Day: August 26, 2019

Indonesia’s president announced Monday that the country’s capital will move from overcrowded, sinking and polluted Jakarta to a site in sparsely populated East Kalimantan province on Borneo island, known for rainforests and orangutans.

President Joko Widodo said intense studies over the past three years had resulted in the choice of the location on the eastern side of Borneo island.
 
The new capital city, which has not yet been named, will be in the middle of the vast archipelago nation and already has relatively complete infrastructure because it is near the cities of Balikpapan and Samarinda, Widodo said.

He said the burden has been become too heavy on Jakarta on Java island as the center of government, finance, business, trade and services as well as the location of the country’s largest airport and seaport.

Widodo said the decision was made not to move the capital elsewhere on Java because the country’s wealth and people are highly concentrated there and should be spread out.

Currently 54% of the country’s nearly 270 million people live on Java, the country’s most densely populated area.

“We couldn’t continue to allow the burden on Jakarta and Java island to increase in terms of population density,” Widodo said at a news conference in Jakarta’s presidential palace. “Economic disparities between Java and elsewhere would also increase”

In an interview with The Associated Press last month, Widodo said he wants to separate the center of government from the country’s business and economic center in Jakarta.

Jakarta is an archetypical Asian mega-city with 10 million people, or 30 million including those in its greater metropolitan area. It is prone to earthquakes and flooding and is rapidly sinking due to uncontrolled extraction of ground water. The ground water is highly contaminated as are its rivers. Congestion is estimated to cost the economy $6.5 billion a year.

Mineral-rich East Kalimantan was once almost completely covered by rainforests, but illegal logging has removed many of its original growth. It is home to only 3.5 million people and is surrounded by Kutai National Park, known for orangutans and other primates and mammals.

Widodo said the relocation of the capital to a 180,000-hectare (444,780-acre) site will take up a decade and cost as much as 466 trillion rupiah ($32.5 billion), of which 19% will come from the state budget and the rest will be funded by cooperation between the government and business entities and by direct investment by state-run companies and the private sector.

He said the studies determined that the best site is between two districts, North Penajam Paser and Kutai Kertanegara, an area that has minimal risk of disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, volcanic eruptions or landslides in the seismically active nation.
Indonesia’s founding father and first president, Sukarno, once planned to relocate the country’s capital to Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan province.

Infrastructure improvement has been Widodo’s signature policy and helped him win a second term in April elections.

Decades of discussions about building a new capital on Borneo island moved forward in April when Widodo approved a general relocation plan. He appealed for support for the move in an annual national address on the eve of Indonesia’s independence day on Aug. 16.

He said Monday that his government is still drafting a law on the new capital which will need to be approved by Parliament.

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French President Emmanuel Macron condemned on Monday “extraordinarily rude” comments made about his wife Brigitte by his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro.

“He has made some extraordinarily rude comments about my wife,” Macron said at a press conference when asked to react to statements about him by the Brazilian government.

“What can I say? It’s sad. It’s sad for him firstly, and for Brazilians,” he added.

On Sunday, a Bolsonaro supporter posted a message on Facebook mocking the appearance of Brigitte Macron and comparing her unfavorably with Brazil’s first lady Michelle Bolsonaro.

“Now you understand why Macron is persecuting Bolsonaro?” he wrote next to an unflattering picture of Brigitte Macron, 65, who is 28 years older than Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle.

Bolsonaro replied on Facebook: “Do not humiliate the guy, ha ha.”

“I think Brazilian women will probably be ashamed to read that from their president,” Macron said. “I think that Brazilians, who are a great people, will probably be ashamed to see this behavior…

“And as I feel friendship and respect towards the Brazilian people, I hope that they will very soon have a president who behaves in the right way.”

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The Democratic Republic of Congo has announced a coalition government.

The announcement comes eight months after President Felix Tshisekedi won a long-delayed presidential election.

“The government is finally here,” Prime Minister Sylvestre Ilunga Ilukamba said Monday.  “The president has signed the decree and we will begin work soon.”

Under the power-sharing deal, 23 posts are going to members of Tshisekedi’s Direction for Change, while the remaining 42 will be filled by members of former president Joseph Kabila’s Common Front for Congo.

The December vote was marred by disorganization at many polling stations, including missing voter rolls and malfunctioning electronic voting machines that pushed the vote well into nighttime hours, forcing election officials to conduct their activities by flashlight. A election observer mission set up by the Catholic Church said it had received at least 544 reports of malfunctioning voting machines.

Violence also overshadowed the vote, with four people killed in eastern South Kivu, including a police officer and an election official, over accusations of voter fraud.

The election to replace outgoing President Joseph Kabila was originally set to take place in 2016, but was called off when Kabila refused to step down after the end of his mandate.  Kabila had ruled the DRC since his father’s assassination in 2001.

The election was initially scheduled for December 23, but was postponed by a week because of a warehouse fire in the capital Kinshasha earlier in the month that destroyed thousands of voting machines.

Election officials also decided to postpone the election in three cities until March.  The eastern cities of Beni and Butembo were stricken with Ebola.  The western city of Yumbi was experiencing ethnic violence.  The move to delay the vote in the three locations affected more than one million voters.

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A new book by a noted historian attempts to show how expanding American democracy hurt Native Americans in the early days of the nation and how tribes viewed the young United States as an entity seeking to erase them from existence.

University of Oregon history professor Jeffrey Ostler’s just-released “Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas” argues that the emergence of American democracy depended on the taking of Native lands.

Leaders of the fledgling nation also felt that removing Native Americans from the ancestral land — by any means necessary — was key to allowing an expanding and poorer white population to move west, the historian writes.

American Woman Promotes Philanthropy through Tourism

For Betty Fullagar an American woman from California,It started as a safari to
South Africa. She had
never been on the African continent before.  

 The tour
guide took the group to a village ?that you will not find in any tourist brochure,?
she says. It was a poor, remote village known as Boxahuku.

Ostler said he based his book on 30 years of research by other scholars in the field of Native American studies, but wanted to do a large survey of how tribes saw the looming U.S. threat.

“If I ask my students, ‘Why did we have an American Revolution?’ They’ll say ‘Taxation without representation,‘” Ostler said. “But a very significant issue among the leaders of the American Revolution was that the British were blocking the colonists’ access to western lands.”

Future President Thomas Jefferson would even write from France that the U.S. needed a constant supply of land to grow while ignoring the people who already lived there, Ostler said.

Ostler’s book is the first of two volumes on Native American history.

The book comes as scholars and writers are challenging narratives around American history and how it hurt people of color. These efforts are drawing criticism from some conservative columnists.

Most recently, The New York Times Magazine published a series of essays called The 1619 Project earlier this month around the 400th anniversary marking the beginning of American slavery. The writers argue that African Americans were the true “perfecters of this democracy” in the U.S. by continually fighting for the nation’s ideals of equality and against the legacy of slavery.

Maine Latest to Ditch Columbus Day, Honor Native Americans

Maine is joining a handful of states that have renamed Columbus Day to honor Native Americans.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said Friday that “there is power in a name and who we choose to honor” before signing a law that drops the state’s recognition of the federal holiday.

The October holiday will now be called Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Maine.

A small but growing number of states, including New Mexico and Vermont, have moved to swap celebrating explorer Christopher Columbus for a tribute to Native Americans.

Demands to do away with Columbus Day date to the 1970s.

Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby called Ostler’s book an exciting work in Native American history. Jacoby said it would counter the romantic story portrayed in such recent books like David McCullough’s “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West.”

Historians, scholars and activists took to social media accused McCullough of romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.

“Ostler’s book is very different and gives a much more complex and accurate story about what happened,” Jacoby said.

Ostler said he is working on finishing his second volume of “Surviving Genocide” which will cover the how Native Americans responded to attempts to remove and kill them in New Mexico, Arizona and the Pacific Northwest.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military on Monday to cut fuel transfers to Gaza in half, in response to rocket attacks from the coastal strip, raising tensions along Israel’s southern border in addition to those stemming from a renewed threat from the north amid reported Israeli strikes on Iranian targets in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

Netanyahu also instructed his staff to prepare plans for building a new neighborhood in a West Bank settlement near where a teenage Israeli girl was killed in an explosion last week. Israel said the blast was a Palestinian attack.

Israel’s Gaza Blockade Under Scrutiny After Latest Violence

For 12 years, Israel has maintained a blockade over the Gaza Strip, seeking to weaken the territory’s militant Hamas rulers. And for 12 years, Hamas has remained firmly in power, developing a thriving homegrown weapons industry along the way.

This weekend’s violence, the worst in a string of flare-ups since a 2014 war, provided the latest illustration of the limitations of the blockade and fueled calls Monday in Israel for a rethinking of the longstanding policy, which many see as ineffective and even counterproductive.

“Israel, similar to the leaders in Gaza, must look forward.

The flurry of activity comes amid a massive manhunt by Israeli troops for the 17-year-old’s killers and dire warnings from Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader of an imminent attack, just weeks before an unprecedented repeat Israeli election.

Netanyahu ordered the Gaza measure to take effect immediately and until further notice. The cut is expected to exacerbate the already dire flow of electricity in the impoverished coastal strip. The move follows airstrikes the military carried out overnight in the Gaza Strip, after three rockets were launched from the territory into southern Israel.

The military said the airstrikes included one on the office of a Hamas commander in the northern Gaza Strip. There were no reports of casualties.

Air raid sirens warning of an incoming attack wailed late on Sunday during an outdoor music festival in the Israeli border town of Sderot, sending panicked revelers scurrying for cover. The military said two rockets were intercepted by its missile defense system.

The rocket attack was the latest in a recent uptick following a relative lull that has threatened to unleash another round of fighting along the volatile Gaza-Israel border.

Palestinian Killed at Israel-Gaza Border During Weekly Demonstration

A Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire at a weekly demonstration along the Gaza-Israeli border fence, according to Palestinian officials.

Gaza’s health ministry said Friday that a 24-year old Palestinian was killed during the border protest and 30 others were wounded by gunfire.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops opened fire when some of the protesters approached the fortified fence.

The violence was the first escalation after a cease-fire deal ended last weekend’s fighting, which was the worst in several years.

Israel accused the Iranian-backed militant Islamic Jihad group of orchestrating the rocket attacks, as part of what it considers Iran’s region-wide campaign of chaos.

“Hostile elements near and far, attempting to ignite a war, are dragging you into violence and destroying the stability and security of your home,” wrote Maj. Gen. Kamil Abu Rukun, the coordinator of government activities in the territories, in a direct message to Gaza residents in Arabic on his Facebook page.

Gaza’s Hamas rulers say that Israel’s slow-moving approach to implementing an unofficial Egyptian-brokered truce aimed at alleviating the enclave’s dire living conditions could lead to further escalation.

Israeli Jets Strike Hamas Bases in Gaza

Exchange, in response to rocket fired into Israel, is the first since May cease-fire

The continued impasse, in which Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has been highlighted by the occasional outburst of violence, has also begun to spark a different tone in Israel, where critics have been advocating for a stronger military response alongside a need to address the civilian needs of Gaza’s impoverished 2 million residents.

“Israel’s strategy over the past few years has been to maintain the situation as it is,” retired general Guy Tzur told Israel’s Army Radio. “Therefore we are in a strategy of ‘rounds’ (of violence) and this does nothing to change the situation … we need to establish deterrence on the one hand and provide serious humanitarian relief on the other.”

3 Palestinians Killed By Israeli Forces at Gaza Border

The incident happened just hours after three rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel

In the West Bank, the search was still on for the attackers behind the deadly blast Friday at a water spring that killed Rina Shnerb, 17, near the settlement of Dolev, and wounded her brother and father. As politicians paid the family condolence visits, Netanyahu announced he had ordered his staff to prepare plans for building a new neighborhood in Dolev that would have about 300 residential housing units.

Dolev is a small settlement northwest of Jerusalem and, if approved, the new housing plans would herald a significant boost in its population. Most of the world considers settlements to be illegal and Netanyahu is typically careful in announcing such plans. But with Sept. 17 elections looming, he is wary of losing the backing of hard-liners who supports such measures.

“We will deepen our roots and strike at our enemies. We will continue to strengthen and develop the settlements,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

The flare-ups come as Israel has also dramatically stepped up its campaign against the growing Iranian military activity in the region. In recent days, Israel has acknowledged attacking targets near the Syrian capital, Damascus, to thwart what it called an imminent Iranian drone strike against Israel.

Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria in recent years, most of them aimed at arms shipments believed to be headed from Iran to its Shiite proxy Hezbollah. But direct clashes between Israel and Iranian forces have been rare, and Israel has typically been wary of publicly acknowledging them for fear of sparking a fierce response that could deteriorate into all-out war.

Lebanese officials reported that Israeli warplanes also attacked a Palestinian base in eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria early Monday, a day after an alleged Israeli drone crashed in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut while another exploded and crashed nearby.

In recent days, U.S. officials have said that Israeli strikes have also hit Iranian targets in Iraq.

Israel Security Cabinet was convening Monday to discuss the next steps in the various fronts the country currently faces.

Israel considers Iran to be its greatest enemy and has repeatedly vowed that it will not allow Iran to establish a permanent military presence in Syria, where Iranian troops have been supporting President Bashar Assad during the country’s eight-year civil war.

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