Day: June 22, 2024

Azerbaijan attractive not only for those who invest in fossil fuels, but also for those who invest in renewables – President …  Trend News Agency

Ukraine can use U.S. weapons for limited strikes in Russia, Biden says  The Washington Post

Currently, the “Rezerv+” application does not have a function for sending electronic summonses.

Kremlin Derides Outcome of Ukraine Talks Held Without Russia  U.S. News & World Report

Top Israel officials to meet with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan Thursday  Yahoo! Voices

Farage is only repeating what many far more qualified commentators have been saying since long before the Russian invasion. Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, CIA director William Burns and George Kennan to name a few. Look it up. MS Media have been abysmal in covering this war

— panicbutton (@panicbutton15) June 22, 2024

With Ukraine desperate to shore up its air defense and counter Russia’s advantage in the sky’s, US government has been disappointingly reluctant to offer Kyiv air capabilities.

Trumpism is stronger than judicial verdicts and democratic norms  Arab News Pakistan

PARIS — The alleged rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in a suspected antisemitic attack has sent shockwaves throughout France and thrust concerns about antisemitism to the forefront of campaigning for the country’s legislative elections.

The anti-immigration National Rally party, which has tried to shed historical links to antisemitism, is leading in preelection polling and has its first real chance of forming a government, if it comes out on top in the two-round elections that end July 7. It would be the first far-right force to lead a French government since the Nazi occupation.

Far-left figures, meanwhile, have faced accusations of antisemitism linked to their response to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war.

Concerns came to the fore after two adolescent boys in a Paris suburb were given preliminary charges this week of raping a 12-year-old girl and religion-motivated violence, according to prosecutors. Lawyer and Jewish leader Elie Korchia told French broadcaster BFM that the girl is Jewish and that the word Palestine was mentioned during the attack. The prosecutor’s office did not specify the girl’s religion or release her identity, according to policies for the protection of victims, as is standard practice for hate crimes in France.

Hundreds of people gathered Thursday evening around the Bastille monument in Paris to protest against antisemitism, in the second straight night of demonstrations.

France has the largest Jewish population in Europe, but as a result of its own World War II collaboration with the Nazis, antisemitic acts today open old scars. France also has the largest Muslim population in western Europe, and anti-Muslim acts have risen in recent years.

Politicians from all sides were quick to comment on the attack, notably after a surge in antisemitic acts in France since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal wrote on the social media platform X that the girl was “raped because she’s Jewish,” while French President Emmanuel Macron called on schools to hold a “discussion hour” on racism and antisemitism.

Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, said that if elected, he would “fight the antisemitism that has been plaguing France since Oct. 7.” In the wake of reports of the attack, Bardella announced that his party was withdrawing support for one of its candidates over an antisemitic message on social media posted in 2018.

His predecessor as party president and the National Rally’s 2022 presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, accused the “extreme left” of “stigmatization of Jews” and of “instrumentalizing” the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon denounced “antisemitic racism,” though the France Unbowed party which he formerly led has itself faced accusations of antisemitism linked to the Israel-Hamas war.

“There has never been any ambiguity in our denunciation of antisemitism,” lawmaker Manuel Bompard of France Unbowed said on French news broadcaster La Chaîne Info on Wednesday, pushing back on accusations that his party’s stance on antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas war contributed to an environment of insecurity for French Jews. “To have people believe that there would be a link between what happened and France Unbowed’s political positions is offensive and inappropriate,” he said.

Arié Alimi, lawyer and vice president of the League of Human Rights, called for a united front against the far right.

“For some time now there is an awareness that there is antisemitism also on the left and that we need to address it,” he said at Thursday’s demonstration. ”Today it’s the camp of the left, of progressives that is gathered with all people who are worried by antisemitism and all kinds of racism in France, in a particular political moment with a far right that could possibly come to power.”

Although the alleged rape has heightened tensions regarding antisemitism in France before the June 30 and July 7 two-round parliamentary election, it is far from a new issue in French politics.

More than 180,000 people across France, marched in November to protest rising antisemitism in the wake of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.

Along with then-Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and representatives of several other parties, Le Pen attended the march amid fierce criticism that her once-pariah National Rally party had failed to shake off its antisemitic heritage despite growing political legitimacy.

Borne, the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, tweeted that “the presence of the National Rally is not fooling anyone.”

Party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, was convicted repeatedly of antisemitic hate speech and played down the scope of the Holocaust. Marine Le Pen — runner-up in the last two presidential elections and likely a top contender in 2027 — has worked to scrub the party’s image, kicking her father out and changing its name from National Front to National Rally.

Attal announced in May that “366 antisemitic acts ” were recorded between January and March this year, an increase of 300% compared to the first three months of 2023.

Antisemitism refers to hatred of Jews, but there is no universally agreed definition of what exactly it entails or how it relates to criticism of Israel. The Israeli government regularly accuses its opponents of antisemitism, while critics say it uses the term to silence opposition to its policies.

The war has reignited the long debate about the definition of antisemitism and whether any criticism of Israel — from its military’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children to questions over Israel’s very right to exist — amounts to anti-Jewish hate speech.

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN — Economic analysts in Kazakhstan say the government is using a formulation for setting the poverty line that fails to capture the number of people living below a humane standard of living. The result, they say, lowers the amount of assistance provided to the poor.

Kazakhstan sets the poverty line at about $70 a month, slightly over $2 a day. That results in an official poverty rate of 5.1% of the population. The World Bank, in a March report, More, Better and Inclusive Jobs in Kazakhstan, said that using its poverty line of $3.65 a day for lower middle-income countries (although the World Bank actually classifies Kazakhstan as upper middle-income) puts the poverty rate at about 10% in 2018.

Meruert Makhmutova, an economist and director of the Almaty-based Public Policy Research Center, said Kazakhstan should adopt the World Bank standard, which she said would result in more people receiving government assistance.

“The switch to $3.65 a day would automatically increase the number of the poor and the government would have to provide targeted social assistance to a greater number of people,” Makhmutova said. “As a result, the government, failing to admit the real scale of poverty, reduces budget spending on social assistance to poor citizens.”

The official Kazakh poverty level is close to the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of $2.15 a day, but Andrey Chebotarev, an Almaty-based economist and director of the Alternativa center for topical research, told VOA that figure is not applicable in Kazakhstan because of climate.

“It’s hard to just survive on the street in Kazakhstan in winter because the weather and climate make it impossible,” he told VOA, referring to winter temperatures that could drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius.

“We need to assess poverty differently,” he said.

Makhmutova also disputed methods authorities use to set the minimum wage and gauge the unemployment level.

Until recently, the minimum wage has been set arbitrarily without consideration of personal incomes or the real cost of living in the country. It was set around $190 a month for 2024, even though the average monthly wage was $890 at the end of last year.

“The government doesn’t use the average wage for setting the minimum wage, that’s why the minimum wage doesn’t grow substantially and its growth in the past few years doesn’t even match the inflation rate,” Makhmutova said.

Baglan Kasenov, the head of the Kazakh Labor and Social Protection Ministry’s department for labor and social partnership, told VOA the Kazakh government had adopted a new methodology to set the minimum wage starting next year. It conforms to International Labor Organization recommendations, he said, and will be based on the median wage and productivity, reaching 50% of the median wage in future. The median wage, where half of workers receive less than that and half receive more, was about $560 a month last year.

The joblessness rate is another contentious issue in Kazakhstan, as authorities, Chebotarev said, now categorize people, for example, farming their kitchen gardens and working without pay in family businesses as “self-employed,” which is new.

Makhmutova said the move “masks unemployment”; the number of jobless has been constant at around 450,000 people or under 5% in the past few years, whereas the number of self-employed is around 2.1 million, according to the government.

“As for unemployment, it’s a Kazakh invention of global scale because we have invented 2 million self-employed and blame everything on them,” Chebotarev said. “Our estimates of unemployment should be revised … but no one in government wants to consider self-employed as jobless.”

World Bank report questioned

Use of the government figures has resulted in criticism of the World Bank report, which claimed that despite declining economic growth, Kazakhstan’s poverty rate had dropped.

Makhmutova questioned the World Bank’s report because it based its analysis on “irrelevant” official Kazakh income and unemployment statistics – figures that are derived from the wrong method to assess poverty as well as being out of date.

She told VOA the report “is not objective in the first place because it relies on statistics provided by the labor ministry which avoids the assessment of the real scale of poverty and unemployment.”

In addition, although the report was published this year, “the latest statistical data on poverty is from 2018, which is why it is irrelevant for the assessment of the current situation,” she said, citing the COVID-19 pandemic and high inflation after Russia invaded Ukraine as having worsened living standards and increased poverty in Kazakhstan since 2018.

In response to Makhmutova’s criticism, the World Bank said it welcomes “critique and debate” over its reports, adding that the report “used the latest available data as is standard in World Bank reports for analysis.”