1 The $18bn arms race in the Middle East (Peter
Beaumont in The Guardian) The Middle East is plunging deeper into an arms race,
with an estimated $18bn expected to be spent on weapons this year, a
development that experts warn is fuelling serious tension and conflict in the
region.
Given the unprecedented levels of weapons sales by
the west (including the US, Canada and the UK) to the mainly Sunni Gulf states,
Vladimir Putin’s decision last week to allow the controversial delivery of
S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran – voluntarily blocked by Russia since 2010
– seems likely to further accelerate the proliferation.
That will see agreed arms sales to the top five
purchasers in the region - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria,
Egypt and Iraq – surge this year to more than $18bn, up from $12bn last year.
Among the systems being purchased are jet fighters, missiles, armoured
vehicles, drones and helicopters. The Russian declaration came only two days
before Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, disclosed he was seeking arms
worth billions of dollars from Washington – with payment deferred – for the
battle against Islamic State (Isis).
Ironically, among the key weapons suppliers in the
arms race are permanent members of the UN security council who have been at the
centre of two unconventional arms control initiatives – disarming the Syrian
government’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and negotiating for a deal on Iran’s
nuclear programme.
2. China economy puts pressure on its lopsided job
market (Neil Gough in The New York Times) China has a job market mismatch. Agriculture
jobs have been declining for years, the result of urbanization and the
country’s continuing economic transformation. And China’s huge manufacturing
sector is showing new signs of stress, as some companies struggle with rising
debt and rampant overcapacity.
China’s services business, which includes industries
like logistics, retail, information technology and sanitation, is booming,
driving job creation across the entire economy. Around 300 million people now
work in services in China, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the world’s
largest work force.
But workers are not easily making the switch.
Unskilled or semiskilled workers can be a bit choosier now as growth of the
pool of migrant workers slows. At the same time, soaring university enrolment
means new graduates often struggle to find the high-paying white-collar jobs
they were expecting. The job market — and its lopsided pockets of supply and
demand — presents a critical test for policy makers. For more than a decade,
China’s urban work force swelled and incomes rose in the double digits,
matching or exceeding the heady economic growth rates in those years.
Now, the nation’s economic outlook is slowing. Gross
domestic product rose 7 percent in the first quarter, which represents the
slowest quarterly growth since early 2009. “We’re in this weird position where the Communist
Party leadership seems completely comfortable with the idea that every year GDP
growth, wage growth — everything in the economy — is going to be growing a
little bit more slowly,” said Andy Rothman, an investment strategist at
Matthews Asia in San Francisco.
China’s premier, Li Keqiang, recently sought to play
down the importance of the GDP growth target, saying instead that he preferred
to focus on whether the economy was expanding in a way that created new jobs.
And so far, it appears to be doing that. China added 13.2 million new urban
jobs last year, surpassing Mr. Li’s official target of 10 million such jobs.
The realities of the market have set in. At nearly
seven million a year, China today produces twice as many university graduates
as it did 10 years ago. The supply appears to be outpacing the demand from
prospective employers. China’s new graduates have traditionally shied away from
working in factories, seeing this as a sign of lower status. But, perhaps
because of the slowdown, there are signs this is changing.
3 Libya chaos rocks Europe’s boat (Dan Murphy in
Khaleej Times/Christian Science Monitor) Libya's chaos has once more made it a
major way station for Africans seeking a better life, as the European Union
grapples with the morality of cutting back on patrols to rescue migrants. The
argument for doing less is that increasing the risk of crossing the
Mediterranean would save lives. Word that there was no safety net would filter
back to people, many of them fleeing persecution, and they’d stop coming.
Last year, a record 170,000 refugees flooded across
the Mediterranean, traveling in large part out of Libya and arriving in Italy.
In January, more than 3,500 refugees and migrants reached Italy from Libya, a
60 percent increase from January 2014. They come from all over Africa and the
Middle East.
The Eritreans are fleeing a brutal regime which
dragoons young men into military conscription and maintains a semi-permanent
war footing with neighbouring Ethiopia. Syrians and Iraqis are fleeing the war
and atrocities committed by the Daesh, Palestinians the open prison that is
Gaza, and West Africans the crushing poverty that has framed many of their
lives ... The vast majority of refugees make for Libya, where a power vacuum
since the 2011 fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi has enabled gangs of human
traffickers to flourish ...
The migration crisis in its current iteration stems,
in part, from the fall of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In 2010, Europe was moving
quickly to normalise relations with the former dictator. Oil interests played a
role, but so did the desire of many European nations to outsource migrant
control to the North African country.
Libya’s coast has a long history of sending people –
willing and unwilling – to Europe and the Americas. Ports like Tripoli and
Benghazi were the final stops for medieval slave-trading caravans from the
African interior until the 19th century. In recent decades, migrants have
shoved off for Italy and Spain in rickety fishing boats, with Libyan officials
looking the other way.
When the uprising against Gaddafi began in early
2011, the situation only grew worse for the African migrants. Many rebel groups
were convinced that any foreign African in the country were mercenaries for
Gaddafi and hundreds were executed. In the years since, Libya’s lawlessness has
made traveling through the country even more dangerous and unpredictable. The
videotaped mass execution of Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants carried out by Daesh
makes that clear enough. Yet still people go, and the UN refugee agency is now
calling the recent shipwreck the deadliest it has ever recorded.
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