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Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe died on Friday after being shot while giving a speech at a campaign event in the city of Nara. He was 67.
“This heinous act of brutality is utterly unforgivable,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said of the killing.
Abe was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister before stepping down in 2020 due to health issues. During his time in office, he conceived of and implemented “Abenomics,” a set of policies to revive Japan’s languishing economy amid a rapidly aging society made up of three “arrows” or pillars: monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms.
As part of these efforts, Abe advocated strongly for enhancing the role of women in the economy—a policy he dubbed “womenomics.” He promoted gender equality in unprecedented ways for Japan, appointing women to positions of power, introducing corporate governance laws encouraging businesses to hire and promote women, increasing the availability of government-subsidized daycare, and driving a change in public attitudes—no easy feat in a nation with such entrenched traditional gender roles.
On the international stage, he was a forceful and visionary leader and a true friend to the United States. A testament to his political and diplomatic skills, Abe was remarkable in his ability to work with former U.S. President Trump, whom Abe neither liked nor understood. Despite these challenging circumstances, Abe was able to manage the relationship well—certainly better than just about any other G7 leader. As a result, while U.S. relations with so many other countries withered, Abe was able to press his agenda and maintain strong and stable U.S.-Japan relations.
Under his tenure, Japan became more integrated with its regional allies, commercially and strategically. He did much to advance free trade and security in Asia, and he developed a grand strategy to respond proactively to China’s rise. He pushed hard for the Trans-Pacific Partnership even when President Obama no longer could, and he was instrumental in getting the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the world’s biggest high-standard multilateral trade agreement. He also developed the Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy and was the catalyst for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), two key security arrangements to counteract China’s influence.
Abe’s slaying rocks one of the world’s safest, most stable and unified democracies, a country with notoriously staid politics where violent crime is exceedingly rare and gun violence is virtually non-existent. The last political assassination in Japan took place in 1960.
The tragedy has already generated an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy for the former prime minister, both at home and abroad. No doubt, it will act as a unifying moment for the nation, much like John F. Kennedy’s assassination did in the United States. It will likely help his Liberal Democratic Party in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, where the ruling coalition is expected to keep or increase its majority, and consolidate Prime Minister Kishida’s position as the strongest domestically among all G7 leaders.
On a personal note, I was honored to know Prime Minister Abe for well over a decade. His extraordinary charisma, openness, and kindness always stood out to me, especially in the context of Japan’s restrained politics.
He served Japan with determination, intelligence, imagination, and dignity, and he was never afraid to go against the grain or to break with tradition. Without question, he was one of the most loved Japanese leaders I’ve ever encountered—and for good reason.
I had great respect and admiration for him. His death fills me with sorrow. I, Japan, and the world will miss him.
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The notion that political stability rests on disinterest of the Japanese electorate is a dangerous one JULY 10, 2022 by Leo Lewis Declining copper prices may be signaling that a recession is on the horizon. Read the full story here. Politics & World Affairs
George Soros fears that the radicalization of the US Supreme Court is part of a larger plan to create a repressive regime. |
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Economics & Finance
Barry Eichengreen explains why the British prime minister’s resignation will heighten downward pressure on the pound.
| | Salt Lake City Confronts a Future Without a Lake |
| From the southern rim of the Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, barely any of the pinkish, saline waters that used to engulf the million-acre basin are visible. “For years the lake lapped right here,” says Ella Sorensen, motioning at the gritty dried lake bed underfoot. “But I have watched it disappear over time.” Sorensen is the manager of Audubon’s Gillmor Sanctuary, a 3,597-acre wetland preserve along the lake’s southern border, about 10 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. Utah’s iconic body of water has been beating a retreat from the state’s capital: In July 2021, the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest level since measurements began in 1875. The lake’s surface area has shrunk to about 950 square miles, according to the US Geological Survey, less than a third of the 3,300 recorded in 1987. This week, the record was broken again.  Satellite images of the Great Salt Lake show how water levels have fallen from 1987 (left) to 2020 (right), exposing large expanses of grayish lakebed. Credit: Google Earth As the lake has dried, the complex web of life that these brackish waters support has been imperiled, including hundreds of bird species that rely on the insects and shrimp that breed here. “This is a key stop on the migration route,” Sorenson says. “But it’s mind-bogglingly dry these days. Blame has fallen on the unprecedented “megadrought” gripping the US Southwest — the region’s driest 22-year period in at least 12 centuries, a slow-motion environmental disaster exacerbated by human-caused climate change. According to the US Drought Monitor, 99.9% of Utah is currently in either “severe” or “extreme” drought levels. But the crisis also reflects the growing water demands of an increasingly developed region. A vanishing lake could spell big trouble for Salt Lake City. The Great Salt Lake is the largest water body in the US after the Great Lakes, and a crucial cog in a fragile regional ecosystem linked to drinking water (not directly, but via evaporation), air quality, biodiversity, and tourism in the city and across the Wasatch Front, a chain of towns and cities containing more than 2.5 million people along the Wasatch Mountain Range. The lake’s value is hard to overstate, says Laura Vernon, the Great Salt Lake coordinator with the Utah Department of Natural Resources (a role created in 2020). Beyond the critical role it plays for millions of migratory birds, brine shrimp farming and mineral extraction bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. And the region’s ski industry relies on “lake-effect snow” fed by the lake’s moisture. “For too long the lake’s value has been overlooked and underappreciated,” says Vernon.  Boat docks sit high and dry at the Antelope Island Marina in August 2021. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America The changes are impossible to miss. Antelope Island hasn’t been surrounded by water since 2001; “Spiral Jetty,” a coil of rocks arranged along the shoreline by sculptor Robert Smithson in 1970, is now a mile from the lake’s edge. “The lake is in big trouble,” says Jeremy Shaw, manager of the Antelope Island State Park since 2011. “It’s drying up more and faster every year.” Vernon says that equilibrium is being “knocked out of balance.” Declining water levels mean salinity is increasing, threatening the brine shrimp. The snowpack that recharges the lake is reducing: Research shows that snow cover in the mountains around the lake melts at least a week earlier than it did 20 years ago. As the bottom of the lake is exposed, winds carry clouds of toxic dust — laced with arsenic and other heavy metals that accumulated both naturally and through man-made pollution — over populated areas nearby. “Once or twice a month the sky is filled,” says Hugh Ferguson, a Salt Lake City resident and keen birder who been seeing more frequent dust storms recently. “You can see it coming from a long way off across the valley. The snow turns brown and it melts quicker because of it.” Click here to read the full story about Salt Lake City's disappearing lake.  |
As South Africa’s inquiry into the Guptas draws to a close, we dive into the FT archives to chronicle their rise and fall JULY 7, 2022 by David Hindley Sri Lanka’s prime minister agreed to resign on Saturday after party leaders in Parliament demanded both he and the embattled president step down on the day protesters stormed the president’s residence and office in a fury over a worsening economic crisis. Read the full story here. A number of top Democratic politicians are positioning themselves for the 2024 election as party officials quietly wonder if President Joe Biden is the right candidate to put forward again. Read the full story here.  | | Brooke Jenkins, a former assistant district attorney in San Francisco, is set to be sworn in as the city’s new district attorney on Friday.Haven Daley/Associated Press |
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Mayor London Breed on Thursday replaced him with Brooke Jenkins, a former San Francisco assistant district attorney who became a high-profile critic while campaigning for Boudin’s recall. Jenkins left the district attorney’s office in October after clashing with Boudin over his management style and what she considered lax policies toward criminals. |
“We are a city of second chances, but the truth is we have to draw a line with people who choose hate, violence and a life of crime,” Jenkins, 40, said at a news conference on Thursday. |
Nationally, Boudin’s recall was seen as a referendum on a liberal city’s handling of crime and punishment. Locally, residents said the issue was more nuanced. They were frustrated by a growing perception that squalor and burglaries had become too commonplace during the coronavirus pandemic, though there was little evidence that Boudin’s policies directly made crime significantly worse. |
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