Source: ASEAN
Secretary-General of ASEAN, Dr. Kao Kim Hourn, this evening attended the China-ASEAN Expo (CAEXPO) Welcome Banquet, which brought together representatives from all participating nations of the 21st CAEXPO. The banquet was also attended by heads of delegation from ASEAN Member States and Observers, along with representatives from China and the United Arab Emirates, the Special Partner Country for the 21st CAEXPO.
Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
Cities are on the front lines of addressing humanity’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to migration as well as natural disasters and socioeconomic inequalities.
City leaders from across the globe will convene for the 4th Forum of Mayors (Geneva, 30 September – 1 October) to discuss the implications for local governments of the Pact for the Future, which will be agreed upon by UN Member States at the United Nations Summit of the Future (New York, 22-23 September).
At the Forum of Mayors, cities will collaboratively draft an Outcome Statement on the Future of Cities.
This statement will emphasize the vital role of cities and local actors in driving a sustainable and brighter future for all. It will then be transmitted to the Secretary General of the United Nations as a contribution to strengthening the engagement of local and regional governments in UN intergovernmental bodies and processes.
As a unique platform within the United Nations system, the Forum of Mayors connects local and national authorities within a normative intergovernmental framework, contributing to a more networked and inclusive multilateralism.
The Forum will be chaired by Ms. Danela Arsovska, Mayor of Skopje (North Macedonia), with Vice-Chairpersons Mr. Ricardo Rio, Mayor of Braga (Portugal), Ms. Susan Aitken, City Leader of Glasgow Council (United Kingdom) and Mr. Sami Kanaan, Deputy Mayor of Geneva (Switzerland). The keynote address will be delivered by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster.
Leaders from a diverse range of cities across the pan-European region and North America will participate, including mayors and deputy mayors from Tirana (Albania), Gyumri (Armenia), Vienna (Austria), Ganja (Azerbaijan), Quebec (Canada), Osijek (Croatia), Nicosia (Cyprus), Ostrava (Czech Republic), Tallinn (Estonia), Turku (Finland), Strasbourg Eurometropolis (France), Heidelberg (Germany), Athens (Greece), Debrecen (Hungary), Bat Yam (Israel), Valmiera (Latvia), Balzan (Malta), Podgorica (Montenegro), Utrecht (Netherlands), Łódź (Poland), Mafra (Portugal), Bucharest (Romania), Novo Mesto (Slovenia), Dushanbe (Tajikistan), Konya (Türkiye), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Mykolaiv (Ukraine), London (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), New Orleans (United States of America). Additional Mayors are expected to confirm their participation.
Additionally, through collaboration with other Regional Economic Commissions (ESCWA, ECLAC, ECA, ESCAP) and the Global Cities Hub, and in recognition of the global connections between urban areas and the opportunities they present for learning, partnerships, and exchange, the Forum will also unite Mayors from the UNECE region with their counterparts from cities such as Buenos Aires (Argentina), Ifangni (Benin), San Jose (Costa Rica), Pichincha (Ecuador), Irbid (Jordan), Klang (Malaysia), Turbat Kech (Pakistan), Dakar (Senegal), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Lusaka (Zambia), Rabat (Morocco).
The Forum will also feature a rich programme of side events, tackling key issues such as the underrepresentation of women in local government leadership, urban peace dialogues, cities’ solutions to the triple planetary crisis, and cities’ experiences with Voluntary Local Reviews of SDGs progress.
More information on the Forum is available at https://forumofmayors.unece.org/.
Source: United Nations secretary general
The Secretary-General met with H.H. Sheikh Sabah Khaled Hamad Al-Sabah, the Crown Prince of Kuwait. The Secretary-General and the Crown Prince discussed the strong partnership between Kuwait and the United Nations. They exchanged views on the situation in the Middle East, Sudan, as well as issues of cooperation, peace and security in the Gulf region.
Source: United Nations secretary general
The Secretary-General met with H.E. Mr. Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, Secretary General of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf. The Secretaries-General discussed issues of mutual concern in the region, including the war in Gaza and the situation in Lebanon and in Yemen.
The Secretaries-General also exchanged views on enhancing cooperation between the two Organizations, including on peace and security in the Gulf region.
US Senate News:
Source: The White House
Today, we—Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan, and President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of the United States—met for the fourth in-person Quad Leaders Summit, hosted by President Biden in Wilmington, Delaware.
Four years since elevating the Quad to a leader-level format, the Quad is more strategically aligned than ever before and is a force for good that delivers real, positive, and enduring impact for the Indo-Pacific. We celebrate the fact that over just four years, Quad countries have built a vital and enduring regional grouping that will buttress the Indo-Pacific for decades to come.
Anchored by shared values, we seek to uphold the international order based on the rule of law. Together we represent nearly two billion people and over one-third of global gross domestic product. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient. Through our cooperation, the Quad is harnessing all of our collective strengths and resources, from governments to the private sector to people-to-people relationships, to support the region’s sustainable development, stability, and prosperity by delivering tangible benefits to the people of the Indo-Pacific.
As four leading maritime democracies in the Indo-Pacific, we unequivocally stand for the maintenance of peace and stability across this dynamic region, as an indispensable element of global security and prosperity. We strongly oppose any destabilizing or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion. We condemn recent illicit missile launches in the region that violate UN Security Council resolutions. We express serious concern over recent dangerous and aggressive actions in the maritime domain. We seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated—one where all countries are free from coercion, and can exercise their agency to determine their futures. We are united in our commitment to upholding a stable and open international system, with its strong support for human rights, the principle of freedom, rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and peaceful settlement of disputes and prohibition on the threat or use of force in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter.
Reflecting the Vision Statement issued by Leaders at the 2023 Quad Summit, we are and will continue to be transparent in what we do. Respect for the leadership of regional institutions, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), is and will remain at the center of the Quad’s efforts.
A Global Force for Good
Health Security
The COVID-19 pandemic reminded the world how important health security is to our societies, our economies, and the stability of our region. In 2021 and 2022, the Quad came together to deliver more than 400 million safe and effective COVID-19 doses to Indo-Pacific countries and almost 800 million vaccines globally, and provided $5.6 billion to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment for vaccine supply to low and middle-income countries. In 2023, we announced the Quad Health Security Partnership, through which the Quad continues to deliver for partners across the region, including through the delivery of pandemic preparedness training.
In response to the current clade I mpox outbreak, as well as the ongoing clade II mpox outbreak, we plan to coordinate our efforts to promote equitable access to safe, effective, quality-assured mpox vaccines, including where appropriate expanding vaccine manufacturing in low and middle-income countries.
Today we are proud to announce the Quad Cancer Moonshot, a groundbreaking partnership to save lives in the Indo-Pacific region. Building on the Quad’s successful partnership during the COVID-19 pandemic, our collective investments to address cancer in the region, our scientific and medical capabilities, and contributions from our private and non-profit sectors, we will collaborate with partner nations to reduce the burden of cancer in the region.
The Quad Cancer Moonshot will focus initially on combatting cervical cancer—a preventable cancer that continues to claim too many lives—in the Indo-Pacific region, while laying the groundwork to address other forms of cancer as well. The United States intends to support this initiative, including through U.S. Navy medical trainings and professional exchanges around cervical cancer prevention in the region starting in 2025, and through U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) openness to finance eligible private sector-driven projects to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer, including cervical cancer. Australia is announcing the expansion of the Elimination Partnership in the Indo-Pacific for Cervical Cancer Program (EPICC) with support of the Australian Government and the Minderoo Foundation to AUD 29.6 million, to cover up to eleven countries in the Indo-Pacific in helping advance the elimination of cervical cancer and support complementary initiatives focused on cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. India commits to providing HPV sampling kits, detection kits, and cervical cancer vaccines worth $7.5 million to the Indo-Pacific region. India, through its $10 million commitment to the WHO’s Global Initiative on Digital Health, will offer technical assistance to interested countries in the Indo-Pacific region for the adoption and deployment of its Digital Public Infrastructure that helps in cancer screening and care. Japan is providing medical equipment, including CT and MRI scanners, and other assistance worth approximately $27 million, including in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste, and is contributing to international organizations such as the Gavi Vaccine Alliance. Quad partners also intend to work, within respective national contexts, to collaborate in advancing research and development in the area of cancer and to increase private sector and non-governmental sector activities in support of reducing the burden of cervical cancer in the region. We welcome a number of new, ambitious commitments from non-governmental institutions, including the Serum Institute of India, in partnership with Gavi, which will support orders of up to 40 million HPV vaccine doses, subject to necessary approvals, for the Indo-Pacific region, and which may be increased consistent with demand. We also welcome a new $100 million commitment from Women’s Health and Empowerment Network to address cervical cancer in Southeast Asia.
Altogether, our scientific experts assess that the Quad Cancer Moonshot will save hundreds of thousands of lives over the coming decades.
Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR)
Twenty years since the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, when the Quad first came together to surge humanitarian assistance, we continue to respond to the vulnerabilities caused by natural disasters in the Indo-Pacific. In 2022, the Quad established the “Quad Partnership on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief in the Indo-Pacific” and signed Guidelines for the Quad Partnership on HADR in the Indo-Pacific, which enable Quad countries to rapidly coordinate in the face of natural disasters. We welcome Quad governments working to ensure readiness to rapidly respond, including through pre-positioning of essential relief supplies, in the event of a natural disaster; this effort extends from the Indian Ocean region, to Southeast Asia, to the Pacific.
In May 2024, following a tragic landslide in Papua New Guinea, Quad partners collectively contributed over $5 million in humanitarian assistance. Quad partners are working together to provide over $4 million in humanitarian assistance to support the people of Vietnam in light of the devastating consequences of Typhoon Yagi. The Quad continues to support partners in the region in their longer-term resiliency efforts.
Maritime Security
In 2022, we announced the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) to offer near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness information to partners in the region. Since then, in consultation with partners, we have successfully scaled the program across the Indo-Pacific region—through the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, with partners in Southeast Asia, to the Information Fusion Center—Indian Ocean Region, Gurugram. In doing so, the Quad has helped well over two dozen countries access dark vessel maritime domain awareness data, so they can better monitor the activities in their exclusive economic zones—including unlawful activity. Australia commits to boosting its cooperation with the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency to enhance regional maritime domain awareness in the Pacific through satellite data, training, and capacity building.
Today we are announcing a new regional Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI), to enable our partners in the region to maximize tools provided through IPMDA and other Quad partner initiatives, to monitor and secure their waters, enforce their laws, and deter unlawful behavior. We look forward to India hosting the inaugural MAITRI workshop in 2025. Furthermore, we welcome the launch of a Quad maritime legal dialogue to support efforts to uphold the rules-based maritime order in the Indo-Pacific. In addition, Quad partners intend to layer new technology and data into IPMDA over the coming year, to continue to deliver cutting edge capability and information to the region.
We are also announcing today that the U.S. Coast Guard, Japan Coast Guard, Australian Border Force, and Indian Coast Guard, plan to launch a first-ever Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission in 2025, to improve interoperability and advance maritime safety, and continuing with further missions in future years across the Indo-Pacific.
We also announce today the launch of a Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network pilot project, to pursue shared airlift capacity among our nations and leverage our collective logistics strengths, in order to support civilian response to natural disasters more rapidly and efficiently across the Indo-Pacific region.
Quality Infrastructure
The Quad remains committed to improving the region’s connectivity through the development of quality, resilient infrastructure.
We are pleased to announce the Quad Ports of the Future Partnership, which will harness the Quad’s expertise to support sustainable and resilient port infrastructure development across the Indo-Pacific, in collaboration with regional partners. In 2025, we intend to hold a Quad Regional Ports and Transportation Conference, hosted by India in Mumbai. Through this new partnership, Quad partners intend to coordinate, exchange information, share best practices with partners in the region, and leverage resources to mobilize government and private sector investments in quality port infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific region.
We applaud the expansion of the Quad Infrastructure Fellowships to more than 2,200 experts, and note that Quad partners have already provided well over 1,300 fellowships since the initiative was announced at last year’s Summit. We also appreciate the workshop organized by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in India, working to empower partners across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen power sector resilience.
Through the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience, we continue to support and strengthen quality undersea cable networks in the Indo-Pacific, the capacity, durability, and reliability of which are inextricably linked to the security and prosperity of the region and the world. In support of these efforts, Australia launched the Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre in July, which is delivering workshops and policy and regulatory assistance in response to requests from across the region. Japan will extend technical cooperation to improve public ICT infrastructure management capacity for an undersea cable in Nauru and Kiribati. The United States has conducted over 1,300 capacity building trainings for telecommunication officials and executives from 25 countries in the Indo-Pacific; today the U.S. announces its intent, working with Congress, to invest an additional $3.4 million to extend and expand this training program.
Investments in cable projects by Quad partners will help support all Pacific island countries in achieving primary telecommunication cable connectivity by the end of 2025. Since the last Quad Leaders’ Summit, Quad partners have committed over $140 million to undersea cable builds in the Pacific, alongside contributions from other likeminded partners. Complementing these investments in new undersea cables, India has commissioned a feasibility study to examine expansion of undersea cable maintenance and repair capabilities in the Indo-Pacific.
We reaffirm our support for the Pacific Quality Infrastructure Principles, which are an expression of Pacific voices on infrastructure.
We underscore our commitment to an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe, reliable and secure digital future to advance our shared prosperity and sustainable development across the Indo-Pacific. In this context, we welcome the Quad Principles for Development and Deployment of Digital Public Infrastructure.
Critical and Emerging Technologies
Today, we are proud to announce an ambitious expansion of our partnership to deliver trusted technology solutions to the broader Indo-Pacific region.
Last year, Quad partners launched a landmark initiative to deploy the first Open Radio Access Network (RAN) in the Pacific, in Palau, to support a secure, resilient, and interconnected telecommunications ecosystem. Since then, the Quad has pledged approximately $20 million to this effort.
Quad partners also welcome the opportunity to explore additional Open RAN projects in Southeast Asia. We plan to expand support for ongoing Open RAN field trials and the Asia Open RAN Academy (AORA) in the Philippines, building on the initial $8 million in support that the United States and Japan pledged earlier this year. The United States also plans to invest over $7 million to support the global expansion of AORA, including through establishing a first-of-its-kind Open RAN workforce training initiative at scale in South Asia, in partnership with Indian institutions.
Quad partners will also explore collaborating with the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation to ensure the country’s readiness for nationwide 5G deployment.
We remain committed to advancing our cooperation on semiconductors through better leveraging of our complementary strengths to realize a diversified and competitive market and enhance resilience of Quad’s semiconductor supply chains. We welcome a Memorandum of Cooperation between Quad countries for the Semiconductor Supply Chains Contingency Network.
Through the Advancing Innovations for Empowering NextGen Agriculture (AI-ENGAGE) initiative announced at last year’s Summit, our governments are deepening leading-edge collaborative research to harness artificial intelligence, robotics, and sensing to transform agricultural approaches and empower farmers across the Indo-Pacific. We are pleased to announce an inaugural $7.5+ million in funding opportunities for joint research, and welcome the recent signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation between our science agencies to connect our research communities and advance shared research principles.
The United States, Australia, India, and Japan look forward to launching the Quad BioExplore Initiative—a funded mechanism that will support joint AI-driven exploration of diverse non-human biological data across all four countries.
This project will also be underpinned by the forthcoming Quad Principles for Research and Development Collaborations in Critical and Emerging Technologies.
Climate and Clean Energy
As we underscore the severe economic, social, and environmental consequences posed by the climate crisis, we continue to work together with Indo-Pacific partners, including through Quad Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Package (Q-CHAMP), to enhance climate and clean energy cooperation as well as promote adaptation and resilience. We emphasize the significant benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy for our people, our planet, and our shared prosperity. Our countries intend to strengthen our cooperation to align policies, incentives, standards, and investments around creating high-quality, diversified clean energy supply chains that will enhance our collective energy security, create new economic opportunities across the region, and benefit local workers and communities around the world, particularly across the Indo-Pacific.
We will work together, through policy and public finance, to operationalize our commitment to catalyzing complementary and high-standard private sector investment in allied and partner clean energy supply chains. To this end, Australia will open applications for the Quad Clean Energy Supply Chains Diversification Program in November, providing AUD 50 million to support projects that develop and diversify solar panel, hydrogen electrolyzer and battery supply chains in the Indo-Pacific. India commits to invest $2 million in new solar projects in Fiji, Comoros, Madagascar, and Seychelles. Japan has committed to $122 million grants and loans in renewable energy projects in Indo-Pacific countries. The United States, through DFC, will continue to seek opportunities to mobilize private capital to solar, as well as wind, cooling, batteries, and critical minerals to expand and diversify supply chains.
We are pleased to announce a focused Quad effort to boost energy efficiency, including the deployment and manufacturing of high-efficiency affordable, cooling systems to enable climate-vulnerable communities to adapt to rising temperatures while simultaneously reducing strain on the electricity grid.
We jointly affirm our commitment to addressing the challenges posed by climate change and ensure the resilience and sustainability of port infrastructure. Quad partners will leverage our learning and expertise to forge a path towards sustainable and resilient port infrastructure, including through the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).
Cyber
In the face of a deteriorating security environment in the cyber domain, Quad countries intend to enhance our cybersecurity partnership to address common threats posed by state-sponsored actors, cybercriminals, and other non-state malicious actors. Our countries commit to taking concrete steps to increase our collective network defense and advance technical capabilities through greater threat information sharing and capacity building. We plan to coordinate joint efforts to identify vulnerabilities, protect national security networks and critical infrastructure networks, and coordinate more closely including on policy responses to significant cybersecurity incidents affecting the Quad’s shared priorities.
Quad countries are also partnering with software manufacturers, industry trade groups, and research centers to expand our commitmentto pursuing secure software development standards and certification, as endorsed in the Quad’s 2023 Secure Software Joint Principles. We will work to harmonize these standards to not only ensure that the development, procurement, and end-use of software for government networks is more secure, but that the cyber resilience of our supply chains, digital economies, and societies are collectively improved. Throughout this fall, Quad countries each plan to host campaigns to mark the annual Quad Cyber Challenge promoting responsible cyber ecosystems, public resources, and cybersecurity awareness. We are constructively engaging on the Quad Action Plan to Protect Commercial Undersea Telecommunications Cables, developed by the Quad Senior Cyber Group, as a complementary effort to the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience. Our coordinated actions to protect global telecommunications infrastructure as guided by the Action Plan will advance our shared vision for future digital connectivity, global commerce, and prosperity.
Space
We recognize the essential contribution of space-related applications and technologies in the Indo-Pacific. Our four countries intend to continue delivering Earth Observation data and other space-related applications to assist nations across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen climate early warning systems and better manage the impacts of extreme weather events. In this context, we welcome India’s establishment of a space-based web portal for Mauritius, to support the concept of open science for space-based monitoring of extreme weather events and climate impact.
Quad Investors Network (QUIN)
We welcome private sector initiatives—including the Quad Investors Network (QUIN), which facilitates investments in strategic technologies, including clean energy, semiconductors, critical minerals, and quantum. The QUIN is mobilizing a number of investments to promote supply chain resilience, advance joint research and development, commercialize new technologies, and invest in our future workforce.
People-to-People Initiatives
The Quad is committed to strengthening the deep and enduring ties between our people, and among our partners. Through the Quad Fellowship, we are building a network of the next generation of science, technology, and policy leaders. Together with the Institute of International Education, which leads implementation of the Quad Fellowship, Quad governments welcome the second cohort of Quad Fellows and the expansion of the program to include students from ASEAN countries for the first time. The Government of Japan is supporting the program to enable Quad Fellows to study in Japan. The Quad welcomes the generous support of private sector partners for the next cohort of fellows, including Google, the Pratt Foundation, and Western Digital.
India is pleased to announce a new initiative to award fifty Quad scholarships, worth $500,000, to students from the Indo-Pacific to pursue a 4-year undergraduate engineering program at a Government of India-funded technical institution.
Working Together to Address Regional and Global Issues
Today we reaffirm our consistent and unwavering support for ASEAN centrality and unity. We continue to support implementation of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) and are committed to ensuring the Quad’s work is aligned with ASEAN’s principles and priorities.
We underscore ASEAN’s regional leadership role, including in the East Asia Summit, the region’s premier leader-led forum for strategic dialogue, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. As comprehensive strategic partners of ASEAN, our four countries intend to continue to strengthen our respective relationships with ASEAN and seek opportunities for greater Quad collaboration in support of the AOIP.
We recommit to working in partnership with Pacific island countries to achieve shared aspirations and address shared challenges. We reaffirm our support for Pacific regional institutions that have served the region well over many years, with the PIF as the region’s premier political and economic policy organization, and warmly welcome Tonga’s leadership as the current PIF Chair in 2024-2025. We continue to support the objectives of the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. We and our governments will continue to listen to and be guided at every step by Pacific priorities, including climate action, ocean health, resilient infrastructure, maritime security and financial integrity. In particular, we acknowledge climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and applaud Pacific island countries’ global leadership on climate action.
We remain committed to strengthening cooperation in the Indian Ocean region. We strongly support IORA as the Indian Ocean region’s premier forum for addressing the region’s challenges. We recognize India’s leadership in finalizing the IORA Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (IOIP) and express our support for its implementation. We thank Sri Lanka for its continued leadership as IORA Chair through this year and look forward to India’s assuming the IORA Chair in 2025.
As Leaders, we are steadfast in our conviction that international law, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the maintenance of peace, safety, security and stability in the maritime domain, underpin the sustainable development, and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific. We emphasize the importance of adherence to international law, particularly as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to address challenges to the global maritime rules-based order, including with respect to maritime claims. We are seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas. We continue to express our serious concern about the militarization of disputed features, and coercive and intimidating maneuvers in the South China Sea. We condemn the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels, including increasing use of dangerous maneuvers. We also oppose efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities.We reaffirm that maritime disputes must be resolved peacefully and in accordance with international law, as reflected in UNCLOS. We re-emphasize the importance of maintaining and upholding freedom of navigation and overflight, other lawful uses of the sea, and unimpeded commerce consistent with international law. We re-emphasize the universal and unified character of UNCLOS and reaffirm that UNCLOS sets out the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and the seas must be carried out. We underscore that the 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea is a significant milestone and the basis for peacefully resolving disputes between the parties.
Together, with our global and regional partners, we continue to support international institutions and initiatives that underpin global peace, prosperity and sustainable development. We reiterate our unwavering support for the UN Charter and the three pillars of the UN system. In consultation with our partners, we will work collectively to address attempts to unilaterally undermine the integrity of the UN, its Charter, and its agencies. We will reform the UN Security Council, recognizing the urgent need to make it more representative, inclusive, transparent, efficient, effective, democratic and accountable through expansion in permanent and non-permanent categories of membership of the UN Security Council. This expansion of permanent seats should include representation for Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in a reformed Security Council.
We stand for adherence to international law and respect for principles of the UN Charter, including territorial integrity, sovereignty of all states, and peaceful resolution of disputes. We express our deepest concern over the war raging in Ukraine including the terrible and tragic humanitarian consequences. Each of us has visited Ukraine since the war began, and seen this first-hand; we reiterate the need for a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in line with international law, consistent with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. We also note the negative impacts of the war in Ukraine with regard to global food and energy security, especially for developing and least developed countries. In the context of this war, we share the view that the use, or threat of use, of nuclear weapons is unacceptable. We underscore the importance of upholding international law, and in line with the UN Charter, reiterate that all states must refrain from the threat of or use of force against the territorial integrity and sovereignty or political independence of any state.
We condemn North Korea’s destabilizing ballistic missile launches and its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions (UNSCRs). These launches pose a grave threat to international peace and stability. We urge North Korea to abide by all its obligations under the UNSCRs, refrain from further provocations and engage in substantive dialogue. We reaffirm our commitment to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula consistent with relevant UNSCRs and call on all countries to fully implement these UNSCRs. We stress the need to prevent any proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies related to North Korea in the region and beyond. We express our grave concern over North Korea’s use of proliferation networks, malicious cyber activity and workers abroad to fund its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. In that context, we urge all UN Member States to abide by the relevant UNSCRs including the prohibition on the transfer to North Korea or procurement from North Korea of all arms and related materiel. We express deep concern about countries that are deepening military cooperation with North Korea, which directly undermines the global nonproliferation regime. As the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts tasked with monitoring violations of North Korea-related UNSCR sanctions was not renewed, we reiterate our commitment to continued implementation of the relevant UNSCRs which remain in full force. We reconfirm the necessity of immediate resolution of the abductions issue.
We remain deeply concerned by the worsening political, security and humanitarian situation in Myanmar, including in Rakhine State, and again call for an immediate cessation of violence, the release of all those unjustly and arbitrarily detained, safe and unhindered humanitarian access, resolution of the crisis through constructive and inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders, and a return to the path of inclusive democracy. We reaffirm our strong support for ASEAN-led efforts, including the work of the ASEAN Chair and the Special Envoy of the ASEAN Chair on Myanmar. We call for full implementation of all commitments under the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus. The ongoing conflict and instability have serious implications for the region, including increases in transnational crime such as cybercrime, the illegal drug trade, and human trafficking. We restate our appeal to all States to prevent the flow of arms and dual-use material, including jet fuel. We remain resolute in our support for the people of Myanmar and commit to continuing to work with all stakeholders in a pragmatic and constructive way, to find a sustainable solution to the crisis in a process which is led by the people of Myanmar and returns Myanmar to the path of democracy.
We call upon all States to contribute to the safe, peaceful, responsible, and sustainable use of outer space. We remain committed to fostering international cooperation and transparency, as well as confidence-building measures with the goal of improving the security of outer space for all States. We reaffirm the importance of upholding the existing international legal framework for outer space activities, including the Outer Space Treaty, and the obligation of all States Parties to the Treaty not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The Quad reaffirms its commitment to fostering a resilient information environment including through its Countering Disinformation Working Group by supporting media freedom and addressing foreign information manipulation and interference, including disinformation, which undermines trust and sows discord in the international community. We recognize these tactics are intended to interfere with domestic and international interests, and we are committed, together with our regional partners, to leverage our collective expertise and capacity to respond. We reaffirm our commitment to respect international human rights law, strengthen civil society, support media freedom, address online harassment and abuse, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and counter unethical practices.
We unequivocally condemn terrorism and violent extremism in all its forms and manifestations, including cross-border terrorism. We are committed to international cooperation and will work with our regional partners in a comprehensive and sustained manner to strengthen their capability to prevent, detect and respond to threats posed by terrorism and violent extremism, including threats posed by the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes, consistent with international law. We are committed to working together to promote accountability for the perpetrators of such terrorist attacks. We reiterate our condemnation of terrorist attacks including the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and in Pathankot, and our commitment to pursuing designations, as appropriate, by the UN Security Council 1267 Sanctions Committee. We welcome the constructive discussions held at the first Quad Working Group on Counter-Terrorism and the fourth tabletop exercise in Honolulu last year, and look forward to Japan hosting the next meeting and tabletop exercise in November 2024.
We share great interest in achieving peace and stability in the Middle East. We unequivocally condemn the terror attacks on October 7, 2023. The large-scale loss of civilian lives and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unacceptable. We affirm the imperative of securing the release of all hostages held by Hamas, and emphasize that the deal to release hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza. We underscore the urgent need to significantly increase deliveries of life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza as well as the crucial need to prevent regional escalation. We urge all parties to comply with international law, including international humanitarian law, as applicable. We welcome UNSCR S/RES/2735 (2024), and strongly urge all parties concerned to work immediately and steadily toward the release of all hostages and an immediate ceasefire. We call on all parties to take every feasible step to protect the lives of civilians including aid workers, and facilitate the rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian relief to civilians. We also encourage other countries, including those in the Indo-Pacific, to increase their support in order to address the dire humanitarian need on the ground. We underscore that the future recovery and reconstruction of Gaza should be supported by the international community. We remain committed to a sovereign, viable and independent Palestinian state taking into account Israel’s legitimate security concerns as part of a two-state solution that enables both Israelis and Palestinians to live in a just, lasting, and secure peace. Any unilateral actions that undermine the prospect of a two-state solution, including Israeli expansion of settlements and violent extremism on all sides, must end. We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating and spilling over in the region.
We condemn the ongoing attacks perpetrated by the Houthis and their supporters against international and commercial vessels transiting through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, which are destabilizing the region and impeding navigational rights and freedoms and trade flows, and jeopardize the safety of vessels and people on board including sailors.
We reaffirm our commitment to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the achievement of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We underscore the importance of achieving the SDGs in a comprehensive manner without selectively prioritizing a narrow set of such goals, and reaffirm that the UN has a central role in supporting countries in their implementation. With six years left, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and accelerating progress toward all the SDGs in a comprehensive manner that is balanced across three dimensions – economic, social and environmental. From global health to sustainable development and climate change, the global community benefits when all stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute to addressing these challenges. We affirm our commitment to contributing to and implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda and to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. We underscore our commitment to strongly engaging constructively in the discussion on advancing sustainable development, including at the Summit of the Future. The Quad continues to realize a safe and secure world where human rights and human dignity are protected, based on the central premise of the SDGs: “Leave no one behind.”
We, the Quad Leaders, remain dedicated to working in partnership with Indo-Pacific countries in deciding our future and shaping the region we all want to live in.
Enduring Partners for the Indo-Pacific
Over the past four years, Quad Leaders have met together six times, including twice virtually, and Quad Foreign Ministers have met eight times in the last five years. Quad country representatives meet together on a regular basis, at all levels, including among ambassadors across the four countries’ extensive diplomatic networks, to consult one another, exchange ideas to advance shared priorities, and deliver benefits with and for partners across the Indo-Pacific region. We welcome our Commerce and Industry ministers preparing to meet for the first time in the coming months. We also welcome the leaders of our Development Finance Institutions and Agencies deciding to meet to explore future investments by the four countries in the Indo-Pacific. Altogether, our four countries are cooperating at an unprecedented pace and scale.
Each of our governments has committed to working through our respective budgetary processes to secure robust funding for Quad priorities in the Indo-Pacific region to ensure an enduring impact. We intend to work with our legislatures to deepen interparliamentary exchanges, and encourage other stakeholders to deepen engagement with Quad counterparts.
We look forward to the next Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting hosted by the United States in 2025, and the next Quad Leaders’ Summit hosted by India in 2025. The Quad is here to stay.
Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News
HOHHOT, Sept. 21 — While durians from Thailand and Malaysia, bananas from the Philippines and passion fruit from Vietnam are well-received by Chinese consumers, a Chinese desert fruit is also making its way to Southeast Asian countries.
Cold-chain trucks shuttle in orchards in Horqin Sandy Land, a vast swathe of desertified area in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, to load and transport fresh crabapples, newly picked in local orchards, to coastal ports for export to southeast Asian countries.
Teng Dayong, a fruit farmer in Horqin Left Wing Middle Banner (county) in the city of Tongliao, Inner Mongolia, manages a 190-mu (about 12.67 hectares) crabapple orchard in this area.
He said his fruit trees are going to produce 2,000 kilograms of crabapples per mu this year, earning him a net income of 10,000 yuan (1,418 U.S. dollars) per mu.
“Nearly half of the fruit from my orchard has been ordered for export to Southeast Asia,” said Teng.
The little chubby red fruit grown in the inland area is transported by trucks to Chinese ports such as Dalian for marine shipping. It is expected to appear on the shelves of supermarkets in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand after ten days of cold-chain transport.
Horqin Sandy Land is one of China’s largest sandy areas, stretching over 77.6 million mu and straddling three Chinese provincial-level regions, namely Inner Mongolia, Jilin and Liaoning.
Aoserji, director of the forestry and grassland administration in the county, said that decades ago, locals had planted poplar trees to serve as shields against sand. However, these trees consumed a lot of water and offered poor economic benefits.
The forestry and grassland academy in Tongliao later developed a crabapple variety that serves both ecological and economic purposes, said Aoserji.
Nowadays, farmers are keen to grow the variety, which is sweet and nutritious, and cold-resistant and drought-tolerant, he explained.
Located in the hinterland of Horqin Sandy Land, the city of Tongliao now boasts 350,000 mu of crabapple trees, achieving an annual output of more than 100,000 tonnes, while the output value is close to 500 million yuan.
This year, fruit farmer Teng has partnered with a Malaysian Chinese to set up a fruit packing and export company. The partner, Zeny Yong, has ordered crabapples from Teng for several years.
Kailu County in Tongliao has recorded an export volume of more than 100 tonnes of crabapples a year, and exports this fruit to a number of countries including Thailand, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.
The county has built a cold storage facility capable of storing 1,000 tonnes of this fruit, thereby keeping it fresh until April and May the following year for export.
Source: China State Council Information Office
This photo taken on Sept. 21, 2024 shows a military parade in Tehran, capital of Iran. [Photo/Xinhua]
Iran on Saturday unveiled its latest homegrown precision strike long-range ballistic missile and kamikaze drone at a grand parade staged by the country’s armed forces, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
The ballistic missile, dubbed Jahad, and the drone, named Shahed-136B, were displayed for the first time during the parade at the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, the late founder of the Islamic Republic, in southern Tehran. The event marked the beginning of Sacred Defense Week, commemorating the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, according to the report.
The one-stage Jahad ballistic missile, powered by solid fuel, can strike targets up to 1,000 km away with pinpoint accuracy. It has been designed and developed by the Aerospace Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), according to Fars.
The Shahed 136B drone, powered by a turbojet engine, can destroy targets over 2,500 km away, Fars said, adding the unmanned aerial vehicle has also been designed and manufactured by the IRGC’s Aerospace Force.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends a military parade in Tehran, capital of Iran, Sept. 21, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]
Speaking at the parade, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stressed that Iran can defend itself and ensure peace and security in the West Asia region through unity, solidarity and cooperation with other Muslim states.
“Today, Iran’s defense and deterrence power has increased to such a level that no devil dares perpetrate any act of aggression against the country, or even thinks of it,” he was quoted as saying in a statement published on the website of his office.
Source: The White House
8:50 A.M. EDT
MR. SULLIVAN: Thank you, guys, for being here. Today, we have the fourth Quad Leaders Summit, fourth in-person Quad Leaders Summit, and the first time that President Biden has actually hosted leaders in his hometown and, literally, at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
You guys have heard the President say many times that all politics is personal, all diplomacy is personal. And developing personal relationships has been core to his approach to foreign policy as President.
So, opening his home to the leaders of India, Japan, and Australia is a way of him showing, not just saying, that these leaders matter to him, that the Quad matters to him as a significant foreign policy priority. And institutionalizing and deepening and elevating the Quad has been one of the things that he’s going to be very proud of when he leaves office and passes the baton to the next President of the United States.
When President Biden came in, within the early months, he held a Quad — a virtual summit, and it was the first time the leaders of the Quad had actually met in any format. And what the President wanted to do was not just have this be something where leaders convened occasionally, but actually a vehicle for driving deepening cooperation and integration across the region.
And so, if you look at the last three and a half years, whether it’s on the response to COVID-19 or humanitarian response across the region, or issues like cyber and cyber capacity-building across the region, there’s a range of significant achievements the Quad has already had. And today, the Quad leaders will announce a number of further steps forward.
There’ll be the announcement of the Quad Cancer Moonshot, which we’re very excited about, with all four countries coming to the table with resources and capacities to help drive towards the cures to deadly cancers. And there’ll be more to say on that later today.
There’s the expansion of the Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative, which is a mouthful, but is really about integrating new technologies and new capabilities, not just for Quad members, but for countries in Southeast Asia and the rest of the region, for them to understand their maritime domains so they can better manage and regulate them and ensure their security and also ensure that they are delivering economic benefits to the people of the relevant countries.
There will be — we’ll have an announcement of the expansion of the Quad fellows, which will now not just be fellows from the four countries, but fellows from Southeast Asia as well.
We’ll announce the pre-positioning of relief supplies across the region and the ability for Quad countries to react more rapidly in the case of humanitarian crises and natural disasters.
And the Quad will announce its first-ever coast guard mission together as well, which will show the joint capabilities of the four countries in terms of their ability — in terms of their coast guards.
So, there’s a number of other things that you’ll see in the fact sheet as well, but this just shows the breadth and range of ways in which the Quad is becoming a feature of the architecture of the Indo-Pacific. And we hope and expect that that will deepen in the years ahead.
And the reason I think we can have some confidence in that is there’s genuine bipartisan support for the Quad. It’s something that really transcends party lines. And, in fact, over the last 24 hours, we’ve had the announcement of a bipartisan, bicameral Quad Caucus, something I never quite thought I would see, but Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate actually standing up a caucus to support this, this platform, because of the importance that Congress places on it and what it can deliver.
The last thing I would say is that when you look at the Quad and AUKUS and the Camp David trilateral and our engagement with the Pacific Islands in ASEAN, one thing that has been a hallmark of the President’s foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific has been to move from the traditional hub-and-spoke model, rooted largely in bilateral alliances and bilateral partnerships, to a latticework approach with multiple institutions, overlapping partnerships, different configurations that all add up to genuinely new architecture for the Indo-Pacific, and the Quad is a critical part of that.
And I think it leaves the United States in a stronger position, with a more dense and capable and dynamic set of partnerships, and with relationships not just between us and our partners, but among our partners, that allow us to deliver greater results and achieve more stability and security and drive towards the ultimate objective, which is a free and open Indo-Pacific.
So let me stop there, and happy to take your questions.
Q Jake, just (inaudible), you didn’t mention China directly in the joint leaders’ statement. What sort of language should we expect directed at the PRC?
MR. SULLIVAN: The Quad isn’t really about any other country. It’s not directed at another country. It’s directed at problem solving and standing up for a set of common principles and a common vision for the region.
So, I don’t think you should expect to see a focus on any particular country, including the PRC, in the Quad leaders’ statement. That’s been the pattern since the beginning, because the nature and purpose of this institution is really about the kinds of things I just described. It’s about delivering vaccines, delivering cyber capacity, delivering coast guard capacity, delivering humanitarian assistance, delivering science and technology progress. So that’s what we’re going to continue to focus on, and that’s what you’ll see in the fact sheet — the joint leaders’ statement.
Q But, Jake, as you add more security features to this partnership, you know, is there a risk, a possibility that China, which has already expressed concerns about encirclement related to the Quad, begins to have objections to this cooperation?
MR. SULLIVAN: Look, I’ll let the PRC speak for itself, and obviously it does speak for itself about a number of different initiatives the United States has taken in the Indo-Pacific. We’re just going to prove year on year everything that I just said, which is really that the thrust and purpose of the institution writ large and the security features of it are about a positive agenda to enhance security, not just for Quad countries but for other regional partners.
So, it’s hard for me to see how and why the PRC should object to the four countries, for example, doing a coast guard mission together, or doing cyber trainings for Southeast Asia together, or taking steps with respect to maritime domain awareness. These do not, to me, indicate any form of aggression or assertive behavior. They’re fundamentally constructive and positive, and that’s where we’re going to continue to position the Quad.
Q Can you speak a little bit to the President’s meeting with Prime Minister Modi and what, if anything, he’ll say about what he wants to do vis-à-vis China and Russia (inaudible)?
MR. SULLIVAN: I won’t go too deep into the details of what he will say on those issues, which are obviously sensitive and will obviously be critical priorities in the bilateral meeting.
I will just say this: that the United States has been clear about our view that Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine flouted every norm and principle of international law, that countries like India should step up and support the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and that every country everywhere should refrain from supplying inputs to Russia’s war machine for it to be able to continue to prosecute this brutal war. So they will talk about that.
The President will also h
ear from Prime Minister Modi about his trip to Ukraine, which was an important and indeed historic trip, and it will be the opportunity for the two of them to talk about their respective views of the way forward.
And then, with respect to China, you know, they will talk about how they see China’s actions in the region, where China is headed. And that’s not just true in the security domain, but the economic and technology domain as well. And we’ll work to try to coordinate approaches to the extent that that makes sense for both countries.
Q In the past month or so, there’s been a lot of (inaudible) China (inaudible). There’s been lots of (inaudible) still in the offing. Can you speak to, like, how the President himself is reviewing the culmination, I guess, of the administration’s China strategy leading up to this? And should we consider this Quad sort of part of that puzzle, (inaudible)?
MR. SULLIVAN: I think you should consider this Quad and all of our other actions part of an effort to strengthen the capacity of the United States to defend our interests, support our allies and partners, advance problem solving on critical common challenges, and generally put ourself in a more robust, competitive position writ large.
But I don’t think you should see it again as being directed at China. And I think this is American foreign policy, in a way at its historic best, which innovation partnerships designed to enhance stability, designed to deliver results, and connected to other partnerships that are going the same thing.
And I think, kind of, over-cranking the emphasis on any one country is missing what I think the central thrust and purpose of these kinds of institutions, including the Quad, are all about.
Q You mentioned at the top the personal nature of this visit. And the White House is using the terminology “personal meeting” rather than the usual “bilateral meeting.” Can you give us a sense of how these meetings are different, what we might expect? For example, Prime Minister Albanese yesterday, did he get a tour of the house? See the Corvette? Were there family members present? Can you can you give us a flavor of that?
MR. SULLIVAN: He did get a bit of a tour of the house. I don’t think he saw the Corvette, though. I can’t confirm that for sure, because the two of them sort of went off by themselves for a bit, and I haven’t had a chance to speak to the President about what exactly the Prime Minister saw.
There weren’t other family members there. It was really a sort of one-on-one opportunity for President Biden and the Prime Minister to sit and talk. And then, a few of us joined them, obviously, for part of the meeting when it turned to substance.
It was just — honestly, the vibe of it was sort of two guys, one at the other guy’s home, talking in broad strokes about where they see the state of the world, about — you know, swapping some stories from their respective political careers, you know, talking about the history of the U.S.-Australia alliance.
It just kind of had a feeling like if you had someone come over for a cup of coffee or a meal. You know, that kind of feeling was much more present than, like, a stiff bilateral. And the President told everybody, “Take off your jackets. Get comfortable,” which we all obliged.
So, yeah, I’m very bad at answering questions like that, but that’s my best shot at it.
Q Well, if I may, on Sudan, a United Nations panel of experts has accused the United Arab Emirates of supplying arms to the RSF in breach of the weapons embargo on Darfur. MBZ, I guess, is coming to the White House this week. Will the President raise those allegations directly with the leader of the United Arab Emirates?
MR. SULLIVAN: I’ll let the President talk to Sheikh Mohamed privately about Sudan. I think it would be more effective to do that.
What I will say is we are concerned about a number of countries and the steps they are taking to perpetuate rather than resolve the conflict. And I will also say that Sudan will certainly be on the agenda, and the President will be as direct and candid with Sheikh Mohamed as he is with every leader. And then, after the fact, we’ll share what we feel we can.
And the reason why I’m not, sort of, laying it out all in public right now is: Our ultimate objective is to get the entire conflict in Sudan on a different track than the tragic and horrific track it is on right now. And I think that requires some intense but sensitive diplomatic conversations with a number of players. That’s what the President is intending to do writ large. And as I said, Sudan will certainly be part of the agenda with the UAE President on Monday.
Q Jake, so (inaudible) President will Japan Prime Minister Kishida. Do you expect him to talk about that deal between U.S. Steel and Japan Nippon Steel? And does (inaudible) oppose that deal and try to stop it?
MR. SULLIVAN: I cannot say yet whether that particular deal will come up in the conversation today. There are obviously huge priorities in terms of current events and geopolitical trends and economic and technology cooperation. So, I’m not sure that it will come up. And the President has spoken to this issue before, but the matter really is, at the moment, in a official process while the transaction is studied by the relevant authorities and the relevant agencies, the U.S. government.
And so, you know, the President will obviously allow that process to run its course because that’s what’s required under the law. And then we will see what happens.
Q Prime Minister Kishida will step down soon. You going to talk about his contribution, achievement, but what do you expect from the new Japanese prime minister?
MR. SULLIVAN: One thing that I do expect, whoever the new Japanese prime minister is, is continued investment in and support for the U.S.-Japan alliance as the cornerstone peace of security in the Indo-Pacific. And I expect that because the overwhelming majority of the Japanese people support that and because this alliance is bigger than any one leader on either side, in Japan or the United States.
So I have confidence that the strong bond and partnership between our two countries will continue no matter who takes the helm, although I will say Prime Minister Kishida should be saluted, and President Biden will salute him, as a very significant contributor to the high-water mark we’ve reached in the U.S.-Japan alliance at this point and in Japan’s global leadership role.
So, it will obviously be different because Prime Minister Kishida is a unique individual, but one thing that we think will remain the same is the strong alliance between the United States and Japan.
Q Just on the Nippon deal, very quickly: Some proponents of that deal are interpreting last week’s extension as a sign that the President is having second thoughts. What would you say to them?
MR. SULLIVAN: I can’t speak to that because I think nobody should overread what happened last week as a substantive expression of views, rather as a matter of process to ensure that the transaction gets the full review that’s appropriate in a case like this, as I said, from the relevant authorities and agencies. And the President really does want to let that play out.
Q You mentioned that it’s not about one country, but of course, China comes to mind over time. As just recently, they announced sanctions against American companies. They’re selling weapons to Taiwan. Taiwan is getting money from the United States to be able to defend themselves. And the incidents in the past few weeks in (inaudible) has been escalating, not only with Taiwan with China, but also Philippines.
During this meeting, is that top of mind
, or is this something that you want to address? Because, I mean, you mentioned the coast guard event shouldn’t be questioned by the Chinese; it’s just an event that they’re going to do as a group. But from their point of view, they’re talking about it and condemning these types of actions. Should we worry about China moving forward or being more aggressive as the world is focused on Lebanon, the Middle East, Ukraine?
MR. SULLIVAN: Well, first of all, it’s true that the front pages of newspapers are filled with stories about the Middle East rather than the Indo-Pacific right now. But the United States of America is focused in both places. And there’s probably no better proof point than the fact that we’re sitting here right now, on a Quad Summit day, meeting with leaders of the Indo-Pacific, even as we continue to closely monitor events in the Middle East.
So, if you look at the work that we have done over the last four years, the intense engagement with allies and partners, the work on — this latticework that I described, the efforts to strengthen our own industrial and innovation base, the measures we’ve taken to protect our sensitive technologies, we feel like we are in a very strong position to stand up for peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. And obviously, we are concerned about actions that China has taken, and we speak out about those actions quite directly and candidly.
But we are also putting the United States and our allies and partners in a position to effectively defend our interests and to defend the rules of the road that have kept the peace in the Indo-Pacific for a long time. We’re going to continue to do that.
The other thing I would say is that each of the four members of the Quad has their own approach to the PRC. There’s not going to be some “Quad approach” to the PRC. But of course, in the course of the conversation today, the four leaders will have the opportunity to talk about all of the developments in the Indo-Pacific, and obviously the PRC is part of that.
So, it will be one of the issues or one of the topics that come up among many.
Q If I may, on Venezuela — because Venezuela is close to China right now, and it’s one of the allies, but also Russia and Iran. So we know four Americans are detained in the past few days. The situation is getting just harder and harder to get to an agreement. We are expecting a meeting at the United Nations to talk about Venezuela, led by Uruguay and other countries. Do you see any possibility of moving forward in this subject? We understand the U.S. have supported the talks. Is it a possibility to go back to Qatar? Is Qatar in the table again?
MR. SULLIVAN: We continue to talk to Qatar, who wants to play a constructive role in engaging the Maduro regime, the opposition, the United States, other players. At the moment, there’s not much traction on talks, and what we’re instead continuing to see are negative steps by the Maduro regime in the aftermath of an election where we have been very clear our judgment is that Edmundo Gonzalez received the most votes.
So, we’ll continue to work, particularly with countries in the region, to try to develop a common approach forward to support democracy and a democratic transition in Venezuela. But I will say that at the moment there is not a substantial diplomatic opportunity to make progress, and we’re going to
have to keep looking for one.
Q Jake, on the Middle East, the Lebanese are saying at least 31 were killed in that bombing of a building that apparently targeted at least one Hezbollah commander. Has the U.S. figured out who exactly was targeted and killed?
MR. SULLIVAN: The Israelis have announced, and I believe Hezbollah itself has confirmed, some of the people who were killed in that strike. And I will let Israel and Hezbollah speak to it, because obviously we don’t have an independent capacity at this point to confirm. But I believe a fair amount of that is out in the public domain at this point.
Q If at least one of those was one of those responsible for organizing the barracks bombing back in the ‘80s, how significant would that be that he’s now dead?
MR. SULLIVAN: That individual has American blood on his hands and has a Rewards for Justice price on his head. And he is somebody who the United States promised long ago we would do everything we could to see brought to justice.
And anytime a terrorist who has murdered Americans is brought to justice, we believe that that is a good outcome. But again, I’m not in a position this morning, until I have the opportunity to talk again to my Israeli counterparts today, to formally confirm anything; just to say, you know, 1983 seems like a long time ago, but for a lot of families, a lot of people, it was — they’re still living with it every day.
Q One other. Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich have been in Washington in recent days, mostly to visit with lawmakers. Is there any plan for them to meet with the President?
MR. SULLIVAN: I guess not. The President met with both of them, obviously, when they came back to the States. So there wasn’t — we didn’t have a plan for them to sit down this past week or this coming week in Washington. But, you know, I’m sure he would be happy to see them again at some point.
Q There’s a report that I got (inaudible) disagree with about U.S. officials conceding that there won’t be a deal during the President’s term. What is your assessment of that?
MR. SULLIVAN: I think that’s crazy. I mean —
Q So, it was correct that you’d (inaudible). (Laughter.) (Inaudible) disagree with it, that yes —
MR. SULLIVAN: This is not me sitting here saying, “Hey, there will be a deal.” One can’t know. And I’ve — you’ve heard me repeatedly use this George Mitchell line of “700 days of failure, one day of success.” But this is diplomacy. Every day, you get up and you try to drive towards a deal that brings about a ceasefire, the return of hostages, surge of humanitarian assistance, and ultimately the end of the war. We’re doing that today. We’re going to do that tomorrow. We’re going to do that every day.
And I do still believe there is a path to get there. It has been a winding path, a frustrating path, but we are still on that path, and we hope to reach the destination. But we’re also mindful of the fact and very clear-eyed about the fact that there’s still obstacles in the way; we’re going to do our best to clear them. And I can’t make any predictions about what’s going to happen, but what I can certainly say is we are not conceding that, period.
Q But we’ve been waiting a while in terms of a new bridging proposal. Is that right? So when is — when do you expect to put that on the table?
MR. SULLIVAN: I can’t tell you that because we’re not at a point right now where I can — where we’re prepared to put something on the table. We’re continuing to work with Qatar and Egypt. They’re talking to Hamas. We’re talking to Israel. The Qataris and Egyptians are talking to Israel. And when we feel ready to take another step, we’ll take another step.
Q What’s the holdup?
MR. SULLIVAN: Well, at the moment, we don’t feel like we’re in a position, if we put something down today, to get both sides to say yes to it. Could that change over the course of the coming days? It could. You know — yeah, I’ll leave it at that for now.
Q Jake, in terms of the events of last week in Lebanon, do you have any assessments what that has done to the operational capabilities of Hezbollah? And what is your current level of concern that what you’ve been trying to prevent the last, you know, 11-plus months could st
art off as (inaudible)?
MR. SULLIVAN: It stands to reason that Lebanese Hezbollah’s capabilities have taken a hit. How significant a hit, how that translates to their ability to represent a threat to Israel, I think we still need some more assessment to reach more guidance on.
The risk of escalation is real; it has been since October 7th. There are moments where it is more acute than others. I think we are in one of those moments where it is more acute.
But I would take a step back and make an observation that I don’t think gets sufficient attention in the reporting on this dynamic, which is that Hezbollah started this whole thing. Hamas attacks on October 7th, this vicious massacre. And then, as Nasrallah just said in his speech this week, the way he put it, Nasrallah opened the Northern Front.
Israel didn’t start just randomly attacking into Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies in — its terrorist allies in Lebanon started attacking Israel. And tens of thousands of Israeli citizens had to leave their homes. That led to an exchange of fire, and then Lebanese citizens had to leave their homes. And we’ve been in that dynamic ever since.
So, that’s an important structural factor that I think, kind of, gets set aside in the commentary and the coverage of the current circumstance.
That being said, the United States’ position is we would like to see calm on the northern border and a durable solution that allows the people on both sides of that border to return to their homes. We are driving at that. Amos Hochstein was recently back in the region to work towards that. I’ve spoken with my Israeli counterparts just in the last couple of days to see how we find a way forward on that.
And so, while the risk of escalation is real, we actually believe there is also a distinct avenue to getting to a cessation of hostilities and a durable solution that makes people on both sides of the border feel secure, and we’re going to do everything that we can to bring that about.
Q And can I just (inaudible) — when you say the risk of escalation is real, are you saying the IDF flattening tower blocks in Beirut is not an escalation?
MR. SULLIVAN: I think the question he was asking — the heart of his question was: could we get into a wider war that we have been trying to avoid for the last 11 months. I think that’s what the question was.
Q Then I’ll ask the question.
MR. SULLIVAN: I was answering (inaudible).
Q I’ll ask the question then: Was the IDF strike an escalation, in your view?
MR. SULLIVAN: Look, when I talk about escalation, I mean where does this take us from the point of view of, “Are we going to end up in a wider war.” We’re not there yet. I hope we do not get there.
When you pose a question, “Was this strike escalation? Was that strike escalation?” the United States is not going to score-keep like that. There’s a number of different ways to look at this strike. The chief way I personally look at it goes back to the discussion we were having before, which is it was a strike against a senior terrorist who has both Israeli and American lives on his hands.
So we could pick any moment, any set of rockets launched by Hezbollah, any set of strikes by Israel, and say, “Is this an escalation? Is that an escalation?” and so forth. I think it’s not a particularly useful exercise. For us, the most useful exercise is to try to drive both parties to a place where we get an agreed and durable outcome that can end the cycle and keep us from ending up in the larger war that, as we were just talking about, we’ve worked so hard to (inaudible).
Q Is there any announcement that we should expect next week about Haiti? (Inaudible) report that says that even though we have now the Kenya team there and the security forces, 80 percent of Port-au-Prince is run by gangs. Things are not getting better for the people. Violence keep growing. And of course, we don’t have elections or plan of a government soon.
MR. SULLIVAN: Look, things are not where we would like them to be in Haiti, but I think it is not correct to say that things have not gotten better from a low point when flights were shut down, the port was shut down, it looked like the entire government was going to be run out of the country.
We have improved the situation from that low point, but the progress we have made has been slower and more uneven than we’d like it to be. Our goal is to continue to enhance the Multilateral Security Support Mission and ultimately work with the United Nations to make sure that it gets institutionalized.
But I don’t know that we have any particular announcements next week. Rather, our goal is to use the U.N. General Assembly to get more resources, more contributions, and a common vision around building step by step on what we’ve put in place so that we can improve the situation beyond where it is right now.
MODERATOR: We have time for about two more questions.
Q Just a follow-up. And how can that happen? I know Colombia wanted to help, but, like, it’s not an actual mission like (inaudible) it was the U.N. (inaudible) — is this a security group, and the U.S. is leading the efforts. So how the countries will get involved, and how can they operate? Like, Mexico cannot (inaudible) officers —
MR. SULLIVAN: Well, a number of countries have pledged contributions, including police units, former police units. And so, the first thing that can happen is we can turn those pledges into reality, and then we can work bilaterally with countries like Mexico and Colombia on their legal requirements to try to satisfy them so that they could, in fact, (inaudible).
Q To put a pin, though, you know, the discussion about China, you know, before, in the lead-up to this, administration officials at the podium were telegraphing that there could be talk about aggressive PRC military action on fair trade practices, tensions over the Taiwan Strait. You know, preview that there’s going to be discussion of North Korea. I know you said that the Quad is not about one country, but to China and to many people, it looks like it’s focusing on China. So I’m curious to what your response to me, to folks that say you’re trying to have it both ways on China.
MR. SULLIVAN: I guess what I would say, and I think I said this before, is the leaders are going to talk about all of the significant developments and dynamics in the Indo-Pacific. Everything you just mentioned fits into that category. So we don’t take issues off the table to discuss or speak about.
But my point is that the purpose of the Quad is not to come together around China or any other country. It’s to come together around how to construct a free and open Indo-Pacific. And actions and policies that disrupt or undermine that are certainly not just of interest, but are going to be a matter of discussion for Quad members.
But the way I square the circle is to say these issues are on the agenda because they relate to a free and open Indo-Pacific, but China is not the focus of the Quad, and the Quad is not about one country. It is about a larger vision that we’re (inaudible).
MODERATOR: All right, thanks, everyone.
9:26 A.M. EDT
US Senate News:
Source: The White House
8:50 A.M. EDT MR. SULLIVAN: Thank you, guys, for being here. Today, we have the fourth Quad Leaders Summit, fourth in-person Quad Leaders Summit, and the first time that President Biden has actually hosted leaders in his hometown and, literally, at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. You guys have heard the President say many times that all politics is personal, all diplomacy is personal. And developing personal relationships has been core to his approach to foreign policy as President. So, opening his home to the leaders of India, Japan, and Australia is a way of him showing, not just saying, that these leaders matter to him, that the Quad matters to him as a significant foreign policy priority. And institutionalizing and deepening and elevating the Quad has been one of the things that he’s going to be very proud of when he leaves office and passes the baton to the next President of the United States. When President Biden came in, within the early months, he held a Quad — a virtual summit, and it was the first time the leaders of the Quad had actually met in any format. And what the President wanted to do was not just have this be something where leaders convened occasionally, but actually a vehicle for driving deepening cooperation and integration across the region. And so, if you look at the last three and a half years, whether it’s on the response to COVID-19 or humanitarian response across the region, or issues like cyber and cyber capacity-building across the region, there’s a range of significant achievements the Quad has already had. And today, the Quad leaders will announce a number of further steps forward. There’ll be the announcement of the Quad Cancer Moonshot, which we’re very excited about, with all four countries coming to the table with resources and capacities to help drive towards the cures to deadly cancers. And there’ll be more to say on that later today. There’s the expansion of the Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative, which is a mouthful, but is really about integrating new technologies and new capabilities, not just for Quad members, but for countries in Southeast Asia and the rest of the region, for them to understand their maritime domains so they can better manage and regulate them and ensure their security and also ensure that they are delivering economic benefits to the people of the relevant countries. There will be — we’ll have an announcement of the expansion of the Quad fellows, which will now not just be fellows from the four countries, but fellows from Southeast Asia as well. We’ll announce the pre-positioning of relief supplies across the region and the ability for Quad countries to react more rapidly in the case of humanitarian crises and natural disasters. And the Quad will announce its first-ever coast guard mission together as well, which will show the joint capabilities of the four countries in terms of their ability — in terms of their coast guards. So, there’s a number of other things that you’ll see in the fact sheet as well, but this just shows the breadth and range of ways in which the Quad is becoming a feature of the architecture of the Indo-Pacific. And we hope and expect that that will deepen in the years ahead. And the reason I think we can have some confidence in that is there’s genuine bipartisan support for the Quad. It’s something that really transcends party lines. And, in fact, over the last 24 hours, we’ve had the announcement of a bipartisan, bicameral Quad Caucus, something I never quite thought I would see, but Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate actually standing up a caucus to support this, this platform, because of the importance that Congress places on it and what it can deliver. The last thing I would say is that when you look at the Quad and AUKUS and the Camp David trilateral and our engagement with the Pacific Islands in ASEAN, one thing that has been a hallmark of the President’s foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific has been to move from the traditional hub-and-spoke model, rooted largely in bilateral alliances and bilateral partnerships, to a latticework approach with multiple institutions, overlapping partnerships, different configurations that all add up to genuinely new architecture for the Indo-Pacific, and the Quad is a critical part of that. And I think it leaves the United States in a stronger position, with a more dense and capable and dynamic set of partnerships, and with relationships not just between us and our partners, but among our partners, that allow us to deliver greater results and achieve more stability and security and drive towards the ultimate objective, which is a free and open Indo-Pacific. So let me stop there, and happy to take your questions. Q Jake, just (inaudible), you didn’t mention China directly in the joint leaders’ statement. What sort of language should we expect directed at the PRC? MR. SULLIVAN: The Quad isn’t really about any other country. It’s not directed at another country. It’s directed at problem solving and standing up for a set of common principles and a common vision for the region. So, I don’t think you should expect to see a focus on any particular country, including the PRC, in the Quad leaders’ statement. That’s been the pattern since the beginning, because the nature and purpose of this institution is really about the kinds of things I just described. It’s about delivering vaccines, delivering cyber capacity, delivering coast guard capacity, delivering humanitarian assistance, delivering science and technology progress. So that’s what we’re going to continue to focus on, and that’s what you’ll see in the fact sheet — the joint leaders’ statement. Q But, Jake, as you add more security features to this partnership, you know, is there a risk, a possibility that China, which has already expressed concerns about encirclement related to the Quad, begins to have objections to this cooperation? MR. SULLIVAN: Look, I’ll let the PRC speak for itself, and obviously it does speak for itself about a number of different initiatives the United States has taken in the Indo-Pacific. We’re just going to prove year on year everything that I just said, which is really that the thrust and purpose of the institution writ large and the security features of it are about a positive agenda to enhance security, not just for Quad countries but for other regional partners. So, it’s hard for me to see how and why the PRC should object to the four countries, for example, doing a coast guard mission together, or doing cyber trainings for Southeast Asia together, or taking steps with respect to maritime domain awareness. These do not, to me, indicate any form of aggression or assertive behavior. They’re fundamentally constructive and positive, and that’s where we’re going to continue to position the Quad. Q Can you speak a little bit to the President’s meeting with Prime Minister Modi and what, if anything, he’ll say about what he wants to do vis-à-vis China and Russia (inaudible)? MR. SULLIVAN: I won’t go too deep into the details of what he will say on those issues, which are obviously sensitive and will obviously be critical priorities in the bilateral meeting. I will just say this: that the United States has been clear about our view that Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine flouted every norm and principle of international law, that countries like India should step up and support the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and that every country everywhere should refrain from supplying inputs to Russia’s war machine for it to be able to continue to prosecute this brutal war. So they will talk about that. The President will also hear from Prime Minister Modi about his trip to Ukraine, which was an important and indeed historic trip, and it will be the opportunity for the two of them to talk about their respective views of the way forward. And then, with respect to China, you kn
ow, they will talk about how they see China’s actions in the region, where China is headed. And that’s not just true in the security domain, but the economic and technology domain as well. And we’ll work to try to coordinate approaches to the extent that that makes sense for both countries. Q In the past month or so, there’s been a lot of (inaudible) China (inaudible). There’s been lots of (inaudible) still in the offing. Can you speak to, like, how the President himself is reviewing the culmination, I guess, of the administration’s China strategy leading up to this? And should we consider this Quad sort of part of that puzzle, (inaudible)? MR. SULLIVAN: I think you should consider this Quad and all of our other actions part of an effort to strengthen the capacity of the United States to defend our interests, support our allies and partners, advance problem solving on critical common challenges, and generally put ourself in a more robust, competitive position writ large. But I don’t think you should see it again as being directed at China. And I think this is American foreign policy, in a way at its historic best, which innovation partnerships designed to enhance stability, designed to deliver results, and connected to other partnerships that are going the same thing. And I think, kind of, over-cranking the emphasis on any one country is missing what I think the central thrust and purpose of these kinds of institutions, including the Quad, are all about. Q You mentioned at the top the personal nature of this visit. And the White House is using the terminology “personal meeting” rather than the usual “bilateral meeting.” Can you give us a sense of how these meetings are different, what we might expect? For example, Prime Minister Albanese yesterday, did he get a tour of the house? See the Corvette? Were there family members present? Can you can you give us a flavor of that? MR. SULLIVAN: He did get a bit of a tour of the house. I don’t think he saw the Corvette, though. I can’t confirm that for sure, because the two of them sort of went off by themselves for a bit, and I haven’t had a chance to speak to the President about what exactly the Prime Minister saw. There weren’t other family members there. It was really a sort of one-on-one opportunity for President Biden and the Prime Minister to sit and talk. And then, a few of us joined them, obviously, for part of the meeting when it turned to substance. It was just — honestly, the vibe of it was sort of two guys, one at the other guy’s home, talking in broad strokes about where they see the state of the world, about — you know, swapping some stories from their respective political careers, you know, talking about the history of the U.S.-Australia alliance. It just kind of had a feeling like if you had someone come over for a cup of coffee or a meal. You know, that kind of feeling was much more present than, like, a stiff bilateral. And the President told everybody, “Take off your jackets. Get comfortable,” which we all obliged. So, yeah, I’m very bad at answering questions like that, but that’s my best shot at it. Q Well, if I may, on Sudan, a United Nations panel of experts has accused the United Arab Emirates of supplying arms to the RSF in breach of the weapons embargo on Darfur. MBZ, I guess, is coming to the White House this week. Will the President raise those allegations directly with the leader of the United Arab Emirates? MR. SULLIVAN: I’ll let the President talk to Sheikh Mohamed privately about Sudan. I think it would be more effective to do that. What I will say is we are concerned about a number of countries and the steps they are taking to perpetuate rather than resolve the conflict. And I will also say that Sudan will certainly be on the agenda, and the President will be as direct and candid with Sheikh Mohamed as he is with every leader. And then, after the fact, we’ll share what we feel we can. And the reason why I’m not, sort of, laying it out all in public right now is: Our ultimate objective is to get the entire conflict in Sudan on a different track than the tragic and horrific track it is on right now. And I think that requires some intense but sensitive diplomatic conversations with a number of players. That’s what the President is intending to do writ large. And as I said, Sudan will certainly be part of the agenda with the UAE President on Monday. Q Jake, so (inaudible) President will Japan Prime Minister Kishida. Do you expect him to talk about that deal between U.S. Steel and Japan Nippon Steel? And does (inaudible) oppose that deal and try to stop it? MR. SULLIVAN: I cannot say yet whether that particular deal will come up in the conversation today. There are obviously huge priorities in terms of current events and geopolitical trends and economic and technology cooperation. So, I’m not sure that it will come up. And the President has spoken to this issue before, but the matter really is, at the moment, in a official process while the transaction is studied by the relevant authorities and the relevant agencies, the U.S. government. And so, you know, the President will obviously allow that process to run its course because that’s what’s required under the law. And then we will see what happens. Q Prime Minister Kishida will step down soon. You going to talk about his contribution, achievement, but what do you expect from the new Japanese prime minister? MR. SULLIVAN: One thing that I do expect, whoever the new Japanese prime minister is, is continued investment in and support for the U.S.-Japan alliance as the cornerstone peace of security in the Indo-Pacific. And I expect that because the overwhelming majority of the Japanese people support that and because this alliance is bigger than any one leader on either side, in Japan or the United States. So I have confidence that the strong bond and partnership between our two countries will continue no matter who takes the helm, although I will say Prime Minister Kishida should be saluted, and President Biden will salute him, as a very significant contributor to the high-water mark we’ve reached in the U.S.-Japan alliance at this point and in Japan’s global leadership role. So, it will obviously be different because Prime Minister Kishida is a unique individual, but one thing that we think will remain the same is the strong alliance between the United States and Japan. Q Just on the Nippon deal, very quickly: Some proponents of that deal are interpreting last week’s extension as a sign that the President is having second thoughts. What would you say to them? MR. SULLIVAN: I can’t speak to that because I think nobody should overread what happened last week as a substantive expression of views, rather as a matter of process to ensure that the transaction gets the full review that’s appropriate in a case like this, as I said, from the relevant authorities and agencies. And the President really does want to let that play out. Q You mentioned that it’s not about one country, but of course, China comes to mind over time. As just recently, they announced sanctions against American companies. They’re selling weapons to Taiwan. Taiwan is getting money from the United States to be able to defend themselves. And the incidents in the past few weeks in (inaudible) has been escalating, not only with Taiwan with China, but also Philippines. During this meeting, is that top of mind, or is this something that you want to address? Because, I mean, you mentioned the coast guard event shouldn’t be questioned by the Chinese; it’s just an event that they’re going to do as a group. But from their point of view, they’re talking about it and condemning these types of actions. Should we worry about China moving forward or being more aggressive as the world is focused on Lebanon, the Middle East, Ukraine? MR. SULLIVAN: Well, first of all, it’s true that the front pages of news
papers are filled with stories about the Middle East rather than the Indo-Pacific right now. But the United States of America is focused in both places. And there’s probably no better proof point than the fact that we’re sitting here right now, on a Quad Summit day, meeting with leaders of the Indo-Pacific, even as we continue to closely monitor events in the Middle East. So, if you look at the work that we have done over the last four years, the intense engagement with allies and partners, the work on — this latticework that I described, the efforts to strengthen our own industrial and innovation base, the measures we’ve taken to protect our sensitive technologies, we feel like we are in a very strong position to stand up for peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. And obviously, we are concerned about actions that China has taken, and we speak out about those actions quite directly and candidly. But we are also putting the United States and our allies and partners in a position to effectively defend our interests and to defend the rules of the road that have kept the peace in the Indo-Pacific for a long time. We’re going to continue to do that. The other thing I would say is that each of the four members of the Quad has their own approach to the PRC. There’s not going to be some “Quad approach” to the PRC. But of course, in the course of the conversation today, the four leaders will have the opportunity to talk about all of the developments in the Indo-Pacific, and obviously the PRC is part of that. So, it will be one of the issues or one of the topics that come up among many. Q If I may, on Venezuela — because Venezuela is close to China right now, and it’s one of the allies, but also Russia and Iran. So we know four Americans are detained in the past few days. The situation is getting just harder and harder to get to an agreement. We are expecting a meeting at the United Nations to talk about Venezuela, led by Uruguay and other countries. Do you see any possibility of moving forward in this subject? We understand the U.S. have supported the talks. Is it a possibility to go back to Qatar? Is Qatar in the table again? MR. SULLIVAN: We continue to talk to Qatar, who wants to play a constructive role in engaging the Maduro regime, the opposition, the United States, other players. At the moment, there’s not much traction on talks, and what we’re instead continuing to see are negative steps by the Maduro regime in the aftermath of an election where we have been very clear our judgment is that Edmundo Gonzalez received the most votes. So, we’ll continue to work, particularly with countries in the region, to try to develop a common approach forward to support democracy and a democratic transition in Venezuela. But I will say that at the moment there is not a substantial diplomatic opportunity to make progress, and we’re going tohave to keep looking for one. Q Jake, on the Middle East, the Lebanese are saying at least 31 were killed in that bombing of a building that apparently targeted at least one Hezbollah commander. Has the U.S. figured out who exactly was targeted and killed? MR. SULLIVAN: The Israelis have announced, and I believe Hezbollah itself has confirmed, some of the people who were killed in that strike. And I will let Israel and Hezbollah speak to it, because obviously we don’t have an independent capacity at this point to confirm. But I believe a fair amount of that is out in the public domain at this point. Q If at least one of those was one of those responsible for organizing the barracks bombing back in the ‘80s, how significant would that be that he’s now dead? MR. SULLIVAN: That individual has American blood on his hands and has a Rewards for Justice price on his head. And he is somebody who the United States promised long ago we would do everything we could to see brought to justice. And anytime a terrorist who has murdered Americans is brought to justice, we believe that that is a good outcome. But again, I’m not in a position this morning, until I have the opportunity to talk again to my Israeli counterparts today, to formally confirm anything; just to say, you know, 1983 seems like a long time ago, but for a lot of families, a lot of people, it was — they’re still living with it every day. Q One other. Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich have been in Washington in recent days, mostly to visit with lawmakers. Is there any plan for them to meet with the President? MR. SULLIVAN: I guess not. The President met with both of them, obviously, when they came back to the States. So there wasn’t — we didn’t have a plan for them to sit down this past week or this coming week in Washington. But, you know, I’m sure he would be happy to see them again at some point. Q There’s a report that I got (inaudible) disagree with about U.S. officials conceding that there won’t be a deal during the President’s term. What is your assessment of that? MR. SULLIVAN: I think that’s crazy. I mean — Q So, it was correct that you’d (inaudible). (Laughter.) (Inaudible) disagree with it, that yes — MR. SULLIVAN: This is not me sitting here saying, “Hey, there will be a deal.” One can’t know. And I’ve — you’ve heard me repeatedly use this George Mitchell line of “700 days of failure, one day of success.” But this is diplomacy. Every day, you get up and you try to drive towards a deal that brings about a ceasefire, the return of hostages, surge of humanitarian assistance, and ultimately the end of the war. We’re doing that today. We’re going to do that tomorrow. We’re going to do that every day. And I do still believe there is a path to get there. It has been a winding path, a frustrating path, but we are still on that path, and we hope to reach the destination. But we’re also mindful of the fact and very clear-eyed about the fact that there’s still obstacles in the way; we’re going to do our best to clear them. And I can’t make any predictions about what’s going to happen, but what I can certainly say is we are not conceding that, period. Q But we’ve been waiting a while in terms of a new bridging proposal. Is that right? So when is — when do you expect to put that on the table? MR. SULLIVAN: I can’t tell you that because we’re not at a point right now where I can — where we’re prepared to put something on the table. We’re continuing to work with Qatar and Egypt. They’re talking to Hamas. We’re talking to Israel. The Qataris and Egyptians are talking to Israel. And when we feel ready to take another step, we’ll take another step. Q What’s the holdup? MR. SULLIVAN: Well, at the moment, we don’t feel like we’re in a position, if we put something down today, to get both sides to say yes to it. Could that change over the course of the coming days? It could. You know — yeah, I’ll leave it at that for now. Q Jake, in terms of the events of last week in Lebanon, do you have any assessments what that has done to the operational capabilities of Hezbollah? And what is your current level of concern that what you’ve been trying to prevent the last, you know, 11-plus months could start off as (inaudible)? MR. SULLIVAN: It stands to reason that Lebanese Hezbollah’s capabilities have taken a hit. How significant a hit, how that translates to their ability to represent a threat to Israel, I think we still need some more assessment to reach more guidance on. The risk of escalation is real; it has been since October 7th. There are moments where it is more acute than others. I think we are in one of those moments where it is more acute. But I would take a step back and make an observation that I don’t think gets sufficient attention in the reporting on this dynamic, which is that Hezbollah started this whole thing. Hamas attacks on October 7th, this vicious massacre. And then, as Nasrallah just said in his speech this we
ek, the way he put it, Nasrallah opened the Northern Front. Israel didn’t start just randomly attacking into Lebanon. Hezbollah and its allies in — its terrorist allies in Lebanon started attacking Israel. And tens of thousands of Israeli citizens had to leave their homes. That led to an exchange of fire, and then Lebanese citizens had to leave their homes. And we’ve been in that dynamic ever since. So, that’s an important structural factor that I think, kind of, gets set aside in the commentary and the coverage of the current circumstance. That being said, the United States’ position is we would like to see calm on the northern border and a durable solution that allows the people on both sides of that border to return to their homes. We are driving at that. Amos Hochstein was recently back in the region to work towards that. I’ve spoken with my Israeli counterparts just in the last couple of days to see how we find a way forward on that. And so, while the risk of escalation is real, we actually believe there is also a distinct avenue to getting to a cessation of hostilities and a durable solution that makes people on both sides of the border feel secure, and we’re going to do everything that we can to bring that about. Q And can I just (inaudible) — when you say the risk of escalation is real, are you saying the IDF flattening tower blocks in Beirut is not an escalation? MR. SULLIVAN: I think the question he was asking — the heart of his question was: could we get into a wider war that we have been trying to avoid for the last 11 months. I think that’s what the question was. Q Then I’ll ask the question. MR. SULLIVAN: I was answering (inaudible). Q I’ll ask the question then: Was the IDF strike an escalation, in your view? MR. SULLIVAN: Look, when I talk about escalation, I mean where does this take us from the point of view of, “Are we going to end up in a wider war.” We’re not there yet. I hope we do not get there. When you pose a question, “Was this strike escalation? Was that strike escalation?” the United States is not going to score-keep like that. There’s a number of different ways to look at this strike. The chief way I personally look at it goes back to the discussion we were having before, which is it was a strike against a senior terrorist who has both Israeli and American lives on his hands. So we could pick any moment, any set of rockets launched by Hezbollah, any set of strikes by Israel, and say, “Is this an escalation? Is that an escalation?” and so forth. I think it’s not a particularly useful exercise. For us, the most useful exercise is to try to drive both parties to a place where we get an agreed and durable outcome that can end the cycle and keep us from ending up in the larger war that, as we were just talking about, we’ve worked so hard to (inaudible). Q Is there any announcement that we should expect next week about Haiti? (Inaudible) report that says that even though we have now the Kenya team there and the security forces, 80 percent of Port-au-Prince is run by gangs. Things are not getting better for the people. Violence keep growing. And of course, we don’t have elections or plan of a government soon. MR. SULLIVAN: Look, things are not where we would like them to be in Haiti, but I think it is not correct to say that things have not gotten better from a low point when flights were shut down, the port was shut down, it looked like the entire government was going to be run out of the country. We have improved the situation from that low point, but the progress we have made has been slower and more uneven than we’d like it to be. Our goal is to continue to enhance the Multilateral Security Support Mission and ultimately work with the United Nations to make sure that it gets institutionalized. But I don’t know that we have any particular announcements next week. Rather, our goal is to use the U.N. General Assembly to get more resources, more contributions, and a common vision around building step by step on what we’ve put in place so that we can improve the situation beyond where it is right now. MODERATOR: We have time for about two more questions. Q Just a follow-up. And how can that happen? I know Colombia wanted to help, but, like, it’s not an actual mission like (inaudible) it was the U.N. (inaudible) — is this a security group, and the U.S. is leading the efforts. So how the countries will get involved, and how can they operate? Like, Mexico cannot (inaudible) officers — MR. SULLIVAN: Well, a number of countries have pledged contributions, including police units, former police units. And so, the first thing that can happen is we can turn those pledges into reality, and then we can work bilaterally with countries like Mexico and Colombia on their legal requirements to try to satisfy them so that they could, in fact, (inaudible). Q To put a pin, though, you know, the discussion about China, you know, before, in the lead-up to this, administration officials at the podium were telegraphing that there could be talk about aggressive PRC military action on fair trade practices, tensions over the Taiwan Strait. You know, preview that there’s going to be discussion of North Korea. I know you said that the Quad is not about one country, but to China and to many people, it looks like it’s focusing on China. So I’m curious to what your response to me, to folks that say you’re trying to have it both ways on China. MR. SULLIVAN: I guess what I would say, and I think I said this before, is the leaders are going to talk about all of the significant developments and dynamics in the Indo-Pacific. Everything you just mentioned fits into that category. So we don’t take issues off the table to discuss or speak about. But my point is that the purpose of the Quad is not to come together around China or any other country. It’s to come together around how to construct a free and open Indo-Pacific. And actions and policies that disrupt or undermine that are certainly not just of interest, but are going to be a matter of discussion for Quad members. But the way I square the circle is to say these issues are on the agenda because they relate to a free and open Indo-Pacific, but China is not the focus of the Quad, and the Quad is not about one country. It is about a larger vision that we’re (inaudible). MODERATOR: All right, thanks, everyone. 9:26 A.M. EDT
Source: China State Council Information Office
Houthi followers take part in the parade to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the group’s seizure of the capital Sanaa at Al Sabeen Square in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]
Hundreds of followers of the Yemeni Houthi group took part in a parade on Saturday commemorating the tenth anniversary of the group’s seizure of the capital Sanaa.
The event, organized by the Houthis, comes as Yemen’s conflict enters its second decade since the Houthis stormed Sanaa on Sept. 21, 2014, forcing the internationally recognized government into exile.
Participants of the parade, wearing uniforms, carrying weapons and placards, and waving flags of Yemen and Palestine, gathered at Al Sabeen Square in central Sanaa.
The Houthis now control most of the northern areas, including Sanaa and the strategic Red Sea port of Hodeidah. The internationally recognized Yemeni government, led by the Presidential Leadership Council since April 2022, mainly controls the southern and eastern regions, with Aden serving as the temporary capital.
The decade-long civil war has taken a catastrophic toll on the Arab country. UN agencies estimate that by the end of 2021, the conflict had directly and indirectly caused 377,000 deaths. The UN has declared the Yemen situation “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”
Currently, about 21.6 million people — two-thirds of Yemen’s population — rely on humanitarian aid.
Over the past decade, multiple international efforts to promote peace in Yemen have yielded limited success. A notable ceasefire agreement in April 2022 lasted six months before expiring, though both sides have largely maintained a “de facto ceasefire” since then.
Source: China State Council Information Office
Rescuers work at the site of an Israeli attack in Beirut, Lebanon, on Sept. 21, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]
Israel launched a new wave of airstrikes in Lebanon on Saturday evening, targeting Hezbollah rocket launchers and other installations, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“Dozens of Israeli Air Force aircraft are currently striking terrorist targets and rocket launchers to remove the threat to Israeli civilians,” IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.
The strikes followed reports of Hezbollah’s preparations for significant rocket attacks on Israel, with Lebanese media releasing footage of large explosions.
Hagari announced new restrictions for civilians in northern Israel, extending from Haifa northward, as regional fighting intensifies. “We ask you to follow the Home Front Command guidelines,” Hagari stated. “It is possible that in the immediate time frame, rockets and other threats may be launched at Israel.”
The new guidelines, effective from 20:30 local time (1730 GMT), include limiting gatherings to 30 people outdoors and 300 indoors, permitting work only in protected spaces, and allowing educational activities to continue where safe spaces are available.
Northern Israeli cities near the Lebanese border such as Haifa, Akko, and Nahariya have reportedly closed the beaches.
These restrictions affect the Lower and Upper Galilee, Haifa Bay, Central Galilee, and parts of the Israeli-occupied southern Golan Heights.
Source: China State Council Information Office 3
Palestinians mourn for the victims after an Israeli airstrike on a school housing displaced people in the Zeitoun neighborhood in southern Gaza City, on Sept. 21, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]
At least 22 Palestinians were killed and 30 others wounded on Saturday in an Israeli airstrike on a school housing displaced people in southern Gaza City, Gaza-based health authorities said.
The school was in the Zeitoun neighborhood and most of the casualties were children and women, the health authorities said in a brief statement.
An Israeli warplane bombed the school with at least one missile, Palestinian security sources told Xinhua.
In a press statement, the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza accused the Israeli army of committing a “horrific massacre” by bombing a school housing thousands of displaced people south of Gaza City.
The statement held the Israeli army and the U.S. administration fully responsible for the continuation of the crime, and called on the international community to compel Israel to stop its crime.
A Palestinian girl sits outside a destroyed building after an Israeli airstrike on a school housing displaced people in the Zeitoun neighborhood in southern Gaza City, on Sept. 21, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]
Meanwhile, Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said in a press statement that Air Force warplanes, with intelligence guidance, struck Hamas militants operating in a command and control complex in a school in Gaza City.
The complex was used by Hamas militants to plan and carry out “terrorist” operations against Israel and its forces, according to Adraee.
Israel launched a large-scale offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip to retaliate against a Hamas rampage through the southern Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, during which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.
The Palestinian death toll from ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza has risen to 41,391, Gaza-based health authorities said in a statement Saturday.
Source: China State Council Information Office 3
Israel launched a series of airstrikes on towns and villages in southern and eastern Lebanon on Saturday afternoon, prompting Hezbollah’s retaliatory bombing at northern Israel, according to Lebanese military sources.
The sources, who spoke anonymously, told Xinhua that Israeli warplanes carried out about 50 airstrikes in less than half an hour, more intense than previous airstrikes, targeting “Hezbollah sites and the outskirts of dozens of towns and villages in southern and eastern Lebanon.”
Meanwhile, Hezbollah announced in separate statements that in response to the Israeli airstrikes, the group has attacked several bases and sites in northern Israel.
“The Islamic Resistance fighters targeted on Saturday the Northern Command’s air defense missile system at Berea Barracks with Katyusha rockets,” and “bombed the headquarters for reconnaissance force of Golani Brigade 631 at Ramot Naftali Barracks with a salvo of Katyusha rockets and attacked the Jal al-Alam Israeli site, located between the towns of Alma Al-Shaab and Naqoura, with artillery shells,” it said.
Tension along the Israel-Lebanon border has escalated sharply following communication device explosions across Lebanon earlier this week that killed 37 and injured 2,931, as well as an Israeli airstrike on Friday targeting a building in the Jamous area in the southern suburbs of Beirut that killed at least 31 and injured 66.
These developments marked the latest escalation of ongoing conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border that began on Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, prompting Israel’s retaliatory artillery fire and airstrikes into southeastern Lebanon. The conflict has already caused heavy casualties and displaced tens of thousands on both sides.
Source: China State Council Information Office
Israeli forces stormed the office of Al Jazeera in West Bank’s Ramallah, with a military order to close it for 45 days, the Qatari broadcaster reported on Sunday.
It said that heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers entered the building and handed the closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari.
“There is a court ruling for closing down Al Jazeera for 45 days,” a soldier told al-Omari. The exchange was broadcast live on Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera reported.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Jordanna Matlon, Associate Professor of Sociology, School of International Service, American University
Africa is the world’s largest market for Guinness beer (and Nigeria is second only to Britain for the most consumers in one country). The Irish brand’s success on the continent is regarded as a trailblazing business model. And that has a lot to do with their advertising campaigns over the years.
Award-winning sociologist Jordanna Matlon recently published a research paper that analyses three prominent Guinness Africa ad campaigns. She explores what market forces are behind them – and how they target male consumers and shape masculinity in a way that echoes colonial extraction. We asked her to explain.
We can think about Guinness in Africa in two phases. The first was less marketing savvy than old-fashioned imperial domination, in which territories under British dominion were captive markets for British imports. Despite its proud Irish origins, Guinness has had solid connections to the UK since the 1800s. Following British imperial shipping routes, the brewery began exporting to Africa in 1827. In 1959 Guinness established an import/export arrangement with Britain’s United Africa Company.
Read more: Coca-Cola in Africa: a long history full of unexpected twists and turns
By the era of African independence from the mid-1950s to the 1970s – the second phase – Guinness was already a well-known brand. Its advertising strategies found a ready African audience. Like colonialism generally, Guinness linked the consumption of foreign goods to the “civilising mission”. To be a civilised, modern man, the argument went, was to drink what the colonisers drank. But this was part of a larger work-consume nexus in which modern men were salaried men who could afford such trappings. Women, I should add, were always excluded: colonial ideals expressed clear gender divisions, with men in the public sphere and women at home, cooking for their (supposed) husbands and raising their (supposed) children.
Tailored to African consumers, mid-1900s Guinness ads featured sophisticated African men in suits and ties enjoying their beers – clearly after a long day at the office. But like so many foreign imports, part of the appeal involved adapting to local tastes. It played off ideas of African strength and especially virility as a masculinised strength.
This follows directly from my last point. Guinness became well known as a drink that made you strong. From the 1960s on, among its African consumers the brewery made “Guinness gives you power” its rallying cry. This morphed into the fictional character of Michael Power who, at the turn of the century, appeared in film shorts and a feature-length award-winning film, Critical Assignment – all part of Guinness’s advertising campaign.
Power, a globetrotting journalist, was handsome, fearless, impeccably dressed, and generically African. In Michael Power, Guinness was responding directly to the question of how Africa positions itself in a world still strongly shaped by colonial hierarchies. Here was a figure who had turned the page, embodying elegance, wit, cosmopolitanism – and, of course, power.
Despite Michael Power’s success in helping make Guinness Africa’s leading imported beer, the campaigns that followed pivoted sharply. Michael Power was a fictional character who reflected the aspirations more than the reality of most African men.
To come of age in Africa in the 2000s was to have grown up reeling from the effects of structural adjustment. Jobs that offered the best prospects for a middle-class life had overwhelmingly been in the public sector. The conditions attached to debt relief scaled these jobs back significantly. Now the informal economy was on the rise. To increase its target market, Guinness needed to speak to the experiences of real consumers: men who had long abandoned the prospect of a job that would have required a tie and a briefcase.
In the commercial I look at from the Greatness campaign, a football scout comes to Africa (it’s unclear where on the continent exactly) and discovers talent everywhere – even in his driver. Not coincidentally, this was aired around the time of the 2010 men’s football World Cup in South Africa when the dream of football stardom felt especially palpable.
In a Made of More commercial, an actual collective of Congolese dandies known as sapeurs return home from thankless day labour and transform into new men with their stylish – we might say ostentatious! – clothing. The narrator says, “In life, you cannot always choose what you do. But you can choose who you are.” Though not salarymen, they prove their worth.
These campaigns take a major turn from the colonial iteration of the ideal man. Rather, we find the improbable but spectacular success of the international athlete, or the shift away from work altogether and toward conspicuous consumption. Both reflect a new Africa – indeed, a new global order – that has abandoned salaried work for economies of entrepreneurs and consumers.
I borrow this idea of the “bottom billion” from the business world, where emerging markets are a final frontier for corporate profits. It is supposed to celebrate the wealth potential of the poorest people on Earth: as the argument goes, the minuscule “wealth” of a billion people is really a fortune.
Of course if we pick this apart just a bit it is clear that the wealth belongs not to the poor but to the corporations that sell them things. There is no real “Africa Rising” in this vision, no plan for enlarging an African middle class. Reflecting a longer colonial legacy, wealth here is something to be extracted.
Read more: The genius at Guinness and his statistical legacy
Bottom billion masculinity genders this dynamic. It asks us to think about how conspicuous consumption becomes a way for men to showcase their worth, a substitute for the provider role that is out of reach for so many men working precariously in Africa’s informal economies.
Guinness’s recent campaigns celebrate the African everyman, the men at the bottom billion. And in doing so, it sells them a beer. It is a powerful example of how men’s search for validation can actually enrich corporations.
– Africa is the world’s largest market for Guinness beer – how its ad campaigns exploit men
– https://theconversation.com/africa-is-the-worlds-largest-market-for-guinness-beer-how-its-ad-campaigns-exploit-men-239120
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)
Press Release
Nokia partners with Zain Iraq to boost network capacity with advanced microwave technology
22 September 2024
Baghdad, Iraq – Nokia today announced a strategic partnership with Zain Iraq to upgrade the telecom operator’s network in the south of Iraq. The three-year deal marks Nokia’s first entry into the microwave (MW) business with Zain Iraq, enhancing network capacity and modernizing the infrastructure to support future growth and increased traffic demand.
The deployment will begin immediately, with a focus on optimizing network performance and ensuring scalability to accommodate future growth. Nokia’s solutions will help Zain Iraq to expand the network capacity and enhance customer experience while paving the way for future innovations in the region. Zain Iraq has been experiencing increasing demand for its data services and the expansion is necessary to provide the best service to its customers. Nokia will implement its state-of-the-art microwave technology, including the latest E-band solutions, to upgrade Zain Iraq’s MW backbone. This upgrade will increase network capacity and prepare the network for the anticipated data surge driven by rising customer usage.
This deal involves swapping out competitor equipment and introducing Nokia’s high-capacity microwave solutions. Central to this deployment is the UBT-T XP version, which offers the highest transmit power in the market. This technology reduces antenna sizes and tower load, delivering significant capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) savings.
Mikko Lavanti, Senior Vice President of Mobile Networks at Nokia MEA, said: “This deal underscores our strong local capabilities and expertise. By deploying our advanced microwave solutions, Zain Iraq will benefit from an optimized network that is ready to handle the demands of the future, including meeting the needs of its growing customer base.”
Emre Gurkan, CEO of Zain Iraq, said: “Our partnership with Nokia enables us to overcome capacity limitations and modernize our network infrastructure. With Nokia’s advanced microwave technology and E-band solutions, we are not only resolving current challenges but also future-proofing our network for future growth.”
Resources and additional information
Webpage: Nokia Wavence portfolio
About Nokia
At Nokia, we create technology that helps the world act together.
As a B2B technology innovation leader, we are pioneering networks that sense, think and act by leveraging our work across mobile, fixed and cloud networks. In addition, we create value with intellectual property and long-term research, led by the award-winning Nokia Bell Labs.
With truly open architectures that seamlessly integrate into any ecosystem, our high-performance networks create new opportunities for monetization and scale. Service providers, enterprises and partners worldwide trust Nokia to deliver secure, reliable and sustainable networks today – and work with us to create the digital services and applications of the future.
Media inquiries
Nokia Press Office
Email: Press.Services@nokia.com
Follow us on social media
LinkedIn X Instagram Facebook YouTube
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Jordanna Matlon, Associate Professor of Sociology, School of International Service, American University
Africa is the world’s largest market for Guinness beer (and Nigeria is second only to Britain for the most consumers in one country). The Irish brand’s success on the continent is regarded as a trailblazing business model. And that has a lot to do with their advertising campaigns over the years.
Award-winning sociologist Jordanna Matlon recently published a research paper that analyses three prominent Guinness Africa ad campaigns. She explores what market forces are behind them – and how they target male consumers and shape masculinity in a way that echoes colonial extraction. We asked her to explain.
We can think about Guinness in Africa in two phases. The first was less marketing savvy than old-fashioned imperial domination, in which territories under British dominion were captive markets for British imports. Despite its proud Irish origins, Guinness has had solid connections to the UK since the 1800s. Following British imperial shipping routes, the brewery began exporting to Africa in 1827. In 1959 Guinness established an import/export arrangement with Britain’s United Africa Company.
Read more:
Coca-Cola in Africa: a long history full of unexpected twists and turns
By the era of African independence from the mid-1950s to the 1970s – the second phase – Guinness was already a well-known brand. Its advertising strategies found a ready African audience. Like colonialism generally, Guinness linked the consumption of foreign goods to the “civilising mission”. To be a civilised, modern man, the argument went, was to drink what the colonisers drank. But this was part of a larger work-consume nexus in which modern men were salaried men who could afford such trappings. Women, I should add, were always excluded: colonial ideals expressed clear gender divisions, with men in the public sphere and women at home, cooking for their (supposed) husbands and raising their (supposed) children.
Tailored to African consumers, mid-1900s Guinness ads featured sophisticated African men in suits and ties enjoying their beers – clearly after a long day at the office. But like so many foreign imports, part of the appeal involved adapting to local tastes. It played off ideas of African strength and especially virility as a masculinised strength.
This follows directly from my last point. Guinness became well known as a drink that made you strong. From the 1960s on, among its African consumers the brewery made “Guinness gives you power” its rallying cry. This morphed into the fictional character of Michael Power who, at the turn of the century, appeared in film shorts and a feature-length award-winning film, Critical Assignment – all part of Guinness’s advertising campaign.
Power, a globetrotting journalist, was handsome, fearless, impeccably dressed, and generically African. In Michael Power, Guinness was responding directly to the question of how Africa positions itself in a world still strongly shaped by colonial hierarchies. Here was a figure who had turned the page, embodying elegance, wit, cosmopolitanism – and, of course, power.
Despite Michael Power’s success in helping make Guinness Africa’s leading imported beer, the campaigns that followed pivoted sharply. Michael Power was a fictional character who reflected the aspirations more than the reality of most African men.
To come of age in Africa in the 2000s was to have grown up reeling from the effects of structural adjustment. Jobs that offered the best prospects for a middle-class life had overwhelmingly been in the public sector. The conditions attached to debt relief scaled these jobs back significantly. Now the informal economy was on the rise. To increase its target market, Guinness needed to speak to the experiences of real consumers: men who had long abandoned the prospect of a job that would have required a tie and a briefcase.
In the commercial I look at from the Greatness campaign, a football scout comes to Africa (it’s unclear where on the continent exactly) and discovers talent everywhere – even in his driver. Not coincidentally, this was aired around the time of the 2010 men’s football World Cup in South Africa when the dream of football stardom felt especially palpable.
In a Made of More commercial, an actual collective of Congolese dandies known as sapeurs return home from thankless day labour and transform into new men with their stylish – we might say ostentatious! – clothing. The narrator says, “In life, you cannot always choose what you do. But you can choose who you are.” Though not salarymen, they prove their worth.
These campaigns take a major turn from the colonial iteration of the ideal man. Rather, we find the improbable but spectacular success of the international athlete, or the shift away from work altogether and toward conspicuous consumption. Both reflect a new Africa – indeed, a new global order – that has abandoned salaried work for economies of entrepreneurs and consumers.
I borrow this idea of the “bottom billion” from the business world, where emerging markets are a final frontier for corporate profits. It is supposed to celebrate the wealth potential of the poorest people on Earth: as the argument goes, the minuscule “wealth” of a billion people is really a fortune.
Of course if we pick this apart just a bit it is clear that the wealth belongs not to the poor but to the corporations that sell them things. There is no real “Africa Rising” in this vision, no plan for enlarging an African middle class. Reflecting a longer colonial legacy, wealth here is something to be extracted.
Read more:
The genius at Guinness and his statistical legacy
Bottom billion masculinity genders this dynamic. It asks us to think about how conspicuous consumption becomes a way for men to showcase their worth, a substitute for the provider role that is out of reach for so many men working precariously in Africa’s informal economies.
Guinness’s recent campaigns celebrate the African everyman, the men at the bottom billion. And in doing so, it sells them a beer. It is a powerful example of how men’s search for validation can actually enrich corporations.
Jordanna Matlon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Africa is the world’s largest market for Guinness beer – how its ad campaigns exploit men – https://theconversation.com/africa-is-the-worlds-largest-market-for-guinness-beer-how-its-ad-campaigns-exploit-men-239120
Source: China State Council Information Office
At least 30 people have died and 17 others injured in an explosion at a coal mine in the eastern Iranian province of South Khorasan, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Sunday.
The blast occurred at the mine belonging to the Madanjoo Company in Tabas County at about 21:00 local time (1730 GMT) on Saturday due to a rise in the amount of methane gas in one of the tunnels, Fars quoted Mohammad-Ali Akhoundi, director general of the provincial crisis management headquarters, as saying in an address to reporters on Sunday morning.
He said that at the time of the explosion, 69 miners were working at the scene.
Earlier on Sunday, Akhoundi said 40 equipped teams were providing rescue services, putting the number of the rescuers at 100. Two ambulance buses and 13 ambulances were present.
Iranian Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni, in a phone call with South Khorasan’s Governor Javad Ghenaat, ordered him to mobilize all provincial facilities and resources to accelerate rescue and relief operations, the official news agency IRNA reported.
Elias Hazrati, head of the Iranian government’s Information Council, said President Masoud Pezeshkian has issued a special directive to handle the incident, ordering relevant ministers to take necessary measures.
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Sept. 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Crypto Content Creator Campus (CCCC), a groundbreaking initiative designed to empower and inspire the next generation of crypto influencers, is thrilled to announce its official launch in Dubai this fall. Taking place from November 8th to 10th, CCCC will serve as the premier annual gathering for the crypto community. It offers a unique platform for crypto content creators, influencers, and key opinion leaders (KOLs) to learn, network, and grow together, shaping the future of the industry.
As a team of industry experts and visionaries, CCCC is dedicated to fostering a thriving ecosystem for content creators within the Web3 and crypto space. Our mission is to provide an educational retreat that equips creators with the tools to drive crypto adoption and expand the crypto ecosystem.
CCCC: Learn x Mingle x Grow
CCCC will offer sponsors and participants an unparalleled opportunity to:
The team is proud to announce that CCCC has already received overwhelming support from the blockchain industry. Leading crypto exchanges have signed on as title sponsors, while key players from the Layer 2 and DeFi ecosystems have also shown their support by joining as sponsors with varying levels of participation.
“CCCC will provide a thought-provoking and transformative experience for crypto influencers,” said Phoebe Peng, spokesperson for CCCC. “We provide a supportive community and platform that empowers creators to not only expand the future of the crypto industry but to redefine what’s possible in the digital age.”
CCCC is now accepting sponsorship applications and ticket purchases. For more information or to register, users can visit https://www.cccc.buzz/
About Crypto Content Creator Campus (CCCC)
Crypto Content Creator Campus (CCCC) is led by a team of industry experts and visionaries dedicated to shaping the future of content creation within the Web3 and crypto sphere. Driven by a shared passion for creating a high-value community, CCCC curated a campus that promises an experience unlike any other.
For more details about CCCC, users can visit: https://www.cccc.buzz/
For inquiries, users can contact: hello@cccc.buzz
Contact
PR Rep
Tony Au
Crypto Content Creator Campus
tony.au@bybit.com
Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News
TIANJIN, Sept. 22 — Wearing an elegant white dress, Umuhoza, a Rwandan businesswoman, took a photo in front of a smart photo device, which soon generated a photo depicting her as a valiant and chivalrous female with traditional Chinese features.
“When people travel to China, they really want to take memories back home. The device can take a picture of you and then transform you into a Chinese kind of person. I really love it,” Umuhoza said.
Umuhoza runs a travel website. She helps tourists from Asian countries travel to African countries, including Rwanda, Egypt and Tanzania. At the same time, her website has a “China package,” catering to travelers from Africa who want to go to China.
At the 2024 China Culture & Tourism Industries Exposition held earlier this month in north China’s Tianjin Municipality, many foreign visitors were overwhelmed by the novel technologies adopted in China’s tourism sector.
“That’s amazing. I am very interested in autonomous driving cars and many smart tourism scenes. Perhaps new trade cooperation can be carried out in the future,” Umuhoza said.
TELLING PEOPLE MORE ABOUT CHINA
Putting on a virtual reality headset, Elena Jitari-Parry, a full-time travel blogger from Moldova, was instantly drawn to various places to experience the magnificent landscapes of China’s mountains and rivers.
“So beautiful. It felt so authentic here,” Jitari-Parry said.
She also quickly learned about securing travel tips for exploring Tianjin via an intelligent tourism companion system, which simply requires a person to ask questions at a booth provided by Midu, a company focusing on artificial intelligence and large language models.
“Traveling in China can be so easy for foreigners! The digitalization and intelligence services of Chinese tourist attractions have become a new trend, enabling foreigners like me to enjoy a more comfortable and convenient travel experience in China,” Jitari-Parry said.
With the desire to further explore China, Jitari-Parry chose to be a full-time travel blogger, documenting her travels and experiences in China. “Foreigners are very interested in China’s technological development. I always advise my audience to come to China and see something different.”
The deep integration of technology and the cultural tourism sector not only creates a variety of experiential consumption scenarios, but also meets people’s new needs for personalized travel, immersive experiences and creative consumption.
Data showed that by the end of 2023, the scale of China’s digital cultural tourism market had exceeded 1 trillion yuan (about 140 billion U.S. dollars), accounting for more than 30 percent of the entire cultural tourism industry.
EXPERIENCING SMART, CONVENIENT SERVICES
In the exhibition area of Meituan, one of China’s leading online services platforms, high-end technologies such as drones and autonomous delivery vehicles became the focus of foreign bloggers’ lenses.
Ruben Diaz Jr. from the United States was amazed by it. “Some of these things are brand new to me. Tourists can specify drones to deliver the items they need directly to the scenic areas, which is definitely more convenient.”
A staff member at the Meituan booth said that currently Meituan drones are operating on more than 30 routes in cities such as Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and have completed over 300,000 orders in total.
Thanks to the rapid development of smart tourism in China, tourists have become accustomed to using online payments, ticket purchases and guided tours during their travels.
Data from iResearch, an industry research and consulting institute, showed that in 2023, the total number of monthly uses and total usage time of online travel apps had grown by more than 30 percent year on year on average.
Some Chinese online travel service companies also use digital technologies to meet the growing travel needs of foreign visitors in China.
In May, Tongcheng Travel launched an international travel reservation platform named HopeGoo, which supports payments in 16 global currencies and via various operating languages.
Richard Santana, a product designer and blogger from the United States, said that with these online services, foreigners will be more willing to go to China, while their travels in China will also be more convenient.
Ma Yiliang, chief statistician of the China Tourism Academy, said that “digitalization plus cultural tourism” has become a development trend.
As “China Travel” has surged to be a hot global social media topic, demand for inbound tourism to China has increased significantly.
“With the smarter and more convenient experience in China, foreign tourists can find a more open, more confident and safer China during their travels,” said Ma.
Source: Government of India (2)
Posted On: 21 SEP 2024 4:09PM by PIB Delhi
The Indian Air Force (IAF) has successfully completed Exercise Eastern Bridge VII with the Royal Air Force of Oman (RAFO) at the RAFO airbase in Masirah. The IAF contingent has returned to India after participating in a comprehensive series of training missions, which featured the participation of MiG-29 and Jaguar aircraft from IAF, F-16 and Hawk from RAFO. This exercise significantly enhanced strategic relations with OMAN besides operational coordination and tactical skills between the two air forces.
Exercise Eastern Bridge VII was aimed to strengthen military cooperation and enhance the interoperability of both forces. The exercise included complex air operations, air-to-air combat drills, and mission scenarios designed to improve strategic and tactical capabilities. The IAF contingent gained valuable insights into RAFO tactics and operational philosophies, enriching combat strategies.
Beyond the tactical exercises, Eastern Bridge VII fostered camaraderie and mutual respect between the IAF and RAFO personnel. Joint briefings, debriefings, and cultural exchanges helped build professional bonds, enhancing mutual understanding and cooperation.
The successful completion of Exercise underscores the commitment of India and Oman towards maintaining regional peace and security. Both forces demonstrated their capability to operate jointly in diverse scenarios, enhancing their preparedness to face emerging security challenges.
The IAF and RAFO look forward to continuing this tradition of joint exercises, aiming for more advanced collaborations in the future.
***
VK/JS/SM
(Release ID: 2057325) Visitor Counter : 80
Source: Government of India
13 State Ministers & 4 Central Ministers graced event
Union Minister for Ministry of Food Processing Industries Shri Chirag Paswan participated in six G2G meetings
Event supported by 9 Ministries/Departments , 8 associated bodies and 26 states
CEO Roundtable & Global Food Regulators Summit 2024 held
4 day event comprised 40 sessions, featuring Thematic, State, Allied Ministries and Country & Organization sessions
Startup Grand Challenge & Chef Competition held ; Partnerships between NIFTEM- K with 11 companies, 3 Development partners and Associations & 4 Academic and Research organizations
Event marked achievement of 100 days action plan of Government
Posted On: 22 SEP 2024 2:34PM by PIB Delhi
‘World Food India 2024’, organized by the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, concluded today. The 3rd edition of this mega food event, held from 19thto 22ndSeptember 2024 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, was inaugurated jointly by Shri Pralhad Joshi, Union Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution and New & Renewable Energy, Shri Chirag Paswan, Minister of Food Processing Industries & Shri Ravneet Singh Bittu, Minister of State, Food Processing Industries & Railways.
Third edition of #WFI2024 began at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi with inauguration of more than 50 MOFPI-supported food processing units under the #PLISFPI, #PMKSY & disbursement of credit-linked subsidies to 25,000 #PMFME beneficiaries & sanction seed capital to 70,000 SHG members. pic.twitter.com/MS5BscuiKf
— FOOD PROCESSING MIN (@MOFPI_GOI) September 20, 2024
On this occasion, food processing units at 67 locations under PLISFPI and PMKSY schemes with total investments of Rs 5,135 crores were inaugurated, Credit linked support was provided to 25,000 beneficiaries for micro projects worth Rs 2,351 crores under PMFME scheme and Rs 245 crores seed capital sanctioned to 70,000 SHG members under PMFME scheme. Senior government dignitaries, global investors, global food regulators, and industry leaders from around the world participated in the event. The event marked the achievement of the 100 days action plan of the Government.
“In the modern era, through progressive agricultural practices, strong administrative frameworks, and cutting-edging technologies, our effort is to ensure that India sets global benchmarks for innovation, sustainability, and safety in the food sector : PM @narendramodi ji pic.twitter.com/iLJXtBAgSG
— युवा बिहारी चिराग पासवान (@iChiragPaswan) September 20, 2024
The Mega Food Event was supported by nine Ministries/Departments of the Government of India, 8 associated bodies, and 26 states. The event featured a remarkable turnout of 1557 exhibitors, 20 country pavilions, and notable participation from 809 buyers from 108 countries and 2390 foreign delegates. 13 State Ministers and 4 Central Ministers graced World Food India 2024.
Inauguration of more than 50 MOFPI-supported food processing units under the PLIS and PMKSY schemes of MoFPI, disbursement of credit-linked subsidies to 25,000 PMFME beneficiaries and sanction of seed capital to 70,000 SHG members at #WorldFoodIndia2024. pic.twitter.com/dNVTlVbw2r
— PIB_Food Processing Industries (@PIB_MoFPI) September 19, 2024
Spanning an expansive area of 70,000 square meters across nine exhibition halls, the event provided a comprehensive platform for showcasing the latest advancements in the food processing industry. The event exhibited over 100 One District One Product items. 16 international delegations, including six Ministerial delegations participated in the event. Japan participated as the Partner Country while Iran & Vietnam participated as the Focus Countries.
आज वर्ल्ड फूड इंडिया के #MoFPIPavilion का दौरा कर पवेलियन में लगी #FoodProcessing की नई मशीनों व उत्पादों से संबंधित चर्चा की और इनोवेटर्स व उद्यमियों के खाद्य प्रसंस्करण क्षेत्र के विकास में किए प्रयासों की सराहना की। pic.twitter.com/z6WivDFuW7
— युवा बिहारी चिराग पासवान (@iChiragPaswan) September 20, 2024
A CEO Roundtable was held on the inaugural day of World Food India 2024. It was co-chaired by Union Minister for Ministry of Commerce and Industry Shri Piyush Goyal and Union Minister for Ministry of Food Processing Industries Shri Chirag Paswan. The roundtable was also graced by the presence of Minister of State for Food Processing & Railways, Shri Ravneet Singh Bittu, Shri TG Bharath, Minister of Industries and Commerce, Andhra Pradesh and Shri Raghavji Patel, Minister of Agriculture, Gujarat and senior officials from various Ministries of Government of India and State Governments. This significant gathering brought together more than 100 CXOs representing the leading Indian and global companies in the food processing and allied sectors. Key deliberations during the Roundtable encompassed facilitation of ease of doing business, misleading advertisements, GST related issues, sourcing interests, and a comprehensive examination of the existing gaps within the value chain of the Indian Food Processing Sector.
During the event, Shri Chirag Paswan participated in six G2G meetings. The four-day event comprised 40 sessions, featuring Thematic, State, Allied Ministries, and Country & Organization sessions. Notably, 13 Thematic Sessions delved into crucial subjects such as zero waste, maximum value, sustainable packaging, irradiation, food safety etc in the food processing and allied sectors. Moreover, 8 State-focused panel discussions and 10 specialized sessions by Allied ministries, including DPIIT and APEDA, addressed pertinent industry challenges. The sessions were graced by Ministers from Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, amongst others.
To capitalize innovation, a Startup Grand Challenge was held to promote innovation in waste management, efficient water uses and novel food processing technologies. The winners of the challenge were awarded during the event. The Ministry will provide financial as well as incubation support through NIFTEM-Kundli to the winners.
A Global Food Regulators Summit 2024 by Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) was organized in conjunction with World Food India from 20th – 21st September 2024. It brought together delegates from over 70 countries, including Food safety regulators and those from Risk Assessment Authorities, Research Institutes and Universities who discussed and strategized on key regulatory issues.
“Honored to address the Valedictory Session of the 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗙𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, hosted by @FSSAI in collaboration with @WorldFoodIndia. It is our responsibility to ensure the highest standards of food quality and transparency for consumers.… pic.twitter.com/vI8IEqnDQZ
— युवा बिहारी चिराग पासवान (@iChiragPaswan) September 21, 2024
Among the event’s highlights was the Technology and Sustainability Pavilion, which spotlighted cutting-edge innovations in the food industry, signalling a shift toward more eco-friendly and resilient food production practices.
As part of #WorldFoodIndia2024, I had the opportunity to visit the international pavilions and interact with representatives from various countries showcasing their food products, technologies, and innovations. This event highlights the incredible potential for collaboration… pic.twitter.com/8bcLC7bkcq
— युवा बिहारी चिराग पासवान (@iChiragPaswan) September 21, 2024
Additionally, the Chef Competition at World Food India 2024 recognized chefs who blend tradition with innovation, showcasing global cuisine, presentation skills, and the use of technology in culinary techniques. The competition featured individual displays, live cooking, mixology, and a mystery basket challenge.
The event also featured partnerships between NIFTEM- K with 11 companies, 3 Development partners and Associations and 4 Academic and Research organizations. These MoUs focused on successful execution of collaborative research programmes, new product development, establishment of Centres of Excellence, placement of students as well as incubation activities. NIFTEM-K also transferred 5 technologies to food companies and start-ups besides launching a pesticide detection kit for tea leaves.
मेगा फूड इवेंट @worldfoodindia का उद्घाटन समारोह
📍भारत मंडपम , नई दिल्लीhttps://t.co/PBjxQp8v88
— युवा बिहारी चिराग पासवान (@iChiragPaswan) September 19, 2024
****
SS/MS
(Release ID: 2057536) Visitor Counter : 50
Source: Government of India (2)
Posted On: 22 SEP 2024 8:15AM by PIB Delhi
Today, we—Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio of Japan, and President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of the United States—met for the fourth in-person Quad Leaders Summit, hosted by President Biden in Wilmington, Delaware.
Four years since elevating the Quad to a leader-level format, the Quad is more strategically aligned than ever before and is a force for good that delivers real, positive, and enduring impact for the Indo-Pacific. We celebrate the fact that over just four years, Quad countries have built a vital and enduring regional grouping that will buttress the Indo-Pacific for decades to come.
Anchored by shared values, we seek to uphold the international order based on the rule of law. Together we represent nearly two billion people and over one-third of global gross domestic product. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient. Through our cooperation, the Quad is harnessing all of our collective strengths and resources, from governments to the private sector to people-to-people relationships, to support the region’s sustainable development, stability, and prosperity by delivering tangible benefits to the people of the Indo-Pacific.
As four leading maritime democracies in the Indo-Pacific, we unequivocally stand for the maintenance of peace and stability across this dynamic region, as an indispensable element of global security and prosperity. We strongly oppose any destabilizing or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion. We condemn recent illicit missile launches in the region that violate UN Security Council resolutions. We express serious concern over recent dangerous and aggressive actions in the maritime domain. We seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated—one where all countries are free from coercion, and can exercise their agency to determine their futures. We are united in our commitment to upholding a stable and open international system, with its strong support for human rights, the principle of freedom, rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and peaceful settlement of disputes and prohibition on the threat or use of force in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter.
Reflecting the Vision Statement issued by Leaders at the 2023 Quad Summit, we are and will continue to be transparent in what we do. Respect for the leadership of regional institutions, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), is and will remain at the center of the Quad’s efforts.
A Global Force for Good
Health Security
The COVID-19 pandemic reminded the world how important health security is to our societies, our economies, and the stability of our region. In 2021 and 2022, the Quad came together to deliver more than 400 million safe and effective COVID-19 doses to Indo-Pacific countries and almost 800 million vaccines globally, and provided $5.6 billion to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment for vaccine supply to low and middle-income countries. In 2023, we announced the Quad Health Security Partnership, through which the Quad continues to deliver for partners across the region, including through the delivery of pandemic preparedness training.
In response to the current clade I mpox outbreak, as well as the ongoing clade II mpox outbreak, we plan to coordinate our efforts to promote equitable access to safe, effective, quality-assured mpox vaccines, including where appropriate expanding vaccine manufacturing in low and middle-income countries.
Today we are proud to announce the Quad Cancer Moonshot, a groundbreaking partnership to save lives in the Indo-Pacific region. Building on the Quad’s successful partnership during the COVID-19 pandemic, our collective investments to address cancer in the region, our scientific and medical capabilities, and contributions from our private and non-profit sectors, we will collaborate with partner nations to reduce the burden of cancer in the region.
The Quad Cancer Moonshot will focus initially on combatting cervical cancer—a preventable cancer that continues to claim too many lives—in the Indo-Pacific region, while laying the groundwork to address other forms of cancer as well. The United States intends to support this initiative, including through U.S. Navy medical trainings and professional exchanges around cervical cancer prevention in the region starting in 2025, and through U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) openness to finance eligible private sector-driven projects to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer, including cervical cancer. Australia is announcing the expansion of the Elimination Partnership in the Indo-Pacific for Cervical Cancer Program (EPICC) with support of the Australian Government and the Minderoo Foundation to AUD 29.6 million, to cover up to eleven countries in the Indo-Pacific in helping advance the elimination of cervical cancer and support complementary initiatives focused on cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. India commits to providing HPV sampling kits, detection kits, and cervical cancer vaccines worth $7.5 million to the Indo-Pacific region. India, through its $10 million commitment to the WHO’s Global Initiative on Digital Health, will offer technical assistance to interested countries in the Indo-Pacific region for the adoption and deployment of its Digital Public Infrastructure that helps in cancer screening and care. Japan is providing medical equipment, including CT and MRI scanners, and other assistance worth approximately $27 million, including in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste, and is contributing to international organizations such as the Gavi Vaccine Alliance. Quad partners also intend to work, within respective national contexts, to collaborate in advancing research and development in the area of cancer and to increase private sector and non-governmental sector activities in support of reducing the burden of cervical cancer in the region. We welcome a number of new, ambitious commitments from non-governmental institutions, including the Serum Institute of India, in partnership with Gavi, which will support orders of up to 40 million HPV vaccine doses, subject to necessary approvals, for the Indo-Pacific region, and which may be increased consistent with demand. We also welcome a new $100 million commitment from Women’s Health and Empowerment Network to address cervical cancer in Southeast Asia.
Altogether, our scientific experts assess that the Quad Cancer Moonshot will save hundreds of thousands of lives over the coming decades.
Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR)
Twenty years since the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, when the Quad first came together to surge humanitarian assistance, we continue to respond to the vulnerabilities caused by natural disasters in the Indo-Pacific. In 2022, the Quad established the “Quad Partnership on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief in the Indo-Pacific” and signed Guidelines for the Quad Partnership on HADR in the Indo-Pacific, which enable Quad countries to rapidly coordinate in the face of natural disasters. We welcome Quad governments working to ensure readiness to rapidly respond, including through pre-positioning of essential relief supplies, in the event of a natural disaster; this effort extends from the Indian Ocean region, to Southeast Asia, to the Pacific.
In May 2024, following a tragic landslide in Papua New Guinea, Quad partners collectively contributed over $5 million in humanitarian assistance. Quad partners are working together to provide over $4 million in humanitarian assistance to support the people of Vietnam in light of the devastating consequences of Typhoon Yagi. The Quad continues to support partners in the region in their longer-term resiliency efforts.
Maritime Security
In 2022, we announced the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) to offer near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness information to partners in the region. Since then, in consultation with partners, we have successfully scaled the program across the Indo-Pacific region—through the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, with partners in Southeast Asia, to the Information Fusion Center—Indian Ocean Region, Gurugram. In doing so, the Quad has helped well over two dozen countries access dark vessel maritime domain awareness data, so they can better monitor the activities in their exclusive economic zones—including unlawful activity. Australia commits to boosting its cooperation with the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency to enhance regional maritime domain awareness in the Pacific through satellite data, training, and capacity building.
Today we are announcing a new regional Maritime Initiative for Training in the Indo-Pacific (MAITRI), to enable our partners in the region to maximize tools provided through IPMDA and other Quad partner initiatives, to monitor and secure their waters, enforce their laws, and deter unlawful behavior. We look forward to India hosting the inaugural MAITRI workshop in 2025. Furthermore, we welcome the launch of a Quad maritime legal dialogue to support efforts to uphold the rules-based maritime order in the Indo-Pacific. In addition, Quad partners intend to layer new technology and data into IPMDA over the coming year, to continue to deliver cutting edge capability and information to the region.
We are also announcing today that the U.S. Coast Guard, Japan Coast Guard, Australian Border Force, and Indian Coast Guard, plan to launch a first-ever Quad-at-Sea Ship Observer Mission in 2025, to improve interoperability and advance maritime safety, and continuing with further missions in future years across the Indo-Pacific.
We also announce today the launch of a Quad Indo-Pacific Logistics Network pilot project, to pursue shared airlift capacity among our nations and leverage our collective logistics strengths, in order to support civilian response to natural disasters more rapidly and efficiently across the Indo-Pacific region.
Quality Infrastructure
The Quad remains committed to improving the region’s connectivity through the development of quality, resilient infrastructure.
We are pleased to announce the Quad Ports of the Future Partnership, which will harness the Quad’s expertise to support sustainable and resilient port infrastructure development across the Indo-Pacific, in collaboration with regional partners. In 2025, we intend to hold a Quad Regional Ports and Transportation Conference, hosted by India in Mumbai. Through this new partnership, Quad partners intend to coordinate, exchange information, share best practices with partners in the region, and leverage resources to mobilize government and private sector investments in quality port infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific region.
We applaud the expansion of the Quad Infrastructure Fellowships to more than 2,200 experts, and note that Quad partners have already provided well over 1,300 fellowships since the initiative was announced at last year’s Summit. We also appreciate the workshop organized by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in India, working to empower partners across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen power sector resilience.
Through the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience, we continue to support and strengthen quality undersea cable networks in the Indo-Pacific, the capacity, durability, and reliability of which are inextricably linked to the security and prosperity of the region and the world. In support of these efforts, Australia launched the Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre in July, which is delivering workshops and policy and regulatory assistance in response to requests from across the region. Japan will extend technical cooperation to improve public ICT infrastructure management capacity for an undersea cable in Nauru and Kiribati. The United States has conducted over 1,300 capacity building trainings for telecommunication officials and executives from 25 countries in the Indo-Pacific; today the U.S. announces its intent, working with Congress, to invest an additional $3.4 million to extend and expand this training program.
Investments in cable projects by Quad partners will help support all Pacific island countries in achieving primary telecommunication cable connectivity by the end of 2025. Since the last Quad Leaders’ Summit, Quad partners have committed over $140 million to undersea cable builds in the Pacific, alongside contributions from other likeminded partners. Complementing these investments in new undersea cables, India has commissioned a feasibility study to examine expansion of undersea cable maintenance and repair capabilities in the Indo-Pacific.
We reaffirm our support for the Pacific Quality Infrastructure Principles, which are an expression of Pacific voices on infrastructure.
We underscore our commitment to an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe, reliable and secure digital future to advance our shared prosperity and sustainable development across the Indo-Pacific. In this context, we welcome the Quad Principles for Development and Deployment of Digital Public Infrastructure.
Critical and Emerging Technologies
Today, we are proud to announce an ambitious expansion of our partnership to deliver trusted technology solutions to the broader Indo-Pacific region.
Last year, Quad partners launched a landmark initiative to deploy the first Open Radio Access Network (RAN) in the Pacific, in Palau, to support a secure, resilient, and interconnected telecommunications ecosystem. Since then, the Quad has pledged approximately $20 million to this effort.
Quad partners also welcome the opportunity to explore additional Open RAN projects in Southeast Asia. We plan to expand support for ongoing Open RAN field trials and the Asia Open RAN Academy (AORA) in the Philippines, building on the initial $8 million in support that the United States and Japan pledged earlier this year. The United States also plans to invest over $7 million to support the global expansion of AORA, including through establishing a first-of-its-kind Open RAN workforce training initiative at scale in South Asia, in partnership with Indian institutions.
Quad partners will also explore collaborating with the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation to ensure the country’s readiness for nationwide 5G deployment.
We remain committed to advancing our cooperation on semiconductors through better leveraging of our complementary strengths to realize a diversified and competitive market and enhance resilience of Quad’s semiconductor supply chains. We welcome a Memorandum of Cooperation between Quad countries for the Semiconductor Supply Chains Contingency Network.
Through the Advancing Innovations for Empowering NextGen Agriculture (AI-ENGAGE) initiative announced at last year’s Summit, our governments are deepening leading-edge collaborative research to harness artificial intelligence, robotics, and sensing to transform agricultural approaches and empower farmers across the Indo-Pacific. We are pleased to announce an inaugural $7.5+ million in funding opportunities for joint research, and welcome the recent signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation between our science agencies to connect our research communities and advance shared research principles.
The United States, Australia, India, and Japan look forward to launching the Quad BioExplore Initiative—a funded mechanism that will support joint AI-driven exploration of diverse non-human biological data across all four countries.
This project will also be underpinned by the forthcoming Quad Principles for Research and Development Collaborations in Critical and Emerging Technologies.
Climate and Clean Energy
As we underscore the severe economic, social, and environmental consequences posed by the climate crisis, we continue to work together with Indo-Pacific partners, including through Quad Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Package (Q-CHAMP), to enhance climate and clean energy cooperation as well as promote adaptation and resilience. We emphasize the significant benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy for our people, our planet, and our shared prosperity. Our countries intend to strengthen our cooperation to align policies, incentives, standards, and investments around creating high-quality, diversified clean energy supply chains that will enhance our collective energy security, create new economic opportunities across the region, and benefit local workers and communities around the world, particularly across the Indo-Pacific.
We will work together, through policy and public finance, to operationalize our commitment to catalyzing complementary and high-standard private sector investment in allied and partner clean energy supply chains. To this end, Australia will open applications for the Quad Clean Energy Supply Chains Diversification Program in November, providing AUD 50 million to support projects that develop and diversify solar panel, hydrogen electrolyzer and battery supply chains in the Indo-Pacific. India commits to invest $2 million in new solar projects in Fiji, Comoros, Madagascar, and Seychelles. Japan has committed to $122 million grants and loans in renewable energy projects in Indo-Pacific countries. The United States, through DFC, will continue to seek opportunities to mobilize private capital to solar, as well as wind, cooling, batteries, and critical minerals to expand and diversify supply chains.
We are pleased to announce a focused Quad effort to boost energy efficiency, including the deployment and manufacturing of high-efficiency affordable, cooling systems to enable climate-vulnerable communities to adapt to rising temperatures while simultaneously reducing strain on the electricity grid.
We jointly affirm our commitment to addressing the challenges posed by climate change and ensure the resilience and sustainability of port infrastructure. Quad partners will leverage our learning and expertise to forge a path towards sustainable and resilient port infrastructure, including through the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).
Cyber
In the face of a deteriorating security environment in the cyber domain, Quad countries intend to enhance our cybersecurity partnership to address common threats posed by state-sponsored actors, cybercriminals, and other non-state malicious actors. Our countries commit to taking concrete steps to increase our collective network defense and advance technical capabilities through greater threat information sharing and capacity building. We plan to coordinate joint efforts to identify vulnerabilities, protect national security networks and critical infrastructure networks, and coordinate more closely including on policy responses to significant cybersecurity incidents affecting the Quad’s shared priorities.
Quad countries are also partnering with software manufacturers, industry trade groups, and research centers to expand our commitmentto pursuing secure software development standards and certification, as endorsed in the Quad’s 2023 Secure Software Joint Principles. We will work to harmonize these standards to not only ensure that the development, procurement, and end-use of software for government networks is more secure, but that the cyber resilience of our supply chains, digital economies, and societies are collectively improved. Throughout this fall, Quad countries each plan to host campaigns to mark the annual Quad Cyber Challenge promoting responsible cyber ecosystems, public resources, and cybersecurity awareness. We are constructively engaging on the Quad Action Plan to Protect Commercial Undersea Telecommunications Cables, developed by the Quad Senior Cyber Group, as a complementary effort to the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience. Our coordinated actions to protect global telecommunications infrastructure as guided by the Action Plan will advance our shared vision for future digital connectivity, global commerce, and prosperity.
Space
We recognize the essential contribution of space-related applications and technologies in the Indo-Pacific. Our four countries intend to continue delivering Earth Observation data and other space-related applications to assist nations across the Indo-Pacific to strengthen climate early warning systems and better manage the impacts of extreme weather events. In this context, we welcome India’s establishment of a space-based web portal for Mauritius, to support the concept of open science for space-based monitoring of extreme weather events and climate impact.
Quad Investors Network (QUIN)
We welcome private sector initiatives—including the Quad Investors Network (QUIN), which facilitates investments in strategic technologies, including clean energy, semiconductors, critical minerals, and quantum. The QUIN is mobilizing a number of investments to promote supply chain resilience, advance joint research and development, commercialize new technologies, and invest in our future workforce.
People-to-People Initiatives
The Quad is committed to strengthening the deep and enduring ties between our people, and among our partners. Through the Quad Fellowship, we are building a network of the next generation of science, technology, and policy leaders. Together with the Institute of International Education, which leads implementation of the Quad Fellowship, Quad governments welcome the second cohort of Quad Fellows and the expansion of the program to include students from ASEAN countries for the first time. The Government of Japan is supporting the program to enable Quad Fellows to study in Japan. The Quad welcomes the generous support of private sector partners for the next cohort of fellows, including Google, the Pratt Foundation, and Western Digital.
India is pleased to announce a new initiative to award fifty Quad scholarships, worth $500,000, to students from the Indo-Pacific to pursue a 4-year undergraduate engineering program at a Government of India-funded technical institution.
Working Together to Address Regional and Global Issues
Today we reaffirm our consistent and unwavering support for ASEAN centrality and unity. We continue to support implementation of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) and are committed to ensuring the Quad’s work is aligned with ASEAN’s principles and priorities.
We underscore ASEAN’s regional leadership role, including in the East Asia Summit, the region’s premier leader-led forum for strategic dialogue, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. As comprehensive strategic partners of ASEAN, our four countries intend to continue to strengthen our respective relationships with ASEAN and seek opportunities for greater Quad collaboration in support of the AOIP.
We recommit to working in partnership with Pacific island countries to achieve shared aspirations and address shared challenges. We reaffirm our support for Pacific regional institutions that have served the region well over many years, with the PIF as the region’s premier political and economic policy organization, and warmly welcome Tonga’s leadership as the current PIF Chair in 2024-2025. We continue to support the objectives of the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. We and our governments will continue to listen to and be guided at every step by Pacific priorities, including climate action, ocean health, resilient infrastructure, maritime security and financial integrity. In particular, we acknowledge climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and applaud Pacific island countries’ global leadership on climate action.
We remain committed to strengthening cooperation in the Indian Ocean region. We strongly support IORA as the Indian Ocean region’s premier forum for addressing the region’s challenges. We recognize India’s leadership in finalizing the IORA Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (IOIP) and express our support for its implementation. We thank Sri Lanka for its continued leadership as IORA Chair through this year and look forward to India’s assuming the IORA Chair in 2025.
As Leaders, we are steadfast in our conviction that international law, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the maintenance of peace, safety, security and stability in the maritime domain, underpin the sustainable development, and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific. We emphasize the importance of adherence to international law, particularly as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to address challenges to the global maritime rules-based order, including with respect to maritime claims. We are seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas. We continue to express our serious concern about the militarization of disputed features, and coercive and intimidating maneuvers in the South China Sea. We condemn the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels, including increasing use of dangerous maneuvers. We also oppose efforts to disrupt other countries’ offshore resource exploitation activities.We reaffirm that maritime disputes must be resolved peacefully and in accordance with international law, as reflected in UNCLOS. We re-emphasize the importance of maintaining and upholding freedom of navigation and overflight, other lawful uses of the sea, and unimpeded commerce consistent with international law. We re-emphasize the universal and unified character of UNCLOS and reaffirm that UNCLOS sets out the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and the seas must be carried out. We underscore that the 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea is a significant milestone and the basis for peacefully resolving disputes between the parties.
Together, with our global and regional partners, we continue to support international institutions and initiatives that underpin global peace, prosperity and sustainable development. We reiterate our unwavering support for the UN Charter and the three pillars of the UN system. In consultation with our partners, we will work collectively to address attempts to unilaterally undermine the integrity of the UN, its Charter, and its agencies. We will reform the UN Security Council, recognizing the urgent need to make it more representative, inclusive, transparent, efficient, effective, democratic and accountable through expansion in permanent and non-permanent categories of membership of the UN Security Council. This expansion of permanent seats should include representation for Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in a reformed Security Council.
We stand for adherence to international law and respect for principles of the UN Charter, including territorial integrity, sovereignty of all states, and peaceful resolution of disputes. We express our deepest concern over the war raging in Ukraine including the terrible and tragic humanitarian consequences. Each of us has visited Ukraine since the war began, and seen this first-hand; we reiterate the need for a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in line with international law, consistent with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. We also note the negative impacts of the war in Ukraine with regard to global food and energy security, especially for developing and least developed countries. In the context of this war, we share the view that the use, or threat of use, of nuclear weapons is unacceptable. We underscore the importance of upholding international law, and in line with the UN Charter, reiterate that all states must refrain from the threat of or use of force against the territorial integrity and sovereignty or political independence of any state.
We condemn North Korea’s destabilizing ballistic missile launches and its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons in violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions (UNSCRs). These launches pose a grave threat to international peace and stability. We urge North Korea to abide by all its obligations under the UNSCRs, refrain from further provocations and engage in substantive dialogue. We reaffirm our commitment to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula consistent with relevant UNSCRs and call on all countries to fully implement these UNSCRs. We stress the need to prevent any proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies related to North Korea in the region and beyond. We express our grave concern over North Korea’s use of proliferation networks, malicious cyber activity and workers abroad to fund its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. In that context, we urge all UN Member States to abide by the relevant UNSCRs including the prohibition on the transfer to North Korea or procurement from North Korea of all arms and related materiel. We express deep concern about countries that are deepening military cooperation with North Korea, which directly undermines the global nonproliferation regime. As the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts tasked with monitoring violations of North Korea-related UNSCR sanctions was not renewed, we reiterate our commitment to continued implementation of the relevant UNSCRs which remain in full force. We reconfirm the necessity of immediate resolution of the abductions issue.
We remain deeply concerned by the worsening political, security and humanitarian situation in Myanmar, including in Rakhine State, and again call for an immediate cessation of violence, the release of all those unjustly and arbitrarily detained, safe and unhindered humanitarian access, resolution of the crisis through constructive and inclusive dialogue among all stakeholders, and a return to the path of inclusive democracy. We reaffirm our strong support for ASEAN-led efforts, including the work of the ASEAN Chair and the Special Envoy of the ASEAN Chair on Myanmar. We call for full implementation of all commitments under the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus. The ongoing conflict and instability have serious implications for the region, including increases in transnational crime such as cybercrime, the illegal drug trade, and human trafficking. We restate our appeal to all States to prevent the flow of arms and dual-use material, including jet fuel. We remain resolute in our support for the people of Myanmar and commit to continuing to work with all stakeholders in a pragmatic and constructive way, to find a sustainable solution to the crisis in a process which is led by the people of Myanmar and returns Myanmar to the path of democracy.
We call upon all States to contribute to the safe, peaceful, responsible, and sustainable use of outer space. We remain committed to fostering international cooperation and transparency, as well as confidence-building measures with the goal of improving the security of outer space for all States. We reaffirm the importance of upholding the existing international legal framework for outer space activities, including the Outer Space Treaty, and the obligation of all States Parties to the Treaty not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The Quad reaffirms its commitment to fostering a resilient information environment including through its Countering Disinformation Working Group by supporting media freedom and addressing foreign information manipulation and interference, including disinformation, which undermines trust and sows discord in the international community. We recognize these tactics are intended to interfere with domestic and international interests, and we are committed, together with our regional partners, to leverage our collective expertise and capacity to respond. We reaffirm our commitment to respect international human rights law, strengthen civil society, support media freedom, address online harassment and abuse, including technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and counter unethical practices.
We unequivocally condemn terrorism and violent extremism in all its forms and manifestations, including cross-border terrorism. We are committed to international cooperation and will work with our regional partners in a comprehensive and sustained manner to strengthen their capability to prevent, detect and respond to threats posed by terrorism and violent extremism, including threats posed by the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes, consistent with international law. We are committed to working together to promote accountability for the perpetrators of such terrorist attacks. We reiterate our condemnation of terrorist attacks including the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and in Pathankot, and our commitment to pursuing designations, as appropriate, by the UN Security Council 1267 Sanctions Committee. We welcome the constructive discussions held at the first Quad Working Group on Counter-Terrorism and the fourth tabletop exercise in Honolulu last year, and look forward to Japan hosting the next meeting and tabletop exercise in November 2024.
We share great interest in achieving peace and stability in the Middle East. We unequivocally condemn the terror attacks on October 7, 2023. The large-scale loss of civilian lives and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unacceptable. We affirm the imperative of securing the release of all hostages held by Hamas, and emphasize that the deal to release hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza. We underscore the urgent need to significantly increase deliveries of life-saving humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza as well as the crucial need to prevent regional escalation. We urge all parties to comply with international law, including international humanitarian law, as applicable. We welcome UNSCR S/RES/2735 (2024), and strongly urge all parties concerned to work immediately and steadily toward the release of all hostages and an immediate ceasefire. We call on all parties to take every feasible step to protect the lives of civilians including aid workers, and facilitate the rapid, safe and unimpeded humanitarian relief to civilians. We also encourage other countries, including those in the Indo-Pacific, to increase their support in order to address the dire humanitarian need on the ground. We underscore that the future recovery and reconstruction of Gaza should be supported by the international community. We remain committed to a sovereign, viable and independent Palestinian state taking into account Israel’s legitimate security concerns as part of a two-state solution that enables both Israelis and Palestinians to live in a just, lasting, and secure peace. Any unilateral actions that undermine the prospect of a two-state solution, including Israeli expansion of settlements and violent extremism on all sides, must end. We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating and spilling over in the region.
We condemn the ongoing attacks perpetrated by the Houthis and their supporters against international and commercial vessels transiting through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, which are destabilizing the region and impeding navigational rights and freedoms and trade flows, and jeopardize the safety of vessels and people on board including sailors.
We reaffirm our commitment to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the achievement of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We underscore the importance of achieving the SDGs in a comprehensive manner without selectively prioritizing a narrow set of such goals, and reaffirm that the UN has a central role in supporting countries in their implementation. With six years left, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and accelerating progress toward all the SDGs in a comprehensive manner that is balanced across three dimensions – economic, social and environmental. From global health to sustainable development and climate change, the global community benefits when all stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute to addressing these challenges. We affirm our commitment to contributing to and implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda and to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. We underscore our commitment to strongly engaging constructively in the discussion on advancing sustainable development, including at the Summit of the Future. The Quad continues to realize a safe and secure world where human rights and human dignity are protected, based on the central premise of the SDGs: “Leave no one behind.”
We, the Quad Leaders, remain dedicated to working in partnership with Indo-Pacific countries in deciding our future and shaping the region we all want to live in.
Enduring Partners for the Indo-Pacific
Over the past four years, Quad Leaders have met together six times, including twice virtually, and Quad Foreign Ministers have met eight times in the last five years. Quad country representatives meet together on a regular basis, at all levels, including among ambassadors across the four countries’ extensive diplomatic networks, to consult one another, exchange ideas to advance shared priorities, and deliver benefits with and for partners across the Indo-Pacific region. We welcome our Commerce and Industry ministers preparing to meet for the first time in the coming months. We also welcome the leaders of our Development Finance Institutions and Agencies deciding to meet to explore future investments by the four countries in the Indo-Pacific. Altogether, our four countries are cooperating at an unprecedented pace and scale.
Each of our governments has committed to working through our respective budgetary processes to secure robust funding for Quad priorities in the Indo-Pacific region to ensure an enduring impact. We intend to work with our legislatures to deepen interparliamentary exchanges, and encourage other stakeholders to deepen engagement with Quad counterparts.
We look forward to the next Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting hosted by the United States in 2025, and the next Quad Leaders’ Summit hosted by India in 2025. The Quad is here to stay.
*********
MJPS/ST
(Release ID: 2057454) Visitor Counter : 48
Source: Government of India
Highlights the vital role of Tourism and Culture in Sustainable Socio-Economic Development
Shri Shekhawat Engages in Bilateral Talks to Enhance Global Tourism Collaboration
Posted On: 21 SEP 2024 8:22PM by PIB Delhi
Union Minister of Tourism and Culture, Shri Gajendra Singh Shekhawat delivered his country statement at the G-20 Ministerial Meeting held on September 21, 2024, in Belem, Brazil, highlighting the significance of tourism in driving economic development, fostering social inclusion and promoting environmental sustainability for the benefit of people, planet and prosperity. Successful deliberations were held during the Tourism Ministers Meeting on Green Tourism, support for data driven decision making, for strengthening the Dashboard developed during India’s G20 stewardship for aggregating best practices, importance of skilling of human capital for global service delivery, supporting MSMEs for generating local employment as well as for effective Destination Management.
In his statement, the Minister acknowledged the efforts of Brazil and all G20 member nations in advancing the tourism agenda set during India’s G20 Presidency. He reiterated the commitment of India in pushing the agenda for green tourism and embracing the collective power of collaboration and innovation to ensure that tourism continues to serve as driver of growth, employment and all over prosperity.
Shri Shekhawat emphasized the vital role of tourism and culture in sustainable socio-economic development and nature positive tourism. The G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration and the ‘Goa Roadmap for Tourism, which were the outcomes of the Tourism Track meetings during India`s Presidency are imperative for taking forward the agenda for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He stressed the need for tourism policies to focus on inclusion and resilience, in line with India’s theme: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam – “One Earth, One Family, One Future.”
India had outlined five key areas for sustainable tourism: Green Tourism, Digitalization, Skills Development, Tourism MSMEs and Destination Management, which have taken forward during the Brazil Presidency. These five priority areas received support and remain essential to address future challenges in tourism.
The Travel for LiFE program was introduced as a part of Mission LiFE, a global movement led by the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi. This initiative prioritizes Green Tourism to promote environmental sustainability through tourism.
India supported the UNWTO’s initiative for a Statistical Framework as a knowledge hub for aggregating global best practices and case studies and to measure tourism sustainability. The progress made under Brazil’s Presidency in this context was also duly acknowledged. The Minister expressed optimism that today’s discussions would help build empowered communities and improve quality of life, calling for continued collaboration and innovation to ensure tourism drives growth and contributes to sustainable development. He thanked Brazil for steering the G20 Ministerial deliberations in Belem and conveyed his best wishes to South Africa for their G20 Presidency and expressed a desire to synergise country and stakeholder efforts for better and more robust outcomes.
Shri Shekhawat also participated in the two ministerial dialogues of the UN Forum and WTTC.
Minister at the UN Tourism Forum Dialogue
On the sidelines of the G20 Tourism Ministers Meeting, Union Minister, Shri Gajendra Shekhawat held bilateral talks with his counterparts from Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, Singapore, Spain, Japan, Czech and pull aside with USA to discuss issues for facilitating tourist flows as well as other issues of significance to tourism sector. The Minister was accompanied by the Director General, Tourism, Ms Mugdha Sinha, DCM Brazil, Mr Pradhan, Sandeep Singh.
Bilateral Meeting with Brazilian Minister Mr Celso Sabino
Bilateral Meeting with Saudi Arabia
Bilateral Meeting with Singapore Minister of Trade and Industry
Bilateral Meeting with Minister Tourism Spain
****
BeenaYadav
(Release ID: 2057411) Visitor Counter : 58
Source: International Organization for Migration (IOM)
New York, 22 September – The COP29 Presidency and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) will co-host a High-Level Roundtable on Climate, Peace, and Human Mobility during the UN General Assembly week on September 22, 2024. With climate change being a major driver of displacement and migration, the event will underscore the urgent need for concrete policy recommendations and practical strategies to address the root causes of climate-induced displacement.
The roundtable will focus on the critical intersections of the climate and peace nexus with water scarcity, food insecurity, and land degradation. It aims to catalyze actionable solutions and inform COP29 discussions on key issues related to the climate and peace nexus.
“The convergence of climate change and conflict is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, with devastating consequences for some of the most vulnerable people on our planet,” said IOM Director General Amy Pope. “We need to act now to address the root causes of climate-induced displacement and build resilience in affected communities.”
The event will also empower a new Centre of Excellence envisaged in the Joint Communique of the COP29 Climate and Peace co-lead initiative to address the gaps in scaling up international cooperation and finance for the most vulnerable, and build synergies between the outcomes of the Summit of the Future and the Peace, Relief and Recovery Day at COP29.
“The forthcoming COP29 Peace Relief and Recovery Day in Baku is envisaged to deliver concrete outcomes to scale up support to the countries under multiple stress of climate extremes and conflicts.” said Ambassador Elshad Iskandarov, Senior Adviser to COP29 Presidency, highlighted the importance of international collaboration. “The high-level roundtable is an important milestone on the road to November to provide a crucial platform for governments, UN agencies, and other stakeholders to come together and develop concrete solutions to address the complex challenges represented by the intersection of climate, peace and human mobility. In the face of the climate driven challenges to human security we must work together to ensure a more sustainable, inclusive and peaceful future for all.”
The roundtable will feature high-level participants, including representatives from the COP29 Presidency, IOM, the governments of Italy and Egypt, the Green Climate Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank Group, and the UN Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.
The event is expected to produce concrete policy recommendations to inform COP29 discussions and support the launch of the Centre of Excellence on Climate Action for Peace.
The Centre will serve as a hub for knowledge exchange, collaboration, and innovation, focusing on solutions to climate-induced displacement and other human security challenges driven by climate extremes, including water scarcity, food insecurity, and land degradation
Note to Editor:
The High-Level Roundtable on Climate, Peace, and Human Mobility will take place on September 22, 2024, from 1:15 PM to 2:30 PM in Room 11 at the UN Headquarters in New York.
About COP29
The 29th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 11-22 November 2024. COP29 will focus on accelerating climate action and delivering on the commitments made under the Paris Agreement.
For more information, please contact :
COP29 Presidency:
gafgaz.adigozalov@cop29.az or visit www.COP29.az
IOM:
MIL OSI Translation. Region: Italy –
Source: The Holy See in Italian
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Vatican Media
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – “We, all of us, are alive because we have been welcomed”. Pope Francis returns to St. Peter’s Square for the traditional Sunday Angelus prayer and thus comments on today’s Gospel passage, in which Jesus announces his death and resurrection to his disciples. But “while Jesus confided to them the meaning of his life”, Francis points out, “they spoke of power. And so now shame closes their mouths, just as pride had previously closed their hearts”. Yet Christ, explains the Pontiff, “openly responds to the whispered words along the way: ‘If anyone wants to be first, let him be last’. Do you want to be great? Make yourself small, put yourself at the service of all”. “This makes you great”, adds the Bishop of Rome off the cuff, then pointing out the reason why the Master “calls a child, places him among the disciples and embraces him. The child has no power: he needs. When we take care of man, we recognize that man always needs life”. “We are all alive because we have been welcomed, but power makes us forget this truth. Then we become masters, not servants, and the first to suffer are precisely the last: the small, the weak, the poor”. “How many people – warns Francis – suffer and die because of power struggles! They are lives that the world rejects, as it rejected Jesus. When He was delivered into the hands of men, He did not find an embrace, but a cross. The Gospel remains, however, a living word full of hope: He who was rejected, is risen”. After the blessing, the Pope’s thoughts go to Honduras, where Juan Antonio López, delegate of the Word of God, coordinator of the social pastoral care of the Diocese of Trujillo and founding member of the pastoral care of integral ecology in Honduras, was killed: “I join in the mourning of that Church – the words of the Pontiff – and in the condemnation of every form of violence. I am close to those who see their basic rights trampled upon and to those who are committed to the common good in response to the cry of the poor and the earth”. Then, a new appeal for peace: “Let us continue to pray for peace. Unfortunately, tension is very high on the war fronts. Let us listen to the voice of the peoples, who ask for peace. Let us not forget the tormented Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Myanmar, many countries that are at war. Let us pray for peace”. Finally, the inevitable greeting: “I wish everyone a happy Sunday. And please do not forget to pray for me. Enjoy your lunch and goodbye!”. (FB) (Agenzia Fides 22/9/2024) Share:
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Apologies should the grammar and/or sentence structure not be perfect.
Source: United States INDO PACIFIC COMMAND
ASAN, Guam –
Members of the Government of Guam, the Rotary Club of Northern Guam, first responders, military leaders, and other distinguished guests gathered for a 9/11 remembrance ceremony at Two Lovers Point on Sept. 20.
The ceremony, initially scheduled for the 23rd anniversary of the tragedy, was postponed due to Tropical Storm Bebinca and instead took place a week later, coinciding with the day former President George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror.” Guests laid wreaths at the memorial in honor of the nearly 3,000 lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
Rotary Club President John Ilao welcomed those in attendance, highlighting the significance of the 9/11 monument the club founded and constructed in 2011. He emphasized that the monument is a testament to their motto, “Service Above Self,” and serves as a symbol for the people of Guam, reminding them that “service to others creates a better world.”
Distinguished guest speaker U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Brent DeVore, commander of Joint Region Marianas, then shared his personal experience from that day when he and his wife, Amy, were in the National Capital Region. DeVore was studying for a graduate assignment, and his wife was working as a nurse practitioner, pregnant with their first child. They were in their apartment, just a mile from the Pentagon, when they witnessed American Airlines Flight 77 crash at 9:37 a.m.
“We felt the concussion of the impact as it flexed the windows of our apartment,” DeVore said. “Moments later, you can imagine the number of sirens and the stream of emergency response vehicles flowing inward towards the city. Meanwhile, this dichotomy of an eerie silence overhead, as we were close to Reagan National Airport where all of that airspace had been closed, punctuated by immediate response fighter planes that started to circle overhead to secure the airways.”
DeVore and the world later learned that 184 lives were lost at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 77, in addition to the 40 people killed on United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, and the 2,753 victims in New York City, including those aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.
He also reflected on the honor of serving aboard the USS New York (LPD-21), an amphibious transport dock carrying 7.5 tons of steel from the World Trade Center in her bow, 15 years later. DeVore said one of the highlights of that tour for him was sailing into New York City Harbor, where first responders and the local community lined the pier. “[They saw the ship] as a visible reminder of the strength of their community,” he said.
U.S. Air Force Col. Brandon Shroyer, deputy commander of the 36th Wing, followed with special guest remarks, where he highlighted the actions of 1st Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney on that fateful day. Penney was assigned to the 121st Fighter Squadron of the District of Columbia Air National Guard along with her commanding officer, Lt. Col. Marc “Sass” Sasseville. They were ordered to intercept United Airlines Flight 93, which was believed to be headed toward Washington D.C. With little time to arm their F-16s, they realized that their plan was simple, Shroyer explained: “Ram the jet and sacrifice themselves for everyone else.” However, due to the bravery and sacrifice of the passengers and crew aboard Flight 93, they learned that the plane had already crashed in a field in Pennsylvania while circling the national capital.
“This was our generation’s wake-up call,” Shroyer said. “It mobilized our nation and it changed the course of our careers, our lives, and was the beginning of a long war that we continue to wage today.”
On that day 23 years ago, Shroyer was a cadet in the U.S. Air Force Academy and learned of the attacks while eating breakfast. Like thousands of other Americans who joined the military in the aftermath of 9/11, he chose to continue his training, knowing he would be leading an Air Force at war. Shroyer later flew C-17 and C-130J combat missions over Iraq and Afghanistan.
During his remarks, DeVore recognized firefighters, emergency medical technicians, flight attendants, pilots, service members, and transportation security officers in attendance.
“You embody the same courage and dedication that we witnessed on 9/11 in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania,” he said. “You remind us that even in the darkest of times, there is light, hope, and an unbreakable spirit that binds us together as Americans. Let us carry the memories of those we lost, not as a burden but as a beacon guiding us to live lives worthy of their sacrifice. Let their bravery inspire us to be better, to do more, and to never forget.”
US Senate News:
Source: United States Senator for Florida Marco Rubio
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Face the Nation to discuss foreign election interference, threats to President Donald Trump’s life, the impact of illegal mass migration on communities across America, and more. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble.
On foreign election interference:
“I think this is going to become a fact of life in the 21st century. It’s just very easy now for anyone to do it. You don’t have to be a big nation-state.
“They’re kind of all different. The Russians are looking at the preexisting fractures in our country, and then they try to sow division, getting us to fight with one another. That’s primarily what we’ve seen them focused on, sowing messages out there, including with inauthentic things that they create. You use AI, you make a fake video, you put it out there just to get Americans to fight against each other.
“In the case of Iran, it seems to be more specifically focused on Donald Trump. It’s now publicly documented that they’re trying to kill him. If Iran is trying to kill Donald Trump, they most certainly don’t want him to win the election. That’s what their efforts have been [focused on], including the attempted hack and leak operations.
“The Chinese are new to this business or growing into it. In past cases that we’ve seen publicly disclosed, [they have been] going after specific candidates that they view as being anti-China. I don’t think they want Donald Trump to win, but I do think you’ve seen them focus on things like congressional races in the past. I also think they’re laying the groundwork for more expansive operations in the future to influence American public opinion, on things like Taiwan and what’s happening in the South China Sea.
“There are multiple actors out there that are in this space now, and I think you’ll see more in the years to come, because you don’t need to build anything really expensive. You just need access to the World Wide Web. We’re an open country, an open society with open means of communication, and the best way to deal with all this is awareness. People need to understand that not everything you see on the internet is true.”
On the congressional testimony of Microsoft’s president:
“What he alluded to are some instances in the past where some fake audio or fake video generated using AI is put out there, and it influences the election in 48 hours. I think we’re a little bit insulated from that. Not that we should let our guard down, but a lot of the votes are already in by the time 48 hours comes around. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. In very close races, it could tip the scales.
“Here’s the bottom line. If you see something out there, a video that just seems way too scandalous, I would pause for a second and make sure that it can be verified. That’s my advice to everybody. Don’t just believe something you see for the first time. It may have been something that happened five years ago, and they’re making it look like it happened yesterday. It may be something that has been made up using an AI mechanism to do so.
“Again, I’m not saying 48 hours before the election is irrelevant in America. I am saying it’s probably less impactful than it is in some of these other countries who don’t have mail voting, early voting, where so many of the votes are already in by then.”
On the hack and leak operation that targeted the Trump campaign:
“I think you’re going to see more of that in the years to come. I remind everybody that back in 2016, when this first happened, I said, ‘That’s a foreign operation that was used to target the Clinton campaign.’ So, [organized operations] are going to become [more regular]. I’m not saying we should be happy about it or accepting of it, but we need to understand that this is going to become a regular feature.
“[It won’t just be a feature] of presidential races. Presidential races get so much attention that I think you can wade through some of that. I think some of these lower ballot races are the ones that are more susceptible, because if you’re running for Congress or Senate somewhere, and someone dumped something like this on you, it’s much harder to get the truth out there in time for it to be cleared up. There just isn’t going to be as much interest [in the story], and there aren’t going to be as many people covering it.
“I don’t know anything more than what’s been publicly reported when it comes to that hack and leak operation. Perhaps we’ll know more this week. It doesn’t surprise me that someone clicked on something [that allowed hackers in]. [The hackers] got into the system, they stole documents, and then they tried to give it to the media.
“Here’s what we’re going to see. One day, they’re not going to take it and give it to a campaign or the media; they’re going to give it to some online journalist, somebody who will run with this stuff, begin to report on it, or maybe even alter it. For example, [they will] make up a fake email where it looks like a real email. Maybe it is a real email, but they altered a few words in it and put it out there. By the time you put out that fire, you know it’s done damage.
“In a presidential race, everybody will cover that. I think you can get to the truth a lot faster in a down ballot race. It’s going to be a lot harder for some candidates to prove that that email is fake. By the time they do, the election may be over.”
On Americans’ lack of trust in federal law enforcement:
“What information is made available to the American public, which deserves to know, on what is behind not just one, but two assassination attempts on Donald Trump? I think that’s where this lack of trust in institutions [comes from]. Multiple people in the Federal Bureau of Investigation face charges or were fired for misconduct in the way they handled issues about Donald Trump just eight years ago. I think people are right to be suspicious and distrustful.
“That’s why it’s so damaging, for example, when 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter saying that a laptop of Hunter Biden is Russian disinformation, then it turns out not to be true. People logically conclude that this is an example of how these agencies and our institutions work against candidates they don’t like. It undermines people’s trust in our institutions. That lack of trust is eroded in government, in the media, in our agencies, and within the government.
“That’s why disclosure and openness with regard to these investigations is so critical. It’s not just because we want to know. It’s because it’s important to preserve trust in our institutions.”
On the FBI’s duty to be transparent about foreign influence in the 2024 elections:
“I trust rank and file, in the field FBI agents to do their job. I don’t know what their leadership in some of these agencies or the mid-level [management] will do with it, because you’ve seen a history in the past of there being bias. I hope that’s not true.
“I’m not saying I know this to be true or even that I think it is true, but let’s say there is a foreign nexus to one of these two attempts [on Donald Trump’s life]. Would they allow that information to be put out there to the American public before the election in November?”
On the bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, being called in by individuals overseas:
“A lot of these calls where they call and tell the SWAT team to go to someone’s house because there’s a murder occurring, a lot of these come from overseas. That doesn’t mean it’s being directed by a government overseas. It could be. I haven’t heard that. But just because they’re coming from overseas doesn’t mean the government is behind it. But we have these kinds of individuals all over the world that like to do these kinds of things.”
On the strain of illegal mass migration on communities across America:
“At a minimum, it shouldn’t keep us from saying, ‘Maybe I don’t believe the dogs and the cats thing, but there are literally people moving in by the thousands.’ They come to Charleroi, Pennsylvania. That’s a 4,000-person city that has 2,500 migrants.
“Americans who are not intolerant, they’re not bigots, are troubled by the fact that their city is being flooded. In Springfield, you see legitimate reports of huge increases in traffic accidents, leading to slower police response times, and overcrowded schools. This puts a strain on a community, and if you complain about it somehow, you’re a bigot, you’re a racist, you’re a hater. Everyday Americans are being made to feel like they’re haters because they’re complaining about something that all and any of us would complain about.
“If any of us, I don’t care who we are, lived in a city of 4,000 people, and you brought in 2,500 migrants overnight into one place, there would be problems there. It doesn’t make you a bigot. That’s the problem we should be focusing on.”
On media coverage of illegal mass migration:
“What should matter the most is there is a real migratory crisis…. There are real impacts happening in our country with this movement of mass migration, and that has not gotten the coverage that it deserves. You say you’ve covered it, but it hasn’t gotten the coverage. The cats and dogs thing has gotten way more coverage than the real world impacts that this is having, and I think that’s what needs to change in the way this issue is covered.”
Source: Peace Action Wellington
On Monday 23 September at 1pm, Peace Action Wellington will protest against the Aerospace Summit. The Wellington protest will be outside the Ministry of Business at 15 Stout Street.
“The Aerospace Conference raises serious concerns because of its ties to the US weapons industry and US military. The aggressive steps taken by the NZ government to join the US in the weaponisation of space, contrary to the Outer Space Treaty, is a deeply alarming agenda,” said Valerie Morse, spokesperson for Peace Action Wellington.
The Aerospace Summit is an annual event sponsored by Rocket Lab and supported by the US government. Rocket Lab is partly owned by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms dealer. Summit speakers include a representative from Boeing Aerospace, the second largest arms dealer. The Summit is held in Ōtautahi/Christchurch.
Rocket Lab has been launching US military satellites providing actionable information for the genocide in Gaza.
“Despite weekly outpouring across Aotearoa of calls for peace, the New Zealand Government seems determined to follow the US into their wars more than ever,” said Valerie Morse, spokesperson for Peace Action Wellington. “New Zealand has taken three steps to join the US Space Race in just the past few months.” (1)
“New Zealand is now one of the top ‘spots’ for space launches – why? Because NZ has become a US military spaceport,” said Morse. “All other major space programmes – US, India, China, Russia – are directly linked to their militaries. Ours is linked, too, but not to the NZ military, but rather to the US military. That gives the US huge sway in the things that are launched from Aotearoa, including things that are contrary to the interests of ordinary people here like surveillance and private spying satellites”
This is the third Aerospace Conference hosted in Ōtautahi, and the third year of peace organising to oppose it. The Wellington action is supported by the Stop AUKUS Coalition, Victoria University Socialists, Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, climate and peace activists, and local solidarity band the Brass Razoo.
“We invite members of the public in Wellington to join us in opposing the militarisation of space. We stand in solidarity with Stop the Space Waste in Ōtautahi who are mobilising against the Aerospace Conference and have a nationwide petition (2). We stand in solidarity with: RocketLab Monitor in Māhia who have long exposed the military aims of RocketLab, with Kanaky, against French militarisation. Rocket Lab is launching technology for Kineis, a company based in France that builds French military satellites; with Palestine and with the Anti-Bases Campaign who have long opposed military bases,” said Ms Morse.
Notes:
About Peace Action Wellington: For the past quarter-century, Peace Action Wellington has worked for peace and justice throughout the world, with a special focus on the New Zealand government’s involvement in international affairs. PAW stands for peace with justice and self-determination.
Source: EveningReport.nz (Video Podcasts)
The LIVE Recording of A View from Afar podcast will begin today at 12:45pm September 23, 2024 (NZST) which is Sunday evening, 8:45pm (USEDT).
In this episode of A View from Afar political scientist and former Pentagon Analyst, Paul G. Buchanan and journalist Selwyn Manning will discuss: The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies.
Today, Paul and Selwyn will reveal Israel’s long-form planning that led to it sabotaging hand-held communication devices that Hezbollah used to communicate with.
This episode’s questions will include:
Who was behind the manufacturing of the booby-trapped devices?
How long has Israel been planning last week’s attack – an attack that saw thousands injured and many killed in Lebanon after Israel remotely pulled the virtual-pin and exploded the devices indiscriminantly?
And why now? Presumably the devices were also programmed to be tracked. So why did Israel decide to abandon tracking Hezbollah and to attack?
Was it to cause chaos among its enemies in a preemptive move immediately prior to its widespread bombing and targeting of communities in Lebanon?
And what of international law? Has Israel gone so far beyond the Rubicon with Gaza that it senses international law no longer applies to Israel?
And, finally, has the United Nations abandoned its right to protect principles, its peacemaking and peacekeeping responsibilities in favour of aid, development and an overly bureaucratic institution?
Live Audience: Remember, if you are joining us live via the social media platforms, feel free to comment as we can include your comments and questions in this programme.
INTERACTION WHILE LIVE:
Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments.
To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
Remember to subscribe to the channel.
For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below:
Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/
Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning
RECOGNITION: The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category.
You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.