Singapura é a cidade mais cara

Singapore retains its title as the world’s most expensive city for a third year in a row, but its lead over the next two cities in the ranking has nearly evaporated. Zurich and Hong Kong follow closely in joint second place, with Hong Kong climbing seven places up the ranking in the last 12 months. London, New York and Los Angeles also move up the ranking to 6th, 7th and 8th place, respectively, displacing Sydney, Melbourne and Oslo from the ten most expensive cities. New York and Los Angeles move up the ranking because of currency headwinds rather than significant local price rises. In fact, the opposite may be true. With the falling cost of oil and a strong US dollar pushing down prices, local inflation has been relatively low across the US. Despite this, New York is in its highest global position since 2002 and has risen by some 42 places up the cost of living ranking since 2011, when it was barely among the 50 most expensive cities, let alone the top ten. The stronger US dollar and weaker euro has pushed euro zone cities further down the ranking, especially as weak consumer sentiment and depressed commodity prices have undermined inflation in terms of both supply and demand. The Australian and New Zealand dollars have also weakened significantly from highs of two years ago, making cities in Australasia more affordable to global travellers. The unpegging of the Swiss franc from the euro, coupled with structurally high income and price levels, means that Zurich and Geneva will continue to vie for the unenviable title of Europe’s most expensive city. Neither city has suffered from Eurozone austerity or economic fallout from falling oil prices to the degree of their EU or Norwegian peers. Global prices have been depressed by commodity oversupply, especially oil. Meanwhile, bearish sentiment in China, Latin America and Europe have weighed on demand-side inflation. This has been compounded by a rise in retail competition from online or discount channels, which has had a further impact on prices. As a result, inflation has slowed across many cities, with deflation becoming increasingly prominent during the course of 2015. Given that the ranking uses New York as base city, most cities have also become relatively cheaper. Five years ago the average cost of living index of all the cities surveyed was 87.8% (with New York as 100). Last year this was 79.7%. In the last 12 months it has fallen to just 71.5%. Despite topping the ranking, Singapore still offers relative value in some categories, especially compared with its regional peers. For general basic groceries, Singapore offers the same value as New York. This compares with Seoul, which is 33% more expensive, Tokyo (26%) and Hong Kong (28%), implying that value for money can be found by those who seek it. However, Singapore remains consistently expensive in other categories. It is the most expensive place in the world to buy and run a car, thanks to Singapore’s complex Certificate of Entitlement system. Transport costs in Singapore are 2.7 times higher than in New York. Alongside Seoul, Singapore is also a very expensive city in which to buy clothes and pay for utility costs. Economist Intelligence Unity

Angola: Eleições em 2017 ou 2018?

1. O anúncio de José Eduardo dos Santos (JES) de que decidiu retirar-se da vida política em 2018, está a prestar-se a interpretações de sentido diverso, mas com predomínio das que depreciam o gesto, em geral por verem no mesmo um “artifício” com uma finalidade subliminar contrária ao espírito da retirada que proclama. A iniciativa de JES, tal como predizem as interpretações cépticas, representa uma “manobra política”, inspirada noutras similares do passado, cujo “objectivo principal” se decompõe em dois: - Prolongar o exercício do poder pelo próprio num ambiente político que sentiu necessidade de “melhorar” em relação ao existente até ao anúncio da retirada. - Garantir nos órgãos de cúpula do MPLA e nas instituições do regime, em geral, condições políticas, legais e eleitorais para o processo da sua substituição corresponda aos seus interesses - alargados aos de sua família e do círculo de “próximos”. 2. O anúncio de JES foi feito numa reunião do CC expressamente convocada para preparar o congresso do MPLA marcado para Ago – antevisto como “etapa decisiva” na prossecução dos seus planos de poder. Apenas os seus próximos e, eventualmente, alguns membros da família, terão sido previamente postos ao corrente do anúncio. Os destinatários-chave da comunicação de JES foram, directamente, os indefectíveis e/ou potenciais apoiantes internos no aparelho partidário; indirectamente, meios da sociedade consigo conotados. A mobilização de uns e de outros no apoio á sua linha política destina-se a ser projectada no congresso de Ago, incluindo preparativos. 3. O que comumente se conjectura serem as expectativas de JES em relação ao congresso, é que a composição dos órgãos de direcção do MPLA resultantes do mesmo seja favorável a dois desígnios considerados “vitais” para a “salvaguarda” do seu poder - exercido pelo próprio e, a seguir, por outrem que na sua mente terá de lhe ser “afecto”. Os referidos desígnios: - A sua própria indicação, de preferência num ambiente de exaltação, como cabeça de lista do MPLA nas próximas eleições. - A indicação, em segundo lugar, como candidato a Vice-presidente, de uma figura na qual precisa de depositar confiança máxima – política e pessoal – na “certeza” que tem de que virá a ser esse o seu substituto desejado. 4. Os cuidados extremos que JES revela em relação à substituição são considerados típicos do quadro mental (temperamento/pensamento) de um líder que, pela sua longevidade e natureza autocrática do poder que tem exercido, se julga no direito especial de sair quando e como quiser. A sua nova apresentação como candidato presidencial às próximas eleições é, porém, objectada internamente, embora sempre de forma recatada, e a ascensão de uma figura como um dos seus filhos ou qualquer outra capaz de ser identificada como seu factotum é ainda mais repudiada no aparelho partidário – BP em especial. Entre os pronunciamentos de dirigentes do MPLA interrogados pelos media acerca do anúncio de JES, nenhum defendeu de forma ostensiva a sua continuidade no exercício do poder. A tónica geral consistiu em descrever como compreensiva e legítima a decisão de JES de se retirar, depois da sua “árdua” tarefa. 5. As presentes circunstâncias políticas não são equiparáveis a outras, do antecedente, em que se registaram similares manifestações de vontade de JES de se retirar do poder, mas se concluiu terem redundado em “artifícios” exercidos com fins tão subliminares como o de encorajar pretendentes ao cargo a assumirem-se – para os anular a seguir. Principais elementos diferenciadores das circunstâncias actuais: - A mais intensa e mais sistemática contestação político-social de que JES é nitidamente alvo – ampliada pelos efeitos nefastos da presente crise económico-financeira, mas propiciada por argumentos como o seu alegado apego ao poder, favorecimento da família e indefectíveis e recrudescimento do autoritarismo. - As repercussões externas (internacionais e regionais), em larga escala particularmente adversas a JES, do ofuscamento da anterior reputação de Angola, baseada na alegada qualidade da sua democracia e pujança da sua economia. - JES está agora mais velho e reavivou-se ao rumor de que está acometido de delicados problemas de saúde. 6. Com base no pressuposto de que JES está ciente das suas “novas fragilidades”, empoladas por uma conjuntura que tende a persistir, as interpretações mais benignas que identificam no anúncio da intenção de se retirar propósitos mais pertinentes, consideram que começou a preparar uma saída e a tentar garantir que seja honrosa. - O anúncio destinou-se, assim, a tentar amortecer/esvaziar a pressão interna e externa que sobre ele se vem exercendo com base no argumento da sua longevidade no poder, de modo a conferir ao acto da retirada um carácter voluntário. - A melhorar a aceitação interna da apresentação da sua candidatura às próximas eleições, neste caso por via de um compromisso de se retirar a seguir; adicionalmente, melhorar as suas condições para apontar/proteger um “sucessor”. Há rumores de que JES também pretendeu, com a sua iniciativa, criar condições políticas e psicológicas que lhe permitam adiar as eleições marcadas para 2017, se tal medida garantir que o MPLA e ele próprio disporão de melhores meios para se lançar numa campanha eleitoral em que as condições de fraude serão menores. África Monitor

José Eduardo: Por dentro da cabeça do Presidente

E se o Presidente angolano for reeleito em 2017 e no ano a seguir disser que fica exclusivamente como chefe de Estado, renunciando à liderança do MPLA? Poderia ser esse o significado da sua retirada da "política activa". Organizava-se um Congresso Extraordinário, para escolher novo líder do MPLA, e José Eduardo dos Santos ficaria na Presidência da República até ao fim do mandato para que eventualmente fosse eleito em 2017. Ele seria, pura e simplesmente, o "Presidente de todos os angolanos"; e já não o chefe de determinado partido. Esta é a minha conjectura, a hipótese que me ocorre. Outros dirão se é ou não totalmente disparatada. JH

"O Sara é nosso", diz Marrocos

As many as one million people have taken to the streets of the Moroccan capital, Rabat, to protest recent comments by the United Nations (UN)’s secretary-general regarding Morocco’s contested Western Sahara territory. On Sunday, protesters gathered in Rabat to express their anger at UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recent use of the word “occupation” regarding Morocco’s presence in the territory, which is considered by Moroccans to include their country’s “southern provinces.” The demonstrators, who held banners and chanted slogans such as “the Sahara is ours,” were led by political parties, unions, and non-governmental groups. This comes just days after Ban visited Morocco in a move aimed at restarting talks between the government in Rabat and the Algeria-backed Polisario Front over the disputed Western Sahara region. The Moroccan government and the Polisario Front, which claims the disputed territory belongs to the ethnic Sahrawis, have failed to reach an agreement despite a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991. For decades, the UN has been seeking to hold a referendum on independence for the territory, which was annexed by Morocco when Spain withdrew from the country back in 1975. The photo shows United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon (L) arriving for a meeting with the Polisario Front’s representative at the UN near a UN base in Bir-Lahlou, in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, on March 5, 2016. (Photo by AFP) In response to the protests in Morocco, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that during his trip to the country, Ban had called for “genuine negotiations in good faith and without preconditions at each stop on his recent trip.” “While the secretary-general acknowledges that there are differences of opinion on the Western Sahara issue, he continues to believe that, 40 years after [the withdrawal of Spain], it is important to resolve this long-standing dispute and open the way to the return of the Sahrawi refugees to their homes,” Dujarric added. This is while Rabat has proposed increased autonomy for the territory under its sovereignty. Following the UN chief’s remarks earlier this month, in a statement released by the official MAP news agency, Rabat criticized the “unjustified gestures of deference” by Ban. The statement further warned that the UN’s “no longer neutral” stance could “jeopardize the process.” Press TV

Sudão do Sul: os horrores

GENEVA (11 March 2016) – A new report on South Sudan published Friday by the UN Human Rights Office describes “in searing detail” a multitude of horrendous human rights violations, including a Government-operated “scorched earth policy,” and deliberate targeting of civilians for killing, rape and pillage. Although all parties to the conflict have committed patterns of serious and systematic violence against civilians since fighting broke out in December 2013, the report says state actors bore the greatest responsibility during 2015, given the weakening of opposition forces. The scale of sexual violence is particularly shocking: in five months last year, from April to September 2015, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in just one of South Sudan’s ten states, oil-rich Unity. Credible sources indicate groups allied to the Government are being allowed to rape women in lieu of wages but opposition groups and criminal gangs have also been preying on women and girls. “The scale and types of sexual violence - primarily by Government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra`ad Al Hussein. “However, the quantity of rapes and gang-rapes described in the report must only be a snapshot of the real total. This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war -- yet it has been more or less off the international radar.” The new report is the work of an assessment team sent by the High Commissioner to South Sudan from October 2015 to January 2016, in accordance with a resolution by the Human Rights Council in July 2015. It focuses primarily on the worst affected Unity and Upper Nile States, as well as Western and Central Equatoria, where the conflict has spread. While building on earlier reports of the African Union Commission of Inquiry and the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), the new reports places special emphasis on violations that took place during 2015. The human rights situation in South Sudan has deteriorated dramatically since the outbreak of the crisis in December 2013. More than two million South Sudanese have been displaced and tens of thousands killed, while the parties to the conflict have yet to establish the Transitional Government of National Unity they promised in the peace agreement last August. The world’s newest country has known conflict for nearly half its five-year existence and the suffering of its people has been immense. Since 2013, all parties to the conflict have conducted, “attacks against civilians, rape and other crimes of sexual violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, abduction and deprivation of liberty, disappearance, including enforced disappearance, and attacks on UN personnel and peacekeeping facilities,” the report says. Given the breadth and depth of the allegations, their gravity, consistency and recurrence and the similarities in their modus operandi, it concludes there are reasonable grounds to believe the violations may amount to war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. The overwhelming majority of civilian casualties appear not to be the result of actual combat operations but of deliberate attacks on civilians, the report says. In towns and strategic counties, the pattern of the conflict has been one of attack, withdrawal and counter attack. Each time an area changed hands those in charge would try and kill or displace as many civilians as they could, based on their ethnic identity. Some of the most serious abuses took place in the Spring of 2014 in Bentiu and Rubkona in Unity State when armed groups allied to opposition forces entered the towns and killed hundreds of civilians trying to shelter from the fighting. “Places of refuge … more often than not turned into veritable traps for civilians,” says the report, “churches, mosques and hospitals were not spared from attack.” Killing, sexual violence, displacement, destruction and massive looting continued unabated throughout 2015. By then, opposition forces in Unity State offered little or no resistance, and fled in advance of the SPLA offensive, leaving civilians behind. The report contains harrowing accounts of civilians suspected of supporting the opposition, including children and the disabled, killed by being burned alive, suffocated in containers, shot, hanged from trees or cut to pieces. One woman told the team she had been stripped naked and raped by five soldiers in front of her children on the roadside and then raped by more men in the bushes, only to return and find her children missing; another was tied to a tree after her husband was killed and had to watch her 15-year-old daughter being raped by ten soldiers. Several women said they were raped when they left UN protected camps to search for food; others were abducted and held in sexual slavery as “wives” for soldiers in barracks. The sexual assaults were characterised by their extreme brutality, with women who tried to resist, or even looked their rapist directly in the eye, being killed in some cases. “If you looked young or good looking, about ten men would rape the woman; the older women were raped by about seven to nine men,” explained one witness. The prevalence of rape, “suggests its use in the conflict has become an acceptable practice by SPLA soldiers and affiliated armed militias,” says the report. Women and girls “were considered a commodity and were taken along with civilian property as the soldiers moved through the villages.” Some were forced to marry their aggressors; others faced stigmatization and domestic violence when they became pregnant as a result of rape, which has made women reluctant to report the crime. All of this, says the report, suggests rape has been part of an intentional strategy to terrorize and punish civilians. Children have borne the brunt of the violence, being maimed, raped, recruited for hostilities and killed throughout this conflict, but there was a sharp increase in reported violations in 2015. The UN has received reports of 702 children affected by incidents of sexual violence since the start of the conflict, with some victims of gang rape as young as nine years old. Both Government and opposition forces have used armed youth groups that include teenagers. There are reports of 617 child soldiers being recruited during 2014 but the magnitude of the problem is likely far greater because there are reports that thousands of children were recruited by opposition forces from cattle camps since the start of the violence in Unity State. Satellite imagery has corroborated accounts of the systematic destruction of towns and villages across southern and central Unity in 2014 and 2015 by government forces and militia. It “suggests a deliberate strategy to deprive the civilians living in the area of any form of livelihood or material support,” concludes the report. In Malakal, in Upper Nile State, in 2014 as many as 9,878 residential structures were destroyed – nearly a quarter of the state capital. Such extensive destruction cannot plausibly be justified by military necessity and appears to be a form of organised pillage. Crop burning, cattle raiding, looting and destruction of food stocks have also led to famine like conditions in Unity State. Critical voices continue to be silenced; in 2015 at least seven journalists were killed and many activists arrested. “Civil society activists, human rights defenders, humanitarian actors, journalists and print media and even UN staff members have been the subject of threats, intimidation, harassment, detention and in some instances death by the Government.” From April to October 2015, at least 13 humanitarian workers were killed in Unity State alone. In July 2015, opposition forces deliberately shot into an UNMISS site for displaced civilians in Malakal, killing and injuring people who had fled the violence. The report examines the considerable challenges to administering justice in South Sudan, not least of which is that a country the size of France and Belgium has no paved roads outside the capital. It says there has been, “a chronic failure to ensure a modicum of accountability…with grants of amnesty or immunity being the norm.” Prisons are easy to escape from, court rooms dilapidated, English is the official language of the legal system but few speak it, law books are sparse and judges and prosecutors have fled the fighting. As a result, the report says, there is no memory of the police ever arresting anyone for murder in the capital. The report recommends that the Human Rights Council continues to monitor developments in the country and considers the establishment of a dedicated mechanism on South Sudan to report on progress towards accountability and on the human rights situation. The report also calls on the Transitional Government of National Unity – once it is established – to take effective action to stop current violations and abuses of the rights of children, and prevent their recurrence, and to eliminate sexual- and gender- based violence, as well as to promote and respect the role of civil society, including ensuring that the freedoms of opinion and expression, and of peaceful assembly, are guaranteed.

Obama e o desastre na Líbia

What sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed. But Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster. Why, given what seems to be the president’s natural reticence toward getting militarily ensnarled where American national security is not directly at stake, did he accept the recommendation of his more activist advisers to intervene? “The social order in Libya has broken down,” Obama said, explaining his thinking at the time. “You have massive protests against Qaddafi. You’ve got tribal divisions inside of Libya. Benghazi is a focal point for the opposition regime. And Qaddafi is marching his army toward Benghazi, and he has said, ‘We will kill them like rats.’ “Now, option one would be to do nothing, and there were some in my administration who said, as tragic as the Libyan situation may be, it’s not our problem. The way I looked at it was that it would be our problem if, in fact, complete chaos and civil war broke out in Libya. But this is not so at the core of U.S. interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally strike against the Qaddafi regime. At that point, you’ve got Europe and a number of Gulf countries who despise Qaddafi, or are concerned on a humanitarian basis, who are calling for action. But what has been a habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game.” “Free riders?,” I interjected. “Free riders,” he said, and continued. “So what I said at that point was, we should act as part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and without a long-term military commitment in Libya. “So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion—which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.” Mess is the president’s diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a “shit show,” in part because it’s subsequently become an isis haven—one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism. “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said. He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming “distracted by a range of other things.” Of France, he said, “Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to “purchase France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us.” In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off—except that “from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we’re going to do something, obviously we’ve got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight.” Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly.” Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.” President Obama did not come into office preoccupied by the Middle East. He is the first child of the Pacific to become president—born in Hawaii, raised there and, for four years, in Indonesia—and he is fixated on turning America’s attention to Asia. For Obama, Asia represents the future. Africa and Latin America, in his view, deserve far more U.S. attention than they receive. Europe, about which he is unromantic, is a source of global stability that requires, to his occasional annoyance, American hand-holding. And the Middle East is a region to be avoided—one that, thanks to America’s energy revolution, will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy. (Parte de um longo artigo na revista The Atlantic)

José Eduardo sai em 2018?

Le président angolais José dos Santos au pouvoir depuis 1979, a annoncé vendredi son intention de quitter la vie politique en 2018, après la fin de son actuel mandat. « J’ai pris la décision de quitter la vie politique en 2018 », a déclaré le chef de l’État de 73 ans devant le comité central de son parti, le MPLA. Son mandat actuel se termine en 2017, mais M. dos Santos n’a pas précisé pourquoi il comptait quitter la vie politique l’année suivante. Il est le second plus ancien chef d’État au pouvoir en Afrique, devancé seulement par le dirigeant de Guinée équatoriale Teodoro Obiang Nguema, arrivé au pouvoir un mois avant lui en 1979. Le comité central était réuni pour préparer le prochain congrès du parti, qui doit désigner un candidat pour la présidentielle de 2017. Quelle succession ? En juin dernier, le président avait indirectement abordé la question de sa succession, en déclarant notamment : « Il nous faut étudier très attentivement la façon de construire la transition, en appelant le MPLA à réfléchir à la nomination d’un candidat. » La Constitution angolaise ne prévoit pas d’élection présidentielle au suffrage universel, mais stipule que le président du parti vainqueur des législatives devient automatiquement chef de l’État. Jeune Afrique