Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has ordered Economic Revitalization Minister Nobuteru Ishihara to draft a range of economic measures to end deflation and raise Japan’s growth potential. The program will include a supplementary fiscal 2016 budget.
The government will submit the fiscal 2016 budget draft to a special session of parliament this fall, Mr. Ishihara told a news conference on July 12.
The Japan Times reported that he had “declined to comment on the size of the economic measures, saying that will be decided at the end of the month using a ‘bottom-up approach.”’
Last December, The Boston Global Forum named Mr. Abe a “Global Leader in Cybersecurity.”
China has lost an important international legal case over control of strategic reefs and atolls that it asserts give it the right to control much of the South China Sea. It has been rapidly militarizing some of these features to cow other nations with claims in the region, through which goes 30 percent of world trade in physical things.
But expansionist dictatorships have a tendency to ignore international law.
The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague overwhelmingly favors claims by the Philippines and will intensify diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in this geopolitically very sensitive area.
As The Guardian noted, “By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing ‘nine-dash’ line that goes almost ridiculously far into the South China Sea, far, far away from China.
China predictably denounced the verdict, which declares large areas of the sea to be neutral international waters or in the exclusive economic zones of other countries. Xinhua, the country’s official news agency, attacked what it called an “ill-founded” ruling that was “naturally null and void”.
The Communist Party newspaper the People’s Daily said that the tribunal had ignored “basic truths” and “tramped” on international laws and norms. “The Chinese government and the Chinese people firmly oppose [the ruling] and will neither acknowledge it nor accept it,” it added.
The tribunal declared that “although Chinese navigators and fishermen, as well as those of other states, had historically made use of the islands in the South China Sea, there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources.”
In this video, Bloomberg columnist Clive Crook presents some ideas on how the European Community can discourage other nations from following the United Kingdom’s exit.
The European Union has approved a new agreement on how consumer data must be transferred with the United States. This brings to an end months of delay caused by fears about U.S. surveillance.
The so-called Privacy Shield, the new commercial data-transfer pact, had been tentatively agreed to by the E.U. and U.S. in February. It comes into effect July 11.
The E.U.’s top court had struck down the previous data-transfer agreement, Safe Harbor, because of fears of intrusive U.S. surveillance. This left such big U.S. companies as Google, Facebook and MasterCard in legal limbo.
The Chinese government is imposing new regulations for online advertising that include a wide-range of practices from e-mail to videos. The increasingly authoritarian government is trying to impose more rigorous control of this part of the Internet, in this case, apparently, mostly for public-welfare concerns and not as part of the efforts of President Xi Jinping to tighten the political control of the huge nation by the Communist Party dictatorship.
The Wall Street Journal reports: “The rules are China’s most comprehensive to date, broadly defining online and electronic advertising as including e-mail ads, paid search results, and embedded links, images or videos ‘with the purpose of promoting goods or services.”’
“The regulations, which take effect in September, lay out guidelines against false or misleading practices and prohibit online ads for prescription medication and tobacco while requiring prior government approval for ads for medical supplies, pesticides, veterinary medicine and other health products.”
Syrian migrants passing through Slovenia on their way to Germany last year.
The German Interior Ministry reports that the number of migrants seeking asylum in Germany from the ravages of violence, corrupt and brutal dictatorships and poverty in the Muslim world fell sharply in 2016’s first half.
About 16,000 people registered as asylum seekers in Germany in June, way down from 92,000 in January, but the migrant crisis is expected to continue.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath that this {the migrant slowdown} will remain so in the coming months,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters.
Officials cited border closings in the Balkans, a European Union-Turkey deal to try to block arrivals by sea from Islamic nations in Greece and tougher asylum rules in Germany were among the main reasons.
Germany took in more than a million migrants in 2015, mainly people fleeing Islamic terrorism and other conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and the endemic poverty — much of it related to corrupt and brutal regimes and relentless Islamic violence.
North Korea has predictably called U.S. sanctions against North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and other senior Kim regime officials for human-rights abuses a “declaration of war”. Pyongyang said the announcement of sanctions was a “hideous crime”.
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, hopes that China will urge its ally North Korea to cooperate internationally on human rights, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said July 7 in New York. Such hopes have been expressed many times before with no effect.
The European Parliament has approved the first rules on cybersecurity for the European Union. This will force businesses to strengthen defenses against cyberattacks — and to promptly report to regulators when they do happen. This puts a particular onus on such digital giants as Google , Facebook and Amazon.
The new law will impose security and reporting obligations on such industries such as banking, energy, transport and health and on such all-digital operators as companies running search engines and online marketplaces. The law also requires the governments of E.U member states to cooperate much more than they have in network security.
The rules “will help prevent cyberattacks on Europe’s important interconnected infrastructures,” Andreas Schwab, a German member of the 28-nation Parliament who steered the measures through the parliament. E.U. governments had already supported the legislation.
Russian and Chinese government-linked and other hackers, some of them Islamic terrorists, have targeted essential infrastructure and services in several nations.
