U.S. median income in 2013 was a mere 4 % higher than in 2008; meanwhile, Chinese & Vietnamese median incomes increased more than 100%, while Thailand’s median income increased by 85% & India’s by 60%.
China has played an enormous role in lowering global inequality. The economic growth of its 1.4 billion people has reshaped wealth around the world. But China has become so wealthy that its continued growth no longer plays such an important role in lowering global inequality.
India, with a population that is still relatively poor, now plays an important role in making the world more equal. In the last 20 years, China and India have driven the reduction in global inequality. From now on, only Indian growth will perform that same function.
Africa, which boasts the world’s highest rates of population growth, will become increasingly important. But if the largest African countries continue to trail behind the Asian giants, global inequality will rise.
If China’s growth continues to top Western countries’ growth by 2% to 3% annually, in a decade middle-class Chinese will become wealthier than their counterparts in the West. For the first time in two centuries, Westerners with middle incomes will no longer be part of the top 20%
Gloomy forecasts are plausible. The opposite of growing equality of globalization might come to be: the gap between US & Chinese middle classes may be preserved if the present trade war heats up, but at the cost of the slower (or negative) income growth in both the US & China.
Improvements in real income would be sacrificed in order to freeze the pecking order of the global income distribution. The net real income gain for all concerned would be zero.
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She resisted. He called another man. One of them held her down and the other raped her. She says, “I fainted. When I woke up, there were seven men in the room. They took turns raping me.”
Samira says that she escaped after being abducted, gang-raped and sold into a forced
marriage. That isn’t her real name, of course.
She’s too scared to allow it to be published. She is 23, with long chestnut hair, and we speak over WhatsApp using a translator. She tells me she was snatched off the street while visiting the city of Homs in February. This is
her account of what happened:
A white panel van daubed with mud for camouflage – ‘a military vehicle’ – pulled up and six men wearing balaclavas jumped out.
Samira ran but they caught her and threw her into the back. She thrashed around as the van moved off, trying to free herself while hands gripped her arms and legs and punches rained down. Then one of the men raised his boot and stamped on her face. ‘I didn’t move
after that.’
The next morning, Samira found her-self alone. She opened the door and started down the concrete stairs. Someone hit her
on the back on the head with a rifle-butt and she crumpled. She was dragged back to the
room with the mattress. This time, four men raped her. They called her ‘unveiled whore’
and ‘Nusayri pig’, a sectarian insult. Days passed with more rapes. In between, she was
left blindfolded, hands tied. She remembers two ropes, one green, one brown. She grew
very weak.
One day, the men ordered Samira and the older woman to go down the stairs and sit on
Caption here over 2 lines if
necessary the bare concrete floor. They told the older
woman, ‘No one paid for you’ and shot her in the chest, a single bullet from a Kalashnikov. Somehow, the woman remained sitting upright, her legs slightly splayed, blood gushing from her chest. The men told Samira: ‘Say your prayers.’ She threw herself to the ground, fingertips touching their boots, begging for her life. ‘I was shaking all over.’
But they didn’t kill her. They told her to lay down and they collected some of the other woman’s blood in a bucket. They
poured blood on the ground next to Samira’s head and they took pictures, apparently to fake her death. That evening, she understood why. An older man arrived, in his sixties, and
the others called him ‘emir’ or prince. She had to shower and dress and he made her turn around, inspecting her. Then he handed the men a suitcase full of cash. She had been sold.
The emir gave Samira a black niqab to wear and took her to sit in the back of a Range Rover.
Pointing to a pistol on his hip,
he said: ‘If you make a move on the road, I’ll shoot you.’ She begged him to say what was
going to happen to her. ‘I saved your life,’ he replied. ‘They were going to kill you like that other woman. I paid for you. You belong to me. It will be like I am your husband; you will do everything I say.’ She stayed with him in a house somewhere in the northern province of Idlib.
She did not want to speak about that period, just saying: ‘I wish I had died before I went there.’ He seemed to be someone impor-
tant: officials visited his home; he was never stopped at checkpoints. She managed to convince him that she had accepted her fate and he let her call her family. They had already
held a funeral for her.
Lattakia, #Syria: The young Alawite, Ali Iyad Hamdan, 22 years old, was martyred by bullets from members of government-backed militias near the al-Muzayri’a Bridge in the city of Lattakia this morning, June 21.
A young Alawite man was martyred in a sectarian attack in Baniyas.
The young man, Muhammad Shaaban Diop, from the village of Al-Mawrid in the Baniyas countryside, was shot June 19 by gunmen on a motorcycle from the predominantly Sunni village of Al-Bayada. There have been no arrests.
The trappings of governance exist – ministers, ministries, announcements, ceremonies, meetings, photo-ops; but the substance does not.
Authority is centralised in the person of the president and radiates outwards from him through a constellation of loyalists, family members and HTS veterans.
"Authoritarian mechanisms based on loyalty and patronage appear not as temporary necessities, but deliberate tools of power."
Sharaa’s rule is defined by the presence of institutions but in phantom form. Accountability mechanisms are avoided; transparency is smothered.
between figures who support conditional engagement with the new Syrian leadership and others (including Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council's counterterrorism official) who view the new Syrian leadership as "jihadists" and de facto "al-Qaeda" elements.
It seemed to me that this latter group currently predominates within the government. I also heard that the Israeli position, hostile to the new Syrian leadership and calling for keeping Syria fragmented and weak, is having a significant impact on the Trump administration's thinking on #Syria.
Alawite women in #Syria being abducted and used as Sabaya just like the Yazidis.
“They tortured and beat us. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other, but I heard the kidnappers’ accents. One of them had a foreign accent and the other had a local Idlib accent. I knew that because they were insulting us because we were Alawites.”
Following the testimonies of Syrian women who were kidnapped on the Syrian coast, we found Rabab, who was kidnapped in broad daylight and found herself with Basma (a pseudonym) in the same house, where they were both beaten and insulted for being “Alawites,”
The phenomenon is reminiscent of the Yazidi captivity in Iraq, but has yet to reach the same level.
There have been repeated pleas from families trying to uncover the fate of their daughters who were kidnapped in broad daylight, whether from the Syrian coastal cities and countryside, or from the countryside of Homs and Hama.
Thread about the situation on #Syria's #Alawite coastal region My brother-in-law traveled from Qadmous to Latakia today - March 12, 2025. This is what he saw.
He was accompanied by Sunni regime officials to make sure that he would not be shot.
He counted 8 checkpoints between his village and Banias on the coast - a 20 minute drive - from his village.
There were no Amn al-`Amm (gov security) at any of the checkpoints. He did not see any HTS uniforms or police uniforms. None of the vehicles had markings on them.
(Photo of Qadmous castle)
Most men at the 8 checkpoints were wearing masks to hide their faces. Those manning the checkpoints between the town of al-Midan and Sqibleh (the higher mountains) were strangers to the region.
Those between Sqibleh and Banias (the lower mountains) were from the Banias region. There were two very different types of men on the road.