But conditions are dire for many of the sector’s four million workers, the vast majority of whom are women whose monthly pay, until recently, started at 8,300 taka (US$75). A government-appointed panel raised the sector’s wage by 56.25 per cent on Tuesday to 12,500 taka, but garment workers have rejectedContinue Reading
Conflict in Shan State, in the northeast bordering China, has displaced at least 50,000 people, with trade routes cut off and several towns seized since an anti-junta offensive launched last month by three ethnic minority insurgent groups. China has called for all sides to cease hostilities. The insurgent alliance saysContinue Reading
One of the tenets of Biden’s economic policy has been to reduce America’s economic reliance on Chinese factories, which came under strain when COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains, and to solidify partnerships with other Asian nations. As part of that policy, the Biden administration last year forged the Indo-Pacific EconomicContinue Reading
This time, I received an invitation – or at least I think I did. As I poured out the last of a 2009 Bordeaux, white tartrate crystals at the bottom of the goblet seemed to spell a message on a background of purple dregs: “Pont dA 11 Nov 12am R.”
I blinked and gave the goblet an inebriate second glance, but the wine diamonds had sunk into the slush and the ghostly message had blurred.
“The Pont d’Alma – the entrance to the Paris sewers – at midnight on the 11th of November,” I translated the shorthand that only could have come—the Devil knows how—from the Ghost of Cardinal Richelieu, my ghostly interlocutor on so many past occasions.
And so, an hour before midnight on the appointed day, I jimmied the rusted lock on the grate in front of a small spiral staircase under the Pont d’Alma. Clad in hip boots and waders, I picked my way down the slippery steps to the Paris sewers, clumsily balancing a magnum of Chateau Petrus antique copper spittoon.
I passed the sewers and found the ancient stone stairs that led ever downward, under the medieval archways below the sewers, through archways dense with hanging moss, through levels too numerous to fathom, until I reached Richelieu’s haunt: The ancient ossuary of the Carthusian monks, a tiny, dank, airless, ghost-infested lair. Shivering, I caught my breath.
I planted the spittoon firmly in muck of indeterminate depth on the ossuary floor and uncorked the wine. Presently a tremor came through the viscous air. I poured the Chateau Petrus into the spittoon. A gelatinous object of indeterminate shape approached and inserted an appendage into the neck of the spittoon. The translucent object turned the red of a cardinal’s cassock. With a loud plop, there emerged the head of the Ghost of Richelieu.
“It’s nice of you to come,” the Cardinal said. “Armistice Day evokes une langueur monotone. During the War, we had so many new faces here.”
“Eminence, why have you summoned me?” I ventured.
“Spengler, do you remember what I told you at our last seance?” the ghastly Cardinal replied. I had consulted the Cardinal on October 9, two days after Hamas attacked southern Israel.
“I cannot forget it: You said that Israel would make life in Gaza so difficult that a large part of the population will leave, or that Israel itself will become unlivable, and Israelis will leave.”
“Bingueaux!,” said Richelieu with a lilt that recalled Maurice Chevalier. “It took less than a month! Less than a tenth of the civilian population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip is left. Nearly a million have fled to shelters in southern Gaza. The Israelis moved first and moved fast, and emptied the stronghold of Hamas of its people. It does not matter how long the fighters of Hamas hide in their tunnels. They are trapped and will die there.”
“But Eminence,” I objected, “was this really a stratagem of war?”
Richelieu emitted a sneeze that projected tiny bubbles of ectoplasm from his spectral nose. “The editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Aluf Benn,” calls my plan a “tie-breaking” move by the Israeli Army:
The October 7 massacre committed by Hamas in the Gaza border communities and the abduction of hundreds of Israelis to Gaza gave Israel domestic support and international legitimacy to deploy unprecedented force, in firepower and duration.
Even if some cease-fire is soon declared under American pressure, Israel will be in no hurry to withdraw and allow the population to return to the northern Strip. And if they do come back – what will they come back to? After all, they will have no homes, streets, educational institutions, shops or any of the infrastructure of a modern city…
Israel is acting to strike at the Hamas forces barricaded in the tunnels, and will try to hunt its leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif. But the move intended to bring about the collapse of the organization and dismantle its ability to rule Gaza is the instruction given to one million residents of the northern Gaza Strip to huddle together in the southern part of the strip.
“Some will call it genocide, Eminence,” I said.
“Genocide? What!? What do these cretins know about genocide? I could teach them a thing or two about genocide! I paid the Dutch in 1624 to fight Spain, I paid Christian VI of Denmark to invade Germany in 1626, I paid Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden to enter the war in 1630, and when Gustavus fell at Lützen in 1632, I paid Prince Bernard and his mercenaries to attack again. By 1635 Germans were starving and eating the newly buried dead. There weren’t enough Protestants to pursue the war, and I finally had to send my own troops in to keep the war going.”
“Both we and the Austrians exterminated hostile populations,” the Cardinal fulminated. “Our opponent, the Imperial General Tilly took Magdeburg in 1631, and only 5,000 of the 25,000 townspeople were still alive the next day. Pope Urban VIII wrote to Tilly, ‘You have washed your victorious hands in the blood of sinners.’ Religious hatred endured until the middle of the 19th century; you can still admire the bronze statue of Tilly in Munich, erected by the Wittelsbach king in 1844.”
“My colleagues and I reduced the population of Germany and its neighbors by two-fifths in the space of just Thirty Years! And they say that sending civilians to live in tents is genocide!”
“What about the bombing of civilians in Gaza, Eminence?”
“No one will complain too loudly about that, mon ami,” snickered the Cardinal. “The Americans do that sort of thing before breakfast. When they invaded Iraq in 2003, the first few weeks of bombing killed more than 8,000 civilians, with the blessing of a half-dozen of America’s allies. We do not know how many civilians died during Israeli bombardments, but that is what the Americans with their gift for hypocrisy call collateral damage.”
“But how will this end?” I asked Richelieu.
“The refugees will sit in their tents in southern Gaza as a portent of shame for Hamas until someone decides to put them somewhere else. Northern Gaza will remain in ruins, as a monument to the impotence of Hamas. The wealthy Arab states will give alms and wag their fingers at Israel and privately enjoy Hamas’ humiliation. The people will go somewhere. Perhaps the Egyptians will be bribed to take them. It really doesn’t matter. Everybody has to be somewhere.”
Richelieu sneezed again and again, and the little bubbles of ectoplasm began to fill the tiny ossuarium, driving out the air. I gasped for breath as the Cardinal grinned, his purple cassock turning translucent. I awoke next to an empty bottle of Calvados.
SINGAPORE: Although WeWork has filed for bankruptcy in the United States, demand for co-working spaces remains strong in Singapore, analysts told CNA.
The SoftBank Group-backed startup, which sought US bankruptcy protection on Monday (Nov 6), said it has entered into a restructuring agreement with key stakeholders to drastically reduce its existing funded debt. It also intends to file similar proceedings in Canada.
The company’s locations outside of the US and Canada, as well as its franchisees around the world, are not affected by these proceedings, it added.
A spokesman for WeWork Singapore said it is “business as usual” and that customers can continue using its 14 offices here.
WeWork first opened its doors in Singapore in 2017. Last September, it opened its 14th outlet in the country at 21 Collyer Quay near Raffles Place – WeWork’s largest location in Asia Pacific at over 220,000 sq ft.
Noting that WeWork Singapore’s operations are not likely to be affected by the bankruptcy, real estate analysts CNA spoke to also highlighted that the demand for co-working spaces in Singapore is “very strong”.
Some co-working operators are seeing occupancy rates between 90 and 100 per cent, and are looking to expand especially in the city centre, said Huttons Asia’s senior director for data analytics Lee Sze Teck.
Mr Alan Cheong, executive director of research and consultancy at Savills, highlighted that furnished spaces occupied by WeWork would find “ready takers” to fill the spot. These may be co-working entities formed by building owners where WeWork is located or competitors stepping up as substitute operators.
Only unfitted office space without furnishing and locations that are performing below the margin are likely to be negatively affected by the bankruptcy.
“Co-working has a place in the new workplace arrangement. With WeWork out of the picture, the competition is reduced, making it easier for others with the same business model to restructure for another fighting chance in the game,” said Mr Cheong.
SLOWING DEMAND For the second year running, Singles Day sales should still exceed 1 trillion yuan, said Vincent Marion, co-founder of VO2 Asia Pacific, a consultancy specialising in the digital economy. “However, sales are stagnating due to the change in Chinese consumer habits, which now favour savings. Consumers have becomeContinue Reading
Manila accuses Chinese vessels of harassing and blocking Philippine boats delivering food, water and materials for badly needed repairs. Beijing, which has urged Manila to remove the ship, insists the Philippine vessels are infringing China’s territorial sovereignty. Second Thomas Shoal is about 200km from the western Philippine island of Palawan,Continue Reading
Hamas may have devised a devious aqueous trap for invading Israeli forces, waiting for the opportune moment to strike as the Gaza war enters a dangerous new underground phase.
Last month, ETV Bharat reported that Hamas is planning to use its tunnel-fighting prowess to counter and frustrate Israel’s ground offensive in the Gaza Strip’s northern region.
According to a “what if” memo prepared by the New Delhi-based think tank ImagIndia, Hamas could potentially create a seawater flood in Gaza by remotely exploding a bomb on the Mediterranean coast, ETV Bharat reported.
The report notes that Hamas’ tunnels are on average 50 feet under Gaza land but they can also be dug at a depth of just three to four feet underground to link to the Mediterranean Sea coast.
It says if Israel pushes deeper into Gaza, the seawater will rush in via the tunnels and flood the low-lying areas, creating a marshy belt around four kilometers, making it virtually impossible for Israeli trucks and tanks to move.
The report mentions the US approved the sale of precision-guided weapons to Tel Aviv in May this year while the Israeli military also has the option to use US-made “bunker buster” GBU-28 bombs on the tunnels. But dropping bunker busters in response to a Hamas seawater flood bomb blast would further aggravate the situation, drastically increasing the size of flooded areas.
As using bunker-buster bombs may not be an option, unofficial sources have said that Israel could instead pump a chemical agent into the Hamas tunnel network to smoke out militants and facilitate the rescue of hostages.
Flooding from the sea has been used as a scorched earth area denial strategy for centuries. For instance, at the 1574 Siege of Leyden during the Dutch War of Independence, the Dutch destroyed the dikes on the Maas River, which held back the North Sea, flooding the countryside and forcing the Spanish to retreat.
Another decisive use of flooding as a military strategy was the 1938 destruction of the Yellow River dikes during the Second Sino-Japanese War. By destroying the dikes, the Chinese prevented the Japanese from capturing Shaanxi, Sichuan and Chongqing, albeit at an immense human cost.
More recently, the June 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, which was then under Russian control, caused severe flooding in Kherson Oblast and delayed Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the region.
Jeff Goodson, in an article this month for RealClearDefense, notes that Israel could opt to flood Hamas tunnels to force the enemy above ground, reduce Israeli casualties and resolve the problem of dealing with deep tunnel warfare. He notes that in 2015 Egypt flooded 37 cross-border tunnels in Gaza, setting a precedent for the strategy.
Goodson notes that flooding could be a permanent or near-permanent solution to Israel’s Gaza tunnel problem, as pumping them out would be costly and complex for Hamas.
He writes that Israel could pump seawater from the Mediterranean directly into the tunnel openings through pipelines and that the most direct route to the entrances would require clearing and holding construction sites.
Goodson also suggests that flooding Gaza’s tunnels would reduce civilian casualties while also serving as a long-term area denial strategy for Israel against Hamas.
John Spencer mentions in an article last month for the Modern War Institute that Hamas will likely use its tunnel infrastructure offensively to launch protected surprise attacks, including to infiltrate behind Israeli positions to surprise forces that might not be as well-prepared or sufficiently equipped for combat.
Spencer also suggests Hamas will use its tunnels defensively to escape Israeli observation and attack, allowing fighters to move between fighting positions safely under massive buildings. He says that entering tunnels presents unique tactical challenges for troops, not least poor vision, thin oxygen and the need to carry and use specialized equipment.
Spencer notes the potential for a single Hamas defender to hold a narrow tunnel against a much superior Israeli force.
He writes that while Israel has developed unique tactics and equipment for Gaza tunnel warfare, the depth and scale of the subterranean infrastructure likely surpass Israel’s specialized capabilities and that success on the underground battlefield will ultimately come down to infantry and engineers effectively dealing with issues as they emerge.
Spencer also notes that finding and destroying Hamas’ tunnels will be complicated by terrain, the possibility of Hamas using civilian human shields and the need for a situation-dependent mix of capabilities, which will require a significant amount of time to develop.
Hamas’ possible combined use of targeted intentional flooding with underground warfare elsewhere goes against conventional wisdom that Israel is more likely to flood the tunnels and could serve to negate Israel’s overwhelming conventional military firepower advantage.
Increasing urbanization and rapid advances in target acquisition and precision strike capabilities mean that subterranean warfare will likely play a bigger role in coming conflicts, especially in asymmetric fights between insurgent and government forces.
In an August 2023 article in the peer-reviewed Studies in Conflict & Terrorism journal, Daphne Richemond-Barak and Stefan Voiculescu-Holvad highlight how subterranean warfare is merging with urban warfare, noting that many major cities have hidden underground passages to house and protect critical infrastructure.
They say that urban tunnels running under densely populated areas present a growing risk to civilian safety and infrastructure when targeted for destruction, as is the case now in Gaza.
YANGON: A surprise offensive by Myanmar ethnic armed groups has blocked two strategically vital roads to the country’s biggest trading partner China, choking cross-border commerce and denying the cash-strapped junta taxes and foreign exchange. Fighting has raged across northern Shan state for two weeks, displacing almost 50,000 people, according toContinue Reading
This is the fourth installment in Asia Times Science Editor Jonathan Tennenbaum’s series “Fusion Diary.” For an introduction to the series, readers are encouraged to start with “US abandoning its leadership in fusion energy,” by Matthew Moynihan and Alfred B Bortz. Then read part 1 of the series here, part 2 here and part 3 here.
On August 22, 2023, I interviewed Paul Methven, director of Great Britain’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) program. STEP aims at building a demonstration electric power-generating fusion plant based on the spherical tokamak design.
Formerly director of submarine acquisition for the UK Defense Ministry, Methven brings with him a wealth of knowledge in organizing complex technological endeavors.
He compares the challenges of STEP to the 1960s Apollo program to land astronauts on the Moon and to the US project, led by the legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover, to build the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. The following is the first of three parts of the interview.
Jonathan Tennenbaum: How would you describe the mission of the STEP program?
Paul Methven: The physical deliverable, if you like, is a prototype fusion energy plant. But the legacy that comes from that is probably the more important thing, which is that the plant will firstly demonstrate that you can actually make fusion energy commercially realistic, but also that through the endeavor of trying to design, deliver, operate that prototype fusion energy plant, you build a supply chain. And through that you really have the industrial capability necessary, with quite a lot of it hosted, or at least value-seeded in the UK, to service fusion programs across the globe, creating a myriad of spinoff businesses.
JT: At this point a number of countries have fusion demonstration reactor programs, generally called demos. Would you call STEP a demo in that sense?
PM: Yes, I would. But it’s a demo beyond “just” the technical aspect. I say “just” in quotation marks because this is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. But as I say, it takes its direction from the fusion strategy that the UK government has published, which is very short document, eight pages or so, published a couple of years ago, which says, look, we intend to design and deliver a prototype fusion energy plant, and put energy on the grid. But the second goal of that is the development of a supply chain. And so our program objectives are broader than the technical.
JT: Why have you decided to build a spherical tokamak? As far as I know, the demo reactors of other countries are all large tokamaks of the “classical” sort.
PM: At the moment, the UK definitely supports being part of large-scale traditional tokamak development. I think that, in one form or another, we would wish to continue to be part of ITER and indeed to support a number of other fusion programs.
(Note: While in the European Union, Britain participated in ITER through Euratom, an organization of EU member-states. Post-Brexit, Britain is no longer a member of Euratom, and the modality of Britain’s participation in ITER has yet to be settled. – Jonathan Tennenbaum)
Because, to just put that in context, I think it’s a bit naive to suggest that there’s only one approach to fusion that could ever work. And I think, from the climate change perspective, it would be folly to only pursue one approach to fusion. It’s too important, for creating a new energy source, to blinker yourself out of everything else.
That said, we looked some time ago at the evolution of the traditional tokamak, the doughnut shape. We said, look, whilst we think technically that can work, do we think that if you merely expanded the scale of that tokamak you would get to a commercially viable proposition? We think that’s less certain.
I’m pretty sure that ITER will eventually work and demonstrate what it has to demonstrate. But if you then say I’m scaling that architecture up to commercial scale, the size of everything increases the capital cost. It is going to be pretty challenging to ultimately get return on the levelized cost of energy even in the far future.
And so we thought: is there a cheaper and therefore technically more efficient way of doing this? The UKAEA has a long history of research on the spherical tokamak stemming back to the START device, which then gave rise to MAST [Mega-Ampere Spherical Tokamak], which has then given rise to the MAST Upgrade, where we demonstrated, we believe, that you can be much more efficient with a spherical tokamak.
And now through MAST Upgrade, we demonstrated some of the critical technologies, particularly heat exhaust. That would say, yes, actually, that is a viable route. It’s an efficiency argument en route to commercial deployability that has driven the spherical tokamak pick in terms of timescales.
Now, I don’t know precisely when we’ll have this delivered and what the schedule will be. I am on the record saying that. There’s a lot of work to do, but we will drive for that target of 2040, and as we develop the details of the program, we’ll then work out exactly what is deliverable.
And that’s hugely ambitious, but represents a balance between (A) having to drive really hard, because of the climate necessity and because you have to have a unifying goal around which to drive progress across multiple organizations, and (B) keeping to something we think is potentially credible.
JT: And do you have good support from the UK government, good institutional support for this?
PM: Absolutely. As I said, STEP actually stems from the UK government fusion strategy. We’ve had really strong and consistent support from the government. Despite all the changes of personalities over the last few years, the support for the program has remained extremely strong and has grown in fact.
We can see that through the announcements that have been made, not the least of which was in October last year, the announcement of West Burton as the selected site for the STEP prototype plant. That is a really strong indication since government wouldn’t announce something like a large-scale site with the benefits that that will bring — not just globally, but in that case very locally as well – without being strongly committed
NEXT: Critical decisions on the way to fusion power
Jonathan Tennenbaum, PhD (mathematics), is a former editor of FUSION magazine and has written on a wide variety of topics in science and technology, including several books on nuclear energy.