Author: Mr. Lakhaney

TOK Teacher

After War Between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Peace Sees Winners and Losers Swap Places

August 10, 2021

Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived side by side when both countries were part of the Soviet Union, but century-old ethnic enmity reignited when communism collapsed. Nagorno-Karabakh, mainly ethnic Armenian, ended up as part of Azerbaijan. Armenia won a war over the territory in the early 1990s that killed some 20,000 people and displaced a million, mostly Azerbaijanis.

Azerbaijanis were expelled not only from Nagorno-Karabakh itself but also from seven surrounding districts, including Kelbajar, that had been mostly inhabited by Azerbaijanis. The entire region became the internationally unrecognized, ethnic Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Azerbaijan’s desire to return its citizens who had been displaced from their homes became a driving force in its politics.

Azerbaijan’s drones owned the battlefield in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of warfare

August 10, 2021

Drone strikes — targeting Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh soldiers and destroying tanks, artillery and air defense systems — provided a huge advantage for Azerbaijan in the 44-day war and offered the clearest evidence yet of how battlefields are being transformed by unmanned attack drones rolling off assembly lines around the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/nagorno-karabkah-drones-azerbaijan-aremenia/2020/11/11/441bcbd2-193d-11eb-8bda-814ca56e138b_story.html

‘It’s cultural genocide’: inside the fight to stop a pipeline on tribal lands

August 10, 2021

The Line 3 route traverses land that Native American pipeline opponents say is protected by US treaties with Ojibwe nations

There are numerous sites in Minnesota, along the new Line 3 route, where water protectors have set up camp. Much of the route goes through tribal lands, as well as Minnesota’s iron range and areas popular for recreation, including hunting, fishing and people enjoying the outdoors.

It is a lush, wooded part of the state, thick with birch and pine trees, pristine lakes, rolling creeks and lakes filled with wild rice, an agricultural product that is historically significant to the Ojibwe.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/19/line-3-pipeline-ojibwe-tribal-lands

There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way.

August 10, 2021

Dozens of countries are backing an effort that would protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have been disregarded, or worse, in the past.

Nature is healthier on the more than quarter of the world’s lands that Indigenous people manage or own, according to several scientific studies. Indigenous-managed lands in Brazil, Canada and Australia have as much or more biodiversity than lands set aside for conservation by federal and other governments, researchers have found.

China’s Belt and Road: Implications for the United States

August 10, 2021

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy undertaking and the world’s largest infrastructure program, poses a significant challenge to U.S. economic, political, climate change, security, and global health interests. Since BRI’s launch in 2013, Chinese banks and companies have financed and built everything from power plants, railways, highways, and ports to telecommunications infrastructure, fiber-optic cables, and smart cities around the world. If implemented sustainably and responsibly, BRI has the potential to meet long-standing developing country needs and spur global economic growth. To date, however, the risks for both the United States and recipient countries raised by BRI’s implementation considerably outweigh its benefits.

https://www.cfr.org/report/chinas-belt-and-road-implications-for-the-united-states/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tf-bri&utm_source=tf-announcement

What 100 contracts reveal about China’s development lending ($)

August 10, 2021

Loans are not obviously predatory; secrecy is sometimes a condition

China insists it is helping poor countries follow in its own debt-financed footsteps, offering the kind of patient capital other lenders are now too wary to provide. China’s critics instead accuse it of drenching countries in red ink, then grabbing strategic assets, such as ports or mines, as collateral when a country defaults.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/03/31/what-100-contracts-reveal-about-chinas-development-lending

Planet Money Podcast Episode 755: The Phone At The End Of The World

August 10, 2021

Tierra del Fuego is home to penguins, grey skies and brutal winds. It’s the last stop for ships before making the final leg to Antarctica.

Today on the show, how a town at the ends of the earth wound up making Blackberry phones, and what happened to when a charismatic president launched a big plan to create jobs and boost manufacturing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episode-755-the-phone-at-the-end-of-the-world

🎧 When Foreign Aid Fails

August 10, 2021

Foreign aid is meant to alleviate suffering and help poor countries develop. But according to William Easterly, a professor of Economics at NYU, it often does the opposite. Instead of helping countries develop, it wastes resources or makes it harder for them to make economic progress. And far from advancing democracy and human rights, it often helps autocrats to stay in power.

In this week’s episode of The Good Fight podcast, Yascha Mounk and William Easterly discuss how political considerations misdirect foreign aid, whether the “development industrial complex” ignores the human rights of the poor, and why foreign aid so often gives a lifeline to authoritarian leaders around the globe. 

https://www.persuasion.community/p/-when-foreign-aid-fails-democracy

Foreign Affairs Backstory on Trade and Worker Protections

August 10, 2021

It has become an axiom in American politics that workers have suffered at the hands of globalization. As economic integration connected the world, opportunities dried up at home. “A responsible policy would capture the gains of free trade but make up for domestic losses,” Gordon Hanson writes. “In recent years, the United States has done neither.”

https://link.foreignaffairs.com/view/59a88934b84a99d70c8b567ee2lrr.nkg/b9bbd09d

Bretton Woods Revisited

August 10, 2021

Good history of the US Dollar system and its implications

The way the modern system works is that money has network effects, and the US is a large economy with an extraordinarily well-developed financial sector, so any asset is priced in dollars by default. Bilateral trade between non-dollar, non-Euro countries countries is usually done in dollars, so a 1% increase in the value of the dollar leads to a 0.6-0.8% change in trade between all other countries.

https://diff.substack.com/p/bretton-woods-revisited