THAILAND — COUNTING TERM LIMITS: Thailand's prime minister, Prayut Chan-ocha, is suspended from duty by the country's constitutional court as it rules on whether he has exceeded his term limit. The question is whether the former army chief hit his allowed eight years this week. It's the eighth anniversary of Prayut becoming prime minister after a military coup in 2014. But should the clock only start in 2017, when the term limit clause was added to Prayut's rewritten constitution, or perhaps 2019, after the first election he contested under the new rules? He still remains defense minister, for the time being. ANGOLA — RULING PARTY SQUEAKS TO VICTORY: MPLA, Angola's governing party since independence in 1975, won 51 percent of the vote , down from 61 percent in the previous election, defeating the opposition UNITA party on 44 percent. ALGERIA — MACRON PROMISES INVESTIGATION INTO COLONIAL-ERA CRIMES: French President Emmanuel Macron is in Algeria today, hoping to improve tense relations with the gas-rich nation, so he can both diversify French energy supplies and shift President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's allegiances away from Russia. Algiers is a longtime ally of Moscow, with which it plans to hold joint military exercises in November. The French president announced the creation of a joint commission of French and Algerian historians to examine the archives of the colonization of the war of independence "without taboo." RUSSIA — TRACKING OWNERSHIP OF THE OIL TANKERS: The Institute of International Finance announced Thursday it has built a database tracking tankers shipping oil out of Russia. " Our database tracks tanker ownership from shell company to shell company, which helps us tag the ultimate owner of oil tankers taking crude out of Russia," the IIF said in a statement. What did they find? Greek fingerprints everywhere: Greek-owned ships are 55 percent of total tanker capacity, up from 35 percent before Russia's latest Ukraine invasion. Predictably, there are some ships flying under Russian and Chinese flags, and a small but still relevant number of Norwegian, Finnish and Singaporean tankers … a fact at odds with the government position of those countries. RUSSIA — PUTIN ORDERS ARMY RECRUITMENT: Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a decree posted on the Kremlin website, has ordered a 137,000 troop boost for his army. If successful, that would bring Russia's active duty armed forces to over 1.1 million. The move indicates Moscow expects a costly and protracted war in Ukraine. CHINA — PUBLIC WANTS GOVERNMENTS TO STAND UP TO FOREIGN BULLYING: That's per new polling from Morning Consult. CHINA — XINJIANG DISINFORMATION WAR: The U.S. State Department released a report on Wednesday highlighting China's attempts to manipulate global public opinion on Xinjiang and discredit independent reporting on crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population. UNITED NATIONS — HIGH SEAS TREATY CRUNCH TIME: Diplomats expect to reach a deal on the text of a new international treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas. Why does this treaty matter? It's the culmination of 20 years of global debate and negotiation around what constitutes sustainable use of marine resources. BY THE NUMBERS — 76: The number of countries where former prime ministers and presidents have been jailed or prosecuted since 2000, per Dave Lawler. Among them are G-20 nations including France, South Korea, Brazil and Argentina. Oh, and the affidavit for the FBI search of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence is due to be unsealed (though redacted) at 12 p.m. EST. CONGRESS MEETS WORLD REMINDER — ONE QUARTER OF AMBASSADORSHIPS REMAIN UNFILLED. CLIMATE CORNER TEXAS VS. WALL STREET Here's my contrarian take on efforts by Republican-led Texas (and some smaller U.S. states) to ban or limit companies that follow ESG guidelines in their investment practices. Think of it as the upside-down version of what the European Union tries to do — use its market power to shape practice. The EU does this either by adopting rules which they encourage others to subsequently adopt, creating a global ripple effect to implement their world view; or the EU uses the threat of blocking access to its massive market (450 million relatively rich consumers) to force behavior change on a company, for example via chemicals rules or antitrust regulation. The backstory: Texas is barring 349 investment funds from doing business with the state, and 10 other financial services companies, mostly European. The claim is that these companies are implementing fossil fuel boycotts. The 10 companies are: BlackRock, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Jupiter Fund Management, Nordea Bank, Schroders, Svenska Bank, UBS. The move puts companies like BlackRock in an awkward position: forcing them to publicize their extensive fossil fuel investments as a defense against Texas' move, while exposing them to criticism from green groups, given their public commitment to accelerate a transition to a net zero emissions economy. The state said in a fact sheet that it is not targeting all ESG funds, but rather "the subset of funds that include a specific prohibition or limitation on oil and gas investments." But the indicators used by the state used to determine if a fund or company was "boycotting" fossil fuels was quite broad, and included "a score which measures a companies' management of and exposure to key environmental risks and opportunities." Texas' strategy problem: It's not the EU, or even California. The state's slogan may be "everything is bigger in Texas," but the EU's population is 16 times greater and the Lone Star state has none of the EU's six decades of experience playing market-bending games. Note: It's also not barring companies from doing business in Texas — it's merely barring them from doing business with the government of the state of Texas, which Republicans pride themselves on trying to keep as small as possible. The final complication: Blue states like California and New York have the biggest pension funds, which hold more sway with investors. So, overall, while Texas may steal some headlines this week, it's unlikely to reshape these companies, or the trend toward better ESG. For that it would need to try something like California's law to end the sale of combustion engine cars by 2035. EUROPEAN LEADERS TO SKIP CLIMATE FINANCE SUMMIT WITH AFRICA: While seven African leaders are heading for the Netherlands Sept. 5, campaigning for Western leaders to deliver the cash promised to help them cope with the destructive forces of climate change, their European counterparts largely plan to skip the meeting. The host, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte — whose country is partly below-sea-level and which hosts the Global Centre on Adaptation — will be there, but that's about it. Rich countries promised to double their financial support for climate-proofing projects in poorer countries to roughly $40 billion per year by 2025. COPENHAGEN MISSES THE MARK: Copenhagen is giving up its goal of becoming the world's first CO2 neutral capital by 2025. Mayor Sophie Hæstorp Andersen said the Danish capital has already reduced its CO2 emissions by 80 percent, making it a global leader for a large city. But to become completely neutral it would need to eliminate the emissions generated by the city's largest incinerator, which is proving impossible because the facility was ruled ineligible for funding from the Danish government's Carbon Capture and Storage fund. "It's a shame we won't reach it by 2025," said Hæstorp Andersen. "But that's not the same as saying we won't make it by 2026, 2027, or 2028." SYDNEY BANS FOSSIL FUEL ADS: "We need a new narrative that counts the costs and works out what Australia should really be exporting to the world: solutions, not climate destruction, " said Jess Scully, deputy lord mayor of Sydney, announcing the move.
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