🌍 Russia and Japan trade barbs over disputed islands

Hi there Intriguer. Yuuuge week of geopolitics ahead: Indonesia hosts Southeast Asian leaders tomorrow (Tuesday) plus a broader East Asia Summit on Thursday, before India kicks off the weekend’s G20 summit. But fear not, dear Intriguer: we’ll sift through the acronyms and photo ops to keep you firmly in the loop.

Today’s briefing is a 5 min read:

• 🇯🇵 Japan wants its islands back.

• 🇹🇭 Thailand’s former leader gets a royal pardon.

• ➕ Plus: Making money off AI, how the papers are covering the FBI’s global cybercrime bust, and why monkey images are springing up around New Delhi.

1.  🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan: Authorities moved to ban TikTok last week over youth mental health concerns. More than a dozen countries have now imposed restrictions on the Chinese short-video app.

2. 🇸🇪 Sweden: The Nobel Foundation has withdrawn invitations for the ambassadors of Russia, Belarus, and Iran to attend this year’s prize ceremony in December. The Foundation’s initial decision to extend the invites had triggered calls for a boycott.

3. 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea (PNG): Prime Minister James Marape will open PNG’s new embassy in Jerusalem this week. PNG is the fifth country to base its embassy in Jerusalem (rather than Tel Aviv), following the US, Guatemala, Honduras, and Kosovo.

4. 🇲🇽 Mexico: Senator Xóchitl Gálvez has been selected to represent a trio of opposition parties in next year’s presidential elections. She’ll likely face the incumbent Morena Party’s Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor who’s currently leading in the polls.

5. 🇸🇾 Syria: Rare anti-government protests have spread across Syria, calling for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. Protestors were initially responding to a government decision to cut a popular fuel subsidy, but have broadened their demands in recent days.

🇯🇵 Japan-Russia | Geopolitics

Russia and Japan trade barbs over islands

Russia-Japan tensions flared up yesterday (Sunday) as ex-Russian president Medvedev said Japan's "militarisation" was complicating the region.

He was referring in part to Russia's long-running territorial dispute with Japan over a string of islands across the mouth of the Sea of Okhotsk.

Why do we care? It’s one of those historical disputes still shaping the world:

• 🤝 Japan and Russia set an initial border through the islands in 1855

• 💣 But they fought a 1904-05 war, and the Soviets then seized more islands in the days after Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, so

• 🕊️ The two haven’t been able to sign a post-WWII peace treaty

Why do Japan and Russia care so much about these islands?

• 🏝️ One of the Russian-held islands is just 3.5km off Japan’s northeast, complicating Tokyo’s efforts to concentrate its forces elsewhere to balance China and North Korea

• 🚢 The islands give Russia a chokehold over the Sea of Okhotsk, which Moscow uses as a staging base for its Pacific fleet, and

• 🛢️ The area also holds fish, oil, gas and rhenium (used in aerospace)

Plus, this dispute goes beyond Russia and Japan:

• 🇨🇳 China sided with Japan in the 1960s as China-Russia ties frayed, but it’s now quietly withdrawing that position in a nod to Moscow

• 🇺🇦 Ukraine is repaying Japan by backing Tokyo’s island claims, and

• 🇮🇷 Even Iran just weighed in for Japan, in a separate jab at Moscow

To cap it all off, reports just emerged that Russia has had to redeploy air defences from the disputed islands back towards Ukraine.

Intrigue's take: There’s centuries of conflict shoe-horned into nine bullet points above, but the big picture we’re trying to paint here is that:

• The more Russia pours into its invasion of Ukraine, the less it can back its interests elsewhere around the world, and

• World peace is a delicate patchwork, with Putin's invasion of Ukraine tugging at some of that patchwork’s many trans-continental threads.

Also worth noting:

• Russia’s withdrawal of air defence from the disputed islands comes after Ukraine reportedly destroyed Russian air defences in Crimea last week.

• Japan’s defence ministry just sought a record $53B as the country aims to double defence spending to 2% of GDP by 2027, citing China and North Korea as its main concerns.

📰 How newspapers covered…

The FBI’s work against a global malware network

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🇹🇭 Thailand | Politics

Thailand’s former leader gets a partial pardon

Thailand’s King commuted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s prison sentence from eight years to one year on Friday (1 September).

Thaksin has had a wild ride through Thai politics. He was:

• 🗳️ Elected in 2001 and re-elected by a landslide in 2005, making him the first Thai prime minister to complete a full term in office

• 👩‍⚖️ But the billionaire was ousted in a 2006 coup while in New York, and

• 🏝️ He went into self-imposed exile in the UAE after being convicted of corruption in 2008.

But on 22 August, just as parliament was selecting a member of his own party as Thailand’s next prime minister, Thaksin finally returned to the country and was quickly detained, then sentenced to eight years in prison.

Intrigue’s take: Thaksin’s populist style made him enormously popular with rural and working-class voters. And this made him a threat to Thailand’s military and aristocratic elite.

But after a stellar performance from another (stridently reformist) party in May’s elections, Thaksin (74) and his party suddenly seemed more palatable. What’s that saying about the devil you know?

Also worth noting:

• Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, served as prime minister from 2011 to 2014 before the military removed her. His daughter was a candidate for prime minister in this year’s elections.

• Thaksin was once briefly the majority owner of Manchester City Football Club in the UK.

➕ Extra Intrigue

Your weekly roundup of the world’s more outrageous news:

• A Tennessee woman has been awarded the Guinness World Record for the longest female mullet, coming in at 172.72 cm (5 ft 8 in).

• In Canada, a squad of beekeepers had to come to the rescue after 5 million bees escaped from the back of a truck.

• A Vietnamese collector has emerged as the owner of the world’s biggest bottle of whisky, bought last year for a cool $1.4M.

• Someone is suing Burger King, arguing its Whopper ads are misleading folks into thinking the burgers are bigger than they are.

• And New Delhi authorities have installed cutouts of angry langur monkeys to scare away smaller primates during this week’s G20.

🗳️ Poll time!

📊 Chart of the day

The small Caribbean nation of Anguilla is raking in cash from an unexpected source: its internet domain. Since the launch of Chat GPT last year and the AI craze that’s ensued, the nation’s .ai domain has become hot property.

Thursday’s poll: Do you think military coups can ever be a good thing?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⚖️ Yes, but only under specific circumstances (65%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔥 No, they just make things worse (32%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✍️ Other (write in!) (3%)

Your two cents:

• ⚖️ A.L: “As a means to oust an illegal ruler, and only as a temporary measure, a coup can in theory be beneficial.”

• 🔥 M.A: “Military coups are always dangerous. Even if sometimes they solve an immediate problem, the long-term effects are never good as they leave lasting negative marks on institutions and reinforce instability, while also giving dangerous political prominence to the military.”

• ✍️ J.J: “There have been instances of successful military coups, who then transitioned peacefully into a democracy. However, if a country is resource-rich, parties in power tend to try and hold on to that material wealth, making things worse.”