Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. July 23, 2021 The Northern Hemisphere's summer of extreme weather continues, as flooding this week in Zhengzhou, China displaced more than 1.2 million people, the South China Morning Post reports. The city's weather bureau called it a "once in a thousand years" deluge, with a year's worth of rain falling in just days, Holly Chik and Maryann Xue write for the paper; the story of rail passengers trapped underground added a harrowing detail, but at the Financial Times, Christian Shepherd writes that as the death toll has climbed to 33, the flooding has stoked a debate about whether cities are ready for the effects of a hotter planet.
It's just one among a handful of major weather events provoking worry about what's to come—and predictions that climate could shake up politics now and in the future.
Extreme heat waves in the Pacific Northwest and the Western US made headlines, and The Guardian's Jonathan Watts reports that the Siberian city of Yakutsk may be suffering "one of the world's worst ever air pollution events," due to toxic smoke from nearby wildfires in the subarctic forest. But the most significant event may have come last week, when heavy rains caused flash flooding that killed at least 195 in Germany and Belgium, producing stunning images of destruction.
At Der Spiegel, an octuple-bylined story suggests the disaster will come to dominate Sept. 26 elections that will replace outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel (who has led the country since 2005)—in which the Greens and their top candidate, Annalena Baerbock, have already been seen as contenders to lead the world's fourth largest economy.
"Perhaps at the end of Germany's current election campaign, the candidates will be asked this: Where were you on Thursday, July 15? What did you do, what didn't you do, and what did you say?" the eight authors write. "Perhaps this Thursday will go down as the day that changed everything … Perhaps this Thursday was the day the real campaigning began." Anyone wanting to fixate on the minor scandals of this campaign season "after the images of the flooded Ahr valley, after dozens of dead, missing and destroyed lives, after the images from a German disaster area, will have to ask him or herself whether they have lost their mind." In May, the World Anti-Doping Agency reported that testing of athletes was "quickly returning to normal" after being disrupted by Covid-19, but The Economist writes that even after successive rounds of global doping scandals, the Tokyo Olympics are unlikely to be free of unnatural performance enhancement, as estimates range as to how rife sport, generally, is with doping.
"As Kyle Chalmers, an Australian swimmer who won the 100 metres freestyle at the 2016 summer Olympics in Brazil, put it last year, 'I can probably not trust half the guys I'm competing against,'" the magazine writes. "No one knows how many athletes still dope. But a glance at the headlines suggests it is far from rare." The bottom line, as The Economist presents it, is that testing is iffy to begin with (given the natural diversity in athletes' biochemistries) and difficult to maintain with integrity, given bad incentives surrounding money and national glory—and given that athletes and scientists continue to innovate ways to boost performance while evading detection. The pandemic didn't help, but the problems run deeper. Afghanistan's Neighbors Brace for Impact As US and NATO forces leave Afghanistan, two pieces in Foreign Policy indicate that Central Asia, Russia, and China are looking warily on the potential fallout.
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan all have cause for concern, Amy Mackinnon suggests, while former US ambassador to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan George Krol tells her that Central Asia is "basically the soft underbelly of the Russian Federation," which has its own concerns about Islamist terrorism.
China, meanwhile, has benefited from the US and NATO presence as it seeks infrastructure contracts and views Afghanistan as potentially fertile ground for its Belt and Road Initiative, Haiyun Ma and I-wei Jennifer Chang write. While the Taliban have endorsed Chinese investment and have promised safety for Chinese workers, Ma and Chang write that the US and NATO withdrawal will likely make Beijing uneasy. What to Do About Ransomware As ransomware—the tactic of infecting a computer system, locking its users out, and demanding ransom payments—proliferates, cyber watchers have noted a few basic conundrums over how to respond.
For one, some have pointed out, it may or may not always be legal to pay the ransom. In a report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Rachael Falk and Anne-Louise Brown note that Australian companies operate in uncertainty as to whether laws prohibit them from paying. The US pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline, for instance, paid a $4.4 million ransom after this year's widely publicized hack, but cybersecurity company Fortinet advises that "the U.S. Treasury warned that facilitating the payment of ransoms on behalf of cyber victims could result in legal consequences, as it sets a bad precedent for other cyber criminals."
As with just about everything, the pandemic seems to have made things worse: In a February report on the global threat landscape, Fortinet observed that widespread remote work had created new opportunities for hackers to sneak into companies' systems, via softer targets. Meanwhile, the ASPI report notes, guidance can be lacking, as Australian cyber authorities issue threat updates, but they're "quite technical," which isn't always great for small and medium-sized businesses.
Unsurprisingly, the proposed solutions are myriad and holistic. Policies can be clarified and coordination improved, the ASPI report suggests, while Fortinet recommends "board-level" conversations about best practices and working toward a culture of cyber safety. |
