Poland will deliver four Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine “in the next few days,” President Andrzej Duda said Thursday.
Poland is the first country to formally commit to sending combat planes to Ukraine, which Kyiv says it urgently needs to repel the Russian invasion, which has become a brutal war of attrition in the eastern Donbas region.
“We will be handing over four fully operational planes,” Duda said at a joint press conference with Czech President Petr Pavel, according to French newswire AFP.
Additional planes which are “currently under maintenance” will be “handed over gradually,” Duda added, and Poland will replace the MiGs with American-made F-35s and South Korean FA-50 fighters.
After convincing its Western allies to supply Ukraine with dozens of tanks following a months-long diplomatic marathon, Kyiv has been intensively lobbying its partners in recent weeks to send modern fighter jets.
As he toured European capitals last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made repeated pleas to the U.K. and France to provide modern jets to boost his country’s aging air force, which is mostly made up of Soviet-era planes.
Yet, Kyiv’s allies have been wary of handing over the latest generation of combat planes, such as American F-16s, out of fear it would only serve to further escalate the conflict.
So far, the U.K. has started training Ukrainian pilots as a “first step” toward sending jets, while the U.S. has welcomed two pilots on an American airbase to assess their flying skills, but will not let them operate American F-16s.
Meanwhile, countries such as France and the Netherlands have expressed openness to the idea, but steered clear of making any formal commitments.
The Polish government — one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 — had already signaled its intention to send jets in recent days.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Ukraine has been resisting the Russian invasion for over a year. Russia launches a new offensive. The news ticker.
Donbass: Increased Russian attacks
Bachmut: Fierce battles on all fronts
Read the latest developments here Ukraine conflict in the news ticker. The information processed Ukraine war come partly from the warring parties Russia and the Ukraine. They can therefore not be independently checked in part.
KIEV/Moscow – The Ukrainian army defends Bakhmut in a battle of attrition to tie down and inflict casualties on as many Russian troops as possible. However, the Russians are not only attacking from the east. They have also worked their way north and south of the city, leaving the Ukrainians with only one clear road for a possible retreat. In addition to regular soldiers, Russia primarily uses the Wagner mercenary group in Bakhmut and aims to wear down the Ukrainians. “The enemy army is increasing the intensity of its offensive activities,” Deputy Minister Maljar wrote on Telegram. Despite heavy losses, the enemies are in the majority. The information could not be independently verified.
The Ukrainian General Staff confirmed intensified Russian attacks on the frontline cities in Donbass. In addition to Bakhmut, attacks on Kupyansk, Liman, Avdiivka and Wuhledar in the east of the country were also mentioned in the General Staff situation report on Monday evening. The attacks near Avdiivka, which is close to Donetsk, and near Wuhledar were repelled. The Russian Ministry of Defense had previously reported an increase in the offensive in the Donetsk area with artillery and airstrikes.
Ukraine War: Battles for Bakhmut “Increasingly Complicated”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described the fighting for the city of Bakhmut in the east of the country as “increasingly complicated”. “The enemy is destroying anything that can help hold our positions,” he said Monday in his evening video address. The Ukrainian soldiers who defended Bakhmut against the Russian attackers are “true heroes”.
Russia has been trying for months to bring Bakhmut under its control. The fighting for the city is the longest-running battle to date in the more than year-long Russian war of aggression.
According to analysts, Bakhmut is of little strategic importance – a revenue would therefore have primarily symbolic value for Moscow. Zelenskyy recently announced that the Ukrainian army would try to hold the city for as long as possible. (editorial with agencies)
#situation #Bachmut #coming
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
Gilsinan: Have you have you spoken to any of these kids or their parents individually? What are you hearing from them?
Razer: What I really hear from the kids, because some of them play sports. You know, they’re 11. It’s just that fear of, why are these adults are doing this to us? Why is this happening? And it’s hard to explain that to them.
Gilsinan: Well, how do you explain that to them?
Razer: First of all, I’ll make sure that they know I’m gay. I’m the only gay one in the Senate. And then I’m not an advocate or an ally, I’m family. And, you know, people are afraid of things that are different. If we’re honest, we’re all different. I like boys. They thought I was going to like girls. You are a girl. They thought you were a boy, you know? Then we’ll laugh. This is a reaction to people being afraid of what’s different.
And then I try to not bore them with a little bit of LGBT history and just say very quickly, they’ve been coming after us since the ’50s, banning us from federal jobs. The ’60s, the ’70s, we were passing nondiscrimination laws in municipalities, with [singer and anti-gay rights activist] Anita Bryant coming in behind to put it on the ballot and take them away. You know, we died in the ’80s and they laughed at us in the ’90s. It’s military, it’s marriage, all those things. They’ve run out of ways to attack me as a gay, white man. I’ve won. But they still have to have a boogeyman. They still have to be able to divide the population. They can’t attack me anymore. So now they’re coming after kids. I’m tired of having to hug crying 11-year-olds after committee hearings. I’m glad I’m there to do it. But I’m tired of it.
Gilsinan: When you when you say “they,” you’re talking about colleagues of yours, Republican colleagues, and you have good relationships across the aisle. What are they saying about their reasoning? And what’s it like to come to work now, given this debate?
Razer: To the degree that some of them would just not like to have to deal with the issue at all, they just try to avoid the issue with me. You know, just, let’s talk about anything but the elephant in the room. I’ve been dealing with that, though, it’s my seventh year in the General Assembly. Did four in the House and now my third year in the Senate. And I quickly made friends on the other side of the aisle, especially the rural guys, being from rural Missouri myself.
And then I would introduce MONA, the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, as an amendment — this is the bill that would make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations. So I’m friends with these people, and then I would watch them all very loudly vote an amendment down, that just says, “Greg gets to have a roof over his head.” And last year on the Senate floor, somebody had asked me, like, “Greg, if this comes up, don’t take our votes personally.” And I said on the Senate floor, “Somebody said that to me. And yes, I do take it personally.” I very much take it personally, because it’s personal.
I was told by many people, “Greg, politics is a game. You just got to play the game.” Politics shouldn’t be a game. There’s going to be gamesmanship to it, when you gotta maneuver around somebody to get something passed. But what we do there in and of itself isn’t a game.
Gilsinan: You’ve talked about having been suicidal when you were growing up. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Razer: I grew up in a town of 450 people — outside of that town, actually, in the middle of thousands of acres of cotton. Literally grew up in the middle of the cotton field, down in extreme south Missouri.
Gilsinan: The famous Cooter, Missouri.
Razer: Cooter, yes. Cooter Wildcats. But I grew up in an evangelical church, with very country friends and neighbors. And it’s not exactly a great place for a young, closeted kid to grow up in the ’80s and ’90s. And so, by my senior year of high school, just various things put me into a depression. And on those worst nights it would be, “I’ll never be able to come out. I’ll never know what it’s like to fall in love or to have my heart broken or to be excited about a first date. So what’s the point of moving on?” The couple of times that I came very close, that was kind of what put me over the edge. And who would’ve thought, 25 years later, here I am.
Gilsinan: What stopped you when you were thinking about that?
Razer: I don’t know. I guess just enough of a cool head in the moment. I honestly have never thought of that. I don’t remember giving up on the idea that night. I don’t remember getting up and walking out of that room. Huh.
Gilsinan: So when did you come out and what was it like for you?
Razer: I came out on Feb. 26, 1999. I’d just been dealing with whether or not to come out. I slowly can feel myself inching that way. And my friends laughed that I didn’t come out of the closet, I exploded out. Once I’ve had enough, it was like, enough. Everybody, I’m gay, let’s get the party going again. You know, I was just tired of hiding. I was in Columbia [at the University of Missouri]. I’m a junior in college at this point, 20 years old. I had the greatest group of friends. They were incredibly supportive. Overboard supportive, actually. Quite a few months later, I show up at a little house party that one of my friends is throwing, and they said, “Greg, you’re here with us every weekend. You haven’t brought a boy over yet. Have you been to a gay bar?” And I was like, “No, I haven’t.” They’re like, “All right, we’re taking you to the gay bar tonight.” So all my straight friends made me go to my first gay bar.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Some 130,000 demonstrators swarmed the streets that night last month to rally against the country’s new far-right government — arguably the most extreme in Israel’s history — and an agenda that even centrist politicians say threatens Israel’s democracy. The protest wasn’t a one-off. Pro-democracy demonstrations have taken place every Saturday since the start of January, bringing in some of the largest crowds in recent memory (though smaller than the 2011 social justice protests that, at their height, brought approximately a quarter million people to the streets).
The new government is led by a familiar face, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in and out of office since 1996 and is still on trial for corruption charges.
But the coalition he cobbled together to regain power includes elements that once composed the fringe of Israeli politics. That includes Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right religious nationalist who heads a political party named “Jewish Power.” Previously, he was a member of Kach, a party that was outlawed in Israel and that spent 25 years on the U.S. State Department’s list of terror organizations; in a twist of irony, Ben Gvir is now serving as the country’s national security minister. Since taking the helm, he has visited the Al Aqsa compound in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, home to the third holiest site in Islam. Al Aqsa is sacred to Jews as well, but such visits are viewed by Palestinians as a huge provocation — an act so contentious that Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 visit is widely credited with sparking the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
Another controversial figure in the new government is Bezalel Smotrich, a settler and the leader of an ultra-nationalist religious Zionist party. Smotrich is now serving as a finance minister; it is widely believed that, in this role, he will ensure West Bank settlements get the money they need to continue to grow, threatening what little possibility remains of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state.
Already, this new government is making moves to chip away at the country’s democratic space. A proposed overhaul to the judiciary would render the High Court’s judgments toothless and would destroy its independence, upending the country’s system of checks and balances. The government also announced an intent to shut down Kan — the country’s only publicly funded broadcast news service — with Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi “calling public broadcasting unnecessary.” Outrage was so intense that it’s been put on ice for now as the government focuses instead on pushing through its controversial judicial reforms. Netanyahu defends the reshuffling of the judiciary, dismissively calling them a “minor correction.”
But even Israel’s own president, Isaac Herzog, is sounding the alarm. In a speech given on Sunday — the day before a massive nationwide strike that brought 100,000 Israelis to protest outside of the Knesset on Monday — Herzog warned that the country is “on the brink of constitutional and social collapse.”
“I feel, we all feel, that we are in the moment before a clash, even a violent clash,” Herzog said. “The gunpowder barrel is about to explode.”
When I wade into the crowd on that Saturday night, just after Shabbat has ended, there’s another consistent fear I hear from Israelis: that this new government will undermine its standing in the world, including with its most important ally, the United States. But while there are fears about losing American support, some Israelis also voice concern that American backing will continue regardless of what this new government does — a scenario they view as enabling and dangerous. Because what would an Israel — held accountable to no one, left entirely to its own devices — look like?
Avi, who works in high-tech, a key Israeli industry, says he is particularly worried about the government targeting the rights of secular Israelis, women and LGBTQ individuals — which could also prove to open rifts between America’s Democratic Party and the Israeli government. (Just a few days later, hundreds of Israeli high-tech employees would take to the streets, leaving their desks abruptly at midday to march on Rothschild Boulevard as they carried signs that read, “No democracy, no high-tech.”)
Asked if Israel’s relationship with the United States is a concern, Hila replies, “It’s always a concern. We’re supposed to be the only democracy in the Middle East and that doesn’t seem like where we’re going with the latest changes.”
Maya Lavie-Ajayi, a 48-year-old professor at Ben Gurion University, says she hopes to see some sort of intervention from the Biden administration and the European Union. “We see Hungary and we see Russia and we know you get to a point where [citizens] can’t fight back anymore.” She added that while Israel isn’t there yet, “I think that we need support to keep the democratic nature that was problematic in the first place.”
Lavie-Ajayi notes the withdrawal of American support would be a powerful lesson to Netanyahu: “Bibi would understand that he can’t just do whatever he wants, that he doesn’t have an open ticket to chip away at the democratic nature of this country.”
It’s not just people in the streets who see the prospect of pressure from abroad. In December, over 100 former Israeli diplomats and retired foreign ministry officials sent an open letter to Netanyahu expressing concern about the new government’s impact on the country’s international standing, warning that there could be “political and economic ramifications.”
Indeed, senior American officials seem to share at least some of protesters’ worries about the direction Israel is taking. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited Israel last month reportedly in hopes of “syncing up” with the new government. Then came Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip, during which he said he had a “candid” talk with Netanyahu, with Blinken touting the need for a two-state solution with Palestinians and the importance of democratic institutions.
Still, it seems unlikely Israel will lose American support — including billions in military aid — anytime soon.
“This administration will go to great lengths to avoid a public confrontation with the new Netanyahu government,” says Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department official who worked on Middle East negotiations and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
At the same time, Israel’s shifting politics — particularly with a government that’s now more religious right than secular right — could have unintended reverberations. It’s taken for granted that American liberals are likely to grow ever more skittish with an ultra-conservative Israel. But some in conservative corners are also worried, according to Yossi Shain, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University, professor emeritus at Georgetown University and former Knesset Member from Yisrael Beiteinu, a secular nationalist party on the right. He says he’s constantly on the phone with American counterparts who are deeply concerned about how the new government will impact the country’s security and economy.
“The Israeli right pretends to reflect American conservative values, but in fact distorts them,” he adds. “It builds on clericalism and religious orthodoxy that negates liberties, the core of American conservative creed.”
Now, Shain says, some of the same political actors who helped foster the circumstances that enabled this government to rise are wringing their hands.
To which Israel’s pro-democracy protesters would likely respond, “Told you so.”
Back on the street in Tel Aviv, many in the crowd, though not all, link the decades of Palestinian occupation with the decline of Israel’s democracy.
“Rights for Jews only is not a democracy,” reads one poster. A massive black sign — made out of cloth and held up by half a dozen protesters — depicts the separation barrier, guard towers and barbed wire that contain the West Bank; in the middle, a dove bearing an olive branch bursts through the structure. “A nation that occupies another nation will never be free,” says the sign in Arabic, Hebrew and English.
Nearby, a woman calls through a bullhorn, “Democracy?”
“Yes!” the crowd responds.
“Occupation?”
“No!” they cry.
“I’m terrified of a situation where [Israel’s new government] doesn’t reduce American support,” says Rony HaCohen, an economist, pointing to the way the military occupation of the Palestinian territories has become normalized amid a lack of American censure.
But one protester questions even the United States’ ability to rein in its closest ally in the Middle East. Jesse Fox, a 41-year-old doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University, says that while he’d like to see the Biden administration raise some pressure, he believes Israel is already headed down “the path of Hungary” and other countries that have abandoned democratic principles.
“It starts with the court reforms,” he says. “After that, they have plans to try to bring the media under government control. And then, who knows?”
And as an American Jewish immigrant who has lived in Israel for the better part of 20 years, Fox adds, “I want Americans to realize that, right now, being ‘pro-Israel’ means opposing the Israeli government.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Saturday’s event was held entirely in Portuguese for a Brazilian crowd of Bolsonaro supporters living abroad and was organized by the right-wing organization Yes Brazil USA. Bolsonaro was cheered throughout the event.
There has been speculation during recent weeks on when Bolsonaro might return to Brazil, where is the subject of several investigations into possible wrongdoing.
He initially entered the U.S. on a one-month diplomatic visa, which ended Jan. 31. He was accompanied by a team of presidential advisers and his wife, all of whom left Florida last month.
Lawyers for Bolsonaro told Brazilian media recently that they applied for a tourist visa to extend his stay in the U.S.
Amid the speculation about Bolsonaro’s plans, one of his sons, Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro, told Brazilian reporters that he didn’t know when his father would return. “It could be tomorrow, it could be in six months, he might never return. I don’t know. He’s relaxing,” the son said.
For the first time in his more than three-decade political career as a lawmaker and then as president, Bolsonaro no longer enjoys the special legal protection that requires any trial be held at the Supreme Court.
Bolsonaro is being investigated in four inquiries, which had been in the Supreme Court and were sent to trial court this past week.
Among the inquiries is whether Bolsonaro had any role in inciting the Jan. 8 riot by his supporters who stormed into government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, demanding his election defeat to Lula be overturned.
Investigators are also looking into who organized and financed the mass gathering of Bolsonaro supporters, who came to the capital from all over Brazil.
One of the investigations held by the Brazilian justice is who are the ones responsible for inciting the crimes, as well as who financed people from all over the country to travel to Brasilia.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Guwahati: As the crackdown on child marriage continued in Assam, the police are now setting up additional prison facilities to house the accused, with two such arrangements in Goalpara and Cachar districts already in the offing.
While accused from different districts have already been moved to the facility in Goalpara, another such temporary jail is coming up in Cachar as well.
“We have got the approval for setting up a temporary jail. It will be established in a non-functional existing government premises near Silchar,” Cachar Superintendent of Police Nomal Mahatta told PTI.
He said building and other infrastructure are already available and security arrangements are now being put in place.
Mahatta added that the temporary jail will be used once the existing facilities run out of space.
In Goalpara district, a transit camp for doubtful and declared foreigners in Matia area is being used to accommodate accused in child marriage cases from neighbouring districts, a police official said.
“Some of the accused held in Nalbari, Barpeta and Kamrup districts are being brought to this temporary jail,” he said.
The first dedicated centre to put suspected and declared foreigners in Assam, the Matia transit camp has a capacity to house 3,000 inmates, with 68 people moved into it in the first batch in January.
The opposition has criticised the manner in which the drive against child marriage was being carried out, equating the police action with “terrorising people”.
Family members of those arrested have also been protesting against the operation.
The Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation has demanded that the Assam government provide a monthly assistance of Rs 2,000 to every woman whose husband has been arrested till he gets bail.
AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi had said that the Assam government should have concentrated on increasing literacy levels if it was actually seized of the problem of child marriage.
At least 2,528 people have been arrested and 4,074 cases registered in the state so far as part of the crackdown that began on Friday.
With the large number of household heads, in many cases the sole bread earners, being arrested, protests were staged in different parts of the state with wives, children and family members coming out on the streets.
“Our menfolk have been taken away by the police, leaving us without anyone to look after or to provide food for us,” said Reshma Khatun, one of those protesting at Dhubri on Monday.
Justifying the action, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said teenage pregnancy accounted for nearly 17 per cent of over 6.2 lakh pregnant women last year in the state.
The state cabinet recently approved a proposal to book men who have married girls below 14 years under the POCSO Act.
Cases under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 will be registered against those who have married girls in the age group of 14-18, the cabinet had decided.
The offenders will be arrested and the marriages declared illegal.
Assam has a high rate of maternal and infant mortality, with child marriage being identified as the primary cause, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS).
Lucknow: “I struggled,” Kerala journalist Siddique Kappan said minutes after he walked out of jail on Thursday to camera crews, a small curious crowd and to his wife and teen son, waiting patiently, just as they had for the more than two years since he was imprisoned on his way to Hathras.
The relief was writ large on their faces but so was the pain. Kappan and three others were arrested in October 2020 while they were going to the Uttar Pradesh town where a Dalit woman died allegedly after being raped. They were accused of trying to instigate violence over the death of the Hathras woman.
“I am coming to Delhi. I have to stay there for six weeks,” Kappan told PTI.
“I struggled more,” he laughed when asked how life had been in jail without saying anything more.
In his two and a half years in jail, his mother died.
“Her name was Kadijah. She is not there to see Kappan coming home,” Kappan’s wife Raihana said.
“The Supreme Court granted bail in the UAPA case and his innocence was revealed. Two and a half years is not a short time. We have experienced a lot of pain and suffering. But I am happy that justice, though belated, has been served,” she told PTI.
“I repeat that Kappan is a media person,” Raihana stressed.
The couple has three children — Muzammil (19), Zidhan (14) and Mehnaz (nine).
“Our children are waiting to welcome him home. Their happiness was taken away. Can they forget their father? They are proud to say that Sidhique Kappan, a journalist, is their father.”
Waiting outside with his mother was their eldest Muzammil, who also reiterated that his father was a journalist.
“What is the cause of my father’s severe suffering for two and half years? Now we are waiting for his freedom. We are very happy. We thanks all those who have been with us.”
According to Kappan’s lawyer Mohamed Dhanish KS, the journalist had been lodged in the Mathura and Lucknow district jails and had been out twice — once when he got Covid and was admitted at AIIMS, Delhi, and the second time to meet his ailing mother.
Police alleged that Kappan had links with the now-banned Popular Front of India (PFI), and charged him under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and sections of the Indian Penal Code.
In September last year, the Supreme Court granted him bail in connection with that case. A bench headed by then Chief Justice Uday Umesh Lalit directed Kappan to remain in Delhi for six weeks after his release from an Uttar Pradesh prison.
However, he continued to be in jail because of a money laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said the drones appear to have been from the U.S.-led coalition, adding that they targeted six refrigerated trucks. The group said there were casualties and ambulances rushed to the area.
Another activist said the strike hit a convoy of trucks of Iran-backed militiamen. Omar Abu Layla, a Europe-based activist from Deir el-Zour who runs a group that monitors developments, tweeted that there was no immediate word on casualties.
The pro-government Sham FM radio station also reported that six refrigerated trucks were hit.
In Baghdad, an official with an Iran-backed militia confirmed there was a strike saying it only targeted one truck. He gave no word on casualties.
The attack in eastern Syria came hours after bomb-carrying drones targeted an Iranian defense factory in the central city of Isfahan causing some damage at the plant.
Last month, Israel’s military chief of staff strongly suggested that Israel was behind a strike on a truck convoy in Syria in November, giving a rare glimpse of Israel’s shadow war against Iran and its proxies across the region.
Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who finished his military service earlier this month, said Israeli military and intelligence capabilities made it possible to strike specific targets that pose a threat.
Israeli leaders have in the past acknowledged striking hundreds of targets in Syria and elsewhere in what it says is a campaign to thwart Iranian attempts to smuggle weapons to proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group or to destroy weapons caches.
The November strike hit tanker trucks carrying fuel and other trucks carrying weapons for the militias in Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour, the Observatory reported at the time. It said at least 14 people, most of them militiamen, were killed in the strike.
The strike, along the border with Iraq, targeted Iran-backed militiamen, Syrian opposition activists said at the time. Some of those killed in the attack were Iranian nationals, according to two paramilitary officers in Iraq.
At the time, Israel declined to comment on the strike.
Iran is a main backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad and has sent thousands of Iran-backed fighters to help Syrian troops during the country’s 11-year civil war. Both Iran and Assad’s government are also allied with Hezbollah, which has fought alongside Assad’s forces in the war.
Israel consider Iran to be its chief enemy and has warned against what it views as its hostile activities in the region.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: The month of January started on a super bad note for employees in the tech world. With more Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Google joining the ongoing layoff season, more than 3,400 tech employees are being laid off per day on average in January globally.
As per the data by layoffs tracking site Layoffs.fyi, 219 companies have laid off more than 68,000 employees in January so far.
In 2022, over 1,000 companies laid off 154,336 workers, as per the data by layoffs tracking site Layoffs.fyi.
The mass tech layoffs of 2022 are continuing into the new year. The sacking episodes have gained speed amid global economic meltdown and recession fears.
Deeper layoffs are coming in 2023 as most business economists have predicted that their companies will cut payrolls in the coming months.
According to a report in CNN citing a new survey, only 12 per cent of economists — surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) — anticipate employment will increase at their firms over the next three months, “down from 22 per cent this fall”.
This is the first time since early days of the Covid pandemic that more business leaders anticipate jobs shrinking at their firms.
The findings indicate “widespread concern about entering a recession this year”, according to Julia Coronado, president of NABE.
With more Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Google joining the ongoing layoff season, about 3,000 tech employees are now being laid off per day on average in January globally, including in India.
According to the survey, a little more than half of the business economists feel the risk of a recession over the next year at 50 per cent or higher, which means more layoffs in the offing in 2023.
Amid the layoffs come another bad news for employees, especially from India in the US, as Google has paused its Program Electronic Review Management (PERM), a key step in acquiring an employer-sponsored green card.
Google has sent an email to foreign employees, notifying them that the tech giant will pause any new filings of PERM, leaving foreign workers in a limbo.
“Recognising how this news may impact some of you and your families, I wanted to update you as quickly as possible on the difficult decision we’ve had to make to pause new PERM applications. This does not impact other visa applications or programmes,” an email from a company executive read.
A Google employee posted the email on Team Blind, an anonymous social networking site for certified IT workers.
A PERM application is a critical first step in the green card (permanent residence) process.
The process requires employers to demonstrate that there are no qualified US workers available for the particular role, which has been an increasingly difficult position for us to support given the labor market today.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn is full of job hunts, offers of support for laid off friends and colleagues, and advice for coping with career hurdles as several companies trim their workforce to navigate through an uncertain macroeconomic environment.
Some LinkedIn groups are providing assistance around signing exit paperwork and aiding with connections for new jobs.
Onishi: I’m happy to say that Balmer outlined that history in grand detail in POLITICO and elsewhere.
Ward: You also argue that Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 prefigured some of the Christian nationalist themes that became more explicit in the 1970s. Goldwater famously broke with the religious right in the 1980s, but how did his campaign contribute to the incipient white Christian nationalist project?
Onishi: Goldwater presented an uncompromising conservatism. He was bombastic on the campaign trail. He said that we might need to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He said that while he personally supported the idea that Black and white folks in the South should live and work next to each other, he said that he was not going to sign any laws that forced integration. And he famously delivered a line during his presidential nomination acceptance speech where he said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
I think that’s worth thinking about. In essence, he’s saying that in times like these — the 1960s, when the civil rights movement was brewing, there were calls for immigration reform, women were pushing for independence and autonomy — extremism is the way that you can keep a hold on your country. Extremism is the modus operandi you are going to need to adopt if you are going to continue to hold positions of power in the political, social and economic realms. The foot soldiers of Goldwater’s campaign never forget this message.
Ward: Speaking of his foot soldiers, historians often point to the formation of the Moral Majority in 1979 as the moment when the religious fervor of evangelicals like Jerry Falwell formally entered into a political alliance with the political extremism of the New Right, led by former Goldwater supporters like Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie. But in some respects, that moment marked not only the beginning of a new sort of conservative politics, but also the culmination of a decades-long project of organization and collaboration between those two camps. What sort of political legwork went into making that union possible?
Onishi: Goldwater lost in a landslide in ’64, but his foot soldiers never lost their enthusiasm for his message and for this extremism. So throughout the ’60s, people like Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie and Morton Blackwell were working to build a political apparatus that would match what they saw on the Democratic side. What they wanted to do was take all of the charisma of Goldwater and turn it into a set of institutions and bureaucracies that would enable the takeover of the GOP and of American politics writ large.
What they realize in the early 1970s is that they don’t have enough votes, but they realize that if they can form a coalition with white, conservative Christians, they can find tens of millions of votes. And if they can promise the leaders of that movement — someone like Jerry Falwell — access to power, [those leaders] will no longer be laughed away as backward, rural Christians or old-timey people that have not caught up with modern America. This coalition building was already happening in the late ’60s and early ’70s, well before the official formation of the Moral Majority in 1979.
Ward: Weyrich, in particular, was not coy about his aims. For instance, you cite his statement: “We are all radicals working to overturn the present power structure.” If that’s not a pretty clear echo of Goldwater’s endorsement of political extremism, I don’t know what is.
Onishi: That’s exactly right. And Weyrich said that as somebody who was actively building the Council for National Policy and the Heritage Foundation. It’s easy to write him off as a boring institution builder, but what he was trying to do was instill the revolution into the institutions that make the GOP move and run — and he succeeded, largely.
Ward: One of the first actions of the New Religious Right was to declare war on Jimmy Carter. Carter was an evangelical, but he embodied a very different style of evangelical politics. What did the clash between the New Religious Right and the Carter administration reveal about the nature of their project?
Onishi: Jimmy Carter was almost made in a lab, in terms of being a white Christian president. He’s a Southern Baptist by birth, a military officer, a peanut farmer, and married to his high school sweetheart. However, when Carter got into the White House, he put more women and people of color in the judiciary than anyone before him. He was not publicly outraged by calls for more representation of gay Americans and gay families. He was not taking a hard-line stance on abortion. And perhaps most damning was that he was a dove on foreign policy — he wanted to use diplomacy when it came to America’s interest in conflicts all over the world.
It was all of those components that led Weyrich, Falwell and their cohorts to put everything they had behind Ronald Reagan, who was not one of them in a very strict sense. What this tells me is that their project was about power and not piety.
Ward: Another defining feature of the New Religious Right was an intense focus on “family values” — and in particular on a certain vision of sexual purity — embodied by groups like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. You write very movingly in the book about how purity culture influenced your own upbringing, but could you explain how the movement’s intense focus on individual purity also contributed to its political radicalism?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
