Mexico replaced China as America's top trade buddy — and it shows how the global economy is rapidly transforming

Cork Gaines
Sun, August 20, 2023 

President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.Hector Vivas/Getty Images

Trade between the US and Mexico reached $263 billion during the first four months of this year.


That pushed Mexico past China and Canada as its top trade partner since the start of the pandemic.


China was America's top partner for much of the 2010s and again at the start of the pandemic.

Meet America's new, old best friend in the world economy.

According to a new post from Luis Torres, a senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Mexico has once again cemented its place as America's top trading partner, with $263 billion worth of goods passing between the two countries in the first four months of this year. Trade with Mexico accounted for 15.4% of goods exported and imported by the US, just ahead of America's trade totals with Canada and China, which were 15.2% and 12% respectively.

Even as the world moves on from the height of the pandemic, Mexico's ability to take the top spot away from China — which had spent the last two decades integrating itself further into the US economy — is a clear sign of how the economic chaos of 2020 is set to continue to define the world economy for years to come.

Torres said the seeds for this shift were sown before the pandemic — with former President Donald Trump's tariffs on some Chinese goods and the signing of the US-Canada-Mexico trade deal, a slight update of the nearly three-decades-old NAFTA deal. But Torres said the changes also suggested an accelerated shift toward "nearshoring," a practice in which countries bring supply chains for crucial goods to countries that are close physically and politically.

"While data on recent nearshoring is thin and evidence of it is largely anecdotal, increased protectionism and related industrial policy are consistent with less global trade, more regional trade, and nearshoring and reshoring (returning production to the home country)," Torres wrote.

Nearshoring increased during the pandemic because of the increased cost of shipping products across the Pacific and the consumer demand for faster delivery times — we'll call the latter "The Amazon Prime Effect." The New York Times' Peter S. Goodman also wrote earlier this year that companies like Walmart were increasingly looking closer to home for ways to fill their needs as political tensions between the US and China heated up.

"It's not about deglobalization," Michael Burns, a managing partner at Murray Hill Group, an investment firm focused on the supply chain, told Goodman. "It's the next stage of globalization that is focused on regional networks."
Trucks at the Port of Manzanillo, Mexico.Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In Shannon O'Neil's new book, "The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter," she made the case for regionalization over globalization and said that keeping production closer to home would help American workers. In his review of O'Neil's book, Greg Rosalsky of NPR summed up the argument:

"O'Neil writes that the average import from Mexico is '40% US made,' meaning that 40% of the parts that go into the end product are still produced in the US. The average Canadian import, meanwhile, is 25% made in the US. 'As for a product coming in from China? Just 4% of it was made in the USA,' she writes."

Still, in recent months, President Joe Biden has sought to improve the relationship between the US and China after seeing the fracturing grow in recent years, including the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon in February. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with China's leader, Xi Jinping, in June, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently made a four-day trip to China.

Blinken and Xi pledged to stabilize the relationship between China and the US. Meanwhile, Yellen voiced concerns about "unfair economic practices" but said she hoped the two sides could work closer because "the world is big enough for both of our countries to thrive."

With pieces in constant motion, especially with China, one thing is clear for now: trade between Mexico and the US appears to be as strong as ever and should continue to grow.

Ford, partners pick Canada for $900 million battery materials plant


By Steve Scherer
Thu, August 17, 2023 

OTTAWA (Reuters) -A consortium of Ford Motor Co and South Korean companies on Thursday said they would build a C$1.2 billion ($887 million)plant to produce electric vehicle (EVs) battery materials in Becancour, Quebec, a town seeking to become an EV-supply-chain hub, Canada's industry ministry said.

The consortium includes South Korean partners EcoProBM and SK On Co Ltd, according a statement from the ministry. The factory will eventually produce 45,000 tonnes of cathode active materials (CAM) per year for Ford EVs.

Ford in a separate statement described the materials as high-quality Nickel Cobalt Manganese (NCM) for rechargeable batteries that are targeting greater performance and improved EV range.

"This cathode facility will supply the material that goes into Ford's future EVs in North America, specifically some of our future trucks," Lisa Drake, Ford vice president for EVs, told reporters.

It is Ford's first investment in Quebec, although it has operated in neighboring Ontario for more than a century.

Canada's federal government will provide the consortium with a conditional loan of C$322 million and Quebec will offer the same amount as a partially forgivable loan, the statement said. The factory is expected to be operational in the first half of 2026, creating more than 345 jobs.

This is the latest in a series of construction announcements for Becancour, a town of fewer than 15,000 people on the St. Lawrence River that is shaping up to be an EV-supply-chain hub in North America.

"This is a big vote of confidence in the (EV) ecosystem we've been building," Canada industry minister Francois-Philippe Champagne told Reuters. "This is very significant for Quebec, because as you know the auto sector has been primarily investing in Ontario, but now we have GM, now we have Ford in Becancour."

General Motors Co and South Korea's POSCO Future M in May said they would increase production capacity at a chemical battery materials facility whose construction was first announced last year. Germany's BASF SE is also building a battery materials factory there.

Canada, home to a large mining sector for minerals including lithium, nickel and cobalt, is trying to woo companies involved in all levels of the EV supply chain via a multibillion-dollar green technology fund as the world seeks to cut carbon emissions.

German automaker Volkswagen and Stellantis, the parent of brands including Fiat and Chrysler, are building multibillion-dollar battery plants west of Quebec in Ontario, the heartland of Canada's fossil-fuel-powered car industry that has historical trade and production links with the Detroit carmakers.

($1 = 1.3525 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Jane Merriman and Mark Porter)

1 year after the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act: How has Canada responded?


Naimul Karim

Financial Post
Tue, August 15, 2023 

0421 biz rt vwtrudeau

The United States a year ago passed a 730-page piece of legislation that almost single-handedly paved the way for some of the world’s biggest manufacturing companies to change their supply-chain systems.

Signed into law on Aug. 16 by President Joe Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), contrary to its title, wasn’t just about bringing down inflation, which was at its peak a year ago. Instead, it promised more than US$300-billion worth of tax credits, grants and loans to fund clean-energy projects and address issues linked to energy security and health care.

With Canadian businesses, especially in the auto sector, linked to the U.S. market, the law was bound to make an impact north of the border. That’s why the Canadian government aggressively lobbied for months prior to the legislation’s passing to change certain conditions that could have otherwise hurt this country’s automotive, energy and mining industries.

One year on, the IRA has had both the desired effect on companies in the U.S. and some unforeseen consequences for others.
A boon for mining and battery sectors

A month after the law came into being, South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution Ltd. inked deals to source materials required to make batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) from three Canadian junior miners.

Toronto-based Electra Battery Materials Corp., which agreed to supply the battery-making giant with cobalt, described the deal as its “first big commercial contract” last September. An Electra spokesman said the IRA helped close the deal.

LG also inked deals with Toronto’s Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. and Winnipeg-based Snow Lake Resources, miners who are in the process of developing lithium projects.

A key reason behind the investments in these early-stage projects that have yet to start production lies in the IRA provisions that provide a US$3,750 credit for vehicles whose batteries contain critical minerals extracted or processed in a country with which the U.S. has a free-trade agreement or were recycled from depleted batteries at a facility in North America. In addition, there’s a separate US$3,750 tax credit for vehicles whose battery components were either manufactured or assembled in North America. The bill mentions various thresholds for both conditions.

Referring to the provisions, both Avalon and Snow Lake last year said the IRA paved the way for Canadian miners exploring battery metals to start working with EV manufacturers.

These weren’t the only Canadian mining projects that benefited from the act. In November, General Motors Co. signed a deal with Brazil-based Vale SA to source 25,000 tonnes of battery-grade nickel annually from Vale’s proposed plant in Bécancour, Que. The nickel feed will be used in GM’s battery cathodes to power about 350,000 electric vehicles annually. A GM representative last year said the deal would help the company become eligible for the clean-energy tax credits mentioned in the IRA.

General Motors assembly workers connect a battery pack underneath a partially assembled 2018 Chevrolet Bolt EV vehicle on the assembly line at Orion Assembly in Lake Orion, Michigan.

Last year, Stellantis and LG also inked an agreement with Ottawa to invest more than $5 billion to build a Windsor battery factory that is expected to create 2,500 jobs.

The IRA played a role in enticing auto companies to build Canada’s first battery plants for EVs, although it could have robbed Canada of a crucial investment from Stellantis and LG.

The companies first announced in March 2022 their goal of building a lithium-ion battery plant in Windsor. However, construction of the plant was halted in May this year after Stellantis, the company behind brands such as Jeep, Fiat and Chrysler, said the federal government had not met its financial commitments.

The issue was linked to the IRA, according to industry minister François-Philippe Champagne, who on May 19 said that while Canada already had a deal with Stellantis, the parties had to renegotiate because of the IRA and the benefits the act provided.

The situation was eventually resolved in July after Canada confirmed it would provide the project with performance incentives worth up to $15 billion. The federal government inked a similar agreement with Volkswagen AG, which is looking to build a battery plant in St. Thomas, Ont. Volkswagen could receive at least $13 billion in performance incentives.

The government’s commitments to the “battery shops” were the most obvious impact of the IRA in Canada, said Bob Fay, a managing director at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an Ontario-based think tank. But he also said it wasn’t enough to “truly position” Canada as a leader in the EV value chain.

“Canada needs to focus on developing and capturing intellectual property as opposed to simply becoming a battery branch plant operation,” he said. “Canada is well positioned to do so with our talent and resources, and governments’ efforts should be redirected to those goals.”
Canada’s counter ‘not as generous’

The IRA helped bring investments into Canada, but it also compelled some businesses to flow south of the border.

For example, Calgary-based fuel distributor Parkland Corp. in March said it decided against building a standalone renewable diesel complex at its Burnaby Refinery due to reasons that included rising costs and the IRA, which it said give U.S. producers an advantage.

Aware of the “major challenge” posed by the IRA, the federal government announced a number of steps in the most recent budget to counter the act, including investment tax credits and targeted programs to boost clean-energy projects and strategic financing pathways, and reaffirmed its support for the mining sector.

A few business leaders, though, described the government’s reaction as “limited” compared to the IRA.

“A lack of action on permitting reform and investment tax credits has put us on the back foot,” said Heather Exner-Pirot, a special adviser at the Business Council of Canada, a group of about 150 companies, including Microsoft Canada Inc. and Google Canada.

“In contrast to Canada’s approach, the IRA treats the private sector as a partner, not an obstacle, in achieving climate goals,” he added.

The Stellantis Canada Windsor Assembly Plant.

Matthew Holmes, a senior vice-president at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce said it wasn’t possible for Canada to go “head to head” with the United States and that the steps taken in the budget were “prudent and pragmatic.”

However, he said Canada needs to “stop dragging” its feet on reducing regulatory red tape and start working with provinces to get projects moving faster.

“We have already seen capital investment head south,” Holmes said. “Over the next year or two, we are concerned that Canadian talent, research and innovation will follow as the U.S. builds momentum.”

Dennis Darby, chief executive of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, which represents 2,500 manufacturers, said Canada’s counter moves haven’t been “as generous” as the U.S. incentives and that the roll out has been “too slow.”

He said that despite the initial steps, Canada’s manufacturing sector runs the risk of being “left behind in the race for clean jobs and investment.”

Darby said there is a need to win more “major clean economy investment projects” such as the ones with Volkswagen and Stellantis to bridge the gap with the U.S. and attract more investment.

Electra lands first big contract with global battery maker LG


Vale inks deal to supply GM with nickel from Quebec plant


Ontario boosts Stellantis subsidy to keep Windsor battery plant

Some researchers such as Carlo Dade, a director at the Calgary-based think tank Canada West Foundation, believe Canada needs to provide a similarly comprehensive response such as the IRA instead of a “bunch of disparate” measures.

“I am still waiting for a Canadian response,” he said. “Maybe one reason that we’re so focused on the IRA is that we don’t have anything similar in Canada? Beyond the immediate hits to business there’s a larger issue here.”

GM's Cruise autonomous vehicle unit agrees to cut fleet in half after 2 crashes in San Francisco

Sat, August 19, 2023
:

General Motors' Cruise autonomous vehicle unit has agreed to cut its fleet of San Francisco robotaxis in half as authorities investigate two recent crashes in the city.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles asked for the reduction after a Cruise vehicle without a human driver collided with an unspecified emergency vehicle on Thursday.

“The DMV is investigating recent concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco,” the DMV said Saturday in a statement to The Associated Press. “Cruise has agreed to a 50% reduction and will have no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night.”

The development comes just over a week after California regulators allowed Cruise and Google spinoff Waymo to operate autonomous robotaxis throughout San Francisco at all hours, despite safety worries spurred by recurring problems with unexpected stops and other erratic behavior.

The decision Aug. 10 by the Public Utilities Commission made San Francisco the first major U.S. city with two fleets of driverless vehicles competing for passengers.

On Thursday around 10 p.m., the Cruise vehicle had a green light, entered an intersection, and was hit by the emergency vehicle responding to a call, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, based on tweets from Cruise.

The robotaxi was carrying a passenger, who was taken by ambulance to a hospital with injuries that were not severe, Cruise told the newspaper.

Also Thursday night, a Cruise car without a passenger collided with another vehicle in San Francisco, the newspaper reported.

The San Francisco Fire Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the newspaper.

The robotaxi almost immediately identified the emergency response vehicle as it came into view, Greg Dietrerich, Cruise's general manager in San Francisco, said in a statement on the company website.

At the intersection, visibility is occluded by buildings, and it's not possible to see objects around a corner until they are very close to the intersection, Dietrerich's statement said. The Cruise autonomous vehicle detected the siren as soon it was distinguishable from background noise, he wrote.

“The AV's ability to successfully chart the emergency vehicle's path was complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light,” Dietrerich wrote.

The Cruise vehicle identified the risk of a crash and braked, reducing its speed, but couldn't avoid the collision, he wrote.

Cruise vehicles have driven more than 3 million autonomous miles in the city and have interacted with emergency vehicles more than 168,000 times in the first seven months of this year alone, the statement said. “We realize that we'll always encounter challenging situations, which is why continuous improvement is central to our work.”

The company will work with regulators and city departments to reduce the likelihood of a crash happening again, Dietrerich wrote.

The DMV said the fleet reduction will remain until its investigation ends and Cruise takes corrective action to improve safety. “The DMV reserves the right, following investigation of the facts, to suspend or revoke testing and/or deployment permits if there is determined to be an unreasonable risk to public safety.”

The Associated Press

Self-driving car company Cruise agreed to reduce its driverless fleet by 50% after a spate of recent crashes. San Francisco officials previously pushed for a slower rollout of robotaxis.

Lloyd Lee
Sat, August 19, 2023

A passenger gets out of a Cruise driverless taxi after a test ride in San Francisco on February 15, 2023.Terry Chea/AP

California regulators recently approved 24/7 operation of driverless taxis in San Francisco.

Traffic jams and collisions followed within a week of the approval.

City officials previously told Insider the approval would be "premature."

Cruise, a self-driving car company, agreed to slash its driverless taxi operation in San Francisco by half on Friday following reports of two separate crashes involving its vehicles.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles said in a statement that it is investigating "recent concerning incidents involving Cruise vehicles" and that the company agreed to its request to reduce the number of operating vehicles by 50% with "no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night."

"Over one hundred people lose their lives every day on American roadways, and countless others are badly injured. We believe it's clear that Cruise positively impacts overall road safety, and look forward to working with the CA DMV to make any improvements and provide any data they need to reinforce the safety and efficiency of our fleet," a Cruise spokesperson told Insider in an email.

Cruise is cutting down its fleet just a week after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) gave the company, along with Alphabet's Waymo, the green light to operate driverless taxis 24/7 in San Francisco.

CPUC Commissioner Darcie Houck indicated on the day of the approval that the commission could vote to limit the number of driverless vehicles or revoke the companies' permits entirely if there are more reports of incidents, The Verge reported.

The DMV also said it reserves the ability to suspend or revoke testing or deployment permits.

A day after the state regulators' approval, videos of several Cruise cars stalling in the middle of San Francisco's roads appeared online, with a buildup reportedly involving around 10 Cruise cars.

The company said SF's Outside Lands Music Festival "posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles."

One Cruise vehicle also drove into wet concrete at a construction site.

On Thursday, two Cruise robotaxis were involved in separate collision incidents, one of which occurred while a passenger was inside the vehicle.

The Cruise taxi did not yield to the firetruck, injuring a passenger inside the car, a firefighter at the scene told CBS Bay Area.

Cruise said in a statement posted on X that its vehicle entered the intersection on a green light "and was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene."

In a separate statement, Cruise said that the buildings in that area make it difficult "for humans and AVs alike" to spot objects around the corner until they're close to the intersection.

The company added: "The AV's ability to successfully chart the emergency vehicle's path was complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light."

Another collision occurred that evening, in which another vehicle ran a red light "at a high rate of speed," the company told Insider.

"The AV detected the vehicle and braked but the other vehicle made contact with our AV. There were no passengers in our AV and the driver of the other vehicle was treated and released at the scene," a Cruise spokesperson said.

City officials and agencies previously raised concerns that San Francisco was not prepared to handle the expansion of driverless taxi operations.

Tilly Chang, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), previously told Insider that her agency believes approving the permits would be "premature."

"We're not saying don't do anything … but there needs to be an incremental form of that expansion," she said.

Before the recent collisions, there had already been incident reports of Cruise cars causing traffic jams, interrupting emergency situations, and running into dogs.

Chang noted that local agencies know about these incidents only because they're "piecing it together ourselves" and that part of the issue they have stemmed from the lack of data.

"We've been asking for the companies to voluntarily or for the CPUC to require a log of incidents," she said.

Joe Castiglione, SFCTA's deputy director for technology, data, and analysis, told Insider that, based on the agency's data, there were about 90-plus incidents involving driverless cars by the end of 2022.

But in March — shortly after CPUC granted Cruise and Waymo permits to collect taxi fares during limited hours of the day — the number increased to about a hundred per month.

"One of the challenges is that there's very little data available to the public or to public agencies to understand what's happening on the street," Castiglione said.

 Business Insider

San Francisco launches driverless bus service following robotaxi expansion

TERRY CHEA
Fri, August 18, 2023 




A driverless shuttle transports passengers on San Francisco's Treasure Island as part of a pilot program to assess the safety and effectiveness of autonomous vehicles for public transit on Aug. 16, 2023. The free bus service was launched less than a week after California regulators approved the controversial expansion of robotaxis on city streets. 

(AP Photo/Terry Chea)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — First came the robotaxis. Then the driverless buses arrived.

San Francisco has launched an autonomous shuttle service -- less than a week after California regulators approved the expansion of robotaxis despite traffic and safety concerns.

The free shuttle will run daily in a fixed route called the Loop around Treasure Island, the site of a former U.S. Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The Loop makes seven stops, connecting residential neighborhoods with stores and community centers. About 2,000 people live on the island.

The all-electric vehicle, which doesn’t have a driver’s seat or steering wheel, is staffed with an attendant who can drive the bus with a handheld controller if necessary. The county is offering the shuttle service as part of a grant-funded pilot program to assess how autonomous vehicles can supplement the public transit system.

“Having the attendant on board makes everyone feel comfortable,” said Tilly Chang, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. “This is just a demonstration for now to see, what does it look like and how does it work to have a driverless shuttle in a low-volume, low-speed environment?”

San Francisco is one of a growing number of cities worldwide that are testing the safety and potential of self-driving vehicles to transform public transportation.

The shuttles are operated by Beep, an Orlando, Florida-based company that has run similar pilot programs in more than a dozen U.S. communities, including service at the Miami Zoo, Mayo Clinic and Yellowstone National Park.

“These shuttles are built for first-mile, last-mile, short connectivity routes. They’re not intended to take the place of a bus system,” said Beep project manager Shelley Caran. “The autonomous vehicle will have a better reaction time than a human and it will offer a more reliable service because they won’t be distracted.”

During a test ride Wednesday, the shuttle drove slowly and cautiously in autonomous mode. An attendant manually steered the vehicle around a utility truck that blocked part of the road.

“I didn’t feel unsafe,” said Dominic Lucchesi, an Oakland resident who was among the first to ride the autonomous shuttle. “I thought that it made some abrupt stops, but otherwise I felt like I was riding any other bus for the most part.”

The boxy shuttle, which can sit up to 10 passengers, will operate 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day and circle the Loop every 20 minutes. The city has two shuttles — one can charge while the other ferries passengers.

The autonomous shuttle pilot project was launched after the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow two rival robotaxi companies, Cruise and Waymo, to offer around-the-clock passenger service in San Francisco.

The approval came despite widespread complaints that the driverless taxis make unexpected stops, cause traffic backups and block emergency vehicles. On Wednesday, the city asked the commission to pause the robotaxi expansion.

Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, reported on social media that one of its robotaxis crashed into a city fire truck Thursday night, sending one passenger to the hospital.

Experts don’t anticipate the same problems with driverless buses because they’re expected to be staffed with drivers or attendants for the foreseeable future.

“Trained operators are going to be required even as we increase automation,” said Nikolas Martelaro, autonomous-vehicle researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. “So the question there may not be how worried should someone be about losing their job versus what should they be thinking about the potential training that’s required.”

Autonomous driving technology could make buses safer, but requiring drivers or attendants on-board could undermine one of their perceived advantages: reduced labor costs.

“We still have to find a market for them,” said Art Guzzetti, vice president at the American Public Transportation Association. “We’re doing it to make the trip better, more efficient, not to take the worker’s job.”

Most Thais oppose plan for Pheu Thai-military coalition government - poll

Orathai Sriring and Panarat Thepgumpanat
Updated Sun, August 20, 2023 

FILE PHOTO: Thailand general election


By Orathai Sriring and Panarat Thepgumpanat

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Most Thais disagree with the leading plan for a coalition government which includes military-backed groups, an opinion poll showed on Sunday, two days before a parliamentary vote aiming to end a three-month political stalemate.

About 64% of 1,310 respondents disagreed or totally disagreed with the idea of the Pheu Thai party forming a "special government" with military-backed rivals, according to the survey by the National Institute of Development Administration.

Thailand has been under a caretaker government for five months and faces prolonged uncertainty after the winner of the May election, Move Forward, was blocked from forming a government by conservative legislators allied with the royalist military.

The second-place Pheu Thai, founded by the family of self-exiled billionaire former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, this month took over efforts to form a government.

Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thaksin's daughter and one of three prime ministerial candidates of Pheu Thai, on Sunday apologised that the party had failed to keep its election pledge of not joining with pro-military parties.

"We have to make adjustments to keep the country going," she told reporters. "Of course, Pheu Thai has the price to pay, that is the criticism of the people. We humbly accept and apologise for making many disappointed and sad."

The party will work fully to solve the country's problems if it can form a government, Paetongtarn added.

Pheu Thai, set to nominate another candidate, real estate tycoon Srettha Thavisin, as prime minister for voting on Tuesday, needs the support of more than half the bicameral legislature, including the military-appointed Senate.

Also on Tuesday, Thaksin is set to return to Thailand, despite facing a jail sentence, Paetongtarn said on Saturday.

On Sunday, she said Thaksin's return had nothing to do with politics and he simply wanted to return to his home country.

Pheu Thai governments were ousted by military coups in 2006 and 2014 - which ousted Thaksin and his sister Yingluck Shinawatra, respectively - when the party's interests clashed with the country's powerful old money elites and royalist military.

Sunday's poll found Paetongtarn would be the preferred prime minister with 38.6% support, followed by Srettha at 36.6%.

Pheu Thai on Thursday gained support from the military-backed rival United Thai Nation Party. A lawmaker from another pro-military party, Palang Pracharat, said this month the party would back Pheu Thai in trying to break the protracted deadlock.

(Reporting by Orathai Sriring and Panarat Thepgumpanat; Editing by William Mallard and Christina Fincher)

INDIA

WE20

Police stop pre-G20 meeting after Modi criticised for using leaders' summit to boost electoral chances


Sky News
Updated Sun, 20 August 2023 


Indian police have intervened to stop a conference where the country's prime minister Narendra Modi was accused of using the upcoming G20 leaders' summit to boost his party's chances in next year's general election.

A spokesperson for the "We20" conference said police sent a letter calling for the two-day gathering of hundreds of people to end as it did not have the proper permission.

Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were criticised by some speakers at the event for using the upcoming G20 gathering of world leaders to try to bolster their chances in the 2024 general election.


He is set to welcome the leaders of the G20 nations - including the UK's Rishi Sunak - to India for the leaders' summit in September.

The UK's health secretary, Steve Barclay, was in India over the weekend for a meeting of G20 health ministers.

Almost 400 people - including activists, academics and politicians - gathered for the We20 conference, with issues like food security, climate change, labour rights, natural resources and rising inequality all being discussed.

We20 spokesperson Kavita Kabeer said the gathering was told it did not have the proper permission to take place in a high-security zone.

"We are shocked that we need to have permission to practice democracy," a statement by the organisers said.

It added that police tried to stop attendees from entering the venue for the gathering.

Delhi Police declined to comment on the We20 summit, according to the AP news agency.

But local media reported that Sanjay Sain, a police officer, said: "They had erected tents outside the building. And there was a considerable gathering of people in an area where Section 144 [prohibiting gatherings of four or more people] had been imposed."

Mr Modi's critics have claimed India's democratic principles are being put under threat during his leadership.

With a population of more than 1.4bn, the nation is the world's largest democracy.

The government has denied democracy is threatened, instead stating that it is robust and thriving.

Read more:
Protests rock Indian parliament following ethnic violence
Indian MP sentenced for defaming Narendra Modi
Sunak condemns violence at Indian High Commission

Last month, protests gripped the Indian parliament following unrest in the northeastern state of Manipur.

At least 130 people died in the violence, with thousands injured since it began in May after women from the Kuki-Zomi tribe were filmed being paraded naked and groped.

While Mr Modi condemned the initial incident, he did not speak against the clashes between the politically dominant Meitei Hindu community of the valley and the Christian Kuki-Zomi tribal groups who live in the hills.

In March, an opposition leader - Rahul Gandhi - was sentenced to two years in prison for defaming Mr Modi in 2019.

While back in January, a BBC documentary about Mr Modi's role in the Gujarat riots in 2002 was blocked. Mr Modi was the chief minister of the state when the unrest left 1,000 people dead.

'Strong enough now': BRICS nations eye global geopolitical shift

Susan NJANJI and Claire DOYEN
Sat, 19 August 2023

The BRICS group GDP growth (John SAEKI)

Leaders of the BRICS emerging economies, which account for about a quarter of the world's wealth, meet in Johannesburg this week looking to widen the bloc's influence and push for a shift in global geopolitics.

South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to host China's President Xi Jinping, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for the annual three-day summit starting on Tuesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also will join remotely.


Putin decided against attending in person as he is the target of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant that South Africa is in theory bound to enforce if he sets foot in the country.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will travel to Johannesburg instead.

Representing billions of people across three continents, with economies undergoing varying levels of growth, the BRICS share one thing in common -- disdain for a world order they see as serving the interests of rich Western powers.

"The traditional global governing system has become dysfunctional, deficient and missing in action," Chen Xiaodong, the Chinese ambassador to Pretoria said at a briefing on Friday, adding the BRICS are "increasingly becoming a staunch force in defending international justice".

There is growing interest in the bloc -- at least 40 countries have expressed interest in joining, and 23 of those have formally submitted applications to become BRICS members.

- 'Polarised world' -

Anil Sooklal, South Africa's ambassador-at-large for Asia and the BRICS, told AFP on Friday that one of the reasons countries are lining up to join is "the very polarised world we live in, that has been further polarised by the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and where countries are being forced to take sides".

"Countries in the South don't want to be told who to support, how to behave and how to conduct their sovereign affairs. They are strong enough now to assert their respective positions," added Sooklal.

The BRICS have raised hope for countries looking to restructure the global "architecture", he said.

"The major markets are now in the Global South... but we are still on the margins in terms of global decision-making."

Lebogang Legodi, international politics lecturer at the University of Limpopo, agrees that many states keen on joining the group "are seeing BRICS as an alternative to the current hegemony" in world affairs.

Around 50 other leaders will attend a "friends of BRICS" programme during the summit, which will be held at a convention centre in the heart of Johannesburg's Sandton, historically referred to as the richest square-mile on the continent.

This year's gathering is themed "BRICS and Africa: Partnership for mutually accelerated growth, sustainable development and inclusive multilateralism".

It comes at "a critical inflection point," said Steven Gruzd of the Africa-Russia Africa project at the South African Institute of International Affairs.

"The current multilateral system is under strain," he said.

A decision on expanding the BRICS membership is expected at the end of the summit, according to Sooklal.

An upbeat Ramaphosa told a meeting of the ruling ANC party in Johannesburg on Saturday that "we are going to have a fantastic BRICS summit".

He said the presence of so many heads of state "goes to show the influence and the impact that South Africa" has in the world.

But experts closely watching the BRICS aren't very optimistic about the meeting's outcomes.

"I don't think this summit will yield those dramatic results because the power is still with Western countries. China is rising, but is not the dominant power yet," said SAIIA's Gruzd.

Formally launched in 2009, the BRICS now account for 23 percent of global GDP and 42 percent of the world's population.

The combined bloc represents more than 16 percent of the world's trade.

sn-cld/rox/mca

Paying the price of truth: Nobel peace laureate Dmitry Muratov won’t be silenced by Putin

Tim Adams

THE GUARDIAN
Sat, 19 August 2023


Dmitry Muratov
Russian journalist and television presenter


A few days after he announced he would sell his Nobel peace prize medal at auction – and give the millions of dollars raised to Ukrainian refugees – the Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov was sitting on a train bound for the city of Samara.

Just before the train pulled away from Kazansky station in Moscow, the door to his carriage was flung open and a masked man threw a bucket of stinking red liquid over him, shouting the words: “This is for our boys!” The liquid – it turned out to be paint mixed with acetone – drenched Muratov in crimson and half-blinded him, but he still had the presence of mind to chase his attacker down the platform. He apprehended the masked man talking to a police officer and demanded his arrest. No action was taken.

Smartphone footage of this event from April 2022 is the opening scene of a documentary film about the life of Muratov, which will be shown on Channel 4 at 10pm on Monday night. The film is called The Price of Truth, and if you were ever in doubt about the human cost of publishing factual news in a time of war and repression, then Muratov’s career establishes it in frank detail.

I spoke to Muratov last week, by Zoom in the office of the newspaper he has edited for 30 years, Novaya Gazeta, standard bearer for the glasnost and perestroika of its founding patron, Mikhail Gorbachev. None of those years have been without challenge and trauma. The photographs of six Novaya Gazeta journalists murdered in the course of their work are on the wall above Muratov’s desk. But even so, he suggested to me, this last year has been the worst.

“All non-state media [including his paper] has been closed,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of web pages have been blocked.” Government propaganda, he suggests, spreads “like radiation” into every home. “There is no one to control power in Russia, and our society hasn’t understood that yet.”

The Price of Truth begins three days after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when the Kremlin stepped up its attack on domestic media. What remained of an independent press was first ordered not to use the word “war”, then suspended; scores of Russian journalists were officially declared traitorous “foreign agents”.

Muratov’s response was, typically, both canny and robust. Knowing what was coming, he suspended Novaya’s production in advance of official sanction, and his editorial team left for Riga, in Latvia, where a Novaya Gazeta Europe edition would report the war in exile. He himself stayed – against all pleading – in Moscow.

In his editorial office last week, Muratov, 61, had the air of a man who has faced down the worst that life could throw at him, yet maintained not only his clear sense of mission but also his human warmth. Patrick Forbes, the director of The Price of Truth, recalled to me how, when he first met Muratov 20 years ago in those same offices while working on a film about Russian oligarchs, the editor barrelled in at 11 in the morning, put a whisky bottle down on the table and demanded: “What are we drinking?” Forbes left some hours later, “drunk and incredibly well-informed”. Even on a Zoom screen, speaking through a translator, to an audience of me in London, Muratov conveys a good deal of that bullish charisma.

I ask him first what work is going on in the offices in the absence of his newspaper and nearly all of his staff. He smiles.

They are busy doing three things, he says. They are making reports to camera that are shown on YouTube and Telegram channels; they are creating a basic pdf version of the paper, which is sent by email every week to half a million Russian readers; and they are organising a letter-writing campaign to imprisoned journalists in Russia. Muratov holds up a letter to the screen addressed to the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent Evan Gershkovich, falsely imprisoned on spying charges in March. “The international community of journalists needs to show more solidarity,” he says.

I wonder if he feels bereft not to have his own family of reporters at Novaya around him? Though by law he cannot be connected to the Novaya journalists in Riga, he says, he feels that those who are working in exile still have “the same DNA”. That keeps him going.

Was he not tempted to join them, to work from abroad? Muratov says he stayed behind in Russia for two reasons. The first was that “he had a contract with the newspaper” that he was obliged to fulfil – and “despite the 100 laws” trying to prevent him, he would do that to the best of his ability. The second is personal: his mother is ill and facing an operation and, as the only son, he must be on hand to care for her.

Watching the film and talking to Muratov, you guess there is a further unspoken reason. His simple continued presence, even in muted form, offers an image of an alternative Russia, the more open nation that his friend and sponsor Gorbachev once envisaged.

As Forbes, who has made films about Vladimir Putin, suggests to me: “The pair of them are total opposites. Putin is paranoid and alone, and his people are bound to him by fear. Dimi [Muratov] is ridiculously brave, and the people around him are bound by loyalty and affection. Those are two characteristics you don’t see much of in the Kremlin.”

Muratov gave the film-maker only one pre-condition: don’t put our lives in danger. A combination of trust and journalistic principle meant that he demanded no editorial control of the film.

You hesitate to ask Muratov, a man who calculates risk hour by hour, whether his current actions are not themselves incendiary to the authorities. For obvious reasons, he doesn’t speak about fear or about security. In the course of our conversation, there are only a couple of moments when he, understandably, closes down a question. At one point, I ask him how he felt when Putin addressed him personally on screen to congratulate him on his Nobel prize. He says, simply: “Since 24th February 2022 [the date of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] my memory is not good.”

Muratov did his national service in the Russian army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and his first job as a journalist was as a war correspondent for the official paper of communist youth, Komsomolskaya Pravda. I wonder if those early experiences of war shaped his feelings about the current horrors?

There are, he says, many parallels: “15,000 Russian soldiers, and 640,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan,” he says. And, as a correspondent, “he brought home many IDs and letters to grieving mothers and widows… The current, as we must call it, ‘special military operation’ has no sense and will have the same outcome for a whole generation.”

The pain and outrage at the Russian body count in that earlier war, I suggest, was one of the reasons for the collapse of Soviet power – and the emergence of Gorbachev. Can he see any evidence of a similar sentiment?

Not clearly, he says. In the earlier war, and later in Chechnya, the mothers of lost sons became a powerful collective voice against war. Mindful of that, he says, in the current conflict Putin passed a law paying tens of thousands of pounds in compensation to each bereaved family. Any individual protest would mean that money would not be paid, and bodies would not be repatriated.

The Kremlin, Muratov suggests, “has learned many lessons in manipulating the public”. He points to the words of Putin’s unhinged political adviser, Alexander Dugin, who has shaped the extremist rhetoric of war: “Dugin said that [to prevail] Russia needs repression and censorship, an exact repetition of the words Stalin’s propagandists used in the last century…”

Given this level of repression, one of the questions the film raises is how Muratov himself has escaped direct personal sanction from his nemesis, Putin. Up until Gorbachev’s death last year – Muratov led the funeral procession – there was tacit protection from his friend and mentor. But since then?

Forbes suggests a couple of reasons. “First of all, his long running status as the champion of free speech. The Kremlin isn’t stupid, never has been. And they know that if they targeted [Muratov] directly it would be such a huge signal to the world that they don’t want to take that step. The Nobel prize has added to that. And then there are his instinctive smarts about knowing exactly where the line is.”

Even so, there are two instances documented in the film where Muratov’s courage is startling. The first is the sale of the Nobel medal (it seemed, Forbes recalls, “insanely brave because it is such a clear ‘fuck you’ ”). The New York auction raised a staggering $103m (£81m), which Muratov donated to Unicef to support its work with child refugees from Ukraine.

The second is perhaps the most chilling part of the film, which documents the kidnap and brutal beating of Novaya’s reporter Elena Milashina in Chechnya last month. Milashina had been reporting on the state torture and murder of members of the LGBT community, and was threatened directly by the Putin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Hearing the news of the attack, Muratov himself, at great personal risk, flew late at night directly to Grozny to personally secure Milashina’s safe return to a Russian hospital.

In answer to my question of how Milashina is recovering, he holds up to the screen a graphic photograph of the mass of scars and bruises on the journalist’s back. Milashina is determined to return to Grozny to continue her work. Though he has counselled her not to go, Muratov says he will lead a group of many Russian journalists who have pledged a symbolic return alongside her.

There is a moment in the film where Muratov recalls how, in the worst of times, he promised himself that he would never succumb to one emotion: self-pity. Towards the end of our conversation, I ask him how he guards against it.

He gives three different answers. One is that he simply owes it to his journalists. Ever since the murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politovskaya in 2006, he says, his primary motivation has been to try to keep his reporters as safe as he can. The second is that there are stories that must be told – as a case in point he talks me through the newspaper’s investigation into the growing power of the mercenary Russian Wagner forces in the Central African Republic.

The third answer is a bit more intangible; it is, he says, that he keeps the unbending faith that despite everything, he “lives in a society, a community, not in a state”. And is that where he places his hope? “Da,” he says, firmly. “Yes.”

UK 

Opinion
Sorry, Tories, but conjuring up ever more culture wars is bound to backfire

Martha Gill
Sun, 20 August 2023 


You might have expected Rishi Sunak’s “health week”, which has just ended, to at least be free of the perennial “wedge issue” – those culture war topics, from small boats to net zero, which have dominated government messaging of late.

But you’d be wrong. Amid the unflattering focus on waiting lists – on which a record 7.6 million people in England were languishing in June – a new culprit for the NHS crisis emerged from government quarters. A source close to the health secretary, Steve Barclay, told journalists that, instead of being “relentlessly focused on caring for all patients and cutting waiting lists”, NHS trusts and other health bodies had been “wasting time and money on woke virtue signalling”.

Yes, woke health managers are to blame for the health crisis. Barclay had previously written to health quangos, urging them to ditch a “diversity champions” scheme. Now this has been linked to waiting lists. A new wedge issue is born.

Amid all the urgent material problems facing the country, why this relentless, almost pathological, search for wedge issues and cultural division points? One must assume the Tory party believes this is helping them. But examine the strategy, and there is little to suggest that this is true.

The first thing to say about a government of a modern western nation setting out to “change its culture” is that this simply cannot be done. We are just too individualistic: our people will not be dictated to in that way. If a western politician were to demand, say, that everyone become “more family minded” or “less woke”, voters might agree – or not – with the principle. But nothing else would happen. In vain have governments urged couples to marry and have more children in the face of plummeting birthrates. They have been ignored.

Culture wars in the west are above all futile; our leaders are just not powerful enough. And therein lies the irony of a party professing to champion small government while fantasising that it has the power to reach into networks of friends, neighbours and colleagues and change their cultural beliefs – making them less elitist, or green, or snobby, or progressive. If the British government could really “reduce snobbery” towards apprenticeships or maths degrees, or conjure up family values merely by saying that it champions them, or demand that students keep portraits of the Queen on the walls of their middle common rooms, they would be ruling a very different sort of country – one that was far less free.

The problem with dividing the electorate is that you inevitably alienate some of your own potential voters

It shows that the only way culture wars actually do win support in the west is by working on the opposite principle – that people naturally resist the idea of being told what to do. Warriors always have to frame their issue as a sort of rebellion against an authoritarian power. Thus, we have the ridiculous spectacle of the most powerful people in the country styling themselves as a sort of rebel coalition – the last outpost of opposition to an often unspecified shadowy elite. This might include anyone from “woke” civil servants (employed to do their bidding) to university departments to the residents of various metropolitan boroughs.

A focus on changing culture cannot, then, in a practical sense, ever really work. But can it win you an election? Again, no. Probably not. Much has been made of the wedge issue as electoral strategy, but less of its disadvantages. The problem with dividing the electorate is that you inevitably alienate some of your own potential voters. Some fall the wrong side of the wedge. Parties that win elections are typically able to reach across vast numbers of individuals who may agree on a few issues but disagree on many more. They must unite young and old, rural and urban, liberal and less liberal.

The conservative values that unite the largest numbers of people tend to concern economics. Wanting lower taxes, for example, is a principle that cuts across large and diverse groups. But the problem with culture is that it is specific: to geography and generation, to class and to economic status. It traces a line around your target group and excludes everyone else. And the harder you go on cultural issues, the more specific it gets and the more people you exclude.

Wise parties leave voters with cultural wiggle room – they profess, for example, to be both “tough on crime” and “tough on the causes of crime”. Precision alienates. Enemies are useful things; they help unite your supporters. But if your foes become too shadowy and non-specific, they might end up absorbing potential friends. Indeed, some Tory definitions of “woke” have included a good chunk of their own MPs.

There is some evidence to suggest the endless culture wars are responsible for turning young voters to the left in western countries. The journalist John Burn-Murdoch has pointed out that the housing crisis doesn’t fully account for the leftwing swing among younger generations: millennial homeowners are just as likely to vote against the Tory party. A recent report by thinktank Onward found groups of “shy capitalists” among young leftwingers – plenty agree with boomers on low taxes and think of big business as an opportunity rather than an opponent. But they have no time for Tory social values.

In fact, some of the government’s wedge issues seem designed to remove most of their own voters. Recent polling tells us that net zero is particularly popular with Conservative voters: about 73% back the 2050 deadline. Meanwhile, mere cultural signalling on small boats, in lieu of sensible immigration policy, is diminishing trust among even those who agree with the government.

And there’s a further problem with culture wars. “The big binary in politics is On Your Side v Out of Touch”, says John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony Blair. “So a culture war issue or a wedge issue needs to paint the other guys as Out of Touch.”

But here’s the irony. As the government brushes over mortgage rises and NHS waiting times to focus on the scourge of metropolitan elite dinner party talking points, it’s not Labour that looks out of touch.

• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist