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Podcast: Modi's India on the world stage
Listen: Is India a US ally? Based on the pomp and circumstance surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington in June, the answer seems obvious, right? They love us! We love them! End of story. Right?
Well ... it’s complicated.
India’s government is not ready to hitch its star to the American wagon, and the US has made it somewhat clear that it’s not a fan of India’s friendly ties to Russia and Iran. Add to that increasing international scrutiny of India’s eroding democratic norms, press freedom crackdowns, and religious persecutions, and the question becomes murkier still: Is India a US ally.
Ian's guest this week will do her best to answer that question and more. Barkha Dutt is an award-winning Indian broadcast journalist with more than two decades of reporting experienceSubscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.US ships during an underway replenishment in the Philippine Sea. January 19, 2023.
Hard Numbers: US camps in Philippines, Malaysia may nix death penalty, Bulgaria’s close vote, Burkina Faso vs. journalists, hungry as a bear in Japan
4: On Monday, the Philippine government confirmed the location of four new military camps that will indefinitely host rotating US forces, despite China’s opposition. The new encampments, which were announced last February, place US forces closer to Taiwan and key trade routes in the South China Sea, where China has territorial disputes with its neighbors.
1,300: Malaysia’s lower house of Parliament approved a bill on Monday to abolish mandatory death sentences, possibly sparing over 1,300 death row inmates. If the bill passes the upper house as expected and gets the king’s signature, it will mean capital punishment is no longer obligatory for crimes like murder and drug trafficking.
5: So far, it’s a dead-heat in Bulgaria’s parliamentary election, the 5th in two years, between center-right PM Boyko Borisov and liberal ex-PM Kiril Petkov. Corruption and inflation were the top concerns for voters in the former Soviet ally, which has struggled to form a durable ruling coalition in recent years. Final results are expected later this week.
2: Burkina Faso’s military junta has expelled two French reporters in its crackdown on journalists. The junta, which seized power in a coup last September (the country’s second in 2022), has not offered an official reason for the move, but it comes after one of the journalist’s publications investigated the execution of children inside military barracks in the northern part of the conflict-plagued West African country.
17: Japanese bear encounters have been on the rise in the wild … and at dinner. A new vending machine in Semboku, northern Japan, is clawing a profit by selling wild bear meat for $17 (2,200 yen) per 250 g. It’s proving so popular that the operator is getting mail-order requests from as far away as Tokyo.A person wearing a protective suit sits in the Beijing Railway Station after China lifted its COVID-19 restrictions in Beijing, January 20, 2023.
Hard Numbers: China zeroes out zero, German tanks run low, Turkey jails a journalist, Greek train crash, police find ‘spiritual girlfriend’ in Peru
0 x 0: Remember China’s zero-Covid strategy? No you don’t, at least not if you’re the Chinese Communist Party, which is now aggressively zeroing out public mentions of the draconian lockdowns that kneecapped the country’s economy and provoked rare widespread protests against Xi Jinping. Here’s our own portrait of zero-Covid life from last spring.
62: Despite promising to give tanks to Kyiv, Germany and other NATO allies have struggled to rustle up enough of them — 62 to be precise — to fill two Ukrainian battalions worth. Part of the problem is that no one on the continent has planned for a major European land war in 30 years, so tanks, parts, and trainers are limited.
10: Turkey has sentenced a journalist to 10 months in prison for posting an unsubstantiated allegation that police officers and soldiers had sexually assaulted a young girl. This is the first jail term handed down under a new law meant to combat disinformation that critics fear will be used to stifle criticism of the government.
36: A train collision has killed at least 36 and injured dozens more near the city of Larissa in northern Greece. Railway employees reported that there were issues with electric coordination of traffic control, despite recent modernization of Greece’s railway system, which is operated by Italy’s state-owned railway company Ferrovie dello Stato Italiene.
1.5: The sentence you are about to read does not end the way you think it will: Police searching a delivery man who was acting drunk at a Peruvian archaeological site found in his backpack a 1.5-meter tall pre-hispanic mummy named “Juanita.” He said the mummy, which once belonged to his dad, lives with him as “a kind of spiritual girlfriend.” We love this LatAm remake of "Fin de Semana at Bernie’s.
World Bank Group President David Malpass speaks to the media in Washington, D.C. in 2022.
Hard Numbers: World Bank chief resigns, Another Russian journalist jailed, Ukraine’s humanitarian needs, pessimistic Nigerians, good riddance Johns Hopkins tracker
12: World Bank President David Malpass, tapped by former President Donald Trump, announced Wednesday that he’ll step down this summer, roughly 12 months before his term expires. Malpass has been mired in controversy in recent months after he refused to say whether fossil fuels are warming the planet. (Malpass spoke to GZERO Media amid the controversy, saying he’s not a climate change denier.)
6: Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko has been handed a six-year jail sentence for posting on social media that Russian planes were responsible for an attack last March on Ukrainian civilians hiding in a theater in Mariupol. Following the verdict, Ponomarenko, a mother of two, said: “No totalitarian regime has ever been as strong as before its collapse."
5.6 billion: The UN said Wednesday that $5.6 billion is needed to provide humanitarian aid to the tens of millions of Ukrainians impacted by the war, including around 4 million who have resettled in Eastern Europe. But with the situation in Turkey and Syria continuing to deteriorate, Ukraine fundraisers could now have a tougher time securing Western aid dollars.
90: Ahead of general elections on Feb. 25, a whopping 90% of Nigerians say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, the worst outlook ever recorded. For a look at what’s at stake in the election, see this primer.
3: After more than three years in action, the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker will stop updating its data on March 10. The dashboard started publishing global pandemic statistics in Jan. 2020 and has been viewed more than 2.5 billion times since. We won’t miss you, Johns Hopkins tracker.Philippines court convicts top journalist — what comes next?
Over a year ago, we reported on Maria Ressa's conviction for cyber-libel in the Philippines. While her appeal works its way through the country's byzantine justice system, today she won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Below is our original piece published on June 15, 2020.
Ever since the rough-spoken populist Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines in 2016, journalists have warned that his open disdain for the media would put press freedom in the country at risk.
On Monday, those fears were underscored when the authorities found Maria Ressa, an internationally-renowned journalist and fierce critic of Duterte's, guilty of libel under the country's cybercrimes law.
What's the back story? In 2012, the online news site Rappler, which Ressa heads, published an article linking a local businessman to illegal activities, citing an unnamed intelligence report. A Manila judged ruled that the article violated the libel provisions in a 2012 cybercrime law. But the story was actually published four months before that law even came into effect. The authorities cited a 2014 update to the article — merely to fix a series of typos — as justification for throwing the book at Ressa. Even then, the charges weren't filed until 2017.
Critics say the case against Ressa and Rappler is politically motivated. Duterte is no fan of journalists in general, but he has singled out Rappler over its coverage of his popular but bloody war on drugs. He has accused the news site of being a CIA front, and said Ressa is part of a conspiracy to topple the administration. The abuse was so bad that in 2018, TIME included Ressa among the journalists named Person of the Year for defying attacks on the press.
Ressa, for her part, has repeatedly warned that Duterte is weaponizing political institutions, as well as social media, to stifle dissent. Last year, she told GZERO Media that she feared the consequences of Duterte's allies winning control over the Senate, one of the last checks on his power. The cybercrime law has proven to be a powerful tool. A new anti-terror law — which allows detaining alleged "terrorists" for up to 24 days without a judicial warrant — will soon be approved as well.
Ressa's conviction also has wider implications for press freedom in the Philippines. Before the ruling, the Philippines had already slipped two places in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index to 136 among 180 countries, and it has already fallen 11 spots from where it was in the first full year of Duterte's presidency. Last month the government shuttered the country's top television network. Ressa's fate will make Filipino journalists even more hesitant to hold the government accountable.
This is part of a troubling global trend. Press freedom is under threat around the world. Not only in authoritarian countries, but in once-vibrant democracies – like the Philippines – where populist leaders are eroding institutions. The watchdog Freedom House has found that over the past five years, press freedom has declined in 16 of the world's freest countries.
What will happen to Ressa? She faces up to six years in prison, but will remain free while her appeal winds its way through the labyrinthine Philippine justice system. But things don't get any easier: Ressa and Rappler are also facing another 7 active charges.
Disclaimer: The author of this story is a former employee of Rappler.
Maria Ressa, the CEO of online news platform Rappler, speaks to the media after posting bail at a Manila Regional Trial Court in Manila City.
Maria Ressa: Fearless and fair
The last time I saw my former boss Maria Ressa, about three years ago in New York, she wasn't worried about being arrested upon her return to the Philippines. Her friends and family had told her to consider staying in America, as she's a dual citizen after growing up in New Jersey. But she thought it was her duty to go back to Manila and continue doing her job as CEO of independent news site Rappler.
She wasn't arrested that time for her role in Rappler updating an old article deemed by a judge to be retroactively libelous. But she was detained in February 2019 over the same charge, and again a month later for allegedly violating a ban on foreign ownership of the media. Maria got out on bail both times, but that wasn't the end of her legal troubles.
In June 2020, she was convicted of cyber-libel, and now faces up to 100 years in prison under a very loose and retroactive interpretation of the law that's been panned as an attack on press freedom.
For years, Maria has been fighting dozens of court cases designed to silence her and Rappler for exposing the truth about President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs and corruption within the administration. She almost always prevails, but it costs her and Rappler energy, time, and money — not to mention personal sacrifice.
The thing is, she does have almost limitless energy. When I worked at Rappler a decade ago, we jokingly referred to Maria as being like the Energizer Bunny in the old TV commercials. No matter how tough a day had been, she'd always be at her tiny desk, chatting with her trusted top editor Glenda Gloria, typing furiously on her laptop, or talking to a source on the phone, and running on her usual diet of pandesal and diet Coke.
She's always smiling. And laughing, especially when she lets her guard down a bit at Rappler parties. But she's also tough as nails.
It takes a lot of guts to defy a dictator wannabe who's ordered his cops and soldiers to kill thousands of people. Especially when he's made it personal. After all, Duterte once claimed Maria was part of a CIA plot to oust him from power. And he still eggs on his supporters on Facebook who threaten to rape and kill her because he's weaponized social media.
More importantly, though, she's fair. Maria and Rappler gave Duterte a chance, even when it seemed a trash-talking mayor from the province didn't have a shot at the top job in Manila. But the relationship soured once the bullet-ridden bodies started piling up on the streets, with Rappler's Patricia Evangelista writing about it all.
Operating in a country long recognized for its press freedom, Rappler is doing the same to the Duterte regime that it did to his predecessor. And that it'll do to the next Philippine administration: hold it to account, and call it out when it fails to deliver or abuses its power.
"I am a cautionary tale for journalists," Maria told Ian Bremmer soon after her conviction on GZERO World. She's also an inspiration — and now a Nobel winner.
The question is now: will Duterte let her travel to Oslo to receive the prize?
A protester holds a placard during a protest in defense of free media in Gdansk, Poland.
What We’re Watching: Polish coalition on the ropes, Ethiopian PM’s call to arms, Russian mercs in Libya
Polish government in trouble: Poland's rightwing coalition government is on the ropes after PM Mateusz Morawiecki fired his deputy, Jaroslaw Gowin, for opposing two key pieces of legislation: a raft of tax reforms that Morawiecki says will help the middle class but Gowin fears will actually hurt them, as well as a proposed new law restricting foreign media ownership, which critics say is meant to silence unfriendly reporting by a US-owned TV network. Without the support of Gowin's small center-right Agreement party, the coalition government — formed by the ruling PiS and the far-right United Poland — could lose its slim majority in parliament, which in turn would force Morawiecki to call an early election. If he does so, he'll face a tough rival in a familiar face for Poles: former PM and European Commission top honcho Donald Tusk, who wants to run for his old job.
Ethiopia's descent: Ethiopia has been gripped by conflict between the government and militant leaders in the region of Tigray for nine months now, but the country of 112 million people may now be on the brink of a wider civil war. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sounded the alarm on Tuesday with a call for "all capable Ethiopians" to "show their patriotism" by taking up arms against rebels from the Tigray People's Liberation Front, who are now expanding their reach beyond their home region. Abiy, who just weeks ago offered a unilateral ceasefire, now wants able-bodied civilians not just to carry weapons, but also "track down and expose spies and agents of the terrorist TPLF." (The TPLF denies being a terrorist group and claims to be the legitimate government of the Tigray region.) This is bad news for a conflict that has already pushed more than two million people from their homes.
Russian mercs' war crimes in Libya: For years, Russian mercenaries employed by the shadowy Wagner Group have been plying their trade across Africa and elsewhere. Now we know what they were up to in Libya... thanks to files on a tablet left behind by an operative. A BBC analysis of the content on the device shows evidence of war crimes such as intentionally targeting civilians and placing landmines in unmarked areas. There also seems to be proof of Russia supplying them with state-of-the art military equipment, which Moscow has always denied. About 1,000 soldiers of fortune with the Wagner Group — a private military company believed to be owned by a Russian catering tycoon known as "Putin's chef" — fought on behalf of Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar against the UN-backed government in Tripoli from 2019 to 2020. It's unclear how many remain almost year after a ceasefire agreement (technically) ended Libya's civil war, but the incriminating tablet is a good reason to get out of Dodge.The Graphic Truth: Press freedom in pandemic times
During a pandemic, the work of reporters around the world is particularly important to ensure transparency about the scope of outbreaks and the measures that governments are taking to contain them. But in many countries, press freedom has been declining since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Press freedom took a bit hit over the past year, as governments across the world doubled down on censoring media that criticized their handling of the pandemic, and locked up reporters for reporting the facts. Reporters Without Borders this week published its annual World Press Freedom Index, which takes a microscope to every country, ranking the ability of its media to report freely and independently. Here's a look at how countries' scores have changed over the past year.