China, India contest going to be important in shifting world: activist

Irfan Aslam 

DAWN.COM

Published October 24, 2022 

LAHORE: Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, a human rights activist from Sri Lanka, says the centre of the world is shifting from Europe and North America to the East and the competition between China and India is going to be very important in the future.

He said India had been a longstanding democracy while China was a totalitarian and authoritarian state that had just given its president another term in office.

“What is the future going to be in terms of this competition? Whether India is going to be an example of liberalism, democracy and tolerance or China is going to be more prominent in terms of authoritarianism or whether they would be going to be more like each other, meaning India will become more authoritarianism while China is going to be more democratic?.”

Saravanamuttu was speaking at the Asma Jahangir Conference in a session, titled “Democracy and human rights in south asian: current challenges and future opportunities”. He said a certain level of democracy and human rights should be maintained in our societies. He termed democracy and human rights integral to each other and we could not have democracy without human rights and vice versa.

“Most of our societies have been organised around the principle of diversity because at the end of the day the society is made up of various peoples. Now the majoritarianism is trying to come up with one country, one law argument, which obliterates the notion of diversity. One country, one law may appeal to some people is a way in which majoritarianism asserts itself,” Mr Saravanamuttu said.

Rita Manchanda, Indian human rights activist, said, “The world is changing and there is realignment and confusion at the global level. Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar last week used a phrase that what is happening between India and China makes it all the more important that we engage with our peripheries. Periphery is a pejorative and imperial term used by the British.”

She wondered what the minister meant by periphery, whether he meant Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bhutan or Afghanistan.

Ms Manchanda said India was important in the region due to its land mass and resources and it had certain responsibilities. However, many in Nepal and even in Sri Lanka consider India responsible for their problems.

“There is a situation of great flux (in the world). In the foreign offices of our countries, some rethinking is going on. South Asia has become extremely important for the international community.” She termed India among the ascendant powers which need engagements with their neighbours to secure geopolitical interests. She underlined the importance of more engagement of civil society in South Asian countries.

Sushil Raj Pyakurel, the former commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Nepal, said India and Nepal had open borders and peoples of both the countries were very close to each other. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was arrested during the Gen Zia regime, he was a journalist and he had entered Pakistan through Wagah border by crossing India but now he had to go to Dubai to take a flight to Pakistan. He took a seven-hour flight which should have taken three hours. “We used to have a direct flight from Kathmandu to Karachi but later India put restrictions.” Mr Sushil stressed more people-to-people contacts.

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2022

Russia deepens its influence in West Africa

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor

Columnist

October 24, 2022 

Supporters of Capt. Ibrahim Traoré wave a Russian flag in the streets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on Oct. 2. (Sophie Garcia/AP)

At the end of September, Burkina Faso experienced its second coup of the year. A military putsch in the West African nation brought down the prevailing junta and made 34-year-old Capt. Ibrahim Traoré the youngest national leader in all of Africa. The coup, largely bloodless, was denounced by the African Union, and E.U. and U.S. officials. But cheers came from a conspicuous corner of the world.

In a message posted via the Telegram app, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and head of the Wagner Group, a shadowy mercenary company that Western experts view as a Kremlin proxy, said Traoré’s power grab “was necessary.” He described the previously little-known captain as “a truly worthy and courageous son of his motherland” and cast the grave security troubles wracking the West African nation as part of France’s imperial legacy.

“The people of Burkina Faso were under the yoke of the colonialists, who robbed the people as well as played their vile games, trained, supported gangs of bandits and caused much grief to the local population,” Prigozhin said. Scenes of jubilant pro-coup supporters in the capital Ouagadougou showed some waving Russian flags, a reflection both of the reach of Russian propaganda networks as well as popular frustration with a status quo some link to Western policy. That includes a decade-long French counterterrorism campaign in the nations of the central Sahel, the vast sweep of semiarid land south of the Sahara desert.

Burkina Faso is in the grips of a harrowing security crisis. Islamist militants control swaths of the country. Thousands of civilians have been killed this year alone, while some 2 million people — a fifth of the Burkinabe population — have been displaced by the fighting. Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the previous coup leader who Traoré supplanted, himself seized power in January on grounds that the government was failing the military in its battles against insurgents.

“Faced with the deteriorating situation, we tried several times to get Damiba to refocus the transition on the security question,” Traoré said in a signed statement read out by another officer on state television after the latest coup.

In bloody battle for Bakhmut, Russian mercenaries eye a symbolic prize

Experts now see Russia exploiting the vacuum. Since at least 2018, the Wagner Group has been enlisted to help fragile African regimes crack down on Islamist extremist insurgencies. In the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Libya and now Mali, Russian military contractors have operated on the ground alongside local forces. In some instances, they’ve been linked to reports of human rights abuses and possible war crimes.

Since the Sept. 30 coup in Burkina Faso, there have been growing suggestions that the new junta will consider forging a new “strategic partnership” with Moscow and pivot away from earlier understandings with Western powers. Prigozhin’s rhetoric may be self-serving, but also could indicate a growing Russian influence.

“Rather than being a transparent partner and improving security, Wagner exploits client states who pay for their heavy-handed security services in gold, diamonds, timber and other natural resources — this is part of Wagner Group’s business model,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told a Security Council briefing earlier this month. “We know these ill-gotten gains are used to fund Moscow’s war machine in Africa, the Middle East and Ukraine.”

“In previous coups Russia has tried to position itself as an accidental beneficiary of regime changes,” Samuel Ramani, an analyst at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC. “This time around Russia is a lot more proactive in support for the coup, and that has led to speculation that Russia has played a co-ordinating role.”

Though it’s unclear what actual presence Russia does or will have in Burkina Faso, the coup sets the stage for a new chapter in a broader geopolitical contest. Some African nations, including a handful of states in West Africa, have conspicuously backed Russia at the United Nations and in other forums as Moscow ducks international censure for its invasion and ongoing war in Ukraine.

Civilian killings soar as Russian mercenaries join fight in West Africa

“What we see is that the Sahel is becoming a battlefield for the rivalry between Russia and the West,” said Jean-Hervé Jezequel, Sahel director for the International Crisis Group, in a podcast episode recently released by the think tank. “This is an additional layer in an already complex crisis,” he added, suggesting that great power competition in this part of the world would only make things more difficult for local actors struggling to forge peace.

The struggle is already acute in cyberspace, with Kremlin-linked online accounts animating the discourse across the region. “Pro-Russian networks today are especially targeting West and Central African nations grappling with conflict,” my colleague Danielle Paquette reported earlier this year. “Among them are Burkina Faso and Mali, which both face fast-growing insurgencies and have endured a combined three” — now, four — “coups d'état since 2020. They’re also home to deep reserves of gold and other precious minerals that analysts say Moscow covets.”

Mali, Burkina Faso’s larger neighbor, provides the sharpest illustration of the dynamics. For close to a decade, it was the main staging ground for a French military mission aimed at beating back the advances of extremist militant factions, including al-Qaeda, Islamic State-linked groups and ethnic Tuareg separatists. But after initial successes, the operation bogged down and anti-French sentiment grew.

The last French detachments left Mali for neighboring Niger earlier this year, with the prevailing regime in Bamako — also installed after a military coup — cheering their departure. Mali has more publicly turned toward Russia in years. In September at the U.N. General Assembly, Malian Prime Minister Abdoulaye Maiga celebrated the “exemplary and fruitful cooperation between Mali and Russia” and said it spoke of a larger transition in a region long dominated by France, the former colonial power. “Move on from the colonial past and hear the anger, the frustration, the rejection that is coming up from the African cities and countryside, and understand that this movement is inexorable,” Maiga said.

Wagner forces are active in the country, operating alongside Malian soldiers. They have been linked to a string of civilian massacres, including the extrajudicial execution of some 300 people in a village in central Mali in March.

“What we observe is that elsewhere in Africa today there are worrying deployments of the Wagner militias, and we have been able to see on the ground that the effects of these militias lead to abuses of the population — we saw crimes that unfolded in Mali, in the Central African Republic, in Mozambique — also the pillaging of natural resources, and most of all, zero effectiveness in the fight against terrorism,” said Anne-Claire Legendre, French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, to the Associated Press last week.

Critics, of course, can also point to France’s limited efficacy. “In the eyes of the Malian government … the French-led system of stabilization has not prevented the expansion of the jihadists in the Sahel,” Jezequel said. “In 10 years, the presence of the jihadists has expanded dramatically.”

By Ishaan Tharoor

Ishaan Tharoor is a columnist on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.  Twitter

Nigerian farmers counting losses after devastating flood


By Africanews Last updated: 22/10 - 


Nigerian farmers say they are expecting poor harvests this year after heavier than average rains pummeled crops and brought widespread floods.

The flooding is affecting most of Nigeria's states and other countries in the region killing hundreds.

Celina Gowan has been farming her 5 hectares of land in Abuja for over 20 years. After this week's overnight heavy rain, she woke to find water coursing across her land.

With her farm divided by the water and many crops ruined, she fears the money she has invested this year will be lost.

Many consumers at this market complain of the rise in goods' prices as well as the low quality of produce.

The floods have blocked or washed away roads, and transporting produce to markets now takes longer and costs more money than ever. Farmers say 20 percent of their goods gets spoiled on the road.

Nigeria has recorded at least 600 deaths while in neighboring Niger authorities say at least 192 people have died there as the result of storms, either from homes collapsing or from drowning in flood waters.

Experts point to unusual rainfalls and the failure of governments to set up early warning systems to better prepare for climate extremes.

The floods in West Africa are "majorly due to government negligence to environmental related issues like climate change over a period of time," said Ibrahim Raji, a climate researcher focusing on the region. The situation "boils down to the government's reluctance to address environmental issues," Raji added.

Chi Lael, a spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program in Nigeria, is concerned about the "worrying harvest season ahead."

Some farmers have lost close to 75 percent of everything planted this year, said Kabir Ibrahim, national president of the local farmers association.

The damage caused by the floods in Nigeria also extends to livestock in areas like Bayelsa state, where Innocent Aluu said he lost nearly 10,000 fowl in his poultry to the floods, most of them dying from waterborne diseases.

In Nigeria, WFP said it is providing emergency assistance in the state of Yobe, one of the hardest-hit places. But the agency urgently needs $129 million to support its operations in Nigeria over the next five months, its spokeswoman said.

JUST IN TIME FOR SAMHAIN

Scientists successfully combined two of the spookiest features of quantum mechanics

An Entangled Matter-wave Interferometer: Now with Double the Spookiness!

OCTOBER 22, 2022 15:34 IST

 

BYAMIT MALEWAR

A rendering of the entangled atoms within the interferometer. Credit: Steven Burrows, Thompson Group/JILA

To create a more effective quantum sensor, a team of researchers at JILA has, for the first time, merged two of the “spookiest” aspects of quantum mechanics: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms.

Entanglement is the strange effect of quantum mechanics in which what happens to one atom somehow influences another atom somewhere else. A second rather spooky aspect of quantum mechanics is delocalization, the fact that a single atom can simultaneously be in more than one place.

In this study, researchers combined the spookiness of both entanglement and delocalization to create a matter-wave interferometer that can sense accelerations with a precision that surpasses the standard quantum limit. Future quantum sensors will be able to provide more accurate navigation, search for necessary natural resources, determine fundamental constants like the fine structure and gravitational constants more precisely, search for dark matter more precisely, and perhaps even detect gravitational waves one day by ratcheting up the spookiness.

Researchers used light bouncing between mirrors, called an optical cavity, for entanglement. This allowed information to jump between the atoms and knit them into an entangled state. Using this special light-based technique, they have produced and observed some of the most densely entangled states ever generated in any system, be it atomic, photonic, or solid-state. Using this technique, the group designed two distinct experimental approaches, which they utilized in their recent work.

In the first method, also known as a quantum nondemolition measurement, they premeasure the quantum noise linked to their atoms and then take that measurement out of the equation. The quantum noise of each atom becomes correlated with the quantum noise of all the other atoms by a process known as one-axis twisting in the second method, where light is injected into the cavity. This allows the atoms to work together to become quieter.

JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson said, “The atoms are kind of like kids shushing each other to be quiet so they can hear about the party the teacher has promised them, but here it’s the entanglement that does the shushing.”

Matter-wave Interferometer

The Matter-wave Interferometer is one of the most precise and accurate quantum sensors today.

Graduate student Chengyi Luo explained, “The idea is that one uses pulses of light to cause atoms to move simultaneously and not move by having both absorbed and not absorbed laser light. This causes the atoms over time to simultaneously be in two different places at once.”

“We shine laser beams on the atoms, so we split each atom’s quantum wave packet in two, in other words, the particle exists in two separate spaces simultaneously.”

Later pulses of laser light reverse the process, bringing the quantum wave packets back together, allowing any changes in the environment, such as accelerations or rotations, to be sensed by a measurably large interference between the two components of the atomic wave packet, much like is done with light fields in conventional interferometers, but here with de Broglie waves, or waves made of matter.

The research team determined how to make this work inside an optical cavity with highly-reflective mirrors. They could measure how far the atoms fell along the vertically-oriented cavity due to gravity in a quantum version of Galileo’s gravity experiment dropping items from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but with all the benefits of precision and accuracy that comes along from quantum mechanics.

The group of graduate students led by Chengyi Luo and Graham Greve were then able to use the entanglement created by the light-matter interactions to create a matter-wave interferometer inside an optical cavity to detect the acceleration due to gravity more quietly and accurately. This is the first instance in which a matter-wave interferometer has been observed at a level of precision that exceeds the typical quantum limit imposed by the quantum noise of unentangled atoms.

Thompson said, “Thanks to the ehanced precision, researchers like Luo and Thompson see many future benefits for utilizing entanglement as a resource in quantum sensors. I think that one day we will be able to introduce entanglement into matter-wave interferometers for detecting gravitational waves in space or for dark matter searches—things that probe fundamental physics, as well as devices that can be used for everyday applications such as navigation or geodesy.”

“With this momentous experimental advance, Thompson and his team hope that others will use this new entangled interferometer approach to lead to other advances in the field of physics. By learning to harness and control all of the spookiness we already know about, maybe we can discover new spooky things about the universe that we haven’t even thought of yet!”

Journal Reference:

1. Graham P. Greve et al., Entanglement-enhanced matter-wave interferometry in a high-finesse cavity, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05197-9

The Bank of England Is Central Banking’s 

Crash Test Dummy

Analysis by Marcus Ashworth | Bloomberg

October 24, 2022 

The Bank of England is proceeding with its plan to start actively selling gilts accumulated via quantitative easing, undeterred by the recent liquidity crisis in UK debt markets. The BOE’s progress, scheduled to begin on Nov. 1, will be scrutinized by its central banking peers at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, who are also keen to start draining their monetary punchbowls. The risks of triggering a renewed market meltdown are uncomfortably high.

The UK became the focus of the fixed-income world in recent weeks, with the BOE buying £19 billion ($20 billion) of government bonds as surging yields forced pension funds into fire sales to meet margin calls on their derivatives positions. While most of the blame for the swiftness of the collapse in gilt prices in recent weeks lies with the government’s disastrous attempt to slash taxes, gilt yields were already rising: the BOE’s proposal to offload its bond holdings put it into direct competition with the burgeoning borrowing requirements of the state.

The impending withdrawal of liquidity supplied by the central bank triggered increased market friction, making it harder for investors to trade gilts. The BOE had to become the market-maker of last resort, albeit temporarily. But the episode underlines that taking away stimulus is tough, and suggests that simultaneously hiking interest rates and embarking on quantitative tightening could be a tricky proposition for any central bank seeking to reduce balance sheets that were swollen by the various pandemic support programs. 

The Fed’s balance sheet reached $9 trillion this spring, more than double its pre-pandemic level. The ECB’s total assets are of a similar magnitude at €8.8 trillion ($8.6 trillion), with an extra €2.3 trillion of assets and €1.5 trillion of commercial bank liquidity added since 2020. Central bankers, though, have been remarkably reticent to discuss the potential dangers of a twin tightening of monetary policy by simultaneously raising borrowing costs and unwinding bond purchases. 

The Fed has tried twice with QT already, first in 2013 with a resultant so-called taper tantrum, and again in 2018 before Fed Chair Jerome Powell backed off. This time it has eased itself into unwinding its holdings, allowing $95 billion to passively run off through maturing Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. Nevertheless, illiquidity in US government debt is becoming an increasing concern, as my colleagues have written here and here.

The Nov. 2 Fed meeting is likely to see a fourth consecutive 75 basis-point hike in official interest rates to 4% and signs of stress are already building in the money markets. The spread between overnight and three-month money in dollars, a key stress gauge during crises, has widened from near zero in September to 43 basis points now. The time value of money is getting more expensive as banks charge more to lend for longer to each other.

The ECB faces a similar dilemma as it raises borrowing costs at the same time as considering pulling its bond market stimulus. The tricky part for the euro zone is winding down its super-generous commercial bank liquidity package, known as Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations. The bulk of this is scheduled to be repaid by June next year; but if the governing council goes ahead with a mooted plan to retrospectively to change the terms of the financing, banks could hand the loans back early, sapping financial liquidity. With Italian 10-year yields near 5% and hovering close to their peak premium of 250 basis points above benchmark German debt, the ECB will need to tread carefully.

All three of the world’s major central banks are keen to abandon the emergency bond-buying programs introduced during the global financial crisis and accelerated during the pandemic. But just as their combined efforts magnified the stimulus across the world, synchronized withdrawals risk triggering a global contraction of financial conditions. Money flows across borders like water; the BOE’s recent stop/start is a salutary lesson that policy makers need to heed.

 

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marcus Ashworth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European markets. Previously, he was chief markets strategist for Haitong Securities in London.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Ebola in Uganda: why women must be central to the response

THE CONVERSATION
Published: October 23, 2022

Women need to be involved at every level of decision-making. 

Luke Dray/Getty Images

“No time for that” was the constant refrain heard by gender and women’s health experts working in the 2014/16 Ebola response. This was an emergency and the main thing was to deal with the crisis.

It was the Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone outbreak of Ebola that signalled what was to come for women around the world in the COVID-19 outbreak. Quarantines saw a rise in domestic and intimate partner violence. Girls were banned from school when they returned pregnant. Fear of health centres and hospitals and closures led to increases in other health issues. More women died from maternal mortality than from Ebola.

In early 2020 I worked with women around the world to raise the flag of the potential gendered impact of COVID-19. But few people wanted to listen. No time for that. As with Ebola, it is often only when the harm is done that people working on the response realise two crucial things. First, health emergencies do immediate and long term harm to women, disproportionately. And second, women are essential to responding to health emergencies.

Ebola outbreaks are scary. We’ve come along way from 2014/16 and the Ugandan government is doing all the right things – alerting the world, contact tracing, protecting frontline health workers, working with traditional healers, and working on communications to avert stigma. But there is a real risk that once again the issues that affect women and girls during a health emergency will be missed.

Get news that’s free, independent and based on evidence.Sign up for newsletter

“Lessons learned” is a tired global health trope. But when it comes to the impact on women, we need to take action and here’s how.

5 steps to take to centre women

First, no-one likes lockdowns. But quarantines and lockdowns are specifically a feminist issue. They harm women and put an increased burden on their time and labour. If necessary, any quarantine measures should be accompanied by a full support package for vulnerable women. This means the government needs to be working with the women’s sector, particularly those working on violence against women from the onset – not as an afterthought. Any quarantine measures need to be met with full social and welfare support. International donors need to support the Ugandan government to make this work.

Second, women health workers tend to be clustered in community health work. This involves door-to-door work on information communication, care and contact tracing. During an Ebola outbreak this is high risk. Their personal protection equipment requirements need to be prioritised alongside medical professionals. Moreover, lots of community health workers are volunteers, yet they are the bedrock of finding information in the Ebola response. They need to be paid. Health workers need to be protected, not stigmatised or subject to violence.

Third, everyone involved in the Ebola response should have training to detect and report sexual exploitation and abuse, including the international community. We do not want a repeat of what happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo – what experts called the worst case of sexual exploitation and abuse in UN history – where 82 alleged perpetrators, 21 with direct links to the World Health Organisation, were accused of the abuse and exploitation of girls and women – as young as 13.

Health emergencies bring a mass influx of resources to a vulnerable situation: this is ripe territory for exploitation. Tackling abuse and exploitation should never be an afterthought; often thought about when it is too late. Instead, it should be addressed as an ever-present risk when responding to health emergencies.

Fourth, we need good data. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014/16 I developed the idea of women being conspicuously invisible. They were everywhere in frontline community health work – but were totally invisible in decision-making or official data. Data should detect not only where and how Ebola is spreading but who is most vulnerable. This means counting how many men and how many women are getting and dying of Ebola. Data informs what measures need to be put in place to help people. Sex disaggregated data is not perfect (most systems fail to account for non-binary people for example), but it is a start.

Finally, and I cannot stress this enough: women need to be involved at every level of decision-making. From the high profile Jane Ruth Aceng, Minister of Health in Uganda, to the contact tracing teams, to the surveillance squads. Women leaders do not necessarily mean greater representation of women’s issues or women friendly policies. However, given that the health sector is highly feminised, women must sit around the tables that matter.
Learning from the past

I’ve seen at first hand the harm that health emergencies did to women in Sierra Leone in the 2014/16 outbreak.

When I started shouting about it during the COVID-19 response, “No time for that” was accompanied by, “Where’s the evidence and data?”.

Thanks to tireless work and mobilisation of gender and global health experts around the world, we have the evidence that health emergencies harm women. Now we must act so that this does not happen again in Uganda.

Author   

Sophie Harman
Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London
Disclosure statement
Sophie Harman receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

Bernie Sanders: 'Republicans blame Biden for inflation ... really?'

CNN SUNDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 23,2022 

 

Pelosi Says No Regrets on Covid Aid That GOP Links to Inflation




Tony Czuczka
Sun, October 23, 2022 

(Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she doesn’t regret pandemic aid passed by Democrats to boost the US economy and advised her party’s midterm candidates to focus on the Biden administration’s efforts to curb inflation.

Pelosi’s messaging before control of both houses of Congress is up for grabs on Nov. 8 amounted to a rejection of Republican arguments that the American Rescue Plan has fueled the fastest US inflation in 40 years. She was asked on Sunday whether she regretted measures under the plan, such as stimulus checks mailed to qualifying Americans in 2021.

“No, absolutely not, because that was necessary for people to survive,” Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The point is that when you reduce unemployment, it’s inflationary. That is a fact.”

In a letter to fellow Democratic lawmakers on Saturday, she urged her party to focus campaigning on “kitchen table” issues and steps to reduce inflation, which is cutting into Americans’ purchasing power ahead of the midterm elections.

Pelosi said House Democrats should tell voters what they have already done to ease the burden of inflation and what they’ll do if they return to power in the next Congress.

“The fight is not about inflation, it’s about the cost of living,” she said on Sunday.

Pelosi denied that Democrats counted too much on tapping into voter outrage about the Supreme Court decision striking down the national right to abortion.

“Nobody said we’re doing abortion rather than the economy, but it’s about both,” she said.

Polls have consistently suggested that a plurality of Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on the economy.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Sunday showed respondents favoring the GOP over Democrats on the economy by a margin of 38% to 24%, while Democrats increased their edge on abortion by 8 percentage points from the previous poll in August to 46%, versus 25% for the GOP.

Pelosi, who is serving her second term as speaker, said in her letter that Republicans “mismanaged” the response to Covid-19, “stealing jobs, shuttering small businesses, strangling supply chains” and that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated a “global scourge of inflation.”

“Greedy corporations and special interests have sought to take advantage of the crisis: stealing from families by raising prices to obscene levels,” she said.

In contrast, Pelosi said her party has passed legislation that would reduce the cost of living for Americans, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan, an infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act.

US inflation gauges have been running at four-decade highs this year, affecting everything from gasoline prices to restaurant sales and prompting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to the highest level since 2007.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican running for re-election next month, said “the issues really are inflation,” gasoline prices that reached a record in June and crime.

“A dollar you held at the start the Biden administration is now worth only 88.3 cents,” he said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

--With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Erik Wasson.

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