Category: General

As Belkis Fajardo, 69, walks through the dense streets of downtown Havana with a small bag of lettuce and onions in hand, she wonders how she’ll feed her family over the holidays.
Scarcity and economic turmoil are nothing new to Cuba, but Fajardo is among many Cubans to note that this year is different thanks to soaring inflation and deepening shortages.
“We’ll see what we can scrap together to cook for the end of the year,” Fajardo said. “Everything is really expensive … so you buy things little by little as you can. And if you can’t, you don’t eat.”
Basic goods such as chicken, beef, eggs, milk, flour and toilet paper are difficult and often impossible to find in state stores.
When they do appear, they often come at hefty prices, either from informal shops, resellers or in expensive stores only accessible to those with foreign currency.
It’s far out of the range of the average Cuban state salary, approximately 5,000 pesos a month, or $29 USD on the island’s more widely used informal exchange rate. Nearby, a pound of pork leg was selling for 450 pesos (around $2.60).
“Not everyone can buy things, not everyone has a family who sends remittances (money from abroad),” Fajardo said. “With the money my daughter earns and my pension, we’re trying to buy what we can, but it’s extremely hard.”
In October, the Cuban government reported that inflation had risen 40% over the past year and had a significant impact on the purchasing power for many on the island.
While Fajardo managed to buy vegetables, rice and beans, she still has no meat for Christmas or New Year’s.
The shortages are among a number of factors stoking a broader discontent on the island, which has given rise to protests in recent years as well as an emerging migratory flight from Cuba. On Friday, U.S. authorities reported stopping Cubans 34,675 times along the Mexico border in November, up 21% from 28,848 times in October.
The dissatisfaction was made even more evident during Cuba’s local elections last month, when 31.5% of eligible voters didn’t cast a ballot — a far cry from the nearly 100% turnout during Fidel Castro’s lifetime.
Despite being the highest voting abstention rate the country had seen since the Cuban revolution, the government still hailed it as “a victory.” However, in an address to Cuban lawmakers last week, President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged the government’s shortcomings in handling the country’s complex mix of crises, particularly food shortages.
“I feel an enormous dissatisfaction that I haven’t been able to accomplish, through leadership of the country, the results that the Cuban people need to attain long-desired and expected prosperity,” he said.
The admission provoked a standing ovation in the congressional assembly, made up solely of politicians from Díaz-Canel’s communist party.
But Ricardo Torres, a Cuban and economics fellow at American University in Washington, said he saw the words as “meaningless” without a real plan to address discontent.
“People want answers from their government,” he said. “Not words — answers.”
For years, the Caribbean nation has pushed much of the blame for its economic turmoil on the United States’ six-decade trade embargo on Cuba, which has strangled much of the island’s economy. However, many observers, including Torres, stress that the government’s mismanagement of the economy and reluctance to embrace the private sector are also to blame.
On Friday, a long line of Cubans waited outside an empty state-run butchery, waiting for a coveted item: a leg of pork to feed their families on New Year’s Eve.
About a dozen people The Associated Press asked for an interview said they were scared to speak, including one who said, “it could have consequences for us.”
Estrella, 67, has shown up to the state butcher every morning for more than two weeks, waiting her turn to buy pork to share with her children, grandchildren and siblings. So far, she’s come up dry.
Although pork is available to buy from private butchers, it’s often far more expensive than at state-run facilities, which subsidize prices.
So she waits, hopeful that she’ll be able to cook Cuba’s traditional holiday dish.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to buy it today,” she said. “If we’re not, we’ll come back tomorrow.”

Source: Voice of America

Hong Kong is forecast to grow economically next year after the city’s leader announced the removal of nearly all COVID-19 restrictions on international arrivals and said it would reopen its border with China.
But experts say the coronavirus pandemic and geopolitics have hampered Hong Kong’s international status after nearly three years of global isolation.
Last week, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee announced that people arriving in Hong Kong are free from COVID-19 restrictions.
International passengers can now travel freely upon arrival. Previous requirements meant arrivals were not allowed to enter places such as restaurants and bars for the first three days, monitoring their health as a precaution against catching the coronavirus. The government also scrapped its COVID-19 tracking media app that granted users access to venues such as restaurants, gyms and salons, although some designated venues will still require vaccination records for those who wish to enter.

Gary Bowerman, a tourism analyst based in Kuala Lumpur, said Hong Kong’s arrivals could still be hesitant to enter.
“Removing most entry restrictions is a big step forward, but as experience proved in Southeast Asia and South Korea, it is not until on-arrival testing is eliminated that confidence will return for inbound travel,” Bowerman told VOA. “Hong Kong is on a holding pattern, where travelers will likely wait until testing is removed before committing to travel to Hong Kong.”
COVID-19 background — China reopening
Arrivals must still be subject to a mandatory COVID-19 PCR test on arrival and one on Day Two, while the city’s face mask mandate is still in place.
Hong Kong initially closely followed China’s “zero-COVID” strategy, implementing strict policies such as vaccine passes, curfews and bans on group gatherings. But the territory has gradually eased restrictions as the spread of the highly transmissible omicron variants has been difficult to control.
Despite cases roaring in China, Lee announced Saturday that by mid-January Hong Kong’s border with the mainland would reopen.
“Hong Kong relies heavily on tourism from mainland China — which accounted for 78% of its visitors in 2018, so it would need China to reopen the border for any significant uplift to occur,” Bowerman previously told VOA.
Visitor numbers low
Hong Kong first opened borders to non-residents May 1 and then, in September, removed quarantines for arrivals. But with much of the world opening completely, Hong Kong hasn’t seen anything close to the number of arrivals it would welcome in pre-pandemic times.
This year has seen arrivals into Hong Kong remain low in comparison to before the pandemic, with only 330,223 visitors through the end of October. The city usually enjoys tens of millions of arrivals per year, with more than 65 million arrivals in 2018.
Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia Pacific region for Natixis, a French investment bank, said the removal of remaining restrictions for arrivals is a “game changer.”
“The announcement [removing] “0+3” is a game changer for Hong Kong. We are going to revise our growth projection. We are at -3 [%] this year at least. We’re going to see a rebound of at least 3%, possibly 4%. So, I can see about 3.5% [economic] growth [for 2023]. That’s to these measures,” Garcia-Herrero told VOA.
But trade wars and political differences between the U.S. and China in recent years have affected Hong Kong’s status as a global financial center. Relations also have soured between Washington and Beijing after Hong Kong authorities cracked down on pro-democracy protests in 2019.
Garcia-Herrero said geopolitics means investors and businesses are relying less on Hong Kong as an investment hub.
“There is also export ban sanctions, even if Hong Kong is a different jurisdiction, the U.S. also applies these sanctions,” Garcia-Herrero said. “Companies in the light of Hong Kong are being perceived much more like the mainland [China] and not only by observers, this affects investors’ positions. Some are leaving for Singapore. I wouldn’t say financial institutions are just shutting and leaving, but they are reducing operations and finding what they can do elsewhere is less risky. It is a geopolitical risk not a competitive risk.”
Hong Kong’s international status “is a different ballgame,” Garcia-Herrero said. “To me, a global financial center like London, New York — the point is there is a vast variety in these two stock exchanges. That’s not the case in Hong Kong anymore and I doubt it will be. For me, Hong Kong will remain increasingly this offshore center for the mainland.”
Long time coming
Business owners, residents and foreign expatriates in Hong Kong have criticized Hong Kong’s long-winded COVID-19 rules, complaining the city would lose its competitiveness and status as a global city.
The city has already seen an accelerated exodus of a number of businesses and expatriates. Data shows Hong Kong’s population has declined significantly, with more than 113,000 residents leaving the city in the past year alone, the biggest-ever drop since record keeping began more than 60 years ago.

Health perspective
But Dr. David Owens, a family physician and honorary assistant clinical professor at Hong Kong University, argued the city could have moved to open earlier to prevent further damage.
“Hong Kong border restrictions, along with other COVID policies have had no grounding in science or evidence for many months,” he told VOA. “With other COVID regulations, Hong Kong border policies will actively harm public health due to the damage to both the economy and trust in public health institutions.
“I see no impact on Hong Kong from opening the international border,” he said. “This was always a political, not medical, decision, which could have been made months ago.”

Source: Voice of America

City officials and outreach workers across the United States were rushing to get people off the streets this week, turning sites such as libraries and arenas into shelters to mitigate a humanitarian crisis caused by freezing weather and an influx of migrants.
Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services opened libraries and police stations as warming stations, while shelters in cities as far south as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, expanded hours and bed capacity as temperatures were expected to sink to the teens in Fahrenheit (below -10 degrees Celsius) Friday night.

Officials in Denver, Colorado, where the temperature of minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 degrees Celsius) Thursday became the second coldest in the city’s history, opened the Coliseum as a shelter this week. Officials prepared the indoor arena to house 225 people but increased its capacity to 359 Wednesday night.
“I feel good about being here because I don’t have to worry about sleeping out in the cold, I don’t have to worry about going from place to place,” said Laphonse McMillan, one of the people seeking shelter at the Coliseum this week.
Denver officials also opened the municipal Wellington Webb Building on Thursday night. The building is a workplace for more than 1,000 city employees and, according to the city’s emergency operations center, it is the first time it has been used as a shelter.
Cities across the United States have been struggling to address homelessness. A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report this week showed nearly 600,000 people were homeless as of January 2022. The report found that homelessness among people in shelters declined by 1.6%, while unsheltered homelessness increased by 3.4%, compared to 2020.
“Severe weather exacerbates the cruel reality of homelessness in America,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Compounding factors
In Hennepin County, Minnesota, where the National Weather Service said blizzard conditions and extreme cold through Saturday could be “life-threatening,” the director of housing stability, David Hewitt, said shelters or facilities such as hotel rooms were accommodating 242 families, compared to a typical capacity of 119 families.
Hewitt said there has been a surge in county shelter stays since a COVID-era eviction moratorium and federal emergency rental assistance programs ended in June.
“We literally have 300 more children in shelter today than we did this time last year,” he said.
Thousands of people trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border daily have placed additional strain on cities in their path. Nearly 1,000 migrants were staying in Denver city shelters or partner shelters as of Thursday, according to a city statement.
In the Texas border city of El Paso, where temperatures were in the teens Fahrenheit Friday morning, shelters were also feeling the combined strain of mass migration and a weather-induced need for housing.
“We have cold temperatures in conjunction with a large number of refugees,” John Martin, head of the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in El Paso, told CBS News, adding that local shelters expected a 50% to 60% uptick in need this week. “It just seems like everything’s hitting at once.”
Making room
Meanwhile, a blizzard was moving eastward across the Great Lakes region Friday.
Central Iowa Shelter in Des Moines, where blizzard conditions were expected through Saturday, housed 250 people overnight in its 150-person capacity shelter this week, and would not turn anyone away, said director of marketing and business development Melissa Alto-Kintigh. Volunteers were still going into the community and urging people to seek shelter from the bitter cold.
“There’s enough space, although this does mean that some people sleep on the floors,” she said.

Source: Voice Of America

Canada’s Western Hudson Bay polar bear population has fallen 27% in just five years, according to a government report released this week, suggesting climate change is affecting the animals.
Every autumn, the bears living along the western edge of the Bay pass through the sub-Arctic tourist town of Churchill, Manitoba, as they return to the sea ice. This has made the population not only the best-studied group in the world, but also the most famous, with the local bear-viewing economy valued at $5.30 million annually.
However, Nunavut’s government assessment finds that just 618 bears remained in 2021 — a roughly 50% drop from the 1980s.
“In some ways, it’s totally shocking,” said John Whiteman, chief research scientist at conservation nonprofit Polar Bears International. “What’s really sobering is that these kinds of declines are the kind that unless sea ice loss is halted, are predicted to eventually cause … extinction.”
Polar bears depend on the sea ice to hunt, staking out over seal breathing holes. But the Arctic is now warming about four times faster than the rest of the world. Around Hudson Bay, seasonal sea ice is melting out earlier in the spring, and forming later in the fall, forcing bears to go for longer without food.
Scientists cautioned that a direct link between the population decline and sea ice loss in Hudson Bay wasn’t yet clear, as four of the past five years have seen moderately good ice conditions. Instead, they said, climate-caused changes in the local seal population might be driving bear numbers down.
And while it’s possible some bears may have moved, “the number of adult male bears has remained more or less the same. What’s driven the decline is a reduced number of juvenile bears and adult females,” said Stephen Atkinson, an independent wildlife biologist who led the research on behalf of the government.
This change in demographics doesn’t fit with the idea that bears are moving out of western Hudson Bay, he added.
“There was a very low number of cubs being produced in 2021,” said Andrew Derocher, who leads the Polar Bear Science Lab at the University of Alberta. “We’re looking at a slowly aging population, and when you do get bad [ice] years, older bears are much more vulnerable to increased mortality.”
Also of concern to scientists, the report suggests declines have sped up. Between 2011 and 2016, the population dropped only 11%.
There are 19 populations of polar bears spread out among Russia, Alaska, Norway, Greenland and Canada. But Western Hudson Bay is among the southernmost locales, and scientists project the bears here are likely to be among the first to disappear.
A 2021 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found most of the world’s polar bear populations are on track to collapse by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t heavily curbed.

Source: Voice Of America

Over the past months, the State Audit Organisation has conducted a scrutiny targeting 416 mismanaged government projects, each costing more than 10 billion kip, according to the president of the organisation.
These state investment projects have a total cost of 58.8 trillion kip (around US$3.3 billion).
Thursday’s morning witnessed President of the State Audit Organisation Viengthavisone Thepphachanh reporting to the ongoing 4th Ordinary Session of the National Assembly about SAO’s examination of state investment projects which was based on the National Assembly’s 24th resolution.
Of the projects subject to the scrutiny of the State Audit Organisation, 280 projects have been completely audited and 136 projects, worth over 41.6 trillion kip, are yet to be inspected.
The organisation also audited 616 projects, worth 1.8 trillion kip, out of 2,850 projects (each costing less than 10 billion kip) listed for scrutiny by the National Assembly.
“As of today, we have audited 89% of the listed projects and these have a total investment cost of over 19 trillion kip. Some 2,370 projects with a total value of 47.7 trillion kip are yet to be audited,” said Mr Viengthavisone Thepphachanh.
SAO’s latest report suggests that 37 state investment projects with a cost of over 310 billion kip have been implemented without detailed designs.
“When these projects were being implemented, their designs were revised with the addition of more project activities, and finally they turned out to be more costly than when approved by the National Assembly,” Mr Viengthavisone Thepphachanh told the ongoing 4th Ordinary Session of the National Assembly.
“Some irrigation projects have improper designs, are costly but ineffective. As a result they have been suspended,” said SAO’s president.

Source: Lao News Agency

Nearly a week after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk said that the accounts of suspended journalists would be reinstated, at least six remain blocked.
Voice of America’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, is among them. Twitter suspended the accounts Dec. 15 over posts about another removed account — @Elonjet — which uses public data to track Musk’s private jet and other aircraft.
On Thursday, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a Washington-based whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, filed a complaint to Congress over the suspension of Herman and other journalists.
“All of this is disturbing,” GAP’s Senior Counsel David Seide wrote in a letter addressed to the House and Senate commerce committees. “For no rational reason, Twitter and Mr. Musk wrongly muzzled and continue to muzzle Voice of America’s reporter and at least five other journalists. We ask you to continue to review this mistreatment and, if you believe warranted, investigate further.”
The letter, shared with VOA, said that Musk “abused his authority by acting arbitrarily and capriciously” in suspending and continuing to block several prominent journalists from the social media platform.
Twitter did not immediately respond to VOA’s request for comment, sent in a direct message via the platform.
Twitter appeals
Early Saturday morning, Musk announced on Twitter that the “accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”
To other Twitter users, Herman’s account looked as if it were back to normal.
But when Herman opened the app later that day, he was met with a notification saying he could regain access only if he deleted three tweets that referenced the @Elonjet account — or he could file an appeal.
Herman chose the latter option, he told VOA, “not realizing that put me in an even deeper level of purgatory.”
Making it seem as if his account was reactivated was “disingenuous at best,” Herman said.
Other journalists had similar experiences, including Matt Binder of Mashable, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN and freelance reporters Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.
VOA spoke with several of these reporters, who all said they were not surprised at being suspended.
Rupar and Webster told VOA they opted to delete the tweets in question to regain full access to their accounts, but the other six refused, so remain locked out.
Twitter told them they will be barred until specified posts are deleted.
“I will not delete the tweets because I feel there was nothing wrong with those tweets, and deleting them would be an admission that I did something wrong,” Herman said. “The only way I will tweet again is if my account is reinstated unconditionally.”
Mashable’s Binder was briefly unsuspended Saturday, but he says he was locked out again after asking a Twitter official which company policy he had broken.
He appealed the ruling instead of deleting the offending tweet but said that Twitter denied the request.
Now journalists are “going to have to be cautious about how they disseminate their reporting on Twitter because Elon Musk can just choose on a whim to change policy,” Binder told VOA in an interview. “We’ve seen it already.”
GAP’s Seide said suspensions over @Elonjet tweets do not bode well for press freedom on Twitter.
“It’s especially concerning because it’s so arbitrary and innocuous,” he told VOA. “If they can force journalists to censor themselves on innocuous issues, they plainly do that on other issues, too.”
Webster, a freelance reporter based in Minneapolis, said Twitter has played a big role in building an audience for his work. Because of that, he deleted the requested tweets to regain access.
Still, getting suspended has changed how he engages with the platform, he told VOA.
“It’s really chilling to have to be so careful about what to say,” he said. “You just worry about what might happen in the future if you say something that might be upsetting to Elon Musk.”
Even though Webster is back on Twitter, he said he no longer trusts the platform and plans to use the social media platform Mastodon more.
The Intercept’s Lee told VOA he will not delete the tweet that got him suspended.
That journalists now risk facing arbitrary censorship “basically just proves that Twitter is no longer a viable platform,” he said, adding that he believes it is important to “diversify what social media you use.”
VOA’s public relations team on Thursday confirmed Herman’s account had not been reinstated.
In an emailed statement when Herman was first suspended, VOA spokesperson Nigel Gibbs said, “As Chief National Correspondent, Mr. Herman covers international and national news stories, and this suspension impedes his ability to perform his duties as a journalist.”
Musk had said on Twitter that the @Elonjet account and any accounts that linked to it were suspended because they violated Twitter’s anti-doxxing policy.
Doxxing is when someone maliciously publishes private or identifying information about someone — like their phone number or address — on the internet, according to Clayton Weimers, executive director of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) U.S. office.
The @Elonjet Twitter account, however, used publicly available data. Additionally, none of the journalists who had tweeted about Musk and his shutdown of the account had tweeted location information for his plane.
Doxxing is an increasingly common intimidation tactic to target journalists over their coverage, Weimers said.
“The risk here is that [Musk is] really lowering the barrier for what we’re considering doxxing and weaponizing it against journalists in a way that doesn’t make journalists or other public officials any safer on the platform,” Weimers said.
Twitter has historically been slow to respond to genuine doxxing attacks, Weimers said.
Musk also dissolved Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, of which RSF was a longtime member. Made up of human and civil rights groups, the 100-member advisory group advised on policies to respond to hate speech and other issues on Twitter.
Since Twitter is Musk’s private company, “there’s an argument to be made that it’s his $44 billion plaything, and he can make the rules as he sees fit,” Herman acknowledged. “And if he wants to turn it into the online equivalent of a private country club, then he probably legally can.”
Herman said he has not spoken with any of the other journalists in the suspended-from-Twitter club.
“I’ve been pretty busy,” he said. “But I think some of us are following each other on Mastodon now.”

Source: Voice Of America