A senior commander of Islamic State’s Somalia wing was captured on Monday, police and state media said, two days after the IS leadership was targeted with U.S. airstrikes and as security forces continue a weeks-long offensive against them. In the last few years Somalia’s IS franchise has become an increasingly important part of the jihadist group’s worldwide network, growing in strength because of an influx of foreign fighters and improved revenue collection…Abdirahman Shirwac Aw-Saciid, head of the group’s assassination squad, surrendered to authorities on Monday in the Cal Miskaad mountains, in the northeastern Puntland state, Somalia’s state news agency SONNA reported…Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region announced a major offensive against Islamic State and a rival Islamist group, the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab, in December and claims to have since captured several IS bases. An initial assessment of Saturday’s airstrikes by the U.S. indicated many militants were killed, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Sunday. (Reuters)
Demonetization
Demonetization is the act of stripping a currency unit of its status as legal tender. It occurs whenever there is a change in national currency. The current form or forms of money is pulled from circulation and retired, often to be replaced with new notes or coins. Sometimes, a country completely replaces the old currency with a new currency.
Managing stress
Last week we saw that we all experience a certain amount of stress, caused by various factors and uncertainties that we face at or outside work. At work, people are expected to adjust to competitive pressures, organizational restructuring, new technologies and the ever-present push for improved quality and productivity. Stress was defined as a state of tension experienced by individuals facing extraordinary demands, constraints or opportunities. Stress does not always act as a negative influence on our lives and there are actually two faces to stress, one constructive and one destructive. Constructive stress acts in a positive way for the individual or organization, while destructive stress or distress is dysfunctional for the individual and the organization. Excessive high levels of stress can overload and break down a person’s physical and mental systems. Performance may suffer and workers experience illness brought on by very intense stress and they may react by being absent from work, making mistakes, causing accidents, dissatisfaction, reduced performance or even unethical behaviour, like cheating.
We also looked at stressors, which are factors that cause stress and which can be classified into three categories: work factors, non-work factors and personal factors.
Now if all workers face stress to a certain extend it is important that managers know about stress and about ways to manage stress effectively. First stress must be recognised. Some people display certain stress related behaviour like:
- Always moving, walking and eating rapidly.
- Feeling impatient with the pace of things.
- Hurrying others, being annoyed by waiting.
- Trying to do several things at once.
- Feeling guilty when relaxing.
There is no doubt that stress impacts the health of an individual as well and the following could be signs of excessive stress:
- Change in eating habits.
- Change in alcohol consumption or smoking.
- Aches, pains, upset stomach.
- Restlessness, inability to concentrate, sleeping problems.
- Feeling disoriented, overwhelmed, depressed or irritable.
The key thing is to look for changes from normal patterns, like from regular attendance to absenteeism, from punctuality to tardiness, from diligence to carelessness, from a positive attitude to a negative attitude, from openness to resistance or from cooperation to hostility.
As we see, the role of stress in the work setting is complex, with constructive stress facilitating performance and destructive stress reducing performance and impairing the worker’s health. Key for management is thus to find a good fit between the individual, the work environment and the amount of job stress involved. Such a fit stimulates productivity without damaging health.
Stress prevention is the probably the best first-line strategy for dealing with stress, i.e. keeping stress from reaching destructive levels in the first place. In particular, stressors emerging from personal and non work factors must be recognised, so that action can be taken to prevent them from adversely affecting work. This involves taking action for yourself or others. Some strategies for management to prevent or cope with stress may include:
- Participation – allowing workers to have more say in decisions affecting them and their work.
- Job redesign – creating jobs that make work more interesting and responsible for individuals and teams.
- Goal setting – making sure that every worker understands job expectations and has challenging but achievable performance goals.
- Communication – providing everyone with continuous information about performance accomplishments by themselves, their team and the organization as a whole.
- Selection, placement and training – emphasizing a proper person – job match when filling jobs; moving people as appropriate to new jobs; and giving the opportunity to update and expand workers’ skills through training and development.
Now, I realise that some of the strategies mentioned above are kind of foreign to the culture and traditions of management in Ethiopia, which is more top down and less participatory. Yet, as we move more and more into an open market economy, which demands more competitiveness and productivity, we must be looking for ways to increase and maintain performance of individuals, teams and the entire company. So in my opinion, managers will do well to seriously consider strategies that seem to work elsewhere and find a way to exercise them in our own particular context.
Finally, it is my opinion that every individual is responsible to find a healthy balance in their lives and make sure that outside work sufficient time is spent at home with the family, to keep fit, to socialise and to grow mentally and spiritually. To bring such a balance into your life requires a personal effort and planning for activities not only at work but perhaps even more for the activities away from work.
Ton Haverkort
India refuses to be America’s attack dog against China
The Galwan is one of the many Himalayan rivers. A narrow mountain stream, in some places almost a brook, in others a turbulent, seething mass of icy water foaming on the rocks. The river, which few people knew about except geographers, diplomats and military personnel – staff officers in Delhi and Srinagar and ordinary soldiers who regularly patrolled the disputed territory of the Line of Actual Control between India and China – suddenly became the talk of the town in June 2020.
Then, literally a couple of months after the announcement of a strict nationwide quarantine in India and China because of the Covid-19 pandemic, a not uncommon skirmish between patrols took place on its banks. Indian and Chinese soldiers patrol without live ammunition, in accordance with a 1996 agreement, and such episodes usually end with a dozen bruises and bumps and a few broken bones. But not this time: as far as we know, one of the newly appointed Chinese commanders responsible for this area decided to demonstrate to the Indians and his superiors his uncompromising nature, initiative and tactical talents.
The Indian military was not going to back down: just recently, Chief of Defense Staff Bipin Rawat said that it was necessary to review the priorities and structure of military spending, threatening to freeze the program to build a third aircraft carrier for the navy and the contract to buy 110 fighters from Israel. The army had an opportunity to clearly demonstrate that its spending should not be cut.
The outcome of the clash in the Galwan Valley shocked India. Twenty people were killed, and neither side used firearms – the injuries sustained from falling off a cliff at night, the fast flow of an icy river and the lack of medical care were enough. The Chinese reported four of their own killed, while Indian media later accused the Chinese of concealing losses and wrote about 40 dead PLA soldiers.
In one way or another, Indian society, already frustrated by the strict lockdown and frightened by reports from Covid-19 hospitals, demanded a tough response from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and the Indian authorities were forced to meet voters halfway. Everything that Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had managed to achieve in bilateral relations over the preceding two years went down the drain.
Modi had visited China in April 2018, unexpectedly for most Indians and outside observers. At the time, relations between Delhi and Beijing were far from ideal: the Indians were frightened by the growing Chinese presence in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region, where in 2016 the Chinese began building a naval base in Djibouti. Indians were irritated by the support that China was providing to their long-time adversary Pakistan.
In addition, less than a year had passed since the standoff on the Doklam plateau, where the Indian Army came to the aid of the Bhutanese military, preventing the Chinese from unilaterally adjusting the border line in their favor. Therefore, both the fact of the visit and its outcome came as a surprise: the negotiations took place in an extremely friendly atmosphere, and the concept of the “Wuhan spirit” firmly entered into common usage, by analogy with the term “Shanghai spirit,” used to describe an atmosphere of mutual trust, understanding and readiness for cooperation.
The following year, Xi Jinping visited Modi in Mahabalipuram. There, according to media reports, the “Wuhan spirit” grew even stronger. Then, the pandemic began and the Galwan Valley incident occurred, demonstrating that the most ambitious strategic plans can collapse due to a nasty virus combined with an overly proactive commander along a disputed section of the border.
Only five years later, during a personal meeting between Modi and Xi at the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan, was it finally possible to turn the Galwan page in the history of bilateral relations. A full-fledged settlement of all problems is still far away, and it is too early to talk about the return of the “Wuhan spirit.”
Soon after the Kazan summit, however, both sides withdrew forces from the border and agreed on patrol schedules to avoid future clashes in the disputed areas. At the recent meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, the parties agreed on a six-point program of further cooperation regarding the border. India, which until recently had looked at its northern neighbor in the Himalayas with demonstrative suspicion, has suddenly changed its anger to mercy, and not without reason.
Until recently, India has successfully pursued a policy of ‘Duobus litigantibus tertius gaudet’ (the third party enjoying itself while two are fighting). The Americans, who are trying by hook or by crook to prevent the growth of China’s power and its transformation into the world’s leading economy, are ready to pay handsomely for Sinophobia. India is in such a convenient strategic position that the US helps it simply because it exists and has a territorial dispute with China – until, of course, it is settled, and India and China become best friends.
Delhi understands very well what exactly the US wants from the Indians, but does not see this as a particular problem as long as American and Indian interests coincide.
Neither India nor the US want to see China as the only world superpower and the only pole of power in Asia. However, the Indian elites realize that China will not disappear from the world map and will forever remain India’s neighbor. This means that even a successful conflict in the present may result in huge problems in the future, and India has no reason to lend blind support to the American strategy, because all the benefits in the event of its successful implementation will go to the US, while India will get the bruises.
Before the “Galwan incident,” India was quite successfully trying to sit on two chairs, developing economic relations with both the United States and China. In that situation, this was the only reasonable strategy.
By 2014, India had a lot of problems with its economy, and the Modi government, which won the elections that year, launched a package of programs in order to maintain the growth rate at least at 5% of GDP, aimed to include India in global production chains. The key programs were infrastructure development (construction of roads and railways, canals and ports) and the mass retraining of specialists, who were taught skills which are in demand in the new world.
Both China and the US were extremely important to India: the work of almost all sectors of the Indian economy, from pharmaceuticals to IT, depended on Chinese imports, and the US was (and remains) the most promising export market for India.
After the Galwan incident, the balance was destroyed, and the Modi government, realizing that it would not be possible to resolve the situation in relations with China in the coming years, decided to squeeze the maximum possible out of the border incident, behaving in an emphatically unfriendly manner and demonstratively limiting the import of Chinese capital and the presence of Chinese companies in the Indian market.
This did not particularly affect Indian-Chinese economic relations – trade turnover is still growing – but Western investment in the Indian economy increased.
Nevertheless, in the last year, there has been a tendency towards a decline in foreign direct investment from Western countries. There are many reasons: the problems in the global economy that resulted from the Ukraine conflict, the uncertainty associated with the US elections and the future policy of Donald Trump, and, finally, the unfulfilled hopes for a tough decoupling.
As it turned out, American and European companies are not at all going to urgently move
production away from China. In order to continue the already launched reform programs and prevent internal socio-economic problems, the Indian authorities need new investments – and China emerges as the only potential source.
The next round of the waltz with the participation of Beijing and Delhi will, of course, have its own peculiarities. The Chinese will clearly not be allowed into border areas and the most sensitive strategic industries, and the flow of FDI will be directed into infrastructure projects – while special attention is paid to preventing the excessive growth of Chinese influence.
