politicodiary

In a strange discovery, it has been ascertained that the drones employed to set an attack on the Iraqi PM were actually locally made. This has been determined by a top security official. The actual infiltrator has not been pinpointed though. Hours after the attempt on his life, Iraqi Security forces had to actually close the heavily fortified Green Zone as they tightened security measures hours after the assassination attempt on the prime minister in Baghdad. Mustafa Al Kadhimi was attacked by two drones which were apparently home grown according to National Security Adviser Qassem Al Araji . The attack was carried out inside Baghdad's high-security Green Zone. The PM has asked for no assumptions to be made and that thorough investigations should ascertain the origins of the drone attacks that could have been fatal. The attack against Mr. Al Kadhimi came amid rising tensions over the results of the elections on October 10. Preliminary results of that poll saw the Conquest (...

The prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison has taken the bull by its horns, by challenging Facebook Inc to back the anti-troll defamation law. But there are chanced that Facebook will quit Australia at together. If this happens, then Morrison says that if the social media giant does so, over laws holding it liable for defamation on its platform, it shows that they have no interest in making the online world safe. The global social media companies have threatened to quit Australia early this year in a discussion over laws making them pay media outlets for content appearing on their websites. Australian government wants that global internet companies to share the identity of the people with anonymous accounts, in case there is a charge of defamation on such account by other person. The purpose is to bring the internet companies accountable for the content on their platforms. Failure to provide the required information, it must assume legal liability. The proposal is also to make soc...

  The new variant of Corona virus is now being called Omicron and it is being suspected that it is resistant to the current lot of vaccines doing rounds worldwide. However pharmaceutical companies are now determined to improvise the current vaccine to create a shield of protection against the new fast mutating variant. Named by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the health organization says that classified it as a highly transmissible virus of concern, the same category that includes the predominant delta variant, which is still a scourge driving higher cases of sickness and death in Europe and parts of the United States. The new variant started its spread from South Africa, due to which UK has already banned travel from four of its countries. The actual risks are still to be ascertained about the new highly infectious fast mutating variant. But early evidence suggests it carries an increased risk of reinfection compared with other highly transmissible variants. That mean...

A post Merkel era is going to be a new birth for Germany- growing up from being protected and hand held from running the show on your own, for a change.... Termed as the ‘traffic light coalition’, there is a wave of change to see, with the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) having agreed to form a new government headed by the SDP’s Olaf Scholz. It is going to be a rough ride- with all three parties having to come to a common ground and footing. While the Greens are hugely focused on the environment, the FDP is looking at pushing for its agenda of a free market orthodoxy, and the SDP is obsessively for redistributive social democracy. Will they find a common ground to work on after a successful 16 years of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) dominating the highest levels of Germany politics? Time will tell! One can also look at the way all three are functioning vis-a-vie the distribution of ministries is concerned. It s...

Polarization has swept Chile in strange ways, leaving it only two strangely different candidates to be selected towards the first-round of presidential election. Chile has seen a lot of change- from complete conservatism to now same sex marriage coming through. Speaking to a journalist who wrote a column over Chile’s crumbling political powers, Michael Shifter, president of Inter-American Dialogue, said, “In Chile, I think you see what is now the established trend in Latin America — the complete crumbling of political parties with any kind of moderate centrist option. It’s being replaced by high levels of political uncertainty and enormous fragmentation.” Between the older José Antonio Kast and the bearded millennial leader Gabriel Boric, the former seems to be winning more brownie points. Kast speaks for an anti-migrant sentiment, and has impressed the police. The culture wars propelling Kast to the presidency in Chile are similar to the themes that took Trump to the White House...

World Health Organisation’s special envoys are now going all out to gather support for a pandemic preparedness treaty. Owing to a fifth wave of high infections and transmission, several countries are still looking at ways of getting back on their feet. It has been two years of combatting the Covid-19 virus.   Maximum deaths are coming through in the low- and middle-income countries. This has been communicated by special envoys appointed by the WHO. The Director-General appointed six Special Envoys on Covid-19 on February 21, 2020. The intend was to provide strategic advice and high-level political advocacy and engagement in different parts of the world.   The Special Envoys will work in close collaboration with WHO Regional Directors and country offices to coordinate the global response to COVID-19. In a specialized report given by the special envoys, it states, “The trends are seen both in nations with adequate doses of vaccine, as well as in those with very tight sup...

China is making good use of Cambodia in every which way. Earlier it was bringing down the US build facilities without notifying or discussing the same with Washington. Then it was constructing Chinese facilities on the same structures. It seems China is expanding its reach and the Cambodian PM had nothing to say but that they had a right to protect their own turf without having to give an explanation to Washington.   Now, it seems, Cambodia is being used as a vaccine storage facility by China too. Strangely, almost all of the vaccines used to date in Cambodia are Chinese (Sinovac and Sinopharm). Political analysts believe there are political, diplomatic and financial reasons behind this decision.Indeed, it isn’t wrong to say that vaccine diplomacy has been aptly given free rein in the kingdom of Cambodia. Washington has had an eye on Cambodia ever since it razed the US facility at its Ream Naval Base. There are reasons that it feels that Prime Minister Hun Sen has sought to posit...