World

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has told his cabinet to increase defence spending to two percent of GDP by 2027, up from a longstanding level of around one percent.

Kishida announced the plan to his defence and finance ministers late Monday, as Japan overhauls its defence and security strategies to address growing threats from China as well as the changing geopolitical landscape after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In August, the defence ministry submitted a $40 billion budget request, but the figure will not be finalised until the government completes updates to several defence policies.

“We’ll take budgetary measures to increase spending on defence and other outlays to two percent of current GDP by 2027,” Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada told reporters after talks with Kishida.

Japan’s defence spending has been set at around one percent of GDP or less for decades, but Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party has signalled plans to boost that figure closer to the NATO standard of two percent.

Growing pressure from China, including military exercises and the presence of boats around islands disputed with Japan, as well as Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, have helped build support for increased spending.

A series of missile launches by North Korea, including some that have travelled over Japan, have also sharpened views.

The issue has been controversial in Japan for several reasons, including the country’s pacifist post-war constitution, which limits its military capacity to ostensibly defensive measures.

Local media said one target of additional spending would be “counterstrike” capacity — weapons that can target enemy missile launch sites and are described by Tokyo as defensive.

A poll published by the Kyodo news agency on Monday found over 60 percent of respondents favoured obtaining a “counterstrike capability”.

Speaking in parliament on Tuesday, Kishida said counterstrike capacity was one of several options being weighed.

“This is being studied within the bounds of the constitution and international law,” he said, adding that a decision should be reached by the end of the year.

Another contentious issue is how to pay for additional defence spending, with higher taxes unpopular, including inside Kishida’s LDP.

Japan’s government is already saddled with enormous costs associated with an ageing and shrinking population, as well as the post-pandemic recovery and fallout from the war in Ukraine.

Hamada said Monday that Kishida told the government to find a way to boost spending, despite concerns about cost.

“(We will) secure the necessary budget by coming up quickly with various approaches, instead of just saying we can’t because there aren’t sufficient financial resources,” he quoted the prime minister as saying.

The Kyodo poll found around a third of respondents favour spending cuts elsewhere in the government’s budget to pay for increased defence spending.

Just over 22 percent backed increased corporate taxes, and 13 percent favour the issuing of government bonds.

In a dark, windowless room with no air conditioning in southern Mexico, thousands of bones of unidentified people encapsulate the crisis of a forensic system overwhelmed by violent crime.

The morgue in Chilpancingo in Guerrero state is full of anonymous human remains — like many others in a country struggling to process a backlog of tens of thousands of bodies.

“The dead keep coming and people keep disappearing,” said Nuvia Maestro, 36, a forensic anthropologist in Mexico City.

On social media, Maestro declares her love for her cat Clementina — her “ray of light” — as well as cycling, wine and colorful jackets.

At work, the 36-year-old uses two electric cooktops that she and her colleagues bought themselves to boil ribs to remove tissue and carry out tests to determine the age of the deceased.

“You work and work and you don’t finish!” she said.

At the Chilpancingo morgue, incense burned by employees failed to mask the stench of death — or keep the flies away.

A forensic service worker browsed handwritten records of the remains, giving a shrug of the shoulders when asked why they are not digitized to facilitate relatives’ search for the missing.

The DNA studies “can take months,” frustrating families desperate to find their missing loved ones, said forensic service coordinator Alfonso Ramirez.

– Spiraling violence –

Mexico’s homicide rate has tripled since 2006 — when an intensification of the government’s war on drug cartels triggered a spiral of violence — from 9.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants to 28 in 2021.

The number of people going missing has also increased sharply, from 265 in 2006 to 10,366 in 2021, and now totals 108,000 since records began in 1964.

Many victims are thought to have been buried by the authorities without being unidentified. The government blames most of the deaths on gang violence.

Experts say the forensic crisis is also explained by the lack of funds, personnel, rapid DNA testing laboratories and a single genetic database.

The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances estimates that, under current conditions, it would take 120 years to process the 52,000 unidentified bodies documented by the Movement for Our Disappeared, a non-governmental organization.

Mexican authorities “do not have the institutional capacity to deal with the backlog” of unidentified bodies, Alejandro Encinas, a deputy minister responsible for human rights, said in October.

Adding to the work of the forensic services, some criminals burn their victims’ corpses or bury them in clandestine graves.

The killers know which body parts are most useful for identification, such as fingertips, and destroy them, said Maestro, noting that the most abused corpses are those of women.

Regional forensic services budgets rose from $110 million in 2015 to $122 million in 2020, according to official data.

Over the same period, the average number of murders jumped from around 17 to 28 per 100,000 people.

– ‘Ugly things’ –

Guadalupe Camarena, 62, cried clutching photos of her five missing children during an exhumation of remains at a graveyard in the western state of Jalisco.

Her daughter disappeared in the city of Guadalajara in 2016, followed by her four sons who vanished in 2019, allegedly after they were detained by police, the domestic worker said.

She hopes that giving a DNA sample will help her search for her five missing children.

“I don’t want to find them (dead) like this, but if I can’t find them alive…” she said, trailing off.

The psychological impact of the situation forces experts such as Dalia Miranda, a municipal coordinator of exhumations in Jalisco, to undergo therapy.

Forensic workers encounter “very ugly things,” she said.

It takes up to six months to compare DNA samples from remains with those of relatives of the missing, according to Alfonso Partida, a university researcher in Guadalajara, whose morgue, he said, contains “tons” of remains.

The government has taken steps such as the creation of two centers for identification and four to store corpses.

It is also working to establish a national identification center and a genetics laboratory to which the United States will contribute four million dollars.

But the attorney general’s office has yet to create a national forensic data bank stipulated by law.

In the meantime, Camarena visits the Guadalajara morgue every week to study pictures of the dead in her search for her children — a routine that she copes with using antidepressants.

The United States is expected to announce “substantial” financial aid to Ukraine on Tuesday to help it deal with the damage caused by Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure, senior US officials said.

The aid, which will be detailed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in the Romanian capital Bucharest, “is substantial and it is not the end”, one senior official told journalists Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity and without giving further details.

However, he noted that the Biden administration had budgeted $1.1 billion for energy spending in Ukraine and Moldova.

It comes ahead of an international donors’ conference on support for the Ukrainian civil resistance to be held December 13 in France, he pointed out.

A Russian campaign of missile strikes targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has damaged between 25 and 30 percent of the grid, according to figures cited by Kyiv.

“What the Russians have been doing is targeting these large transformer stations. They are high-voltage transformer stations”, not just power plants, the US official said, a move aimed at disrupting the entire energy network from production to distribution.

NATO foreign ministers are meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Bucharest where the alliance’s support for Ukraine since the Russian invasion will be discussed.

Germany, which currently chairs the G7, has convened a meeting Tuesday afternoon on the sidelines of the NATO gathering to discuss the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.

The United States will call on the other member countries to strengthen their aid in this area, according to the US official.

It will also be an opportunity to highlight the “remarkable cohesion and unity that is still there among all the allies” since the start of the war, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Karen Donfried told reporters on Monday.

Romania, as well as neighboring Moldova, has been hard hit by the war, and around two million people fleeing Ukraine have passed through the country.

Bucharest currently hosts nearly 80,000 refugees, according to figures cited by Washington.

Besides the war in Ukraine, the NATO ministers will take stock of progress in the accession of Finland and Sweden, already ratified by 28 of the 30 member countries but which remains suspended awaiting the green light from Turkey and Hungary.

They will also discuss the growing threat posed by China. This discussion, initiated at the NATO summit in June in Madrid, “is not about NATO going to China; it is reflecting the challenges really of the PRC having come to Europe”, said Donfried, citing the technological challenge in particular.

Canada’s foreign minister on Monday ordered her officials to summon Russia’s ambassador in Ottawa, Oleg Stepanov, over a series of “hateful” anti-LGBTQ tweets including one aimed at an openly lesbian federal minister.

The embassy posted the messages on Twitter in recent days after Russian lawmakers approved a bill banning all forms of LGBTQ “propaganda” that critics say ramps up a crackdown on “non-traditional” sexual relationships, affecting everything from books and films to social media posts.

“Unsurprisingly, the Russians have once again chosen hateful propaganda,” Foreign Minister Melanie Joly’s deputy director of communications, Emily Williams, said in a statement.

“This is an attack on the Canadian values of acceptance and tolerance. Minister Joly has directed Global Affairs Canada to summon the Russian ambassador to tell him as much,” she said.

The Russian tweets included a photo illustration of a pride flag overlaid with a red line inside a red circle, indicating it was banned, alongside remarks: “It is all about family. Family is a man and a woman and children.”

The embassy also hit back at Canadian Sports Minister Pascale St-Onge, who is openly lesbian, after she objected to the “Russian homophobic propaganda,” asking her to “explore and explain how you appeared in this world?”

“We absolutely can’t tolerate this rhetoric and even less the subsequent comments on Minister St-Onge’s response,” Williams said.

In an email to AFP, St-Onge said she was “profoundly offended by the Russian ambassador’s message against homosexuals while on Canadian soil,” calling it “an affront to the hard-earned rights of the whole LGBTQ2S+ community.”

She had written to the embassy to say: “Russian homophobic propaganda is not welcome here” and that “the treatment of LGBTQ2+ people in Russia is a disgrace and an attack on basic human rights.”

Russia has sought to present LGBTQ relationships as a product of dangerous Western influence, toughening its rhetoric as Moscow presses its military campaign in Ukraine.

Its embassy’s tweets also followed a deadly shooting at a Colorado LGBTQ club, and controversy over the rainbow logo at the World Cup in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal.

Despite decades of effort, plastic pollution is only getting worse — a gloomy fact that representatives of almost 200 nations meeting in Uruguay Monday are determined to change.

Delegates in the seaside city of Punta Del Este began charting a path to the first global treaty to combat plastic pollution.

“We know that the world has a significant addiction to plastic,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme, at the start of the talks.

“A plastic crisis is also a climate crisis. Plastic has a heavy carbon footprint and a heavy chemical footprint,” she said.

The Uruguay meeting comes after the parties at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi in March agreed to create an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding plastics treaty by 2024.

The decision was seen as the biggest environmental advance since the Paris Agreement to curb global warming was signed in 2015.

By some estimates, a garbage truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into the sea every minute. The amount of plastic entering the oceans is forecast to triple by 2040.

At the same time, microplastics have been found in human blood, lung, spleen, and kidney tissue, and even in fetal tissue.

Experts believe it is only an international, legally binding agreement that could truly begin to halt one of the worst environmental scourges on the planet — if there is enough political will.

The meeting in Uruguay will last for five days, and is only a first step in the negotiations process. Another four global meetings are planned to carry the process forward.

Technical matters, such as how to structure the two years of talks, or even what should be included in the treaty, are up for discussion.

“It is ambitious to end plastic pollution, but it is entirely doable,” said Andersen.

She said the delegates would work together to “transform the entire life cycle of plastic,” from the production of polymers, to the way brands and retailers use plastic, to the waste that emerges.

“That means working with the private sector, that means working with environmentalists, that means working with communities, that means strong political leadership,” said Andersen.

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) the total plastic in the ocean has increased 50 percent in the past five years. This is despite a 60 percent increase in policies to fight plastic pollution on the country level.

“The unique potential of a global treaty is to hold all signatories to a high common standard of action,” the WWF said in a report on the treaty published this month.