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China has a sweeping vision for its remote steppes, Venezuela’s president offers to negotiate, and President Trump feuds with his intelligence chiefs. Here’s the latest:
Turning the middle of nowhere into a global economic hub
The barely inhabited steppes of Central Asia — near the one point on earth farthest from a sea or ocean — are in for a transmogrification.
The Chinese government has decided to shape the region that straddles its border with Kazakhstan into the control center of its vast, trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative. A village there named Khorgos, which its boosters say is poised to become the next Dubai, will soon be the world’s largest dry port — an inland shipping and logistics hub.
Background: Beijing has embarked on a mammoth project to link China to the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Europe with a latticed network of trains, highways and shipping corridors. Critics have described it as “debt trap” diplomacy and a new kind of colonialism.
One sticking point: Beijing’s detention of hundreds of thousands of Uighur, Kazakhs and other minorities in internment camps in the nearby Xinjiang region has not helped its standing with the Kazakh government.
Maduro offers an olive branch, while his police crack the whip
As protests broke out in Venezuela again, President Nicolás Maduro said he was open to sitting down with the opposition, but it was unclear whether the offer was genuine or just a delaying tactic.
In an interview with a Russian news agency, Mr. Maduro also rejected calls for a new election. His re-election last year has been widely disputed, and the U.S. and a number of European countries have called for a fresh vote.
In a video, Mr. Maduro warned the U.S. that military intervention in his country “would lead to a Vietnam worse than they can imagine.”
Background: Over the last week, Juan Guaidó, the leader of the opposition, has received growing recognition around the world as interim president. The U.S., in an effort to oust Mr. Maduro, has imposed harsh oil sanctions that economists worry could unravel a Venezuelan economy already in vertiginous decline.
On the streets: Mr. Maduro has hit back viciously, human rights groups and others say, dispatching security forces to crush dissent in poor neighborhoods that have turned on his government. The deadly operations have alarmed even some of the president’s traditional supporters. And his reliance on a special police unit — relatively new and shrouded in secrecy — may be a sign of disarray and waning loyalty in the military.
Another angle: Russia has been supporting Mr. Maduro from the sidelines and directing opprobrium at the U.S. It is unlikely to do more than that, our Moscow bureau chief writes.
In Opinion: Mr. Guaidó compares the movement he is leading against Mr. Maduro to the uprising that unseated the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958, and writes that “the military’s withdrawal of support from Mr. Maduro is crucial to enabling a change in government.”
An attempt to slow America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan
Unnerved by fears of a rushed American deal with Taliban insurgents, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan sent a letter to President Trump offering to lower the costs of keeping U.S. troops in the country. The letter suggested reducing the number of American troops to as few as 3,000.
Context: U.S. diplomats and Taliban representatives both say they have made significant progress in peace talks that offer a path for America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. But the Afghan government has been left out of the loop, frustrating Mr. Ghani. Afghan officials say they see their worst fear coming to pass — a Trump administration with little regard for what withdrawal means for Afghanistan’s 35 million people.
But many members of the Afghan political elite support an American exit, isolating Mr. Ghani.
Warming oceans could be killing off starfish
A new study has found that rising ocean temperatures correlate with the widespread deaths of the sunflower star, a species of starfish native to the Pacific Ocean.
Details: From 2013 to 2015, the Pacific became unusually warm. At the same time, millions of starfish started succumbing to a wasting disease. The study found that there was a correlation between the two events.
Background: The ocean, which absorbs 90 percent of atmospheric heat trapped by greenhouse gases, has been warming faster than previously thought, which in turn is killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and creating more extreme weather patterns.
U.S.-Mexico border: A Times correspondent and photographer are on the 19th day of their drive along the roughly 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. In the remote, tiny Mexican town of Boquillas del Carmen, they found tourism had dried up because of the partial government shutdown that, at least temporarily, just ended.
The Netherlands: A church’s nonstop 96-day service came to an end after its organizers received confirmation from the government that a family of refugees sheltering inside the church would no longer face immediate deportation from the Netherlands — although their fate remains in limbo.
Brexit: The stickiest wicket is the so-called Irish backstop, a scheme for averting a physical border ever falling in Northern Ireland. The problem may not have a solution. Meanwhile, Parliament is looking worse for wear after this week giving Prime Minister Theresa May a mandate to do what is likely impossible: renegotiate her plan with the E.U. If Britain crashes out without a deal, food retailers warn they’ll be the first to feel it.
E.U.: The churning chaos of Brexit has brought member states closer together and widely silenced populists who had only recently been calling for their own countries to leave the union.
The first pairing of “polar” and “vortex” is widely credited to an article published in 1853, in a magazine Charles Dickens edited. The author, John Capper, was a merchant and journalist who lived in what’s now Sri Lanka.
His article, “Air Maps,” was a somewhat florid account of the state of the relatively new science regarding wind, a crucial factor for nautical travel and trade in the era before marine engines.
The patterns of the Earth’s major winds could be tracked, Capper wrote, and one “whirled about the pole in a continued circular gale: at last, reaching the great polar vortex.”
These days, we know the polar vortex as those swirling winds breaking out of the polar region, bringing frigid temperatures south.
James K. Williamson wrote today’s Back Story.
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Source : Nytimes
