Category Archives: Analysis

Russia at critical crossroads as business turns its back

Chris Weafer writes: The crisis in Ukraine and the political dispute with the U.S. and EU could not have come at a worse time for Russia’s economy.

Economic growth had been sliding across most key sectors for more than twelve months, before the crisis escalated in late February as previous drivers of growth become exhausted.

The country clearly needs to boost both the volume of inward investment and the participation of international companies, with their expertise and technologies, if it is to pull out of the long slump into which it is now seriously in danger of heading.

The St Petersburg Economic Forum was supposed to be a showcase for Russia’s invigorated approach to business and investment reforms. It was intended to mark the start of the next phase of investment led growth intended to boost average annual GDP expansion to at least 4% to the end of the decade.

Instead, because of the sanctions already imposed by the EU and its partners in the G7 — but particularly because of the concerns over the risk of even tougher sanctions to come — many of the international companies which Russia needs to come have decided to delay Russia entry or expansion. Many of their CEOs, originally slated to attend the forum, are staying at home. [Continue reading…]

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Presidential vote may not bridge regional divide in Ukraine

Pew Research: This Sunday’s presidential election in Ukraine may do little to unite a nation riven by ongoing separatist movements in the country’s east, and haunted by the March secession of Crimea. Our April survey found that businessman Petro Poroshenko, the leading candidate – according to a local poll conducted earlier this month – is much more popular in the country’s west than in the east, where doubts are widespread not only about the candidates but the fairness of the election itself.

Our poll, conducted before the list of presidential candidates had been finalized, found that Poroshenko was the most liked among four contenders tested. Overall, a modest majority of Ukrainians (54%) gave Poroshenko a favorable rating. By comparison, only three-in-ten offered a positive view of the country’s first female prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko (30%), and nationalist politician Oleg Tyagnibok (30%). Even fewer (15%) were favorable toward Mykhaylo Dobkin, former governor of Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. [Continue reading…]

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America’s double standards on cybercrime and national security

The New York Times reports: The National Security Agency has never said what it was seeking when it invaded the computers of Petrobras, Brazil’s huge national oil company, but angry Brazilians have guesses: the company’s troves of data on Brazil’s offshore oil reserves, or perhaps its plans for allocating licenses for exploration to foreign companies.

Nor has the N.S.A. said what it intended when it got deep into the computer systems of China Telecom, one of the largest providers of mobile phone and Internet services in Chinese cities. But documents released by Edward J. Snowden, the former agency contractor now in exile in Russia, leave little doubt that the main goal was to learn about Chinese military units, whose members cannot resist texting on commercial networks.

The agency’s interest in Huawei, the giant Chinese maker of Internet switching equipment, and Pacnet, the Hong Kong-based operator of undersea fiber optic cables, is more obvious: Once inside those companies’ proprietary technology, the N.S.A. would have access to millions of daily conversations and emails that never touch American shores.

Then there is Joaquín Almunia, the antitrust commissioner of the European Commission. He runs no company, but has punished many, including Microsoft and Intel, and just reached a tentative accord with Google that will greatly change how it operates in Europe.

In each of these cases, American officials insist, when speaking off the record, that the United States was never acting on behalf of specific American companies. But the government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security. In short, the officials say, while the N.S.A. cannot spy on Airbus and give the results to Boeing, it is free to spy on European or Asian trade negotiators and use the results to help American trade officials — and, by extension, the American industries and workers they are trying to bolster. [Continue reading…]

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How rising seas could sink nuclear plants on U.S. East Coast

Shane Shifflett and Kate Sheppard write: In 2011, a tsunami sent waves as high as 49 feet crashing over the seawalls surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, causing meltdowns at three of the plant’s reactors. After that incident, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ordered nuclear facilities in the U.S. to review and update their plans for addressing extreme seismic activity and potential flooding from other events, such as sea level rise and storm surges. Those plans aren’t due until March 2015, which means that many plants have yet to even lay out their their potential vulnerabilities, let alone address them.

During the 1970s and 1980s, when many nuclear reactors were first built, most operators estimated that seas would rise at a slow, constant rate. That is, if the oceans rose a fraction of an inch one year, they could be expected to rise by the same amount the next year and every year in the future.

But the seas are now rising much faster than they did in the past, largely due to climate change, which accelerates thermal expansion and melts glaciers and ice caps. Sea levels rose an average of 8 inches between 1880 and 2009, or about 0.06 inches per year. But in the last 20 years, sea levels have risen an average of 0.13 inches per year — about twice as fast.

And it’s only getting worse. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has laid out four different projections for estimated sea level rise by 2100. Even the agency’s best-case scenario assumes that sea levels will rise at least 8.4 inches by the end of this century. NOAA’s worst-case scenario, meanwhile, predicts that the oceans will rise nearly 7 feet in the next 86 years.

But most nuclear power facilities were built well before scientists understood just how high sea levels might rise in the future. And for power plants, the most serious threat is likely to come from surges during storms. Higher sea levels mean that flooding will travel farther inland, creating potential hazards in areas that may have previously been considered safe. During Superstorm Sandy, for example, flooding threatened the water intake systems at the Oyster Creek and Salem nuclear power plants in New Jersey. As a safety precaution, both plants were powered down. But even when a plant is not operating, the spent fuel stored on-site, typically uranium, will continue to emit heat and must be cooled using equipment that relies on the plant’s own power. Flooding can cause a loss of power, and in serious conditions it can damage backup generators. Without a cooling system, reactors can overheat and damage the facility to the point of releasing radioactive material. [Continue reading…]

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NSA spying has a disproportionate effect on U.S. immigrants

Conor Friedersdorf writes: The U.S. government concedes that it needs a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls between Americans, or to read the body of their emails to one another. Everyone agrees that these communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment. But the government also argues that Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply when an American calls or writes to a foreigner in another country.

Let’s say, for example, that the head of the NAACP writes an email to a veteran of the South African civil-rights struggle asking for advice about an anti-racism campaign; or that Hillary Clinton fields a call from a friend in Australia whose daughter was raped; or that Jeb Bush uses Skype to discuss with David Cameron whether he should seek the 2016 presidential nomination for the Republican Party. Under the Obama administration’s logic, these Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to these conversations, and it is lawful and legitimate for the NSA to eavesdrop on, record, and store everything that is said.

The arguments Team Obama uses to justify these conclusions are sweeping and worrisome, as the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer captures in his analysis of the relevant legal briefs: [Continue reading…]

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The BJP landslide victory in India

Samanth Subramanian writes: On Friday, as the results were announced, it became clear that almost all of the prognosticators, amateur and professional, had got it wrong. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) had assessed its chances confidently, and it was commonly expected to amass enough seats to lead a coalition of allies into government. But few expected Narendra Modi, its candidate for Prime Minister, to romp home in such a blistering manner. No single party had won an outright majority in the Lok Sabha, Parliament’s lower house, since 1984. Of the five hundred and forty-three seats, the B.J.P. won a stunning two hundred and eighty-two; with its coalition allies, it controls a dominating three hundred and thirty-four seats. The Congress, India’s oldest party, has led the governing coalition for the past decade. Although its members acknowledged in private that they were likely to be voted out, they suspected that they would secure roughly ninety seats—which would have been a record low. Instead, they took a miserable forty-four seats. What looked a few weeks ago like a mere dramatic change of government now appears to be a seismic shift, arguably the most significant in India since 1977, when the Congress was voted out after three decades in power. Even in that election, held after the Congress government, under Indira Gandhi, declared an emergency and suspended constitutional rights for two full years, the party managed to win a hundred and fifty-three seats.

Any election can be spun as a tussle to define the very soul of a country, but that has truly felt like the case for the past year in India. Both the Congress and the B.J.P. framed their campaigns as plebiscites on the fate of the country. The Congress asked voters to examine whether they wanted to elect Modi, a man who had ruled the state of Gujarat when more than a thousand people — mostly Muslims — were killed in religious riots, in 2002, who was known for his autocratic temperament, and whose political education was shaped by Hindu nationalists. In one campaign speech, the heir to the Congress dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, explicitly compared Modi to Hitler, warning that he would discard democracy altogether. “Hitler thought there was no need to go to the people,” Gandhi said. “He believed that the entire knowledge of the world was only in his mind. Similarly, there is a leader today in India who says, ‘I have done this, I have done that,’ and behaves arrogantly.” [Continue reading…]

Subir Sinha writes: Given than the elections have been declared “free and fair”, does this apparent magnitude of popular support for Modi not suggest that the fears of people like me, who recently signed a letter expressing concern at this prospect, are unjustified?

Modi appears to have been democratically elected. But, as his record in Gujarat indicates, he has exhibited a propensity to wield power in an undemocratic way and for undemocratic ends. Within his own party, he prevents emergence of independent leadership, making sure that potential rivals are politically finished. He encourages defections from other parties, rewarding defectors with party tickets, undermining the legitimacy of opposition.

He undermines key constitutional bodies: whether agencies investigating the 2002 massacres or extra-judicial killings in Gujarat, or the Election Commission. He centralises power, once holding 14 portfolios in the state cabinet. He talks of “uprooting” opponents and “erasing” opposing political parties, and his supporters promise exile and incarceration to critics.

The cult of personality around him likens him to Hindu gods: this militates against the principle of political equality at the basis of democracy. He does not open himself to any critical questioning, about the “Gujarat model” or about the massive finances spent by his campaign. Gujarat, which he holds up as a model of “good governance”, has the highest levels of violence against those seeking to use the “right to information” to find out about the activities of his government. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden fallout still echoes across cyber industry

Reuters reports: Revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden changed lives in the cyber community, from slowdowns in obtaining high-level security clearances to providing material for a “really good comedy routine.”

Experts at the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit this week were asked how Snowden, now living under asylum in Russia after exposing the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet spying programs in 2013, altered their worlds.

The creation of a mini “Snowden industry” is one on them.

“I give a lot more speeches,” said Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director. “It has allowed someone of my background to comment on issues of national importance.”

The website of Leading Authorities, the speakers’ bureau that represents Hayden, shows the retired four-star general can command $20,000 to as much as $75,000 for a speech.

“It’s made my life busier,” deadpanned Robert Anderson, who steered the Snowden investigation as the FBI’s assistant director of counterintelligence. “What it has done for me is to very much broaden the way I look at an issue.”

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union, lauded the spotlight that Snowden’s disclosures shone. [Continue reading…]

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Bill to curb NSA spying looks like change, but isn’t really

McClatchy reports: The bipartisan bill that aims to put serious curbs on the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ communications is being hailed by Republicans and Democrats as a big breakthrough.

It’s not.

“The bottom line: This is largely faux reform and a surveillance salve,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior official turned whistle-blower who’s critical of the agency’s collection programs. “To date, neither the House nor Senate attempts go far enough.”

That’s not easy to discern, thanks to an outpouring of raves for the legislation. Democrats, Republicans and traditionally skeptical watchdog groups have put their muscle behind the USA Freedom Act.

The House of Representatives is expected to vote on its version of the bill next week, the first time since news about the surveillance broke last year that major legislation supported by top congressional leaders like this has come to the floor. The Senate might take up its own version as early as this summer.

The top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee even issued a joint statement praising the bipartisan cooperation, a rarely seen trait around Congress these days.

But peek just past all the good will and there’s serious concern that Congress has much more to do. Not only are loopholes easy to find but also the government has other ways of collecting the data. [Continue reading…]

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With Brahimi’s exit, what becomes of the Syria peace process?

Syria Deeply spoke to Steven Heydemann and Ayham Kamel: On Tuesday, Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.’s special envoy to Syria and mediator of the Geneva I and Geneva II peace talks, officially resigned his post, citing frustration with the country’s ongoing stalemate and the international community’s inability to make a difference.

“It’s not very pleasant for me. It’s very sad that I leave this position and leave Syria behind in such a bad state,” he said, after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced the departure. “Everybody who has responsibility and an influence in the situation has to remember that the question is, How many more dead? How much more destruction is there going to be before Syria becomes again the Syria we have known?”

Brahimi is the second diplomat to resign the post since the start of the conflict; Kofi Annan left in 2012 after just six months on the job. The announcement has led to questions about the future of an internationally negotiated peace process, as laid out by the Geneva plan, and as to who, if anyone, will replace Brahimi.

“It’s a pretty damning indictment of the U.N. Security Council that the prospects for a political settlement look worse after three years of U.N. effort than they did earlier,” says Steven Heydemann, vice president of Applied Research on Conflict at Washington’s U.S. Institute of Peace.

We asked Heydemann and Ayham Kamel, Middle East analyst at the Eurasia Group, to weigh in. [Continue reading…]

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Still don’t care about net neutrality? Give the internet slow lane a try

Slate: One thing the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Tom Wheeler, seems to have overlooked in his widely loathed proposal for a net neutrality overhaul is that if the Internet has a fast lane, it must, necessarily, have a slow lane.

What would life be like in the slow lane—in a “pay to play” world where cable broadband providers can charge companies like Netflix a toll if they want reliable and swift streaming speeds? Well, not to exaggerate, but remember when you tried to use Neopets in 1999 on a dial-up connection?

Tech companies and activists are worried that the creation of two Internets: one quick and reliable for those that can afford it, and the other, of a lesser quality, would seriously undermine the Internet as an open medium for limitless entrepreneurship and communication.

And while we’re not at SOPA and PIPA protest levels by any means, people are coming up with creative ways to voice their disapproval. [Continue reading…]

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Donetsk steams through another Soviet-style vote, so now what?

Christopher Miller writes: The people have spoken. But what exactly they said is a question and whether anyone in power in Ukraine or Russia take their wishes into account is yet another one.

Will it mean the breakup of Ukraine? Or finally a fierce response from the West and the central government in Kyiv? Will Donetsk and Luhansk become stand-alone states within Ukraine or be absorbed into Vladimir Putin’s growing empire, just as the Russian president took Crimea in March?

On the morning after the May 11 vote, no one seemed to know the fate of the two oblasts that collectively make up 15 percent of Ukraine’s population.

Separatist election officials reported 89 percent for seceding and 10 percent against doing so in Donetsk Oblast. Preliminary results in neighboring Luhansk Oblast were not immediately released, but de facto election officials from the separatist camp there reported a 79 percent turnout and a similar result is expected.

Some of the uncertainly was due to the vaguely worded ballot, which asked: “Do you support the act of self-rule of the Donetsk People’s Republic?” The only answers available were “yes” and “no.”

But the votes needed not to be tallied to know the result. It was clear from the beginning and made even more apparent throughout the day, as Soviet-style tactics of ballot stuffing, manipulation and intimidation were observed at polling stations across the regions: the referenda in the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk would pass.

Still, some weren’t quite sure what that meant. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine’s small Sovietized underfunded and poorly trained army

Linda Kinstler writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin is celebrating Victory Day in Simferopol today, admiring the Crimean peninsula that he so winningly stole from Ukraine this spring. Not too far away, in the city of Mariupol, Ukrainian police began the holiday with a deadly gun battle with separatists. Over 100 people have died in Ukraine since May 2, and despite reports that Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” was successfully driving out separatists in the east, it does not look like the fighting will stop anytime soon. Victory Day celebrations in Ukraine must carry an ironic tone today, as the conflict has revealed the extent to which its armed forces were systemically mismanaged since the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving Ukraine almost entirely helpless to stave off the Russian invasion. Here are a few reasons why: [Continue reading…]

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‘Russia is not a multi-national country,’ RISI expert says

Paul Goble writes: Despite the declaration in the 1993 Constitution that the Russian Federation is a multi-national country, an expert at the influential Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI) argues that in fact it is not that but rather a nation state of Russians with a few ethnic minorities.

Ilya Anosov, the head of RISI’s Chelyabinsk Center, made that somewhat unexpected declaration following a meeting there devoted to the question “Why is there no fascism in the Southern Urals?” and based his claim on the fact that 80 percent of the population consists of ethnic Russians and that they define the nature of the country.

The idea that the Russian Federation should be a nation state of the Russians has been percolating for some time and has gained new energy as a result of the propaganda campaign the Kremlin has launched in support of its efforts to “defend” ethnic Russians abroad in Crimea, Ukraine and other places.

But Anosov’s statement is important because RISI is extremely influential in the Kremlin, and it suggests that the idea of re-writing the 1993 constitution to eliminate such references to multi-nationality, the basis of the country’s ethno-federal system may be gaining ground. [Continue reading…]

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Putin keeps Russians, West guessing with Ukraine shift

Reuters reports: One of Vladimir Putin’s most influential supporters was up early on Thursday explaining to puzzled Russians why the president has softened his stance on Ukraine.

Vladimir Solovyov, the outspoken host of a popular radio call-in, enthusiastically portrayed Putin’s unexpected appeal to separatists in east Ukraine to suspend a planned autonomy referendum as a masterstroke.

“This is a very clever and strong move in the game of chess over Ukraine,” he told listeners. “Putin has again become peacemaker number one.”

Dismissing a caller’s concerns that it might seen be as a sign of weakness, he said: “Putin has forced the Ukrainian authorities into a dialogue … He’s massively raised his support in Europe.”

When another listener dissented, the acid-tongued host told him he was listening to the wrong channel and, inventing a name, told him to “go and listen to ‘Voice of the Enemy’.”

If ever Putin needed supporters like Solovyov, it may be now. [Continue reading…]

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War-weariness key to ending fight over Homs

Paul Wood reports: Who is winning in Syria? It is a simple question with no simple answer.

You may think it is President Bashar al-Assad, with the rebels abandoning Homs. But further north, in Idlib and in Aleppo, government forces are under pressure.

The confusion arises because Syria is not one battlefield but several.

The rebels seem incapable of acting as anything other than a series of local or, at best, regional militias.

That was the anguished complaint of the rebels in Homs – no-one else came to help them break the siege; no-one came to their rescue.

In Homs, the rebels were beaten by the Syrian army’s “surrender or starve” tactics. Fighters lost a third or even half of their body weight, they told us, as they hung on for two years.

They had no weapons to break the siege. The al-Nusra Front made a last attempt to break out with a series of suicide bombings against government checkpoints. They failed, and the jihadists joined the buses out with the rest of the fighters.

Further north, the rebels are, somehow, getting US-made anti-tank weapons. That has had a hand in their recent successes. It might account for the government’s apparent, desperate use of chlorine bombs. [Continue reading…]

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Seven charts that show how climate change is already altering life in the U.S.

Mashable: The White House released the most comprehensive U.S.-focused climate science assessment ever conducted on Tuesday. It makes clear that global warming is no longer a phenomenon that will rear its ugly head in a far-off time and place. Instead, it is affecting everyone in the U.S. already, be it a farmer in Oklahoma dealing with heat waves and drought, or a coastal resident in New York City, still recovering from Hurricane Sandy’s flooding.

Here are some of the report’s key findings, in graphics. [Continue reading…]

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Americans are outliers in views on climate change

The New York Times: As President Obama sets out to convince the public that climate change requires immediate attention, he has his work cut out for him.

Perhaps more than people in any other rich nation, Americans are skeptical that climate change is a dire issue. In Pew Research Center surveys conducted last spring, 40 percent of Americans said that global climate change was a major threat to their country. More than 50 percent of Canadians, Australians, French and Germans gave that answer. More than 60 percent of Italians and Spaniards did. And more than 70 percent of Japanese did.

Similarly, a Gallup survey conducted in early March found that a third of Americans said they personally worry about global warming or climate change a great deal.

Americans rarely cite environmental concerns when asked in polls to name the most important problem facing the country. In the last several years, the economy, jobs, the budget deficit and health care garnered the most mentions, with the environment barely registering. In the Pew poll, fewer Americans cited climate change as a top threat than cited financial instability, Islamic extremism, Iran’s nuclear program or North Korea’s nuclear program. [Continue reading…]

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Trying to ‘win’ Ukraine could lead to its collapse

James Goldgeier and Andrew S. Weiss write: With the Ukraine crisis now entering its sixth month, policymakers ought to step back from the daily torrent of bad news and ask whether the West’s current approach is yielding positive results.

The honest answer has to be: not really.

The tragic loss of life in Odessa on May 2 and the stepped-up fighting in and around separatist strongholds in eastern Ukraine appear to be setting in motion precisely the series of events that the West has sought to avoid: full-scale armed conflict between Moscow and Kiev and the prospect of Ukraine’s collapse as a unitary state.

Ever since the dramatic overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovich government in late February, U.S. and EU leaders have failed to come to terms with an unpleasant reality. As former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer put it, Vladimir Putin “cares a whole lot more about losing Ukraine than the West cares about keeping it.”

There are no excuses for the reckless policies Putin has pursued. His annexation of Crimea, and his unapologetic embrace of Russian chauvinism and ultra-nationalist themes are evocative of the worst aspects of European power politics during the first half of the twentieth century. It is deeply disconcerting to see far-right wing European politicians, from Marine Le Pen to Geert Wilders, touting Putin as their ideological soul-mate and comrade-in-arms in the fight against European elites and the soulless EU bureaucracy.

But even if events do not come to a head in coming days, a protracted crisis in Ukraine may, over time, simply exhaust Western capabilities to counter a Russian campaign to destabilize Ukraine or to keep its basket-case economy afloat. What we are looking at now is nothing less than a bigger, messier version of Georgia across a territory the size of France with the potential for a lot more bloodshed.

Rather than developing a new approach to avoid catastrophe, Western leaders are doubling down. President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel announced last week that the derailing of the May 25 presidential elections could be the basis for imposition of so-called sectoral sanctions on Russia. While they and other Western leaders continue to profess their desire to see a diplomatic solution to the crisis, high-level dialogue with the Kremlin amounts to little more than exchanging public statements. Nor are we aware of any serious back-channel diplomatic moves to resolve the crisis. The West has said elections or else, but Moscow shows no sign of acquiescing to a smooth internal political transition. Quite the contrary. [Continue reading…]

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