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Why Ethiopia’s Massive Nile Dam Project Has Spilled Over Into Regional Tensions_我的网站

一 |     Under construction since 2011, the GERD project is one of the largest public infrastructure projects in Ethiopia, and will be the biggest hydroelectric power plant on the African continent once finished next year.,The third phase of the filling of a massive reservoir, capable of holding up to 74 billion cubic meters of water, was completed this week, with two of the dam’s planned 16 turbines now operational. When construction is finished, the dam will be capable of generating some 6,000 megawatts of power – more than double the average output of a WER-1000 nuclear reactor.,AfricaWATCH Water Pour Over Spillway on Ethiopia’s GERD Hydroelectric Dam After Finishing Third FillingYesterday, 22:33 GMT,In a ceremony inaugurating the project on Friday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stressed that the dam was Ethiopia’s “gift,” and that it was “Ethiopia’s responsibility to use it” together with the other two Nile Basin countries - Egypt and Sudan.,“PM @AbiyAhmedAli reiterated that Ethiopia is working to ensure the benefits of the lower basin countries, saying that our Abbay River [Ethiopia’s term for the Blue Nile, one of the two major tributaries of the Nile] takes what it deserves while passing on what others deserve,” the prime minister’s office tweeted following the ceremony.,PM @AbiyAhmedAli reiterated that Ethiopia is working to ensure the benefits of the lower basin countries, saying that our Abbay River takes what it deserves while passing on what others deserve. He also congratulated all Africans on this milestone. (2/2) pic.twitter.com/Be9WtrHczO— Office of the Prime Minister - Ethiopia (@PMEthiopia) August 12, 2022,Just Deserts,The question of which country “deserves” what has been the subject of considerable consternation and debate between the three nations, as has the dam’s potential environmental impact, with Cairo and Khartoum fearing the filling of the 145 meter tall, 1.8 km long dam could threaten the region with droughts and floods. Last month, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry warned that Cairo would defend its interests using “all means available” at its disposal, and called on the United Nations Security Council to negotiate a legally binding agreement between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan on regulating the dam’s operation. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi earlier called the GERD dispute a “red line” security issue.,Ethiopian Ambassador to Russia Alemayehu Tegenu dismissed these concerns, telling Sputnik last month that Egypt and Sudan were trying to “internationalize and politicize the dam to solve their internal affairs” and assuring that the dam “has no significant harm” for the downstream nations.,WorldEgypt, Sudan Politicising Renaissance Dam Construction, Ethiopian Diplomat Says27 July 2021, 08:23 GMT,Nile River: Giver of Life,Stretching some 6,695 km and covering over 3.3 million square km, the Nile is the longest river in the world, and has played a significant role in regional civilizational development going back to the Ancient Egyptians owing to the rich soil perfect for agriculture created by its annual flooding, and its use as a tool for regional river navigation. Ethiopia’s Blue Nile tributary accounts for a whopping 85 percent of the Nile’s total waters.,Egypt, which receives almost no rainfall, relies on the Nile for more than 90 percent of its freshwater, with eastern Sudan similarly dependent on the river for its economic wellbeing and water and food security.,Legacy of Colonial Meddling,Part of the difficulty of regulating the dispute over the Nile is the lack of a regional agreement regulating the waters’ flow. Addis Ababa is not a party to the 1959 bilateral treaty between Egypt and Sudan dividing the Nile’s waters.,A separate 1929 Nile Waters Treaty between Britain and its then-puppet state of Egypt, plus the territories of what are now Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Sudan provided Cairo the right to veto infrastructure projects up the Nile if they threatened to impact the country’s interests. However, that treaty similarly didn’t apply to Ethiopia, which managed to survive as the only independent nation in Africa after the European imperialist scramble for the continent in the 19th century, and which was never consulted on the agreement’s terms.,Russia’s Position,As a strategic partner of both Ethiopia and Egypt, Russia has sought to assure the dam dispute’s peaceful and mutually amenable resolution, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicating in 2021 that Moscow would be ready to provide technical assistance for any negotiations on the matter. Russia also supports the use of the African Union platform to resolve the crisis.,Also last year, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia called on the three countries to stick to the terms of the 2015 Declaration of Principles on the GERD, which urged consensus in reaching an agreement on guidelines for the dam’s filling and operation, and committing Ethiopia to avoid steps which could harm its downstream neighbors. “At the same time, we note legitimate concerns of Egypt and Sudan over the possible negative impact that unconstrained functioning of the dam may produce on the populations of those countries in drought prone years,” he said.,The 2015 agreement and efforts at the African Union and UN levels mean that a baseline for a breakthrough and compromise exists. However, amid regional and global concerns about food and water security, and the threats posed by increasingly prevalent climate disasters and extreme weather events, the GERD dispute comes during a period of heightened regional and global tensions.,In 2021, Africa and Middle East intelligence analysis group Pangea-Risk warned that an all-out water war between Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan, or their proxies was becoming increasingly probable in the face of dwindling options for a mediated solution.。

二 |     WASHINGTON -- Charles and Kathleen Moore are about to have their day in the Supreme Court over a $15,000 tax bill they contend is unconstitutional.The couple from Redmond, Washington, claim they had to pay the money because of their investment in an Indian company from which, as Charles Moore, 62, said in a sworn statement, they “have never received a distribution, dividend, or other payment.”But significant parts of the story they have told to reach this point seem at odds with public records.The Moores are the public face of a high court case backed by business and conservative political interests that could call into question other parts of the U.S. tax code and rule out a much-discussed but never-enacted tax on wealth. The case is set for arguments on Dec. 5. The Moores are the latest example of plaintiffs whose lawsuits seem to simply be exercising their legal rights, but whose cases are backed by others with enormous amounts of money or a consequential social issue at stake. The Moores sought help from the anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute.Underscoring the case's importance at a recent Heritage Foundation event, lawyer Paul Clement said, "The constitutionality of a wealth tax may well be decided in the context of this case.”Details of the Moores' involvement with the company, initially called KisanKraft Machine Tools Private Limited, were first reported by Tax Notes, which caters to tax professionals. The public documents are filings with the Indian government.At issue in the case is a provision of the 2017 tax bill enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by then-President Donald Trump. The law applies to companies that are owned by Americans, but do their business in foreign countries. It imposes a one-time tax on investors' shares of profits that have not been passed along to them, in order to offset other tax benefits. The measure is expected to generate $340 billion in tax revenues.The Moores, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative think tanks, contend that the provision violates the 16th Amendment, which allows the federal government to impose an income tax on Americans.The $15,000 tax bill was for the Moores' share of KisanKraft's profits."If you haven’t received any income, how can you be required to pay income taxes?” Charles Moore asks in a video posted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.But far from being a passive investor with no influence over the company, Moore, who worked at Microsoft during his career in software development, served on KisanKraft's board of directors for five years.“The story the Moores told about Charles' involvement with KisanKraft is directly at odds with the fiduciary responsibilities of an individual holding a board seat for an Indian company,” Mindy Herzfeld, a professor of tax practice at the University of Florida law school, wrote in Tax Notes.And there are other indications of Moore's more extensive involvement with KisanKraft than his testimony indicated. The company paid for his travel to India four times and he made at least two investments beyond the $40,000 stake he put up in 2006.Moore also was prepared to invest an another roughly $250,000. That money was ultimately returned by KisanKraft, along with 12% interest.One other inconsistency is that while the Moores say they jointly invested the money, only Charles Moore's name appears in company documents.The couple and their lawyers did not disclose any of that information in legal filings in three different federal courts, including the Supreme Court.“The original declaration on which the case is built is full of lies,” said Reuven Avi-Yonah, an international tax expert at the University of Michigan law school.In a brief conversation with The Associated Press, Kathleen Moore said she and her husband would not discuss the case and referred questions to their lawyers. Andrew Grossman, the Moore's lead attorney, did not respond to messages seeking comment.The omissions, along with the Moores' failure to take advantage of other legal options that would have deferred, if not eliminated, their tax liability make Avi-Yonah and other experts in international tax law suspect the case was manufactured to get at a larger issue, the tax on billionaires that has been proposed by some prominent Democrats but never enacted.A wealth tax would apply not to the incomes of the very richest Americans, but their assets, like stock holdings, that now only get taxed when they are sold. “There really was no reason for the court to take it on, other than to send a signal to warn off the Congress from passing a billionaire tax," said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.Other provisions of the tax code could be upended by the court's decision, including measures relating to partnerships, limited liability companies and other business formations, Rosenthal said.Changes to those provisions also could affect some justices' finances. Chief Justice John Roberts holds a one-eighth interest worth up to $15,000 in an Irish partnership that owns a cottage in county Limerick, Ireland, and Justice Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginni, owns a limited liability company that generated between $50,000 and $100,000 in income last year from Nebraska real estate, according to the justices' financial disclosure forms. Two other recent Supreme Court cases advanced by conservative interests also raised questions about whether facts had been manipulated to get the disputes in front of the court. One of those involved a wedding website designer in Colorado who did not want to work with same-sex couples and a public high school football coach in Washington who wanted to pray on the field.Rosenthal said that “the ugly facts matter” and that the justices could return the Moores' case to a lower court without ruling on it.Charles Moore said in his sworn statement that he agreed to invest in the company that was being formed by his friend and former colleague at Microsoft, Ravindra “Ravi” Kumar Agrawal, because he liked the business plan and trusted his friend.“Moreover, I thought KisanKraft was formed for a noble purpose and had the potential to improve the lives of small and marginal farmers in India,” Moore said. The case had already kicked up ethical questions. Senate Democrats had asked Justice Samuel Alito to step aside from the case because of his interactions with David Rivkin, another lawyer who also is representing the Moores. The Democrats said Alito had cast doubt on his ability to judge the case fairly because he sat for four hours of Wall Street Journal opinion page interviews with an editor at the newspaper and Rivkin.Alito rejected the demands in a four-page statement issued by the court in which he said there “is no valid reason” for his recusal. ___Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.___This story has been corrected to reflect that Mindy Herzfeld is a professor of tax practice at the University of Florida law school, not director of the master's program in international tax.。

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