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TOKYO, Japan - The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama (C), attends a memorial at Gokokuji temple in Tokyo on April 29, 2011, for the victims of the March 11 quake and tsunami in Japan.
The Dalai Lama is coming to America. Will Biden meet him?
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso arrives in the United States on June 20 for surgery – his first trip outside India since 2018. The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists is reportedly having a procedure on his knees, but his visit compounds the delicate choices now facing the White House.
Joe Biden made a campaign promise to meet with the Dalai Lama, and with just months remaining in his first term, this might be the only good chance he gets. That said, the president is in the midst of a delicate stabilization process with China, which conquered Tibet in 1950 and forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India in 1959. Beijing has long considered the Dalai Lama a threat to the regime and has attempted to punish countries that give him an audience.
“A meeting between Biden and his Holiness, under any circumstance, would be seen as violating a diplomatic taboo by Beijing,” says Dominic Chiu, senior analyst at Eurasia Group.
“The current communication channels and working groups established between Beijing and Washington to manage bilateral relations would be completely ineffective in managing such a scenario.”
Biden, in other words, might be wise to give the Dalai Lama a wide berth.
Former Pakistani PM Imran Khan, gestures as he speaks with Reuters during an interview in Lahore.
What We're Watching: Punjab election back on, China-India war of names, Brazil wants peace in Ukraine
Constitutional & political crises in Pakistan
Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered that Punjab, the country’s most populous state, can hold elections on May 14, deeming a recent government decision to postpone polls in two states as “unconstitutional.”
Quick recap: This comes after Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf Party, led by former PM Imran Khan, filed a petition challenging the government’s decision to delay the polls in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from April to October.
The government had attributed the delay to a shortfall in funds due to economic constraints, but the top court ordered the government to release 20 billion rupees ($70 million) to fund the elections.
You’ll likely remember that Khan – who was ousted last April in a no-confidence vote and now faces corruption and terrorism charges that he says are politically motivated – is at loggerheads with the central government that’s trying to sideline him.
What’s more, this comes just days after the government introduced a bill in parliament trying to limit the power of the Supreme Court, which Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has long accused of “judicial activism.”
While the tussle between the government and the judiciary continues, there is at least one winner here: Khan, whose primary demand since being ousted has been fresh elections, particularly in his home state of Punjab. The last time Punjab held by-polls, PTI won in a landslide.
India to China: You can't rename what ain't yours
India is pushing back against China's latest attempt to rename 11 places in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing claims as part of southern Tibet. The names China says it is "standardizing" include five Himalayan mountains.
China has tried before to rename areas in the region, triggering angry responses from New Delhi. In 2017, Beijing did it as payback for India allowing the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh. The motive now is unclear, but the stakes are higher: In June 2020, Chinese and Indian troops had their first violent clash along their disputed Himalayan border since the 1960s. (That skirmish was in Ladakh, another chunk of India that China wants to gobble up.)
The fallout from the 2020 border fight saw India come down hard on China, for instance, by banning Chinese-made mobile apps like TikTok. Several rounds of talks had helped calm things down, but not entirely. Last December, soldiers from the two sides had another icy scuffle, this time in Arunachal Pradesh.
With the militaries of two nuclear-armed regional rival powers on high alert in the world's highest battlefield, what could go wrong?
Brazil visits Russia
On Monday, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva revealed that he had dispatched his top foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, to Moscow for talks with Vladimir Putin on how to stop the war in Ukraine.
It’s easy to dismiss the importance of this trip. Putin can stop the war anytime he wants, and a cynic will say Lula simply wants to raise Brazil’s international profile with a peace initiative that will make no difference to the conduct of the war.
But this visit reminds us that many developing countries, now struggling with inflation and debt exacerbated by the war, are far more interested in seeing the conflict end as soon as possible than in Western lectures on its importance for the international order.
There’s also this comment from Amorim: “There will come a time when, on one side or the other, a realization will emerge that the cost of war – not just the political cost, but the human and economic cost – will be greater than the cost of the concessions needed for peace." He’s surely right about that, and if Brazil can play any role at all in helping to shape the eventual peace, the world will become a safer place.
Google Bard seen on Google blog post with Google logo on mobile, in Brussels, Belgium.
What We're Watching: Bard bot, Nigerian election heats up, Tibetan kids pulled away
Google's Bard vs. ChatGPT
Google has soft-launched Bard, the tech giant's answer to OpenAI's uber-popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot. Why should you care? Well, Google says that Bard will "outsmart" ChatGPT, a service that has taken the world by storm since it became a thing in late 2022 and is now backed by Microsoft. But how? Bard will be up to date on current events — giving it a leg up over ChatGPT, which is stuck in 2021. Also, Bard will run on something called Language Model for Dialogue Applications or LaMDA, which is so advanced that last year Google fired an engineer who declared that LaMDA was "sentient" because it could mimic human emotions. This is where it gets tricky, since theoretically this type of AI could be used to make deepfake videos virtually indistinguishable from real ones. And that, in turn, might someday unleash political mayhem befitting a "Black Mirror" episode. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So far, access to Bard is by invite only, and Google likely has guardrails in place to ensure its new AI platform doesn't become too smart for its own good.
Nigeria nears decision day
Some people simply refuse to take no for an answer. Atiku Abubakar, known widely by his first name, is now making his sixth run for president of Nigeria in an election set for February 25. Atiku did serve as vice president under Olusegun Obasanjo from 1999 to 2007, but the now 76-year-old candidate is making a determined run to finally win the top job. He should be careful what he wishes for. Nigeria’s next president will wrestle with a COVID-damaged economy that’s still recovering from two recessions in five years and the ongoing security challenges posed by terrorist group Boko Haram in the country’s north, secessionists in the southeast, and well-armed criminal gangs in multiple regions. His campaign presents him as a “unifier,” not an easy sell in a country polarized along regional and religious lines. Still, he might actually win this time. His main opponents are the favorite, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who represents the currently unpopular ruling party of outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari, and a compelling outsider, Peter Obi, who doesn’t have a well-organized party behind him with local officials to help get out the vote.
China is separating Tibetan children from families
Over 1 million ethnic Tibetan children are being forcibly separated from their families and placed in residential schools in China’s bid to assimilate them into the majority Han culture, according to UN experts. The youngsters only visit home for one or two weeks a year, and because they have not practised their native tongue, many struggle to communicate with their parents. This is the latest example of the Tibetan way of life coming increasingly under threat as part of the systematic “ideological education” policies targeting Chinese minorities under Xi Jinping. Chinese officials insist they are determined to promote ethnic culture, but Tibetan monks and nuns are also dispatched to “transformation through education” facilities, where they endure reported sexual abuse and torture — much like Uighurs suffer in reeducation camps in the northwestern Xinjiang region. The “Land of Snows” has long endured repression since China, but resistance there to the ruling Communist Party — which last erupted into a failed uprising in 2008 — is likely to be further blunted by increased state surveillance, including phone hacking, spying on villages, and even DNA collection.China defends Tibet labour programme, urges against overdoing religion
The programme, aimed at lifting skills and incomes, has involved about 15 per cent of Tibet’s population of 3.51 million.
Dalai Lama 'deeply sorry' for saying female reincarnation must be attractive
NEW DELHI (AFP) - The Dalai Lama is "deeply sorry" about comments he made about women in a recent BBC interview, his office said in a statement on Tuesday (July 2).
US ambassador to China visiting Tibet this week
BEIJING (REUTERS) - US Ambassador to China Terry Branstad was scheduled to visit Tibet this week, a US embassy spokesman said, the first visit to the region by a US ambassador since 2015, amid escalating trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Dalai Lama, 83, hospitalised with chest infection
MUMBAI (REUTERS) - Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama was admitted to a New Delhi hospital on Tuesday (April 9) with chest infection, an aide said, adding that the 83-year-old Buddhist monk was stable.