December 10th – The BESA Times

Sixty-First Edition - Monday, 10th Every week, a complete snapshot of what happened around the world in the past seven days

Gilets Jaunes Crisis

The main event happening in the European area is currently the ongoing protest organized by the so-called Gilets Jaunes. The initial demonstration was against the proposed increase in oil price, but it rapidly gain momentum and became a massive movement against the Macron presidency in more general, including extremists (and non) from all over France. The protest is still ongoing and this Saturday (for the 4th time in a row) demonstrators flooded Paris with an estimate of 50000 people. Macron during the weekend reunited with various majors and organs of the Government, (supposedly) admitting some mistakes. Finally, he organized a national live speech for the 10th night, when he will announce the government’s measures in response to the protests. Will it be enough to calm down protestors and cut their public support?

Global Compact

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini recently declared that Italy will not take place in Marrakech’ s meeting about Global Compact. The Global compact is a document by the United Nations that establish some voluntary guidelines with regards to how to manage immigration policies. Even though the document does not order anything and is more focused on promoting some humanitarian values and hinting at some ways to pursue them, has always been rather low and it seems to be declining even further. Focusing only on Europe, the list of countries that lined up against it is: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Israel, while many others expressed many reserves about it (especially, Belgium and UK). The Marrakech meeting of the 10th and 11th will be a crucial step in the future of politics in both Europe and the World.

What to remember from last week’s news?

The 6th December, Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei, was arrested while in Canada, under specific request of the US government (when Trump and Xi Jinping were meeting at the G20, ironically.). While Huawei is generally known to the public as only a smartphone producer, their main business is the construction of communication networks. The reasons behind the arrest are not of public domain, but many sources suggest that Huawei probably sold some secret 5g-related American technologies to Iran, thus violating international accords. However, it appears evident that US has much interests in excluding China from the upcoming 5g trade war and that, despite the smiling photos together, the tension between the two superpowers is still very high.

Did you know:

4 billion people in the world do not have a physical addresses, thus making many “routine operations” such as receiving letters or having an official residence a real issue in most of the world.In order to solve this problem, researchers at MIT and Facebook are developing a Machine-Learning based system that analyses images from satellites, builds a topology of roads and house clusters and then assign them a univocal code. The results seem encouraging, but there are still many challenges to be faced, most notably being able to produce an address system that people will want to use and government will be able (and willing) to implement in their legal system. However, if they will mange to reach their goal, they will bring significant changes in the lives of billions of people, making a small but still significant worldwide revolution.

What to expect from the coming week:

Before the Christmas Holidays there will be bursts on the current hot topics, such as the Global Compact, Gilet Jaunes and Brexit, but we will not likely reach an epilogue. Moreover, we will probably hear more from Mrs. Kramp-Karrenbaue, Angela Merkel’ s successor at the head of the CDU.