There is a growing asymmetry between the media’s mounting demands for Donald Trump to release his tax returns (Hillary has done so) and their diminishing demands that Hillary Clinton release the secret transcripts of her $5000 per minute speeches before closed-door banking conferences and other business conventions.

The Washington Post, an endorser of Clinton, in its August 18 issue devoted another round of surmising as to why Trump doesn’t want to release his tax returns—speculating that he isn’t as rich as he brags he is, that he pays little or no taxes, and that he gives little to charity. Other media outlets endorsing Hillary have been less than vociferous in demanding that she release what she told business leaders in these pay-to-play venues.

When asked last year about her transcripts on Meet the Press, she said she would look into it. When the questions persisted in subsequent months, she said she would release the transcripts only if everybody else did. Bernie Sanders replied that he had no transcripts because he doesn’t give paid speeches to business audiences. Nonetheless she continues to be evasive.

We know she has such transcripts. Her contract with these numerous business groups, prepared by the Harry Walker Lecture Agency, stipulated that the sponsor pay $1000 for a stenographer to take down a verbatim record, exclusively for her possession. .

The presidential campaign is moving into a stage where it will be harder for reporters to reach her. Except for a recent informal gathering with some reporters, Hillary Clinton, unlike all other presidential candidates, has not held a news conference since last December. This aversion to media examination does not augur well should she reach the White House. Secrecy is corrosive to democracy.

Why wouldn’t Hillary tell the American people, whose votes she wants, what she told corporations in private for almost two years? Is it that she doesn’t want to be accused of doubletalk, of “gushing” (as one insider told the Wall Street Journal) when addressing bankers, stock traders or corporate bosses? On the campaign trail Hillary only mimics Bernie Sanders’s tough, populist challenges to Wall Street. The Clintons are not known for answering tough questions or participating in straight talk. Dodging and weaving is what they do and too often they get away with it.

Hillary is the clear reported choice for president not just by the Wall Street crowd. The champions of the military-industrial complex love her variety of extreme hawkishness, which rings the cash registers for ever more military weapons contracts.

As the Sanders uprising dims, Hillary can be seen already returning to her former militarized foreign policy. On the last day of the Democratic Convention, the stage’s military presence foreshadowed her return to militarism. Her supporters shouted “U.S.A., U.S.A.” to drown out the Sanders shoutouts for peace and justice. Hillary’s supporters sounded like the jingoistic Republicans. She’s been endorsed by numerous retired Pentagon, C.I.A. and N.S.A. officials who find Trump’s “Why can’t we get along with Russia and China?” statements disturbing to their world views.

Where Trump’s White House is seen as utterly unpredictable, Hillary’s White House is utterly predictable: more Wall Street, more military adventures. As Senator and Secretary of State she has never seen a weapons system or a war that she didn’t support. Remember her singular pressure to attack Libya over the objections of then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who asked, “What happens after the regime is overthrown?”

Hillary’s judgement and experience regarding Libya resulted in an ongoing, spreading disaster of violence and chaos in that war-torn country and its neighboring countries to the south.

It is bad enough that monetized politicians and the mass media reduce voters to the status of spectators, excluded from injecting their issues, and their perceived injustices into the electoral campaigns. Now people are told to stop complaining when candidates such as Hillary Clinton tell the gilded few what she and they don’t want many of us to hear.

To help people prevail against the refusals to disclose by Hillary and Donald, I’ve made two videos you may wish to see and share.

On Hillary Clinton’s Transparency.

On Donald Trump’s Transparency.

On Sunday 7th August 2016 ordinary Thais were forced, at gun point, to take part in the junta’s sordid “Constitution Referendum”.

These hardworking and decent Thai people did so knowing that if they campaigned against the referendum they could be arrested, tried in a military court and thrown into one of Thailand’s horrific prisons for a decade. These same Thai people also knew the junta’s spectacular capacity for violence – the pile of 100 bullet-ridden corpses from the 2010 Bangkok Massacre testament to the last time they dared confront the Thai military – and that their unelected dictator, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, had a ready willingness to brutally suppress them again should the opportunity arise. Finally, Thai citizens knew that if they rejected the constitution worse could await them – Prayuth himself had repeatedly threatened to impose an even more anti-democratic constitution on Thais should they dare to refuse to back his squalid charter.

So the ordinary people of Thailand took the only choice they could – they voted for the constitution. On a very low turnout of roughly 55% (the last full & free general election in 2011 had a turnout of 75%) just over 61% voted in favour. This “yes” vote represents 33.5% of the Thai electorate – hardly the kind of ringing endorsement such a constitutional change needs. However, we must state here we fully respect the will of the Thai people and fully understand that given the choices available to them they took the best option they could. But we make this statement this with a very heavy heart and huge misgivings as Sunday’s referendum dealt another hammer blow to the democratic aspirations of ordinary Thais.

The constitution itself – we discussed it previously here – is essentially a document designed to cut away the legitimacy of the elected house of representatives. This new constitution removes the power to amend the constitution from representatives legitimately elected by the Thai people and hands it over to the unelected senate which will include members of the military. Put simply, executive power no longer rests will a body democratically mandated by the Thai people. Democracy is abrogated.

Yet, such is the yearning for Thais to have Prayuth removed from office, for the whip hand of the military courts to cease their repression and for the power-crazed Thai Army thugs to return to their barracks, that they voted for this aberration of a constitution. At least Thais can now look forward to some kind of promised “elections” in 2017 and a return to a modicum of civilian rule.

Of course a few Thais did attempt to push-back against both the referendum and the constitution. Unsurprisingly these brave people were immediately repressed by the draconian military government – some sources are citing that almost 200 people have been arrested for simply campaigning for a “no vote” by the Thai Army in the run up to the referendum. The fate of these 200, at the time of writing, is unknown but many could face lengthy prison terms.

The international reaction to the “DemExit Referendum” has been noticeable by its almost complete and shameful absence. A few human rights groups have made a handful of cursory statements and Bangkok’s notoriously insipid Western media correspondents have mouthed a few platitudes but the governments of Europe and North America have been almost completely silent.

The net result is that the Thai people’s exit from democracy has been little more than a fait accompli enforced by a military government and ignored by the world.

We continue to offer support to those seeking a genuine Thai democracy and call on the international community to condemn, without any reservation, the terrible hand forced upon the Thais and the ongoing destruction of their democracy.

In order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on the present, however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside.

In the case of the creation of Islamic State, for instance, the United States’ policy analysts are willing to concede that invading Iraq back in 2003 was a mistake that radicalized the Iraqi society, exacerbated the sectarian divisions and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government; similarly, the war on terror era political commentators also “generously” accept that the Cold War era policy of nurturing the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.

The corporate media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the creation of Islamic State and myriads of other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has as much to do with the unilateral invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the previous Bush Administration as it has been the consequence of the present policy of Obama Administration in Syria of training and arming the Sunni militants against the Syrian regime since 2011-onward, in fact, the proximate cause behind the rise of Islamic State, al Nusra Front and myriads of Sunni jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has been Obama Administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.

Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of the insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle” during the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian insurgencies of today, it is simply beyond the power of minor regional players and their nascent media, that has a geographically and linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them; only the Western mainstream media, that has a global audience and which serves as the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments, has perfected this game of legitimizing the absurd and selling the Satans as saviors.

It is very easy to mislead the people merely by changing the labels while the content remains the same – call the Syrian opposition moderate and nationalist rebels or insurgents and they would become legitimate in the eyes of the Western audience, and call the same armed militants “jihadists or terrorists” and they would become illegitimate. How do people expect from the armed thugs, whether they are Islamic jihadists or supposedly “moderate” and nationalist rebels, to bring about democratic reform in Syria or Libya?

For the whole of the last five years of the Syrian civil war the focal point of the Western policy has been that “Assad must go!” But what difference would it make to the lives of the Syrians even if the regime is replaced now when the whole country has been reduced to rubble? Qaddafi and his regime were ousted from power in September 2011; five years later Tripoli is ruled by the Misrata militia, Benghazi is under the control of Khalifa Haftar who is supported by Egypt and UAE and a battle is being fought in Sirte between the Islamic State-affiliate in Libya and the so-called Government of National Accord.

It will now take decades, not years, to restore even a semblance of stability in Libya and Syria; remember that the proxy war in Afghanistan was originally fought in the ‘80s and even 35 years later Afghanistan is still in the midst of perpetual anarchy, lawlessness and an unrelenting Taliban insurgency.

The only difference between the Soviet-Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s, that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian jihads 2011-onward is that the Afghan Jihad was an overt jihad – back then the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Pakistani ISI which then forwards such weapons to the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) to combat Soviet Union’s troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore, this time around they have waged covert jihads against the “unfriendly” Qaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, in which the Islamic jihadists (terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels” to the Western audience. It’s an incontrovertible fact that more than 90% of militants operating in Syria are either the Islamic jihadists or the armed tribesmen, and less than 10% are those who have defected from the Syrian army or otherwise have secular and nationalist goals.

Notwithstanding, unlike al Qaeda, which is a terrorist organization that generally employs anticolonial and anti-Zionist rhetoric to draw funds and followers, Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front, both, are basically anti-Shi’a sectarian outfits. By the designation “terrorism” it is generally implied and understood that an organization which has the intentions and capability of carrying out acts of terrorism on the Western soil. Though, Islamic State has carried out a few acts of terrorism against the Western countries, such as the high profile November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 Brussels bombings, but if we look at the pattern of its subversive activities, especially in the Middle East, it generally targets the Shi’a Muslims in Syria and Iraq.

A few acts of terrorism that Islamic State has carried out in the Gulf Arab States were also directed against the Shi’a Muslims in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia and Shi’a mosques in Yemen and Kuwait. Moreover, al Qaeda Central is only a small band of Arab militants whose strength is numbered in several hundreds, while Islamic State is a mass insurgency whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, especially in Syria and Iraq.

Additionally, Syria’s pro-Assad militias are comprised of local militiamen as well as Shi’a foreign fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and even Hazara Shi’as from Afghanistan. And Sunni jihadists from all over the region have also been flocking to the Syrian battlefield for the past five years. A full-scale Sunni-Shi’a war has been going on in Syria, Iraq and Yemen which will obviously have its repercussions all over the Middle East region where Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have coexisted in peace for centuries.

Regardless, it should be kept in mind here that the Western interest in the Syrian civil war has mainly been about ensuring Israel’s regional security. The Shi’a resistance axis in the Middle East, comprised of Iran, the Syrian regime and their Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah, posed an existential threat to Israel; a fact which the Israel’s defense community realized for the first time during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War.

When protests broke out against the Qaddafi and Assad regimes in Libya and Syria, respectively, in early 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, under pressure from the Zionist lobbies, the Western powers took advantage of the opportunity provided to them and militarized those protests with the help of their regional allies: Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States.

All of the aforementioned states belong to the Sunni denomination and they have been vying for influence in the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to June 2014, when Islamic State occupied Mosul, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional allies and the Sunni jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a resistance axis. In accordance with this pact, Sunni militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in border regions of Turkey and Jordan.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the Sunni jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and started conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni jihadists battling against the Syrian regime, i.e. the Islamic State, after the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and threatened the capital of another steadfast American ally: Masoud Barzani’s Erbil in the oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan.

After that reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Shi’a regime, the momentum of Sunni Arab jihadists’ expansion in Syria has stalled and they now feel that their Western allies have committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause; that’s why, they feel enraged and they are once again up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the Paris and Brussels attacks has been critical: Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, Obama Administration started bombing Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014 and after a long time first such incident of terrorism took place on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and then the November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 Brussels bombings.

Ramen noodles are supplanting the once popular cigarettes as a form of currency among state prisoners, but not in response to bans on tobacco products within prison systems, finds a new study.

Instead, study author Michael Gibson-Light, a doctoral candidate in the University of Arizona School of Sociology, found that inmates are trying to figure out ways to better feed themselves as certain prison services are being defunded.

The rise of ramen as currency in prison signals “punitive frugality,” indicating that the burden and cost of care is shifting away from prison systems and onto prisoners and their support networks, said Gibson-Light, who will present his research at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

“Punitive frugality is not a formal prison policy, but rather an observable trend in prison administration practice in institutions throughout the country,” Gibson-Light said.

“Throughout the nation, we can observe prison cost-cutting and cost-shifting as well as changes in the informal economic practices of inmates,” he said. “Services are cut back and many costs are passed on to inmates in an effort to respond to calls to remain both tough on crime and cost effective.”

The research Gibson-Light will present is part of a larger project investigating the lives of inmate laborers in a male state prison in the U.S. Sunbelt. During his 12-month investigation from May 2015 to May 2016, Gibson-Light conducted interviews with nearly 60 inmates and prison staff members, and also observed prisoners involved in work. Ultimately, he began to study monetary practices among inmates, and how such men were responding to declining services.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons reported that states spent about $48.5 billion on corrections in 2010, marking a 5.6 percent decline compared with 2009, and that — dating back to 1982 — per capita state corrections expenditures have not kept pace with the number of inmates.

“Prison staff members as well as members of the inmate population provided narratives of the history of changes in prison food — the past few decades have seen steady decreases in the quality and quantity of inmate food,” Gibson-Light said.

“Prisoners are so unhappy with the quality and quantity of prison food that they receive that they have begun relying on ramen noodles — a cheap, durable food product — as a form of money in the underground economy,” he said. “Because it is cheap, tasty, and rich in calories, ramen has become so valuable that it is used to exchange for other goods.”

Those other goods include other food items, clothing, hygiene products, and even services, such as laundry and bunk cleaning, Gibson-Light said. Others use ramen noodles as bargaining chips in gambling when playing card games or participating in football pools, he said.

And ramen noodles are not merely replacing cigarettes. Gibson-Light said the same is happening with noodles replacing stamps and envelopes as forms of in-demand currency.

Gibson-Light believes it is important to highlight the clear connection between prison practices and the daily lives of inmates and their support networks.

Although Gibson-Light’s findings are related to his study at one prison, he points to other investigations indicating that the trend toward using ramen noodles for exchanges is evident in prisons that have not banned tobacco use.

“What we are seeing is a collective response — across inmate populations and security levels, across prison cliques and racial groups, and even across states — to changes and cutbacks in prison food services,” he said.

Gibson-Light called for a deeper study of prison food services, and what implications the decline in support could mean for the quality of care for prisoners.

“The form of money is not something that changes often or easily, even in the prison underground economy; it takes a major issue or shock to initiate such a change,” he said. “The use of cigarettes as money in U.S. prisons happened in American Civil War military prisons and likely far earlier. The fact that this practice has suddenly changed has potentially serious implications.”

A University of Alaska Fairbanks-led research project has provided the first modern evidence of a landscape-level permafrost carbon feedback, in which thawing permafrost releases ancient carbon as climate-warming greenhouse gases.

The study was published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The project, led by UAF researcher Katey Walter Anthony, studied lakes in Alaska, Canada, Sweden and Siberia where permafrost thaw surrounding lakes led to lake shoreline expansion during the past 60 years. Using historical aerial photo analysis, soil and methane sampling, and radiocarbon dating, the project quantified for the first time the strength of the present-day permafrost carbon feedback to climate warming. Although a large permafrost carbon emission is expected to occur imminently, the results of this study show nearly no sign that it has begun.

The study used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of methane emitted from expansion zones, where Arctic lakes have recently grown to consume and thaw terrestrial permafrost. The age of that methane mirrors that of the ancient permafrost soil thawing alongside and beneath the lakes, and provides the largest known dataset of radiocarbon dated methane emissions.

The data is important for climate change models, since the emissions released by thawing permafrost could significantly affect levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Old carbon isn’t part of that equation if it remains trapped in frozen soil, but it’s released as methane and carbon dioxide when permafrost soils thaw and decompose.

Walter Anthony said the billions of tons of carbon stored in permafrost are about twice the amount that is currently in the atmosphere. Many researchers are concerned that if old carbon begins to cycle it could create a feedback loop — its emissions contribute to warming, which again contributes to the thawing of more permafrost.

“If you open the freezer door, you thaw permafrost soil that’s been frozen for a long time, and the organic matter in it is decomposed by microbes,” Walter Anthony said.

Grosse, a co-author of the study from the German Alfred Wegener Institute, said climate change researchers are increasingly concerned about how fast that thaw and release of carbon may happen, and whether the process has already accelerated in recent years.

The new study found the rate of old carbon released during the past 60 years to be relatively small. Model projections conducted by other studies expect much higher carbon release rates — from 100 to 900 times greater — for its release during the upcoming 90 years. This suggests that current rates are still well below what may lay ahead in the future of a warmer Arctic.

Determining the rate of old carbon release from permafrost had been a challenge for researchers, since vegetation that grows in thawed permafrost in forest and tundra systems releases its own modern organic carbon into soils, which readily decomposes and dilutes the “old carbon” signal from thawing permafrost soils. The research team led by Walter Anthony focused on methane emissions from lakes, where permafrost thaws much deeper than on land. Methane that forms in deeply thawed soils beneath lakes generates bubbles that rapidly rise to escape from lakes without mixing with younger surface carbon.

It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one — not even the best cryptographers — has cracked.

Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich Manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.

The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, emerging only occasionally.

But after a ten-year quest for access, Siloe, a small publishing house nestled deep in northern Spain, has secured the right to clone the document — to the delight of its director.

“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” says Juan Jose Garcia, sitting on the top floor of a book museum in the quaint centre of Burgos where Siloe’s office is, a few paved streets away from the city’s famed Gothic cathedral.

“It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time… it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.”

Eternal youth? Da Vinci?

Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich — so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.

The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones — a number which is a palindrome, or a figure that reads the same backwards or forwards — after the success of their first facsimile that they made 696 copies of… another palindrome.

The publishing house plans to sell the facsimiles for 7,000 to 8,000 euros ($7,800 to $8,900) apiece once completed — and close to 300 people have already put in pre-orders.

Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke Library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript.

“We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,” he said.

“It also enables libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and we will use the facsimile ourselves to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested.”

The manuscript is named after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who bought it around 1912 from a collection of books belonging to the Jesuits in Italy, and eventually propelled it into the public eye.

Theories abound about who wrote it and what it means.

For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail.

But that theory was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438.

Others point to a young Leonardo da Vinci, someone who wrote in code to escape the Inquisition, an elaborate joke or even an alien who left the book behind when leaving Earth.

Its content is even more mysterious.

The plants drawn have never been identified, the astronomical charts don’t reveal much and neither do the women.

Does the book hold the key to eternal youth? Or is it a mere collection of herbal medicine and recipes?

Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan’s “Purple” cipher during World War II.

But the only person to have made any headway is… Indiana Jones, who in a novel featuring the fictitious archeologist manages to crack it.

Fiction aside, the Beinecke Library gets thousands of emails every month from people claiming to have decoded it, says Rene Zandbergen, a space engineer who runs a recognised blog on the manuscript, which he has consulted several times.

“More than 90 percent of all the access to their digital library is only for the Voynich Manuscript,” he adds.

>The art of cloning

Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains over 200 pages including several large fold-outs.

It will take Siloe around 18 months to make the first facsimiles, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale.

Workers at Siloe are currently making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real deal.

The paper they use — made from a paste developed by the company — has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.

Once printed, the pages are put together and made to look older.

All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret by Garcia, who in his spare time has also tried his hand at cryptology.

“We call it the Voynich Challenge,” he says.

“My business partner… says the author of the Voynich could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery.”

By Cecil Victor*

These were the mainstay of colonial empires east of Suez for many decades. With China announcing its “largest flying boat in the world” and India placing orders for 18 from Japan, the strategic environment in the Asia-Pacific oceanic region is about to become murkier than ever.

Also known as ‘amphibians’ for being able to take off and land on water as well as operate from terrestrial bases, these platforms lend themselves to a multitude of operations. From search and rescue to firefighting on land, anti-piracy operations, logistics support and surveillance and reconnaissance they will be useful in what the Chinese say (almost in an aside) for ‘strategic purposes’ in the disputed South China Sea.

Thus, given the massive investment in the overland economic corridor with Pakistan, it should be expected that the Chinese flying boat AV-600 can be deployed at the Gwadar-Pasni naval facilities on the Makran coast of Balochistan in Pakistan. From there with support facilities in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and Seychelles off the East African coastline the Chinese will be able to use the 5,500-km range of the aircraft for surveillance and reconnaissance in support of its maritime Silk Route and ‘one-road, one belt’ proposition in the Indian Ocean region.

It will be able to deploy up to 50 passengers (or marine commandos) at a speed of 570 kmph anywhere along the western coast of peninsular India within about two hours. Mischief in the Sir Creek disputed area in Gujarat in the North Arabian Sea can happen in minutes given its proximity to Karachi and Pasni.

The Chinese AV-600 has a maximum takeoff capacity of 53,500 kg while the Indian flying boat (the Japanese ShinMaywa U-2) has a payload of 43,000 kg for a take-off from water. Overall, the Chinese will be able to deploy two-and-a half times more personnel than the Indian Navy. This is in keeping with the Chinese military philosophy of ensuring more boots on the ground than any likely adversary (in spite of a drawdown of about three hundred thousand military personnel in recent times).

Intriguing is the single capability (search and rescue) attributed to the Japanese flying boat that India has acquired. This could be a product of Japanese post-war constraints preventing it from selling military equipment. But Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has recently taken steps to break out of a “self-defence force only“ injunction to deal with the evolving geostrategic environment in the Pacific Ocean caused by Chinese military assertiveness.

India has long ago broken the mould of “single capability” military platforms to upgrade its flying machines to “multi-role” capability. Its search for a “MMRCA” (medium multi-role combat aircraft) to replace the MiG-21 and MiG-27 says it all.

Similarly, India’s flying boat needs to be fitted out for multi-role operations. Search and Rescue is very important given the abject failure to swiftly search out the debris of a Coast Guard aircraft and, more recently the Indian Air Force An-32 that took off from Tamil Nadu for the Andamans.

Given that Chinese nuclear submarines have made it a habit to creep into Sri Lankan waters, India needs a better platform for submarine detection in the Indian Ocean region. The ‘low and slow’ capability of a flying boat can be put to good use in anti-submarine operations especially because it is capable of sitting in the water and using a “dunking sonar” (that which can be dipped into the sea to various levels) to scan the spaces within thermal layers which airdropped (as from the sonobouys dropped from the Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft acquired from the US) sensors cannot penetrate. This is because the sonar ‘ping’ is deflected (and not reflected) by the thermal layer giving the wrong impression that there is no submarine in the sea. It was with the skilful use of such thermal layers that a Chinese submarine captain was able to hide his boat and emerge within the defensive cordon of a US aircraft carrier in the South China Sea some years ago.

As is obvious this anti-submarine capability is a critical requirement in an Indian flying boat.

The small passenger capacity of 20 personnel or 12 stretchers need not be a handicap vis-a-vis the Chinese. Twenty marine commandos with their special skills and equipment is large enough to do extensive damage to an enemy.

It is in the intrinsic surveillance and reconnaissance role that flying boats can better serve Indian national interests during patrols in and around the outlying Andaman and Nicobar Islands that guard the Malacca Strait route and the south of Indonesia approach to the Indian Ocean. Detection and tracking of both submerged platforms and flying machines at this distance from the Indian mainland will give adequate advance warning to enable suitable counter-measures.

Given the expanse of the Indian Ocean region India needs more than the 18 flying boats it has ordered from Japan. A more optimum use of this fleet can be achieved by the introduction of an airborne refuelling facility. This will not only increase the range of each flying boat but also nearly double the ‘time on station’ which makes for better intelligence gathering and consequently better preparedness.

*Cecil Victor is an Indian defence analyst. Send your comments/feedback to: southasiamonitor.org

Some economists are approaching a consensus that the Eurozone’s financial architecture is now resilient enough to withstand another shock similar to that of 2010-11. This column argues that such a view may be overly optimistic. Economic and financial instability persists in member states and the banking sector, and institutions to tackle a shock remain incomplete. While the Eurozone remains vulnerable to a bad shock, the blanket application of burden sharing without consideration of current economic and financial conditions is unwise.

By Stefano Micossi*

On 25 June, Vox published a column –  “Making the Eurozone more resilient: What is needed now and what can wait”, signed by an impressive list of ‘Resiliency Authors’ – arguing that the Eurozone now has an adequate financial architecture for coping with another ‘bad shock’, and that what needs to be done “mostly [is] to make sure that the rules in place can be enforced” (Resiliency Authors 2016).¹ I would like to explain why I feel that this view may prove optimistic and, more importantly, that the careless implementation of existing rules may become the very source of a new bad shock.

Is the glass half-full or is it half empty?

The Resiliency Authors share the view that the Eurozone has not resolved the problem of risk sharing that lay at the root of the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-12. They recognise that the ESM is too small to provide sufficient resources in case of a shock hitting the sovereign debt of a large country such as Italy, while its decision-making procedures would not ensure the prompt action needed to stop a financial market rout. They also see that the Single Resolution Fund may prove too small to meet a major shock hitting a large cross-border bank or an important segment of a national banking system, but hold that in case of need the ESM would be allowed to step in. And they see the lack of cross-border deposit insurance (EDIS) as something to be fixed over time, but not urgent. In sum, the glass in their view is half-full, and they maintain that what we have is sufficient to rule out a new bad shock.

I rather see the glass as half-empty. I fear that the combination of extensive economic and financial fragility in some member states and large segments of the banking system on one hand, and an incomplete institutional set up on the other, create sufficient opportunities and incentives for financial investors to test the system’s resiliency – they may only waiting for some trigger to coordinate expectations, and then launch the attack (and the after-shocks of Brexit could well provide that trigger). Should that happen, a new bad shock could well arrive, similar to that of 2010-11.

Why financial stability in the Eurozone cannot be taken for granted

I see three main reasons why the Eurozone remains exposed to a new shock bad enough to endanger its survival. First of all, the re-emergence of severe stress in the Eurozone financial markets is likely to lead to the same acrimonious and publicly voiced disagreements on the source of the shock and its remedies as when the Greek public sector woes first came to full light in 2010. In this regard, failure to agree on working risk-sharing arrangements for sovereign and banking risks reflects fundamentally different, and indeed incompatible, views on the way to bring about lasting financial stability to the Eurozone. The latest manifestation of this is the recent decision by the ECOFIN Council to freeze ‘political’ negotiations on EDIS until “sufficient progress has been made on measures for risk reduction” and, furthermore, that any such negotiation will resume in the framework of an inter-governmental agreement, requiring unanimity, and no longer under the normal Community decision making under Article 114 (the legal basis for the internal market legislation). I view this decision as an official declaration that the sovereign-bank doom loop may restart at any time.

It is also unclear that the task of meeting a new bad shock could be left solely to the ECB, as has happened so far. For one thing, a repeat of the 2014 OMT hocus-pocus to stabilise the sovereign debt market of a member state under attack without real interventions would probably not work. However, real market interventions could only be initiated after the country concerned had signed up to an economic programme with the ESM entailing “strict and effective conditionality” – i.e. another intergovernmental negotiation,² possibly highly divisive, possibly too slow to allow the required swift action by the ECB. Similarly, a lot of the goodwill of the ECB with German policymakers has been consummated to justify quantitative easing, perhaps entailing a reduced ability for the ECB to make ‘unlimited’ resources available for the stabilisation of financial markets in the periphery. Investors would of course recognise the predicaments of the central bank. An ominous sign, in this regard, has been that peripheral sovereigns’ risk premia over the Bund have returned to levels that had not been seen since the start of quantitative easing, following the Brexit referendum.

Finally, the reason why a bad shock cannot be ruled out is that the Eurozone is still plagued by severe imbalances in its banking and financial system. According to the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report, one in three banks in the Eurozone must confront severe challenges due to legacy issues (900 billion of non-performing loans and an unspecified amount of toxic assets), and the need to revise business models to respond to a sharply modified economic environment, and adapt to taxing regulatory changes. Let me note in passing that the Italian banking system only makes up for about a third of the bad loans, and is virtually clean of other toxic assets. As bank stocks often trade at heavy discounts from book value, raising fresh capital in the market can be prohibitively expensive, raising the cost of capital well above the banks’ ability to remunerate it. This aggregate fragility has come to the fore after the British referendum, with bank stocks sinking to new lows throughout European markets (Figure 1).

The rules on burden sharing and bail-in for state aid to banks

The new rules on state aid and the BRR directive³ require that shareholders and creditors share the cost of any public intervention to shore up bank capital, but they provide the leeway necessary to suspend burden sharing when financial stability may be put at risk.⁴ This risk is stronger when extensive weaknesses plague the banking system.

In such circumstances, expectations of the use of burden-sharing and of the bail-in tool by competition and resolution authorities directly affect the risk of capital instruments in the banking sector and, if not properly governed, may actually become a source of instability rather than firming up the system.

Figure 1 presents data on the evolution of banking stocks in Germany, Italy, Portugal, as well as the Eurozone average.⁵ As may be seen, with the exception of Portugal, quantitative easing had a galvanising effect on banking stocks throughout 2015. In Portugal, over the course of 2014 the authorities decided – in the context of the resolution of the Portuguese Banco Espirito Santo – to apply burden sharing to certain unsecured bonds held by institutional investors. The decision led to the collapse of Portuguese banking stocks – the senior unsecured bond market seized up not only for Portuguese borrowers, but also for all but the largest banks throughout the Eurozone. Similarly, the figure shows that especially depressed stock prices for Italian banks have emerged following the resolution of four local banks in November 2015. It may also be noted that in the charted period the stock index of German banks behaved no better than the Italian index – an alarm bell confirming that bank weakness maybe a systemic feature of the Eurozone banking system, as is well reflected in the concomitant fall of the overall Eurozone bank index.

Figure 1 Bank stock indexes, selected Eurozone countries (02 January 2015 = 100)
Note: Index Eurozone (EZ) = Euro stoxx Banks; Index Italy (ITA) = FTSE Italia All Share Banks; Index Portugal (POR) = PSI Financials Gross Return; Index Germany (GER) = DAX Banks. Source: www.investing.com.

In sum

Two conclusions are worth retaining. First, it would seem to me utterly imprudent to maintain that the Eurozone is no longer exposed to a bad shock, given the lack of adequate risk sharing arrangements. Second, existing rules in EU law do not require the application of burden sharing when this risks financial instability. And indeed, the current financial conditions in the Eurozone seem to require great caution in the application of burden sharing.

The idea that the Eurozone would be made more stable by ruthless application of burden sharing without due consideration to the current economic and financial conditions of the banking system seems to me ill-thought and indeed quite dangerous.

About the author:
* Stefano Micossi, Director General, ASSONIME; Professor, College of Europe; Member of the Board, CEPS, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and CIR Group; Chairman, Scientific Council of the School of European Political Economy, LUISS

References:
Council of the European Union – ECOFIN (2016), “Council Conclusions on a roadmap to complete the Banking Union”, Brussels, 16 June

IMF (2016), Global Financial Stability Report: Potent policies for a successful normalization, April.

Micossi S, G Bruzzone and M Cassella (2016), Fine-tuning the use of bail-in to promote a stronger EU financial system, CEPS Special Report no. 136, April

Resiliency Authors (2016), “Making the Eurozone more resilient: what is needed now and what can wait?“, VoxEU.org, 25 June

Endnotes
[1] The case in point in their view is Italy, on the twin counts that large amounts of non-performing loans are carried in the banks’ books at prices substantially above market prices and that the government “has proven very reluctant” to apply the bail-in rules.
[2] This can take the form of a full macroeconomic adjustment programme or, under certain conditions, of a ‘precautionary’ programme. The possibility of a precautionary programme may offer a way out, but requires the government’s willingness to sign up to a memorandum of understanding on adjustment measures with the ESM well before the country has its back against the wall – something only far-sighted politicians may be willing to do.

[3] Commission Guidelines on state aid to banks of July 2013 and Directive 2014/59 of 15 May 2014.

[4] In its 2013 Communication on the application of Article 107(3)(b) of the TFEU in the banking sector (the Banking Communication), the European Commission stated that, whenever there is a capital shortfall, it will require that any state aid be preceded by all possible measures to minimise the cost of remedying that shortfall, including capital raising by the bank, burden-sharing by shareholders and subordinated creditors, and measures aimed at avoiding the outflow of funds from the bank. However, the Banking Communication provides for an ‘exception rule’ whereby burden-sharing can be derogated, when implementing such measures would endanger financial stability or lead to disproportionate results (point 45). The Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD), like the 2013 Communication, aims to prevent moral hazard by making the bailout of banks virtually impossible and providing that any extraordinary public financial support will normally entail at least some bail-in of shareholders and creditors, in accordance with the order of their priority claims under normal insolvency proceedings. However, under its Article 32 (4), temporary “precautionary” recapitalisations fulfilling certain conditions – that is, when the institution concerned is solvent, and the injection of funds or purchase of capital instruments takes place “at prices and on terms that do not confer an advantage upon the institution” – are permitted without activating the bail-in instrument when they are adopted to remedy a serious disturbance to the economy of a member state and to preserve financial stability.

[5] The indices have been calculated with basis 2 January 2015 = 100 to highlight the initial impact of quantitative easing by the ECB.

You might say it’s your partner or perhaps your mum, assuming you’ve had the sort of tame life a parent would find acceptable.

But you’d be wrong, because tech companies now have more information about you than almost anyone else.

The firm with the largest information stash is likely to be Google, which could theoretically tell an awful lot about your life based on your search history.

But coming in at second place has to be Facebook, the social network which holds gazillions of our photos, conversations and innermost thoughts.

Now Mark Zuckerberg’s firm has revealed the 98 “data points” it holds on all users, which can be found in a new website revealing how it targets users with advertising.

“We want the ads people see on Facebook to be interesting, useful and relevant,” a Facebook spokesman said.

“Like many companies, we use widely available information to help show people better ads. However, unlike many of those companies, we provide information that helps explain this practice, and we give people ways to opt out and help control their experience.”

So here are the facts and secrets Facebook has found out about you or is trying to discover, according to the Washington Post.

1. Your location

2. Age

3. Generation

4. Gender

5. Language

6. Education level

7. Field of study

8. School

9. Ethnic background

10. Income and net worth

11. Home ownership and type of home

12. Value of home

13. Size of your property

14. Square footage of home

15. The year your home was built

16. Who lives in your house

17. Whether you have an anniversary approaching in the next month

18. If you’re living away from family or hometown

19. Whether you’re friends with someone who has an anniversary, is newly married or engaged, recently moved, or has an upcoming birthday

20. If you’re in a long-distance relationship

21. If you’re in a new relationship

22. If you have have a new job

23. If you’re recently engaged

24. If you’ve just got married

25. If you’ve moved house recently

26. When your birthday is coming up

27. Parents

28. Expectant parents

29. Mothers, divided by ‘type’ (which includes ‘soccer mums’ or other maternal tribes)

30. If you are likely to engage in politics

31. Whether you are conservative or liberal

32. Relationship status

33. Employer

34. Industry

35. Job title

36. Office type

37. Interests

38. Whether you own a motorcycle

39. If you’re planning to buy a car

40. If you have purchased auto parts or accessories recently

41. If you are likely to buy auto parts or services

42. The style and brand of your car

43. The year your car was bought

44. Age of car

45. How much money you’re likely to spend on next car

46. Where you are likely to buy next car from

47. How many employees your company has

48. If you own small businesses

49. If you work in management or are executives

50. If you have donated to charity (divided by type)

51. Operating system

52. If you play browser games

53. If you own a gaming console

54. If you have created a Facebook event

55. If you have used Facebook Payments

56. If you have spent more than average on Facebook Payments

57. If you administer a Facebook page

58. If you have recently uploaded photos to Facebook

59. Internet browser

60. Email service

61. Early/late adopters of technology

62. If you are an expat and what country you left

63. If you belong to a credit union, national bank or regional bank

64. If you are an investor

65. Number of credit lines

66. If you are an active credit card users

67. Credit card type

68. If you own a debit card

69. If you carry a balance on your credit card

70. If you listen to the radio

71. What TV shows you like

72. If you use a mobile device and what brand it is

73. Internet connection type

74. If you have recently bought a smartphone or tablet

75. Whether you access the Internet through a smartphone or tablet

76. If you use coupons

77. The type of clothing your household buys

78. Which time of year you do the most shopping

79. Whether you are a ‘heavy’ buyer of beer, wine or spirits

80. What groceries you buy

81. Whether you buy beauty products

82. Whether you buy medications

83. Whether you buy/spend money on household products

84. Whether you buy/spend money on products for kids or pets, and what kinds of pets

85. If your household makes more purchases than is average

86. If you tend to shop online or offline

87. The types of restaurants user you eat at

88. The kinds of stores you shop at

89. If you’re interest in adverts offering auto insurance, mortgages or satellite telly

90. Length of time user you have lived your house

91. If you are likely to move soon

92. If you are are interested in the Olympics, football or cricket

93. If you travel frequently

94. Whether you commute to work

95. The type of holiday you enjoy

96. If you have recently returned from a holiday

97. If you have used a travel app

98. Whether you are involved in a timeshare

By Elise Harris

Instead of giving the usual catechesis during his Wednesday general audience, Pope Francis decided to postpone the speech, leading pilgrims in praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary for the victims of an earthquake that rocked central Italy earlier that morning.

“On hearing the news of the earthquake that has struck central Italy and which has devastated many areas and left many wounded, I cannot fail to express my heartfelt sorrow and spiritual closeness to all those present in the zones afflicted,” the Pope said Aug. 24.

He offered his condolences to all who have lost loved ones, and his expressed his spiritual closeness to those who are “anxious and afraid.”

At least 21 people have been killed and countless buried under rubble after an earthquake hit central Italy early Wednesday morning.

The original 6.2-magnitude quake hit the town of Norcia, about 65 miles northeast of Rome, at 3:36a.m. with several aftershocks following.

According to the BBC, the mayor of Amatrice, one of the worst-hit areas, said “the town is gone.” Officials warn that the death toll will likely continue to rise as rescue efforts move forward.

Pope Francis, hearing that the mayor of Amatrice said his town “no longer exists” and learning that many children are also among the dead, said “I am deeply saddened.”

“For this reason I want to assure all the people of Accumoli, Amatrice, the diocese of Rieti, Ascoli Piceno and all the people of Lazio, Umbria and Le Marche of the prayers and close solidarity of the entire Church,” he said.

The Pope then offered his thanks to all the volunteer and rescue workers assisting in the affected areas, asking Jesus, “who is always moved by compassion before the reality of human suffering, that he may console the broken hearted, and through the intercession of the Virgin Mary bring them peace.”

“With Jesus, let our hearts be moved with compassion,” he said, and invited the some 11,000 pilgrims present to join him in praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.

In addition to Pope Francis’ appeal to prayer, the Italian Bishop’s Conference (CEI) has already decided to donate 1 million euros to the most urgent relief efforts, and have asked that a special collection take place to help raise more money for the affected areas.

In an Aug. 24 communique from the CEI, the bishops said the Church throughout Italy “gathers in prayer for all the victims and expresses her fraternal closeness to the people involved in this tragic event.”

The president of the bishop’s conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, launched a national collection for Sept. 18, set to coincide with Italy’s 26th National Eucharistic Congress, inviting all parishes, religious institutes and lay institutions in the country to participate.

The funds gathered from the collection will go toward relieving those who lost everything, and is “a fruit of the charity” that will flow from the Eucharistic congress and the participation of all “in the concrete needs of the affected populations.”

By Cecilia Remón

President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, better known as PPK, acronyms taken by his political group Peruanos Por el Kambio (Peruvians for Change), took the oath of office on July 28 for a five-year term. Many people were surprised that Kuczynski, a 77 year old neoliberal economist, manifested in his first message to the nation his desire for “a social revolution for my country. I long for a Peru in five years that is modern, fairer, more equitable and socially committed.”

“What does it mean to be a modern country? It means that the inequalities between the poorest and the richest must be reduced by raising the income of the poorest,” he stated.

Two weeks before swearing in, Kuczynski announced the names of the 18 ministers who were to serve in the cabinet, and also appointed economist Fernando Zavala for chairing the Council of Ministers. While most have had experience working for the State, almost all of them come from the private sector. The only one reconfirmed in office who comes from the former government is the Education Minister, Jaime Saavedra Chanduví.

In his speech, Kuczynski listed the commitments for his term of office as: “1. Bring water and sewer services to all Peruvians; 2. Provide quality public education, an education that opens the world to millions of young people; 3. Provide public health services that are sensitive to the patient, timely and effective; 4. Formalize the country, to the maximum extent possible; 5. Build infrastructure to foster development, something we so urgently need; 6. Rid our country from corruption, discrimination, insecurity, and crime, fighting with transparency against all these historical scourges.”

Many analysts agreed that the presidential message was well received by all political camps except for the Fujimorismo members united in the Fuerza Popular (Popular Force) political party.

In the view of Historian Nelson Manrique, it was a speech that was “well-articulated, very well prepared, touching on substantive issues relating to some of the fundamental problems facing the country at the moment.”

“Providing drinking water, quality education, and decent public health to all Peruvians is a program that we all can converge,” he said in his opinion column in La República newspaper.

Witch hunt

However, the swearing in ceremony, attended by the presidents of Argentina, Maricio Macri; of Chile, Michelle Bachelet; of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos; of Ecuador, Rafael Correa; of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto; and of Paraguay, Horacio Cartes, was interrupted by pro-Fujimori legislators who during the message shouted slogans in favor of their leader Keiko Fujimori, who was defeated by Kuczynski in the runoff election on June 5 by a difference of a mere 42,000 votes.

The Fujimorismo won the first round on Apr.10 with 39.8 percent of the votes and won 73 of the 130 congress seats, which gives them almost absolute control of Congress; in contrast, the ruling PPK party has only 18 lawmakers. A week before the runoff election, held on June 5, the polls showed an almost certain victory for Fujimori. However, allegations of ties to drug trafficking in her own ranks, and a strong campaign from the Anti-Fujimorismo sectors, bringing back memories of the authoritarian regime of her father ex-president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who has been in prison since 2007 serving a sentence of 25 years for human rights violations and corruption, thwarted her victory.

For Fujimorista leaders, like Luz Salgado, the current president of the Congress, the victory was stolen from them. In an interview with the El Comercio newspaper, Salgado said the Anti-Fujimorismo “is the result of people who were put in jail, people involved with Sendero and the MRTA,” referring to the subversive groups Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, whose leaders have been imprisoned since 1992, serving life sentences.

Representatives of the No to Keiko group, which brings together citizen groups fighting against Fujimorismo, responded that what Salgado and other Fujimoristas in Congress are trying to do is to criminalize the popular movement and the left by qualifying their members as terrorists.

“With those assertions that we are senderistas and MRTA members, can you imagine what it would have been like if Keiko Fujimori had been elected to rule the country? What a witch hunt it would have been!” Sandra de la Cruz, of the No-To-Keiko movement, told reporters.

Economic recovery

It will not be easy for Kuczynski to govern, whose direct and jovial style has been heavily criticized by conservative sectors. In addition to facing a hostile Congress with an opposing majority that still cannot accept the defeat of their leader in the second round — Fujimori never personally congratulated the winner, and she broadcast a message to the country simultaneous to the presidential message in which she said that “we are going to turn our proposals in our governance plan into laws” —, Kuczynski will be forced to re-launch the country’s economic growth amid an unfavorable international economic environment.

According to economist José de Echave, “the supercycle of international prices of raw materials has reached its end.” Between 2006 and 2015, the average economic growth for the country was 5.8 percent, reaching a peak of 9.1 percent in 2008, according to figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Until 2009 Peru experienced “a period of sustained increase, falling in the wake of the global economic crisis, and a new increase that peaked in 2011-2012,” De Echave stated in presenting the 18th report of the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Peru, held on July 13.

The collapse of international prices of raw materials that had its beginning in 2012, which the Peruvian economy is highly dependent on, slowed the economic growth. From 5.9 percent in 2013, the Peruvian economy fell to 2.4 percent in 2014 and 3.3 percent in 2015, and for this year the World Bank predicts that the economy will grow at a similar rate as last year.

At a press conference with foreign correspondents on July 26, Kuczynski said that to boost the economy “investments will be unblocked” and “the mining sector will be reactivated.”

However, De Echave said that “the drop in mining investment is global. There has been a decline in mining concessions in Peru since 2014 and mining investments will keep falling for the next few years. Currently there are only expansions of old projects taking place.”

“Mining exports began to fall starting in 2011, the mining revenue is negative in so far as the State returns more money to the mining companies than what those companies pay in taxes,” he added. “The volume of mineral production has increased to compensate for the drop in exports.”

Economist Humberto Campodónico said in his column in La República newspaper that if the reactivating momentum of Kuczynski has the “unblocking” of investment as its axis, “one has to question if the problem is the blocking and up to what point [investments] are stopped due to the fall in the economic cycle.”

For Campodónico, the “unblocking” is not enough to revive the economy. “If there are no new driving forces, production diversification and an increase in public investment, there will hardly be an economic recovery, increased employment, income redistribution or increased social inclusion,” he said.

Cyber cooperation remains a prominent area of mutual interest between Singapore and Washington. Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency (CSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently established a formal cybersecurity partnership. This agreement will improve bilateral cybersecurity and potentially create mechanisms for ASEAN nations to better address cybersecurity challenges.

By Harry Hung*

At the invitation of President Barack Obama, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong paid a state visit to the United States from 31 July to 5 August 2016. It was the first official visit to the US by a Singapore prime minister since 1985, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations. The two leaders subsequently released a joint statement, one highlight of which was cybersecurity commitments. These included “broadening and deepening our cooperation to promote an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure global Internet that supports innovation, economic growth and social development.”

Both leaders endorsed a common approach to international cyber stability, affirming that international law applies to state conduct in cyberspace, and committed to promoting voluntary norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. Both governments affirmed their support for a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance and for the protection of human rights online.

Bilateral Agreement to Enhance Cybersecurity

As a key deliverable to PM Lee’s visit, Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency (CSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) co-signed on 2 August a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the Cooperation in the Area of Cybersecurity, which lays a foundation for cooperation on cyber-related issues.

This agreement covers cooperation in key areas that include regular Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERT) to CERT information exchanges and sharing of best practices, coordination of cyber incident response, conducting new bilateral initiatives on critical infrastructure protection, and continued cooperation on cybercrime, cyber defense, and on regional capacity building.

Capacity building efforts include joint exercises, regular exchanges and visits, joint research and development, capability development, and regional cyber capacity building programs or initiatives.

David Koh, Chief Executive of CSA, noted that “Singapore and the US share long-standing warm bilateral relations and a shared vision to ensure international peace…Considering the interdependence in cyberspace between [both countries], the borderless nature of transboundary cyber-attacks would have a significant impact on both countries’ critical information infrastructure.”

Necessity and Importance

Singapore’s CSA has entered into four other bilateral cyber MOUs signed with France, United Kingdom, India and the Netherlands. The agreement with the US is the fifth and an important milestone for both countries. It is the first cyber agreement between an ASEAN nation and the US. While Singapore benefits from accessing knowledge about cyber threats and mitigation responses from the US, Washington will equally gain deeper insights into the cyber threats experienced by Singapore and potentially the South East Asia region.

As cyber threats continue to rapidly evolve, it is often difficult for one nation, corporation or entity to identify, characterise, mitigate, and respond in a timely manner. Both countries are uniquely postured to mutually support one another by bringing together their own global and regional expertise in understanding cyber threats.

Filling in knowledge gaps more rapidly and comprehensively is a key necessity that can only come from shared awareness and understanding, particularly with more advanced and sophisticated cyber threats originating from both state and non-state actors. These knowledge gaps may include specific attribution of adversaries, their capabilities, threat infrastructure, targeted victims, vulnerabilities exploited, mitigation and remediation measures and response actions. This agreement enables the critical information sharing needed to deepen these types of cyber threat awareness, understanding and responses.

Implications for the Future

Both Singapore and the US are becoming more digitally dependent, with Singapore having aspirations to be the world’s first Smart Nation. The creative use of information and communications technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IOT) will undoubtedly bring about significant advances in the way we live, work and play through predictive and automated decision-making based on detailed collected data on individuals.

Public and private organisations stand to considerably improve efficiencies and deliver smart allocation of their resources and services through these innovative solutions. Realising these opportunities will be key motivators that drive rapid development, early adoption and integration of these technologies into day to day life.

However, often overlooked in the design stages of these technological innovations are the cybersecurity considerations and the potential security vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity frequently remains an afterthought that might, if at all, receive attention just prior to integration and or implementation into a larger network. Hackers exploit these vulnerabilities.

Regional cities and countries where cyber capabilities and capacities are still developing will find it increasingly important to improve their cybersecurity posture and response mechanisms. This is especially so as they adopt and integrate new smart technologies into their society. Both the US and Singapore can play a leading role in supporting the cybersecurity efforts for ASEAN nations.

First ASEAN Cybersecurity Workshop

From 16-18 August 2016, Singapore’s CSA, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US Department of State’s Third Country Training Programme hosted an ASEAN Cybersecurity workshop, the first of its kind. This Singapore and US lead diplomatic effort brought together ASEAN cyber officials from both policy and technical offices to discuss developing and implementing national cybersecurity strategies, cyber incident response, multi-stakeholder engagement, private-public partnerships and building a culture of cybersecurity.

Leading cyber experts from government, industry, and academia provided relevant presentations that supported daily country team exercises. The workshop concluded with each ASEAN country presenting their identified lessons learned for cyber coordination and initiatives. This type of diplomacy and engagement mechanism will likely become more frequent, in greater depth and with sharper focus as leaders in ASEAN countries become more accustomed to sharing their cybersecurity challenges, tactics, techniques, and procedures and best practices.

Finally, as Singapore continues to mature CSA and its national cybersecurity posture, this bilateral relationship can help inform current and emerging decisions related to the prioritisation of resources and investment allocations needed to enhance Singapore’s cybersecurity. This remains the most difficult and elusive question in a highly fluid and dynamic global cyber operational environment: how much of what capabilities is enough to ensure there is sufficient and sustainable cybersecurity to allow our citizens, businesses, governments and critical infrastructures to function without significant loss or degradation?

Singapore is in a unique position to take the necessary technological leadership role in enhancing its national cybersecurity posture while supporting the region. The shared insights and experience by both Singapore and the US can be of considerable benefit to the ASEAN countries and to the larger global community as all nations continue to seek ways to improve their cybersecurity postures.

*Harry Hung, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, is a Visiting Fellow from the US Army War College at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is a career US Army intelligence officer whose command and staff assignments include Cyber, Signals Intelligence, and Information Assurance.

By Stephen Blank*

(FPRI) — A year ago, President Obama opined that Russian intervention in Syria would turn into a quagmire. One year later, however, Russia is expanding and consolidating its positions and goals in Syria. Bashar Assad’s rule looks more secure than ever, buttressed by Russian weapons (including chemical weapons), intelligence, diplomatic support, and money. Moreover far from reducing its military footprint, Russia is expanding it. The Duma is about to ratify agreements essentially giving Russia permanent air bases like Hmeymim air base and Tartus. Thus Moscow, for the first time in over forty years, now has permanent bases in the Middle East, both in Syria and in Cyprus. Moreover, it is an open secret that Moscow would like to obtain a base at Alexandria like the one it had in the 1970s. In August 2016 Moscow revealed that it is now operating out of the Hamadan air base in Iran. However, within days the Iranian government pulled the plug on Russia, criticizing its inconsiderate and ungentlemanly attitude. Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan also noted that Moscow acts like and wants to show that it is a great power.[1] Obviously this episode cries out for explanation but it should not be taken as indicating that Moscow has now descended into a quagmire or, in the Russian phrase, stepped on a rake.

While this episode strongly suggests that Russo-Iranian ties are more fragile than Moscow believed, it does not disprove the fact that both sides have hitherto collaborated quite well up to this point in Syria and that they share a common objective of preserving the Assad regime in power. Iran apparently could not stand the publicity about this base and was upset that Moscow had “blown its cover” by announcing it was flying missions form Hamadan. Evidently Tehran would have preferred not to open itself up to charges from the entire Middle East (and presumably Washington) or to the domestic opposition within Iran about letting foreign powers have a military base in Iran from which they could launch sorties with impunity. Indeed, the presence of this base was surprising for the following reasons. Moscow’s acquisition of the right to use an Iranian air base is the first time the Iranian regime has allowed any foreign military presence in Iran, something that contravenes the fundamental message of the Iranian revolution of 1979 that is the regime’s claim to legitimacy. It also represents a violation of UN Resolution 2231 forbidding foreign bases in Iran — passed as part of the 2015 deal to prevent Iranian nuclearization. It may well be the case – though we cannot be certain – that once the implications of this fact became clear to Tehran, notably that it jeopardized the continuation of the agreement with the 5+1 of 2015 regarding Iranian nuclearization and could lead to serious economic harm that second thoughts about having this base prevailed. Beyond that, this base, especially if it had continued, would have extended Moscow’s rapprochement with Tehran and the two states’ military cooperation beyond arms sales. As it is, Iran has not only now acquired the formidable S-300 surface to air anti-pair missile, it is now negotiating for Sukhoi fighter jets. And that negotiation appears to be unaffected by the decision to suspend Russian use of the base.

Russia’s and Iran’s violation of UN resolutions in this context are not totally unexpected, since Iran’s ongoing missile program is also a violation of Resolution 2231. The Russian use of incendiary weapons against civilians in Syria violates the Chemical Weapons Convention going back to 1925. Thus both Iran and Russia have ignored agreements while Washington and the international community look the other way, and are basically saying, we will do as we please whether you like it or not and you either cannot or will not do anything about it. So while this episode suggests that Irano-Russian ties are more problematic than Moscow might have imagined, there is no reason to see here a rupture of those ties or a divide in the fundamental identity of Russian and Iranian interests regarding Syria. Nor is this an obstacle to these two governments’ further cooperation on Syria and other issues.

None of this should surprise anyone. Since Catherine the Great, Moscow has sought bases in the Mediterranean, and even the Adriatic Sea. Thus Catherine’s forces occupied Beirut for 18 months in 1772-74, and a generation later Paul I went to war on behalf of Malta, undoubtedly with similar objectives in mind. Throughout the nineteenth century Russian encroachments on the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans were a fundamental aspect of European diplomacy. In World War I, in the allied negotiations around bringing Italy into the war on the side of the Entente, Russia sought to gain a naval base through Serbia in the Adriatic. Stalin sought bases and colonies in the Mediterranean after World War II; Brezhnev obtained and lost the base at Alexandria. And now Putin has obtained the bases in Cyprus and Syria and has sought a naval base at Bar in Montenegro on the Adriatic and a land base at Nis in Serbia. Indeed, Moscow has consistently sought bases for what is now its Mediterranean Eskadra (Squadron) – even when it did not have the capacity to operate or utilize them – in order to lay down a marker, stake a claim, and force others to recognize it as a great power with a sphere of influence in the Mediterranean. These bases would also challenge NATO’s Mediterranean presence, guarantee Russian freedom of maneuver in the Black Sea, and encircle Turkey, a centuries-old Russian objective.

But the loss of the base at Hamadan does upset Russian plans. Had it been able to preserve that base, Russia would then have been able to project power constantly throughout the Levant, (the Eastern Mediterranean) and the Middle East, and force its way to an equal status with Washington in determining future security outcomes there. Apart from its logistical and tactical advantages in having a base in Iran from which to pursue Syrian targets and objectives, Moscow would also gain from a base in Iran because it could then project Russian air power all the way out to the Gulf where the US Fifth Fleet is stationed. Acquiring such a capability is a long-standing Russian objective; so Iran’s decision does strike at Russia’s larger ambitions. In 2014, Moscow indicated its desire, even well in advance of its actual naval capabilities, to project power into the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, so this base could have been a down payment on that ambition as well. Meanwhile Washington keeps appealing for Russian cooperation in Syria only for Russia to break every agreement and intensify its support for Assad to the point of using chemical weapons in Aleppo, if not elsewhere.

While Russia will undertake the occasional bombing of ISIS, it clearly is more interested in equal status with Washington in an anti-terrorist coalition against Assad’s opponents, not Washington’s. And this is the case even though ISIS clearly presents a threat to Russia by its own admission and has evidently now carried out some small-scale terrorist operations in Russia, even beyond the North Caucasus. Therefore we can expect that Moscow will use its ever-stronger position in Syria and the Middle East to coerce Assad’s opponents still further into preserving his state if not his leadership. It will also likely demand that Washington support Assad’s remaining in power, or at least his regime’s remaining in power. Moscow appears wedded to Assad personally, especially as Putin has told him that Russia would not let him down. So while there may be interludes where the attack on Aleppo is stopped for a while ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, it is most likely that the overall battle will continue on Assad’s and the Russians’ part to vanquish the insurgents and force them to accept his rule over most, if not all of Syria.

We may also expect broader diplomatic initiatives by Russia to extend its weapons and economic connections to Iran, and not only regarding the Middle East. The revelations of a Russian base in Iran suggest as well that Moscow is looking for other bases in the greater Middle East even if this episode has had an unfortunate ending for Russia. In this context we should remember that, since “power projection activities are an input into the world order,” Russian force deployments into the greater Middle East and economic-political actions to gain access, influence and power there represent competitive and profound attempts at engendering a long-term restructuring of the regional strategic order.[2] And that region is not just the Middle East.

The recent tripartite summit with Azerbaijan and Iran clearly signals an effort to involve Iran in the latest of Russia’s transcontinental trade and transportation initiatives of a railway from Russia to Iran thorough Azerbaijan. Moscow will also undoubtedly continue to pursue expanded arms sales to Iran and endeavor to persuade Iran and other Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, to raise energy prices by curtailing production or by some other means. Russia’s position in Syria will undoubtedly be used as leverage to induce Riyadh to accept such ideas although there are clearly no guarantees of success. We can also expect Russian efforts to insert it into schemes for a Gulf security bloc and to sell more weapons to Middle Eastern clients (e.g., Egypt and Algeria). Indeed, past experience shows that energy deals, arms sales, and the quest for Russian military bases are all intimately linked as part of a grand design. Russia will continue, for example, building an anti-access area denial air and ship capability for its Mediterranean Squadron at its bases in Syria, Cyprus, and in the Caucasus as it already is doing.

Finally, Moscow has successfully forced Turkish President Erdogan to come to St. Petersburg and fawn all over Putin, and not just for supporting him against the insurgents who tried to oust him in a coup on July 15, 2016. Erdogan now says Turkey will implement the Turkstream energy pipeline, Akkuyu nuclear plant, and engage in military-technical cooperation with Russia. Indeed, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has offered many recent statements attacking NATO, and all but saying that Turkey will buy weapons in the future from Russia among other producers. Both sides are also establishing a mechanism for ongoing military-intelligence coordination, supposedly against ISIS. Apart from this Russo-Turkish cooperation against ISIS there are signs that Turkey might have to agree to a “decent interval” for Assad to stay in power before leaving as part of a projected settlement. Yet Putin has certainly not stopped supporting the Turkish or Syrian Kurds whom Ankara suspects of having committed recent terrorist attacks in Turkey. Neither is Russia going to be deterred from supporting Assad, and it will only lift its economic sanctions on Turkey dating back to the end of 2015 only gradually. Meanwhile Turkish officials have more than once hinted at offering Moscow access to Incirlik Air Base. Therefore it is hardly surprising that there are mounting reports in the media sounding alarms that Turkey is in fact compromising its membership in NATO as Erdogan ruthlessly moves to stamp out all opposition and re-establish an authoritarian-cum-Islamist state in Turkey rather on the model of what Putin has done in Russia.

Even with losing the base in Iran Russia has achieved virtually all of its strategic aims in Syria including some it had not originally sought or expected. In addition we also see the evisceration of the pro-Western Kemalist Turkey, the expansion of Russian military power throughout the Middle East – even if that expansion has hit a temporary bump in the road – and the continuing disarray – to put it mildly – of U.S. policy. Indeed, insofar as Syria is concerned, it is not inaccurate to say that Washington neither has a strategy, nor a coherent policy, or any idea how to use the instruments of power at its disposal to achieve anything in Syria. One year after intervening, Putin – rather than entrapping himself in a quagmire – has achieved his avowed political and military objectives: coordinating with virtually every Middle Eastern state, exposing the fatuousness of U.S. policy, forcing Washington to accept its leadership in Syria, and establishing permanent and expanding military lodgments, all at a very low and affordable cost. Indeed, it is the U.S. that appears to be in a quagmire in Syria, not Russia. Given this unbroken and consistent series of successes for Putin in the Middle East, the prospect of a Russian quagmire seems low.

About the author:
*Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research institute as well as at the American Foreign Policy Council.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

Notes:
[1] Andrew Roth, “Iran Ends Russian Use of Air Base Because Of Unwanted Publicity,” Washingtonpost.com, August 22, 2016

[2] Henk Houweling and Mehdi Parvizi Amineh, “Introduction,” Mehdi Parvizi Amineh and Henk Houweling, eds., Central Eurasia in Global Politics: Conflict, Security, and Development, International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004), p. 15.

By Rajendra Shende*

It was hotter than normal in Vienna on 22nd July when John Kerry Secretary of State of USA arrived there. He flew straight from international meeting with 45 countries on terrorism related to ISIS in Washington DC to the meeting with more than 190 countries on exceptionally innovative negotiations related to climate change. That demonstrated the unflinching commitment of USA, to address, on top priority, two of the most defining challenges of our times, terrorism and climate change.

He termed the negotiations in Vienna as “ one of the single most important unitary steps that we could possibly take at this moment to stave off the worst impacts of climate change”. That step was about global phase-down of production and consumption of Hydro fluorocarbons (HFCs), one of the six Green House Gases thousands of times more powerful in warming our earth than Carbon dioxide and now widely used in refrigeration and air conditioning including those used in nearly each and every car manufactured on the earth.

There is a strange similarity between ISIS and HFCs. Both are man made. World addressed the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but then that resulted into larger threat to the mankind namely ISIS. World successfully addressed the threat to stratospheric ozone layer by eliminating ozone depleting Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) but then that resulted in the threat of HFCs that contribute to global warming. Like ISIS, HFCs are growing in its threats. The use of HFCs are growing steeply at the rate more than 10 percent due to demand in refrigeration and air conditioning, particularly in room AC and in car ACs.

The negotiators in Vienna faced trying and simmering experience. Vienna was unusually hot. 2015 has already smashed the record for the hottest year since reporting began in 1850. Year 2016 is on the way to even break that record. Till June 2016 each month had been hotter than its precedent. The last decade was not only the hottest decade in the history but 15 of the last 16 years were the hottest on the global record.

Much hyped Paris climate agreement–yet to enter into force- pledges to take action to keep the global warming “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”. The average global temperature rise, as per analysis of NASA of USA, for the first three months of 2016 was already 1.48°C, essentially equaling the 1.5°C. Though it has to be seen if this rise is a longer term trend or influenced by El Nino, the Earth is playing dangerous tango with the rising temperature, getting closer and closer to the target where world community does not want to reach.

If successful, the phase down in production and consumption of HFCs for which Kerry rushed to Vienna can cumulatively avoid the equivalent of more than 100 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2050. More importantly, it promises to bring down the warming by 0.5 deg C by 2100, as per National Academy of Sciences and Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

But there are other magnetic reasons to focus on control of HFCs. Unlike carbon dioxide, the most widely emitted GHG that has atmospheric life of nearly 100 years; many of the HFCs have very short atmospheric life. Reducing emissions of these short-lived climate pollutants would effectively give early benefits and slow the near-term rate of climate change, a dire need in wake of inaction on Paris climate Agreement.

That itself is convincing reason to bring HFCs from Paris Climate Agreement to the most successful Montreal Protocol.

The Montreal Protocol effectively prevented the global burnout from UV rays penetrating the earth’s depleted stratospheric ozone layer by phasing out production and consumption of man–made chemicals responsible for depletion of the ozone layer. More than 98 percent of such chemicals have now been put in history books. World has succeeded in setting the ozone layer in spectacular recovery path as per joint scientific assessment report of World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and United nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released in 2014.

World policy makers are more impressed with the 2015 annual report of UNEP, which stated that the Montreal Protocol, through halting ozone layer depletion, could save an estimated $2.5 trillion in health care costs including those due to avoided skin cancers, cataracts and avoided damages to agriculture, fisheries, and materials. That enormously effective implementation of the Montreal Protocol and hands on experience in addressing the global environmental challenge prompted world’s flirting with HFCs.

Inspired by the success, USA, India, EU, Canada and Mexico along with small island countries have proposed unusual, uncommon but most welcome amendment to the Montreal Protocol to phase down the production and consumption of HFCs.
Unusual, because HFCs-unlike the controlled substances under the Montreal Protocol-are not ozone depleting chemicals. Uncommon, because the Montreal Protocol deals with the control that other international treaty namely Paris Climate Agreement has been mandated to exercise.
Getting HFCs controlled by one international treaty into the control regime of another global treaty is innovative initiative in international environmental diplomacy and it is succeeding. The details, however, are being negotiated by discussion on the amendment proposals made by the countries. India’s proposal stands out and has much wider support as it is most comprehensive in terms of the financial and technological needs of the developing countries and it preserves the principles of the Montreal Protocol including common but differentiated responsibility. The global agreement on amendment is expected by end of 2016.

The creative diplomatic solution is also being found to keep the effective role of both the Montreal and Paris accords in phasing down of HFCs consumption and production.

John Kerry stated in Vienna “The Paris agreement is not a silver bullet. It doesn’t guarantee we’re going to get where we need to go”. HFCs phase down under the Montreal Protocol, therefore seems to be the only show in the town at present that is better than any other options to keep the temperature rise below 2 deg C while pursuing the efforts to limit it to 1.5 deg C.

Flirting with HFCs is necessary to avoid dangerous tango with temperature.

*Rajendra Shende, an IIT-alumnus, is Chairman, TERRE Policy Centre and former director of the UNEP. He can be contacted at shende.rajendra@gmail.com

The best argument for a single-payer health plan is the recent decision by giant health insurer Aetna to bail out next year from 11 of the 15 states where it sells Obamacare plans.Aetna’s decision follows similar moves by UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, and by Humana, another one of the giants.

All claim they’re not making enough money because too many people with serious health problems are using the Obamacare exchanges, and not enough healthy people are signing up.

The problem isn’t Obamacare per se. It lies in the structure of private markets for health insurance – which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. Obamacare is just making this structural problem more obvious.

In a nutshell, the more sick people and the fewer healthy people a private for-profit insurer attracts, the less competitive that insurer becomes relative to other insurers that don’t attract as high a percentage of the sick but a higher percentage of the healthy.

Eventually, insurers that take in too many sick and too few healthy people are driven out of business.

If insurers had no idea who’d be sick and who’d be healthy when they sign up for insurance (and keep them insured at the same price even after they become sick), this wouldn’t be a problem. But they do know – and they’re developing more and more sophisticated ways of finding out.

Health insurers spend lots of time, effort, and money trying to attract people who have high odds of staying healthy (the young and the fit) while doing whatever they can to fend off those who have high odds of getting sick (the older, infirm, and the unfit).

As a result we end up with the most bizarre health-insurance system imaginable: One ever better designed to avoid sick people.

If this weren’t enough to convince rational people to do what most other advanced nations have done – create a single-payer system that insures everyone, funded by taxpayers –  consider that America’s giant health insurers are now busily consolidating into ever-larger behemoths.

UnitedHealth is already humongous.

Aetna, meanwhile, is trying to buy Humana in a deal that will create the second-largest health insurer in the nation, with 33 million members. The Justice Department has so far blocked the deal.

Insurers say they’re consolidating in order to reap economies of scale. But there’s little evidence that large size generates cost savings.

In reality, they’re becoming huge to get more bargaining leverage over everyone they do business with – hospitals, doctors, employers, the government, and consumers. That way they make even bigger profits.

But these bigger profits come at the expense of hospitals, doctors, employers, the government, and, ultimately, taxpayers and consumers.

There’s abundant evidence, for example, that when health insurers merge, premiums rise. researchers found, for example, that after Aetna merged with Prudential HealthCare in 1999, premiums rose 7 percent higher than had the merger not occurred.

What to do? In the short term, Obamacare can be patched up by enlarging government subsidies for purchasing insurance, and ensuring that healthy Americans buy insurance, as the law requires.

But these are band aids. The real choice in the future is either a hugely expensive for-profit oligopoly with the market power to charge high prices even to healthy people and stop insuring sick people.

Or else a government-run single payer system – such as is in place in almost every other advanced economy – dedicated to lower premiums and better care for everyone.

We’re going to have to choose eventually.

This book project on Saudi public diplomacy using primarily the kingdom’s financial muscle has had a long gestation. It focuses on the impact of various policies of the kingdom on Muslim communities and nations across the globe.

In doing so, I will concentrate on Saudi government policy and actions as well as those of senior members of the ruling Al Saud family rather than wealthy individuals who may or may not be associated with them. As a result, theological and ideological differences between various expressions of Muslim ultra-conservatism fall beyond the parameters of what I am looking at.

My thinking on this has evolved in the past year despite having covered the Saudi efforts for many years from very different angles and multiple geographies. The evolution of my thinking is reflected in the fact that were I looking today for a title for these remarks, I’d call it Saudi export of ultra-conservatism rather than Wahhabism. The reason is simple: Saudi export and global support for religiously driven groups goes far beyond Wahhabism. It is not simply a product of the Faustian bargain that the Al Sauds made with the Wahhabis. It is central to Saudi Arabia’s efforts to position itself internationally and flex its muscles regionally as well as on the international stage and has been crucial to the Al Sauds’ survival strategy for at least the last four decades.

There is a lot of talk about Saudi funding of Wahhabism, yet in the mushrooming of Islamic ultra-conservatism in the last half century, Wahhabis as a group form a minority in the ultra-conservative Muslim world. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: For the Saudi government, support of puritan, intolerant, non-pluralistic and discriminatory forms of ultra-conservatism – primarily Wahhabism, Salafism in its various stripes, and Deobandism in South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora – is about soft power and countering Iran in what is for the Al Sauds an existential battle, rather than religious proselytization. One other important aspect is that South Asia has been an important contributor to ultra-conservative thinking for more than a century. Another significant element is the fact that while the Saudi campaign focuses predominantly on the Muslim world, it also at times involved ties to other, non-Muslim ultra-conservative faith groups and right-wing political groups.

Saudi Arabia’s focus on ultra-conservatism rather than only Wahhabism or quietist forms of Salafism allowed the kingdom to not simply rely on export of its specific interpretation of Islam but also to capitalize on existing, long-standing similar worldviews, particularly in South Asia. South Asia is also where the Saudi effort that amounts to the single largest dedicated public diplomacy campaign in post-World War Two history, bigger than anything that the Soviet Union or the United States attempted, had its most devastating effect.

The campaign is an issue that I have looked at since I first visited the kingdom in the mid-1970s, during numerous subsequent visits, when I lived in Saudi Arabia in the wake of 9/11, and during a 4.5-year court battle that I won in 2006 in the British House of Lords, a landmark case that contributed to changes in English libel law.

The scope of the Saudi campaign goes far beyond religious groups because it is about soft power and geopolitics and not just proselytization. It involved the funding of construction of mosques and cultural institutions; networks of schools, universities and book and media outlets, and distribution of not only Wahhabi literature in multiple languages but also of works of ultra-conservative scholars of other stripes. It also involved forging close ties, particularly in Muslim majority countries, with various branches of government, including militaries, intelligence agencies and ministries of education, interior and religious affairs to ensure that especially when it came to Iran as well as Muslim minority communities like the Ahmadis and Shiites, Saudi Arabia’s worldview was well represented.

An example of this is Indonesia where Asad Ali, the recently retired deputy head of Indonesian intelligence and former deputy head of Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), one of the world’s largest Islamic movements that prides itself on its anti-Wahhabism, professes in the same breath his dislike of the Wahhabis and warns that Shiites are one of the foremost domestic threats to Indonesian national security. Shiites constitute 1.2 percent of the Indonesian population, including the estimated 2 million Sunni converts over the last 40 years. A fluent Arabic speaker who spent years in Saudi Arabia as the representative of Indonesian intelligence, this intelligence and religious official is not instinctively anti-Shiite, but sees Shiites as an Iranian fifth wheel. In other words, the impact of Saudi funding and ultra-conservatism is such that even NU is forced to adopt ultra-conservative language and concepts when it comes to perceptions of the threat posed by Iran and Shiites.

In waging its campaign, Saudi Arabia was not alone. It benefitted from governments eager to benefit from Saudi largesse and willing to use religion opportunistically to further their own interests that cooperated with the kingdom wholeheartedly to the ultimate detriment of their societies.

Much of Saudi funding in the last half century, despite the more recent new assertiveness in the kingdom’s foreign and defense policy, was directed at non-violent, ultra-conservative groups and institutions as well as governments. It created environments that did not breed violence in and of themselves but in given circumstances greater militancy and radicalism. Pakistan is probably the one exception, the one where a more direct comparison to Russian and Communist support of liberation movements and insurgencies in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is most relevant.

In many ways, the chicken is coming home to roost. The structure of the Saudi funding campaign was such that the Saudis ultimately unleashed a genie they did not and were not able to control, that has since often turned against them, particularly with a host albeit not all militant Islamist and jihadist groups, and that no longer can be put back into the bottle.

The government, to bolster its campaign created various institutions including the Muslim World League and its multiple subsidiaries, Al Haramain, another charity that ultimately pos-9/11 was disbanded because of its militant links, and the likes of the Islamic universities in Medina, Pakistan and Malaysia. In virtually all of these instances, the Saudis were the funders. The executors were others often with agendas of their own such as the Brotherhood with the Muslim World League or in the case of Al Haramain, more militant Islamists, if not jihadists. Saudi oversight was non-existent and the laissez-faire attitude started at the top. Saudis seldom figure in the management or oversight of institutions they fund outside of the kingdom, the International Islamic University of Islamabad being one of the exceptions.

This lack of oversight was evident in the National Commercial Bank (NCB) when it was Saudi Arabia’s largest financial institution. NCB had a department of numbered accounts. These were all accounts belonging to members of the ruling family. Only three people had access to those accounts, one of them was the majority owner of the bank, Khaled Bin Mahfouz. Bin Mahfouz would get a phone call from a senior member of the family who would instruct him to transfer money to a specific country, leaving it up to Bin Mahfouz where precisely that money would go.

In one instance, Bin Mahfouz was instructed by Prince Sultan, the then Defence Minister, to wire US $5 million to Bosnia Herzegovina. Sultan did not indicate the beneficiary. Bin Mahfouz sent the money to a charity in Bosnia, that in the wake of 9/11 was raided by US law enforcement and Bosnian security agents. The hard disks of the foundation revealed the degree to which the institution was controlled by jihadists.

At one point, the Saudis suspected one of the foundation’s operatives of being a member of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad. They sent someone to Sarajevo to investigate. The investigator confronted the man saying: “We hear that you have these connections and if that is true we need to part ways.” The man put his hand on his heart and denied the allegation. As far as the Saudis were concerned the issue was settled until the man later in court testimony described how easy it had been to fool the Saudis.

The impact and fallout of the Saudi campaign is greater intolerance towards ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, increased sectarianism and a pushback against traditional as well as modern cultural expressions in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali and Bosnia Herzegovina.

It creates a wasteland that Saadat Hasan Manto, a Muslim journalist, Indian film screenwriter and South Asia’s foremost author of short stories, envisioned as early as 1954 in an essay, ‘By the Grace of Allah.’ Manto described a Pakistan in which everything – music and art, literature and poetry – was censored. “There were clubs where people gambled and drank. There were dance houses, cinema houses, art galleries and God knows what other places full of sin … But now by the grace of God, gentlemen, one neither sees a poet or a musician… Thank God we are now rid of these satanic people. The people had been led astray. They were demanding their undue rights. Under the aegis of an atheist flag they wanted to topple the government. By the grace of God, not a single one of those people is amongst us today. Thank goodness a million times that we are ruled by mullahs and we present sweets to them every Thursday…. By the grace of God, our world is now cleansed of this chaos. People eat, pray and sleep,” Manto wrote.

The fallout of Saudi- and government-backed ultra-conservatism has been perhaps the most devastating in Pakistan. There are a variety of reasons for this including,

the fact that Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state rather than a state populated by a majority of Muslims,

the resulting longstanding intimate relationship; between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that long before the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s led to constitutional amendments against the Ahmadis and every Pakistani applying for a passport being forced to effectively sign an anti-Ahmadi oath;

the devastating impact of the jihad itself on Pakistan; and

Pakistan’s use of militant Islamist and jihadist groups to further its geopolitical objectives.

To be sure, the Saudi campaign neatly aligned itself with the manipulation of religiously-inspired groups by governments as well as the United States to counter left-wing, communist and nationalist forces over the decades.

Pakistan had however from the Saudi perspective additional significance. It borders on Iran and is home to the world’s largest Shiite minority that accounts for roughly a quarter of Pakistan’s 200 million people.

The result is that with the exception today of Syria and Iraq and Bosnia in the 1990s, Pakistan is the only country where Saudi funding strayed beyond support for non-violent groups. In Pakistan, the Saudis were at the birth of violent groups that served their geopolitical purposes, many of which are theoretically banned but continue to operate openly with Saudi and government support, groups whose impact is felt far and wide, including here in Britain as was evident with the recent murder of an Ahmadi in Glasgow. These groups often have senior members resident in Mecca for many years who raise funds and coordinate with branches of the Saudi government.

These groups as well as Pakistani officials have little hesitation in discussing Saudi Arabia’s role as I found out recently during a month of lengthy interviews with leaders and various activists of groups like Sipaha-e-Sabaha, Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat, the remnants of Lashkar-e-Janghvi whose senior leadership was killed in a series of encounters with Pakistani security forces, Lashkar-e-Taibe and Harakat al Mujahedeen as well as visits to their madrassas.

I want to conclude by suggesting that the Saudi campaign may be coming to the end of its usefulness even if its sectarian aspects remain crucial in the current environment. Nonetheless, I would argue that the cost/benefit analysis from a Saudi government perspective is beginning to shift. Not only because of the consequences of ultra-conservatism having been woven into the fabric of Pakistani society and government to a degree that would take at least a generation to reverse and that threatens to destabilize the country and the region.

But also because identification of Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism with jihadists like the Islamic State has made the very ideology that legitimizes the rule of the Al Sauds a target witness debates in countries like the Netherlands and France about the banning of Salafism. Bans will obviously not solve the jihadist problem but as Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism increasingly is in the crosshairs, efforts to enhance Saudi soft power will increasingly be undermined.

Thank you

Remarks at 2016 Exeter Gulf Conference

The Japanese government issued its annual Defence White Paper on 2 August. Its contents have become the issue of debate in China, who reacted strongly on its contents. The main highlight of the Defence White Paper is that Japan has called North Korea’s nuclear and missile development a “grave and imminent threat” to the region and international security. The report also criticised China’s increasingly assertive military action in the Asia-Pacific region and its defiance to the ruling on 12 July by the international tribunal on the South China Sea. The significance of the observation in the white paper cannot be missed as the Japanese government under Abe Shinzo is pushing for Japan to take on greater military roles abroad.

The key points in the 484-page report focus mainly on three points: North Korea’s nuclear and missile development program, China’s assertive posture and maritime claims as well as air activity, and China’s interference in the East China Sea. First, the report expressed alarm that Pyongyang is suspected to have achieved the capability to miniaturise atomic weapons for warheads, as well as acquired a missile capable of reaching as far as 10,000 km (6,200 miles), and therefore has “become a grave and imminent threat not only to Japan but also to the security in the region and the international society”.

The second key point is on China’s expanding and assertive maritime and air activity and lack of transparency in China’s military build-up, which have destabilised the military balance in the region. It further observes that some of China’s moves over conflicting maritime claims are “dangerous actions that could create unanticipated situations ….They raise strong concern about what may happen in the future”. The report also observes that China’s land reclamation and construction in the South China Sea are a provocation and recommends that China accept the international arbitration ruling of 12 July aimed at settling its maritime disputes with the Philippines. The document described China’s actions in the disputed waters as “highhanded” and that Beijing is “making steady efforts to turn the coercive changes to the status quo into a fait accompli”.

The third key point is on the East China Sea, where China has stepped up activity around Japanese-controlled islands that both claim. The report expresses concern that a Chinese warship entered water just outside Japanese-claimed waters in the area, “the first case by Chinese Naval combatant ship to enter that contiguous zone”. This year’s 484-report is longer by 60 pages than defense white paper of 2015. In response to the activity of Chinese warplanes, Japan’s Air-Defense Force (JASDF) had to scramble its fighter jets 873 times, of which 571 involved Chinese aircraft during fiscal year 2015 to intercept Chinese military aircraft approaching or introducing Japanese airspace. This number constitutes an all-time high since the defence ministry started to keep records in fiscal year 2001 and also marked a significant increase from 2014 with 464 sorties. While Japan calls the disputed islands the Senkaku, China calls them as Diaoyu.

The White Paper expresses concern that China is “determined to accomplish its unilateral demands without compromise” and without regard to international norms that could result in “unintentional consequences”. There has been a rapid surge in China’s defence budget, by double-digit numbers, since 1989. The Japanese report observes that China has embarked on a rapid modernisation of its military, seen as the largest in the country’s history and the pace of this has been rapid.

The Abe administration is currently making efforts to reinterpret the country’s pacifist constitution, which now permits the government a more proactive approach towards Japanese security, which means “collective self-defence” and limited military support of allies abroad. After having secured a majority in the recently-held elections to the Upper House, the Abe government is emboldened now to invigorate efforts to amend Article 9 of the Constitution to give the government’s push towards making the country a “normal” state. Though this does not come out clearly in the White Paper, the essence of Japan’s intent is obvious. Abe government’s move is in response to the security environment surrounding Japan that has become increasingly severe and the move to change the legislation is intended to contribute to peace and stability of the regional and international community.

The Chinese media did not view the report so kindly. Condemning the report, the official Xinhua news agency noted in a commentary: “’China threat’ and stirs up tensions in the region with a view to justifying Japan’s new security bills and finally moving closer to Abe administration’s long-held goal of revising the country’s pacifist constitution.” The agency also accused Japan of making “irresponsible remarks” on “China’s normal military growth and maritime activities”. It slammed Japan’s security law that permits Japanese troops to work more closely with allies in conflicts outside its territory. Blaming squarely Japan, it observed: “For a country which is reluctant to face up to its ignominious wartime history squarely, its attempts to beef up military power will pose a serious threat to world peace”. The real purpose of the document, it said, is “to tarnish China’s image”.

China’s People’s Daily was equally scathing. Expressing strong opposition to the White Paper, it called the document “hostile to the Chinese military and deceptive to the international community”. China’s Defence Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian said in a statement that the White paper was “full of hackneyed expressions, distorts China’s justified and reasonable defense work, heightening issues in the South China Sea and the East China Sea”. Wu accused Japan of devoting some 30 pages in the 484-page document on China’s “normal and legal maritime activities” in South China Sea and East China Sea, which are “irresponsible”. While asserting the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in East China Sea as “part of China”, Wu accused Japan for hyping the so-called “abnormally close encounter” of Chinese and Japanese military aircraft. He urged Japan to create conditions for improved China-Japan ties through concrete action.
In Japan, the popular Asahi Shimbun in its editorial found fault that the White paper failed to define “the goal or direction of the nation’s defense policy”. The editorial felt that merely listing the threats is not enough; what the report should have, it felt, is that it should have shown direction of the country’s defence policy to the nation and to the world. As the first defense white paper to be published since the enactment of contentious national security legislation in 2015, easing arms exports, the editorial felt that the white paper “should have been more thorough than ever in explaining exactly where Japan’s defense policy is going”.

There are several gaps, it was felt in some quarters. For example, it remained unclear that though Japan’s SDF is beefing up joint military exercises with armed forces of other countries and reinforcing cooperation with some ASEAN nations by providing equipment (for example, Vietnam), the kind of environment that Japan wants to create in the region remains unclear. Given that China is already a major player, the biggest challenge for Japan as also for others is how to integrate China into the global system in a spirit of accommodation and cooperation so that China’s contribution can be useful to the world. Countries tend to be oversensitive to changes happening in their neighbourhood. China is a clear example to this.

Japan can probably be more sensitive to China’s concern and accordingly steer a course whereby its security interest are maintained while at the same time chances of accidental military confrontations can be avoided. Japan also needs to keep in mind the limits of its defence forces to respond to a new situation hindered by the country’s constitutional limitations. At the same time, China should exercise restraint in many of its recent actions.

What some say about Russia/Russians is more of an indicator about the former than the latter. A good deal of commentary is on record about the Olympics and Russia. For a fuller overview, some additional points can be added.

Bigotry has been definitely at play. From Juliet Macur’s July 20 New York Times (NYT) article “First Medal of Rio Olympics Deserves to go to a Whistle Blower”, is this contemptible excerpt: “The whistle-blowers are holding their breath. The Russians and clean athletes are, too.” That kind of sentiment has been expressed elsewhere. Substitute “Russians” for some other group in such a negatively applied way and see the selective outrage. No NYT journo would write a bigoted comparison that differentiates between law abiding citizens and African-Americans, followed by a utilization of crime statistics as “proof” for such a presented contrast.

Like her other NYT Olympic covering colleagues, Macur has been an uncritical cheerleader of their newspaper’s exclusive feature of the Russian doctor, Grigory Rodchenkov, who has made a series of eye opening claims that (to date) haven’t been firmly established. Likewise, The NYT has given uncritical praise to the questionable report by Canadian attorney Richard McLaren, at the behest of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). McLaren’s report is largely based on Rodchenkov’s claims. Rodchenkov hasn’t been accessible for follow-up. Rather than seeking to cover-up the claim of a Russian state sponsored doping campaign in sports, the Russian government has openly sought a further questioning of Rodchenkov.

In his report, McLaren states a need to get it completed by a certain date – with the obvious intent to serve as a tool to further propagate the call to ban the Russian athletics (track and field) team, as well as the rest of their Olympic compatriots before the start of the Rio Olympics. WADA’s bias against Russia has been clear. It was no surprise that the WADA appointed McLaren went along with their line.

A detailed second guessing of McLaren’s report is provided by Rick Sterling in his Counterpunch articles of August 3 “The Biased Report that Led to Banning Russian Athletes” and 12 “Banning Paralympic Athletes to Bash Russia”. I can see instances where McLaren and his supporters will take issue with Sterling. That aspect serves the argument for a greater point-counterpoint scrutinizing of McLaren’s report. Meantime, it isn’t appropriate to fully accept McLaren’s report.

The Russian athletics team got screwed over big time. That wasn’t enough for the heavy anti-Russian advocacy, which sought a complete ban of Russia at Rio.

The suspiciously sudden attempt by the International Association of Athletics (IAAF) and WADA to ban Russia’s lone Rio Olympic track and field participant, Darya Klishina, from competing was rejected on appeal. To the bone, Alexander Mercouris’ August 14 Duran article “Darya Klishina – Last Remaining Russian Track and Field Athlete in Rio Suddenly Banned From the Olympics”, expresses my immediate reaction to the announced banning of Klishina.

It remains to be seen whether the ban on the Russian Paralympic athletes will remain in force. The IAAF, WADA and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) appear out of control in not respecting the rights of Russian athletes. In the interests of fairness, these organizations are in need of a comprehensive outside review and overhaul. Meantime, it’s not impractical to seek some interim scrutiny over the three.

Besides harboring bigoted thoughts about Russia/Russians, some in the West harp on a previous time in history. Matthew Futterman’s July 22 Wall Street Journal article “Why Russia Makes the Olympics Better”, reminisces about evil Soviet era Russians during the Cold War, in conjunction with his stated depiction to fear competing against present day Russian athletes – a reference to whether they’re clean. Futterman doesn’t take into consideration the lack of actual evidence against Russian Olympians en masse, while downplaying the non-Russian use of banned substances in Olympic sports.

Within reason, one can question Futterman’s characterization (in his article) about Soviet period Olympic cheating against the US. I share his view that the US got a raw deal in the 1972 men’s Olympic basketball final against the USSR – a scenario involving some Soviet allied countries on the review panel of that game. On other matters, a bias of that sort isn’t as clear cut. Circa the 1970s, the US wasn’t generally among the top competitors in the very judgmental sports of gymnastics and pairs figure skating.

ally Jenkins’ August 10 Washington Post article “In Vilifying Russian Swimmer Yulia Efimova, Americans are Splashing Murky Waters”, might very well be the most objective US mass media article concerning Russia and the Olympics. Jenkins clearly reveals that Efimova wasn’t acting under a direct Russian “state sponsored” program, with her prior drug offences being quite minor when compared to some other illicit drug taking occurrences. Jenkins’ article isn’t the norm to be found in Anglo-American mass media.

An additional point to Jenkins’ piece concerns US swimmer Michael Phelps’ stern anti-illicit drug taking stand, as a direct follow-up to what his swimming compatriot Lilly King said against Efimova’s Olympic participation. Upon her initial denunciation of the Russian swimmer, King seemed unaware of the previously banned status of American track sprinter Justin Gatlin. After being informed of Gatlin’s prior offences, King said that he should be banned as well. Phelps has taken a cordial selfie with Gatlin, without any mention of doping.

The IAAF head Sebastian Coe’s stated negativity on Gatlin highlights the former’s hypocrisy. Gatlin isn’t the only US Olympic track and field athlete with prior drug offences. Yet, he and other non-Russian track and field drug cheats (US and otherwise) will be competing in Rio, unlike the clean Russian track and field athletes (as well as some of those with a prior banned status, who served the penalty time allotted to them), who Coe approvingly banned.

Only now, does Coe speak of having the Russian track and field team reinstated sooner rather than later. This one time world record holder in the 800 and 1500 meters eloquently spoke out against boycotting the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics where he competed. By denying the clean Russian track and field athletes a Rio Olympics entry, Coe knows better than anyone the damage he has done to them.

Coe/IAAF didn’t give the clean Russian track and field athletes ample enough notice on the dubiously revised standard of needing to train outside Russia for an extended period for Olympic track and field consideration. Never minding that drug cheats can and have existed outside Russia.

Moreover, Coe has openly sought getting the 800 meter drug cheat Yuliya Stepanova approved for Rio competition. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) correctly denied that request. For justice sake, too bad the IOC couldn’t have been more forceful against the IAAF/WADA bias against Russian athletes. Stepanova was busted for doping in Russia. Her changed anti-doping stance came after (not before) she was caught. Stepanova has been continuously involved in caricaturing Russia’s top track and field athletes without clear supporting evidence.

For Coe, she’s the better example of what a Russian athlete should be unlike Yelena Isinbayeva, Sergey Shubenkov, Maria Kuchina, Sergey Litvinov and the other clean Russian track and field athletes, who steadfastly claim innocence with no evidence against them.

There’re other like minded individuals besides Coe who’ve received kid gloves treatment. The former WADA head Dick Pound has been at the forefront in seeking a blanket Olympic ban against Russia.

Pound’s main arguing points are collapsible. He has repeatedly made reference to apartheid era South Africa as one example of a precedent for banning a nation from the Olympics. That absurd red herring overlooks the multiethnic dynamic of Russia’s Olympic team, government and society at large – a far cry from apartheid era South Africa.

Pound is right in saying that innocent apartheid era South Africans missed out on an Olympic opportunity. That view isn’t a legitimate basis to ban Russia from the Rio Olympics. Two or more wrongs don’t make a right. Many of us would like to believe that the international community has evolved in finding workable ways to avoid a primitive collective punishment approach.

Another Pound talking point portrays the Russians seeking to get off in the manner of a speeding violator, who says that other drivers are speeding as well without getting charged. That perception is wrong.

The Russian consensus supports penalizing drug cheats, as opposed to the primitive collective punishment route favored by Pound. I’ve likened his advocacy towards Russia to instances like the driving while black situation in the US. In addition, British academic Ellis Cashmore makes the analogy of revoking the driving license of every resident in a whole town, because a disproportionate minority in such a community (when compared to other towns) are found guilty of wrongdoing.

he collective punishment sought against Russia is premised on the idea of an unproven vast state sponsored doping regimen of athletes. Rather coincidently, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, recently came out with a statement that the late Serb President Slobodan Milosevic wasn’t part of a “criminal enterprise” in Bosnia. (Of possible interest, a sharp difference of opinion on this topic exists between Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Gordana Knezvic and Andy Wilcoxson.)

Aspects of international law are big on conspiracies like the aforementioned “criminal enterprise” and “state sponsored doping” examples, which are used to punish a given group. The banning of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) from the 1992 Summer Olympics was wrong, seeing how other countries at war weren’t banned from the Olympics, for acts that led to many more deaths than what happened in Bosnia. The likes of Efimova, Subchenkov, Isinbayeva, Kuchina, Litvinov and most other Russian athletes, don’t seem to be part of a state sponsored doping program.

Notwithstanding, the Russian government acknowledges a doping problem in Russia and has announced an implemented regimen to curtail that activity. Another subject to tackle is the considerable lack of objectivity within the IAAF, WADA, IPC and a good portion of Western mass media.

For the reasons stated in this essay, the spin portraying a cowardly corrupt IOC of not doing the right thing in completely banning Russia from Rio, isn’t a well founded position. The aforementioned instances against Yugoslavia (in 1992) and Russia (at present) are indicative of a cultural bias.

The methodology of testing for banned substances is regularly updated. Towards the end of the Rio Olympics, it was announced that two Russian athletes were found guilty of doping. One of them involves the 4 X 100 women’s relay team at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the other pertains to a woman shot putter at the 2012 London Summer Olympics.

Along with some other particulars, the timing of the release of these findings, serve to further reasonable question whether the IAAF and WADA have consistently applied standards in monitoring drug cheats. None of the numerous mass media pieces reviewed, address if ALL participants in the aforementioned 2008 and 2012 events were retested.

Assuming that the (aforementioned) retested positive drug findings remain valid and that WADA/IAAF have been consistent in their retesting, I’ve no problem disqualifying the 2008 Russian Olympic 4 X 100 women’s relay team and the 2012 Russian woman shot putter in question. Note that only one of the four woman on that relay team tested positive. That particular athlete has taken action to contest the claim made against her.

On a related front, the suspension of the Russian wright lifting team concerns a sport with rampant doping. (Seemingly more so than track and field.) The Russian weight lifting team’s receipt of Russian government funding doesn’t (without conclusive proof) necessarily mean that there’s a clandestine Kremlin approval for doping.

Hence, the claim of a vast illicit Russian state sponsored doping regimen remains in considerable doubt.

Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic. This article is an updated version of the one which appeared at the Strategic Culture Foundation’s website on August 19.

By James Stafford

We’ve gone electric, and there’s no going back at this point. Lithium is our new fuel, but like fossil fuels, the reserves we’re currently tapping into are finite—and that’s what investors can take to the bank.

You may think lithium got too popular too fast. You may suspect electric vehicles are too much buzz and not enough real future. You may, in short, be a lithium skeptic, one of many. And yet, despite this skepticism, lithium demand is rising steadily and sharply, and indications that a shortage may be looming are very real.

It won’t be a shortage in terms of ‘peak lithium’; rather, it will be a game of catch-up with the electric car boom, with miners hustling to explore and tap into new reserves.

Consider the number of battery gigafactories that are being built around the world. We have all heard about Tesla’s (NYSE: TSLA) Nevada facility that will at full capacity produce enough batteries to power 500,000 electric cars per year by 2020.

This, as the carmaker proudly notes, is more than the global total lithium ion battery production for 2013. That’s a pretty impressive rate of demand growth over just three years—but this growth also represents the culmination of a sea change in the way we think.

Lithium is powering pretty much everything upon which our present depends on and our future is being built. It’s a viable alternative to petrol and in consumer electronics market segment alone, there is no sign of contraction—only expansion. Think the Internet of things, or smart houses, or smart cities, eventually. All these fascinating ideas are powered in some way by lithium.

But the real and present coup has been launched by electric vehicles. Forecasts from market research firms seem to be unanimous: EVs are on the rise, EVs are hot, and EVs will be increasingly in demand as people all over the world are eagerly encouraged to cut their carbon footprint. According to Lux Research, the EV market will grow to $10 billion within the next four years. Navigant Research forecasts EV sales will rise from 2.6 million last year to more than 6 million in 2024. So, whether we like it or not, EVs are coming—and in force.

Indeed, says Nevada Energy Metals (TSX-V:BFF) executive Malcolm Bell, “It may be time to start worrying about a shortage, but it’s not a question of whether we have enough lithium—it’s a question of tapping into new reserves. Those who don’t see the supply wall looming, will hit with a resounding thud. Those who start tapping into new reserves will be extremely well-positioned for the future.”

From where everyone is standing right now, it may seem that the world’s got a fair amount of lithium. According to global estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey, there is enough lithium in the world – 13.5 million metric tons of it – to last us over 350 years in batteries.

What’s missing from this prediction, however, is … the future, and indeed, the present. This calculation takes into account only the current rate of lithium ion battery usage. It does not account for the entrance of EVs into the mainstream. It does not account for Tesla, not to mention the growing ranks of Tesla rivals. And it most certainly doesn’t account for what is by all means a pending energy revolution that sees lithium as its leader.

Already, the present is clear: Demand is growing fast, faster than production, and for now this new demand is coming increasingly from the electric vehicle industry.

Tesla’s is by no means the only battery gigafactory out there. There are others being built around the world (at least 12, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence) and these gigafactories will raise the global demand for lithium batteries to some 122 GWh by 2020. That’s up from 35 GWh currently. It’s a phenomenal rise over a very short period of time.

In the U.S., there is already one gigafactory—Tesla’s, in Nevada—operating. A second gigafactory is in the works, courtesy of LG Chem. Brine-based lithium production in the country is concentrated in one place only, at least for now, and this place is Nevada. That’s because it is the only confirmed place with lithium deposits. The biggest actively mined area is the Clayton Valley, with presence from both mining majors like Albermarle (NYSE: ALB) and smaller, pure-play lithium miners such as Nevada Energy Metals. This makes Clayton Valley ground zero for the U.S. lithium rush and everyone wants to be there, but it’s the pure play miners who are set to explode onto this scene from an investors’ perspective.

Clayton Valley can hardly contain the lithium rush, and it is already time to look in the surrounding areas to secure future supply for soaring demand predictions. Those with enough foresight are diversifying their Nevada holdings and banking on geological clues that suggest there’s plenty more lithium in Tesla’s backyard, and whoever gets to it first will be far ahead of the game.

“When everyone starts paying attention to Nevada’s geology, we’ll see a land rush that makes the current one pale by comparison,” says Bell, who heads of acquisitions for Nevada Energy Metals, one of the pure play movers in this playing field that sees the wider lithium potential in Nevada.

“Nevada’s geothermal footprints are large and extend well beyond the Clayton Valley. If you put a mirror up to Clayton Valley, there is endless opportunity here. The real race here is to create the next U.S. lithium powerhouse,” says Bell.

How to Play Lithium

Look everywhere, and then look again. Securing an investment in Clayton Valley is a good place to start—but it’s also potentially only a flash in the pan. The best way to secure a foothold in lithium right now is to think outside the box and look for those companies who see the bigger picture but are also smart enough to keep one foot in the proven lithium hunting grounds.

But you also have to understand the supply and demand picture here.

Macquarie Research estimates that in 2015 demand for lithium already exceeded supply, while this year, lithium output will again fall short of demand.

In 2017, thanks to so much new production capacity the metal’s fundamentals will near an equilibrium, which will last for about a year before deficit rears its head once again—but this time the deficit will stick. Despite new efforts to ramp up supply, it will take a while before supply corresponds to the demand.

The future is pretty clear: We’re looking at a period of shortage, and shortage is where the savvy investors make real money. The lithium feeding frenzy has only just begun. Consumer electronics keeps it safe and steady, as always; the electric vehicle boom skews the demand picture dramatically, and the future’s energy storage and powerwall evolutions take it over the edge.

The reserves are there, and there’s geologists estimate there’s plenty of unproven reserves out there as well—it’s just a matter of who finds them first, and who starts extracting first.

Lithium has the purest of fundamentals of any ‘commodity’ out there, and the next oil barons look set to actually be lithium barons. In fact, in this respect, electric vehicles will likely be the cause of the next oil crisis. Demand and supply are simple and shockingly visible, and that means there’s a lot of new money floating around for lithium exploration. If you’re not a believer, the immediate future will sweep you off of your feet.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Could-A-Lithium-Shortage-De-Rail-The-Electric-Car-Boom.html

Given the current Middle Eastern scenario, one may reasonably hold the argument that the on-going turmoil in the Middle East owes its burden equally to the Machiavellian Anglo-American policies in the region and the harrowing failure of the Muslim governments/leaderships in the Middle East to rationally respond to those challenges.

But are there any dimensions beyond religion?

Nationalism and Turmoil

The region of West Asia (known as the Middle East) and North Africa has been home for tension and conflict since the end of the 19th century. The tensions were accentuated by the division of North Africa between European powers during the period of colonial expansion and the Sykes-Picot Agreement between the British and the French in 1916 during the First World War.

Showing no regard to the demographic distribution of ethnicities, religions, languages and other cultural dimensions, borders of nation-states were drawn and mandatory colonial imperialism was established until the mid of the 20th century.

While the western role in the region was fluctuating between supportive and subversive of dictatorships, stability and security remained constant measures when meddling in the region.

Entangled by these complex processes of independence after the Second World War, newly emergent nation-states were neither capable nor willing to establish well-functioning political, economic and social systems. Democratization processes, procedural and cultural, were postponed. There were actually many other pressing matters to attend to other than democratization. The Egyptian writer and winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz, notes correctly that in Egypt “most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.”

Nationalism came up to define individual subjects, who lived within the borders of nation-states as, for instance, Syrian, Iraqi, and Egyptian etc. Two paradoxes developed concerning nationalist sentiments in the region: The first one is that the concept of nationalism was interchangeably used to refer to Pan-Arabism, which excluded significant segments of these societies such as for instance, the Berber in North African countries and the Kurds in Syria and Iraq.

The newly drawn borders not only created frontiers among majorities, but also among religious minorities. The Druze divided between Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel (formerly Palestine), the Kurds between Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran and the Armenians between rather more national states are a few cases in point.

Even the official names of the newly authoritarian nation-states were controversial: ArabRepublic of Egypt, Syrian Arab Republic, The Arab Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Libyan Arab Republic etc. Nation-states failed to recognize the diversity within their borders, as colonial powers did before them.

In the words of Libya’s former leader Muammar Al-Gaddafi: “The times of Arab nationalism and unity are gone forever. These ideas, which mobilized the masses, are only a worthless currency.”

The second one is that nation-states offered very little to serve the cultural sphere in the region but much to serve doctrinal forms of thought. While nation-states were, and unfortunately still are, lacking vision, participation and serious contributions to their citizens, rapid demographic inflation in the region crippled the already struggling economic and political institutions. In 2014, the region was home for approximately two per cent of the global population.

Focusing on nationalist notions, while unable to respond to real life contradictions paved the way for Islamist ideologies to blossom. In other words, deficient and inadequate response to peoples’ needs increased rigid frameworks of ideological perception, in which Islamism counterposed to nationalism were racing to reach power. Nationalist criticism of Islamist ideologies was, we might risk saying, itself ideological and vice versa. Ironically, the distinctions between nationalism and Islamism have blurred recently, so one might detect nationalist Islamists and Islamist nationalists.

Identity Crisis

The region of the Mashreq, an Arabic word means the place of the sunrise, is considered the cradle of ancient human civilizations and the birthplace of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yet, its recent contributions to human development can be, with confidence, considered minimal in comparison to the western ones since the Age of Enlightenment. This is a time-dimension of identity crisis.

The region of West Asia and North Africa experienced the period of Cold War at its best. While some regimes tended to ally themselves, although sometimes sporadically, with the US, some others tended to ally themselves with the Soviet Union. Postcolonial period of oil extraction remarkably characterized the geopolitical calculations in the region. Securing the flow of oil and gas without interruption and at acceptable prices to the United States and its allies is still a main policy pillar of foreign intervention in the region. The Mashreq, in other words, suffers from several political conflicts and is significantly dominated by foreign powers. Not only is the region linguistically, ethnically and religiously fractionalized, but also ideologically: Nationalism, Baathism, socialism, communism, liberalism and Islamism. This is a philosophical dimension of identity crisis.

A crisis arises if there is a conflict when defining multiple layers of identity that should concur between the understanding of the self and actual reality. For instance feeling proud of being an Egyptian or Syrian national collides with a harsh reality that neither the Egyptian nor the Syrian national passports rank decently compared with other travel documents of almost the whole world. This is a psychological dimension of identity crisis.

Individuals in the region of West Asia and North Africa still face several problematics to determine, especially to answer two crucial questions: Who are they as a collective or individual and where are they in the world today? Serious contemplation about these issues has the potential to achieve two crucial results: The decrease of rigid ideological forms of thought and the increase of self-consciousness.

Ideologies With Islamic Flavour

During the 1970s, Islamist movements, rigid ideological movements with an Islamic flavour, were augmented by the recapitulated military defeats of nationalist regimes before Israel. These movements emerged to defy the western secular model of governance and modernization on one hand, and to go back to Islamic references – “governing by what Allah has revealed in the Quran” – on the other. While this is another psychological dimension of identity crisis, it is a modernization process itself. The success of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini represented a political and ideological support to other Islamist movements in the region, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Egypt, Jordan and other countries, and later to more radical groups such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Following the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US increased its military capacities in the Arabian Peninsula during the 1990-91 Gulf War. This has led to the increase of anti-Americanism sentiments in the region, which was a perfect condition for radical Islamists, including Al-Qaeda affiliates, to gain ground among the weary populations.

To sum up, there are several reasons behind the persistence of turmoil in the region of West Asia and North Africa. Some of which are based on external interventionism, some others lie in the heart of the region. New narratives and collective memory creation should be intensively and extensively operationalized in order to reach a stable level of pacification among all conflicting actors.