The World Today for July 10, 2023

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NEED TO KNOW

The Tiger’s Stripes

EGYPT

Ten years ago on July 3, the Egyptian military under Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi launched a coup against the first democratically elected president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi – a member of the Islamist organization the Muslim Brotherhood, that supporters describe as a religious and social movement but critics call a terrorist organization.

Secular Egyptians, business leaders, and Egypt’s large Christian minority were especially concerned about Morsi’s plans, reported Middle East Eye. Less than a year later, in 2014, el-Sissi won the presidency with more than 95 percent of the vote – a landslide victory that international observers said reflected unfair election rules.

Now Egyptians are growing increasingly disgruntled with el-Sissi, noted the Economist.

The president has been building massive infrastructure projects, including a new $58 billion capital city, to boost the economy, create jobs, and modernize the country. “I believe that this generation who through their effort and patience transported Egypt from chaos and anxiety to stability and security is able to complete its development transformation,” he said recently in a national speech marking his decade in power, according to Reuters.

But the debt service on those projects now accounts for more than half of the country’s budget. Because Egypt depends on Ukraine for wheat and is a net importer of energy, the worldwide inflation stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has hit Egyptians hard, especially the third of the country that lives in poverty, Al Jazeera wrote. The currency has lost half its value. Food costs have increased by 60 percent in the last year.

Knowing that many Egyptians are unhappy, el-Sissi kicked off a national dialogue in early May to let people air their grievances and propose solutions. As the Financial Times explained, the dialogue was a remarkable development. Opposition leaders, human rights activists, and others can speak their minds at a government conference center, with the press in attendance, three days a week. El-Sissi even released 1,000 political prisoners to show good faith.

However, as Agence France-Presse reported, el-Sissi last month also allowed his security services to arrest a new batch of 3,000 opposition leaders and human rights activists, among others. These included football fans whose club played a big role in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 that ousted Morsi’s predecessor, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for 30 years.

Critics said the new arrests illustrated how the national dialogue was a marketing ploy. Reporters Without Borders, for example, listed journalists who are still rotting in Egyptian prisons despite el-Sissi’s claim that he wants to turn over a new leaf.

The Egyptian president might have grand visions. But they don’t comport with reality.

THE WORLD, BRIEFLY

The Cycle

NETHERLANDS

The Dutch government collapsed over the weekend after the ruling four-party coalition failed to agree on new policies that would restrict immigration, the Washington Post reported.

The governing coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte had been negotiating over policies to curb the number of refugees and asylum seekers in the Netherlands, as the European Union has been struggling to handle an influx of refugees in recent years.

The proposed changes would require families to wait at least two years before they can be reunited and impose an annual cap of 200 entries for the relatives of war refugees already in the Netherlands.

One of the main changes would be to create two tiers of refugees: Those escaping persecution – who would be granted more rights – and those fleeing war.

Rutte’s center-right party and coalition partner the Christian Democratic Appeal party wanted tighter restrictions, but other members were opposed to them.

Following the collapse, the current government will operate in a caretaker capacity until elections are held later this year.

Even so, government collapses are not uncommon in the Netherlands – particularly for Rutte, the country’s longest-serving prime minister.

Two years ago, Rutte and his cabinet stepped down after being involved in a scandal where parents were wrongly accused of child welfare fraud. However, they regained their seats when they were reelected two months later.

In 2012, another ruling coalition government headed by Rutte collapsed after budget negotiations broke down, only for Rutte’s VVD party to be reelected with even more seats.

Undisputed

UZBEKISTAN

Preliminary results indicate Uzbekistan’s incumbent president Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been reelected with a towering 87.1 percent of ballots cast in a vote that most analysts believed was a foregone conclusion, Radio Free Europe reported.

Sunday’s early polls come months after Uzbeks approved in a referendum a change to the constitution allowing the president to serve two more terms and increase his tenure in office from five to seven years, Al Jazeera reported. The amendments mean that Mirziyoyev could stay in power until 2037.

Political observers noted that Mirziyoyev faced three relatively unknown candidates who remained largely silent during the campaigning from which he was long expected to win a third term.

Mirziyoyev initially served as the country’s prime minister under the hardline rule of his predecessor, former President Islam Karimov.

First elected in 2016, Mirziyoyev has portrayed himself as a reformer and promised to open Uzbekistan – a tightly-controlled former Soviet republic – to foreign investment and tourism.

The president has released political prisoners detained under Karimov and ended forced labor in the country’s cotton fields. Human rights groups have welcomed Mirziyoyev’s changes but noted that there is still room for improvement.

One of the main issues is the lack of real opposition against the government.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said the campaign has been “low-key, mirroring (the) lack of opposition to the incumbent.”

Mirziyoyev’s campaign has mainly focused on the economy and education, with the incumbent vowing to double Uzbekistan’s gross domestic product to $160 billion in the coming years.

Even so, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian nations are dealing with the collateral damage from Western sanctions imposed against their traditional trading partner Russia over the war in Ukraine.

Once an energy exporter, Uzbekistan now consumes more oil and gas than it produces. It has been buying hydrocarbons from Russia, benefiting from Moscow’s decision to divert exports away from Western markets.

‘Context of Tensions’

FRANCE

Hundreds of protesters defied an official ban Saturday to demonstrate in the capital against police violence, days after the country was gripped by nationwide riots over the killing of a teenager by a police officer in a Parisian suburb, Reuters reported.

Authorities dispersed demonstrators from Paris’s huge Place de la République and detained two people. Officials said it had banned the weekend protests, citing a “context of tensions.”

Demonstrations were also banned in the northern city of Lille, while a march in Marseille took place away from the city center along a different route to that previously planned.

Saturday’s protests were called by the family of Adama Traore, a Black Frenchman whose death in police custody in 2016 has been marked by annual demonstrations since.

But the planned marches followed days of unrest across France that saw the arrests of more than 3,000 people and some 2,500 buildings damaged.

The violence followed the June 27 shooting of 17-year-old Nahel M. by a police officer at a traffic stop in the capital. The weeklong riots underscored deep-rooted issues of racism, discrimination, and poverty among France’s minority communities, according to the Jerusalem Post.

But French President Emmanuel Macron and the government have denied institutional racism within the nation’s law enforcement agencies. The government has also rejected allegations by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, after the latter called for France to address “the structural and systemic causes of racial discrimination, including in law enforcement.”

Amid concerns of further violence, the government banned the sale and personal use of fireworks on the Bastille Day holiday next Friday. The pyrotechnics were widely used during the riots, leading to fires and injuries.

DISCOVERIES

Telling The Difference

Scientists recently discovered that artificial intelligence can easily deceive netizens and is getting better at lying, El País reported.

The emergence of AI models has been met with a mix of awe and concern about the impact they will have on humanity.

For their study, a research team asked nearly 700 people to read 220 tweets written by other humans and by the AI model GTP-3 – a precursor of the current ChatGPT.

Participants had to determine which tweets were true or false, as well as figure out which of them were written by a human or a machine.

GTP-3 won on both counts: It lied better than humans and its tweets did not appear to humans as if they had been written by a machine.

The researchers explained that the findings provide further evidence that people cannot distinguish between what is written by a human or by a machine. They proposed a “theory of resignation” to suggest why people are – and allow themselves to be – easily deceived.

“Our resignation theory applies to people’s self-confidence in identifying synthetic text,” explained co-author Giovanni Spitale. “The theory says that critical exposure to synthetic text reduces people’s ability to distinguish the synthetic from the organic.”

Spitale and his colleagues cautioned that if the theory proves true, Internet users will find it very difficult to recognize patterns in machine-produced texts.

However, the authors noted that the AI model did not respond well to misinformation requests and would occasionally disobey them, especially regarding topics with more evidence, such as flat-Earthism.

They suggested that the training databases for these models should adhere to principles of accuracy and transparency, with verified information and open origins that can be independently examined.

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