Miércoles, 3 de febrero de 2021 (Continuación)

Supporters of Myanmar’s armed forces wave national and military flags Tuesday in Yangon, Myanmar. (Thein Zaw/AP)

MundoAsia,

On Feb. 1, Myanmar’s military — the Tatmadaw — detained State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and dozens of key leaders of the country’s largest party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), and declared a one-year state of emergency. On Tuesday, hundreds of legislators remain under house arrest. For observers of Myanmar politics, this coup dashes already dwindling hopes for the country’s democratic prospects.

Democracy faces various threats around the world. Yet the challenges facing Myanmar’s limited democracy are unique because of the role the country’s military plays in politics — with the uneasy relationship between the Tatmadaw and the NLD a key issue.…  Seguir leyendo »

The long arm of the authoritarian state

InternacionalOrden Mundial

The reach of authoritarian repression is growing.
Now, not even exile is safe.

In October 2019, Iran kidnapped journalist Ruhollah Zam in Iraq. Zam had lived as a recognized refugee in France, but after traveling to Iraq for unknown reasons, the Revolutionary Guard Corps abducted and then smuggled him across the border to Iran. After a hasty trial last summer, he was executed in December for “corruption on earth.”

Last July, Mamikhan Umarov, a Chechen exile who had criticized the regime of leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was shot and killed in a Vienna suburb — the third Chechen killed in apparent assassinations in Europe in a year.…  Seguir leyendo »

Kim Jong Un, along with newly elected party leaders, in Pyongyang on Jan. 12. (Str/AFP/Getty Images)

MundoAsia

Last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did something none of his predecessors dared to do: He admitted that his country is in crisis. A grim reality may have left him little choice. The hermit kingdom is reeling from sanctions, natural disasters, famine and the covid-19 pandemic. And since life in North Korea looks likely to get even worse in the months ahead, the regime is doubling down on its efforts to prevent the flow of outside information into the country.

At the end of 2020, North Korea passed a slew of new laws to rein in what it calls “reactionary ideology and culture.”…  Seguir leyendo »

A farmer stands next to police barricades along a blocked highway as farmers continue to protest the central government's recent agricultural reforms on Feb. 2. (Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images)

MundoAsia,

“This flag is our life, it’s drawn from the blood and toil of our ancestors”, a farmer from Punjab told me, pointing to the Indian tricolor fluttering from the corner of his tractor as it joined a cavalcade of thousands on the morning of India’s Republic Day on Jan. 26. I hung on precariously, one foot in the air, one arm clasping the tractor’s overheated emission rod, as we rolled through a sea of people. It was a protest march, but the atmosphere was joyous. After two months of demonstrating at the capital’s borders against new legislation that farmers say will hand over the agriculture industry to oligarchs, the protesters finally had permission to cross the city limits and enter Delhi.…  Seguir leyendo »

Gravediggers are seen at a funeral of a covid-19 victim at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Brazil, last month. (Marcio James/AFP/Getty Images)

InternacionalSalud Pública, ,

For nearly a year, most of us have assumed this pandemic could end only one way: herd immunity. Maybe we’d get there by staying inside until a vaccine arrived, or maybe we’d all give up, catch covid-19 and acquire immunity the old-fashioned way. Almost none of us considered whether it was possible that neither of those things might happen.

So let’s ask: What if the virus gets more contagious and even more lethal, like the variant first identified in Britain, instead of less deadly, like the 1918 flu? What if the virus keeps reinventing itself and evading our immune defenses, so much so that it’s not possible to reach herd immunity without continually updated vaccinations?…  Seguir leyendo »

Soldiers standing guard on a blockaded road leading to Myanmar’s Parliament, in Naypyidaw on Monday. One open question about the coup is how popular it will be within the ranks of the military. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MundoAsia,

Myanmar’s decade-long experiment in conditional democracy just ended in a textbook example of a coup — a coup that was a pre-emptive strike.

In the early hours of Monday, as the new national Parliament was scheduled to convene for its first session, the military, known as the Tatmadaw, announced that it was taking over, alleging fraud during the last general elections in November. It arrested Daw Aung San Suu Kyi — formally the state counselor, but really the country’s de facto leader — as well as other senior officials and a handful of prominent political and social figures.

The Tatmadaw invoked the Constitution (which it drafted back in 2008) to declare a state of emergency for a year; the already-powerful commander in chief, Senior Gen.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protesters in Moscow on Sunday. This impressive display of dissent has been met, increasingly, with force. Credit Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

Europa,

For the first time in close to a decade, the rule of President Vladimir Putin of Russia may be facing a sustained challenge.

Over the past two weekends, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of cities and towns across the country to voice their disapproval of the arrest of the anti-corruption campaigner Aleksei Navalny. This impressive display of dissent has been met, increasingly, with force. On Sunday, over 5,000 people were detained — the most ever on a single day in Russia — including 1,600 in Moscow alone.

This strategy of suppression was successful before. In the winter of 2011 and ’12, thousands of people demonstrated against electoral fraud by the ruling United Russia party and Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Photo on the subject of hackers and data security. Hands write on a computer keyboard on 2 February 2020 in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images.

Internacional

In mid-December 2020, the biggest cyber intrusion known to date was discovered in the United States, the world’s leading cyber power. The global reach of the incident, and the nature and number of affected US government agencies –  most notably the US Energy Department which controls the National Nuclear Security Administration – is unprecedented. A joint statement by the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA) and others, concluded that Russia is ‘likely’ to be behind the hack. Although it is tempting to focus on options for a potential response, such as ‘cost imposition’ or the use of offensive cyber capabilities - and even on the purported failure of the US strategy to ‘defend forward’ – there is also value in paying attention to what this wasn’t, to ensure that future preventative action is appropriately focused.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

In a major blow to Myanmar’s fragile democratic transition, the army staged a coup d’état on 1 February 2021. It arrested senior political figures of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) – including the country’s de facto civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi – and seized executive, legislative and judicial power for at least a year under a state of emergency. The Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, justified overthrowing the elected government by citing alleged fraud in the 8 November 2020 election that saw the NLD win an overwhelming victory over the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). The country’s election commission had firmly rejected those allegations last week, as international observers had previously done.…  Seguir leyendo »

Alexei Navalny appears at Moscow city court on Tuesday. Photograph: Moscow City Court Press Service/Moscow City Court/TASS

Europa

The sum of €700 (£618) is not large in the context of Russian corruption, but it is a lot to spend on a toilet brush. Then again, sprawling presidential estates have a lot of toilets, which must be cleaned to a standard delivered only by Italian designer brushes.

Details like that are what make Alexei Navalny’s recent film about Vladimir Putin’s personal fortune so potent. The anti-corruption campaigner’s documentary has been viewed more than 100m times. Thanks to aerial drone footage and digital reconstructions based on leaked architectural plans, ordinary Russians have had a guided tour of what Navalny describes, without exaggeration, as a modern-day Versailles.…  Seguir leyendo »