| | | | Why We Shouldn't Label Las Vegas "Terrorism" | | Demands that President Trump and others describe the Las Vegas shooting as terrorism are premature at best, and probably misguided, writes Masha Gessen in the New Yorker.
"The argument confuses cause and effect. The fact that people are terrorized doesn't necessarily mean that an act of terror has been committed. This matters, because language matters. When terms are used too broadly, or just sloppily, they lose their meaning," Gessen writes.
"Perhaps more important, consider the potential consequences of broadening the use of the term 'terrorism' to include white men who express generalized rage by firing the guns so easily available to them. More people, potentially, would be subjected to entrapment, inflated sentences, and torture conditions—hardly a desirable outcome, even if the injustice would be spread a little more fairly. Worse, these killers would get to enjoy an entirely different profile after committing their crimes."
| | Tillerson's Double-Edged Humbling | | Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's statement denying he has contemplated resigning may have appeased President Trump -- for now, writes David Ignatius in the Washington Post. But in humbling himself so publicly, he may have undercut his credibility with the rest of the world.
"Whether Tillerson's recommitment to the job is temporary — sufficient to get the president through the Beijing meeting in November, but not long-term — remains to be seen," Ignatius writes. "In a sense, Tillerson faces a paradox: To be effective as secretary of state, he must communicate better with the country and the world; but to maintain the confidence of this prickly president, he must avoid comments that seem to question the president's personality or policies."
| | The New Fast Food Nations | | | As fast food chains look to turn their products from treats into routine meals, they are increasingly looking outside their home country markets, suggest Dionne Searcey and Matt Richtel in the New York Times. The result? Extraordinary growth in middle income economies.
"From 2011 to 2016, fast food sales grew 21.5 percent in the United States, according to Euromonitor, a market-research firm, while they swelled 30 percent worldwide. The industry has had remarkable success in finding new mouths to feed, with 254 percent growth in Argentina, 83 percent in Vietnam, 64 percent in Egypt," they write.
"From around the globe come snapshots of fast-food's spread. Carl's Jr. opened Cambodia's first drive-through fast-food restaurant in 2016, bringing Phnom Penh staples like the Western Bacon Cheeseburger; McDonald's, with 600 Russian outlets, recently opened in Siberia and the Urals; India, which, according to Euromonitor, saw fast-food sales rise 113.6 between 2011 and 2016, now has more than 1,100 Domino's Pizza outlets and is home to an experiment — a 'Dessert Pizza,' topped with brownies, cookies, coconut nougat, cheesecake and fudge sauce." | | North Korea's missile threat might make all the headlines. But a new type of missile being developed by China, Russia and the United States risks dramatically increasing the likelihood of miscalculation – and sparking a wider conflict, suggests a new RAND report (h/t John Kester at Foreign Policy).
"Hypersonic missiles can be maneuverable and travel at approximately 5,000 to 25,000 kilometers per hour, or one to five miles per second. In more familiar terms, these missiles fly six to more than 25 times as fast as modern airliners," the report says.
As a result, "[a] hypersonic attack could occur with very little warning time; this factor and the unpredictability of the targets of a hypersonic attack compress the timeline for response by the party being attacked. Hypersonic missiles also increase the expectation of a disarming attack. These threats encourage the threatened nations to take such actions as devolution of command and control of strategic forces, wider dispersion of such forces, a launch-on-warning posture, or a policy of preemption during a crisis. In short, hypersonic threats encourage hair-trigger tactics that would increase crisis instability."
| | The Dear Leader's New BFF? | | It might not yet rival China's influence, and it isn't giving North Korea a free pass. But it is increasingly clear that Moscow is "playing a fraught double game, by quietly offering North Korea a slender lifeline to help insulate it from U.S.-led efforts to isolate it economically," Andrew Osborn writes for Reuters.
Worried that the collapse of Kim Jong Un's regime would diminish Moscow's regional influence – and mean U.S. troops on its border – Russia has offered North Korea a range of economic assistance.
"A Russian company began routing North Korean internet traffic this month, giving Pyongyang a second connection with the outside world besides China. Bilateral trade more than doubled to $31.4 million in the first quarter of 2017, due mainly to what Moscow said was higher oil product exports," Osborn writes.
"And Russia, which shares a short land border with North Korea, has also resisted U.S.-led efforts to repatriate tens of thousands of North Korean workers whose remittances help keep the country's hard line leadership afloat."
| | Trade Might Not Be the Most Important Deficit with China | | America – and much of the West – is running a deficit with China. But it's not just a trade deficit, argues Kerry Brown for The Diplomat. There's a big knowledge deficit, too. And it has been decades in the making.
"Delegations from across China at every level of government, some led by [former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping] himself, traveled the world studying. Over three and a half million Chinese have been abroad since to study. More than 200 million Chinese have learned English. The net result of this is that for all the complaints about China being introspective and culturally self-contained and superior, the average Chinese person in 2017 knows more about Europe, the United States, and the outside world than the average British, French or American does about China," Brown writes.
"This asymmetry in knowledge levels is now to China's benefit, and the outside world's problem."
| | Why Skeptics are Wrong About Africa | | Africa's largest economies may have slowed, but that's no reason to dismiss the continent's prospects, Brahima Coulibaly writes in Project Syndicate. Skeptics might be worried about a return to Africa's darker days of dictatorships, but a lot has changed since the 1970s.
"For starters, when one sets the three largest economies aside, Sub-Saharan Africa's aggregate-growth rate for this year rises from 2.5% to almost 4%. That is faster than the 3.5% rate at which the global economy is currently growing. In fact, five of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world are in Africa. And over the next five years, around half of all Sub-Saharan economies will expand at an average rate similar to or higher than that which prevailed during the 'Africa rising' heyday," Coulibaly writes.
"Owing to new information and communication technologies, Africans, particularly young Africans, are better informed, more engaged in civil and political discourse, and increasingly capable of holding their leaders accountable. ICTs have also unleashed a wave of innovation and entrepreneurship across the continent." | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment