Odds & Ends

  

The US THAAD 'missile defense' system deployed in South Korea and aimed at China

• China has urged South Korea not to let its US-made missile defence shield become a “stumbling block” in relations, as the two sides again clash over the THAAD system. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made the remarks late on Thursday after meetings with his South Korean and Nepalese counterparts in Qingdao, Shandong this week. Security differences over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system – installed in South Korea in 2017 – threaten to undermine efforts by Beijing and Seoul to improve bilateral ties, including during Wang’s meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin on Tuesday.

• Alaska Aerospace Corp., Anchorage, Alaska, is being awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity hybrid contract (cost-plus-incentive-fee, firm-fixed-price, and cost) with a maximum amount of $110,864,000. Under this follow-on contract, the contractor will provide launch facility and range support services for Missile Defense Agency tests. The work will be performed at the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska, Kodiak Island, Alaska. The ordering period including options is from Aug. 12, 2022, through Jan. 11, 2029. One offer was solicited and one offer was received. Fiscal 2022 research and development funds in the amount of $369,784 will be obligated at time of award. The Missile Defense Agency, Huntsville, Alabama, is the contracting agency.

• Adult members of Generation Z are experiencing food insecurity at over twice the rate of the average American, according to our latest consumer food survey. In fact, about 1-in-3 Americans born from 1996-2004 have had trouble affording enough food in 2022. That compares with fewer than 1-in-5 millennials and members of Generation X, and fewer than 1-in-10 baby boomers. Food insecurity means having a lack of money or other resources for food. And when food insecurity surges, it can take a long time for affected populations to recover. After the Great Recession that ran from 2007 to 2009, food insecurity increased by 34 percent. It took a decade for food insecurity to drop to its pre-recession levels.

• A new imperialism stalks the Third World. It shares with the old an unquenchable thirst — for its labor, its land, its minerals, and its water. If colonization depended on the political strategies of divide and rule, the imperialists no longer have to rule today. Instead, they rely on local elites eager to aid their peoples’ exploitation in return for a share of the spoils — a process sanitized with the language of investments, trade deals and partnerships. That imperialism would find a way to become more efficient, not less, was not inevitable. At the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, the declaration was clear: “We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.” As pan-Africanism gained prominence, intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, alongside political actors, workers, and peasants, endorsed the unity of the African people for the purpose of liberation from political oppression and emancipation from economic exploitation.

• The Swedish government announced Thursday that it has decided to extradite a man to Turkey who is wanted for fraud, a move that comes after Sweden and Finland signed a deal with Ankara to cooperate on extradition to join NATO. After signing the deal and lifting its objection to the Nordic nations joining NATO, Turkey submitted a list of dozens of suspected “terrorists” that it wants to be extradited, including suspected members of the Kurdish militant group PKK. But the man Sweden announced its extraditing does not appear to be linked to the PKK, although he was on the list of names Turkey handed to Stockholm, according to the Swedish broadcaster SVT. The man, a Turkish citizen, had been sentenced to 14 years in prison in Turkey for credit card fraud but has been detained in Sweden for the past year.