When Populism Succeeds | Facing the China Question | Stopping Migrants from Leaving Africa, and more

British Police Try to Stop Migrants Leaving Africa  (Matt Dathan, The Times)
Police from the National Crime Agency will help countries in north Africa to identify and break up people-smuggling gangs in an attempt to stop an expected surge of hundreds of thousands of migrants trying to leave the continent for Europe this summer.
The Italian government has forecast that 400,000 migrants will seek to enter Italy from north Africa this year, The Times has been told — four times as many as arrived last year.
In the first three months of this year 80,000 migrants entered Italy having crossed the Mediterranean via boats and other irregular means, quadruple the number that arrived over the same period last year.

Indian Official Suspended After Ordering Reservoir to Be Drained After He Dropped His Phone into It  (The Telegraph)
A government official in India has been suspended from his job after he ordered a water reservoir to be drained so he could retrieve his smartphone, which he had dropped while taking a selfie.
Food inspector Rajesh Vishwas dropped his Samsung smartphone in Kherkatta dam in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh last week, The Times of India newspaper reported.
Mr. Vishwas first asked local divers to jump into the reservoir to find the device, claiming it contained sensitive government data. But after the initial efforts to retrieve his smartphone failed, he asked for the reservoir to be emptied using diesel pumps.
Over the next three days, more than two million liters of water were pumped out from the reservoir, which is enough to irrigate at least 1,500 acres of land during India’s scorching summer, local media reported.

Facing the China Question  (David Smith, The Critic)
Much as the Biden team might see “political warfare”, with economics on the front line (a little ironic that, given America’s longstanding use of its own economic muscle), the reality is that key players in the Western alliance simply cannot contemplate such, because they cannot afford such. Japan, for example, counts China as its biggest trading partner. So too does the European Union, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen could hardly be clearer. She stresses “de-risking, not decoupling”, insisting Europe needs and wants business with China. Even the United States has China third on its list when it comes to trade.
So here’s the dilemma. “China’s GDP is going to outstrip the USA in the next few years, and offer an even bigger market, that will be huge,” to quote one World Bank economist. “So having access to China is critical for advanced economies.”
There, evidently, lies the take-away from this latest round of what’s next with Xi Jinping. We have a Western alliance united in theory about the need to challenge China, and Xi’s modus operandi across our world economically, but divided over how far anyone can and should go when its key players consider the cost of not doing business with Beijing.
Some still cling to hope that dialogue is possible, warning of catastrophe for some of the poorest countries if China doesn’t forgive debt — and conflict if major economies move to sanction Beijing. “My view is that we have to drag them (China) to the table, impolite way to say it, I know,” says Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund, also present at the G7 in Japan. “We need to walk, and work together.”

The Next Chinese Tech Threat Is Already Here  (Charles Parton, The Spectator)
In recent years we’ve had fierce debates about the safety and security of Huawei, 5G, TikTok, semiconductors, ChatGPT and artificial intelligence. Let me add something even more threatening to the mix of the threat from China: the security of cellular (internet of things) modules. 
Cellular modules used in a vast array of industrial applications including energy, logistics, manufacturing, transport, health, security, and payment processing. At home, they are in cars, smart meters, computers, electric vehicle chargers and white goods. They monitor and control complex systems remotely. To ensure that these systems run efficiently, they collect huge amounts of data and metadata for analysis. Then through software updates, improvements are sent back to whatever they control. Like fungi, they form a mesh, independent of human action.
In January the security services took apart a UK government car because data was being transferred via a ‘Chinese e-sim’ (they meant a cellular module) inside. The government has been tight-lipped about who used the car – or if it ever transported the Prime Minister. But we know from a separate Tesla scandal that it would be perfectly possible for a Chinese engineer to record a private conversation in a car like this with a cellular module.
Chinese companies hold 64 per cent of the global market by sales, and 75 per cent by connectivity. For North America and Europe the shares are 30 per cent, 35 per cent, and for India a whopping 86 per cent. 

When Populism Succeeds  (Francisco Toro, Persuasion)
The most dangerous political experiment in Latin America is underway in El Salvador. A strange breed of populism is tipping the scale in the region’s age-old tug of war between authoritarianism and democracy. Rather than dividing the country, like populism usually does, it’s uniting it solidly behind a new consensus. More than anything, though, it’s succeeding, and doing so in the kind of impossible-to-miss way that turns heads up and down the hemisphere.
At the top of it all is the self-described “coolest dictator in the world,” the startlingly energetic Nayib Bukele. Having rounded up tens of thousands of suspected gang members in a series of police and military actions that don’t even pay lip service to due process of law, Bukele has become something of a national hero, with approval ratings now north of 90%. Under his watch, one of the most violent countries on earth has become considerably safer: a startling transformation that nearly all Salvadoreans seem profoundly grateful for.
It’s not the first time a charismatic but brash young leader has come to power vowing to take radical steps to root out crime in their country at the expense of basic human rights. Most often, such leaders fail, leaving behind a pile of ruined lives and an unstable political system. But once every great while, you get a leader like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew: ruthless, authoritarian, but so successful at building a stable, prosperous society that their far-from-pristine human rights record gets rinsed out of the historical record, becoming a footnote on page 4 rather than the headline. This is the model Nayib Bukele has set out to follow—explicitly.