The Weekly Lift - September 28, 2023

This week's selection of headlines and articles*:

International Relations: U.S. and China Agree To New Economic Dialogue Format

The New York Times (US) reports that "the United States and China have created a new structure for economic dialogue in an effort to improve communication between the world’s largest economies and stabilize a relationship that has become increasingly strained in recent years.

The Treasury Department said on Friday that the United States and China had agreed to create economic and financial working groups that would hold regular meetings to discuss policy and exchange information. The announcement followed visits to Beijing by three of President Biden’s cabinet members over the summer that were intended to ease tensions over economic and geopolitical matters that has been festering for years between the two countries.

The Treasury Department said that the new working groups would create “ongoing structured channels for frank and substantive discussions.” Treasury officials will report to Secretary Janet L. Yellen, who traveled to Beijing in July. China’s representatives, from its ministry of finance and the People’s Bank of China, will report to Vice Premier He Lifeng.

“These working groups will serve as important forums to communicate America’s interests and concerns; promote a healthy economic competition between our two countries with a level playing field for American workers and businesses; and advance cooperation on global challenges,” Ms. Yellen said in a statement.

The United States and China still have major economic disagreements on tariffs, technology controls and investment restrictions. The Biden administration has been especially concerned recently about the treatment of American companies operating in China.

The creation of a working group linking the Treasury Department directly with Chinese officials on economic and financial issues represents the revival of a decades-long approach to bilateral relations that was dismantled under President Donald J. Trump.

“These are issues where the U.S. and China clearly see mutual benefit to mitigating conflict and managing the bilateral relationship in a constructive way,” said Eswar Prasad, a former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “These working groups might also help in maintaining dialogue on such issues even if geopolitical fissures between the two sides continue to deepen.”

He added: “The formation of these working groups is unlikely to lead to a significant de-escalation of trade and economic tensions but will at least reduce the risk of any further escalation, especially as the U.S. political season heats up.”

Congress took away the Treasury’s authority over trade relations in the 1970s, transferring that authority to the newly created Office of the United States Trade Representative, which was also made a cabinet agency. Congress acted after complaints from American industries and labor unions that Treasury and the State Department had been making trade concessions to other countries to win allies against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Treasury led interagency negotiating teams in talks with China. Treasury’s leadership limited the influence of American trade officials, as a succession of Treasury secretaries assigned a high priority to economic policy coordination with China and to opening China’s financial markets to Wall Street firms.

Mr. Trump dismantled the interagency working group system and said each agency would negotiate separately with China. Vice Premier Liu He, the predecessor of Vice Premier He Lifeng in handling international economic policy, tried repeatedly to reach trade arrangements with the Treasury secretary at the time, Steven T. Mnuchin, bypassing Robert E. Lighthizer, who was Mr. Trump’s trade representative.

But Mr. Trump did not endorse those arrangements and instead backed Mr. Lighthizer, who ended up negotiating a limited trade agreement that was signed by both countries in January 2020, and remains in place.

In August, Gina M. Raimondo, the commerce secretary, announced during her trip to Beijing and Shanghai that the United States and China had agreed to hold regular conversations about commercial issues and restrictions on access to advanced technology.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative was aware of the planning of the new working groups and will be consulted when the discussions turn to trade matters, but the new format for talks will be led by Treasury.

A senior Treasury official said a consensus had been reached during Ms. Yellen’s trip in July to form the groups, which are meant to allow both sides to voice concerns and look for ways to work together. The economic group will focus on challenges such as restructuring debt for low- and middle-income countries in distress, while the financial group will delve into topics like financial stability and sustainable finance.

Ms. Yellen said on Friday that the new structure was an important step forward in the bilateral relationship.

“It is vital that we talk, particularly when we disagree,” she said."

Gender Empowerment - India Reserves One-third Of Seats In The Lower House Of Parliament For Women

The Los Angeles Times (US) reports that "India’s Parliament has approved landmark legislation reserving 33% of the seats in its powerful lower house and in state legislatures for women to ensure more equal representation, ending a 27-year impasse over the bill.

But the wait is still not over, as the new law will not apply to next year’s national elections. It will be implemented in the 2029 national elections following a new census and redistricting after next year’s polls, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said during a debate in the upper house of India’s Parliament on Thursday night.

The lower house of Parliament approved the legislation Wednesday on a 454-2 vote, and the upper house passed it unanimously, 214-0, late Thursday. India’s decennial census was to be held in 2021 but was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

All opposition parties supported the bill and said the delay in its implementation was an injustice to women. They demanded that it apply to the next national elections, which are due to be held before May.

Under the legislation, the reservation of seats for women would continue for 15 years and could be extended by Parliament. Only women will be allowed to contest 33% of the seats in the elected lower house of Parliament and in state legislatures. Home Minister Amit Shah said four attempts by three governments since 1996 failed to enact the legislation.

Women make up more than 48% of India’s 1.4 billion people but only 15.1% of Parliament, compared with the international average of 24%, Law and Justice Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal said. In India’s state legislatures, women hold about 10% of the seats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress party have been trying to enact legislation to bring about gender parity and inclusive governance since 1996. They faced opposition from regional parties, which argued that seats reserved for women would be cornered by the educated elite from urban areas, leaving poor and less educated women unrepresented.

But opposition to the bill waned over the years, “giving way to broader symbolic politics where it is crucial to being perceived as responsive to emerging constituencies — like women,” the Indian Express newspaper wrote.

India remains a patriarchal society in which the social status of work done by women is often considered inferior to that done by men. Men also often enjoy greater rights than women."

Global Development: Abu Dhabi Throws A Surprise Challenger Into The AI Race

The Economist (UK) reports that "over recent decades the oil-rich economies of the Gulf have shown a taste for flashy government projects with dubious payoffs. In the early 2000s Dubai spent an estimated $12bn building an artificial archipelago shaped like a palm. Last year Qatar splurged around $220bn hosting the football World Cup. Saudi Arabia, the region’s gorilla, is building a pair of 120km-long skyscrapers in the desert—for roughly $1trn.

Amid the vanity projects, some serious efforts at economic diversification are also being pursued. One such endeavour is under way in Abu Dhabi, where earlier this month a government research institute released Falcon 180b, its latest massive artificial-intelligence (ai) model, which is impressing technologists around the world with its performance.

Abu Dhabi has even bigger ai ambitions. “We are entering the game to disrupt the core players,” says Faisal al-Bannai, secretary-general of the Advanced Technology Research Council (atrc), the government agency which houses the institute that created Falcon. He says that later this year the atrc will announce the launch of a state-backed ai company to go head to head with the field’s leading lights, such as Openai, creator of Chatgpt. Though it will face an uphill battle, the Emirati outfit could yet emerge as a credible competitor. Its success will be closely watched both by rivals and by other governments seeking to carve out a role in an ai economy currently dominated by America and China.

The Technology Innovation Institute (tii), the applied-research arm of the atrc, employs around 800 staff of 74 nationalities, working on subjects from biotechnology and robotics to quantum computing. Launched in 2020, it has been experimenting with Chatgpt-like “generative” ai for some time. It released Noor, an Arabic-based aimodel, in April last year, and then Falcon 40b, the first iteration of its flagship open-source model, in May this year.

Falcon 180b, as its name hints, is a beefed-up version of its predecessor. Comparing the performance of ai models is notoriously tricky, but going by a selection of commonly used benchmarks compiled by Hugging Face, a library of models, tii’s latest release bests the previous open-source champion, Meta’s llama 2. A blog post by Hugging Face staff suggests the model is “on par” with Google’s palm 2.

Why make such a powerful model freely available? Mr Bannai talks of “democratising” access to a transformational new technology, and warns against power falling into the hands of a small clique of companies, as has happened in the internet economy. But opening up access to Falcon 180b also allows software engineers to play around with a model that is not quite at the technological frontier, and suggest improvements. According to tii, some 12m developers experimented with the first generation of Falcon.

Giving away the model also opens up other opportunities for monetisation. Consider Stability ai, a startup whose open-source Stable Diffusion model was behind 13bn of the 15bn images generated by ai in the year to August, according to Everypixel, a software firm.

Emad Mostaque, Stability ai’s founder, says that its open-source strategy makes “commercial sense” for the firm “because the models are adopted far more quickly and widely than proprietary models”. Although the company generates revenue directly through its DreamStudio text-to-image generator, that tool accounts for a small fraction of the pictures produced using Stable Diffusion. It also makes money from developers opting to build applications based around the model (or others created by the company) on top of its computing platform, and by building tailored solutions for customers.

Mr Bannai has a similar vision. He pictures an “end-to-end platform for ai developers”, pointing to Shopify, an e-commerce platform used by merchants to build online shops, as his inspiration. He says the company will also build new proprietary models and applications tailored for specific fields, such as medicine and law, while keeping access to its core model open. It will experiment, too, with “multimodal” ai systems that incorporate many types of data (from text and images to audio) and “edge” models that can run on smaller devices such as phones.

Abu Dhabi may not seem like an obvious hub for ai talent, but big (and tax-free) salaries have already started luring tech whizzes from abroad. The emirate has also been training local brainboxes, including at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, founded in 2019. And although it will be a late entrant to an already crowded race, the Emirati firm will have some advantages, too.

One is a tight-knit business milieu. Many bosses are still grappling with how best to harness generative ai. By teaming up with local businesses and using them as test cases, Mr Bannai reckons his agency’s aicompany will quickly be able to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Another advantage is the emirate’s deep pockets. Abu Dhabi’s various sovereign-wealth funds hold around $1.5trn in assets, which makes even Openai’s $40bn valuation look like chump change. With frontier ai models becoming more computationally intensive and data-guzzling, access to cash could become decisive, especially in a world of higher interest rates.

If the endeavour succeeds, it will be a favourable omen for the long-term prospects of the Gulf as the demand for oil declines. Countries that harbour similar hopes of becoming an ai superpower, including Britain, will be watching along with interest—and, perhaps, envy."

Human Rights: Brazilian Court Rules On Land Rights

The Taipei Times (Taiwan) reports that "indigenous people celebrated on Thursday after the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled to enshrine their land rights, removing an imminent threat that the protections could be rolled back.

The justices had been evaluating a lawsuit brought by Santa Catarina State, backed by farmers, seeking to block an indigenous group from expanding the size of its territorial claim. Nearly all of the justices voted to support the indigenous group, which has far-reaching implications for territories nationwide.

Dozens of indigenous people in traditional yellow feather headdresses and body paint danced, sang and jumped around in front of a multitude of flashing cameras in the capital, Brasilia, after the decisive vote was cast.

Some wiped away tears of joy. “I’m shaking. It took a while, but we did it. It’s a very beautiful and strong feeling. Our ancestors are present — no doubt about it,” said Jessica Nghe Mum Pripra, who is from the Xokleng-Laklano group.

Santa Catarina State argued a legal theory held by opponents of further land allocations for indigenous groups. It said that the date Brazil’s constitution was promulgated — Oct. 5, 1988 — should be the deadline for when indigenous people would have had to have already either physically occupied land or engaged in a legal process to reoccupy territory.

The state said that the theory would provide legal certainty for landholders. Nine of the court’s 11 justices rejected that argument. “Areas occupied by indigenous people, and areas that are linked to the ancestry and tradition of indigenous peoples have constitutional protection, even if they are not demarcated,” said Justice Luiz Fux, who cast the vote that established the majority.

Indigenous rights groups told the court that the concept of the deadline was unfair, saying it does not account for expulsions and forced displacements of indigenous populations, particularly during Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship.

The lawsuit put at risk the status of Brazil’s hundreds of indigenous territories, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil rights group said. Large groups of indigenous people had gathered in and around Brasilia in the past few months during the court’s deliberations.

UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Francisco Cali Tzay had urged the court to protect indigenous lands.“Under the constitution, indigenous peoples are entitled to the permanent possession of the lands they traditionally occupy,” Tzay said in a 2021 statement.

He said a ruling in favor of business interests “could legitimize violence against indigenous peoples and inflame conflicts in the Amazon rainforest and other areas.”

Although the case involved only one indigenous group, the court gave it “general repercussion” status, meaning the ruling will serve as a precedent for all instances of justice involving indigenous groups. The ruling is expected to apply to hundreds of administrative procedures and legislative initiatives that are in progress and is likely to torpedo a proposal in the Brazilian Congress to enact the same 1988 deadline."

Diversity: In Flanders, Belgium, Member of Parliament Sammy Mahdi Wins A Drag-queen Contest

Le Monde (France) reports that "tonight of September 8, it was Cindy Envy. And, on the set of the Flemish private channel VTM, he caused a sensation, disguised as a drag queen during the show "Make Up Your Mind", imported from the Netherlands.

He even won the competition. But what really surprised the two juries, one composed of professional queens, the other of Flemish personalities, was that behind this queen in an orange dress was actually hiding Sammy Mahdi, president of the Christian Democratic and Flemish party (CD & V). This center-right formation, whose elected officials in Strasbourg are members of the European People's Party (EPP), alongside the French Republicans and the German CDU, has a conservative electorate.

If the appearance in a Drag Race of Brice Hortefeux, Fran?ois-Xavier Bellamy or Manfred Weber - the leader of the EPP Group in the European Parliament - seems unlikely, that of the president of this party who, since the 1970s, has delivered seven prime ministers to Belgium has apparently not unduated viewers. The attacks of a deputy of the far-right party Vlaams Belang (the most popular party in Flanders at the moment, according to polls) even before the broadcast of the show did not prevent the program from being a success.

No less than seven hundred thousand people were in front of their screens, ignoring the criticism of those who see in "Make Up Your Mind" a threat to traditional values. "It's a feel good program, for the whole family, whose message is that everyone must be able to be who they want," explained the VTM antenna director, without confirming that the experience would be renewed despite the good audiences.

Sammy Mahdi took some risks by dragging himself alongside a former football player who became a consultant, a TV news presenter or a singer. Part of the public may have had difficulty understanding the meaning of his performance, another may have wondered if it was the role of a deputy and party leader to be there, a third was recall that, when he held the position of Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration between 2020 and 2022, he did not show a particular leniency towards LGBT asylum seekers.

Sammy Mahdi explained afterwards why he wanted to support the "societal message" of the show. "Dred-queen shows are banned in Tennessee, the United States, and in Italy, they are banned on television," he explained. Many acquired rights are sometimes questioned. Today, the drag-queens shows, tomorrow maybe the gay wedding. We must continue to fight this fight and, if I can do it on 20-centimetre heels, it is with great pleasure. ”

If the statement is unambiguous, a few malicious observers pointed to the slight contradiction between the image of the Flemish Christian Democratic Party and that which its young president wanted to give of it, obviously in search of a second wind. Under its former name (CVP, Christian People's Party), it held power for much of the second half of the 20th century and sometimes held nearly 50% of the vote in Flanders.

In free fall, he is now approaching the 10% mark, victim of a flight of his electorate to the nationalists of the Neo-Flemish Alliance (N-VA). In almost permanent conflict with the latter within the regional government, Sammy Mahdi plays the card of a rather radical change of line.

Born of an Iraqi refugee father and a Flemish mother who educated him in Dutch and French, this perfect bilingual, graduated in political science as well as international and European law, already had some media hits to his credit. Seriously, when he refused to send back to Afghanistan those denied asylum, a little less when he called himself the "Barack Obama of the Aldi store", under the pretext of a vague physical resemblance to the former President of the United States.

He was also surprised when, in February, he formalized on social networks, with a red heart, his relationship with an elected official of his party, Nawal Farih, already a deputy and municipal councillor in Genk, and likely head of the party's list in the legislative elections in June 2024 in Limburg. In the party, this union is grinding its teeth: even if Nawal Farih was already approached for this role, the fact that the president will most certainly appoint it leads some disappointed people to talk about favoritism.

Sammy Mahdi therefore had everything to gain from restoring his image. If her stage name, Cindy Envy, was obviously a reference to the acronym CD & V - pronounced in English - it took time for the jurors to identify it. His dress was orange, the color of his party. And his tongue was blue, like that of his dog, a chow-chow, a breed known to be a bit grumpy and not very playful, unlike Sammy Mahdi.

The real drag-queens present at "Make Up Your Mind" did not take over the shade. Their president, Vanessa Van Cartier, stressed that this only ambition was to make drag art better known and to color life with the colors of the LGBT rainbow flag."

* Please note that certain headlines and articles may have been modified or summarized to fit the format of the newsletter.

If you have come across a positive headline or article in the last two weeks or are interested in contributing to future original content,?please contact me directly on LinkedIn.