Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on in the world this week. Today is Saturday, July 22th, 2023.
Today, continuing trouble for Thai democracy, Who’s humiliating whom in Russki Mir, no pity for Mike Pence, spies go much more public than usual, travel news, and can you unscramble SERDARBERDYMUKHAMEDOV?
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DIRTY BUSINESS IN THAILAND: Pita Limjaroenrat’s bid to become prime minister ended on Wednesday, at least for now. Mr. Pita lost his MP status after the Thai Constitutional Court ordered him suspended pending a further ruling. After he left the chamber, lawmakers voted not to allow him to be nominated for prime minister a second time.
Before he left the parliament Pita said
“I’d like to take this opportunity to say goodbye to the parliament president until we meet again. I would like fellow members (of the parliament) to use the parliament to take care of the people. I think that Thailand is different since May 14. If people have won halfway, the other half has yet to come, and even if I haven’t done my duty I ask all fellow members to jointly take care of the people.”
And just like that, the leadership of the largest vote getting party by far in the May elections was gone.
As to the complaint against him, Pita says he inherited shares in a defunct media company called iTV Plc. The Thai constitution prohibits parliamentarians from holding stock in a media organization. Pita has argued the 42,000 shares were part of his late father's estate, which he managed as executor. He said the title had since been transferred to relatives.
Later in the day on Wednesday a crowd gathered at Bangkok’s democracy monument. “The battle will not be about the Move Forward Party, but it is about people who cast their ballots in the (May 14) general election. We must join hands to take steps against the so-called independent organisations and ‘invisible hands’. The battle across the country starts today,” Somyos Pruksakasemsuk, leader of the June 24 Democracy Movement, told the crowd.
Although it had been planned, no vote was called to elect a new Prime Minister on Wednesday. The next session to choose a prime minister has been scheduled for July 27.
Speculation centers around two main questions: will the street rise up, and what will Move Forward’s coalition partner Pheu Thai do. A Pheu Thai ‘compromise candidate’ “might be more acceptable to senators, since Pheu Thai is less committed to root-and-branch reform of the military and lese majeste laws than Move Forward, though Pheu Thai has verbally committed to major military reforms.”
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UKRAINE: World political realities which are greater than Ukraine’s political realities may eventually supersede the previous Western imperative that Ukraine win the war outright. If the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive demonstrates that it hasn’t turned the tide in this war, the begin to US consider imposing some kind of peace.
Articles are beginning to pop up suggesting that Washington Needs an Endgame in Ukraine. Richard Haass, the outgoing President of the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, wrote The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine, A Plan for Getting From the Battlefield to the Negotiating Table in April.
Admin officials continue to point out (paraphrasing CIA Director Bill Burns) that Putin’s war has already been a strategic failure for Russia — its military weaknesses have been laid bare; its economy has been badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China are being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions have been blunted by a NATO that has only grown bigger and stronger, and it’s all true. And the president reiterated at Vilnius that “Putin has already lost this war.”
A time could come when the continuing open-ended risk of an unpredictable spiral into war might surpass the administration’s calculation of its interest in propping up Ukraine. Not saying it will, but it might. The table is being set for that eventuality.
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PUTIN AND PREGOZHIN: Until then, “Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression,” the CIA director said last Saturday in remarks to the Ditchley Foundation in England, according to a transcript of his speech.
“That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste,” he said.
To the extent that a CIA Director engages in trolling, particularly this CIA Director, that sounds like trolling, and Burns was joined later in the week by MI6 head Richard Moore, who said MI6’s door is ‘always open’ to Russian defectors.
The head of British intelligence is known as “C” within the agency, and Politico.eu says this week that
“a rich lore has developed around the spy agency, with writers from Graham Greene to John Le Carré mythologizing the agency, culminating with Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 character.”
Moore, the article says, “winks at some of this legend, for example by using a green pen, in keeping with a century-old tradition. On Wednesday, he added a new flourish to the tradition by showing his Marmite jar-shaped cufflinks.”
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WHO’S HUMILIATING WHOM? Humiliation was in the news last week, but thought leaders aren’t on the same page about who’s doing the humiliating.
Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, says Putin is humiliating Pregozhin: “He is being humiliated,” said Tatiana Stanovaya at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “They decided to kill Prigozhin the politician . . . But as a businessman, they’re still deciding what to do with him.”
But the MI6 head says it was Putin who was humiliated:
“He has to realize, I’m sure, that something is deeply rotten in the state of Denmark, to quote Hamlet, around him and he had to cut this deal, and it was pretty humiliating. He had to go and cut a deal through [Belarusian President Alexander] Lukashenko to save his skin on that day.”
And speaking of the Belarusian president, he can’t be pleased to have an elite squad of mercenaries setting up camp on his territory, but it appears there was enough humiliation for everybody this week in Russki Mir, as it looks like Pregozhin’s Wagner Group has begun to populate this previously empty military base southeast of Minsk in Belarus.
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ELECTORALLY AROUND EUROPE:
THE UNITED KINGDOM: Thursday’s by-elections resulted in the loss of two seats by the Sunak Tory government in three contests – in Selby and Ainsty east of Leeds, Somerton and Frome in the southwest, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip in greater London, Boris Johnson’s former seat. The Tories held Johnson’s former seat by less then 500 votes.
As Reuters had it, “the loss of the once safe Conservative parliamentary seat of Selby and Ainsty in northern England, where Labour overturned the biggest Conservative majority at a by-election since World War Two.”
“In Somerton and Frome in southwest England, the Liberal Democrats overturned a Conservative majority of 19,213 after a another lawmaker quit over allegations of sexual harassment and cocaine use.”
THE NETHERLANDS: Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said he will quit politics after his coalition government collapsed in a row over asylum policies.
After nearly 13 years in power, Mr Rutte is one of Europe's longest-serving leaders. He is now heading a caretaker administration until fresh elections can be held in November, but he told parliament he would not run for a fifth term in office and would leave politics following the elections.
FRANCE: the French president reshuffled domestic cabinet ministries on Thursday in response to demonstrations over contested pension reform, and nationwide riots sparked by the shooting death of a 17-year-old by police. The government is still led by Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne.
SPAIN: Just about everybody predicts a swing toward the right in national elections tomorrow.
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MORE FROM THE UK: What is Labour Party leader Kier Starmer doing by identifying Labour with some notably failed policies of the Tories? The old saying about what to do when your opponent is busy digging a hole applies here. Last week Starmer was heard ‘hating tree huggers’ and this week Starmer told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show that Labour was “not changing that policy,” meaning the Tories’ unpopular two-child benefits cap. It’s a policy which has been widely criticized as unfair, cruel, ineffective on its own terms, and one of the biggest drivers of child poverty.
When your opponent has spent the last couple months dominating the news with headlines like “Tories back 'racist and authoritarian' laws” and “Suella Braverman rhetoric fuels racism, claims Tory peer,” maybe you want to accentuate the differences between you?
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THERE WILL BE NO PRESIDENT PENCE. Ever.
You didn’t need the latest fundraising numbers, you knew he wasn’t presidential timber all along. From the point of view of just rank embarrassment you have to feel a little sorry for Mike Pence, a former vice-president of the country who flounders near the bottom of presumed ‘serious’ candidates. But his own humiliation is the only reason to feel sorry for him. Nobody made him run.
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.MIL v .ML: A Dutch company that has managed Mali’s .ml internet suffix has received millions of emails intended for Pentagon employees. The emails
“were inadvertently sent to email accounts in Mali over the last decade because of typos caused by the similarity of the US military’s email address and the domain for the West African country.”
CNN says “In some cases, sensitive information like hotel reservations for senior US military officials were revealed.”
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SERDARBERDYMUKHAMEDOV: Random collection of letters, or President of Turkmenistan? Serdar Berdymukhamedov, the Turkmen president, may be in a bit of trouble. The Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor says:
“The independent Telegram channel “Turkmen News” reports that Ashgabat’s security services recently blocked an attempt at an armed insurrection in Turkmenistan’s capital and have arrested 20 Turkmen citizens. Most prominently, the son of a former agricultural minister was arrested (then later died while behind bars), as was Akhmed Khodzhatov, the current deputy minister of internal affairs. The channel says that the group brought in arms of various kinds to support their effort and planned for a far larger uprising (T.me/anthabar, July 8; Bizmedia.kz, July 9; Eurasia Today, July 10; News-asia.ru, July 11). According to the outlet, the government disrupted Internet access in the country to block additional reports about the coup attempt.”
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Ten years ago, planning a trip to Turkey and Ukraine, we ended up with just enough time for a quick fly-in fly-out to somewhere else, so we made a bid to visit our first 'Stan.’
We would arrive at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul late in the evening, and Turkish Airlines' flight schedule worked out great. It would allow us to keep pushing east. Just a brief wait and off we'd go to Ashgabat. Alas, it was not to be.
The Turkmen government required a letter of invitation (loi) in order to grant a tourist visa. They were available through travel services and we applied through a friendly, helpful service in Ashgabat.
We didn't invest much of our hearts in our quick little prospective visit, and it's just as well, because Turkmenistan didn't invite us, at least on the dates we could visit. We got this email from our man in Ashgabat:
"Please, be informed, the Migration Service of Turkmenstan
has announced some limitations on issuing LOIs (for tourist visas) for the
period between March 11 till March 25. Now, we must shift the dates of
your travel to Ashgabat before March 11 or after March 25.Please, advise if it is possible for you to travel to
Turkmenistan during the period of March 9 till March 11?"
Those dates didn’t work. Most places you get to choose your own dates to visit. Of course, this just made me want to visit more. One of these days.
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TURNING UP THE HEAT: Petroleum use is a big reason why heatwaves have been getting worse year after year for the past forty years, due to carbon pollution from the burning of oil. So meteorologist Guy Walton has decided, a la naming storms, to name heat waves after oil companies.
The 2023 list:
Amoco
B.P. (British Petroleum)
Chevron
Citgo
Conoco (Phillips)
Dana
Exxon
Frontera
Gazprom
Hess
Koch
Laredo
Marathon
Occidental
Pemex
Shell
Todd
Woodside
Valero
XTO
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TRAVEL: Last month my wife and I returned from abroad, entering the US at DFW. Finding the queue for pass control, we made our way for it, but were stopped short by a uniformed man. I began to offer him my passport but he declined it and said ‘just look at the camera,’ or something similar, which I did, and in seconds he smiled at me and said ‘William Murray, welcome home.’
While, like everybody else, I’ve been having my picture taken at the little pass control booth in the front for many years now, this was the first time I’ve entered the country with no passport, no paper, no contact.
The TSA has been experimenting with facial recognition for some time as this 2022 article in the Washington Post explains. Here are the initial sixteen airports the TSA used for testing (the places you’d expect – but Gulfport Biloxi?)
There are concerns about all kinds of issues, privacy rights, potential tech fails, police state issues like unseemly and undisclosed surveillance elsewhere. But for sheer ease of use, one can see into a future in which pass control is dispensed with entirely for most law abiding folks. Just walk by the camera and keep moving. Welcome home.
Although I’ll miss collecting the stamps in my passport.
(Here is how the TSA says the program works)
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Your hometown airline isn’t in it for the environment:
From the FT: “An appeals court ruled yesterday that The Hague can reduce flights at the airport between the end of the year and October 2024, overruling a local court.
The move is the most drastic yet in the EU to tackle noise and pollution caused by the aviation industry, and was challenged by carriers including KLM, easyJet, Tui and Delta.”
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And as I posted on yesterday weekend reading, a fun new Danish tourism ad:
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FINALLY, TWO NOT SO IMPORTANT THINGS:
Bulgaria unveils EU’s highest flagpole, and the $29 hot dog:
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Good weekend. CS&W will be on summer break next week and we’ll see you back here two weeks from today.