English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For August 30/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today
We speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts
First Letter to the Thessalonians 02/01-13/:”You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but though we had already suffered and been shamefully maltreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us. You remember our labour and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was towards you believers. As you know, we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you should lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.”.
 

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on August 29-30/2020

Lebanon Coronavirus Cases Top 15,000
Health Ministry: 662 new COVID19 cases
Hariri Hospital: One death case, 529 PCR tests conducted
UN renews Lebanon peacekeeping mandate with minor changes/Timour Azhari/Al Jazeera/August 29/2020
Macron to plant a Cedar tree in the Jaj Cedar Forest upcoming Tuesday
President Aoun to address the Lebanese and conduct a comprehensive dialogue on the occasion of the first centenary of the declaration of the state of Greater Lebanon
Shea Says Lebanon Sanctions Won’t Stop, France’s View on Hizbullah ‘Its Own’
Macron Warns Lebanon Risks 'Civil War' if Not Helped
Lebanon: Tammam Salam Refuses to Head Govt Under Current President
On his 2nd Beirut Trip, Macron Holds Onto Tangible Results
Seven still missing after Beirut blast: Lebanon army
Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah calls for boycott of Al Arabiya, Al Hadath
Beirut explosion: Seven still missing after port blast, says Lebanese army
Four Soldiers Wounded in Border Clash with Smugglers
Perpetrator arrested for wounding four soldiers during an army ambush in Rashaya
Geagea, Bukhari meet
Families of Lebanese students abroad: We are not concerned with Monday's sitin outside Parliament
Shouf Cedar Reserve warns of risk of fires due to heat wave
Property Sharks Circle Ravaged Homes After Beirut Blast

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on August 29-30/2020

Readout: Minister Champagne wraps up trip to Lebanon and Europe with stop to meet with U.K. foreign secretary
UAE issues decree to abolish 1972 Israel boycott law
Al Jazeera host promotes conspiracy that Israel, US tricked Arabs into fearing Iran
US Plans Further Troop Reductions in Iraq by November
Turkey to hold military exercise off Cyprus amid Mediterranean tensions
EU demands Turkey stop Med drilling, steps up sanctions plan
Syrian opposition calls on major powers to back nationwide ceasefire
UN expresses concern over ‘dramatic turn’ in Libya crisis
Suspended Libyan GNA Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha arrives in Tripoli: Sources
Far-right activists burn Quran in Sweden sparking riots, unrest

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on August 29-30/2020

Eastern Mediterranean – another irritant in Turkey-US ties/Sinem Cengiz//Arab News/August 28/2020
Bumps on the road to Afghan peace/Luke Coffey/Arab News/August 28/2020
The 2020 presidential campaign remains in the balance/Dr. John C. Hulsman/Arab News/August 28/2020
Democrats’ tanks are on the White House lawn/Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/August 28/2020
Power Grids Aren’t Evolving Fast Enough for Global Warming/Mark Buchanan/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Republicans Hail Trump, Ignore the Headlines/Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Abe Defied Expectations to Build a Better Japan/Noah Smith/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
The Big China Disaster That You’re Missing/Anjani Trivedi/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Assessing Eight Years of Shinzo Abe's Leadership/Daniel Moss/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Raymond Ibrahim on the Bottom-Up Oppression of Egypt's Christians/Gary C. Gambill/Middle East Forum Webinar/August 29/2020

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on August 29-30/2020
Lebanon Coronavirus Cases Top 15,000
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 29/2020
Lebanon passed the 15,000 mark for coronavirus cases on Friday, the health ministry said, as the country eased lockdown measures just a week after re-imposing them following pressure from businesses.
The ministry announced 676 new infections and two deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of novel coronavirus cases registered since February to 15,613, including 148 deaths. Daily infection rates have spiked since a massive explosion at Beirut's port on August 4 that killed more than 180 people, wounded thousands and ravaged large parts of the capital. Some 5,855 cases, or more than a third of the total, have been registered in the past 10 days alone. Authorities on August 21 imposed a lockdown in all parts of the country except those ravaged by the blast, as well as a night-time curfew from 6 pm (1500 GMT) to 6 am (0300 GMT). But they eased the restrictions on Friday after protest from the private sector, including the owners of service and tourism businesses already reeling from the country's worst economic downturn in decades. The start of the curfew was pushed back to 10 pm (1900 GMT), while malls, restaurants, coffee shops and gyms were allowed to re-open. Caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan warned on August 17 that hospitals were reaching maximum capacity to treat coronavirus patients after the blast overwhelmed health centers already stretched by the virus. Doctor Firass Abiad, the head of the state-run Rafik Hariri University Hospital, was unimpressed by Friday's easing of preventive measures. With a record 24-hour tally of 689 positive tests recorded a day earlier, "it is clear the objectives of the lockdown had not been reached," he said on Twitter.

Health Ministry: 662 new COVID19 cases
NNA/August 29/2020
The Public Health Ministry announced, on Saturday, that 662 new Coronavirus cases have been reported, thus bringing the cumulative number of confirmed cases to-date to 16,275.

Hariri Hospital: One death case, 529 PCR tests conducted
NNA/August 29/2020
Rafic Hariri University Hospital stated Saturday, in its daily report on the latest Coronavirus developments, that the number of examinations conducted in its laboratories during the past 24 hours reached 529, and that the number of patients infected with the virus who are currently at the hospital for follow-up is 69, while 20 suspected cases were transferred from other hospitals within the past 24 hours. The report indicated that no recoveries have been recorded during the past 24 hours; thus, maintaining the total number of recoveries to-date to 356.
It added that one new death case has been recorded, while 24 critical cases are currently receiving treatment at the hospital and 1 patient was moved from the critical unit to the isolation section due to some improvement.
For further information on the number of COVID-19 infected cases on all Lebanese territories, the hospital indicated that this data can be found in the daily report issued by the Ministry of Public Health.

UN renews Lebanon peacekeeping mandate with minor changes
Timour Azhari/Al Jazeera/August 29/2020
US pressure results in a reduction of troops and stronger language, but likely few tangible changes on the ground.
Beirut, Lebanon - The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has unanimously approved a resolution to renew the mandate of UN peacekeeping forces stationed on Lebanon's southern border with Israel, making only minor changes after weeks of tough negotiations, a source at the UN told Al Jazeera.
The renewal was set to be officially announced by the UN at 22:30 GMT. The 42-year-old mission's troop ceiling was reduced from 15,000 to 13,000 after pressure from the United States and its ally Israel, both of which have blasted the force as ineffective in curbing the activities of Hezbollah. The force is, however, currently made up of only around 10,500 troops, and the change will likely have little effect on the ground. Language was also inserted into the French-drafted resolution asking the Lebanese government to grant the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) "prompt and full access" to sites that it wants to investigate, including potential tunnels from Lebanon into Israel. It also condemns "in the strongest terms" attempts to restrict the movement of UN troops in their area of operations, but notes its respect for Lebanese sovereignty.
UNIFIL mediates regular meetings between the Lebanese and Israeli armies, aimed at keeping tensions low, in addition to its monitoring work and regular patrols of southern border areas. Its activities have sometimes been impeded by local farmers and villagers as well as by private property belonging to citizens, or NGOs aligned with Hezbollah.
The multinational force has been stationed at Lebanon's southern border since 1978, deployed during the country's civil war. Its mandate was widened following the month-long 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah that left more than 1,100 Lebanese dead, mostly civilians, and killed more than 100 Israelis, mostly soldiers. Since US President Donald Trump took office, his administration has pushed for changes to the mission's mandate, arguing it has failed to implement UNSC Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war and called for the removal of all armed groups in the south except the Lebanese army.
Hezbollah maintains a heavily armed presence and shared video of rockets it fired towards an Israeli army vehicle near the border last year. It said the move was in retaliation for an Israeli drone attack on southern Beirut, where the Iran-backed group is headquartered.
Lebanon, for its part, has long criticised the UN for failing to stop near-daily Israeli infringements on Lebanese sovereignty via air, sea and land. But Lebanese officials argue that the force should be maintained as is, in order to help maintain calm at the border.
The efficacy of the peacekeeping force has come into further question in the past month after Israel twice shelled Lebanese border areas, both times alleging it had acted in response to provocations by Hezbollah. The armed group denied any involvement in the first incident in late July but has not denied the second, which took place earlier this week. Despite promising an investigation into the July incident, a diplomatic source previously told Al Jazeera that it had been inconclusive. A UNIFIL spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment at the time.

Macron to plant a Cedar tree in the Jaj Cedar Forest upcoming Tuesday
NNA/August 29/2020
French President, Emmanuel Macron, will visit the town of Jaj in district of Jbeil next Tuesday morning, where he will plant a Cedar tree in the Jaj Cedar Forest, NNA correspondent reported on Saturday.
The visit has been coordinated between the French Embassy in Beirut, Municipality Head Gabriel Abboud, and the "Roots of Lebanon" Association, where several meetings were held between both sides during which the details of the visit program and the number of invitees were tackled, NNA correspondent added.

President Aoun to address the Lebanese and conduct a comprehensive dialogue on the occasion of the first centenary of the declaration of the state of Greater Lebanon
NNA/August 29/2020
On the occasion of the declaration of the first centenary of the "State of Greater Lebanon", on September 1, 1920, the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, will address the Lebanese via various audio and visual media at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday. The President's speech will be followed by a dialogue with journalist Ricardo Karam, in which he tackles the meanings of the memory and the latest political, economic and security developments in the country. {Presidency Press Office}

Shea Says Lebanon Sanctions Won’t Stop, France’s View on Hizbullah ‘Its Own’
Naharnet/August 29/2020
U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea in an interview with Lebanese al-Modon newspaper on Saturday, said the US regularly meets with international partners who share the same desire to see Lebanon and its people march towards prosperity, noting that Hizbullah’s activities in Lebanon “serve its own interest.”Asked about the differences or similarities in the French and American views on Lebanon, mainly that France “does not mind Hizbullah’s participation in the government.”Shea told the newspaper the US remains in close contact with its French counterparts, but the “French proposal belongs to the French alone.”“The United States has focused on the urgent necessity to form a new government that has the intention and capacity to implement long-awaited economic reforms to help restore the collapsing Lebanese economy, to rest on a solid base,” she said, adding “we are also cooperating with the international community through the International Support Group for Lebanon.”On the bilateral relations between Lebanon and the US, Shea said: “We have been a committed partner for decades, working side by side with the Lebanese on issues of education, humanitarian aid, and strengthening Lebanon's security, stability and sovereignty. “But when we discuss the issue of Hizbullah, the US position is clear. Our senior leaders in the State Department and the White House made it clear... and I personally repeated it more than once, its substance is: Hizbullah’s terrorist and illegal activities in Lebanon show that it cares more about its interests than what is best for Lebanon and the Lebanese people.”On remarks of a change in Lebanon’s regime reportedly made by the French President, and whether the regional and international circumstances allow a new Lebanon system and change the sectarian one.
The Ambassador said that the Lebanese must determine the answer to this question, and that during his recent visit to Lebanon, Assistant Secretary of State David Hale spoke of the urgent need for Lebanon's elected leaders to put aside partisan concerns and interests and act out of the national interest.
“Focusing on what is best for Lebanon's future, and pursuing the best ways to tackle systemic corruption and mismanagement, is the key to a bright future for this country and its people. Therefore, it is only Lebanon that decides the formula for success, not the external actors or influencers,” said Shea.
On possible sanctions against Lebanese officials, namely Free Patriotic Movement chief MP “Jebran Bassil,” Shea said: “I will not dwell on rumors, but I can focus on the facts of our sanction policy. The administration's "maximum pressure" campaign is designed not only to stem the flow of money to "malicious forces", including Iran, but also to change the behavior of malicious actors and their allies. “At the same time, I would like to emphasize that sanctions are not intended to harm ordinary Lebanese citizens. Our sanctions do not weaken Lebanon or its economy, and I would mention here that the country's economic crisis is the result of decades of corruption and mismanagement,” stated the ambassador.

Macron Warns Lebanon Risks 'Civil War' if Not Helped
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 29/2020
French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday warned that Lebanon risks a return to civil war if it is left alone to deal with the crisis that followed the deadly Beirut port explosion this month. Macron was speaking as he prepared to head to Lebanon on Monday in a new bid to press its leaders to undertake radical reform in the wake of the explosion this month that left 181 dead. "If we let Lebanon go in the region and if we somehow leave it in the hands of the depravity of regional powers, it will be civil war" as well as "the defeat of what is the very identity of Lebanon," he said. Paris is impatient over the lack of progress in forming a new government to undertake reform in the aftermath of the blast, which was blamed on a store of ammonium nitrate left for years in a warehouse. Many Lebanese have blamed the disaster on a ruling class they charge as being mired in nepotism, corruption and neglect since the 1975-1990 civil war.
Macron spoke of the "constraints of a confessional system" in a country populated by 18 Christian and Muslim sects. This had led to "a situation where there is hardly any (political) renewal and where there is almost an impossibility of carrying out reforms," he added. Macron insisted that France would follow a policy of being "demanding without interfering" and awaited reforms like passing an anti-corruption law and reforming public contracts, the energy sector and the banking system. "If we do not do this, the Lebanese economy will collapse" and "the only victim will be the Lebanese people (...) who cannot go into exile," he warned. He extolled Lebanon's multi-confessional make-up saying it "is perhaps one of the last existing forms" in the Middle East of the "peaceful possible coexistence of religions" and a pluralist system based on "education and culture."

Lebanon: Tammam Salam Refuses to Head Govt Under Current President
Beirut- Mohammed Shukair/Asharq Al Awsat/August 29/2020
Former Prime Minister Tammam Salam said that he refused to deal with the current President, because there was no way to reach an understanding with him, nor with the mentality and method he followed since the start of his tenure. Salam’s visitors quoted the former premier as saying that President Michel Aoun has been arrogant in his dealings with the current crisis, instead of showing his readiness to conduct a critical review of the policies that were behind the deterioration of the situation in Lebanon. The current presidency has brought the country to a dead end because it denied all the faults and mistakes committed throughout the four years of the presidential term and which led to the current crises, Salam was quoted as saying. Commenting on reports on his nomination to head the new government, the former premier asked: “How is it possible to cooperate with this tenure, which continues to create rules that violate the constitution and weakens the Taif Agreement…?”Salam told his visitors: “Today, in these difficult circumstances, we are in dire need for the presence of a rational, fair, and just president, who gathers the Lebanese around him and unites them instead of separating them.”Lebanon’s former prime ministers held a private meeting on Friday to discuss the latest developments and Aoun’s invitation for the binding parliamentary consultations on Monday.

On his 2nd Beirut Trip, Macron Holds Onto Tangible Results
Paris - Michel Abu Najm/Asharq Al Awsat/August 29/2020
French President Emmanuel Macron is set to hold largescale talks on his second visit to Beirut on Monday and will take part in a ceremony marking the first centenary of the declaration of Great Lebanon at the Pine Residence of the French ambassador. Macron, according to Elysee sources, will plant a five-year-old cedar tree that he will bring from France, in the Jaj forest located in the northern Jbeil district. The tree symbolizes continuity and perpetuity. A group of Lebanese schoolchildren will accompany the French president.
In addition, the French Air Force Aerobatic Team, which performs on official occasions, specifically on the French National Day, will head to Lebanon, where it will present an air show that highlights the colors of the Lebanese national flag.
Macron, upon his arrival, will meet with the diva, Fairouz. The sources said the meeting “reflects the admiration and appreciation” of the French President for the singer. His visit will also coincide with the arrival of the French military vessel, Tonnerre (Thunder) at the Beirut Port, carrying tons of aid and supplies to help in the reconstruction of the facility, which was destroyed in the massive Aug. 4 explosion. After planting the cedar tree on Tuesday morning, Macron will visit the port and meet with representatives of non-governmental organizations, which are working in Beirut’s damaged areas, as well as representatives of United Nations agencies. His political meetings will start with talks with President Michel Aoun, followed by an official lunch. He will further meet with Speaker Berri and visit Rafik Hariri Public Hospital. At the Pine Palace, Macron will hold talks with Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai.
Macron returns to Lebanon with a determination to obtain tangible results, according to the Elysee sources. He first visited Beirut in the aftermath of the blast on Aug. 6. Monday's visit falls within the “framework of pressure” exerted by France to push the Lebanese political class to respond to local and international demands to form a new government capable of implementing the required reforms. A high-ranking French official said that Macron’s “plan” was based on “freezing political disputes to allow - within the next year or two until the parliamentary elections are held – for an effective government to put in place reforms that would speed up international assistance for Lebanon.”
 

Seven still missing after Beirut blast: Lebanon army
The Arab News/August 29/2020
BEIRUT: The Lebanese army said Saturday that seven people, including at least three Lebanese nationals, remained missing after an August 4 blast at Beirut port that left at least 188 dead. “Search and rescue operations will not stop until the missing are found,” said army spokesman Elias Aad during a press conference.There are still “seven missing people: three Lebanese nationals whose relatives have submitted DNA samples, three Syrian nationals and one Egyptian national,” he told reporters. The army spokesman said the figure was compiled from data submitted by the country’s Internal Security Forces, in coordination with the Red Cross. The ISF last week said it had identified the remains of 33 people who had gone missing following the explosion. The health ministry said Saturday the death toll from the blast had climbed to 188. The explosion of a huge stockpile of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the port of Beirut also injured at least 6,500 people and left tens of thousands more homeless, piling new misery on the city after months of economic crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. An estimated 300,000 people including around 100,000 children, whose homes were damaged or destroyed in the blast, face a lack of access to critical safe water and sanitation services, UNICEF warned on Friday. “As COVID-19 cases continue to surge, it is more critical than ever to ensure that children and families whose lives were turned upside down by the explosion have access to safe water and sanitation,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Yukie Mokuo.

Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah calls for boycott of Al Arabiya, Al Hadath
Ismaeel Naar, Al Arabiya English/Saturday 29 August 2020
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has called for a boycott of the Al Arabiya and Al Hadath channels during a televised speech marking Ashoura. Nasrallah was speaking in a live television address marking the tenth night of the Islamic month of Muharram and the day of Ashoura. “They pay money to spread poisons and go beyond lying to provocation and insults against Hezbollah,” Nasrallah said in his attack of the media against his group, naming Al Arabiya, Al Hadath and UAE’s Sky News Arabia during his speech.

Beirut explosion: Seven still missing after port blast, says Lebanese army
AFP/Saturday 29 August 2020
The Lebanese army said on Saturday that seven people, including at least three Lebanese nationals, remained missing after an August 4 blast at Beirut port that left at least 188 dead. “Search and rescue operations will not stop until the missing are found,” said army spokesman Elias Aad during a press conference.
There are still “seven missing people: three Lebanese nationals whose relatives have submitted DNA samples, three Syrian nationals and one Egyptian national,” he told reporters. The army spokesman said the figure was compiled from data submitted by the country’s Internal Security Forces, in coordination with the Red Cross. The ISF last week said it had identified the remains of 33 people who had gone missing following the explosion. The health ministry said Saturday the death toll from the blast had climbed to 188. The explosion of a huge stockpile of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in the port of Beirut also injured at least 6,500 people and left tens of thousands more homeless, piling new misery on the city after months of economic crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. An estimated 300,000 people including around 100,000 children, whose homes were damaged or destroyed in the blast, face a lack of access to critical safe water and sanitation services, UNICEF warned on Friday. “As COVID-19 cases continue to surge, it is more critical than ever to ensure that children and families whose lives were turned upside down by the explosion have access to safe water and sanitation,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Yukie Mokuo.

Four Soldiers Wounded in Border Clash with Smugglers
Naharnet/August 29/2020
Four soldiers were injured Saturday at dawn when smugglers tossed a hand grenade at an army unit while trying to infiltrate Lebanon’s territory in Rashaya el-Wadi along the Lebanese-Syrian border, the National News Agency reported on Saturday. The Army Command-Orientation Directorate said in a statement that clashes erupted between two smugglers and army units in said area. The smuggler tossed a hand grenade at the troops injuring four military who were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment. Search operations in the mountainous region continued until dawn. The army was able to arrest one of the culprits, a Syrian national, and seized four boxes of ammunition in his possession containing 2,800 rounds of 7.62 mm. Police opened an investigation into the incident, while search operations for the second smuggler are underway.

Perpetrator arrested for wounding four soldiers during an army ambush in Rashaya
NNA/August 29/2020
A hand grenade was thrown at an army patrol at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, in the area of al-Mahfoura outside the town of Aiha in the district of Rashaya Al-Wadi at the Lebanese-Syrian border, NNA correspondent reported.
In details of the incident, smugglers ran into an army ambush at dawn today which triggered one of the smugglers to throw a grenade at the army patrol unit, injuring 4 soldiers who were rushed to nearby hospitals for treatment.
Meanwhile, the search operations in the aforementioned mountainous area continued until the early morning hours, following which the Army Intelligence arrested the perpetrator and sent him to Ablah in Rashaya for interrogation to find out the background of the smuggling of weapons between Lebanon and Syria and those involved in the smuggling operations.

Geagea, Bukhari meet
NNA/August 29/2020
Lebanese Forces Party Leader, Samir Geagea, welcomed Saturday at his residence in Maarab, the Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon, Waleed al-Bukhari.
The pair reportedly discussed the general situation in the country and the broader region.

Families of Lebanese students abroad: We are not concerned with Monday's sitin outside Parliament
NNA/August 29/2020
The Association of Families of Lebanese Students Abroad thanked House Speaker Nabih Berri for "the positive step he took by inviting the joint committees to convene upcoming Wednesday, in order to approve the project law for the student dollar 1515." Meanwhile, the Association cautioned the concerned sides and parents and students that it is not involved in Monday's sit-in in front of the Parliament, "as this sit-in carries unexplained goals that may negatively affect the proposed bill for the student dollar law."It also questioned "the timing of this move preceding Wednesday's parliament session," stressing that "the Association is solely aiming for the student dollar law and does not adopt any other demands."

Shouf Cedar Reserve warns of risk of fires due to heat wave
NNA/August 29/2020
In an issued statement on Saturday, the "Shouf Cedar Reserve" warned citizens of "the risk of fires due to the heat wave that will hit Lebanon in the next two days." "The meteorology points to a heat wave that will affect Lebanon and the region in the next two days, and temperatures in the coming days may reach high levels, and the index of fires is very high, which increases the risk of fires that threaten the environment and agricultural crops," the statement alerted.
Accordingly, it urged citizens to exercise caution and not set fire near the woods for any reason whatsoever, and be quick to notify the concerned authorities when any fire occurs.

Property Sharks Circle Ravaged Homes After Beirut Blast
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 29/2020
Ever since a monster blast ravaged the arches and high ceiling of his family home in Lebanon's capital, Bassam Bassila says a real estate developer has been hounding him to sell. "The owner of a tower block nearby is trying to pressure me into selling him my home so he can raze it to the ground" and "build a tall tower" instead, the 68-year-old said in Beirut's Monot neighbourhood. A massive explosion at the Beirut port on August 4 that many blame on official negligence killed more than 180 people, wounded thousands and laid waste to some of the capital's most picturesque streets. With survivors still picking through the rubble, property sharks are moving in to take advantage of distraught homeowners, sparking outrage over yet another disaster in the making, this time targeting the country's heritage. Standing inside his living room turned balcony after the wall separating them was blown off, Bassila said the developer had first approached him some time before the blast, offering to buy his apartment after acquiring the ground floor of the same building. "Eventually you will leave," the developer threatened at the time. And now he is back, ramping up pressure on Bassila to sell the home he inherited from his grandparents by refusing to prop up the ceiling of the flat below -- meaning Bassila's apartment could collapse. A former photographer now eking out a living as a taxi driver, Bassila says he cannot afford to restore his family home without financial aid. But he is also determined not to give it up. "I was born in this house and my father was before me... I can't live anywhere else."
'Real estate vultures'
Of 576 heritage buildings surveyed in the wake of the explosion, including 331 in the port's immediate vicinity, the culture ministry says 86 were severely damaged. Of those, 44 risk complete collapse, while a further 41 could partially fall down. In the days after the explosion, Bishara Ghulam, the mayor of the Rmeil district near the port, said he received an unexpected visitor among those flocking to his office to report damage to their homes. "A man turned up who said he was a real estate broker. He said he wanted to buy houses damaged in the blast, and would pay whatever the owners wanted," Ghulam said. "I told him we weren't selling." The blast came as Lebanon was already suffering its worst downturn in decades, plunging a portion of the middle class into poverty, drastically weakening the local currency and trapping people's dollar savings in the bank. Reports of developers now trying to snatch homes -- sometimes in exchange for rare dollars -- have sparked anger among activists. In the capital, banners have appeared reading "Beirut is not for sale". Political and religious figures have issued condemnations, with Maronite Christian Patriarch Bechara al-Rahi warning against real estate "vultures" hovering over Beirut. The culture ministry has said damaged properties must be restored before transactions can take place, while the finance ministry banned the sale of any listed property without official permission.
'Our history'
Naji Raji, the founder of the Save Beirut Heritage initiative, said: "We've heard from people who have received offers from investors linked to certain politicians." These developers were bent on profit and coveted central Beirut real estate as it was a "prime touristic area" but would likely change its appearance with no regard for heritage, he said. In the devastated Gemmayzeh neighbourhood, architect Rita Saade surveyed the damage sustained by the home that once belonged to her great-grandparents. Between the mint green walls of a room held up by arched pillars, she pointed to where the floor had partially caved in. Wooden slats from broken window shutters and shattered drinking glasses lay in a pile nearby. "This is heritage and it needs to be restored," said the 23-year-old Saade. But "we can't afford to restore it on our own". Audrey Azoulay, the head of the UN's culture and education body UNESCO, Thursday said the agency hoped to raise "considerable" funding to help with reconstruction. "It's Beirut's soul that's on the line," she said. "Without its historical quarters, its creators, Beirut would no longer be Beirut."After the 1975-1990 civil war, the real estate company of slain billionaire and former premier Rafic Hariri was criticised for not preserving the city's soul after it bought up and transformed large swathes of central Beirut. Outside his damaged home in Gemmayzeh, Alain Chaoul said he had no idea what he would do next. "My house is worth three million dollars, and would cost $200,000 to renovate. I don't have a penny to fix it."But it's not for sale, he said. "It's our history."

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on August 29-30/2020

Readout: Minister Champagne wraps up trip to Lebanon and Europe with stop to meet with U.K. foreign secretary
August 28, 2020 - London, United Kingdom - Global Affairs Canada
The meeting took place at Hampton Court Palace near London.
Minister Champagne and Secretary Raab discussed Canada-U.K. relations and cooperation on common priorities, including international security, human rights, climate change and media freedom.
They exchanged views on Minister Champagne’s visit to Lebanon as well as his other key meetings, in Switzerland and Italy, earlier this week.
The two also discussed coordination of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the situations in Belarus, Hong Kong and the Middle East.
Minister Champagne and Secretary Raab reiterated their commitment to ensure accountability and justice for the families of the victims of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752. They spoke of the need for Iran to conduct a full, transparent and independent investigation in accordance with international standards, including reparations to the victims and affected states.
Finally, Minister Champagne and Secretary Raab discussed the U.K.’s upcoming G7 presidency as well as the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, to be held next year in Glasgow, Scotland.
 

UAE issues decree to abolish 1972 Israel boycott law
The National/August 29/2020
Move comes after the announcement of the Abraham Accord earlier in August
Following the announcement of the Abraham Accord with Israel earlier this month, President Sheikh Khalifa has issued a federal law abolishing a decades-old ruling regarding the boycott of Israel. The decree comes as part of the UAE's efforts to expand diplomatic and commercial co-operation with Israel.
Following the abolition of the Israel Boycott Law, individuals and companies in the UAE may enter into agreements with bodies or individuals residing in Israel or belonging to it by their nationality, in terms of commercial, financial operations, or any other dealings of any nature. Based on the law, it will be permissible to enter, exchange or possess Israeli goods and products of all kinds in the UAE and trade in them. Israel and the UAE announced an agreement on August 13 to establish full diplomatic ties, in exchange for the suspension of Israel's planned annexation of the occupied West Bank. The UAE-Israel agreement, known as the Abraham Accord, came in a joint call between Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
An Israeli-American delegation will fly on the first commercial flight from Israel to the UAE on Monday after the landmark deal between the countries, Israeli officials said on Friday. Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser and son-in-law to US President Donald Trump, has confirmed he will be on the flight, alongside National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien.

Al Jazeera host promotes conspiracy that Israel, US tricked Arabs into fearing Iran
Al Arabiya English/Saturday 29 August 2020
A prominent host of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network promoted a conspiracy theory that the US and Israel were involved in spreading the idea of exporting the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the Arab world to allegedly benefit Israel. Al Jazeera presenter Faisal al-Qassim said on Twitter that the US and Israel had exported the idea that similar revolutions could occur in Arab states, which had led Arab leaders to partner with Israel against Iran. Al-Qassim’s comments come in the wake of a historic peace deal signed by the UAE and Israel earlier this month, bringing to end a decades-long boycott and opening the door to a full normalization of relations. On Saturday, the UAE abolished its official Israel boycott law, allowing commercial deals to occur with Israelis. In return for signing the peace agreement, Israel has agreed to cease its plans to annex a vast majority of the West Bank.
While many, including the US and Bahrain, have come out in support of the agreement, Doha-based Al Jazeera has been accused of bias in its coverage of the deal, and chosen not to contextualize Qatar’s own track record of ties with Israel. Despite the channel’s slogan being “The Opinion and The Other’s Opinion,” Al Jazeera has recently covered peace talks and efforts with Israel in a negative light, ignoring its own history of hosting Israeli officials both on air and in Qatar. When it first launched in 1996, Al Jazeera became one of the first Arab channels to open and maintain a bureau in Jerusalem and an office in Tel Aviv, and appoint its own correspondent in Israel. Al Jazeera’s own correspondent subsequently defended the channel’s role in normalizing the appearance of Israelis on Arab television, writing in an Israeli newspaper when Israeli authorities threatened to ban it. In more recent times, Al Jazeera caused widespread controversy in February 2018 when its popular program The Opposite Direction hosted by al-Qassim himself hosted Israel Defense Forces spokesperson for Arabic Media Avichay Adraee.

US Plans Further Troop Reductions in Iraq by November
Associated Press/Naharnet/August 29/2020
The United States plans to reduce its military force in Iraq from the current 5,200 to about 3,500 by November, U.S. officials said Friday. The cut would be in line with President Donald Trump's repeated call to bring troops home and his reelection campaign pledge to end what he calls "endless wars."
The plan to shrink the U.S. force in Iraq was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Officials who confirmed the plan spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a matter not yet publicly announced. American troops are in Iraq to train and advise Iraqi security forces battling the Islamic State group, but the relationship has been rocky at times in large part because of periodic attacks by Iran-backed militia groups that are not fully controlled by the Iraqi government. U.S. troops, after invading Iraq and toppling President Saddam Hussein in 2003, had withdrawn from the country only to begin returning in 2014 after IS militants swept across the Syrian border and took control of large swaths of Iraqi territory. Trump met last week at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. "We look forward to the day when we don't have to be there," Trump said then. "We were there and now we're getting out. We'll be leaving shortly and the relationship is very good. We're making very big oil deals. Our oil companies are making massive deals. ... We're going to be leaving and hopefully we're going to be leaving a country that can defend itself." Last month, the top U.S. general for the Middle East said he believed the U.S. will keep a smaller but enduring presence in the country. Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, said he believes the Iraqis welcome U.S. and coalition troops, especially in the ongoing fight to keep IS fighters from taking hold of the country again. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said as recently as this month that the administration intends to get U.S. forces in Iraq to the lowest possible level as quickly as possible, but he has not cited specific numbers. Pompeo said after meeting last week with Iraq's foreign minister that Washington was committed to helping Iraq regain and maintain security. Armed groups are not under the full control of the Iraqi prime minister, Pompeo said, adding that those groups should be replaced by local police as soon as possible and that the U.S. would help. Tensions spiked between the U.S. and Iraq in January after a U.S. drone strike near the Baghdad airport killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Angry Iraqi lawmakers, spurred on by Shiite political factions, passed a nonbinding resolution to oust all U.S.-led coalition forces from the country. In response to the Soleimani killing, Iran on Jan. 8 launched a ballistic missile attack on al-Asad air base in Iraq, which resulted in traumatic brain injuries to more than 100 American troops. Two months later, U.S. fighter jets struck five sites in retaliation, targeting Iranian-backed Shiite militia members believed responsible for the January rocket attack.

Turkey to hold military exercise off Cyprus amid Mediterranean tensions
The National/August 29/2020
The long-running dispute flared up after Ankara began exploring for gas off the coast of Cyprus.
Turkey said it will hold a military exercise off northwest Cyprus for the next two weeks, amid growing tension with Greece over disputed claims to exploration rights in the east Mediterranean. The long-running dispute between Turkey and Greece, both Nato members, flared up after Ankara began exploring for gas off the coast of Cyprus. Both sides have held military exercises in the east Mediterranean, highlighting the potential for the dispute over the extent of their continental shelves to escalate into confrontation. Two weeks ago Greek and Turkish frigates shadowing Turkey's Oruc Reis oil and gas survey vessel collided, and Turkey's Defence Ministry said Turkish F-16 jets on Thursday prevented six Greek F-16s entering an area where Turkey was operating. On Friday night, Turkey issued a Navtex notice - an advisory message to mariners - saying it would be holding a "gunnery exercise" from Saturday until Sept. 11 off northwest Cyprus. The European Union's top diplomat said on Friday the bloc was preparing sanctions against Turkey that could be discussed at a summit in late September in response to Ankara's standoff with EU member Greece.
EU diplomatic chief Josep Borrell said the bloc wanted to give "a serious chance to dialogue" but was steadfast in its support for member states Greece and Cyprus in the crisis, which has raised fears of a military standoff.
A dispute over maritime borders and gas drilling rights has reignited the long-running rivalry between Athens and Ankara, with the two neighbours staging rival naval drills. EU foreign ministers meeting for talks in Berlin agreed to a request from Cyprus to sanction more individuals for their role in Turkey's exploratory drilling in waters claimed by the island. Mr Borrell urged Ankara to "abstain from unilateral actions" as a basic condition to allow dialogue - which Germany is trying to broker - to advance. "We agreed that in the absence of progress in engaging Turkey we could develop a list of further restrictive measures that could be discussed at the European Council on September 24 and 25," Mr Borrell said after the talks. Asked what these measures might entail, Mr Borrell said sanctions could be extended to ships or other assets involved in the drilling, as well as prohibiting the use of EU ports and supplies and restricting "economic and financial infrastructure related with this activity".

EU demands Turkey stop Med drilling, steps up sanctions plan
AP/August 29, 2020
BERLIN: The EU on Friday urged Turkey to halt its drilling activities in contested waters in the Mediterranean and ordered EU officials to speed up work aimed at blacklisting some Turkish officials linked to the energy exploration. Tensions are mounting to breaking point between Turkey and Greece over Turkey’s drilling work near the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which like Greece is an EU member country. Turkish and Greek armed forces have been conducting snap war games in the area. Referring to what he called “growing frustration” with Turkey, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that the sanctions — which include asset freezes and travel bans — could be extended, with Turkish vessels being deprived access to European ports, supplies and equipment. Economic sanctions are also a possibility. EU leaders will discuss whether to impose additional measures at a summit in Brussels on Sept. 24-25 should Turkey fail to stop what the Europeans consider to be “illegal activities” in the eastern Mediterranean near Cyprus. “Turkey has to abstain from unilateral actions. This is a basic element to allow the dialogue to advance,” Borrell told reporters in Berlin after chairing a meeting of EU foreign ministers. He said the EU is keen to establish a “healthier relationship” with Turkey, which is a candidate for membership in the 27-nation trading bloc, although its accession talks are virtually frozen. “We must walk a fine line between preserving a true space for dialogue and at the same time showing collective strength in the defense of our common interests. We want to give a serious chance to dialogue,” Borrell said. EU leaders will discuss whether to impose the additional measures at a summit in Brussels on Sept 24-25. Turkey doesn’t recognize the divided island of Cyprus as a state and claims 44 percent of Cyprus’ exclusive economic zone as its own, according to Cyprus government officials. Turkish Cypriots in the east Mediterranean island nation’s breakaway north claim another 25 percent. The Cypriot government has prepared a list of Turkish officials that it believes should face sanctions, and it is this list of names that EU officials will accelerate work on in coming days. Cyprus was split along ethnic lines in 1974 when Turkey invaded in the wake of a coup by supporters of union with Greece. A Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence is recognized only by Turkey, which keeps more than 35,000 troops in the breakaway north.
It is unclear whether sanctions might slow Turkey down. Steps were taken in the past — the slashing of funds meant to prepare Turkey for EU membership and the virtual freezing of its accession talks — yet Ankara has only become more vocal.
On top of that, Erdogan has shown his willingness to encourage migrants and refugees from Syria to cross the border into Greece and on to Europe, which remains deeply destabilized by the arrival of well over 1 million people in 2015, to ensure that his demands are well understood.
Turkey also plays a military role in Libya, a main jumping off point for migrants aiming for Europe. Meanwhile, Greece and the UAE began joint air force exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, in the latest build-up of military forces. The training flights started on Friday, a day after the UAE completed the transfer of nine F-16 fighter jets and four transport planes to a Greek air base on Crete, the Greek Defense Ministry said. France, Italy, and the UAE have joined recent military exercises and training missions held by Greece and ally Cyprus, while the US has also held separate exercises with Greece.
 

Syrian opposition calls on major powers to back nationwide ceasefire
Reuters/Saturday 29 August 2020
The main Syrian opposition called on major powers on Saturday to help clinch a nationwide ceasefire in coming months to pave the way for a political transition after nearly a decade of war. Hadi al-Bahra, the Syrian opposition co-chair of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, was speaking to reporters in Geneva after week-long UN-sponsored talks. The 45-member committee composed of representatives of the government, opposition and civil society, has a mandate to draw up a new Constitution leading to UN-supervised elections. UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen said that there were “many areas of disagreement,” but also “quite a few areas of commonalities.” “My hope is with continued calm on the ground...we will also see some progress,” he told a briefing. Pedersen, referring to a ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia in March in the last remaining opposition-held bastion of Idlib in northwest Syria, said it was “by and large holding” despite violations. Al-Bahra said that as long as there was no nationwide ceasefire, the political process would remain stalled. It was the responsibility of the international community and countries supporting either warring side to push for a full and permanent ceasefire, he said. “When we see that happen we will see the political process moving faster, because all sides they will know that there is no way for them to achieve a final victory on military terms,” he said. Troops from the United States, Russia, and Turkey as well as Iranian militias are present in Syria, Bahra said. “They will not permit any victory for any one side. My expectation is that within the coming months we will see a complete, comprehensive ceasefire through all of Syria, that then we will see more international effort to move the political process forward to make it move faster,” he added. Ahmad Kuzbari, the Syrian government co-chair, did not speak to reporters. No date was announced for the next round.

UN expresses concern over ‘dramatic turn’ in Libya crisis
APhe Arab News/August 29/2020
“Libya is witnessing a dramatic turn of events that underlines the urgent need to return to a full and inclusive political process,” the UN support mission in Libya said. In Tripoli, local militia allied with the government opened fire on the demonstrators using rifles and truck-mounted guns, and abducted some of the protesters. CAIRO: The United Nations on Saturday voiced alarm over what it called “a dramatic turn of events” in Libya’s civil war, after a power struggle between leaders of the Tripoli-based government surfaced in the wake of anti-corruption protests.
“Libya is witnessing a dramatic turn of events that underlines the urgent need to return to a full and inclusive political process,” the UN support mission in Libya said. Protests over deteriorating economic conditions erupted earlier this week in the capital and elsewhere in western Libya, which is controlled by forces loyal to the UN-supported government. In Tripoli, local militia allied with the government opened fire on the demonstrators using rifles and truck-mounted guns, and abducted some of the protesters. Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj and his interior minister, Fathi Bashaga, initially accused “outlawed infiltrators” over the violence. The prime minister also said the protesters “did not obtain necessary permits” for their rally and described their demonstrations as “riots.”However on Friday, Sarraj suspended Bashaga and referred him to an administrative investigation after the interior minister accused a government-allied militia of attacking the peaceful protesters in Tripoli this week. Bashaga, who was excluded from two high-profile military and security meetings in the capital over the past few days, quickly responded. He said in a statement he accepted the premier’s decision but demanded a public and live questioning “to expose the facts” of the incident. Following the suspension of the interior minister, militias in Tripoli celebrated the decision by firing into the air, while others in Bashaga’s hometown of Misrata took to the streets to show support for the minister. The UN mission in Libya, known as UNSMIL, said it was still concerned about “the excessive use of force against demonstrators as well as the arbitrary arrest of a number of civilians.” It did not say how many people were detained. Retweeting the UNSMIL’s statement, the US embassy in Libya urged Sarraj and Bashaga toward “cooperation” in the interests “the Libyan people.”Over the past two days, militias sealed off main streets and roads to prevent the demonstrators from reaching Tripoli’s Martyrs Square, the epicenter of the protests, according to two residents who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear reprisals. A group of women however protested in the city center before being dispersed. Two women were wounded and four others were arrested, according to the protest movement, known as “Hirak Aug. 23.” The movement called for civil disobedience until achieving their demands that include handing over power to the Supreme Judicial Council to work toward presidential and parliamentary elections. Protests also spread to the southern town of Sabah and the eastern town of Quba, both under the control of rival east-based Libyan forces led by Khalifa Haftar. The UN also said it is concerned about “on-going human rights violations and abuses” in the coastal city of Sirte, which is controlled by Haftar’s forces since January. It said at least one civilian was killed and several others were arrested. “The prolific use of hate speech and incitement to violence appears designed to further divide Libyans, increase polarization and tear at the country’s social fabric,” the UN mission said. Oil-rich Libya was plunged into chaos when a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 toppled longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who was later killed. The country is now split between rival east- and west-based administrations, each backed by different armed groups and foreign governments.

Suspended Libyan GNA Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha arrives in Tripoli: Sources
Ismaeel Naar, Al Arabiya English/Saturday 29 August 2020
Fathi Bashagha, the suspended interior minister of Libya’s Government of National Accord, has arrived in Tripoli after his recent visit to Turkey, according to Al Arabiya sources. The embattled Libyan Government of National Accord’s Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj said on Friday he had temporarily removed his Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha pending an investigation. The GNA also announced the removal of Bashagha in a formal document on Friday, according to a tweet by the main media account of the GNA government verified on Twitter. A Libyan protester burns an image of Libyan officials as he protests over announcement of suspension of the Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha during an anti-government protest in Misrata, Bashagha made the trip to Turkey without Sarraj’s knowledge or approval, Al Arabiya sources confirmed. The sources said his temporary suspension may be due to his attempted plot against Sarraj although the GNA said the official reasoning behind the decision was due to his ministry’s handling of the recent protests in Tripoli in which excessive use of force was used. “Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha has been temporarily suspended” and will face an inquiry “on his statements about the protests and incidents in Tripoli and other cities,” the GNA said Friday. Demonstrations began last Sunday in Tripoli, the seat of the GNA, against poor public services and living conditions, and gunmen fired on the crowd. Similar shootings occurred on Monday and Wednesday.
Gunmen on Wednesday attacked a peaceful demonstration by “firing live ammunition indiscriminately,” Bashagha had said.

Far-right activists burn Quran in Sweden sparking riots, unrest
The Associated Press, Stockholm/Saturday 29 August 2020
Far-right activists burned a Quran in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, sparking riots and unrest after more than 300 people gathered to protest, police said Saturday. Rioters set fires and threw objects at police and rescue services Friday night, slightly injuring several police officers and leading to the detention of about 15 people. The violence followed the burning Friday afternoon of a Quran, near a predominantly migrant neighborhood, that was carried out by far-right activists and filmed and posted online, according to the TT news agency.
Later, three people were arrested on suspicion of inciting hatred against an ethnic group after kicking the Muslim holy book.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on August 29-30/2020
Eastern Mediterranean – another irritant in Turkey-US ties
Sinem Cengiz//Arab News/August 28/2020
The differences of opinion about the Syrian conflict between Washington and Ankara, including the US support for PKK/YPG terrorist group and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian-made S-400 anti-aircraft missile system, are not the only reasons for the deterioration of Turkish-American ties. The volatile situation in the Eastern Mediterranean is increasingly coming to the forefront.
Two recent developments have added to the mutual unease: The Pentagon’s decision to activate military bases and other facilities in the northern Greek port of Alexandroupoli amid the maritime tensions, and tit-for-tat statements by Ankara and Washington about the recent visit by Hamas leaders to the Turkish capital.In recent years, the US and Greece have forged close political, economic and military ties. Washington’s decision to activate its bases in Alexandroupoli, just 30 km from the Turkish border, is interpreted by some analysts who closely follow relations between Ankara and Washington as an indication that the latter wants to relocate its bases in Turkey to Greece, given the proximity to Russia.
It seems unlikely that the two nations will resolve the contentious issues that currently divide them any time soon. On Wednesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke with US counterpart Donald Trump, and the main topic of conversation was the Eastern Mediterranean, where Turkey and Greece disagree about oil and gas exploration rights. According to the Turkish Communications Directorate, Erdogan reminded Trump that Ankara was not responsible for the instability there.
The recent US activity in Greece has displeased Ankara. Historically, Washington took the lead in encouraging its two allies to find peaceful solutions to their disagreements with one another, thus avoiding NATO becoming embroiled in local disputes. To do so it had to remain neutral in the disputes over the Eastern Mediterranean, a region that borders on a number of conflict zones.
However, US attitudes seem to have changed as tensions rise between Turkey and Greece, both of whom believe their vital interests are at stake and have become increasingly confrontational.
In particular Turkey’s purchase of the S-400 missile system, and its closer ties with Russia in general, while the US continues to support groups in Syria designated by Turkey as terrorist groups have tested the relationship between Ankara and Washington.
At a time when the military forces of Turkey and Greece are on high alert, and both sides have deployed warships to shadow each other in the Mediterranean, the question now is what effect the US activity in Greece will have on the situation in the conflict-ridden region.
Against this backdrop, the latest war of words between Ankara and Washington erupted when a delegation that included Ismail Hanniyeh, the political head of Hamas, visited Turkey last weekend and met Erdogan in Istanbul on Aug. 22. It was the second time Erdogan has met Hamas leaders in Turkey this year, with the first meeting taking place in February.
After the US objected to the meeting, the Turkish Foreign Ministry responded by issuing a harsh statement on Aug. 25 that said: “A country that openly supports the PKK, which features on their list of terrorist organizations and hosts the ringleader of FETO (the name the Turkish government uses for the Gulen Movement, which it considers a terrorist organization), has no right whatsoever to say anything to (other) countries on this subject.” It called on the US to use its regional influence to develop a “balanced policy” that serves not only the interests of Israel but helps bring about a righteous and fair solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s relationship with Israel is also strained and Erdogan’s recent meeting with senior Hamas officials did not help. Roey Gilad, Israel’s charge d’affaires to Ankara, said that his country has evidence that Ankara has given citizenship to Hamas members, a claim that prompted opposition MPs to raise the issue in the Turkish parliament.
Historically, Tel Aviv has adopted a rather careful stance on the dispute between Turks and Greeks/Greek Cypriots over the Eastern Mediterranean and avoided openly confronting Ankara, even though it is within the conflict zone. On Aug. 12, however, the Israeli Embassy in Athens issued a statement expressing full solidarity with Greece and its maritime jurisdiction. This move further strained Turkish-Israeli relations and elevated the already high tensions in the region.
While Turkey’s ties with the US and Israel have been deteriorating, its relationship with Russia gradually has been improving to the point where it is becoming a nightmare for Washington.
While Turkey’s ties with the US and Israel have been deteriorating, its relationship with Russia gradually has been improving to the point where it is becoming a nightmare for Washington. Ankara and Moscow have signed a contract for a second delivery of S-400s, Russia’s state arms exporter Rosoboronexport announced on Aug. 23. Turkey’s increasing engagement with Russia prompted Washington to remove the country from its F-35 fighter jet program and to threaten Ankara with sanctions.
Despite all of this, the US does not want to give up on its relationship with Turkey, especially when it comes to the situation in Syria. A US delegation led by James Jeffrey, Washington’s special envoy for Syria, arrived in Turkey on Wednesday to discuss the latest efforts to resolve the crisis in the war-torn country.“We have exciting developments on the Syrian account,” Jeffrey told reporters at the airport. Given the absence of many promising developments in Libya or the Eastern Mediterranean so far, one could certainly do with some positive moves in Syria, where Turkey and the US can still find some common ground to cooperate.
*Sinem Cengiz is a Turkish political analyst who specializes in Turkey’s relations with the Middle East. Twitter: @SinemCngz

Bumps on the road to Afghan peace
Luke Coffey/Arab News/August 28/2020
The news coming out of Afghanistan is often bleak, but the recent announcement of the start of peace talks next month offers a glimmer of hope.
Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation and Kabul’s leading peace negotiator, said that discussions with the Taliban will begin sometime in September. At the same time, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan invited Abdullah to Islamabad to discuss cooperation between the two countries to help bring an end to hostilities.
While Pakistan’s overtures when it comes to the Taliban will always be viewed with skepticism, the fact that this invitation was extended to Kabul at all is encouraging.
A considerable amount of time and a lot of patience have been needed to get to this point — and it could be that the talks are delayed again. The past year has been a rollercoaster ride for negotiations, with optimism and pessimism, progress and setbacks.
It has been almost a year since US President Donald Trump abandoned his planned gathering at Camp David with representatives of the Taliban to hammer out the final details of a cease-fire agreement. After this meeting was abruptly canceled due to continued militant attacks, it took many months more for the US and the Taliban to sign an agreement in Doha in February.
Also, complicating matters was the presidential election in Afghanistan last September. The results of the poll were not finalized until last February, with President Ashraf Ghani declared the winner. Then it took several weeks more for President Ghani and his main political rival, Abdullah, to come to a power-sharing agreement.
After the US-Taliban deal in February it was hoped that intra-Afghan talks would begin in Oslo the following month. But this has been delayed for two reasons. First was the continued Taliban attacks against Afghan forces that breached the spirit of the peace process itself.
Second, there was a disagreement between the Afghan government and the militants on the issue of prisoner swaps. This resulted from the ambiguous wording in the agreements the US made with the Taliban and Afghan government in February.
In recent months, the issue has slowly been resolved. Over the summer about 400 Taliban prisoners remained in Afghan government custody. In early August, a Loya Jirga, or tribal council, was convened to settle the matter. In the end the Loya Jirga agreed that it was in the interest of peace to release the remaining captives.
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is further complicating the peace process as Afghanistan struggles to cope with the overwhelming demand on what is already a fragile health system.
Added to the health pressures is the severe flooding this week in more than eight provinces in the country’s north. Floods in Parwan province, just north of Kabul, have killed more than 150 people with hundreds more injured. More than 2,000 homes have been destroyed and at least 1,000 people displaced. Hundreds of hectares of agricultural land have been destroyed and major roads washed away, complicating relief efforts.
Political turmoil, continued Taliban attacks, a global pandemic and severe flooding — will Afghanistan ever get a break?
However, even amid these challenges, Afghans — including the government, civil society and the Taliban — must find a way to sit around a table for peace. Only a genuine and enduring agreement between all Afghans can bring stability to the country after 40 years of war.
Of course, there are many potential spoilers. Perhaps the Taliban as a movement is too decentralized to speak with one authoritative voice. Even if there is some sort of pact with the Afghan government, there could still be a continuing insurgency in areas of the country.
There is also the threat of the so-called Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K). The extremist group has been responsible for some of the most atrocious attacks in recent months in Afghanistan. Many disgruntled Taliban fighters who do not want peace are joining the IS-K ranks. The terror group thrives in chaos and it is in its interests to see peace talks fail.
There will be ups and downs, cease-fires and attacks, optimism and frustration. But the Afghans will eventually figure it out. The rest of the world must be patient and supportive along the way.
Finally, one of the biggest threats to the process is the US and the international community losing interest in Afghanistan altogether.
Regardless of any settlement that might or might not happen between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the global community must remain fully engaged with the country. In the 1990s, we saw what happened when the world ignored Afghanistan after the Soviets left. This created the conditions that led to the rise of the Taliban and to the 9/11 attacks. Nobody, least of all the Afghan people, will benefit from a repeat of this.
If recent history is any guide, the international community should lower its expectations for the talks next month. The discussions might not even happen. The journey to this point has been a long one, so it must be assumed the peace process itself will also be lengthy.
There will be ups and downs, cease-fires and attacks, optimism and frustration. But the Afghans will eventually figure it out. The rest of the world must be patient and supportive along the way.
/Luke Coffey is director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Twitter: @LukeDCoffey

The 2020 presidential campaign remains in the balance
Dr. John C. Hulsman/Arab News/August 28/2020
An interesting and wholly unexpected political dynamic has reared its head in both the just-completed Democratic convention and in the ongoing Republican version: The art of counter-programming. This political tactic has it that both changing the subject and/or tackling a weakness head-on can pay significant political dividends. The US convention season, traditionally (ahead of the autumn debates) a policy light zone in any case, has seen both parties stray far from the two primary 2020 presidential issues of COVID-19 and violence in America’s cities amid massive civil rights protests.
Instead, we find the Democrats talking at length about the virtues of kindness, while the Republicans take head-on their enemies’ cries that they are barely veiled white nationalists. Intriguingly, in both cases, at least so far, the counter-programming has been highly effective, perhaps even altering overall narrative impediments both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have been laboring under.
In the Democrats case, the virtues of kindness — surely the first time such an issue has been highlighted in a modern political campaign — has paid narrative dividends. One of the most effective speakers at the Democratic convention was a young man with a stutter, who spoke movingly about how Biden (a lifelong sufferer) stopped to support him, going so far as to give him a book of the poetry of W.B. Yeats, suggesting that, as proved the case with him, reciting poetry could alleviate the condition.
Indeed, the standard narrative of Biden is that he is at base a fundamentally decent man. This stands in total contrast to the persona of Trump. Indeed, a June Fox News poll found that only 37 percent of respondents believe the president "cares about people like you," while a decisive 57 percent say he does not.
This gets at the perceived negative aspects of Trump’s personality, as well-educated suburban voters (especially women) have deserted the Republican Party in droves, more due to Trump’s negative personality than over any substantial policy differences. Retaining these voters by highlighting Biden’s genuine bedrock decency in the end is not a peripheral concern. Instead, it is central to retaining the party’s advantage among suburban voters, who supported Trump in 2016, while decisively shifting toward the Democrats in the midterm elections of 2018.
For the Republicans, a dose of counter-programming has proven necessary too. In their case, while it is politically acceptable to be viewed as the party of American nationalism — as indeed Republicans have been since the time of Lincoln — it is decidedly neither socially nor politically all right to be seen as the party of white nationalism, a charge the Democrats have leveled at them to some effect following the advent of the George Floyd civil rights protests.
To the surprise of many, the Republicans have successfully taken this hot-button issue head-on. The early stages of their convention have seen African-American Sen. Tim Scott talk of his rise from Cotton to Congress in just one generation. Likewise, Trump’s former UN Ambassador, Niki Haley, of Indian ancestry, spoke movingly about how the party should become the home of all immigrant strivers. By showing a different, and unexpected, face to the American people through their convention, Republicans are hoping to challenge the settling (and highly detrimental) political narrative that they are the home of America’s shrinking white population, and little else.
Both the Democrats and Republicans did surprisingly well at their conventions.
If this narrative takes hold, given fundamental changes in American demography, Republicans are doomed to lose national elections for the next generation. Instead, the surprisingly hopeful convention marked a good first step toward eradicating the party’s baleful negatives.
Conventions rarely if ever determine American presidential campaign outcomes. Indeed, even the more touted autumn debates only occasionally (as in the case of Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 and perhaps Carter-Reagan in 1980) tip the presidential scales. However, that does not mean they are unimportant, as they provide windows into the souls of the parties, showing us what they think their weaknesses and their strengths truly are.
In the case of the Republicans the party is rightly worried it is turning off the growing non-white percentage of the country’s voters. In the case of the Democrats, fearing Republican charges that their tilt to the left might damage them as the campaign reaches its climax, Democrats are showcasing Biden’s fundamental decency as a form of ideological insurance. Both parties did surprisingly well at their conventions; the 2020 presidential campaign remains in the balance.
*Dr. John C. Hulsman is the president and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a prominent global political risk consulting firm. He is also senior columnist for City AM, the newspaper of the City of London. He can be contacted via www.chartwellspeakers.com.

Democrats’ tanks are on the White House lawn
Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/August 28/2020
US political party conventions are traditionally a celebration of the country’s democratic traditions, accompanied by razzmatazz and over-the-top speeches to rally the party faithful in a show of unity before they go back to their communities and begin campaigning with a spring in their step.
This year’s events were affected, as everything is, by the constraints of the coronavirus pandemic, and conducted virtually with almost no audience, serving as a reminder that the world is in the midst of one of the worst health crises, and consequently one of the worst economic crises, in recent history. The need to hold the party conventions in virtual mode benefited the Democrats most, as it brought home, literally as well as figuratively, the magnitude of the crisis the country is enduring while the blame for its mishandling lies clearly at the door of the Trump administration.
While it is generally acknowledged that Joe Biden is a decent human being and a person of integrity, who with nearly 50 years’ political experience at the highest level has the advantage of knowing the ins and outs of the Washington scene as few others do, he is nevertheless not known for his vision, his charisma, or his oratorial skills. It was therefore a great relief to campaign managers and the party faithful that he saved one of his best speeches for his nomination acceptance at the end of the convention, and with it hit all the right chords. He was authoritative; he was personable as he talked about his experiences of losing loved ones, as so many Americans are currently undergoing; and although he is no visionary, he has left the impression of someone who cares, who is experienced, and who is happy to roll up his sleeves and deal with the mammoth challenges his country is facing.
He summed up his administration’s priorities, should he win in November, by reminding his compatriots that “history has delivered us to one of the most difficult moments America has ever faced.” It was, he said, “the worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the sixties.” And in case we should forget, he also highlighted “the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change.” Biden not only set out the main priorities for his presidency, but he also established clear blue water between himself and President Trump.
As the two parties dominating American politics, Republicans and Democrats by nature represent a wide range of opinion on almost every key issue, while sharing a thin layer of common values and an ideology that holds them together, each with a tent that is big enough for a critical mass of voters to hand it victory in elections.
Last week’s Democratic convention exemplified this as it presented something for almost every variety of American, and united the left and the centrists to ensure that Biden would receive the blessing of all. However, if there was an overriding strapline for this Democratic Party gathering it was “Anything But Trump.” Only a few months ago the Democrats didn’t expect to arrive at their convention with a solid lead in the polls, but even in traditionally Republican states like Arizona and North Carolina the Biden–Harris partnership is leading. To win, they need to protect this lead, and for that, unity is paramount.
Last week’s Democratic convention... presented something for almost every variety of American, and united the left and the centrists to ensure that Biden would receive the blessing of all.
Coming to the convention as favorites to win the White House and retain their majority in the House of Representatives, and even with a chance of overturning the Republicans’ Senate majority, has changed the Democrats’ calculus of how to approach the convention. It has become more about consolidating their lead, and as most speeches have revealed, from the party’s grandees to the rank and file, the Democrats’ greatest asset is the current occupant of the White House. All speakers were on message, with various degrees of zest and robustness as they made it clear that the US can’t afford another four years of a divisive Trump. The combination of a presidency unparalleled in its bizarre appetite for aggression and friction, both at home and abroad; its lack of strategy and sheer incoherence on every major issue; and topping it all, the unprecedented vulgarity of its conduct, is enabling the Democratic party to pursue a campaign which emphasises the opposition’s weaknesses and failures rather than its own strengths.
Unusual times lead to unconventional approaches to fighting elections, and these are extremely unusual times. Departing from the protocol that former presidents never criticize their successors by name, Barack Obama’s speech to the convention went for the jugular. It was not only what he said, but the location of his speech at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the city where the US constitution was written, that made it a powerful statement of the irrevocable damage President Trump is causing to the very foundations of American values. It was a blistering attack on a president who Obama described as lazy, divisive, selfish and self-centerd, living in a reality show instead of in reality, to serve his craving for attention. And should anyone still harbor the illusion that Trump might eventually grow into his role as president, Obama’s verdict was that “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”
The nominee for vice-president, Kamala Harris, spoke after Obama, which was symbolic. Similar to Obama’s nomination 12 years ago, hers is another step in the direction of breaking the glass ceiling for people from ethnic minorities, and in her case for women too. As successful as the Democratic convention was, nominating Kamala Harris in advance set the tone, and made clear where the party is heading and what values it represents.
The convention is over, and the real door-to-door work is beginning. The Democrats have entrusted Biden to be the transitional leader he has promised to be, and the convention did what it set out to do; it has rallied its base, empowered its leadership, instilled hope for a better future, and made it clear to the incumbents that they are in for a real fight.
*Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations at Regent’s University London, where he is head of the International Relations and Social Sciences Program. He is also an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. He is a regular contributor to the international written and electronic media. Twitter: @YMekelberg

Power Grids Aren’t Evolving Fast Enough for Global Warming
Mark Buchanan/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
The heatwave currently baking the Western US has produced a record high — 133 degrees Fahrenheit — in Death Valley and triggered rolling blackouts affecting millions of Californians. With demand for electricity threatening to exceed supply, the state sought extra capacity from producers in Washington and Arizona, but those states also faced soaring temperatures and spiking demands. Making matters worse, cloudy conditions and faltering winds cut the energy coming from several large solar and wind generators. Power grid managers in California chose rolling blackouts to avoid a more serious systemic failure.
Extreme heat is the proximate cause of California’s current trouble. But behind this lies the increasing pressure that global warming is putting on power systems everywhere. The recent explosive growth of renewable energy sources may help keep temperatures from rising even faster, yet it also makes managing the grid more complex, as it requires integrating diverse energy sources subject to the fickle whims of clouds and winds. Rising temperatures and more extreme weather also make those sources increasingly prone to disruption.
Renewable energy offers great hope for avoiding the worst consequences of a warming planet. Yet it’s a massive challenge to redesign the existing grid — much of it decades old and built for fossil fuels — so it can efficiently utilize this energy. In coming years, the challenge will only be compounded by rising temperatures.
Cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin touched on the problem in her 2016 book “The Grid,” which examined the history of the US electrical grid and the complex interplay of technological, political, financial and cultural forces shaping its evolution. She suggested to me in a recent phone interview that the most pressing challenge is to find ways to run a grid reliably when its power comes not only from central generating stations, but also from millions of distributed generating sources such as rooftop solar panels.
Many areas around the world have seen a surge in renewable energy capacity in the past decade. Yet if many individual sources send power to the grid at the same time or go online together, these coordinated changes lead to voltage surges that can damage power lines and transformers, while dips in supply lead to brownouts and blackouts. Energy generation from natural gas or fossil fuels can be turned on or off on demand, but small photovoltaics only produce energy when it’s sunny.
“One tiny puffy white cloud can produce a dip across a whole region as it moves over multiple rooftops,” says Bakke. “And since electricity use and production have to be balanced all the time, this makes everything unstable. The current grid is simply not made to work this way.”
For this reason, a significant amount of renewable energy capacity hasn’t been incorporated into the grid as it might have been, with California being a prime example. The state passed a law in 2015 requiring 50% of all electricity in the state to come from renewable sources by 2030. However, after lawmakers were pressured by utility lobbyists, the law only counted energy coming from large producers running centralized stations, excluding rooftop solar from individual homes. This despite the extremely rapid growth of such capacity: As of 2015, rooftop solar was producing three times as much as centralized stations.
An amendment in 2018 changed this, allowing the inclusion of essentially all renewable energy sources. The fact that they were first excluded, Bakke told me, reflects the general distrust energy authorities have for smaller-scale energy projects because they can bypass centralized systems management.
“The right path would have been the more difficult one — to ask the utilities to work out a system whereby all renewable power was counted and integrated in the 2030 goal,” Bakke says of the 2015 law. “There’s a ton of rooftop solar available.”As if the complexity of the emerging grid weren’t enough, the problems facing energy producers will grow worse with as temperatures rise. Mikhail Chester, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, points out that much of the current US electrical grid was built decades ago and designed to cope with temperatures and environmental conditions typical of the past three or four decades. As temperatures rise, the efficiency of both energy generation and distribution is likely to suffer — power lines can't dissipate heat quickly enough, and components fail more frequently. In a modeling study of Arizona’s grid, Chester and colleagues estimated that every 1-degree-Celsius rise in temperatures will make key power-system components fail three times as quickly and make cascading power outages 30 times more likely. Hence, there’s an urgent need to figure out how to re-engineer the grid to be more resilient even as the climate becomes more unstable.“How to do this is the trillion-dollar question,” says Chester, “and there's no clean answer at this point. The science and engineering are emerging; the question is, Are they emerging and being implemented fast enough?”
As in California, we’re likely to see encouraging surges of success in implementing renewable energy, followed by unanticipated failures, as a diversified power industry — along with millions of individual energy producers — feels its way by trial and error toward an electrical grid able to cope with an uncertain climate future. What’s clear, notes Bakke, “is that we cannot continue to make electricity from fossil fuels. Because of climate change, it just keeps getting hotter and harder. So we have to find a way to do it with renewables. In California, our efforts are currently failing, and maybe, in the end, we will fail.”
But Bakke is optimistic. “There are so many really smart people working to make it happen,” she says. “But we don’t know if it’s even possible — especially as climate conditions grow worse — to have an electrical grid of the kind we’ve been used to.”

Republicans Hail Trump, Ignore the Headlines
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Way back in March, President Donald Trump gave an Oval Office speech about the coronavirus, which was immediately rendered irrelevant by the breaking news that Tom Hanks had contracted it and that the National Basketball Association was shutting down. The Republican convention has had a similar feel all week, but on Wednesday the impression was overwhelming. Republicans went through a series of (mostly taped) speeches that felt entirely out of touch with current events, as the NBA once again shut down, along with the WNBA and three Major League Baseball games, this time to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake. And of course those NBA games were supposed to take place in a “bubble,” a brand-new term that for most people evokes the ongoing pandemic — except for Republicans, who continue to pretend that the coronavirus is something that Trump solved long ago.
Even when they’re not explicitly talking about the crisis in the past tense, they’re effectively doing so. Vice President Mike Pence proclaimed that “we’re re-opening America’s schools” even as many districts are staying remote and dealing with impossible choices — and without the extra funds that even Trump concedes they need but hasn’t been able to deliver. Pence at least addressed the pandemic, which most other speakers have ignored. But he gave no hint that there are still tens of thousands of new cases a day, or that the toll in the US is among the worst in the world.
And while it’s probably true that Democrats last week underplayed the violence and looting that have broken out in some cities in the wake of protests, Republicans have exaggerated the discord out of all proportion — and blamed it all on Democrats, who (as Joe Biden just did) have mostly condemned the violence while supporting peaceful protests. Again, that was true on the first two nights of the convention, but it seems increasingly out of touch.
The second notable thing Wednesday, and really throughout the convention, is just how hollowed out this Republican Party is. I counted four administration officials and two candidate family members among the speakers, and there have been several other relatives featured so far. It’s unusual (and potentially illegal) for White House staff and other administration officials to speak at political events. But it’s also, well, unimpressive. Senators, governors, community leaders and ordinary citizens all presumably speak on behalf of the presidential candidate out of genuine support. Staff … well, sure, they wouldn’t be working for the president if they didn’t support him, but the bottom line is that they’re praising the boss, and the only folks apt to be impressed by that are those who already support the candidate.
Regardless of how effective those speeches are, they suggest that the party is atrophying rapidly (at the level of party actors, that is, not of voters, where there’s been little change). It’s not clear whether other politicians just don’t want to be associated with the convention or if Trump doesn’t want them there, but either way the whole week has seemed more like a Trump National Celebration (and airing of grievances) than a Republican National Convention. And that’s all the more true because the Trump family members are for the most part giving standard political speeches, not talking personally about the president in a way that others could not. In that sense, it’s hard to see the logic of why they’re speaking at all.

Abe Defied Expectations to Build a Better Japan
Noah Smith/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister, is resigning due to ulcerative colitis. He leaves behind a Japan that is both economically stronger and more socially liberal than the one he inherited.
When Shinzo Abe took over Japan’s leadership in late 2012, I was extremely skeptical. After a short and unimpressive tenure in office in the mid-2000s, Abe seemed unlikely to rise to the challenge of Japan’s faltering economy and unequal society. And the fact he emerged from a right-wing political bloc seemed to portend a less liberal Japan.
But Abe quickly defied the skeptics. He quickly gathered a group of capable advisors around him, including economics professor Koichi Hamada, Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda, political ally Yoshihide Suga, and his own wife, Akie Abe. As a result of their sage advice, Abe’s second term in office looked nothing like the cautious conservatism that characterizes most administrations from Japan’s long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party.
First and foremost, Abe managed to revive Japan’s economy. At the BoJ, Kuroda embarked on the world’s boldest program of quantitative easing, even buying up a significant portion of the country’s stock market.
Although this didn’t boost inflation to the targeted level of 2%, it did get Japan out of deflation, and appears to have stimulated both consumption and (eventually) business investment. Despite a severely aging society and the aftermath of a devastating tsunami and nuclear accident in 2011, Japan enjoyed the longest unbroken period of economic growth since the 1980s.
Monetary easing was only one arrow in the quiver of Abenomics, as Abe’s program came to be called. The second, fiscal stimulus, proved harder to implement. Worries about the sustainability of the country’s debt prompted Abe to implement multiple consumption tax hikes, which probably slowed growth. Buffeted by conflicting economic and political pressures, the Abe administration was forced to chart a middle path on fiscal policy, which was ultimately not much of a factor in Japan’s recovery.
The third arrow of Abenomics was a sweeping program of structural reform. Although Abe’s detractors derided the lack of quick results, and some reforms were stymied by political opposition, overall this program laid the foundations for Japan’s long-term economic health. Abe took on Japan’s most sclerotic sector, the politically powerful agriculture industry, and scored major wins, encouraging competition and lowering barriers to food imports. That will ultimately result in more efficient, productive farms and increased food security for the island nation.
Abe also became a general champion of trade agreements and globalism, even as the US sank into sullen protectionism under Donald Trump. He concluded a major trade deal with the European Union and kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive after America’s ill-advised withdrawal.
At home, Abe tried to reform Japan’s hidebound and unproductive corporate culture. His administration created a new corporate governance code and investor stewardship code, aimed at increasing shareholder control and profitability and decreasing the power of aging, traditionalist managers. A 2018 revision tried to unravel corporate cross-shareholdings, a traditional Japanese practice that encourages productive companies to support unproductive ones.
Anecdotes and government data both suggest companies are following the new codes, and corporate profits have surged, boosting tax revenues. Japan is also developing a robust private equity industry, which will help to consolidate a family business sector suffering from a lack of heirs. It will also hopefully push companies toward a more productivity-focused culture. Abe has also tried to reduce the punishing and unproductive overtime hours many Japanese companies force workers to endure.
But Abe’s biggest economic reform has been to expand Japan’s labor force, through gender equality and immigration — two things his conservative party had long resisted. Abe jawboned companies to increase their hiring of women, provided federally funded daycare centers, encouraged more men to take paternity leave, and used preferential government contracting to reward companies that hired women. Japanese women’s employment, which stagnated in the 1990s, accelerated during Abe’s term.
Abe also opened his homogeneous country up to immigration in an unprecedented way, creating a new guest-worker law that offered a path to permanent residency, as well as a new fast track for skilled immigrants. The result was a surge in workers from overseas.
Increased gender equality and immigration, though done for economic reasons, are transforming Japanese society. Now firmly ensconced in the working world, women are more vocal about challenging sexual harassment, demanding promotions, and insisting men do more child care at home.
Meanwhile, Japan is becoming a more diverse society, with one in eight young people in the capital city born in a foreign country. Many languages can be heard on the street thanks to an unprecedented tourism boom, and the nation is embracing more mixed-race celebrities.
Abe didn’t simply preside over this liberalization and opening of Japanese society; he actively encouraged it, often in the face of fierce opposition from the right-wing forces many feared would be his support base. When a hate group emerged early in Abe’s tenure to threaten and harass the country’s Korean ethnic minority, Abe vocally criticized the racists and passed the nation’s first law against hate speech, which was then used to prosecute members of the group.
So although Abe resuscitated Japan’s economy and laid the groundwork for future economic strength, his biggest accomplishment was to begin the transformation of a nation many observers had concluded would never allow itself to change. It’s now possible to glimpse a future of a very different Japan — a liberal, dynamic, open society that is progressive in both economic and cultural terms. At a time when many world leaders are retrenching into nationalism, protectionism, racism, and authoritarianism, Abe defied expectations and became a champion of the embattled notion of liberalism. He leaves behind a legacy future Japanese leaders will struggle to match. But for the sake of their country’s continued strength, dynamism, and prosperity, they must try.

The Big China Disaster That You’re Missing
Anjani Trivedi/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
The world’s largest dam is under pressure in the massive flooding that’s wiping away billions of dollars of value in China. The predicament symbolizes a looming crisis for Beijing. Climate change is bringing more frequent and intense deluges that threaten the economic heartland, and infrastructure defenses installed with the disasters of previous eras in mind can’t keep up. There’s very little time to prepare for what’s coming.
The problem isn’t that China lacks water management projects. It has built hundreds of thousands of levees, dikes, reservoirs and dams on its seven major river systems. But many are struggling to cope with months of rain-fed flooding that has ravaged vast swathes of industrial and agricultural land and engulfed millions of homes.
This past week, officials feared that the Three Gorges Dam on the mighty Yangtze was peaking and could overflow. Elsewhere, authorities have blown up barriers that were causing more damage than help.
China has experienced three of the world’s 10 most devastating floods since 1950. The limited number of deaths this time is a testament to how far the country has come, with officials saying that at least 219 people have died or disappeared. Yet flooding in cities is getting worse, a sign of rising populations and failure to execute urbanization policies.
Annual average losses from river inundations are the highest in the world. Flood policy hasn’t been made the a priority it should be given the high stakes. The Yangtze River Economic Belt is home to more than 40% of China’s population (about 600 million people) and accounts for almost 50% of export value and 45% of gross domestic product, according to China Water Risk. On its own, the region could be the third-largest economy in the world.
More severe disasters are anticipated. Hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, told the South China Morning Post that climate change is increasing the risks of extreme rainfall events, making it “even more likely that dams like the Three Gorges will be unable to prevent the worst flooding from occurring in the future.”
A study has found that if temperatures rise by 2 degrees, flows around the Yangtze and other major world rivers will intensify, increasing the frequency of huge floods. Heavy rain days are already more numerous and intense inside cities compared to suburban areas along the Yangtze, a study using rainfall records over two periods between 1961 and 2010 found. Such days increase by 30% on average in places like Suzhou, near Shanghai, known for wedding gowns and bridal exports along with big tech factories.
China isn’t shy about deploying money. Last year, 726 billion yuan ($105 billion) was shoveled into water conservancy construction – the highest in history, according to CLSA Securities Ltd. Flood management has received 1.2 billion yuan in central government funds since the beginning of the rainy season. But there’s competition. Trillions of yuan are being spent to support a national recovery from Covid-19, including building massive 5G capacity to ensure future manufacturing capabilities. That’s certainly justifiable. Roads to nowhere aren’t. Past disasters tend to frame thinking about future ones. Yet threats aren’t static — climate change is speeding up the severity of flooding. Risk assessments need to factor in where China’s wealth is being built. For instance, quantifiable flood losses in heavily industrialized Guangdong province in 2015 reached around 30 billion yuan, but disruption to its concentration of roads and railways, ports and airports pushed costs far higher. The cities of southern China are at great jeopardy. One example of how mitigation efforts are being outpaced is the strategy of diversion zones adopted two decades ago, setting aside areas where authorities released water to control excessive flow. Resettled people have since been driven further away from zones where they were supposed to live as ever-larger amounts of water need to be unleashed. Eventually, they end up on lands that aren’t eligible for compensation.
Beijing’s ministries have issued streams of climate change-related rules and targets, and China was at one point considered a leader. This was supposed to be the year that companies got better about environmental and social governance disclosures. Constrained coffers, the viral outbreak, trade war with the US, and slowing economic growth will make it harder to put future floods and the like front of mind. That needs a rethink. Consider this knock-on effect. In theory, banks will likely take losses because of natural disasters; their clients will pass them along to insurers. In China, insurance companies aren’t well-prepared; statistics remain sparse and risk-modelling around flood events has become more difficult. In 2016, China’s non-life insurers were hit with losses of more than 4 billion yuan related to floods and storms between June and August. This time, Fitch Ratings Inc. analysts expect claims “to continue to surge as the rainy season is not over yet in certain parts of China.”
They noted on July 15 that insurers in Hubei, Guangxi and Jiangxi provinces had reported aggregate incurred losses of more than 500 million yuan as of a week earlier, including claims from motor, agricultural and property insurance. The last thing China’s burdened, state-run financial institutions need are continued natural disasters. As tough as this year has been, it may be time to re-calibrate priorities. Building 5G base stations and rail lines won’t matter if they get wiped out by floods again and again.

Assessing Eight Years of Shinzo Abe's Leadership
Daniel Moss/Bloomberg/August 29/2020
Less than a week after chalking up a milestone for the most consecutive days in office, Shinzo Abe is bowing out as prime minister of Japan due to health problems. His eight-year stint began as Japan was reckoning with its place in a new world order: China had become Asia’s main commercial power and the planet’s No. 2 economy. Restoring growth, or at least arresting its slide, became Abe’s primary goal.
The prime minister leaves with his signature fiscal and monetary expansion in full swing because of Covid-19. This means his successor will probably keep the substance of these policies in place. With an economic contraction of 27.8% last quarter, there may not be much choice.
The next premier will likely be drawn from the ranks of Abe’s cabinet. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, Abe’s right hand man, is a continuity candidate who could be tapped as a caretaker if the party’s factions are unable to coalesce behind anyone with staying power.
Abe’s departure also closes a chapter in his family’s long role at or near the apex of political power in Japan. His great uncle, Eisaku Sato, and grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, both served as prime minister before him. But even if Japan is ready for a new beginning, it’s important to recognize that the past wasn’t a complete failure. When I lived there from 1999 to 2001, a broad funk had settled in after the bubble economy collapsed a decade earlier. In my multiple visits during Abe’s term, I felt a very different energy.
Abe swept to office promising to shake things up. It was more than a question of pure economics: National security demanded a big shot at reflation. Now amid the upheaval of a pandemic, it's his legacy that could offer a blueprint for the global recovery.
Here are some highlights from my coverage of Japan under Abe:
Abenomics Finally Finds Its Moment of Genius: With Japan facing its deepest downturn since the 1950s, it would be tempting to conclude that the twilight of Abenomics has arrived. Even before the coronavirus hit, the “three arrows” of the prime minister’s signature economic program had been losing altitude. Muscular fiscal policy, massive monetary easing and efforts to unshackle business from regulatory burdens were failing to adequately reflate the economy. It’s true that Abenomics has had its setbacks, but to overlook its successes would be a mistake. If anything, the legacy of this program could outlive Abe’s tenure, offering lessons to future Japanese leaders and global policy makers alike.
Japan Is Going for Broke. Minus the Broke Part: Tokyo's stimulus was replete with superlatives suited to the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unveiled his second package in two months worth about 117 trillion yen ($1 trillion), each installment dwarfing the response to the Great Recession. Abe said efforts to combat the deepest global dive since the 1930s will amount to about 40% of gross domestic product. This fiscal onslaught won't prevent a big dip in Japan's economy; it will probably mitigate it.
Welcome to the Table, Mr. Abe. Japan's Been Waiting: For a man who swept to office almost eight years ago vowing to restore Japan's economic vitality, going back to the starting line must have been particularly painful for Shinzo Abe. He enjoyed huge parliamentary majorities and no internal challengers to his command of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yet despite this security, Abe's response to the Covid-19 pandemic showed anything but leadership in its initial months. He had to be dragged to postpone the Olympic Games — a decision announced only after a number of nations said they wouldn't send teams. Abe looked more like a prisoner of events than someone at the zenith of his power.
Empty Hair Salons Can't Be Saved by a Central Bank: A pre-Covid trip around the empty hair salons and rusted pachinko parlors of Hokkaido, the northern-most of Japan’s main islands, brought to life the country’s demographic challenges. Places like Naie, a town of roughly 5,000, illustrated the scope of what Japan’s monetary policymakers need to accomplish, and suggest the central bank is ill-equipped to deal with the problems at the heart of the Japanese economy.

Raymond Ibrahim on the Bottom-Up Oppression of Egypt's Christians
Gary C. Gambill/Middle East Forum Webinar/August 29/2020
Raymond Ibrahim, a Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, spoke to participants in a June 22 Middle East Forum webinar (video) about the plight of the Copts, Egypt's Christians.
The word "Copt" comes from the same Greek root, Aigyptos, as the word "Egypt." After the Arab conquest of Egypt (639-646), inhabitants of the majority Christian land became known as qibt (anglicized as "Copts"), then the term narrowed to refer only to those who maintained their adherence to the Christian faith. Over the following 14 centuries, Copts dwindled to roughly 10% of the population.
The community of Christians who refused to convert to Islam were accorded the status of a dhimma, which under Islamic law allowed "people of the book" – namely, Jews and Christians – to practice their faith in return for paying a special tribute, known as jizya, and accepting a "very inferior" position in society, explained Ibrahim. "There's a long list of what you can and can't do. You can't rebuild churches, you can't build new churches. ...There was no social mobility, really. You're not going to get the good administrative jobs. You're not going to be part of the military."
On top of that, "you also have sporadic bouts of ... outright persecution ... churches being burned, Copts and others being massacred," said Ibrahim, but violence wasn't main driver leading most Copts to convert to Islam. "That demographic shift is largely due just to this institutionalized form of discrimination," or dhimmitude. "It wasn't because Copts were being slaughtered." This same system was "entrenched in ... virtually all nation that got conquered by [Muslims] and had 'people of the book' in them." In other Christian majority regions, such as North Africa, Syria, and Asia minor, "Christianity has almost disappeared."
Over the centuries, most Copts were pressured to "convert to the so-called winning team."
Academic apologists for Islam, noted Ibrahim, have often portrayed dhimmitude as a form of benevolent protection, and exemption from the military as a form of privilege. But Christians and Jews "were exempt from the military because they were infidels, and no fighting Muslim engaged in holy war wanted a Jew or Christian next to him because they weren't trustworthy and it was bad for morale," he explained. "The dhimmi system ... wasn't active persecution, but it really hampered and limited, and degraded the non-Muslim, to the point that so many of them ... [were] willing to convert to the so-called winning team."
In addition, Copts were barred from speaking their native Coptic language, which is "linguistically rooted" in the language of Pharaonic Egypt and written in an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, and instead forced to use Arabic. Coptic thus became "a liturgical language only."
During Egypt's colonial era, which began in the nineteenth century, religious "fanaticism began to wane" and secular nationalism became "the new thing," said Ibrahim, which was "good of course for people like Copts and any other non-Muslim living in a Muslim majority nation ... much better than they were in the pre-modern era."
In Egypt today, "we've come back full circle and we're starting to see the sort of pre-modern mentality resuming again." With the growth of Islamism among the population, successive Egyptian regimes have hesitated to provide equal protection under the law to Copts.
"The most obvious form of discrimination that the Christians, the Copts, are facing in Egypt has to do with their churches," said Ibrahim:
Every other week or sometimes every week ... a Muslim mob rolls up after Friday prayers against a church because it was adding a bathroom, or it was building a Sunday school. Or because there was a rumor that someone was going to build a church, or because they found out Copts who have no church we're meeting in the house, having a church service. They rise up, create havoc, violence, sometimes deaths are a result, and the authorities always respond by shutting down the church, or just canceling whatever plans the Christians had. So this is very, very common.
The authorities "turn a blind eye" to other outrages. Ibrahim recounted the recent case of a church-going Coptic woman, married with three teenage daughters, who abruptly disappeared:
[She] reappears a few weeks later after her family makes a big scene and gets a lot of media, and she appears dressed in black and you can see there's people around her giving her cues. She seems very scared saying, "I'm now a Muslim praise be Allah. I don't want you, my family, to bother with me. Don't contact me. I'm not interested. I'm happy to serve Allah and that's it."
The authorities did nothing about this. "If it was the opposite, if a Muslim woman disappeared ... even if it was voluntary, and she had converted to Christianity and ran off with a Christian man, it would be the end of the world in Egypt," said Ibrahim. "It would be the biggest scandal. They would both be thrown in jail."An Coptic Christian woman mourns over the body of a relative killed in the Maspero Massacre at a hospital mortuary in Cairo, October 2011.
There's little Copts can do to fight the discrimination they face. In October 2011, thousands of Copts peacefully protested about the demolition of a church outside the Maspero building in Cairo (where the Egyptian Radio and Television Union is headquartered). "The government responded by unleashing tanks, armored vehicles that literally ran over them. ... At least two dozen were killed," recalled Ibrahim. The Obama administration responded by calling for restraint on all sides, as if the Copts were equally responsible.
Egypt's current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has won a lot of praise and support from Copts for his public criticism of Islamic radicalism. But little has changed on the ground. "What's happening in Egypt is not a top-down thing. It's a bottom-up thing. It's a cultural thing. These ideas, these anti-Christian, anti-Coptic, anti-church ideas, anti-Israel, they don't come from the leadership." Ibrahim suggests that popular hostility to Christians will be a problem until religious authorities "change, or moderate, or do something with the core text[s]" of Islam, in particular "the hadith, the words and the sayings that are attributed to Muhammad."
*Gary C. Gambill is general editor at the Middle East Forum. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.