World Politics

New Zealand has temporarily halved fares on public transport as part of a package of measures to reduce the cost of living.The move comes in response to soaring fuel costs sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has seen a global surge in prices.Announcing the measure, Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern described the situation as “a wicked perfect storm”.“We cannot control the war in Ukraine nor the continued volatility of fuel prices but we can take steps to reduce the impact on New Zealand families,” she said.”We hope this ensures that where the option of shifting how we travel is available, this makes it more affordable to take that public transport option up.”The three-month subsidy needed to cut fares will cost between $25m and $40m NZ (£12.9 to £20.7m), according to local media.The country’s government is also set to cut fuel excise duty by 25 cents (13p) a litre for three months to ease pressure on people who cannot switch to public transport.The change to transport fares means a one-zone rail fare with a smartcard in Aukland will be cut from £1.14 ($2.20 NZ) to 57p. ($1.10 NZ).New Zealand’s approach differs from that of the UK, where rail fares were this month hiked by the fastest rate in nine years, 3.8 per cent.Instead of reducing fares because of rising inflation, the UK government increases fares in line with inflation every year, meaning a rising cost of living leads to steeper fare rises.Experts have told MPs in the UK that the cost of a litre of petrol could hit £2.50, with diesel topping out at £3.00. More

Warnings have been raised over a potential surge in Russian cyber attacks against British organisations as the crisis in Ukraine escalates.Analysts and officials are expecting retaliation from Kremlin-linked cyber groups after sanctions were imposed by Boris Johnson and the government announced plans to send extra military support to Ukraine.The National Cyber Security Centre has already urged British organisations to “bolster their online defences” amid a deterioration in relations between Russia and the West.This follows several high-profile cyber operations that have been launched against Ukraine by suspected Russian forces since the beginning of 2022. On Wednesday, multiple Ukrainian government and banking websites were knocked offline in the latest wave of attacks linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency.It’s now feared the same tactics, in which Ukrainian websites have been defaced or breached by destructive malware, could also be deployed against UK servers if the current crisis further deepens in the weeks to come.Stefano De Blasi, an analyst at Digital Shadows, which specialises in digital risk protection, said it was “realistically possible that Russia will eventually retaliate against the sanctions recently imposed on them with targeted cyber operations”.He said distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – an attempt to hinder the running of a server or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic – could be launched against Western organisations, alongside the dissemination of destructive malware.Digital Shadows, along with other cyber surveillance and protection companies, have detected a rise in attacks against Ukrainian targets in recent weeks.This include defacement attacks, espionage campaigns, wiper malware deployments, disinformation campaigns, and DDoS operations, Mr De Blasi said.“Although some of these attacks haven’t been attributed to the Russian Federation, overlapping motivations and goals likely indicate a common origin,” he said.“These attacks showcase the breadth of offensive operations that the Russian Federation maintains in its toolkit, and it suggests the potential for future attacks targeting Ukraine and its allies if the situation was to escalate.”On Tuesday, first minister Nicola Sturgeon also warned that the international community must be “vigilant” to retaliatory cyber attacks engineered by the Kremlin and its allies.“I think that is something that we have to be very vigilant about,” she said. “The discussions I’ve mentioned already about domestic impacts, cyber security is one of those.“We know, even before the current situation in Ukraine, that Russia was very active around cyber activity.”Russian state-associated threat groups have consistently used destructive cyber-attacks during military conflicts in the past, Digital Shadows said.This hybrid warfare approach has become a staple of Russian military doctrine and has been observed during its 2008 conflict with Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and against Ukraine since 2014.In an attempt to combat the spread of Russian disinformation and propaganda, the culture secretary has told Ofcom to review the operation of the Kremlin-backed Russia Today (RT) news channel in the UK.Writing to the regulator, Nadine Dorries said RT was “demonstrably part of Russia’s global disinformation campaign”.Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said RT was president Vladimir Putin’s “personal propaganda tool” and argued there is “no reason why it should be allowed to continue to broadcast in this country.”Currently, the NCSC said it was not aware of any specific cyber threats to UK organisations in relation to events in and around Ukraine, while Digital Shadows said “given the tense situation in Ukraine, Moscow is likely to focus on the conflict and on establishing financial and political frameworks to lessen the impact of Western sanctions,” rather than pursuing cyber operations.However, John Hultquist, a vice-president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, a cyber security consultancy, said there was likely to be an increase in “more aggressive information operations and disruptive cyber attacks within and outside of Ukraine” as the crisis continues.“Russia’s military intelligence service is the most aggressive of its peers when it comes to cyberattacks and other activity in the sphere,” he added. “We have seen them carry out DDoS attacks on several occasions which they use to harass and undermine institutions.“It’s also important not to misjudge the purpose of these attacks – the disruption they cause is designed to intimidate and undermine and is not an end in itself. Furthermore, they may be timed or accompanied by other elements to magnify their psychological impact.” More

More countries are adopting policies that coerce women into having more children, a report has found.Around three in ten nations across the globe now have pronatalist policies that encourage citizens to have more children, according to charity Population Matters.Researchers, who examined data from the United Nations, noted a substantial rise from the ten per cent of nations that enacted such policies in 1976.The paper highlighted examples of pronatalism being pursued in countries such as Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Iran and China.However, it also warned politicians in the US and Germany are beginning to champion parallel policies.Monica Scigliano, the report’s author, said: “When people think of coercive population policy, their minds often go to examples like China and India, in which leaders wanted to limit population growth by forcing women to have fewer children.“Now, however, with birth rates declining and in some cases emigration reversing population trends, that has changed.“As people continue to choose smaller families, more governments across the world are resorting to coercive tactics, depriving people of their reproductive rights in order to increase their populations.”Ms Scigliano, a policy adviser, said nationalism can spawn a “toxic brand of pronatalism” which signifies an “almost inevitable threat to sexual and reproductive health and rights”.Researchers warned nationalist governments are infringing on women’s reproductive and sexual freedom rights – suggesting “right-wing, populist and nationalist administrations are stigmatising women who choose to have smaller families as unpatriotic”.The proponents of pronatalist policies sometimes believe in the deeply racist and xenophobic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory which maintains Christian and European populations and their culture will be eradicated due to immigrants from Muslim countries relocating overseas to escape human rights abuses.The report noted Viktor Orban, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, has proposed “a comprehensive agreement with Hungarian women” to bear more children. The leader promotes debt-free education for women but only if they have at least three children.He has also pledged that women who give birth to four or more children need not ever pay income tax again.“We want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender,” Mr Orban has previously said.Researchers also drew attention to pronatalist policies in Poland where a near-total abortion ban was enacted last October – further tightening the nation’s already highly restrictive abortion laws and triggering the largest protests in the country since the collapse of communism.Under the new laws, it is now illegal to have an abortion in cases where there are foetal defects. Before that, although terminating a pregnancy has long been illegal in Poland, foetal abnormalities were one of the exceptions where an abortion was permitted, along with cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s life is at risk.Before the stringent new abortion rules were rolled out, some 98 per cent of the tiny number of legal abortions which occurred in the predominantly Catholic nation were cases of foetal defects.Campaigners have blamed the new for the recent death of a 30-year-old pregnant woman, named only as Izabela, who died after she was blocked from having an emergency operation as doctors said they had to wait until they could stop hearing her baby’s heartbeat.Antonina Lewandowska, an abortion rights campaigner who is one of the report’s authors, said anti-abortion campaigners in Poland forced doctors into “such a state of fear” that they preferred to let Izabela “go into septic shock” than provide her with an abortion earlier on and therefore “save her life”.She said: “They are terrified of prosecution and stigma, as the pro-natalist anti-choice movements would probably eat them alive. On the other hand, there is a group of medical professionals that are rather comfortable with the current situation.“As it lets them argue that medical negligence happens due to that ‘freezing effect’ of an abhorrent law rather than their own incompetence, mistake or deliberate choice to not provide their patients with necessary medical care – an abortion – due to their personal beliefs.“In both cases, it is clear – aggressive, fundamentalist pronatalism paved the way for violating human rights in Poland.”The report is titled Welcome to Gilead, a reference to The Handmaid’s Tale – a 1985 dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, which is set in a fervently patriarchal, totalitarian state where women are forced to bear children for a governing class of men.Robin Maynard, director of Population Matters, said: “Coercive pronatalism is not simply a manifestation of patriarchy or misogyny but can be a product of political and economic forces entirely indifferent to women, for whom they exist simply as productive or non-productive wombs.“These regimes are instrumentalising women’s bodies to serve nationalistic, economic and patriarchal interests. Violating sexual and reproductive health and rights is never justified. It is imperative we all defend them, wherever they are threatened, and for whatever reason.”The report warned world leaders are anxious women deciding to have fewer children will impede their “economic and political goals”.“Pronatalism is often linked to a restrictive, patriarchal ‘pro-family’ agenda and the promotion of ethnic nationalism, based frequently on religious orthodoxy and hostility to multiculturalism and immigration,” researchers added. More

Former president Barack Obama slightly squinted and bit his lip in characteristic fashion as he said: “Now she is all alone,” to his adviser. He had spent three hours alone with Angela Merkel in Hotel Adelon in Berlin. It was late November 2016. Donald Trump had just been elected the 45th president of the US and Obama was worried as he prepared to leave office. Only one individual, he thought, could keep the liberal world order alive while America was taking leave of its geopolitical senses. And that person was the German chancellor.But Merkel had decided not to seek another term after the German federal elections in September 2017. Obama was in the German capital to make her change her mind. He succeeded. Merkel was persuaded that it was her duty to carry on the baton of liberal internationalism, free trade and democracy. At least for the next four years.“I noticed a tear in her eye as we left,” Obama’s speechwriter Ben Rhodes later noted when he recounted the rendezvous between the two leaders. At least, that is the story as told in a fly-on-the-wall account by the editor of newspaper Die Welt. In the next four years, it was Merkel who sought to salvage the Paris climate accord and it was she who maintained the geopolitical pressure on Vladimir Putin when Trump did the opposite.If anything is Merkel’s legacy, it is her custodianship of the liberal world order. Angela Dorothea Merkel (nee Kastler) is, above all, a pragmatic foreign politician. Whereas her immediate predecessors – her mentor, the Christian democrat Helmut Kohl (1982-98) and the social democrat Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005) are primarily remembered for domestic policies, Merkel was a foreign-policy politician. Kohl presided over German unification and Schroeder reformed the welfare state. Merkel’s legacy, now that she really is standing down, has been international.Evidence, deliberation, expertsMerkel used state intervention on a massive scale to rescue the world economy after the 2008 financial crash. She embraced anti-austerity policies to save the euro. She was always pragmatic. As she told me in 2008: “I want as much market economics as possible, with as much state intervention as necessary.” When reminded that this was reminiscent of socialist politics from the 1960s, she just smiled and shrugged, “Yes, and, so what if it works?” More

Boris Johnson said he was “delighted” to meet Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro but urged the vaccine-skeptic right-wing populist to get jabbed against Covid-19.Joined by the new foreign secretary, Liz Truss, at the British Consulate General’s residence in New York, the prime minister said he had promised to come to Brazil before the “bummer” of the pandemic.Mr Johnson added: “But we’re working together on the vaccines. AstraZeneca it’s a great vaccine. I have AstraZeneca.”As the press were ushered out of the room at the end of the bilateral meeting, Mr Johnson told them: “Thanks everybody, get AstraZeneca vaccines.”He turned to Mr Bolsonaro and said: “I’ve had it twice.”Mr Bolsonaro, who has made strange claims about vaccines including that they could turn people into crocodiles, pointed at himself and wagged his finger.“Not yet,” he said through an interpreter, before laughing. Both men were maskless throughout the exchange.They discussed their own fights against coronavirus infections, before Mr Bolsonaro bragged he had developed ”excellent“ immunity to the disease. Mr Bolsonaro, who has courted publicity over his anti-vaccine stance, arrived in New York on Sunday ahead of the 76th United Nations General Assembly, when he was pictured eating a slice of pizza on the street with Brazilian ministers and aides – reportedly after falling foul of local rules for unvaccinated diners. He has been condemned in Brazil for falling ill with Covid after his own resistance to many public health measures to control the virus, which has seen Brazil among the worst hit by Covid in South America and around the globe.Separately, Mr Johnson told world leaders he is growing “increasingly frustrated” that their commitments to tackle the climate crisis are “nowhere near enough”.The prime minister warned during the UN meeting that the gap between what industrialised nations have promised and what they are actually delivering remains “vast”.Mr Johnson had been expected to challenge Mr Bolsonaro, a notorious climate change sceptic, on deforestation during the New York trip. More

Russia’s foreign ministry has put the US on notice ahead of a meeting between American president Joe Biden and and his Russian counterpart.Sergei Rybakov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, warned president Vladimir Putin’s government would send “unpleasant” messages to the US if they did not discuss a range of issues at their upcoming meeting.“The Americans must assume that a number of signals from Moscow … will be uncomfortable for them, including in the coming days,” he said, according to reporting from Russian news agency RIA.Biden and Putin are expected to meet on 16 June in Geneva. Biden has publicly said he press Mr Putin on the importance of human rights. This will be their first meeting of Biden’s presidency. Mr Rybakov said Russia could be willing to discuss human rights, in exchange for discussing the increase of NATO and American forces in the western regions of Russia, bordering Ukraine. “The actions of our Western colleagues are destroying the world’s security system and force us to take adequate countermeasures,” said Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, according to the Interfax news agency.Biden made reference to his upcoming talks with Putin on Sunday. “I’m meeting with President Putin in a couple weeks in Geneva, making it clear we will not stand by and let him abuse those rights,” Mr Biden said in a Memorial Day weekend address in Delaware.A Human Rights Watch report in 2020 on Russia found numerous human rights infringements. In 2019, the human rights situation was “deteriorating”. They cited torture and degrading treatment, election protest crackdowns and issues when it comes to freedom of expression. An additional complication to better relations between the two countries is Biden announcing sanctions on Belarus after they arrested Raman Protasevich, a 26-year-old dissident journalist and his girlfriend Sofia Sapagea, a fellow journalist. More

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad voted on Wednesday in an election set to tighten his grip over a country mired in more than a decade-long conflict.Al-Assad cast his ballot in the former rebel stronghold of Douma, the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack in 2018, which, in retaliation, saw heavy military strikes by the US, UK and France.After voting, Assad said, “Syria is not what they were trying to market, one city against the other and sect against the other or civil war. Today we are proving from Douma that the Syrian people are one.”Since March 2011, scores have died, forcibly disappeared, and tortured. More than 11 million people – about half the country’s population – fled from their homes.While Syrians at home and some scattered internationally believe the presidential election is a sham, others say the polls will cement Assad’s fourth seven-year term and extend his family’s rule to nearly six decades. His father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000.For Monther Etaky, a Syrian who fled Aleppo in 2017, now living in Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey, the elections are no different from those in 2014. “This criminal regime and its allies are trying to act like they didn’t kill one Syrian citizen,” he said, adding that these elections cannot reliably define the future of Assad or Syria. Etaky fled the airstrikes, hunger and fear of torture with his two young children after the Assad regime brutally seized his properties. Meanwhile, the opposition is boycotting the vote. Assad’s presidential rivals are deliberately low-key: former deputy cabinet minister Abdallah Saloum Abdallah and Mahmoud Ahmed Marei, head of a small, officially sanctioned opposition party.Addressing his critics, including the West, Assad said Syrians had made their feelings clear by coming out in large numbers. “The value of your opinions is zero,” he said.Assad’s choice of Douma for voting, northeast of the centre of Damascus, is of great significance, says Taleb, a Syrian living in Germany, who only shared his first name. A Sunni Muslim town in eastern Ghouta, Douma was for long beseiged by the Assad regime. “He is trying to send a strong political message of victory to the radical Islamic militant groups, including the Al Nusra Front who once controlled Douma,” said Taleb.Douma was the main base for the groups and of vital strategic importance in the East of Damascus with a road linking Damascus and Homs. “The elections are rigged and it is a show for the international media to show that they are holding elections,” Taleb said.In the southern city of Deraa, cradle of the uprising against Assad in 2011 and an opposition bastion until rebels there surrendered three years ago, local leaders called for a strike.The election went ahead despite a U.N.-led peace process to call for a new constitution and a political settlement.At Damascus University’s Faculty of Arts and Economics, hundreds of students lined up to vote, with several buses parked outside.”With our blood and soul we sacrifice our lives for you Bashar,” groups of them chanted before the polls opened, in scenes repeated across the 70% of Syria now under government control.Zainab Hammoud, a freelance photographer and journalist in Damascus said Assad after all these years in the war has proved he is still there and infact has emerged much stronger. “He has carried out several military operations against the Islamic groups and has made progress against corruption, ” she said. By choosing Douma, Hammoud said Assad is sending a strong message, not an aggressive message but a love message to its people. “This is the time is to fix everything inside Syria. The entire world had closed its doors to Syria, but now they are opening their doors to the country economically. It is important to re-energise Syria’s economy and with Assad it is possible,” she said. “Yesterday Syria’s Tourism minister was in Saudi to attend a tourism exhibition and that is a good starting point for Assad,” Hammoud added. Gauging from the number of people donning t-shirts carrying his name and photograph, Hammoud is certain of his win. His campaign promise read “Al Amal Amal”, which translates to “Hope with work“. Even the elderly were out in force to show their support, Hammoud said. Officials said privately that authorities had organised large rallies in recent days to encourage voting and the security apparatus that underpins Assad’s Alawite minority-dominated rule had instructed state employees to vote.”We have been told we have to go to the polls or bear responsibility for not voting,” said Jafaar, a government employee in Latakia who gave his first name only, also fearing reprisals.In parts of the southern city of Deraa, local figures opposed the election and called for a general strike. Former rebels in the area said there were several incidents of gunfire on vehicles carrying ballot boxes, and shops in many towns were closed.Graffiti scribbled across several towns in the south read, “All people reject the rule of the son of Hafez.”In the northwestern Idlib region, the last rebel enclave where at least three million of those who fled Assad’s bombing campaign are sheltering, people took to the streets to denounce the election “theatre”.In northeast Syria, where U.S. backed Kurdish-led forces administer an autonomous oil-rich region, officials closed border crossings with government-held areas to prevent people from heading to polling stations.They said the election was a setback to reconciliation with a Kurdish minority that has faced decades of discrimination from one-party rule and Arab nationalist ideology. More