If anything, I see myself as a “witness.” I’d also be pleased, if you’d call me an “interpreter.”
WIM WENDERS
Wednesday 31 May 2023
NATO to send more troops to Kosovo
The decision was announced after a violent standoff between NATO riot police and local Serbs
NATO will deploy 700 additional troops to Kosovo, where 30 of the bloc's security personnel were wounded during clashes with local Serb protesters. Another battalion will be placed on high alert in the event of further escalation.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the move in a Tuesday press briefing, saying the deployment was a response to recent “attacks” on the force, which he said were “unacceptable.”
Stoltenberg urged officials in Pristina and Belgrade to take “concrete steps” to de-escalate the situation, and said the two sides should participate in an EU-brokered dialogue.
Violent clashes between local Serbs and NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) erupted after peacekeepers attempted to disperse demonstrators protesting the inauguration of a an Albanian mayor in a Serb-majority area. The standoff resulted in dozens of injuries on both sides.
The unrest came after local Serbs, who have long sought autonomy in Kosovo, boycotted Pristina-backed elections in several regions of Serbia’s breakaway province. Despite a turnout of less than 4%, the local authorities accepted the votes as legitimate, announcing the election of four Albanian mayors.
KFOR was first established in 1999 in the wake of NATO’s intervention in the Kosovo conflict on behalf of ethnic Albanians, and the bloc’s months-long bombing campaign in Serbia. The force consisted of around 50,000 troops at its height, but has since declined to about 3,700 soldiers today.
Kosovo has seen several waves of unrest since the 1999 war. In 2008, the Western-backed Albanian authorities unilaterally declared independence from Belgrade. The move was quickly backed by the US and many other Western countries. Russia and China are among the states that continue to view Kosovo as part of Serbia.
Moscow has said NATO is largely responsible for the recent spike in hostilities. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused the alliance of becoming “a source of unnecessary violence” and an “escalation factor” in the region. She urged the bloc to “silence its false propaganda” against local Serbs, who she said had been wrongly blamed for provoking incidents.
AI ‘extinction’ should be same priority as nuclear war – experts
The Center for AI Safety has released a statement signed by 350 industry leaders, including the CEOs of OpenAI and Google DeepMind
Preventing runaway artificial intelligence from causing the extinction of humanity should be a top-level global priority, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety said in a statement on Tuesday signed by 350 prominent individuals in AI and related fields.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement reads.
Signers included Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently told Congress he was worried the technology could go “quite wrong” and urged them to impose regulations on the industry. The three industry leaders met with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month to discuss potential regulations. Numerous executives from their companies also added their names to Tuesday’s statement.
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, considered the “godfathers of AI” for their work on neural networks, were listed first on the document, though Yann LeCun, who did the research with them and now runs AI research for Meta, did not sign. Hinton left his position at Google earlier this month to sound the alarm about AI risks and has said he sometimes regrets his life’s work.
The letter represents a “coming out” for industry leaders who previously kept their concerns about the future of AI under wraps, Center for AI Safety executive director Dan Hendrycks told the New York Times on Tuesday.
“There’s a very common misconception, even in the AIA community, that there are only a handful of doomers,” he explained, clarifying that “many people privately would express concerns about these things.”
The message echoes another open letter published in March by the Future of Life Institute, arguing for a six-month moratorium on large-scale AI developments in order to avoid “an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds.” That message was signed by more than 1,000 influential figures in tech, including billionaire Elon Musk, who just received US government approval to go ahead with human testing on his Neuralink brain-computer interface, which is meant to give people a competitive advantage against AI.
Not all AI influencers are gun-shy, however. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently told an audience at National Taiwan University that those who didn’t jump on the AI juggernaut would see their jobs stolen, their companies perish, and themselves eaten – at least metaphorically – while Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a big AI investor, insists the technology will bring only “huge benefits.”
EU to break ranks with US on Russia and China trade – Bloomberg
The bloc is reportedly unwilling to pursue the hawkish stance on trade with Beijing and Moscow being promoted by Washington
The European Union does not intend to condemn Russia and China for "economic coercion" in its joint trade strategy with the US, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday citing a draft document.
According to the outlet, the US has been advocating a more confrontational stance on China, while members of the EU have been reluctant to adopt a hawkish approach despite embracing the concept of "de-risking" regarding outbound investment, which is endorsed by both Washington and Brussels.
The EU reportedly seeks to reduce its economic exposure to the Asian powerhouse by signing on to the US-led policy of curbing Beijing's access to advanced technologies. At the same time, the bloc is struggling to maintain a balance in relations with Washington and China, which remains an important trading partner for the EU.
France and Italy objected to references to China as a non-market economy during internal meetings, Bloomberg reported citing sources familiar with the document.
While previous strategy drafts called out China's "anti-competitive and harmful non-market policies and practices," in particular in the semiconductor sector, the latest version does not include that language.
The US also proposed accusing China and Russia of "economic coercion" in earlier drafts of the document. The final text of the trade strategy mentions the problem but avoids calling out the two countries by name, Bloomberg said.
Washington and Brussels initially pushed for a text saying they had an "interest in preventing the narrow set of technological advances that are assessed to be core to enhancing the military and intelligence capabilities of actors who may use these capabilities to undermine international peace and security, from being fueled by our companies' capital, expertise, and knowledge."
The latest version reportedly says that the transatlantic partners "recognize that appropriate measures designed to address risks from outbound investment could be important."
US and EU representatives have reportedly agreed on a simplified draft avoiding harsh rhetoric while still enumerating the core issues. The document is expected to be published after the conclusion of the trade meeting between the two sides, which is taking place in Sweden on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The five emerging nations have already outpaced the G7 in economic growth, the prominent economist has noted
The status of the US dollar as the kingpin currency could be challenged with time and under certain circumstances by the BRICS group of emerging countries, according to Jim O’Neill, the former Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
O’Neill coined the term BRIC – later expanded to include South Africa – and at the time predicted that the four emerging countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) were on their way to reshaping the world economy.
“The idea that the dollar will remain king forever, I think, is probably unlikely,” the economist said in an interview with TV show Going Underground. “This is not the first time that people have talked about the end of the dollar, it happens every other year if not with the same intensity” he said, adding that the US currency would probably at some point lose its position.
“I do think if China and India could ever strongly agree on things as the two biggest countries in the emerging world… then that would probably hasten the end of the dollar’s dominance,” he stated.
According to the economist, the shape of the world economy has shifted since the advent of the BRICS concept. In purchasing power parity terms, the BRICS share of global GDP is now greater than that of the G7 in dollar terms, O’Neill pointed out.
According to him, a growing number of countries are considering joining BRICS, but the group of five should determine what new members can actually bring to the table. “In that case it is possible to seriously think that the BRICS countries could be at the basis of some new kind of – not only currency – but some kind of competitor to the US financial system,” O’Neill explained, adding that “in order for the dollar to end, there has to be some alternative.”
Turning to Russia and Western sanctions, the economist said Moscow was doing better than those who imposed the sanctions believed, and that that was essentially due to its strong links with the BRICS member states. However, “it is not entirely clear whether Russia would continue to be able to cope with the persistence of sanctions, because the scale of restrictions is getting tougher,” he warned.
EU issues plea to Russia after Moscow drone attack
A foreign affairs spokesman urged Moscow not to use the incident as an excuse for escalation
The EU has called on Russia not to escalate its conflict with Ukraine despite Tuesday’s drone attack on Moscow. The bloc’s foreign affairs spokesman, Peter Stano, claimed he did not know all the details of the incident.
“We took note of the reports claiming allegedly that there were some drones flying over the region of Moscow. This is not really for us to comment on, we don’t know anything about the origins or about the details of it,” Stano said during a briefing in Brussels.
“The only thing I can recall and repeat is the strong call by the EU to Russia not to use such incidents as a pretext for further escalation of its illegal aggression against Ukraine,” the official added.
The comments came after Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced on Tuesday morning that the city had come under attack from multiple drones. The incident was confirmed by the Russian Defense Ministry, which accused Kiev of conducting a terrorist attack.
“The Kiev regime launched a terrorist attack with unmanned aerial vehicles on targets in the city of Moscow,” a statement from the ministry said.
According to Russian officials, eight drones were involved in the raid, all of which were neutralized. Three were suppressed by electronic warfare measures and deviated from their intended course, while the remaining five were shot down by air defense systems. Several residential buildings sustained slight damage and two civilians received minor injuries.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated that the attack was perpetrated by Kiev and claimed it had specifically been directed at civilian targets. The Kremlin, meanwhile, claimed that the raid was a Ukrainian attempt to exact revenge for a recent Russian strike on a decision-making center in Kiev.
“It is clear that we are talking about the response of the Kiev regime to our very effective strikes on the center, one of the decision-making centers. This strike took place on Sunday,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
He argued that Tuesday’s attack “once again confirms” the need to continue the military operation in Ukraine until its goals are achieved.
The NDB was established in 2014 to provide funding for infrastructure and sustainable development projects
Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov talked up the potential of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) as he attended the opening ceremony of the NDB’s eighth annual meeting in Shanghai on Tuesday.
The current aim of the NDB is to expand links and infrastructure across the bloc and boost the quality of life in member states, the Russian minister stated.
“The task of the BRICS is to unite, not to divide. Therefore, when the BRICS countries decided to create the NDB, we pursued one simple goal: to create a financial institution for developing countries, so that we all have an additional tool to support our joint development agenda,” Siluanov said.
According to Siluanov, the bank should focus on areas such as facilitating the transfer of technology and promoting innovation, as well as solving food and energy security problems, developing sustainable infrastructure, and creating development potential.
It is important that the NDB remains open to admitting new members and cooperating with all international organizations, Siluanov stressed.
The Shanghai-based NDB was established in 2014 by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and formally opened for business a year later. It was later joined by Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. Uruguay is in the process of joining the NDB and Saudi Arabia is also in talks to become a member, the Financial Times reported last week.
To date, the NDB has loaned $33 billion to more than 96 projects in its five founding-member countries, according to the bank’s website.
Dilma Rousseff, NDB president and former president of Brazil, said on Tuesday that the bank would look to work more closely with other multilateral and national banks. It will also aim to finance more projects in local currencies to protect borrowers from fluctuations, she noted.
On Monday, the NDB announced the issuance of 8.5 billion yuan worth of panda bonds ($1.23 billion) in China’s interbank bond market, with the aim of financing sustainable development projects.
Yakov Rabkin: I left the USSR to enjoy free speech in the West. Fifty years later, it no longer exists
In the 1970s, the Soviets made it impossible to access the foreign press. Now the US-led bloc is doing the same with Russian media.
By Yakov Rabkin, a professor emeritus of history at the Université de Montréal, author and public intellectual
Fifty years ago I left the Soviet Union for one reason: My desire for freedom. I was disgusted by the one-sided world view fostered by the banning of foreign publications and the jamming of Western radio stations. The obedient media, toeing the party line, repulsed me and made me laugh.
Fear of the authorities (even if they were far more "vegetarian" than in Stalinist times) restricted open discussion of politics to the "kitchen cabinet,” with a small circle of trusted friends.
I left behind my hometown (then Leningrad, now St Petersburg), my friends, my brother and the graves of my parents and grandparents. Applying to emigrate meant taking a risk, because you almost always risked losing your job, many friends and even relatives, with no guarantee that you would even be granted an exit visa.
I was lucky. Just a few months later, my Soviet citizenship was revoked and I was able to buy a one-way train ticket to Vienna. My dream of freedom had come true. Although I was only allowed to take $140 out of the Soviet Union, the first thing I bought in Austria was a copy of the International Herald Tribune newspaper.
In November 1973, I joined the University of Montreal, which has since become my professional home. In addition to teaching and research, I followed with interest the political debates about the Vietnam War, the CIA's role in overthrowing the Salvador Allende government in Chile, and the implications of the October War in the Middle East. Debate raged over America's flirtation with China and, of course, relations with my own country. Some praised the Brezhnev-Nixon détente, others feared its pitfalls.
What struck me most in the newspapers and on television was the diversity of opinion. Letters to the editor offered a wide range of viewpoints, some of which not only criticized Western policies but also offered alternatives. It wasn't long before I began to express my own views, first in letters to publications and then in articles. I was excited by the opportunity to engage in free political debate and to make my contribution as a citizen and a scholar. After all, society had created the conditions for me to share the results of my research and observations broadly.
However, things have changed. Today, when it comes to some important issues of international politics, freedom of discussion is severely restricted.
One such issue is Israel. It takes a lot of courage to criticize it freely without fear of being accused of anti-Semitism. In the early 1970s, a South African by birth, Abba Eban, whose eloquence as the country’s UN representative and later foreign minister has become legendary, devised a long-term strategy. His aim was to silence his country's critics by accusing them of anti-Semitism. His efforts continue to bear fruit: accusations of apartheid against Palestinians in Israel, and even boycotts of Israeli supermarket products, have been officially banned in many Western countries as manifestations of anti-Semitism. Israel's policy towards the Palestinians is thus removed from the realm of open debate.
An even more important issue that has disappeared from rational discussion is policy towards Russia. This issue is all the more important because Moscow has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Long before February 2022, when President Vladimir Putin announced the military campaign in Ukraine, most NATO countries (as well as Kiev itself) had restricted access to Russian media, something that did not happen in the West even during the Cold War. Just as the Soviets justified their jamming of Western radio broadcasts with the need to protect against "ideological sabotage,” many institutions have been created in recent years by NATO and its member states to protect citizens from, so-called, "Russian disinformation."
Once prominent Western scientists such as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago have all but disappeared from the mainstream media: their criticisms of Western policy towards Moscow are often dismissed as Kremlin propaganda. Their views must now be sought on alternative websites in the vastness of the internet.
Moreover, the few attempts to take a dispassionate look at Western policy in Eastern Europe face insurmountable obstacles. Recently, for example, the association Montréal pour la paix (Montreal for Peace) attempted to organize a debate with prominent experts in international relations and, in particular, Canadian foreign policy. It promised to present "facts you have never read or heard from our media or from the offices of Justin Trudeau and Melanie Joly" (Canada's prime minister and foreign minister respectively). The institution that had initially agreed to rent space for the event, according to its staff, succumbed to pressure from its "Ukrainian neighbors" and cancelled the deal. Another institution agreed, but quickly changed its mind "so as not to offend its regular customers.”
The event had to be moved to a nearby park, where several dozen middle-aged people gathered to listen to the experts. About the same number of young people arrived waving Ukrainian flags and anti-Russian posters. Police arrived to separate the two groups to prevent violence. The demonstrators tried to drown out the speakers by occasionally singing loudly or shouting "Glory to Ukraine!” But there was something strange about their behavior. When one of the experts, Yves Engler, author of several books on Canadian foreign policy, said that Ukrainians had the right to resist Russian troops, the demonstrators began chanting "Shame!" The event was held in French, but it turned out that most of the bold demonstrators not only did not understand French, but also had difficulty speaking English. So their anger could not have been directed at what the speakers were saying. It was clearly against freedom of speech on the war in Ukraine.
Freedom of speech is not just a democratic right. It is also a way of defining and weighing alternatives. When conflict becomes an epic struggle between good and evil, rationality is replaced by moral judgment and noble indignation. This undermines all diplomacy and, in turn, exacerbates the danger of nuclear war, the inevitable consequence of which, as US military strategists recognized as early as 1962, is Mutually Assured Destruction, or ‘MAD’.
Unanimity, una voce, one-sided debate – call it what you like. But this is about more than just the denial of free speech. The climate it has created threatens the very survival of humanity.
