Politicians

The smart money is betting that China won’t invade Taiwan, says a piece in the Nikkei by Philip Hou and Eric Guyot which argues that $25 billion of foreign company investment in Taiwan in the last seven years from the likes of AMD, ASML, Alphabet, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia, Yahoo and other suggest that corporate analysts discount the prospect of war. ...

The 24 prisoner swap between the US and Russia in Ankara earlier this month was the biggest post-Cold War prisoner swap since the West and Russia exchanged 27 prisoners in 1985. Last week the US received 16 prisoners back from Russia and Russia got 8 prisoners back from the US, among them Vadim Krasikov, convicted in Germany in 2021 of ...

Provisional EU tariffs on Chinese EVs are additional to the existing 10% duty. A 20.8% additional duty is proposed for the 13 car manufacturers which co-operated with the EU’s investigation into production costs and subsidies, a 17.4% additional duty for BYD, 19.9% for Geely, 37.6% for SAIC,  zero on hybrids and 37.6% for everyone else. The situation remains fluid while ...

The French election on Sunday left the National Assembly in deadlock. The leftie New Popular Front got 180 seats. The right wing National Rally got 143 seats. The centrists got 163 seats. A majority in the Assembly requires 289 votes, so no one from one of  the Big Three parties can pass legislation without help from one of the other ...

Identification with the Democratic Party has fallen to the lowest recorded levels, according to a Gallup database. In June, before the first presidential debate, only 23 percent of U.S. respondents surveyed by Gallup said in June that they identified as Democrats. Identification with the Republican Party was not much higher in June at  25 percent The lowest Democratic party affiliation ...

Earlier this week Belarus has joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), becoming its tenth member state. The intergovernmental cooperation mechanism was founded in 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to strengthen cooperation on the security, anti-terrorism, economic and energy fronts. India and Pakistan joined in 2017. However, India’s role in the SCO is questionable due to Prime ...

117 million people fled their countries last year getting away from war, persecution and conflict, according to a report by the UNHCR. That was up eight percent from the year before and up by 31 percent compared to 2021. 62 percent of all refugees and people in need of internal protection originated from just five countries in late 2023, while ...

Global spending on nuclear weapons rose by 13.4 percent in 2023 says a  report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The US spend rose almost 18%, closely followed by the UK with 17.1%. The U.S. had the largest  outlay last year: $51.5 billion, compared to the second highest total of $11.9 billion in China. The total global ...

Last week, Germany sent an advance team of 20 soldiers to Lithuania, laying the groundwork for the recently discussed establishment of a permanent brigade in the country. The brigade will support the already existing so-called NATO Enhanced Forward Presence in Lithuania, which rotates its personnel regularly and was made up of soldiers from Germany, Belgium, Czechia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway ...

In power for around a quarter of a century – spanning four presidential terms and two terms as prime minister between 1999 and 2000 and between 2008 and 2012 – Putin has spent almost 9,000 days as boss of Russia. By the end of his new six-year term of approximately 2,190 days he will be Russia’s longest serving leader since ...