News round-up, March 6, 2023
Quote of the day…
European Commission chief von der Leyen says the EU has seen ‘no evidence’ that China is considering sending arms to Russia.
POLITICO EU BY GABRIEL RINALDI AND HANS VON DER BURCHARDMost read…
Germany’s Scholz says China ‘declared it will not deliver’ weapons to Russia
European Commission chief von der Leyen says the EU has seen ‘no evidence’ that China is considering sending arms to Russia.
POLITICO EU BY GABRIEL RINALDI AND HANS VON DER BURCHARD, MARCH 5, 2023The Republicans Begin to Eye 2024
It’s been a winter of garish factional disputes in the G.O.P., and Donald Trump remains a seismic force of instability.
The New Yorker By Steve Coll, March 5, 2023Kremlin: Nord Stream's future is decision for all shareholders
Modi’s India demands good news only
Narendra Modi’s government has muzzled India’s media through arrests, tax raids and other uses of arbitrary powers. Only a few brave independent news sources still resist.
Le Monde Diplomatique by Samrat Choudhury
”We’ll need natural gas for years…
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but can start blending it with green hydrogen today, AES CEO, Andrés Gluski says…
Image: Germán Toro Ghio by shutterstock.comGermany’s Scholz says China ‘declared it will not deliver’ weapons to Russia
European Commission chief von der Leyen says the EU has seen ‘no evidence’ that China is considering sending arms to Russia.
POLITICO EU BY GABRIEL RINALDI AND HANS VON DER BURCHARD, MARCH 5, 2023MESEBERG, Germany — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday said China had declared it won’t supply Russia with weapons for its war against Ukraine, suggesting that Berlin has received bilateral assurances from Beijing on the issue.
Scholz was speaking at a press conference with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who told reporters that the EU has received “no evidence” so far from the U.S. that Beijing is considering supplying lethal support to Moscow.
Senior U.S. officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken have expressed deep concern in recent weeks that China could provide weapons such as kamikaze drones to Russia, which in turn triggered warnings to Beijing from EU politicians. Scholz himself urged Beijing last week to refrain from such actions and instead use its influence to convince Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.
Yet speaking at Sunday’s press conference, which was held at the German government retreat in Meseberg north of Berlin, Scholz claimed that China had provided assurances that it would not send weapons to Russia.
“We all agree that there should be no arms deliveries, and the Chinese government has declared that it will not deliver any either,” the chancellor said in response to a question by POLITICO. “We insist on this and we are monitoring it,” he added.
Scholz later told CNN that if China were to aid Russia: “I think it would have consequences, but we are now in a stage where we are making clear that this should not happen, and I’m relatively optimistic that we will be successful with our request in this case, but we will have to look at and we have to be very, very cautious.”
Scholz’s comments about Beijing came as a surprise because China has not publicly rejected the possibility of weapons deliveries to Russia. The chancellor appeared to suggest that Beijing had issued such reassurances directly to Germany.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell received similar private assurances last month. Borrell told reporters that China’s top diplomat Wang Yi had told him in a private discussion at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February that China “will not provide arms to Russia.”
“Nevertheless, we have to remain vigilant,” Borrell said.
Von der Leyen, who attended the first day of a two-day German government retreat in Meseberg, told reporters that the EU still had not seen any proof that China is considering sending arms to Russia.
“So far, we have no evidence of this, but we have to observe it every day,” the Commission president said. She did not reply to the question on whether the EU would support sanctions against China should there be such weapon deliveries, saying that was a “hypothetical question” she would not answer.
Image: Germán & CoThe Republicans Begin to Eye 2024
It’s been a winter of garish factional disputes in the G.O.P., and Donald Trump remains a seismic force of instability.
The New Yorker By Steve Coll, March 5, 2023On August 6, 2015, Donald Trump appeared at the first Republican Party primary debate of the 2016 Presidential cycle, hosted by Fox News. Bret Baier asked all the candidates onstage if they would endorse the eventual Republican nominee, whomever that might be, and rule out running as an Independent. Trump alone declined, stating, “I cannot say.”
Come next August, another season of Republican Presidential-primary debates is set to begin, and candidate Trump is again a seismic force of instability in the G.O.P. Last week, the Republican National Committee chair said that, during the 2024 cycle, all participants in its televised primary debates should first sign a “loyalty pledge” promising to support whichever candidate is finally selected to take on the Democratic nominee—presumably Joe Biden. Trump has not indicated that he will sign such a pledge; last month, he told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that his support for the Republican standard-bearer in 2024 “would have to depend on who the nominee was.” Some of Trump’s most ardent Republican opponents feel similarly; Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, who is considering joining the race, told the Washington Post that he has doubts about promising to back Trump if he becomes the nominee.
This has been a winter of garish factional disputes among Republicans, starting in January with the fifteen-ballot shouting match required to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House of Representatives. McCarthy’s difficulties highlighted the power of hard-right extremists and social-media egoists among the fragile Republican majority in the House. Yet the context for that imbroglio was Trump’s continuing grip on the Party’s base, his legitimizing of the country’s far right, and the institutional G.O.P.’s ongoing failure to hold him accountable for his lies about election fraud in 2020 or his attempted subversion of the Constitution on January 6, 2021.
Holed up in his gilded bunker at Mar-a-Lago, Trump might not appear to be the political force he once was, and he has clearly lost some mojo since the Republicans’ disappointments in the midterm elections, which followed his endorsement of weak and extremist candidates in key races. By Trump’s robust standards, his fund-raising since the midterms has been anemic. His love-hate relationship with Fox News has been aggravated by a lawsuit’s recent revelations that Rupert Murdoch and some of his network’s personalities seem to have privately thought that Trump’s claims of election fraud were nonsense. As the primary field for 2024 takes shape, G.O.P. establishment figures are calling Trump a liability. “If we nominate Trump again, we’re going to lose,” the former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said late last month.
Yet Trump remains the top choice for 2024 among likely Republican primary voters, often by sizable margins, according to many national polls, including two released last week. Among other possible contenders, only Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, attracts double-digit support. And, although he and other high-profile Party leaders such as former Vice-President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are testing the waters, for now the only other prominent figure to have officially declared is Nikki Haley, who has served as both U.N. Ambassador and governor of South Carolina.
Of the undeclared contenders, nobody triggers Trump like DeSantis, who won a thumping reëlection victory last November and has become a star attraction for Republican donors. Trump’s take is that DeSantis owes his political success to the fact that Trump backed him in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. If he is to be believed, DeSantis had “tears coming down from his eyes” at a meeting where he begged Trump for an endorsement, only to betray his mentor after he lost to Biden. These days, on his social-media site, Trump has been highlighting DeSantis’s past support for cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits (which the Governor has since walked back). “he is a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy,” Trump posted last week.
The DeSantis surge raises the question of whether, in today’s G.O.P., only a quasi-Trumpist can defeat Trump. The Governor promotes his record in Florida as a model for the nation, and he has a lustrous résumé—Yale, Harvard Law, Navy service. Yet he has positioned himself as a fists-up culture warrior, choosing Disney as a foil for his anti-woke posturing and championing censorious laws in Florida to regulate the teaching about gender identity and Black history. On tour last week to promote a new book, DeSantis renewed his crusade against “the ruling class” and recounted for a Fox News interviewer how he managed to stave off liberal indoctrination at Yale. He recalled turning up on campus in jean shorts and flip-flops, only to experience “major, major culture shock” as he encountered “kids from Andover and Groton,” as well as classroom discourse that involved “attacking God, attacking the United States.” (DeSantis captained Yale’s baseball team and graduated magna cum laude.)
Other contenders, including Haley and Pence, might try to run against Trump as unifiers, eschewing populist battle cries. In past Republican eras of orderly succession, Pence would likely have been an early front-runner, but Trump has excoriated him for refusing to go along with the January 6th coup plot, and he has lagged in early primary polls.
The R.N.C. might wish for normalcy and party discipline, but an unregulated brawl is the only kind of campaign that Trump knows how to mount. During last week’s litany of attacks, he complained about the “Marxist Thugs” who are out to get him, by which he meant the federal and state prosecutors who have been investigating his finances, his intimidation of election officials, his role on January 6th, and his handling of classified documents. He described America under President Biden as a “Third World Failing Nation” whose rescue urgently requires his maga revival and his restoration to the White House.
Our two-party apparatus of Presidential primaries—absurdly long, media-saturated, corrupted by big money—can hardly be justified as a model of democratic decision-making. Yet it does allow Republicans and Democrats to resolve their factional conflicts in the open, and it gives motivated partisan voters at the grass roots a say. The Republican primaries will offer an early measure of whether our constitutional system remains strong enough to expunge by democratic means the anti-democratic movement that Trump continues to mobilize. ♦
Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country
…Armando Rodríguez, vice-president and executive director of the company, talks to us about their projects in the DR, where they have been operating for 32 years.
More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.
Image: Germán & CoKremlin: Nord Stream's future is decision for all shareholders
MOSCOW, March 6 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Monday it was for all shareholders to decide whether Nord Stream gas pipelines damaged in blasts last year should be mothballed.
Sources familiar with the plans told Reuters last week that the ruptured Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, built by Russia's state-controlled Gazprom (GAZP.MM), were set to be sealed up and mothballed as there are no immediate plans to repair or reactivate them.
Asked about the report at a regular briefing, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "Of course, this is a decision that should be taken collegially by all shareholders."
He also said the Kremlin would not issue any recommendations to Gazprom regarding the future of the undersea pipelines.
Apart from Gazprom, shareholders in Nord Stream AG, the Swiss-based operator of Nord Stream 1, are Engie (ENGIE.PA), Gasunie (GSUNI.UL), Wintershall DEA (WINT.UL) (BASFn.DE) and E.ON (EONGn.DE).
Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, each consisting of two pipes, were built by Gazprom to pump 110 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
Three of the four pipes were ruptured by unexplained blasts in September, and one of the Nord Stream 2 pipes remains intact.
Gazprom has said it is technically possible to repair the ruptured lines, but two sources familiar with plans said Moscow saw little prospect of relations with the West improving enough in the foreseeable future for the pipelines to be needed.
Europe has drastically cut its energy imports from Russia over the past year after Moscow's decision to send hundreds of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin Editing by Gareth Jones
Cooperate with objective and ethical thinking…
Image: Germán Toro Ghio by shutterstock.comModi’s India demands good news only
Narendra Modi’s government has muzzled India’s media through arrests, tax raids and other uses of arbitrary powers. Only a few brave independent news sources still resist.
Le Monde Diplomatique by Samrat ChoudhuryAround midday local time on 14 February 2023 the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Delhi and Mumbai were surprised to see men march into their offices. They were told to hand over their mobiles and assemble in one place: it was a ‘survey’ by the Indian government’s income tax department. Although the official reason for the survey was suspected tax evasion, journalists were questioned and their computers were also ‘surveyed’. Paramilitary soldiers in combat fatigues brandishing assault rifles guarded the gate during the three-day operation. The taxman’s visit came weeks after the release of a BBC documentary, The Modi Question, that did not go down well with its subject, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his government (1).
The two-part documentary looks at Modi’s role as chief minister of Gujarat during riots in that state in 2002 in which at least a thousand people, most of them Muslims, were killed. The on-screen captions mention that ‘More than 30 people in India declined to take part in this series because of fears about their safety. The Indian government declined to comment about the allegations made in this film.’ After the first episode of the two-part series was broadcast by BBC Two on 17 January, the government banned the documentary, even though the BBC did not show it in India, and there were no plans to show it there.
Kanchan Gupta, a former journalist who is now senior advisor at the ministry of information and broadcasting, wrote in a Twitter thread on 21 January, ‘Important. Videos sharing @BBCWorld hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage, disguised as “documentary”, on @YouTube and tweets sharing links to the BBC documentary have been blocked under India’s sovereign laws and rules.’ Gupta added that the government had used emergency powers under its new Information Technology Rules, framed in 2021, since multiple government ministries had found it to be ‘vile propaganda’ which was ‘undermining the sovereignty and integrity of India, and having the potential to adversely impact India’s friendly relations with foreign countries as also public order within the country.’
This position was repeated stridently by the army of social media handles run by Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and by most mainstream Indian news channels, which have in recent years largely become public relations wings of the party. For years, TV news anchors have been Modi cheerleaders. After the tax raid on the BBC, journalists close to unnamed sources in the government swiftly began circulating through WhatsApp groups an unsigned, undated press release with no letterhead or attribution, which said, ‘Today, the Income Tax authorities conducted a survey on the BBC’s premises in Delhi in view of the BBC’s deliberate non-compliance with the Transfer Pricing Rules and its vast diversion of profits.’ Most Indian media outlets ran it, as part of their nationalist duty.
The Indian media’s relationship with the Modi government is one of deep love, though the affection has not been fully returned. Since the start of his tenure in 2014, the prime minister has held only one press conference in India and on that occasion, in 2019, he did not answer a single question. He has given rare interviews to TV news anchors known to be fans; in 2018 he spoke to the Zee News channel, answering questions like, ‘At this age, how do you have so much energy?’ Those who ask harder questions about him, his party or any aspect of his government are accused not so much of being anti-Modi or anti-BJP (both legal in a multi-party democracy) as of being ‘anti-national’. For them, Modi is India and India is Modi.
Accused of being ‘anti-national’
Being called ‘anti-national’ can have serious consequences, as several journalists have discovered in recent years. In 2020 there was a gang-rape of a girl in Hathras in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is run by a Hindu nationalist monk from the BJP, Yogi Adityanath (2). Siddique Kappan, a journalist who was on his way to report on this, was arrested, charged with crimes including sedition under emergency anti-terrorism laws and imprisoned without trial for more than two years before finally getting bail. After his release, he told independent news portal The Wire, ‘It was easy for them to call me a terrorist, because I am a Muslim.’
The crackdown against journalists has not been restricted to Muslims. In 2020 a journalist in the state of Manipur, Kishorchandra Wangkhem, spotted the wife and girlfriend of a local government minister having a fight on Instagram. He posted this on Facebook; soon after, he was arrested and jailed for crimes including sedition (3). It was his second stint in jail for a Facebook post; in 2018 he had been jailed for 133 days after posting a rant against the state’s BJP chief minister, Biren Singh, himself a former journalist.
There is a growing tendency to monitor every news report and social media post and crack down on anything critical. The official press release is the only acceptable version. Any departure is treated as heresy. This is done by appointing government officials as ‘fact checkers’. Several state governments, run by parties across the political spectrum, have tasked the police with the job of curbing ‘fake news’. While India does indeed have a fake news problem, politicians and government officials keen on protecting their own image have found it convenient to suppress any unfavourable coverage by labelling it as fake.
Covid deaths uncovered
In 2020 in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the editor of the small Gujarati-language web news portal Face of Nation, Dhaval Patel, ran a news item saying the state’s chief minister, Vijay Rupani of the BJP, was likely to be replaced by the party’s central leadership. Patel’s story was derided as fake news and he was jailed for sedition. The following year, Rupani was indeed replaced (4). The state had been in the throes of a terrible Covid wave. The death toll had shot up, and efforts to suppress the news had finally failed when one Hindi-language newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar, and its Gujarati-language subsidiary, Divya Bhaskar, ran investigative stories that showed massive undercounting of the deaths including a front cover report headlined ‘Government data on deaths is a lie, these burning pyres are telling the truth’.
The Dainik Bhaskar publications ran reports revealing the horrendous state of affairs in India during the second wave of Covid, when hospitals overflowed and patients in intensive care died after medical oxygen ran short. They subsequently experienced a harsher version of what the BBC is now getting — tax raids across 30-odd locations including not just offices but also the home of its owner, Sudhir Agarwal (5).
With Indian media reduced to compliance or silence, solid journalism about India appears in the foreign press, to government consternation
Mainstream Indian media companies, especially TV channels, realised that safety lay in abandoning investigative journalism. They now strictly avoid criticising the government and attack the opposition instead. Since the government is a major advertiser, this brings significant revenues (the ads get withdrawn before the taxman comes). Uncompliant journalists have lost their jobs or been sidelined within organisations; columnists who are critical of Modi have had their columns dropped. A sizeable number of once secular, liberal journalists have saved their jobs by becoming loud cheerleaders for him and Hindu nationalism. Others have simply fallen silent. The number of prominent Indian journalists who still speak truth to power is low. And mainstream TV channels that still produce proper journalism are all but gone: NDTV, the last such channel, was bought up in December 2022 by Gautam Adani, a controversial billionaire from Gujarat with close ties to Modi.
What little journalism worthy of the name still exists in India is published by small, independent websites. Not even these have escaped police raids or tax ‘surveys’. The decline in press freedom has been reflected in India’s global ranking on the annual press freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders. In 2022 India was ranked 150th out of 180 countries, a little ahead of Russia, at 155th. With Indian media reduced to compliance or silence, solid journalism about India slowly started appearing in the foreign press, to the government’s consternation. The taxman’s visit to the BBC offices is only the latest episode in a simmering row.
The BBC is not the only foreign news organisation to face the Indian government’s ire. On 13 January Deutsche Welle (DW) Asia released a video report headlined ‘Is communal violence in India here to stay in 2023?’ (6). In a promotional tweet, DW said, ‘After numerous instances of communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims in 2022, new research suggests that such violence could increase across India in 2023. Many see growing Hindu extremism as a threat to India’s principles of secularism, diversity and democracy’ (7). Reacting to this, Kanchan Gupta, cited above, described it as ‘Further drivel and trash from DW’. He added that ‘DW’s hostile agenda is to attack India in G20 year. That apart, this unhinged report stinks of anti-Hindu hate. It’s reflective of DW’s jaundiced reportage out of India’ (8).
There is one kind of story that the media can safely tell from India. All journalists are free to say or write anything they like in praise of Modi and the happy state of affairs under his rule.
Samrat Choudhury is a journalist and author, and former newspaper editor.