WorldAffairs: Understanding the Leadership of Kim Jong Un

Since becoming the supreme leader of North Korea in 2011, Kim Jong Un has solidified his power base at home, clearing out his father’s top advisors and expanding the nation’s nuclear program. While he’s often characterized by his odd behavior, he has successfully maintained domestic dictatorial rule while also exerting international pressure to establish state legitimacy. Anna Fifield, Beijing bureauchief for The Washington Post and author of “The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Jong Un”, talks with Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, about how a better understanding of North Korea’s leader might lead to improved relations with the closed-off nation.

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Today in Focus: Jeff Bezos and the United States of Amazon

In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the company that has since made him the richest man in the world. Julia Carrie Wong charts the company’s success and controversies. Plus: Jim Waterson on why young people aren’t watching the news anymore.

Amazon started out as a platform that sold books, but it quickly expanded to become the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace, as well as moving into cloud computing, digital streaming and AI. A third of the world’s cloud computing is controlled by Amazon.

This expansion has not been without controversy – from working conditions within the Amazon fulfilment centres to recent protests over its involvement with US authorities’ deportation efforts. Julia Carrie Wong, Guardian US technology reporter, talks to India Rakusen about what drove Bezos to start Amazon, how it has managed to expand into so many other areas, and whether we should be concerned by how powerful it has become.

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UnHerd: Is Xi losing his grip on Taiwan?

There is only one exception in the media coverage. The China Times – whose owners famously sympathise with Beijing – barely mentioned the Hong Kong protests at all. For most Taiwanese, such self-censorship is just another indicator of the ideological obedience expected by the Communist Party of China. [...]

With the Democratic Progressive Party currently in power, the political options now are more often expressed as a choice between the uneasy status quo and a move towards outright independence, despite the risk that might entail invasion by the People’s Republic. The older generation generally prefers the former and younger people the latter. [...]

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party must have known this, and yet they pressed on with moves to erode Hong Kong’s special status. Above all things, Beijing seems to fear disintegration; the ruling party is concerned that tolerating local diversity could unravel the country. According to Chi-Ting Tsai, Executive Director of the Centre for China Studies at the National Taiwan University: “One of the greatest fears among the Chinese leadership is fragmentation. There’s a concern that they can’t control what goes on in the provinces.” [...]

In April 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced a ruling that 80% of the country’s citizens must speak the national language – Mandarin Chinese – by 2020. The Ministry’s ruling was an admission that almost a third of the population, around 400 million people, do not speak the nominally ‘national’ language. Instead, they speak regional ‘topolects’ – Cantonese, Shanghainese and others – that are mutually unintelligible. This diversity threatens the homogenisers. The campaign to impose Mandarin nationwide has been stepped up.

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ChickenWire: Why BREXIT Has To Be Done By The Next Election!

Why Brexit has to be done by the next election. The next general election might be sooner than you think depending on whether Brexit get's delivered or not. But what will be the result of that election. Well I take a look back at the by-elections in Newport, Brecon and Radnorshire and Peterborough to work out what these results mean. The Labour Party along with the Conservatives have been consistently losing out with the Brexit party and the Lib dems along with other remain party's like the green party making gains. But what does this mean for a general election well in this analysis we'll find out.

The Guardian: Russia Without Putin by Tony Wood review – myths of the new cold war (27 Dec 2018)

In the first piece of myth-debunking promised in his subtitle Tony Wood argues that Putin’s system is not a deviation from the Yeltsin years when the Russian elite enthusiastically embraced capitalism; it is a direct continuation of it. There may have been a minor shift under Putin towards the restoration of partial or full control by the state over some of the big resource-extracting companies in the raw material sector. But the intertwining of government and big business, the creation of an oligarchy and a huge widening of income differentials in favour of the rich were initiated under Yeltsin. To call Putin’s Russia a mafia state is therefore a mystification, since its elements – the hollowing out of elections so as to remove genuine democratic content, the promotion of former security agents to top jobs in the state apparatus and the entanglement of officialdom with organised crime – were all there under Yeltsin, too. Western governments and the advisers they dispatched to aid the Kremlin’s economic ministries at best turned a blind eye; more often they connived at it.

The second myth is that where there were negative distortions in Russia’s transition to capitalism it was because of the legacy of the Soviet past with an authoritarian ruling class and a population made passive by decades of submission to power. Here Wood is bold enough to confront the prevailing narrative of several prominent Russian writers and sociologists, as well as western observers, who adopt a kind of social Darwinism in arguing that it will take another generation for Homo Sovieticus to die out. Wood turns the argument on its head: “Rather than being a hindrance, the remnants of the Soviet past have been a massive boon for post-Soviet Russia,” he writes. Russians were willing to put up with devastating inflation, the destruction of their savings, the loss of jobs and the closure of much of industry because these hardships were softened by the survival, at least until recently, of low rents, free medicine, the pension system and other aspects of the welfare state. This parallelism of old and new structures smoothed the path of capitalist transition and forestalled massive rebellion. [...]

The fundamental fact, as Wood sees it, is the huge imbalance of power and resources between the west and post-Soviet Russia since the end of the cold war. In the 1990s the west wanted to drive home its advantage, hence the expansion of Nato that Russians, elite as well as people, came to resent. Not initially, though. Under Yeltsin and in Putin’s first few years as president, Russians wanted to be part of the liberal internationalist US-led bloc of developed states. The downfall of that idea was caused by the west’s rejection of Russia’s repeated proposals to join Nato, followed by Washington’s promotion of “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004. Even as recently as 2011 when Dmitry Medvedev was president, Russia went along with the west on a major foreign policy issue by declining to use its UN security council veto to block the west’s intervention in Libya.

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The Guardian: Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on Brexit could yet pay off, even for remainers. Here’s why

Yet, seeing Campbell announce this week that he’s given up on the Labour party, mainly because under Jeremy Corbyn it won’t go all-out remain, I couldn’t help wondering if he shouldn’t also take heed of that Irish lesson. Because if you want Labour to be a pure remain party – against the wishes of so many of its marginalised, traditional voters, particularly those working-class people in the north – then don’t do it after a referendum in which those same voters had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to actually make their vote count. Don’t choose this moment to tell millions of long-standing party supporters that you’re ignoring their deeply held views. [...]

Corbyn is facing far more flak for this today than New Labour did 20 years ago, and that’s because many on the right of the party don’t actually want to see him win power. (If you want proof, look at Stephen Kinnock’s stony-faced reaction, captured by a BBC documentary camera, as the news broke that Theresa May had lost her majority in the 2017 election.) Many of those in and around politics still yearn for the Blair-Brown era when they were close to power. They’re not worried about the damage Labour would suffer by going “full remain”: an election defeat would merely hasten the day when the hated Corbyn steps down.

Others say that now Boris Johnson has energised the hard right and united his cabinet over no deal, Corbyn must do the same – but for remain. This is nonsense. Johnson has already seen the damage caused by his rash decision-making. He’s boxed himself in by refusing to talk to European leaders until they ditch the backstop; he’s been slapped down by Nicola Sturgeon and learned that his stance is boosting the cause of Scottish independence; he’s faced angry Welsh farmers whose livelihood is threatened by no-deal tariffs; and he’s gone to Northern Ireland, where he’s been told that the peace process is at risk. And in Brecon and Radnorshire he’s tasted defeat after just a week in office, losing an 8,000 majority. Far from rallying supporters, his Brexit stance has just piled up his problems. He can’t even rely on the party’s hardcore Brexiteers to support any deal he might achieve with Europe.

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The Guardian: Boris Johnson is the last person young Britons would vote for

A recent Barnardo’s report found that more young people think Brexit is an immediate threat to their future than is climate change. When Johnson wrote of the Extinction Rebellion protests in April that he was “utterly fed up with being told by nice young people that their opinions are more important than my own”, few would expect him to think otherwise for our concerns about Brexit. [...]

And even if young people were in fact in favour of Brexit, they would still reject Johnson. This is a politician who, regardless of his personal beliefs, is happy to dabble in misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia as far as it appeals to those whose support he needs. This is a man who has described women wearing the burqa as “letterboxes”, claimed “voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts” and described gay men as “tank-topped bumboys”. [...]

This is a prime minister whose cause is neither Brexit, nor Britain. It’s Boris. Johnson clearly believes that his political survival is best served by ignoring and alienating my generation, and MPs flock to him in the hope he’ll save their seat in the process. We’re under no such illusion: a Johnson premiership leaves our futures at the bottom of the pile. And if he does call a general election he’ll quickly consider the thousands of young people who protested in London on his first day in office a happy memory. Because many, many more will be sure to make themselves heard – on the streets, yes, but at the ballot box too.

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The Atlantic: What Happens When the World’s Population Stops Growing?

For most of the time that humans have existed, our ranks have grown really, really slowly. There were an estimated 4 million people on Earth in 10,000 b.c., and after the following 10 millennia, the planetwide population had only reached 190 million. Even in 1800, the total number of humans was still under 1 billion. [...]

Humanity has experienced population drop-offs before—the Black Death is thought to have killed about 200 million people—but this time will be different. “In the past, when the world population experienced a decline,” Tom Vogl, a development economist at UC San Diego, told me, “it was because a lot of people died.” This coming transition, meanwhile, will be the result of people having fewer kids—a product of rising incomes and levels of education, especially for women and especially in less-wealthy countries. [...]

“When that happens on a global level, it means that that pension crisis is going to happen in many countries independently, at different points along that global path,” Vogl said. As each country encounters this problem, immigration—bringing in younger, work-ready people from countries with a lower concentration of older people—could counteract the aging dynamics. But today’s politics indicate that immigration is not a simple fix. Less controversial ways for countries to offset this problem include growing their economy (because there would be more money to go around) and creating more opportunities for women in the labor market (which would alter a country’s ratio of workers to retirees). [...]

When Eloundou-Enyegue thinks about the coming demographic shifts, he also wonders how they will alter the world’s cultural centers of gravity. “Because the young shape a lot of the large segments of the culture—let’s say, artistic culture, or sports culture—it would be interesting to see where most of the young people [will be],” he says. According to his calculations based on the UN’s data, the proportion of all humans on Earth under the age of 25 who live in Asia will drop from 56 to 37 percent between next year and 2100. Meanwhile, Africa’s share of the global population of young people will shoot up, from 25 to 48 percent. (The proportion living in the rest of the world will not fluctuate much.)

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euronews: Trust in EU at its highest in five years, new poll shows

At 44%, trust in the EU is at its highest level since 2014 and ten percentage points ahead of trust in national governments and parliament, Eurobarometer said.

Among other key findings, 61% of Europeans are optimistic about the future of the EU.

Meanwhile, 55% of Europeans say they are satisfied with the way democracy works in the EU, the highest score since 2004.

Support for the euro reached a record high 76%.

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