VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Mar. 3 - The U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price on Tuesday said that the United States understanding is that Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York Kyaw Moe Tun remains in position despite an attempt by the junta to install his deputy.

Myanmar state television announced on Saturday that Kyaw Moe Tun had been fired for betraying the country, a day after he urged countries to use “any means necessary” to reverse a Feb. 1 coup that ousted the nation’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. (Reuters)

Mar. 2 - The global oil market is rebalancing after damage to demand wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic was met with curbs on output by producers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the group’s president said on Tuesday.

“Crude prices are relatively stable ... we see a certain balance between demand and supply,” OPEC president Diamantino Azevedo told Reuters in an interview.

“However, due to the pandemic situation the world is living through and with new waves arriving, we could have a situation of smaller demand due to confinements. Vaccination of the global population against COVID-19 will certainly increase demand”.

OPEC and other key exporters such as Russia, a grouping dubbed OPEC+, meet on Thursday and are expected to discuss allowing as much as 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) back into the market to address demand likely to be unlocked later in the year as vaccine programmes gather pace.

But Azevedo, Angola’s minister of Mineral Resources and Petroleum, who occupies OPEC’s rotating presidency, warned that any worsening of the pandemic could lead producers to tamp down output.

“The production levels that were desirable at the time of the latest adjustment could naturally be affected downward due to... the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants,” he added.

Azevedo insisted that foreign interest in developing oil resources in Angola, Africa’s second-biggest exporter, remains high after cratering oil prices briefly led a halt on oil drilling in the depths of the pandemic last year.

“We don’t have any (energy) major planning to leave Angola at the moment,” he said. “Although there is a drop in investment globally, investors in Angola are interested in keeping the same level of investment.”

Crude production from Angola’s existing fields, which has been declining since 2008, is due to dwindle to almost nothing by 2040, according to government projections.

It has pinned its hopes on keeping international partners engaged to avoid its offshore oil and gas resources turning into stranded assets, though there is a risk the industry, increasingly sensitive to environmental concerns, may seek greener projects elsewhere.

“We’ll do everything to keep our industry attractive,” Azevedo said. (Reuters)

Mar. 2 -  The new chief of the World Trade Organization (WTO) urged its member states on Monday to work with pharmaceutical companies to license more COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing in developing countries in order to triple global production.

“People are dying in poor countries,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said on her first day in office. “The world has a normal capacity of production of 3.5 billion doses of vaccines and we now seek to manufacture 10 billion doses.”

Her call comes as a group of developing countries led by South Africa and India seek to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 drugs and vaccines, a move opposed by the United States, the European Union and other wealthy nations.

Okonjo-Iweala, the WTO’s first female and first African director-general, said that, while this debate continued, companies must be encouraged to open up and license more viable manufacturing sites now in developing countries.

In a speech to the WTO’s 164 member states, she said there was an upcoming world manufacturing convention and urged the start of dialogue with manufacturers associations.

After a long campaign that was derailed in the latter stages by a Trump administration veto, the 66-year-old Nigerian was confirmed as boss last month, pledging to “forget business as usual” at the WTO, which is struggling to strike new deals and whose arbitration functions are paralysed.

“READY TO GO”

“It feels great. I am coming into one of the most important institutions in the world and we have a lot of work to do. I feel ready to go,” Okonjo-Iweala told a reporter on arrival at the WTO’s lakeside Geneva headquarters where she donned a mask and elbow-bumped officials.

The former Nigerian finance and foreign minister aims to revive the global trade watchdog ahead of a major year-end meeting, saying she feared the world was leaving the WTO behind.

WTO delegates agreed to hold the next major ministerial conference in Geneva from Nov. 29.

The meeting was originally due to be held in Kazakhstan in 2020 but was delayed due to the pandemic. Okonjo-Iweala has said she hopes ministers at the year-end meeting can finalise deals on ending fisheries subsidies and reforms for the WTO’s top appeals body which was paralysed by the Trump administration.

Since the WTO director-general holds few executive powers, some analysts question her ability to revive the body in the face of so many challenges, including persistent U.S.-China trade tensions and growing protectionism heightened by the pandemic. (Reuters)

Mar. 2 - Russia launched its space satellite Arktika-M on Sunday on a mission to monitor the climate and environment in the Arctic amid a push by the Kremlin to expand the country’s activities in the region.

The Arctic has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average over the last three decades and Moscow is seeking to develop the energy-rich region, investing in the Northern Sea Route for shipping across its long northern flank as ice melts.

The satellite successfully reached its intended orbit after being launched from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome by a Soyuz rocket, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, said in a post on Twitter.

Russia plans to send up a second satellite in 2023 and, combined, the two will offer round-the-clock, all-weather monitoring of the Arctic Ocean and the surface of the Earth, Roscosmos said.

The Arktika-M will have a highly elliptical orbit that passes high over northern latitudes allowing it to monitor northern regions for lengthy periods before it loops back down under Earth.

At the right orbit, the satellite will be able to monitor and take images every 15-30 minutes of the Arctic, which can’t be continuously observed by satellites that orbit above the Earth’s equator, Roscosmos said.

The satellite will also be able to retransmit distress signals from ships, aircraft or people in remote areas as part of the international Cospas-Sarsat satellite-based search and rescue programme, Roscosmos said.

“As more activity takes place in the Arctic and as it moves into higher latitudes, improving weather and ice forecasting abilities is crucial,” said Mia Bennett, a geographer at the University of Hong Kong.

“There is also an element of data nationalism that is feeding into all this. Countries, especially those that see themselves as space powers, want to be able to rely on their own satellites and data to inform their activities, whether commercial or military in nature,” she said. (Reuters)