next may hinge on how quickly the party can forge a consensus on who should replace her.

Below is a guide to how the party deals with leaders it wants rid of.

Shaping History

The fate of Tory prime ministers is determined by rank-and-file Conservative MPs known as the 1922 Committee. It takes its name from a meeting of Tory lawmakers 100 years ago that ultimately brought down a coalition government and led to the Conservatives winning the ensuing election.

“The ’22” has continued to play a key role in Tory history. While Margaret Thatcher’s demise in 1990 was prompted by her deputy premier quitting, it was her ministers’ advice that she wouldn’t survive a second 1922 committee ballot on her leadership that made her withdraw. Her reference to “men in gray suits” calling on her to stand aside is now often used describe the ‘22.

During her successor John Major’s tenure, the group embodied Tory opposition to closer ties with Europe. David Cameron -- who ultimately called the Brexit referendum -- wanted to dilute its influence by opening up its membership. He failed. Graham Brady was elected chairman and has has held the job since.

Eyes on Brady

Nowadays the ’22 is primarily a line of communication between the party leadership and the rank-and-file. Reporters gather outside the committee’s weekly meetings to try to gauge the mood by the volume of desk-thumping. When an unhappy Tory MP wants a change in party leadership, it’s Brady they write to.

In normal times, it requires 15% of Conservative lawmakers to trigger a confidence vote and in the current parliament that means 54. The existing rules protect Truss from a leadership challenge for the first 12 months in office, but they can be changed in response to a groundswell of opinion within the parliamentary party.

Nobody except Brady knows how many letters have been submitted at any given time. On Sunday, a person close to the committee was playing down rumors that more than a 100 letters may already have been submitted.

Next Steps

The ’22 is due to meet again on Wednesday. That’s the earliest point they could consider changing the rules, though once they do reach a decision, it’s a quick and straightforward process. The prime minister’s opponents will be trying to build momentum ahead of that appointment.

It’s likely that the committee will want more than 54 letters in order to change the rules. So if they do announce that shift, a confidence vote is likely to follow shortly afterward.

Once a vote is triggered, Brady would inform Truss and the parliamentary Conservative party, and a vote on his leadership would be held as soon as possible.

At this point, it seems difficult to imagine that Truss could survive such a vote. But even if she did, it would most likely only delay the inevitable. Both Boris Johnson and Theresa May, her most immediate predecessors, were forced out of office within months of winning a confidence vote.

There’s another way the Tories could arrive at a leadership contest: Truss’s cabinet could effectively take matters into its own hands. If enough members resign, or perhaps one of the two biggest names, that would signal they have lost confidence. The pressure could then make Truss’s position untenable.

Leadership Contest

If Truss were to lose a confidence vote, or if she accepts that her authority has gone and simply resigns, the next step would be a third Tory leadership contest since 2019.

Under the current rules, Conservative MPs whittle down the candidates to a final two and then grassroots Tory members make the final choice. But again, MPs are unhappy with that system after the debacle of Truss, who only just sneaked into the final round.

There’s a strong feeling among MPs that they need to avoid letting the members choose another prime minister. One way around that would be to put forward a single candidate, but with so many rival factions within the party, Truss’s opponents are struggling to forge a consensus on who should be next.

Next in Line?

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak was beaten by Truss in last summer’s leadership contest, in which he warned, prophetically, that her economic policy plans would trigger chaos in financial markets. There is talk that he could form an alliance with Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, who finished third in the race.

Ben Wallace, the defense secretary, saw his stock rise during the war in Ukraine and is another name who has been touted, though he’s said he doesn’t want the job. Jeremy Hunt, who was parachuted in as chancellor last Friday, has been burnishing his credentials as a safe pair of hands on the economy. He says that after losing out in the last two leadership contests, his time has gone. Steve Brine, a Tory MP and an ally of the chancellor, said last week that it’s no secret that he had wanted the job in the past.

Tory MP says his constituents are 'frightened' of Liz Truss's government

James Cheng-Morris
·Freelance news writer, Yahoo UK
Sun, October 16, 2022

Tory MP Robert Halfon said of Liz Truss: 'The biggest problem is not that my constituents are angry at the government but some of them are actually frightened.' (PA)

A Tory MP has said his constituents are “frightened” of Liz Truss’s government.

Robert Halfon, a senior backbencher, said the prime minister has “played into” the Conservative stereotype of being the party for the rich.

It comes amid the ongoing economic turmoil sparked by the prime minister and ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous “growth plan” announced in the mini-budget only three weeks ago.

The mini-budget contained £43bn of unfunded tax cuts, including for people earning more than £150,000 and large corporations. It sparked market chaos, including with mortgages being withdrawn by lenders.

Truss U-turned on the income and corporation tax policies, and made Kwarteng the scapegoat by sacking him on Friday in an attempt to reset her government.

But Harlow MP Halfon, speaking on Sky’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday programme, made light of the reputational damage by suggesting his constituents are scared of what her administration might do next.

“The awful stereotypes of Conservatives in the past, that we were just the party for the well-off and the rich... the government over the past few weeks has played into that stereotype every day of the week.

“The biggest problem for me is not that my constituents are angry at the government but some of them are actually frightened because they fear for what has gone on, and this can’t continue.”

Robert Halfon said Truss has played into 'awful stereotypes of Conservatives'. (PA)

Jeremy Hunt was appointed as chancellor on Friday after the sacking of Kwarteng, but is now widely seen as more powerful than the prime minister herself. In interviews on Saturday, he effectively trashed the policies that brought Truss to power last month.

Read more: Jeremy Hunt refuses to say Liz Truss is a 'confident leader' who 'has a grip on country'

Halfon added: “I welcome what Jeremy Hunt was saying yesterday in the media but the proof in the pudding will be in the eating. There have to be dramatic improvements and pretty quickly.”

After just 40 days as PM, Truss is battling to stay in power amid widespread reports of Tory plots to replace her.

Halfon later told Times Radio: “I don’t think that [Truss] grasps just how bad the public feel that the government has been over the past few weeks.” While not calling for Truss to go, he demanded an “apology and a fundamental reset”.

'The game is up': Tory MPs publicly call for Liz Truss to resign

James Cheng-Morris
·Freelance news writer, Yahoo UK
Sun, October 16, 2022 

'Game is up' for Liz Truss says Tory MP Crispin Blunt

A number of Conservative MPs have publicly called for Liz Truss to resign as the prime minister battles to regain her tattered authority.

On Monday, new chancellor Jeremy Hunt made a statement junking the PM's mini budget, reversing almost all the tax cuts laid out last month and signalling the death of Truss's economic approach.

Truss sacked her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on Friday following the disastrous financial impact of the measures.

Her spokesperson insisted the prime minister is planning to stay in office, saying she was providing “stability of leadership”.

Three Tory MPs have publicly called for Liz Truss to step down as prime minister. (PA)

Crispin Blunt, a former justice minister, told Channel 4’s Andrew Neil Show on Sunday: “I think the game is up and it’s now a question as to how the succession is managed.”

He was followed by Andrew Bridgen on Sunday evening, who told The Telegraph newspaper: “We cannot carry on like this.”

Bridgen, who backed Rishi Sunak in the leadership contest over the summer, said: “Our country, its people and our party deserve better.”

Read more: Jeremy Hunt refuses to say Liz Truss is a 'confident leader'

Conservative MP Jamie Wallis also confirmed he had written to Truss, asking her to stand down. He accused her of "very basic and avoidable errors".

Conservative MP Crispin Blunt has called for Liz Truss to resign as prime minister. (PA)

After Hunt's statement, Angela Richardson went public with her call for Truss to be replaced, telling The Telegraph that it would be "better for the party and for the country to have a change in leadership at the top".

In his statement the chancellor confirmed:

The energy price guarantee – which had been due to cap prices for two years – will end in April after which time the government will look to target help for those most in need

Plans to cut the basic rate of tax by 1p have been shelved

The cut in dividend tax, the freeze to alcohol duty and VAT-free shopping for overseas tourists promised by his predecessor will also go

Hunt said he will continue with the decision to reverse the increase in national insurance contributions and a reduction in stamp duty, which are already going through Parliament.

The Treasury said the move – following talks over the weekend between Hunt and Truss – was designed to “ensure sustainable public finances underpin economic growth”.

The move will be seen as an attempt to reassure the financial markets after weeks of turmoil in the wake of former chancellor Kwarteng’s £45 billion mini-budget tax giveaway.

Read more: UK economy now comparable to Greece and Italy thanks to Liz Truss, ex-Bank leader says

Jeremy Hunt was appointed chancellor on Friday. (PA)

Following his surprise appointment on Friday, Hunt warned that taxes would have to go up while spending would rise less quickly than had previously been planned.

A new poll, first published in the Guardian, predicted a landslide for Labour and wipe-out for the Tories.

The poll, by Opinium for the Trades Union Congress, put Labour on 411 seats compared to the Tories on 137.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Isn’t Joking. She’s Pushing ‘War.’

The Daily Beast
Tue, October 18, 2022 

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hateful rhetoric isn’t a joke. She wants to start a war, says podcaster Danielle Moodie on the latest episode of The New Abnormal podcast.

Moodie, who joined as guest co-host of the show alongside host Andy Levy, tore into the Georgia Republican after listening to a recent clip of Greene making Democrats out to be child predators. According to Moodie, the left and the media have been grossly underestimating the congresswoman’s propensity for violence.

“Ever since Marjorie Taylor Greene entered into Congress, she’s been looked at primarily as a joke, right? We have said she’s the QAnon queen. She is the conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theorist. Like she is absolutely crazy. She has said things about Jewish people operating lasers from outer space. But what I want folks to take away from that rant that she went on is that Marjorie Taylor Greene is not representative of the fringe of the Republican Party. She is the mainstream of the Republican Party,” Moodie says during the episode’s opening brief.

“And when she is referring to Democrats as predators,” continues Moodie, “when she is saying that we are going after children, talking about mutilation and all of these things, what she is signaling to the Republican Party, to her base, is that we are at war.”

Andy agrees, saying that he’s been telling everyone for a while now that Greene isn’t a joke.

“Now anyone that thinks Mitt Romney is a better representation of the Republican Party right now than Marjorie Taylor Greene is nuts. This is her party, the party that Trump made over, that she is part and parcel of. This stuff has to be taken seriously at the highest levels,” he adds.

Moodie then makes a pointed plea to Democrats to shut down these dangerous GOP talking points: “You need to direct the American people to exactly who is taking away your rights. Who is making your communities more dangerous. Who is putting your children under threat.”

‘Not a Prayer in Hell’ Trump Will Testify Before the Jan. 6 Committee

Also on this episode: The Intercept investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein explains where the United States currently stands with the Trump- and Putin-friendly Saudis, who are gearing up to screw President Joe Biden over, big-time. And for good measure, Klippenstein shares all the ways we could fuck over Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman without war, if we wanted to.

Plus! Daily Beast media editor and editor of the media newsletter Confider, Andrew Kirell, joins to give Andy the inside scoop on how Fox News is handling the deranged Kayne West clips that were cut from his segment on Tucker Carlson’s show and then subsequently leaked.

Kirell thinks he has an idea of who the leaker could be, and he and Andy talk theories.

Global Times editorial: Chinese modernization will broaden horizon of civilization



Mon, October 17, 2022 


BEIJING, Oct. 17, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Under the spotlight of major news media around the world, the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) opened in the Great Hall of the People on Sunday morning. General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping delivered a report to the congress on behalf of the 19th CPC Central Committee. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people and international observers paid close attention to the congress, and the relevant content quickly became trendy topics on the internet. When the world is once again at the crossroads of history, how will China respond to opportunities and challenges, and how will it interact with the world? People are looking for answers in the report.

General Secretary Xi emphasized in the report, "From this day forward, the central task of the CPC will be to lead the Chinese people of all ethnic groups in a concerted effort to realize the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects and to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization." Next, the work of the Party and the country will all be carried out around this central task. This is another great new journey for China to make overall progress while driving the world forward.

The report's elaboration on "Chinese modernization" is also a clear demonstration to the world of today's China's development path, which has attracted special attention from the international public opinion. General Secretary Xi mentioned this important concept on many occasions and made a comprehensive and in-depth systematic expounding in the report, forming a complete theoretical system. Chinese modernization is the socialist modernization pursued under the leadership of the CPC. It not only has the common characteristics of modernization of all countries, but also Chinese characteristics based on its own national conditions. This is another innovative breakthrough in theory and practice by the CPC since its 18th National Congress, and it is also a new contribution to mankind's exploration of the path of modernization.

This is a path to modernization that not only develops itself, but also benefits the world. The successful practice of Chinese modernization tells the world in an irrefutable way that there is more than one path leading to modernization. Every country and nation not only has rights, but also possibility to embark on a path to modernization that suits its own national conditions.


Chinese modernization has broadened the horizon for the development of human society. China's continuous enrichment and development of new forms of human civilization has inspired more countries and nations to add their own colors to the garden of human civilization.

Among the five major characteristics of Chinese modernization summed up by General Secretary Xi, there is one that China has repeatedly stated, and has been proven time and time again, that is, Chinese modernization is the modernization of peaceful development. The CPC leads the Chinese people to firmly explore a new path to achieve national development and national rejuvenation in a peaceful way, and at the same time better maintain world peace and development through its own development. This is one of the important connotations of the "new model for human civilization."

Currently, the changes of the world, of the times and of history are unfolding in an unprecedented way. The report delivered by General Secretary Xi has linked the historic mission of the CPC, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation with peace and development of the world, which is a vivid manifestation of a community with a shared future for mankind. The report stressed that China adheres to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in pursuing friendship and cooperation with other countries. It is committed to promoting a new type of international relations, deepening and expanding global partnerships based on equality, openness, and cooperation, and broadening the convergence of interests with other countries. The CPC always honors its promises. Standing on the right side of history, on the side of the progress of humanity's civilization, the new path of Chinese modernization will become wider and wider.

The important message released by this congress is firm and clear, positive and well-intentioned. Anyone who hold pragmatic and rational attitude toward China and the world's development will gain a sense of direction and positive energy from the report. With the irreversible process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, Chinese modernization will increasingly demonstrate its civilizational significance. When we reach the goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects, it is a success worthy to be celebrated by the Chinese people and the people of the world.

Global Times: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277276.shtml

SOURCE Global Times

China delays release of economic data during key political meet

Laurie CHEN, Jing Xuan TENG
Mon, October 17, 2022 


China said Monday it will delay the release of economic growth figures, as the country's leadership gathers for a major meeting set to hand President Xi Jinping a historic third term in office.

The announcement comes a day before analysts had expected Beijing to publish some of its weakest quarterly growth figures since 2020 with the economy hobbled by Covid-19 restrictions and a real estate crisis.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said the release of growth figures for the third quarter along with a host of other economic data would be "postponed", without specifying a reason or giving a new timeline.

The delay comes as officials from China's ruling Communist Party meet in Beijing for their 20th Congress, which is set to rubber stamp Xi's bid to rule for another term.

Zhao Chenxin, senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters on Monday that "the economy rebounded significantly in the third quarter".

"From a global perspective, China's economic performance is still outstanding," he said.

But many analysts expect the world's second-largest economy to struggle to reach its growth target this year of around 5.5 percent, with the International Monetary Fund lowering its forecast for GDP expansion to 3.2 percent.

A panel of experts polled by AFP last week predicted an average of three percent growth in 2022 -- a long way off the 8.1 percent seen last year.

That would be China's weakest growth rate in four decades, excluding 2020 when the global economy was hammered by the emergence of the coronavirus.

The NBS said it would also postpone the release of monthly data on indicators including real estate and retail sales.

Last week customs authorities delayed the release of September trade figures without providing an explanation.
- China 'in a bind' -

Nick Marro, lead for global trade at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told AFP that signs point to "a really ugly Q3 data print, at a time when the party is focused on highlighting its policy achievements, while minimising any missteps".

Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief economist at Natixis, said "nothing, not even GDP data release, can disturb the coronation of Xi Jinping".

The delay "puts China in a bind", Marro added.

"If it comes out with a rosier-than-expected data print, the national statistics bureau will inevitably face questions around data veracity," he said.

China's economy has been hit hard by the government's strict zero-Covid policy.

The country is the last of the world's major economies to continue to follow the strategy, which imposes tight travel restrictions, mass PCR testing and obligatory quarantines.

It also involves sudden and strict lockdowns -- including of businesses and factories -- that have disrupted production and weighed heavily on household consumption.

China is also battling an unprecedented crisis in its real estate sector -- historically a major driver of growth that accounts for more than a quarter of GDP when combined with construction.

Following years of explosive growth fuelled by easy access to loans, Beijing launched a crackdown on excessive debt in 2020.

Property sales are now falling across the country, leaving many developers struggling and some owners refusing to pay their mortgages for unfinished homes.

bur-tjx/reb/axn

Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin’

Maura Reynolds
Mon, October 17, 2022 

LONG READ

It’s been nearly eight months since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops and tanks over the border into Ukraine, and a lot has changed in that time. Ukraine has shown itself to be a far more robust military force than pretty much anyone predicted. Talk has changed from wondering how long Ukraine could hold out to how much territory it can retake — and to when and how the war will end.

But it’s still hard to imagine how Putin’s war on Ukraine will conclude. Does Putin even have an endgame? If he really wants to control Ukrainian territory, why does he seem so bent on destroying it?

To get insights into these questions, I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed observers of Russia and Putin, who served as an adviser to former President Donald Trump and gained fame for her testimony in his first impeachment trial. In the early days of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Hill warned in an interview with POLITICO that what Putin was trying to do was not only seize Ukraine but destroy the current world order. And she recognized from the start that Putin would use the threat of nuclear conflict to try to get his way.

Now, despite the setbacks Russia has suffered on the battlefield, Hill thinks Putin is undaunted. She sees him adapting to new conditions, not giving up. And she sees him trying to get the West to accede to his aims by using messengers like billionaire Elon Musk to propose arrangements that would end the conflict on his terms.


“Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they're just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin,” Hill says.

But while Putin appears to be doubling down in Ukraine, the conflict poses some real dangers to his leadership. He has identified himself quite directly with the war, Hill notes, and he can’t afford to look like a loser. If he begins to lose support from Russian elites, his hold on power could slip.

The West has come a long way since February in understanding the stakes in Ukraine, Hill says, but the world still hasn’t totally grasped the full challenge Putin is posing. Putin must be contained, Hill says, but that won’t happen unless and until international institutions established in the wake of World War II evolve so they can contain him. And that conversation is only just beginning.

“This is a great power conflict, the third great power conflict in the European space in a little over a century,” Hill says. “It's the end of the existing world order. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Reynolds: The war clearly hasn't gone as Putin originally intended. How has Putin reacted to his setbacks and how do you think his mindset is evolving?

Hill: Whenever he has a setback, Putin figures he can get out of it, that he can turn things around. That’s partly because of his training as a KGB operative. In the past, when asked about the success of operations, he’s pooh-poohed the idea that operations always go as planned, that everything is always perfect. He says there are always problems in an operation, there are always setbacks. Sometimes they’re absolute disasters. The key is adaptation.

Another hallmark of Putin is that he doubles down. He always takes the more extreme step in his range of options, the one that actually cuts off other alternatives. Putin has often related an experience he had as a kid, when he trapped a rat in a corner in the apartment building he lived in, in Leningrad, and the rat shocked him by jumping out and fighting back. He tells this story as if it's a story about himself, that if he's ever cornered, he will always fight back.

But he's also the person who puts himself in the corner. We know that the Russians have had very high casualties and that they've been running out of manpower and equipment in Ukraine. The casualty rate on the Russian side keeps mounting. A few months ago, estimates were 50,000. Now the suggestions are 90,000 killed or severely injured. This is a real blow given the 170,000 Russia troops deployed to the Ukrainian border when the invasion began.

So, what does Putin do? He sends even more troops in by launching a full-on mobilization. He still hasn't said this is a war. It remains a “special military operation,” but he calls up 300,000 people. Then, he goes several steps further and announces the annexation of the territories that Russia has been fighting over for the last several months, not just Donetsk and Luhansk, but also the territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Putin gives himself no way out except to pursue the original goals he had when he went in, which is the dismemberment of Ukraine and Russia annexing its territory. And he's still trying to adapt his responses to setbacks on the battlefield.


Reynolds: At this point, if he's so adaptive, do you think he has an endgame?

Hill: In his mind, I think Putin still thinks he's got more game to play. His endgame is to go out of this war on his terms. What we're seeing right now, with the annexations and the big speech that he made on September 30th is very clear. He sees this conflict as a full-on war with the West, and he still is adamant on removing Ukraine from the map and from global affairs.

It's also clear that he has no intention whatsoever of giving up Donetsk and Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, as well as Crimea, which he's already taken and already declared as part of Russia for time immemorial.

Reynolds: Why does Putin want all that territory? Does he want the symbolism of having restored an important part of the Russian Empire, reestablishing this mythological Novorossiya, taking back lands that Russia seized from the Ottoman Empire? Or does he really want to rule this part of modern-day Ukraine in concrete, practical ways?

Hill: It's actually both of those things. They are inextricably linked. You mentioned this idea of Novorossiya, “New Russia.” I think most people have forgotten that he used this term in 2014. Back then, the Kremlin triggered the war in Donbas as part of an effort to regain control of the territories of Novorossiya that were first annexed from the Ottoman Empire by Catherine the Great back in the late 18th century.

There wasn't really a lot of settlement there then, and that’s how we got Potemkin villages — Prince Grigory Potemkin took Catherine on a carriage ride through her new dominion and they created fake villages, with peasants brought in to wave at the empress as she went by.

We have this same issue now — what and who is Putin presiding over? Even Dmitry Peskov, Putin's press secretary, recently admitted that Russia hasn’t quite worked out the borders of the annexed areas yet, because the Ukrainians have been pushing back. The question of what Russia actually controls beyond all the symbolism of annexation is still a major question.

Reynolds: If Putin wants Ukrainian territory so badly, why is he raining down such destruction on civilian areas and committing so many human rights abuses in occupied areas?

Hill: This is punishment, but also perverse redevelopment. You cow people into submission, destroy what they had and all their links to their past and their old lives, and then make them into something new and, thus, yours. Destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. Build New Russia and create Russians. Its brutal but also a hallmark of imperial conquest.

Reynolds: And it’s how they did it in the 18th century.

Hill: Exactly. Putin would love to control the territory. But control involves actually having people on your side. And that is really a big question. We've seen in all of these territories, Russia shipping people out or detaining them, from entire families and children to teachers, administrators and local police, and then proxy citizens sent in from Russia itself.

Putin's initial goal when he launched the invasion was the collapse of central Ukrainian authority, the imposition of a puppet government in Kyiv, and all local governments swearing allegiance to Moscow, probably with some political commissar-type proxy leaders put in place around the country — the kind of thing that we saw happening in 2014 in the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Lugansk and Crimea. But of course, that didn't happen. So the problem that Putin has is controlling people in these territories rather than playing his own version of Potemkin villages.

Reynolds: We've recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he's playing?

Hill: It's very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea. He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn't have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.

Now, there are several reasons why Musk’s intervention is interesting and significant. First of all, Putin does this frequently. He uses prominent people as intermediaries to feel out the general political environment, to basically test how people are going to react to ideas. Henry Kissinger, for example, has had interactions with Putin directly and relayed messages. Putin often uses various trusted intermediaries including all kinds of businesspeople. I had intermediaries sent to discuss things with me while I was in government.

This is a classic Putin play. It's just fascinating, of course, that it's Elon Musk in this instance, because obviously Elon Musk has a huge Twitter following. He's got a longstanding reputation in Russia through Tesla, the SpaceX space programs and also through Starlink. He's one of the most popular men in opinion polls in Russia. At the same time, he's played a very important part in supporting Ukraine by providing Starlink internet systems to Ukraine, and kept telecommunications going in Ukraine, paid for in part by the U.S. government. Elon Musk has enormous leverage as well as incredible prominence. Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they're just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.

Reynolds: Putin is very comfortable dealing with billionaires and oligarchs. That's a world that he knows well. But by using Musk this way, he goes right over the heads of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government.

Hill: He is basically short-circuiting the diplomatic process. He wants to lay out his terms and see how many people are going to pick them up. All of this is an effort to get Americans to take themselves out of the war and hand over Ukraine and Ukrainian territory to Russia.


Reynolds: You have compared Putin's invasion of Ukraine to Hitler's invasions of other countries in World War II, of Czechoslovakia, of Poland. Do you still see it that way? Do you think that Putin has become Hitler-like in how he thinks of himself and how he seeks territory?

Hill: Yes, but also like Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I as well. Look, exactly 100 years before Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, in 1914, the Germans invaded Belgium and France and World War I was fought as a Great Power conflict to eject Germany from Belgium and France. And World War II in Europe, of course, was a refighting territorially of many of the outcomes of World War I.

Part of the problem is that conceptually, people have a hard time with the idea of a world war. It brings all kinds of horrors to mind — the Holocaust and the detonation of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the dawning of the nuclear age. But if you think about it, a world war is a great power conflict over territory which overturns the existing international order and where other states find themselves on different sides of the conflict. It involves economic warfare, information warfare, as well as kinetic war.

We're in the same situation. Again, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, exactly 100 years after Germany invaded Belgium and France — and just in the same way that Hitler seized the Sudetenland, annexed Austria and invaded Poland. We're having a hard time coming to terms with what we're dealing with here. This is a great power conflict, the third great power conflict in the European space in a little over a century. It's the end of the existing world order. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before.

People worry about this being dangerous hyperbole. But we have to really accept what the situation is to be able to respond appropriately. Each war has been fought differently. Modern wars involve information space and cyberspace, and we've seen all of these at play here. And, in the 21st century, these are economic and financial wars. We're all-in on the financial and economic side of things.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has turned global energy and food security on its head because of the way Russia is leveraging gas and oil and the blockade Putin has imposed in the Black Sea against Ukrainian grain exports. Russia has not just targeted Ukrainian agricultural production, as well as port facilities for exporting grain, but caused a global food crisis. These are global effects of what is very clearly not just a regional war.

Keep in mind that Putin himself has used the language of both world wars. He's talked about the fact that Ukraine did not exist as a state until after World War I, after the dissolution of the Russian Empire and the creation of the Soviet Union. He has blamed the early Soviets for the formation of what he calls an artificial state. Right from the very beginning, Putin himself has said that he is refighting World War II. So, the hyperbole has come from Vladimir Putin, who has said that he's reversing all of the outcomes territorially from World War I and also, in effect, World War II and the Cold War. He's not accepting the territorial configuration of Europe as it currently is.

What we have to figure out now is, how are we going to contend with this?

Reynolds: China and India, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and other world leaders who have not exactly been with West on this — how do you think their views of what Russia is doing is changing?

Hill: This is another global dimension. Just before the invasion, at the Beijing Olympics, we had Xi Jinping and Putin standing in seeming solidarity, talking about a limitless partnership, and Xi Jinping being very explicit in terms of Chinese opposition to the expansion of NATO and the role of NATO in the world. Clearly, at that point, Xi and China didn't expect that Vladimir Putin's special military operation would turn into the largest military action in Europe since World War II. Now, Xi Jinping is leery about showing any kind of diminution of his support for Vladimir Putin and Russia, since that would suggest he made a major miscalculation in lending Putin support. We haven't seen Xi repudiating Putin and Russia directly. But we've certainly seen some signs of concern. At a meeting in Central Asia around the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Putin himself acknowledged that China had concerns. We're pretty sure at this point that the Chinese also don't like Vladimir Putin's nuclear saber rattling in the context of the war in Ukraine, because that destabilizes the larger strategic balance globally, not just in Europe.

For India, this has been a nightmare, frankly, and they've been trying to straddle the fence and figure out a balance. They don’t want to get on the wrong side of the United States or Ukraine, or Russia, and they just don't really know quite what to do. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Modi has said explicitly to Putin, look, this is a time for peace, not war. And being much more outspoken on the issue of the conflict than perhaps some might have anticipated. That's not insignificant.

Once we get past the party Congress in China, we should watch how the Chinese-Russian relationship plays out. China would be instrumental in signaling to Putin how far he can go in terms of pursuing his endgame.

Reynolds: Let's talk about the situation inside Russia. Do you think Putin was surprised by the wave of protests that followed his announcement of what he called a partial mobilization? Or was he expecting that?

Hill: Yes, he was expecting pushback which is why he called it partial when it’s really a stealth full mobilization. The goal is to try to get the military up to full strength and get everybody he possibly can. The problem is that all these new forces are not battle ready. Many have had minimal military training. It’s very clear that most of them are going to be used as cannon fodder.

Putin’s responding not just to the setbacks on the battlefield, but to setbacks in the information war in the domestic arena. He's getting pushback from the party of war. We have to remember there were nationalists since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s who wanted to retake Ukraine, not just Crimea, and reabsorb all the Russian-speaking territories. People in the cohort around Putin have pushed the invasion of Ukraine for some considerable period of time, and he has to keep them on his side. They are not satisfied. They want Ukraine dismembered.

The shock, perhaps, is how many Russians have fled the mobilization. Although Russian authorities have been going to the borders to forcibly conscript people lining up to leave, they still haven’t taken the step of closing all the borders off. Putin and the Kremlin are aware that they would get a massive backlash if they did. We’ve already seen violence in Dagestan and other places where ethnic minorities have borne the brunt of recruitment. I think they are very, very aware that they've got to leave a safety valve open because otherwise there might be more protests, and more violence in response to the mobilization.

Reynolds: If there are more protests and more violence, does that pose a threat to Putin as leader? How weak or vulnerable is Putin's position right now?

Hill: Back to the Soviet period, there were tens of thousands of violent protests across the Soviet Union over the years. This didn’t lead to the disintegration of the Soviet Union because of severe repression. It was something messy they had to deal with. They decapitated the opposition, and that's what Putin's done. Russia is back to the USSR. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is in isolation in a penal colony. The repressive capacity of the government is pretty significant. They’ve been taking thousands of people off the streets and putting them in jail. I think Putin feels he can decapitate any organized opposition. He has to just be careful to control the sheer number of opposition protests, which is, again, why they're keeping the safety valves open.

Putin knows Russian history. World War I did lead to mass protests. The defeat in the Russo-Japanese War earlier in the 1900s also led to mass protests that got out of hand and discredited the czarist system. All of this could discredit him. So, there is some real risk. What he's making sure of is that there's no one who could lead these protests and make them coalesce.

If you think back to when Navalny was poisoned in 2020, he was out in the Urals region and Siberia, pulling together opposition groups at a time when there were many protests going on in Russia. He was poisoned because he was getting some traction.

Nonetheless, the mobilization chips away at Putin’s popularity because people feel that they've got no hope. They're no longer able to watch the war on their TV screens and switch it off and forget it's happening. They're forced to confront it. Support for the war was already fairly passive, but active support for the war is declining and support for Putin himself will decline as well. And he's got to keep placating the hardliners. So, he's got to take extreme actions.

You're going to start hearing more and more stories of people who've gone to the front completely unprepared and got killed. That will reduce tolerance for the special military operation. If that happens, it could impact Putin's standing among the elite. He's been pretty much unassailable as long as he's been the only really truly popular politician in Russia. But if he starts to look like a loser, then he no longer seems infallible. He's no longer the strongman and arbiter of the system. Although elites are invested in him and his system, there may eventually come a point where people start saying, “maybe somebody else, Vladimir Vladimirovich, maybe somebody else might handle the system better.” It could start with the hardliners trying to push themselves forward.


That's why, again, we see him doubling down. He’s got himself in a corner in the war and in a corner domestically at home. He has made himself the face of this war in Ukraine. His September 30th speech basically said it's his war, his annexation, his Russia. And so, everything will fall on him if it falls apart.

Reynolds: In the autocratic system that Putin has built, he has to stand for election every so often even though it's mostly window dressing. But it periodically renews his legitimacy. One of those years is 2024. Is he facing a deadline? Does he need to look like he’s won this war by 2024?

Hill: One would think so. In 2024, the reelection has to be in the early part of the year. So, we've got a year and a few months in the Russian political calculations to start to prepare for this and ensure that it all goes smoothly. That was why Putin wanted to get the quick victory in Ukraine well out of the way. Ukraine started in February and March of 2022, because February and March of 2024 will be election time.

I'm sure Putin thought he would have been unassailable with a quick, victorious war. Ukraine would be back in the fold and then probably after that, Belarus. Moldova as well, perhaps. There would have been a reframing of the next phase of Putin as the great czar of a reconstituted “Russkiy mir” or “Russian world.”

If Putin had succeeded at that, maybe he could have found himself in a position where he could have begun to delegate some power to others.

Just this past week, on October 7th, Putin turned 70. He’s in that age when people are asking, does he die in office? There are lots of questions about succession. 2024 is very much an inflection point for the system.

Reynolds: Do you feel like Ukraine is on course for a military victory and what would that mean to the Russian side?

Hill: Ukraine has already had a great moral, political and military victory. Russia has not achieved the aims of its special military operation. But I think Putin is obviously hoping that now, with all of the nuclear saber-rattling, threats of nuclear Armageddon, deploying Elon Musk and others to convey his messages, that basically he can take the territory that he's got and get recognition of that. And then he hopes that he will be able to put pressure back on Ukraine. He'd still like to see the Ukrainian political system crumble away. He’d like to get somebody as leader of Ukraine who is personally loyal to him. Putin hopes that he'll still prevail, that he'll find other ways of getting what he wanted when he went across the border in February.

Reynolds: So to some extent, the biggest thing that Putin wants right now is to get Zelenskyy out. He wants somebody more pliant.

Hill: That's exactly what he wants. And I'm sure he feels that he might still get that. I mean, everything that he's doing is an effort to discredit Ukraine and Ukrainians and Zelenskyy.

Ukraine has the right to choose their own leadership. But Putin will try to manipulate this whichever way he can. He'll keep trying to soften the battlefield beyond Ukraine, keep on trying to poison attitudes internationally against Ukraine.

Reynolds: Along those lines, what do you make of the fact that some Americans, primarily in the Trump wing of the Republican Party and some Fox News personalities, are expressing doubts about how much support the United States should direct to Ukraine? Is there something about this conflict that you don't think they understand?

Hill: This goes back to the point I tried to make when I testified at the first impeachment trial against President Trump. There's a direct line between that episode and now. Putin has managed to seed hostile sentiment toward Ukraine. Even if people think they are criticizing Ukraine for their own domestic political purposes, because they want to claim that the Biden administration is giving too much support for Ukraine instead of giving more support to Americans, etc. — they're replaying the targeted messaging that Vladimir Putin has very carefully fed into our political arena. People may think that they're acting independently, but they are echoing the Kremlin's propaganda.

Reynolds: What do you think is the right response from the West if Putin does detonate some sort of nuclear weapon, either as a demonstration or something else?

Hill: What Putin is trying to do is to get us to talk about the threat of nuclear war instead of what he is doing in Ukraine. He wants the U.S. and Europe to contemplate, as he says, the risks that we faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Euromissile crisis. He wants us to face the prospect of a great superpower war. His solution is to have secret diplomacy, as we did during Cuban Missile Crisis, and have a direct compromise between the United States and Russia.

But there's no strategic standoff here. This is pure nuclear blackmail. There can’t be a compromise based on him not setting off a nuclear weapon if we hand over Ukraine. Putin is behaving like a rogue state because, well, he is a rogue state at this point. And he's being explicit about what he wants. We have to pull all the diplomatic stops out. We have to ensure that he's not going to have the effect that he wants with this nuclear brinkmanship.

Putin is also making it very clear that to get what you want in the world, you have to have a nuclear weapon and to protect yourself, you also have to have a nuclear weapon. So this is an absolute mess. Global nuclear stability is on a knife edge.

But again, this is not about strategic issues. This is not an issue of strategic stability. This is Vladimir Putin pissed off because he hasn't got what he wanted in a war that he started. It's another attempt to adapt to the battlefield.

Reynolds: Can this war end in a way that would be satisfying for the West and with Putin remaining as Russian leader? Or is this the beginning of a revolution that's going to be very messy and dangerous?

Hill: It’s unlikely this ends in any satisfying way. You need every side willing to compromise, and Putin doesn't want to compromise his goals.

Any compromise is, in any case, always at Ukraine's expense because Putin has taken Ukrainian territory. If we think about World War I, World War II or the settlements in many other conflicts, they always involved some kind territorial disposition that left one side very unhappy.

There is not going to be a happy or satisfying ending for anybody, and it's also not going to be happy or satisfying for Vladimir Putin either, honestly.

Reynolds: It is striking to me that of all the conflicts that Russia has been engaged in since Putin became president, that none of them have been resolved with any kind of a peace settlement. They just have been fought to stalemate.

Hill: There’s not any good outcome I can see come out of this. What’s incumbent upon us is to figure out is how to constrain Russia’s ability to put Ukraine under pressure again in the future or invade again. If there’s any interim freezing of battle lines, make sure that they're not recognized as official. Maybe we can contemplate some international receivership. We’ve had many of these different formulations in the past for disputed territory. We have to ensure, again, that Ukraine can always defend itself and make it impossible for Putin to break out of constraints and do this again.

But that still leaves you with lots of questions about the future relationship with Russia, the future configuration of any European security institutions. How do we reconfigure ourselves internationally to deal with this? The United Nations has proven to be in dire need of an overhaul. The United Nations has been a major player in this conflict. The secretary-general has been heavily involved investigating war crimes and pressing resolutions. But the United Nations has shown itself inadequate because of the configuration of the Security Council and the veto. Everybody's talking about how to address this.

Reynolds: It occurs to me that there's a kind of reckoning coming for NATO. With Finland joining, that adds a long direct border between NATO and Russia. With the new union between Belarus and Russia, there's going to be another NATO border between Poland and Belarus. Considering the fact that NATO's already getting a line across Europe that it's going to have to defend, should NATO consider membership for Ukraine?

Hill: This is also going to be a big issue, right? There are so many people out there who still look at Ukraine as a proxy war. Many of the people trying to push Ukraine to surrender are basically those who believe that the United States or NATO is somehow using Ukraine in a proxy war with Russia.

We're not in a proxy war with Russia, just like we weren’t in a proxy war with Germany during World War I when we were trying to get German forces out of France and Belgium. It wasn’t a proxy war either when we were trying to get Germany out of Poland and all the other places that it invaded in Europe during World War II. We are trying to help Ukraine liberate itself, having been invaded by Russia.

This whole proxy war debate deprives Ukraine of agency. But, if we talk about Ukraine being part of NATO at this particular moment, it will simply feed into this flawed discussion. It will detract from the essence of what this war is, which is Russia trying to seize Ukrainian territory.

Russia believes NATO is simply a cover for the United States in Europe. I think it should be very clear right now with Finland and Sweden wanting to join that this is not the case at all. Finland and Sweden did not apply to NATO before, they have now because NATO is focused on ensuring common collective security and defense, and Russia has put all of Europe at risk.

I see current NATO expansion as a kind of an interim step, a way station to thinking more broadly about how we configure ourselves after Ukraine.

You know, there's also talk about making Ukraine a “giant Israel,” making Ukraine completely self-sufficient for its own security, as, frankly, Finland was before. I think we have to have an open discussion about all of this and not be fixated on one aspect or another.

Reynolds: In other words, even if Ukraine wins the war for its territory, even if Putin is somehow constrained or deposed, we're still at the very beginning of a rethinking of the international order that those outcomes are not going to solve.

Hill: Yes. We’ve also had the impacts of Covid. We've got a climate crisis, which should be evident to everybody by now. There are so many things that we need to contend with, and we've only got the skeleton of an international system.

Putin is holding the whole world hostage. We've got so many things that we have to deal with. I understand why the Global South is so frustrated with all of this: “While you're fighting this war in Ukraine over the same kind of territorial disputes you guys have been having for a hundred years now, we're dying here from disease and climate change. Our countries have flooded. We're starving and you guys are expecting us to help you solve this?” The United Nations system is breaking down, as [António] Guterres, the secretary-general, has said over and over again. All the alarm bells are going off. And Vladimir Putin is behaving as if it's the 1780s all over again.

Reynolds: So we need a new or a revamped global order to address the whole problem?

Hill: That’s obvious. So how do we do it? A lot of people don't find the idea of a revamped United Nations very popular. I can just imagine some of my former colleagues groaning loudly. We definitely need a slimmed-down version.

But we do need international institutions to deal with the magnitude of the problems that we're facing. It’s ironic that Elon Musk, the man who has been talking about getting us to Mars should be Putin’s messenger for the war in Ukraine, when we're having a really hard time getting our act together on this planet. But it's glaringly obvious to ordinary people that we need to do so. Time is not on our side.