World News
New WBG Strategy Focuses on Conflict Prevention and Partnerships for Peace and Security in Africa

Urgent action is needed in countries impacted by fragility, conflict and violence (FCV) to end extreme poverty globally, according to the World Bank Group. As crisis situations become increasingly protracted — with dire impacts on people and economies — the World Bank Group today released an FCV strategy, which for the first time systematically brings a full suite of financing and expertise to address these challenges in both low-and-middle income countries.
On the current trajectory, by 2030 up to two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor will live in fragile and conflict-affected countries, according to a World Bank report also released today. Bucking the overall trend of a global decrease in extreme poverty, these countries are seeing sharp increases, threatening decades of progress in the fight against poverty. Fragile and conflict-affected situations take a huge toll on human capital, creating vicious cycles that lower people’s lifetime productivity and earnings and reduce socioeconomic mobility. One in five people in these countries are deprived of money, education and basic infrastructure simultaneously. And the number of people living in close proximity to conflict has nearly doubled in the past 10 years.
“Addressing humanitarian crises requires immediate support and long-term development approaches,” said World Bank Group President David Malpass. “To end extreme poverty and break the cycle of fragility, conflict, and violence, countries need to ensure access to basic services, transparent and accountable government institutions, and economic and social inclusion of the most marginalized communities. These kinds of investments go hand in hand with humanitarian aid.”
The World Bank Group now emphasizes working before, during, and after crisis situations to tackle poverty. It emphasizes prevention by proactively addressing the root causes of conflict — such as social and economic exclusion, climate change and demographic shocks — before tensions turn into full-blown crises. During active conflict, it focuses on building institutional resilience and preserving essential services like health and education for the most vulnerable communities.
The strategy also emphasizes long-term support to help countries transition out of fragility, including private sector solutions, such as scaling-up investments in small and medium enterprises that are essential to create jobs and spur economic growth. It addresses the cross-border impacts of FCV, for example by focusing on the development needs of both refugees and host communities.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of the extreme poor live in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and fragility and conflict have a destabilizing effect across borders. In response, the World Bank has been scaling up its support to FCV countries in Africa through the International Development Association (IDA). Over the past three years, IDA commitments to FCV countries in Africa nearly doubled from about $6bn in IDA17 to $11bn so far in IDA18. In the next three years, the World Bank will invest over $7 billion in the Sahel.
In fragile contexts across the region, the focus has been on delivering services and improving the wellbeing of the most vulnerable, particularly women in insecure areas, and addressing the drivers of fragility. In Somalia, mobile money has helped provide cash payments to families affected by drought and provided the government with e-payment solutions to expand service delivery. In the Central African Republic, the LONDO program («stand-up» in Sango) is providing temporary employment to the most vulnerable and increasing families’ incomes and well-being. In Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and other countries, Geo-Enabling for Monitoring and Supervision is helping improve the monitoring and impact of projects.
This institutional shift is backed by increases in financing, both through the World Bank’s General Capital Increase and through the recently approved replenishment of IDA, the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, which included over $20 billion for FCV. The Bank and IFC will also make key operational changes, such as deploying more staff and resources to countries impacted by FCV and partnering with a range of international and local actors. IFC and MIGA have also committed to significantly increase their support to private sector investments in economies impacted by FCV.
World News
White House is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation

Current U.S. foreign policy toward Russia is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation. Russia is not going to lead a peace effort, nor will Ukraine, writes Matthew G. Andersson, a law and policy author, he studied with White House National Security Advisor W.W. Rostow at the Johnson School of Public Affairs.
The Biden administration has through its own incompetence and incapacity, also left leadership open to other countries. It is a strategy that creates economic and industrial disruption, perhaps even deliberate destruction, including of American government itself.
Why would this be?
I suggest that there are six reasons that directly serve the “Biden” administration by this foreign policy of war escalation:
The current administration’s domestic social policies are so radical that they cannot be implemented (or disclosed) within a normal spectrum of law and government. Its plans require extra-constitutional authority. War provides that authority.
A formalized war footing with Russia is presumed an essential path to oil and gas supply disruption, both physical (exploration, production, and refinement, including Arctic claims) and price stability disruption, which presumably will accelerate green energy switching behavior (problem: there is nothing to switch to). In reality, war merely enriches oil and gas, and further consolidates its central energy role.
Financial flows, commercial/central banking, and U.S. dollar stability would all be subject to war-time emergency manipulation. The U.S. is not able to absorb over $30 Trillion in national debt obligations under normal economic arrangements and methods.
War is also an ideal platform to fully effect political persecution, and the marginalization or complete removal of competitive political parties. The U.S. is already well on its way to a single-party consolidation. A civil or world war “seals the deal” just as it did in wartime Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and eventually in Cuba and China. The Biden administration has numerous “blueprints” it can follow from other countries, as the administration is saturated with inexperienced ideologues who both naively admire “revolutionaries” and at the same time are intellectually incapable of imagining and carrying out actual economic development policy.
A fifth reason involves traditional Pentagon motivations in defense spending. Most of the public (and even political class) doesn’t acknowledge that the GWOT (Global War on Terror) is still fully operational, but more, its legal infrastructure, formed after 2001 through the Patriot Act, among other legislation and executive orders (hundreds that remain undisclosed or unexamined) can be activated at-will under emergency pretext. Moreover, the GWOT has been turned inward toward America’s own citizens. All that was required was a structured program of terror accusations against a manufactured target: Trump provided that, and now Russia does in a war context.
Finally, war unleashes massive disruptions in population, demographics and health risk. The current administration and its supporters, above all else, are ideologues devoted to population control because it is the “root cause” of global warming. And global warming is the fundamental organizing policy of the Left, even though it has nothing to do with climate, but rather with absolute social control.
An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.
It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law.
The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order, concludes Matthew G. Andersson.
World News
Polish militants join armored assaults into Russian Territory

Polish militants fighting in Ukraine have participated in recent assaults into Russia’s Belgorod Region, with the Polish Volunteer Corps releasing an announcement and video evidence of their roles in these operations. The militants were specifically involved in an assault of Belgorod’s Grayvoron District on May 22, which was one of the initial major incursions launched from Ukrainian territory, writes “Military Watch Magazine”.
Videos published by the Polish militants regarding their operations show them using Ukrainian T-72B tanks and Mi-8 helicopters as well as U.S.-supplied HMMWV armoured vehicles, which comes as part of a much wider trend towards Polish combatants in Ukraine being given extensive access to weapons supplies as they are often considered more reliable than many of the local conscript units.
Poland has been outstanding even within the Western world for its hard line position against Russia, with senior politicians calling for Russia’s “balkanization” into separate states, while the country’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stated shortly after the outbreak of fighting in Ukraine that the only way forward for the West was through “fighting” against Moscow…
The country has accordingly been a leading supplier of armaments to Ukraine. In contrast to political leaders, however, Polish military leaders have repeatedly expressed serious doubts regarding Ukraine and its allies’ ability to prevail in the ongoing war against Russia.
Although forces from multiple Western countries have been deployed very widely in Ukraine, forming what the ‘New York Times’ referred to as a ‘stealth network’ of assets directed by Western intelligence agencies to fight Russia within the country, Poland has been the leading contributor of manpower among foreign countries involved in the conflict.
Former senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defence U.S. Army Colonel (ret.) Douglas McGregor accordingly reported the presence of an estimated 20,000 contractors from Poland alone who have played key roles in the war effort including in frontline positions such as Bakhmut, which was for months a key centre of hostilities until its capture by Russian forces in late May.
World News
Gen. Li Shangfu: “When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns”

In his first international public address since becoming defense minister in March, General Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue that China doesn’t have any problems with “innocent passage” but that “we must prevent attempts that try to use those freedom of navigation (patrols), that innocent passage, to exercise hegemony of navigation.”
A U.S. guided-missile destroyer and a Canadian frigate were intercepted by a Chinese warship as they transited the strait between the self-governed island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, and mainland China. The Chinese vessel overtook the American ship and then veered across its bow at a distance of 150 yards in an “unsafe manner,” according to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
Additionally, the U.S. has said a Chinese J-16 fighter jet late last month “performed an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” while intercepting a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, flying directly in front of the plane’s nose.
Those and previous incidents have raised concerns of a possible accident occurring that could lead to an escalation between the two nations at a time when tensions are already high.
Li suggested the U.S. and its allies had created the danger, and should instead should focus on taking “good care of your own territorial airspace and waters.”
“The best way is for the countries, especially the naval vessels and fighter jets of countries, not to do closing actions around other countries’ territories,” he said through an interpreter. “What’s the point of going there? In China we always say, ‘Mind your own business.’”
He accused the U.S. and others of “meddling in China’s internal affairs” by providing Taiwan with defense support and training, and conducting high-level diplomatic visits.
“China stays committed to the path of peaceful development, but we will never hesitate to defend our legitimate rights and interests, let alone sacrifice the nation’s core interests,” he said.
“As the lyrics of a well-known Chinese song go: ‘When friends visit us, we welcome them with fine wine. When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns.’”
In his speech U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin broadly outlined the U.S. vision for a “free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights.”
Li scoffed at the notion, saying “some country takes a selective approach to rules and international laws.” “It likes forcing its own rules on others,” he said. “Its so-called ‘rules-based international order’ never tells you what the rules are and who made these rules.”
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