Saturday, May 31, 2025

33 countries sign Convention on Establishment of International Organization for Mediation in Hong Kong

Photo: www.fmprc.gov.cn

The signing ceremony of the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation (IOMed) took place in Hong Kong on Friday. Around 400 high-level representatives from 85 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, as well as from nearly 20 international organizations, attended the ceremony, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Of these,n-s 33 countries signed the convention oite, becoming its founding member states, according to the ministry.

China has consistently advocated resolving differences in the spirit of mutual understanding and compromise, building consensus through dialogue and consultation, promoting development with a win-win mindset, and addressing challenges with a forward-looking approach, Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, told at the ceremony.

The establishment of the IOMed is an innovative step in the field of international rule of law and holds significant importance in the history of international relations, Wang said, according to a statement published on the ministry’s website on Friday. It embodies the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, fills a longstanding institutional gap in the field of international mediation, and serves as an important public good for strengthening the rule of law in global governance, Wang said.

According to Reuters, Indonesia, Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia and Serbia were among the countries attending the signing ceremony. Representatives from 20 international bodies including the UN were also expected to participate.

The mediation group could enhance China's influence internationally and promote a more assertive role for the world's second-largest economy in global governance, some analysts said, although its success remains to be seen, according to Reuters.

The IOMed is an authoritative symbol for peaceful and harmonious settlement, and the establishment of the IOMed marks a new chapter in global dispute resolution, Chu Kar-kin, a member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies, told the Global Times on Friday.

Given the legal system and bilingual environment, Hong Kong is an ideal jurisdiction for hosting the IOMed headquarters, Chu said, noting that Hong Kong also benefits from its status as a hub attracting global business attention.

“Geographically, Hong Kong enjoys full support from the mainland, it is a gateway and middleman between the Oriental and West. The IOMed opens opportunities to professionals and talents starting or advancing their career in Hong Kong,” Chu said, noting that upon the establishment of IOMed end of this year, parties from potential disputes or conflicts and entrepreneurs may vet IOMed as the jurisdiction of dispute resolution.

After consultations among the negotiating parties to the convention, it was agreed that Hong Kong would serve as the headquarters of the IOMed, Wang said at the ceremony. Hong Kong’s return to the motherland itself stands as a successful example of peacefully resolving international disputes, he added.

The success of the “One Country, Two Systems” framework has ensured continued prosperity and stability to the city, promising an even brighter future, Wang said.

The HKSAR Chief Executive John Lee said at the ceremony that the HKSAR government is committed to supporting the IOMed's provision of friendly, flexible, economical and efficient mediation services. We actively promote a vibrant culture of mediation. In fact, it is a general policy to incorporate a mediation clause in all government contracts. We are also improving the system for local accreditation and disciplinary matters of the mediation profession, Lee said.

The establishment of the IOMed reflects the peaceful development ethos inherent in international law. It embodies a spirit of internationalism and the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind. It also upholds the rule-of-law values underpinning a true human destiny community, Tian Feilong, a vice-dean of the Law School of Minzu University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times on Friday.

“Mediation embodies the core of China’s traditional legal culture. Unlike the adversarial nature of Western-rooted litigation and arbitration, mediation prioritizes consensus, reconciliation, and mutual understanding. This approach offers unique advantages in resolving disputes, bringing divisions, enhancing international social capital, and building a more cooperative global order,” Tian said.

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Apple to rebrand its operating systems

Major overhaul: Signage for the iPhone 16 in New York. Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. — Bloomberg

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple Inc is planning the most sweeping change yet to its operating system names, part of a software overhaul that extends to all its devices.

The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to sources.

That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26”, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private.

Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.

Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers.

Today’s operating systems – including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 – use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time.

A spokesperson for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

The company will announce the shift at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9.

The branding will accompany fresh user interfaces across the operating systems – an attempt to ensure a more cohesive experience when people move between devices.

The new look, dubbed Solarium internally, will include tvOS, watchOS and parts of visionOS, Bloomberg News reported this week.

The latest naming strategy is reminiscent of approaches taken by both Samsung Electronics Co and Microsoft Corp.

In 2020, Samsung renamed its flagship Galaxy S phone line after its launch year, moving to the Galaxy S20.

That device’s predecessor, which debuted in 2019, was the Galaxy S10, representing the 10th generation.

In 1995, Microsoft shifted to naming major operating systems after the year they launched, rolling out Windows 95 and then Windows 98 and Windows 2000.

The big difference is Apple will use the upcoming year rather than the current one.

Though its next operating systems will launch around September 2025, they’ll be named for 2026 – not unlike how car companies market their vehicles.

If Apple keeps the strategy, the following set of releases will carry the 27 moniker.

Apple previously attempted something similar with its software bundles for office work and creativity applications.

In August 2007, it rolled out iWork ‘08 and iLife ‘08.

That was eventually followed by iLife ‘11, which went on sale in October 2010.

As part of the changes, Apple plans to give the iPad a more Mac-like experience, potentially making it more useful for office work.

And the company is opening up its artificial intelligence (AI) models to third-party developers, letting them tap into the underlying technology used by the Apple Intelligence platform.

Other new features coming this year include a live-translation mode for AirPods and the Siri voice assistant, as well as an eye-scrolling option on the Vision Pro headset.

In the AI realm, Apple is planning health features and an AI-enabled battery management mode.

There also will be a new bi-directional Arabic and English keyboard, a digital calligraphy pen for Apple Pencil users and a new app for gaming on Apple devices. — Bloombe

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Sunday, May 25, 2025

How Asean can ease the birth pains of the multipolar world

Power shift: Asean has a big opportunity this week to help usher in the new world order. — Bernama

ON April 2, US President Donald Trump smashed the World Trade Organisation’s system of multilateral trade by announcing the imposition of tariffs, starting at midnight on April 9, on imports from “cheater” countries that were engaging in unfair trade practice. To Trump, a cheater is one that exports more goods to the United States than it imports.

This is nonsensical reasoning. A bilateral trade deficit is not evidence of being “cheated” because the payment to my barber does not mean that I have been cheated and my salary does not imply that my employer has been bamboozled. This nonsense shows that the tariff war is only marginally related to unfair trade practices. The two key reasons for the tariffs are to increase wages by bringing manufacturing jobs back to America and to cement US primacy in the global order with a show of force.

Tragically, the tariffs will neither revive manufacturing nor preserve US primacy. Tariffs will temporarily expand employment in a few sunset industries, but wages will remain stagnant because productivity growth potential in those sectors is nonexistent.

The immediate response to Trump’s show of force were precipitous collapses in the prices of US stocks and bonds, and the value of the US dollar. Investors recognised that this Great Wall of Tariffs had isolated the US economy, inevitably impoverishing it. Hence, 13 hours after the tariffs came into force, Trump suspended them for every trading partner except China. This climbdown made clear that the real target is China, which the US perceives to be an unfriendly power (eg, being friendly to Iran) that is engaging in unfair trading practices (eg piracy of US technologies).

The economist Adam Smith had anticipated this kind of clash in 1776. He observed that the three centuries of globalisation that began with the discovery of the Americas in 1492 and the discovery of the sea route from Europe to India in 1498 had overwhelmingly benefited Europe because its much greater military might enabled it to pillage instead of trade.

Smith, however, foresaw a reversal: the diffusion of technology through trade would eventually narrow the gap between the two groups. The economic rise of Japan, South Korea, China, and India is ushering in today’s messy transition from a unipolar to a multipolar order.

Asean should be guided by two understandings in navigating this transition.

The first is that the current US-China confrontation stems from their shared recognition that the prevention of war would require an eventual agreement on their respective spheres of influence. We are witnessing a defensive race between them to expand their spheres of influence, which is why the US has asserted its rights over Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Gaza; and China’s nine-dash line in the South China Sea has brought its maritime border to the doorstep of several Asean nations.

States that lock themselves into Washington’s orbit will be under strong pressure to decouple from Chinese technology and to shrink commercial ties with the world’s largest trader – sacrificing not only today’s access to the Chinese market (prospectively, tomorrow’s access to India) and compromising their sovereignty.

The second understanding is that this transition has created systemic dangers that require institutional responses. These new dangers include the Thucydides Trap which is the risk of war between rising and established powers; the Kindleberger Trap where inadequate international cooperation leads to ineffective handling of global disasters like climate change; and the Tragedy of the Commons which identifies the coming collapse of the food chain.

The Cold War 2.0 is causing growing collateral damage to Asean. A viable alternative to membership by Asean states in one of the spheres of influence is for Asean to cooperate with other middle power countries to form a nonpartisan club that functions as a buffer zone between the spheres of influence.

It is crucial for this club to achieve critical mass quickly – being big enough in population and GDP to earn begrudging acceptance by Washington, Beijing, and Moscow for its right to remain a neutral force. To achieve critical mass quickly, the founding group of countries must be kept to a manageable number to ease negotiations.

Asean must avoid instinctively shaping a Global South response like convening a new Bandung Conference (which brought together 29 newly independent Asian and African countries in 1955). The goal is not to accentuate class warfare at the international level but to maintain economic globalisation, world peace, and environmental sustainability.

To achieve critical mass quickly, this club must also bridge the Global South and the Global North. After establishing deep cooperation among Asean, Japan and South Korea (thereby setting the tone of North-South cooperation), this Asian grouping should propose to the European Union and United Kingdom the formation of the Atlantic-Pacific Sustainability Partnership (APSP).

The APSP would serve three core functions: (a) defend economic globalisation with a free trade area based on open regionalism; (b) defend global peace and environmental sustainability with a sustainability caucus to reduce tensions among major powers and coordinate actions on common challenges like pandemics; and (c) defend mutual aid with a development assistance agency guided by the 17 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to counterbalance the use of development aid by major powers as a means of political influence.

Given the accelerated growth of Asean under this new system, the economic weight of the APSP would be more than twice that of China or the US by 2045, making it necessary for US and China to join the APSP to avoid defeat through self-marginalisation.

When this happens, the APSP would have crowded out Cold War 2.0 with cooperative multilateralism.- by Prof Datuk Dr Woo Wing Thye

Renowned economist Prof Datuk Dr Woo Wing Thye is a visiting professor at Universiti Malaya and research professor at Sunway University. He is also Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Davis; University Chair Professor at Liaoning University; and Distinguished Fellow at the Penang Institute.

The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.

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Saturday, May 24, 2025

I am stronger now a better person than I was before my stroke

Beating the odds: Jenithaa conducting a training programme.

In July 2017, I woke up during the night with the feeling gravity was pinning me to the bed.

I managed to get up and shuffle to the bathroom before waking my wife. My left side didn’t seem to be responding as it should. We’re both familiar with the F.A.S.T (Face. Arms. Speech. Time) signs of stroke so when we switched on the light and saw there was no change to my face, we went back to bed. We hoped whatever was going on would sort itself out by the morning.

However, the next day things were clearly not right so we went to hospital. I was assessed by the stroke team and had a scan of my brain. My scan didn’t show anything and my symptoms were deemed to be related to a virus, so I went home.

Back home, I nearly fell over in the driveway as my leg failed to step out of the car. I still had movement in my left limbs, but they were reacting slowly. I couldn’t walk unaided. I needed assistance getting into the house and getting into bed, where I stayed until the next morning. By then, the situation had worsened and I went back to hospital in an ambulance.

I was assessed again and had another brain scan. This time the doctor saw a stroke.

I had been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat nine years earlier when I was 47. My cardiologist, at the time, conducted a treadmill test and echo test. She concluded that my heart was strong and my arteries were clear. I was otherwise well, so I was told not to worry and enjoy life.

The doctors in the hospital detected my heart irregularity and said I had atrial fibrillation (AF), and that is what caused my stroke. According to the Stroke Foundation, atrial fibrillation affects more than 400,000 Australians and many of those people don’t even know. People with AF are five times more likely to have a stroke.

My occupational therapist put everything in context. She said my white blood cells were stripping away the dead brain cells and other cells were taking on the job of that part of my brain. But these cells needed to learn, so the more I did or tried to do, the better chance they would have of establishing new pathways for messaging to the rest of my body.

This made sense to me so I kicked into gear – well, not quite ‘kicked’ but motioned at least. My left side was impacted so I started working on it. I ordered a banana with breakfast each morning and spent a few hours holding and twirling it in my left hand until I got sick of it and ate the sucker. I worked out I could use the bed rail as a makeshift tricep lifting machine to strengthen my left arm, until the nursing staff caught me. They thought l might break the bed so they brought in some dumbbells. I did other exercises as well and noticed the more l did, the more movement was coming back. I was excited to wake up and see what my brain had learnt the day before and how it would respond today.

After a week, I moved to a rehabilitation hospital where I did occupational therapy and two physiotherapy sessions each day. I was determined to improve, and I did my own workouts in between. I was told I would be there for up to four weeks, but was discharged after two weeks. I wanted to stay longer because I felt there was more improvement I could make, but I was sent home and continued as an outpatient.

Once I was home, I had a garage gym I began working out in and also hit the local gym every day focusing on what I could turn this new body of mine into.

On my first day back at the gym, I picked up 12 kilogram dumbbells in each arm, which is what l used before the stroke. The first few days were pathetic attempts to use these weights, but I persisted. Amazingly the strength came back fairly quickly and I now use 17 kilo dumbbells.

I took an initial three months off work as a home loan specialist to rebuild my body, then another three months to try and build brain endurance as brain fatigue would hit and it would hit hard. When I was able, I’d go to the gym as l found the blood flow and endorphins would give the brain fatigue a run for its money and replace it with muscular fatigue – which was much nicer.

I couldn’t have done any of this without the love and support of my family. They were my cheer squad. My wife was my rock and my recovery journey has inspired each of them to some degree in different ways.

Emotionally, I never felt upset or depressed. I had a pretty simple approach to my situation – I had lived 55 great years, married a wonderful woman and we had raised great kids. My life to me was a book – I didn’t write it; it was written for me and I have no idea how many chapters are in my book. No-one does.

The reason I wanted to share my story was partly to highlight that not all the F.A.S.T factors need to be present when a stroke occurs. But more importantly, stroke doesn’t mean your life is over. The human body is an amazing thing and the recovery journey I’ve been on has shown me what it is capable of doing.

Although it has taken time, my journey has been exciting in many ways as l watched my left side become operational again. I am actually stronger now than l was pre-stroke. I have also returned to work – all that within eight months. - By Greg Crawford

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Greg exercising

‘I am now a better person than before the stroke'

Beating the odds: Jenithaa conducting a training programme.

KLANG: She was at the height of her career when the inevitable struck, leaving her physically and financially devastated.

However, years later, Jenithaa Santhirasekaran, 56, believes that the stroke she suffered in 2011 was a blessing in disguise.

Jenithaa, who was then a country director for the Malaysian AIDS Council overseeing an externally funded programme on community action and harm reduction, recalled: “The stroke and the physical disability that followed made me look at myself, and life in general, from a different perspective.

“I was doing very well before it happened, but I was proud, arrogant and self-centred, believing I had the best career, as well as wealth and glamour.”

The mother of three daughters aged 33, 22 and 17, and grandmother of a six-year-old girl, had also served as the executive director of outreach organisation PT Foundation before joining the Malaysian Aids Council.

Jenithaa recalled how the turning point in her life came after she was injured in a snatch theft incident that resulted in her suffering injuries to her head, face and neck.

“I was on medical leave for two weeks and suffered from nausea and headaches and felt faint all the time long after my medical leave ended.

“Two months later, when attending a meeting in Bali, I suffered a stroke in my hotel room,” said Jenithaa.

The stroke rendered her unable to walk and talk, and also affected her right eye.

After being hospitalised in Bali for two weeks, she was allowed to return home to Malaysia and was readmitted here two weeks later after suffering fits.

Wheelchair-bound but able to speak by then, Jenithaa said she went for everything she believed could help her, such as ayurvedic treatment, massages and acupuncture.

“I was jobless, broke and an OKU (orang kurang upaya – a person with disabilities) and after a while I had no money left in my bank account.

“There came a time when there wasn’t even any food in the house to feed my children and that truly devastated me and made me feel useless,’’ said Jenithaa, adding that it was then that she decided to take her own life.

Desiring to spend one final day with her three daughters, then aged 19, eight and four, Jenithaa emerged from her room, where she had been isolating herself, to be with them.

However, when she saw how much her children loved her and their happiness upon seeing her, Jenithaa chose to fight back and refused to let the stroke control her life.

“I stopped using my wheelchair and held on to walls and objects while teaching myself to walk again.

“I also literally begged, borrowed and stole to raise my children in the condition that I was in.

“I made myself ‘thick-skinned’ and asked for help but unfortunately lost so many ‘friends’ during this time after I approached them to seek financial help,” said Jenithaa, who became a single mother when her youngest daughter was born.

She also called up friends and acquaintances and started going out to let people see her in her post-stroke condition.

Jenithaa added that she started taking any job that came her way as well as pursued courses and developed herself into a speaker, forum panellist and advocate for the differently-abled.

“I am now a certified neuro-linguistic master practitioner and trainer, clinical hypnotherapist, disability equality training trainer, non-governmental organisation management trainer, environment social and governance trainer and a diversity, equity and inclusion trainer.”

She added that she has also developed and run modules on emotional well-being, climate change and innovative parenting and has conducted over 100 workshops to date.

Jenithaa said she is currently completing a diploma in integrated psychotherapy specialising in childhood and adulthood abuse, trauma, grief health and past life regression therapy.

Despite sight not yet fully returning to her right eye, her right leg completely numb, her right hand disabled and her speech sometimes impaired, Jenithaa added that she has finally found herself.

“I am happy that I am now a better person than I was before the stroke happened.”

She can be contacted at jenithaa69@gmail.com

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