Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: May 15, 2016 Edition

Controversial, tough-talking mayor Rodrigo Duterte has registered a big win in the Philippine presidential elections according to a certified poll monitor, sparking worries about the future of reform gains realized under his predecessor Benigno Aquino III.

On May 10, the White House announced that President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima when he visits Japan to attend his final G7 Summit in Ise-Shima. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will accompany Obama on his visit to Hiroshima.

Since Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Peace Memorial Park and Museum during his visit to Hiroshima for the G7 foreign ministerial meeting in April, the prospect for Obama’s visit to Hiroshima has been receiving renewed attention.

May 13, 2016, is the 11th anniversary of the Andijan massacre. There are a number of excellent articles from years past to read regarding the events of 2005, but there’s little new to report. As Human Rights Watch noted today, campaigns to crush dissent remain a feature of political life in Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan maintains a narrative that the violence in Andijan was incited by a terrorist group called Akromiya, founded by Akram Yuldashev. Yuldashev was, at the time, in Uzbek prison after being convicted of a range of crimes relating to the 1999 Tashkent bombings. In January 2016, a month ahead of Yuldashev’s scheduled release, it was revealed that he had died in prison in 2010.

On June 29, 2016, Mongolians will be voting for a new parliament, the State Great Khural, for the seventh time since the country’s democratic revolution in 1990. In its 2016 assessment of political transformation towards democracy, the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI) ranked Mongolia 30th among 129 developing and transition countries. This is significantly ahead of other nations in post-Soviet Eurasia and a great improvement from the country’s 41st rank in 2010.

In an amusing and widely circulated story, it has emerged that a school district in Uzbekistan is payingits teachers in freshly hatched chicks, due to a lack of cash. The teachers, in the city of Nukus, in the Karakalpakstan autonomous republic, are not too happy with this decision as they were not paid in cash last year either, as one told Radio Ozodlik.

“Last year they paid us with potatoes, carrots and pumpkins. This year they are forcing us to take newborn chickens instead of our wages. If we need chickens we can buy them from a market at a much cheaper rate.”

On Tuesday, the United States Navy has staged its third freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea since China started building artificial islands in the disputed Spratly chain. According to a senior U.S. defense official who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, the USS William P. Lawrence, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Fiery Cross Reef. In January 2016, the USS Curtis Wilbur sailed within 12 nautical miles of Triton Island in the Paracel Islands. In October 2015, the USS Lassen sailed within 12 nautical miles of several features in the Spratlys.

Sadiq Khan’s ascendance to power as London’s new mayor is an extraordinary story born of an appreciation of cultural and ethnic diversity and, above all, the acceptance of and respect for different faiths.

In Pakistan, Khan’s win has drawn great interest, only because he happens to be a Muslim and that too of Pakistani origin. Khan’s Pakistani background could very well be described as a coincidence: With the same faith, he could have born in India or Afghanistan, or any other country for that matter.

Ahead of the planned May 12 inauguration of the CASA-1000 project, the World Bank, one of the project’s main financiers, published a Q&A to try and provide answers to sustained criticisms of the project. The $1.17 billion CASA-1000 project aims to supply electricity from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan via a 1,222-kilometer power transmission line. The goal is to supply 1,300 MW of electricity–excess summer generation in Central Asia–to South Asia. Crossroads Asia has published a number of articles critical of the project (here, here and here).

Ashraf Ghani is making his first official visit to Tajikistan to attend the inauguration, underscoring the importance of the project which, if achieved as envisioned would provide much-needed revenue to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and much-needed energy to South Asia. After meetings with his Tajik counterpart, Ghani said“CASA-1000 is not only a project, but a symbol of our resolve and it will reunify the Asia that has fallen apart.”

An apparent environmental disaster off Vietnam’s central coastal region, estimated by some as one of the country’s worst ever toxic spills, represents newly appointed Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s first big political test. How Phuc strikes a balance between foreign investor interests and local community rights in handling the case will set an early precedent for his government’s policy priorities.

The controversy first erupted on April 6 when tons of dead fish, including many deep sea species, began to appear on the shores of central Ha Thinh province. Massive fish fatalities have since been reported in three other central provinces covering a stretch of some 200 kilometers of coastland. Speculation about the cause of the deaths has focused on a steel plant built and operated by Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics through a local joint venture. Reuters reported a first phase of the $10.6 billion planned complex commenced operations in December.

In the tiny French South Pacific collectivity of Wallis, two would-be kings have gone head to head in a dramatic battle for the throne.

A largely Polynesian nation, Wallis and its sister island Futuna were colonized in 1842 and initially administered as part of New Caledonia. Since becoming a French overseas territory in 1959, the islands have been administered by a prefect appointed by Paris. Whilst the prefect alone administers most sectors of government, they have no influence over matters of custom in Wallis and Futuna. Rather, custom is theprovince of the three kings: the Lavelua (the king of Wallis), the Tuiagaifo (the king of Alo) and the Tuisigave (the king of Sigave). Wallis and Futuna are administered in three separate districts that correspond to these ancestral kingdoms.

The current controversy concerns the kingdom of Wallis. The island of Wallis, locally known as Uvea, has been ruled over by generations of the Takumasiva Dynasty since the early 17th century. The modern era has seen the monarchy undergo a series of positively theatrical twists and turns that rival not only the scandals of the British royal family, but the titanic clashes between the Lannisters and the Starks.