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Politics
Hard Numbers: Iran cracks down on women, bestsellers sue AI, Venezuelan migrants get right to work, India suspends Canadian visas, Turkey jacks up rates
An Iranian woman walks past a huge mural of Iran's flag, in the Enghelab (Revolution) avenue in downtown Tehran, September 12, 2023.
10: Under a new law passed Wednesday, Iranian women could be jailed for up to ten years if they refuse to wear hijab. The crackdown comes just days after the one year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, who died in state custody after the morality police arrested her for not wearing hijab properly.
17: A group of 17 prominent authors are suing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, accusing the company of “systematic theft on a mass scale.” The suit says ChatGPT has violated their copyright protections because it draws upon their texts to build its language models and responses. The complaint also alleges that ChatGPT can be used to plagiarize them, and includes examples for each writer — including a Game of Thrones prequel called “Dawn of Direwolves”. (Can I read it? - Matt)
472,000: As President Joe Biden left the Big Apple late Wednesday, his administration announced that Venezuelans already in the country could legally live and work in the US for the next 18 months. The decision will affect 472,000 Venezuelans nationwide and roughly half of New York City’s migrants, letting them support themselves and easing the strain on New York’s social safety net. (For more on the situation in New York, see our explainer).
80,000: India announced it would suspend visas for Canadians amid the ongoing row over the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Last year about 80,000 Canadians visited India. Should Canada reciprocate, it could threaten the visa status of over 320,000 Indian students in Canadian universities.
30: The central bank in Turkey raised interest rates by an aggressive 5 percentage points to 30%, as official inflation rates topped 58%. It’s part of a major reversal of the Erdogan administration’s policy after winning re-election back in May: the previous economic team insisted on cutting rates even as prices soared.
(Department of Corrections: While we’re talking interest rates, in yesterday’s edition we mistakenly said the Fed’s rate pause was their first in 18 months. In fact, they decided on a pause in June, 2023 as well. We regret the error and hope it doesn’t affect your rate of interest in the Daily)
Biden approves hundreds of thousands of work-visas for Venezuelan migrants
Undocumented Immigrants from West Africa, Mexico, and Venezuela camp outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
As President Joe Biden left the Big Apple last night, his administration announced that Venezuelans already in the country could legally live and work in the US for the next 18 months.
The decision will affect 472,000 Venezuelans nationwide and roughly half of New York City’s migrants, letting them support themselves and easing the strain on New York’s social safety net. (For more on the situation in New York, see our explainer).
The bigger picture: Adams is pushing Biden to extend the authorization to migrants from other nations, but the White House is wary that a broad policy could incentivize even more migrants to cross the border. On the national level, Democratic leaders fear the GOP could sweep suburban house districts in 2024 by weaponizing the migrant issue, as they did with crime in 2022.
BJP Mahila Morcha workers celebrate the introduction of Women's Reservation Bill in the Special Session of the Parliament in Ahmedabad on Thursday.
On Monday, India opened its first special session of parliament since 2017, and expectations rose that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a plan to use the short session to make an unusual – maybe historic -- announcement.
There’s precedent for that assumption. Six years ago, Modi used a special session to roll out a nationwide goods and services tax to help centralize India’s economy. Many analysts now credit that move with sharply boosting internal trade across India, strengthening the country’s overall economic performance.
On Wednesday, in a nearly unanimous vote, India’s lower house of parliament passed the so-called Women’s Reservation Bill that will reserve one-third of its seats for women, who currently hold just 15%. They will also hold at least one-third of seats in state legislative assemblies.
The bill will move to the upper house for approval this week. It will then require approval from at least half of India’s 28 states.
If nothing else, the women who make up nearly half of India’s 950 million registered voters can have confidence their influence will play a much larger role in the direction of the world’s largest democracy.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki embrace during a joint news briefing on a day of the first anniversary of Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine February 24, 2023.
Maybe you saw the shock headline – “Poland no longer supplying weapons to Ukraine amid grain row” – and wondered how such close allies had experienced such a significant wartime falling-out.
Early Wednesday, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced the country had stopped weapons shipments to Ukraine, presumably in response to criticism from Ukraine’s President Zelensky over Poland’s refusal to buy Ukrainian grain diverted by war. But the shocked international response to Morawiecki’s message forced Poland’s government to quickly backtrack/clarify its position.
Here’s the critical context:
· Poland will continue to supply Ukraine with weapons it has already promised to deliver.
· Poland’s stock of excess weapons is currently close to depletion, leaving its government with little more to offer, at least for the moment.
· Poland is, and will remain, the path through which arms shipments from other countries reach Ukraine.
One more point to remember: Poland will hold parliamentary elections on October 15. Prime Minister Morawiecki is well aware the far-right Confederation party can pull votes from his center-right party by criticizing the cost of continuing support for Ukraine. By appearing to punish Poland’s eastern neighbor, Morawiecki can try to protect his vote share.
Bottom-line: Don’t be fooled. Poland remains Ukraine’s staunch ally against Russia.A member of the Carabinieri gestures towards migrants outside the hotspot, on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, Italy, September 16, 2023.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said during a visit to Italy that both countries had reached the “limits of [their] capacity” to accommodate migrants, and called for “fair distribution” of the burdens of migration across the European Union.
The background. In just the last week, over 11,000 people have landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa. They’re part of the 127,000 migrants who have landed in Italy in 2023, more than double the number who had arrived by this point in 2022.
Under current EU asylum regulations, migrants are required to apply for asylum in the member state to which they first arrive. Should they, say, leave Italy to try their chances with Germany’s relatively generous system, they’re to be deported back.
But Rome has recently been refusing to accept back asylum-seekers who leave, citing the disproportionate influx. That caused a row with Berlin, which announced last week it would suspend a voluntary agreement to take in 3,500 asylum seekers who had landed in Italy — before suddenly reversing course.
The European Union received over 519,000 asylum requests between January and June, a 28% year-on-year increase and the most since 2016. Germany fielded 30%, about as many as France and Spain combined. That’s not counting over a million Ukrainian refugees whom Germany hosts, far and away the most in Western Europe.
So when Meloni says the rest of the bloc needs to share the burden, it resonates in Berlin. It’s also in the SPD’s interest to be seen taking a more proactive anti-immigration stance, as their conservative rivals have recently revived the idea of a national migrant cap. It’s part of a larger shift on migration politics in Germany, as even SPD’s left-wing allies in the Green party call for tougher migration standards faced with the ascendance of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland.
Convincing the rest of the bloc to step up will be difficult. Since migration to Europe from Syria spiked in 2015, the EU has struggled to find consensus on bloc-wide immigration policies due to conflicting pressures in the politics of each member state.
Civilians get out of a truck during an evacuation performed by Russian peacekeepers at an unknown location following the launch of a military operation by Azerbaijani forces in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region inhabited by ethnic Armenians, in this still image from video published September 20, 2023.
Just one day after launching a fresh assault on the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan halted its offensive under a ceasefire in which ethnic-Armenian separatists there reportedly agreed to surrender and disarm.
This effectively marks the end of Karabakh’s decades-long de facto independence from Azerbaijan. As a reminder, Karabakh is officially part of Azerbaijan, but historically had an ethnic-Armenian majority and has been run by Armenian separatists since a war of independence in the early 1990s.
In a 2020 flare up of the conflict, Azerbaijan — with ample help from Turkey — reconquered parts of Karabakh and surrounded it.
The capitulation of the Karabakh authorities means that the enclave is now effectively under Azeri control. For Azerbaijan, retaking Karabakh has been a nationalist dream for decades. President Ilham Aliyev on Wednesday promised to turn Karabakh into “a paradise.”
But the fate of ethnic Armenians there is now in the balance. Both sides have carried out ethnic cleansing of each other’s populations over the past 30 years. Thousands of ethnic Armenians have reportedly rushed the airport already at Stepanakert, the Karabakh capital, looking to flee ahead of any Azeri reprisals.
Russia, whose peacekeepers have spottily overseen a ceasefire in the region since 2020, said that it would host talks on the future political and ethnic composition of Karabakh beginning on Thursday.
Hard Numbers: Rwanda’s Kagame will run again, the EU takes on Uber, water contamination threat in Libya, US Fed keeps cool
Rwandan President Paul Kagame attends the lighting ceremony of the Rwandan genocide flame of hope, known as the "Kwibuka" (Remembering), to commemorate the 1994 Genocide at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali, Rwanda April 7, 2023
4: Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, who has been in power since 2000, announced that he’ll run for a fourth term in next year’s election.
Kagame, who has been accused of cracking down on the opposition, tweaked the constitution back in 2015 to extend presidential term limits. Asked about what “the West” might think of his move, Kagame, didn’t mince words: “What these countries think is not our problem.”
40: A top Uber executive has warned that an EU proposal to classify gig workers as employees could boost ride prices by as much as 40%. Brussels says Uber should provide more job security and benefits for its employees. Uber, which has come up against similar battles in Spain, the UK and elsewhere, says the measure will hurt consumers and lead to “devastating” job losses.
4,000: Over a week after a catastrophic flood tore through two dams in eastern Libya, killing 4,000 people (while 9,000 remain missing) the UN has warned that sewage is contaminating water supplies, raising the specter of waterborne diseases like cholera, diarrhea, and hepatitis.
5.25-5.55: The US Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at 5.25-5.55, still the highest level in more than two decades after 11 rate hikes beginning in March 2022. The decision gives policy makers some breathing room to plot their next moves amid subsiding inflation. Still, with price growth well above the Fed’s 2% target, rates could stay above 5% well into 2024, analysts warn.Correction:Yesterday, we incorrectly stated that the Fed's pause was the first in 18 months. The Federal reserve also paused rate hikes in June, 2023. We regret the error.
Latest
Biden approves hundreds of thousands of work-visas for Venezuelan migrants
A political breakthrough for India’s women
Poland’s startling - and deceptive - announcement
Migration makes strange bedfellows of Germany and Italy
Is this the end of Karabakh?
Fish fight: China vs Japan
