Latest news with #Putin-style
Otago Daily Times
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
An India-Pakistan war would hit the whole world
India and Pakistan have had several shooting matches since they carried out a total of nine underground nuclear weapons tests in 1998. However, they don't make Putin-style thinly veiled threats to use their nukes (around 170 nuclear warheads each at the moment), and they do understand that escalation from smaller, "conventional" wars is the real danger. For example, Islamabad did not retaliate to Indian air strikes on Pakistan in 2016 and 2019, didn't even admit that they had happened in order to damp down domestic pressure for a tit-for-tat escalation. India has also worked to keep the level of violence down, even though the basic relationship is one of mutual hatred with religious overtones. However, the relationship between the two countries is fundamentally unstable, because Pakistan has only one-sixth of India's population and one-10th of its wealth. Conventional wars are basically wars of attrition, which means that Pakistan would almost certainly lose a non-nuclear conflict. By contrast both countries would be destroyed in a nuclear war, so threatening to escalate a war to the nuclear level would give Pakistan a weird kind of leverage. The two countries have not strayed that far into the swamp of nuclear deterrence theory yet, but they will probably get there in the end. Yet the rest of the world pays almost no attention to these "local" calculations, because other countries don't feel threatened by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. They believe it would largely stay within South Asia. They are wrong about that, which is why the present confrontation between the two is far more dangerous for the world than the Ukraine war or any other current conflict. The trigger for the India-Pakistan crisis this time was a terrorist attack in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir on April 22 by four gunmen who stepped out of the woods at a well-known tourist site and machine-gunned a group of Indian tourists, killing 26 of them. All the dead but one were Indian Hindus. The terrorists have been identified as Kashmiri Muslims or Pakistani citizens of Kashmiri origin, and the Indian government has declared that they were supported by the Pakistani government. That is possible, but India has offered no evidence, and a home-grown Kashmiri group is an equally plausible alternative. Kashmir was India's only Muslim-majority state, and since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's sectarian Hindu and ultra-nationalist regime ended its special status in 2019 it has been boiling with resentment and is effectively occupied by the Indian army. Matters have now got worse, with Modi suspending the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 that regulates the sharing of the six rivers' water between India and Pakistan. The water is important for India but utterly existential for Pakistan, where it irrigates 80% of the land on which the country grows the food for its quarter-billion people. In no previous war has India suspended this treaty, but Modi's party almost lost its parliamentary majority in the last election and the quickest way to rebuild its support among Hindu nationalist voters is to have a huge crisis with Muslim Pakistan. Many other countries have leaders just as reckless, but few of them have nuclear weapons. And Modi is playing with far more lives than the others: not just the 20 million "prompt" dead expected from blast, fires and fallout in a full-scale Indo-Pakistan nuclear war, but the 200 million to two billion dead predicted elsewhere in a 10-year nuclear winter. A nuclear winter is a long period with conditions cold enough to cut global food production. It would start with hundreds of firestorms in cities hit by nuclear explosions that boost enormous amounts of soot in the stratosphere. The soot blocks much of the incoming sunlight — and it stays there for years because there is no rain in the stratosphere to remove it. The original calculations were done in the 1980s for an all-out nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, but a decade ago a team led by Profs Alan Robock and Brian Toon of Rutgers and Colorado Universities redid the calculations for an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war on fast, modern computers with a huge data-processing capacity. The results were horrifying. Several hundred burning cities in India and Pakistan provide the initial boost of soot into the stratosphere over South Asia as before, but we now know that prevailing upper-altitude winds would carry most of it east and north until it blankets most of the northern temperate zone as well. Countries south of the equator would fare somewhat better, but countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia would not be spared. Famine conditions would prevail worldwide for about 10 years. Go on worrying about Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Taiwan and so on, but the big threat is a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. — Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
Winnipeg Free Press
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
The risk of nuclear war
Opinion India and Pakistan have had several shooting matches since they carried out a total of nine underground nuclear weapons tests in 1998. However, they don't make Putin-style thinly veiled threats to use their nukes (around 170 nuclear warheads each at the moment), and they do understand that escalation from smaller, 'conventional' wars is the real danger. However, the relationship between the two countries is fundamentally unstable, because Pakistan has only one-sixth of India's population and one-tenth of its wealth. Conventional wars are basically wars of attrition, which means Pakistan would almost certainly lose a non-nuclear conflict. By contrast, both countries would be destroyed in a nuclear war, so threatening to escalate a war to the nuclear level would give Pakistan a weird kind of leverage. The two countries have not strayed that far into the swamp of nuclear deterrence theory yet, but they will probably get there in the end. Yet the rest of the world pays almost no attention to these 'local' calculations, because other countries doesn't feel threatened by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. They believe it would largely stay within South Asia. They are wrong about that, which is why the present confrontation between the two is far more dangerous for the world than the Ukraine war or any other current conflict. The trigger for the India-Pakistan crisis this time was a terrorist attack in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir on April 22 by four gunmen who stepped out of the woods at a well-known tourist site and machine-gunned a group of Indian tourists, killing 26 of them. All the dead but one were Indian Hindus. The terrorists have been identified as Kashmiri Muslims or Pakistani citizens of Kashmiri origin, and the Indian government has declared that they were supported by the Pakistani government. That is possible, but India has offered no evidence and a homegrown Kashmiri group is an equally plausible alternative. Kashmir was India's only Muslim-majority state, and since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's sectarian Hindu and ultra-nationalist regime ended its special status in 2019 it has been boiling with resentment and is effectively occupied by the Indian army. Matters have now got worse, with Modi suspending the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 that regulates the sharing of the six rivers' water between India and Pakistan. The water is important for India but utterly existential for Pakistan, where it irrigates 80 per cent of the land on which the country grows the food for its quarter-billion people. Many other countries have leaders just as reckless, but few of them have nuclear weapons. And Modi is playing with far more lives than the others: not just the 20 million 'prompt' dead expected from blast, fires and fall-out in a full-scale Indo-Pak nuclear war, but the 200 million to two billion dead predicted elsewhere in a ten-year 'nuclear winter.' A nuclear winter is a long period with conditions cold enough to cut global food production. It would start with hundreds of firestorms in cities hit by nuclear explosions that boost enormous amounts of soot in the stratosphere. The soot blocks much of the incoming sunlight — and it stays there for years because there is no rain in the stratosphere to remove it. The original calculations were done in the 1980s for an all-out nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but a decade ago a team led by professors Alan Robock and Brian Toon of Rutgers and Colorado Universities redid the calculations for an Indo-Pak nuclear war on fast modern computers with a huge data-processing capacity. The results were horrifying. Several hundred burning cities in India and Pakistan provide the initial boost of soot into the stratosphere over South Asia as before, but we now know that prevailing upper-altitude winds would carry most of it east and north until it blankets most of the northern temperate zone as well. Countries south of the equator would fare somewhat better, but countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia would not be spared. Famine conditions would prevail worldwide for about 10 years. Go on worrying about Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Taiwan and so on, but the big threat is a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Gwynne Dyer's new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World's Climate Engineers.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign
Not for the first time, JD Vance, America's outspoken vice-president, has made a public fool of himself. He insisted on visiting Greenland despite unequivocal statements by the territory's leaders and Denmark's government that he was not invited and not welcome. Vance's trip was confined to a remote Arctic base, where he briefly spoke to a few Americans. Plans to make a wider tour and speak to Greenlanders were cancelled – because Greenlanders did not want to speak to him. Such hostility is entirely understandable, given the repeated, provocative and disrespectful declarations by Vance's boss, Donald Trump, that the US plans to annex Greenland and may do so illegally and by force. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Election results this month showed the vast majority of local people back expanded self-rule or outright independence. They do not want to be Americans. In a feeble attempt to justify what is, in effect, a Putin-style bid to seize another country's sovereign territory, Vance claimed Denmark had failed to protect Greenland from Chinese and Russian threats – but did not produce any evidence. He also failed to explain why, if such dangers exist, the US, which like Denmark is a Nato member, has not honoured its legal obligation to develop a 'collective capacity to resist armed attack' under the 1951 US-Denmark 'Defence of Greenland' treaty. Trump, too, has been prating about Greenland's importance for 'world peace'. It's true the Arctic region is seeing increased great power competition, partly because climate change renders it more accessible. Yet Trump, in another echo of Ukraine, appears more motivated by desire to control Greenland's untapped mineral wealth. As in Gaza and Panama, his main interest is not security and justice but geopolitical, financial and commercial advantage. Insulting plans to enrol Canada as the 51st state reflect another Trump preoccupation: a return to an earlier age of aggressive US territorial expansionism. Vance in Greenland may have preferred a woolly hat to a pith helmet, but his imperialist intentions were unmistakable. Yet despite his frosty reception, he was perhaps glad to escape Washington, where he and his travelling companion, US national security adviser Mike Waltz, are feeling the heat for another scandalous piece of foolishness: the Signal message group security breach. This concerns the inadvertent inclusion of a leading journalist in an online discussion by Vance, Waltz and senior officials of real-time US bombing attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen. This breach, by itself, is bad enough. It might have endangered US pilots and wrecked the Houthi operation. The discussion, on an insecure platform, could have been, and probably was overheard by the Russians and others. Yet its contents, which have now been published in full, also include rude and mocking comments by Vance and Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, about European allies. Their shaming, ignorant exchanges dramatically and damagingly highlight the rapid deterioration in transatlantic ties since Trump took office. Like the Greenland incursion, the official response to the Signal scandal speaks volumes about the true nature of the Trump administration. Trump's shabby instinct was to deny all responsibility, minimise its importance, denigrate the journalist and dismiss the whole thing as a hoax. Hegseth's claim that no classified information was released is an obvious, stupid lie, as the transcript demonstrates. There is huge hypocrisy in the refusal of Waltz, Vance and Hegseth to even contemplate resignation, when such a blunder by a lower-ranking official would certainly have led to the sack. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Above all, the hubris, arrogance, amateurishness and irresponsibility revealed by both episodes is truly shocking – and a chilling warning to the world.
Fox News
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
TIME highlights illegal immigrant detained by ICE, who was a previous TIME100 listee
TIME magazine reported one of its 2017 TIME100 listees, an illegal immigrant who crossed into the United States on Christmas Eve in 1997, has been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "In 1997, Jeanette Vizguerra left Mexico City for Colorado, where she became a janitor and immigration reform advocate," the Wednesday article in TIME read. "Twenty years later, she was one of the most influential people in the world." On Monday, Vizguerra was reportedly arrested by ICE at a Target where she was employed in the Denver area. She was known to stay in churches to claim shelter from ICE enforcement, a policy from former President Biden's administration that allowed illegal immigrants to stay in churches or schools to avoid arrest, which the Trump administration revoked on Jan. 21, 2025. In TIME's report on Vizguerra's arrest, it quoted the 2017 TIME100 list profile of Vizguerra that was written by actress America Ferrera. "Jeanette moved to the U.S. to be a janitor, working as an outspoken union organizer and building her own company before becoming an advocate for immigration reform—a bold and risky thing for an undocumented immigrant," Ferrera's tribute to Vizguerra read. "The current Administration has scapegoated immigrants, scaring Americans into believing that undocumented people like Jeanette are criminals. She came to this country not to rape, murder or sell drugs, but to create a better life for her family… This is not a crime. This is the American Dream," the 2017 article continued, referring to President Donald Trump's first term in office. In addition to crossing into the United States illegally, Vizguerra was reportedly stopped by police in 2009 and charged with driving without a license, insurance, or registration, but those charges were eventually dismissed. In 2012, Vizguerra "self-removed" to Mexico, before illegally reentering the United States and was arrested April 22, 2013, by the U.S. Border Patrol. In a post on X on Wednesday, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston called Vizguerra "a mom of American citizens, a Target employee, a nonprofit leader and an immigration reform advocate with no violent criminal history." He then blasted the Trump administration, saying, "Her detainment is not about safety. This is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents." Fox News Digital reached out to ICE, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado, Laura Lichter, who is reportedly representing Vizguerra, as well as Johnston, but did not immediately receive a response.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jeanette Vizguerra cannot be deported before hearing, federal judge in Colorado orders
Jeanette Vizguerra speaks at Colorado Capitol in Denver on Feb. 3, 2025 for the national "A Day Without Immigrants" demonstration, a response to President Donald Trump's policies that target the immigrant community. (Sara Wilson/Colorado Newsline) A federal judge on Friday ordered that immigration officials cannot deport Jeanette Vizguerra, the Denver immigration rights activist arrested earlier this week, before a hearing in the case scheduled for next week. Vizguerra sometimes goes by Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez. 'Given the fact that Ms. Vizguerra-Ramirez was recently taken into ICE custody, it does not appear that there will be any prejudice to Respondents by maintaining the status quo pending resolution of this action, particularly given the expedited manner by which this action is proceeding,' the order from United States District Judge Nina Wang said. A hearing is set for the afternoon of March 28. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Vizguerra was taken into custody on March 17, and her lawyers immediately filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Respondents listed in the petition include local immigration officials, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. That petition argues that Vizguerra's detainment is illegal, because there is not a current and valid order of removal against her. Wang wrote that the reinstatement of a removal order from years ago against Vizguerra, who is originally from Mexico, is 'procedurally flawed.' A deadline for the government's lawyers to explain why they detained Vizguerra and want to deport her is set for Monday. Vizguerra has lived in the United States since 1997. She was convicted in 2009 for driving without a license and not having car insurance, which set off her struggle against deportation. She gained national attention in 2017 when she sought sanctuary in a Denver church to avoid deportation during the first Trump administration. Her arrest prompted deep criticism from local Democratic elected officials, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who called the arrest 'Putin-style' political persecution. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
