Last Thursday President-elect Donald Trump triumphantly celebrated Carrier’s decision to reverse its plan to close a furnace plant and move jobs to Mexico. Some 800 jobs will remain in Indianapolis.

“Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers,” Trump told The New York Times. “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Vice President-elect Michael Pence added, as Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”

So what’s the Trump alternative to the free market? Bribe giant corporations to keep jobs in America.

Carrier’s move to Mexico would have saved the company $65 million a year in wages. Trump promised bigger benefits. The state of Indiana will throw in $7 million, but that’s just the start.

Carrier’s parent company, United Technology, has military contracts that just last year generated $6.8 billion of its $57 billion in revenue – creating a yuge Trump card that makes $65 million look like peanuts. If Trump comes through with the military buildup he’s promising, United Technologies could reap a bonanza. You can bet that figured into the deal.

In addition, United Technologies has more than $6 billion parked abroad where tax rates are low. It will make a bundle if Trump follows through with a plan to allow global corporations to bring that money home and pay a rock-bottom tax rate.

In other words, Trump will get corporate America to take care of “our workers” by bribing them with government contracts, tax cuts, and relief from regulations. The art of the deal is to Increase corporate profits, and assume that corporations will reciprocate with good American jobs.

It’s “trickle-down” economics dressed in populist garb.

But it won’t work. As long Wall Street continues to push corporations to maximize shareholder returns, American workers will continue to lose good-paying jobs to foreign workers or to homegrown robots.

Payrolls are the biggest single cost on most companies’ balance sheets, so cutting jobs and wages will continue to be the easiest way to boost profits and share prices.

If Donald Trump were serious about reviving good jobs in America, he’d give workers more bargaining power by strengthening trade unions, upgrading lifelong education and training, and simultaneously making it harder for Wall Street to demand that companies shed workers.

This was the way the American economy functioned from the end of World War II through the early 1980s, when jobs and paychecks rose in tandem with corporate profits. Large corporations weren’t just responsible to their shareholders; they were also responsible to their workers.

They treated workers as assets to be developed – retraining them with higher skills as the companies moved to higher value-added production, or for new jobs as the companies expanded – and resorting to layoffs only as a last resort.

But starting in the 1980s, workers became costs to be cut. Corporate raiders mounted hostile takeovers – using high-yield junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, and proxy fights to gain control of companies – and then squeezed payrolls to get higher profits. They busted unions, outsourced jobs abroad, and installed automated equipment.

American manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at nearly 20 million jobs. Since then, about 8 million of those jobs have been lost to cheaper foreign labor or to automation.

Trump won’t change these economic fundamentals. How do I know? Because his cabinet choices for key economic posts were among the ring leaders in the changes I’m talking about.

Steven Mnuckin, his Treasury pick, is a former Goldman Sachs partner who made billions over the past decades buying up companies and slashing payrolls. Wilbur L. Ross Jr., Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, made his billions using bankruptcy to protect wealthy owners while leaving workers and communities holding the bag. (Example in point: the collapse of Trump’s casino empire.)

These men exemplify the financialization of the American economy that’s focused only on high profits and rising share prices, and shafted American workers.

Trickle-down economics dressed in populist garb is still trickle-down economics.

From Tehran a dire warning: new US sanctions will mean we stop implementing the Iran nuclear deal. This warning, issued by Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif at a meeting in India, reflects Iran’s growing concern that the coming Trump administration is likely to take action against the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Already, from Iran’s spiritual leader, ayatollah Khamenei, to president Rouhani to various members of the Iranian parliament, there is a loud objection to Obama’s signing into law a new Iran sanctions bill that extends the comprehensive sanctions for another 10 years, in direct violation of the terms of agreement under the JCPOA. The US’ justification is that due to the presidential waivers, these sanctions laws do not apply in whole and thus do not change the nature of US’s commitments and obligations under the JCPOA.

But, this is at best a lame excuse that, for one thing, overlooks that the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 (July 2015) stipulates the formal termination of all Iran sanctions 8 years after the “adoption day,” i.e., October, 2015. Considered alone, the new US bill to extend the sanctions, initially passed in 1996 under proliferation concerns, also violates the JCPOA’s terms, e.g., Annex V, which clearly mandates the parties to adhere to the timeline of the agreement.

The big question is, of course, what happens when Obama leaves office on January 21, 2017 and all his executive orders allowing those Iran waivers expire on the same day? Either Trump will renew those important waivers through new executive orders or he will not, in which case the sanctions foreseen in the Iran sanctions extensions bill will apply, tantamount to new nuclear-related sanctions, in direct contradiction to the terms of JCPOA.

In such a scenario, two possibilities exist, either the US will abide by Obama’s waivers in a de facto manner, which overtime will become impossible, if not rather immediately, or Trump will make a move, positive or negative, which will have direct affect on the JCPOA’s longevity. The likelihood of Trump acting immediately in renewing Obama’s waivers is not great, notwithstanding Trump’s campaign rhetoric against the JCPOA, echoed by a number of his picks for top positions, and chances are there will be a considerable time gap between the expiration of Obama’s waivers and Trump’s explicit action.

Of course, there is a distinct possibility that Trump will simply scuttle the JCPOA and let the chips fall where they may, even if it means angering US’s European allies, who are presently consumed by the welter of their own internal problems. Europe’s ability to act as a counterweight to Washington on foreign matters has diminished considerably and one should not vest too much hope on any significant difference made by the EU.

As for Moscow, which hopes to improve ties with Washington under Trump, it may have a nuanced reaction to any Trump’s trashing the JCPOA, and it is not far-fetched to think of a Trump attempt for a quid pro quo with Moscow over Iran, in light of past such histories between Washington and Moscow as regards Iran. Of course, anything about Russia involves Syria these days, and by implication Iran, and therefore one must wait and see how Trump seeks to devise a distinct Iran policy that would not clash with its Russia detente policy?

All eyes than are set on Trump’s takeover next month and his key decisions on JCPOA. Another question is, of course, what will Iran do if Trump fails to renew the sanctions waivers? Iran can selectively de-implement the JCPOA and then engage in a tit-for-tat with Washington, sure to sound the death knell for the JCPOA down the road, which might come sooner rather than later.

By Manoj Joshi

On one corner of the coming Donald Trump administration boxing ring, we have Vice President Michael Pence and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who have links to the conservative wing of the Republican establishment, Speaker Paul Ryan and the Congress. On the other, we have former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and a range of financiers, lobbyists, bankers and retired military officials who have propelled the Trump bandwagon.

There is a titanic struggle going on to capture the soul of the Trump establishment and the president-elect seems to be enjoying it. His appointments so far show a mix of the pragmatic and the ideological, leaning sharply towards the latter — Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Steven Mnuchin (ex-Goldman Sachs) as Treasury Secretary, General James Mattis as Defence Secretary, Mike Flynn as National Security Advisor, K.T. MacFarland as his deputy, Tom Price at health and human services, Wilbur Ross at commerce, Nikki Haley, Elaine Chao and Betsy De Vos.

Yet, our principal concern would be the new secretary of state, a position that has yet to be filled. Mitt Romney would be an orthodox secretary of state, but a great deal would depend on the authority he is given by the president-elect and the freedom with which he can make key sub-cabinet appointments. General David Petraeus would be somewhat similar, in view of his experience as the head of the US Central Command. On the other hand, Giuliani would be a much more unorthodox figure, one that could give our adversary Pakistan a hard time, but that could well be offset by his whimsicality.

Given the enormous complexity of the US bureaucracy, what we need to watch out for are sub-cabinet appointments such as the assistant secretary of state, who deals with South Asia, and his or her defence department counterpart.

This is often best indicated by the composition of the various ‘landing teams’ that have been announced. These are unpaid people who range from retired officials, specialists, lobbyists to academics, who fan out to the various departments of government and the National Security Council to assist in the transition process. They work with the existing staffers to smoothen the transition and play a key role in making new appointments. Some of the landing team members are themselves often tapped to fill positions. (The details of the “landing teams” can be found at www.greatagain.gov)

An example is visible from the fact that Paul Atkins, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a critic of regulation, has been put in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau team. The bureau was created as part of the Dodd Frank regulation, which Trump has promised to dismantle it. Andrew Peek, a young counter-terrorism specialist, has been nominated to the state department team, as has Herman Pirchner, the head of the American Foreign Policy Council, a conservative Washington DC think tank.

Myron Ebell, chosen for the Environment Protection Agency, is the head of an NGO which questions many accepted aspects of global warming. Another critic of the Paris Climate treaty, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation, has been appointed to the state department team.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Washington DC, has been tapped for other landing team members as well. Curtis Dubay, a research fellow of the foundation, has backed Trump’s tax plans and has been nominated to the department of treasury team. Another Heritage alumnus, Dakota Wood, a former military officer, has been nominated to the defence department team. Nina Owcharenko, The Heritage specialist on health policy reform is surprisingly not in the landing team for the department of health and human services. Beltway rumours suggest that Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow at the foundation, could well be nominated to the position of assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

The actual work of filling out many of the key positions in various departments will be a long-drawn process. As of now, the landing team members themselves are going through the process of getting their security clearances and credentials, before they are allowed access into the various offices.

The key questions that the Washington strategic community notes is the extent of autonomy Trump will be willing to grant to any of his top nominees, especially in the Department of State. It is a no-brainer to suggest that an empowered secretary will make for a vigorous Trump administration imprint around the world, but it remains to be seen just what kind of administrative style Trump will follow. If he is too controlling, it could mean an emasculated system. On the other hand, if is not able or willing to rein in the generals around him, primarily his NSA choice Mike Flynn, there could be dissonance within the American system.

The problem of generals could resonate in a different way as well. Retired generals like James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who has just been appointed Secretary of Defence, and Petraeus, who is in the running for Secretary of State, can complicate relations with the military. The chairman, joint chiefs of staff is the principal military advisor to the president and the presence of well-known generals in other high-level positions can complicate the advise he gives, since they also have networks within the senior echelons of the armed forces. But, that said and done, both Mattis and Petraeus are not cardboard generals, but thorough professionals with an intellectual bent. Neither are likely to be pushovers for Trump or anyone else. Incidentally, in service Mattis outranked Flynn, who is the NSA.

Cabinet and sub-cabinet picks are no doubt important in understanding the direction of the new administration’s policies. However, equally important is the need to understand who has been chosen and why. The Trump team has a distinct ideological orientation and it will be surprising if it is not manifested in the unfolding of its policies.

This article originally appeared in The Wire.

By Alessandro Bruno

Fidel Castro is dead. The Cuban dictator’s departure places the headstone on the Cold War, or at least the post-WWII world order. Much more than was the case with the death of Hugo Chavez, Fidel has taken the last breaths of Caribbean communism with him. Yet, for a brief period, Fidel’s island utopia became the center of the world’s worst fears and greatest hopes. Just a few miles away from Florida are the echoes of a failed U.S. blitz at the Bay of Pigs, the appeals of Pope John XXIII, and American and Soviet superpowers coming within inches of dragging the world into World War Three.

Fidel and his revolutionary partner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara soon became the symbols of a youth revolution in the West. It did not produce much more than a shift in culture and perhaps the erosion of the meaning of authority. But, communism, apart from the isolated efforts of fringe groups, did not spread. Castro was many things, but he wasn’t a communist. He was a nationalist. He did not want Cuba to remain a ‘brothel for the United States.” While many of his admirers might have exceeded in their acclamations, including Canada’s very own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the critics missed the point. Castro restored Cubans’ sense of pride. No Caribbean nation comes close.

Castro led a revolution against the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista. It wasn’t a communist revolution. His success was facilitated by President Eisenhower’s disengagement from that outpost, marked by frequent revolts, coups, and counter-coups. Castro was not motivated by Marxist ideals. He did identify his island country’s problems as coming from the United States, but he targeted rampant corruption in every ganglion of public life. It was later, that Castro ‘el Lider Maximo’ leaned on the USSR. He asked Nikita Khrushchev for help only when he realized that he could not stand up to the United States ‘naked,’ without proper military deterrents. Had Castro led a revolution a few decades earlier, who knows whose support he would have solicited. Castro, might even have become a fascist like his fellow Galician Francisco Franco in Spain.

But the Cold War imposed a bipolar system that left little to the imagination. If the revolutionary leader of a small country needed support, the choice was simple: either you are with Washington or Moscow. It wasn’t even a G.W. Bush case of ‘with us or against us.’ Formally, in fact, Cuba was one of the “non-aligned states,” along with Sukarno’s Indonesia and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. But, Cuba earned a spot as the West’s champagne leftists’ communist utopia with a smile. But history has a way of turning even the most idealistic of revolutionaries into tyrants, often despite their own will. However, Castro left an indelible mark on the world, and as he said: “history will judge me.”

“Hasta la victoria, siempre,” wrote Russian President Vladimir Putin to his country’s former client. But, Putin also captured the essence of Castro’s true achievement. He fought for and maintained Cuba’s independence. The New York Times and the Washington Post did not fall short of Fidel’s own presumed expectations, throwing mud on his figure. Pope Francis predictably expressed warm feelings, while President Barack Obama extended “a hand of friendship to the Cuban people.”

The biggest mistake of Fidel’s detractors is to consider his revolution and leadership according to the moral and ethical parameters of our day. This is especially the case when it comes to the persecution of homosexuals. But, this would fail the test of analysis as a pretext to throw blame on Castro’s leadership.

Being gay or effeminate sparked discrimination and social marginalization in the West until not long ago. In the “democratic” West, this mentality prevailed for the entire first part of the 20^th century. The UK abolished the crime of homosexuality in 1967. In some U.S. States, until 2003, sodomy, hetero or homosexual, was considered a crime. As for Cuba, relations between consenting adult homosexuals (not prostitution) were legalized in 1979. In 1995, Cuba won an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Picture with Freisa y Chocolate (Strawberries and Chocolate). The movie tells the story of a homosexual dissident – presented in a flattering light.

The other obvious and frequent point of contention is emigration from the island. Nothing has contributed more to that emigration than the debilitating US embargo that devastated the local economy. The embargo, as all embargos, has hampered political development as well, by forcing people to rely on the state. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1990, Cubans felt the effects of the embargo even more directly, given the loss of important markets and aid. On a separate note, the ‘capitalist’ economies of Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and any number of Caribbean and Central American states, produce many more migrants than has Cuba.

Cubans are proud of their achievements. They are proud of what they and Fidel have done. They are united like no other country in all of Latin America. Hoping for an uprising by tightening the embargo just as the Soviets left, the US found a people who managed to remain independent once again. The widely praised Cuban education system took a few hits in the 90s, but many Latin Americans, and others, continue to come to Cuba to benefit from it. They also come to enjoy the country’s healthcare system. This includes those coming from allegedly democratic and free market economies. Nicaragua is full of people who studied, for free, in Cuba. They enjoyed free room and board for years. Cuba commands respect in Latin America. It has earned it.

Cuba began to emerge in 1860, when whites and blacks came together to challenge Spanish rule. They won independence in 1898, when the U.S. found an excuse to arrive. They changed their Spanish masters for American puppets. There was a revolt in the 1930s, followed by more dictatorships and puppet governments, while their economy depended on the United States. And then came Fidel. He made sure Cuba did not end up like Puerto Rico. Fidel united Cubans and invented the very idea of ‘Cubaness.’ Under his rule, Cuba made the only true and significant social achievements of Latin America, capturing the imagination of many around the world in the process. Fidel turned a colony into a state.

Castro made mistakes. Cubans have suffered and much could have been done better. But the alternative might have been far worse. Thanks to Fidel, Cubans are now the best educated, most literate people of the Caribbean. They are the better to face the challenges of the future. Hasta la victoria, siempre Comandante.

This article was published at Geopolitical Monitor.com

By Cheryl Pellerin

Russia and China are rising in importance among the state powers that occupy the attention of Defense Department officials these days, and deterring those nations is the entire focus of the Pentagon’s third offset strategy, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said Saturday.

At the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, Work participated in a panel discussion on “Restoring Deterrence in an Era of Revanchist Powers,” in which defense leaders discussed deterring states practicing the political policy of recovering their lost territory or status. Joining Work on the panel, among others, were U.S. Pacific Command Commander Navy Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley. David Feith of the Wall Street Journal moderated the panel.

Work referenced political scholar John Mearsheimer’s definition of a great power: a large state that could take on a dominant state like the United States conventionally and also has a nuclear deterrent that could survive a nuclear strike against it.

“It’s a very simple definition for a great power from the Department of Defense’s perspective,” Work said, “because it focuses on capabilities.”

Aggrieved Challengers

Russia and China, both large nuclear powers, are starting to challenge the United States conventionally, disagree with the global order that the United States has been working to build since World War II and are aggrieved, he added.

“The Russians believe that they have been humiliated since the end of the Cold War,” Work said, “and China still smarts from the [so-called] century of humiliation [between 1839 and 1949] that drives so much of its thinking.”

The Russians and the Chinese believe that competition is the natural state of affairs, and within that competition, the United States must have three things — strategic deterrence and conventional deterrence, and “we have to manage strategic competition on a day-to-day basis.”

Work added, “If you think of strategic deterrence at the top, conventional deterrence in the middle and managing strategic competition at the bottom, the link between the bottom two is crisis management and the link between the top two is escalation control.”

The third offset, he said, focuses on conventional deterrence within the framework of comprehensive strategic stability.

The Deterrence Equation

Harris said he thinks of deterrence as an equation: capability times resolve times signaling equals deterrence.

“If any of those things … capability, resolve or signaling … are zero, then you’ve got no deterrence. You could have the greatest military in the world, which we do, the greatest resolve to use [military force] if threatened, which we do, but if you don’t have the signaling or if you signal incorrectly, you’ve got no deterrence,” the admiral said.

Capability — the military — is only part of the equation, he said, noting that deterrence is a whole-of-government effort and the United States must work with China and Russia inside the international system.

“I look at all that … from my vantage point in the Pacific through a dark lens,” Harris said, “and everything we do is aimed at giving the National Command Authority the ability to manage that in a complex way.”

To Milley, deterrence works when a nation is strong to begin with.

For the past 15 years, he said, all the services “have been focused on a single typology of war — insurgency and counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. We’ve optimized our force structure to do that … and sub-optimized other parts of our force structure, and capability gaps have emerged.”

Competitive Advantage

The United States still has competitive advantage, Milley said, but it also has capability gaps that are clear, dangerous and closing fast.

“While it’s true the United States military is strong and very … capable and, you’re not going to hear anything different from me, let’s be careful about beating our chest on that stuff,” the general said.

The world is a serious place with dangerous actors, he said. Those actors must be deterred and as a nation the United States must accept the reality that there are significant threats to the international order.

“Do we want to continue that international order or not, because it is under challenge by Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and terrorists. Coming to grips with that means maintaining capabilities in order to assure our allies and deter our adversaries,” Milley said.

“It’s done through strength, which is a combination of size and capability,” he added, “and we’ve got some work to do on that. I think the current [DoD] leadership has acknowledged that, and I think the future leadership will do the same.”

Strategic Competition

Work says that what’s different in U.S. strategic competition with China and Russia is that America’s national strategy values allies.

“What every president since World War II has said is that Article 5 [of the North Atlantic Treaty] are ironclad … [and] I don’t think anybody in Russia or China doubts our resolve to NATO and to our allies of the Western Pacific, Work added, noting, “That is a very big help for deterrence against both these great powers.”

Parties to the 1949 treaty agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America will be considered an attack against all, and all will help, with military force if necessary, the party of parties attacked.

In response to a question about how Russia and China see the U.S. deterrence balance and U.S. capabilities today, Work said the he knows for certain that the Chinese conception of deterrence is on demonstrated capabilities.

Trend Lines

“I know for certain that the Chinese and Russians both are trying to … duplicate our level of jointness,” he continued, “and I know that they’re trying to gain technological parity. At this point in time I am confident that both Russia and China believe the United States … has a competitive advantage today.”

The deputy secretary said “the irony is, [believing] that is forcing them to put a lot of money into capabilities … so the trend lines are what I think concern the Department of Defense — how do we make sure that … the trend lines at the end of 10 years still have them thinking that we have a competitive advantage?”

In the months ahead and with a new administration transitioning into the White House, Work said the nation must debate America’s role in the world.

“I think the American people will take part in that debate and tell us,” he added, “what they stand for and … [understand] who do we want to deter, how we want to deter them, who we want to have as allies [and] who will we protect. All those questions need to be answered.”

Work attended the defense forum as part of a four-day trip that began with a stop in Tucson, Arizona, where he met with Raytheon defense contracting officials and then visited Davis-Monthan Air Force Base airmen. After arriving in California, he visited Boeing Defense, Space and Security in Huntington Beach.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi says he takes full responsibility for the crushing defeat at the referendum he proposed, which would have reduced the powers of the Senate. Renzi intends to send in his resignation on Monday.

“The experience of my government ends here,” Renzi said in a televised news conference, adding that his defeat was “extraordinary clear.”

“I have lost and I say it out loud,” he said, the Guardian reported.

“Tomorrow I will gather the Council of Ministers, and I will go to the Quirinal Palace to resign,” Renzi said, confirming his plans to tender his resignation to the country’s president, Sergio Mattarella.

According to Italy’s Interior Ministry, some 70 percent of Italy’s eligible voters took part in the referendum, after more than two-thirds of polling stations reported their results. An exit poll conducted by the Piepoli Institute/IPR for RAI television estimated that 40.9 percent voted “Yes,” while 59.1 percent voted “No.” RAI projections indicate that voters in only three of Italy’s 20 regions cast ballots to approve the reform, while in 17 regions the proposal was rejected.

Ahead of the referendum vote, Renzi promised that he would step down if his proposed constitutional reform was not approved.

Renzi’s plan to limit the Senate’s powers has drawn strong criticism from the Italian opposition. Matteo Salvini, of the right-wing Northern League, hailed the “No” vote, calling it a “victory of the people against the strong powers of three-quarters of the world.”

France’s far-right presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, has also welcomed the Italian referendum result, congratulating “our friend” Salvini, who shares his Eurosceptic stance with Le Pen, on the “victory.”

The proposed legislation envisaged a significant reduction in the powers of the Senate, the upper house of the Italian parliament. Under Italy’s 1948 constitution, both chambers of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, have equal importance in the adoption of any legislation. Before a bill can be made into law, it has to be passed by both chambers. The two-step approval system often led to a gridlock and was blamed for being ineffective. The constitutional amendment put forward by Renzi would have capped the power of the Senate so the government would no longer need its approval on an array of laws, including budget issues.

The world’s most popular food and household companies are selling food, cosmetics and other everyday staples containing palm oil tainted by shocking human rights abuses in Indonesia, with children as young as eight working in hazardous conditions, said Amnesty International in a new report published Nov. 30.

The report, “The great palm oil scandal: Labour abuses behind big brand names,” investigates palm oil plantations in Indonesia run by Singapore-based agri-business Wilmar, tracing palm oil to nine global firms: AFAMSA, ADM, Colgate-Palmolive, Elevance, Kellogg’s, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever, said AI in a statement.

“Companies are turning a blind eye to exploitation of workers in their supply chain,” said Meghna Abraham, a senior investigator at Amnesty.

“These findings will shock any consumer who thinks they are making ethical choices in the supermarket when they buy products that claim to use sustainable palm oil,” Abraham said.

“There is nothing sustainable about palm oil that is produced using child labor and forced labor,” she said.

“The abuses discovered within Wilmar’s palm oil operations are not isolated incidents but are systemic and a predictable result of the way Wilmar does business.”

MIT researchers and their colleagues have developed a new computational model of the human brain’s face-recognition mechanism that seems to capture aspects of human neurology that previous models have missed.

The researchers designed a machine-learning system that implemented their model, and they trained it to recognize particular faces by feeding it a battery of sample images. They found that the trained system included an intermediate processing step that represented a face’s degree of rotation — say, 45 degrees from center — but not the direction — left or right.

This property wasn’t built into the system; it emerged spontaneously from the training process. But it duplicates an experimentally observed feature of the primate face-processing mechanism. The researchers consider this an indication that their system and the brain are doing something similar.

“This is not a proof that we understand what’s going on,” said Tomaso Poggio, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a multi-institution research consortium funded by the National Science Foundation and headquartered at MIT. “Models are kind of cartoons of reality, especially in biology. So I would be surprised if things turn out to be this simple. But I think it’s strong evidence that we are on the right track.”

Indeed, the researchers’ new paper includes a mathematical proof that the particular type of machine-learning system they use, which was intended to offer what Poggio calls a “biologically plausible” model of the nervous system, will inevitably yield intermediary representations that are indifferent to angle of rotation.

Poggio, who is also a primary investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is the senior author on a paper describing the new work, which appeared in the journal Computational Biology. He’s joined on the paper by several other members of both the CBMM and the McGovern Institute: first author Joel Leibo, a researcher at Google DeepMind, who earned his PhD in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT with Poggio as his advisor; Qianli Liao, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; Fabio Anselmi, a postdoc in the IIT@MIT Laboratory for Computational and Statistical Learning, a joint venture of MIT and the Italian Institute of Technology; and Winrich Freiwald, an associate professor at the Rockefeller University.

Emergent properties

The new paper is “a nice illustration of what we want to do in [CBMM], which is this integration of machine learning and computer science on one hand, neurophysiology on the other, and aspects of human behavior,” Poggio says. “That means not only what algorithms does the brain use, but what are the circuits in the brain that implement these algorithms.”

Poggio has long believed that the brain must produce “invariant” representations of faces and other objects, meaning representations that are indifferent to objects’ orientation in space, their distance from the viewer, or their location in the visual field. Magnetic resonance scans of human and monkey brains suggested as much, but in 2010, Freiwald published a study describing the neuroanatomy of macaque monkeys’ face-recognition mechanism in much greater detail.

Freiwald showed that information from the monkey’s optic nerves passes through a series of brain locations, each of which is less sensitive to face orientation than the last. Neurons in the first region fire only in response to particular face orientations; neurons in the final region fire regardless of the face’s orientation — an invariant representation.

But neurons in an intermediate region appear to be “mirror symmetric”: That is, they’re sensitive to the angle of face rotation without respect to direction. In the first region, one cluster of neurons will fire if a face is rotated 45 degrees to the left, and a different cluster will fire if it’s rotated 45 degrees to the right. In the final region, the same cluster of neurons will fire whether the face is rotated 30 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, or anywhere in-between. But in the intermediate region, a particular cluster of neurons will fire if the face is rotated by 45 degrees in either direction, another if it’s rotated 30 degrees, and so on.

This is the behavior that the researchers’ machine-learning system reproduced. “It was not a model that was trying to explain mirror symmetry,” Poggio said. “This model was trying to explain invariance, and in the process, there is this other property that pops out.”

Neural training

The researchers’ machine-learning system is a neural network, so called because it roughly approximates the architecture of the human brain. A neural network consists of very simple processing units, arranged into layers, that are densely connected to the processing units — or nodes — in the layers above and below. Data are fed into the bottom layer of the network, which processes them in some way and feeds them to the next layer, and so on. During training, the output of the top layer is correlated with some classification criterion — say, correctly determining whether a given image depicts a particular person.

In earlier work, Poggio’s group had trained neural networks to produce invariant representations by, essentially, memorizing a representative set of orientations for just a handful of faces, which Poggio calls “templates.” When the network was presented with a new face, it would measure its difference from these templates. That difference would be smallest for the templates whose orientations were the same as that of the new face, and the output of their associated nodes would end up dominating the information signal by the time it reached the top layer. The measured difference between the new face and the stored faces gives the new face a kind of identifying signature.

In experiments, this approach produced invariant representations: A face’s signature turned out to be roughly the same no matter its orientation. But the mechanism — memorizing templates — was not, Poggio said, biologically plausible.

So instead, the new network uses a variation on Hebb’s rule, which is often described in the neurological literature as “neurons that fire together wire together.” That means that during training, as the weights of the connections between nodes are being adjusted to produce more accurate outputs, nodes that react in concert to particular stimuli end up contributing more to the final output than nodes that react independently (or not at all).

This approach, too, ended up yielding invariant representations. But the middle layers of the network also duplicated the mirror-symmetric responses of the intermediate visual-processing regions of the primate brain.

By Suresh Jaura*

The first American-born Indian-origin woman, Nikki Haley, made history in U.S. by being nominated to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, by President-elect, Donald Trump, on November 23. She is one of the two women in Trump cabinet, the other is, Ms Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education nominee.

Haley, 44, born as Nimrata Nikki Randhawa on January 20, 1972, is the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants. Her parents, Ajit Singh Randhawa and Raj Kaur Randhawa, immigrated to Canada after her father received a scholarship offer from the University of British Columbia. Her father moved his family to South Carolina after earning PhD in 1969.

Haley is a rising star in Republican politics. She is the first woman to serve as Governor of South Carolina; at the age of 44, she is the youngest current governor in the United States. Prior to becoming governor, she represented Lexington County in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 2005 to 2011.

Donald Trump’s nomination of Haley is “a move that will probably serve to both assuage and confound the president-elect’s critics, raising questions about the tone and direction of his foreign policy. As an Indian-American woman, she would also add ethnic and gender diversity to the appointments, so far predominantly of white men, he has made to other top posts in the administration”, write Richard Fausset and Somini Senguptra in New York Times.

Haley backed two of Trump’s opponents during the Republican primary campaign: Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and then Texas Senator Ted Cruz, after Rubio dropped out.

Tweeting in March, Trump panned her, “The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!”

In response to an attack by the then GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Hailey‘s response “bless your heart” was extensively covered in the media.

During the campaign, Haley, like other Republicans including Paul Ryan, disagreed with Trump outright on many major issues; and as with many of his potential appointees.

In response to Trump’s anger and anti-immigrant tirade, she said: “No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.”

Haley has little foreign policy experience, yet Trump praised her as “a proven dealmaker”.

Haley said she had accepted the offer because she felt good about South Carolina’s economic standing. She added that the November elections had brought “exciting changes to America”.

“When the president believes you have a major contribution to make to the welfare of our nation, and to our nation’s standing in the world, that is a calling that is important to heed,” the statement said.

In 2012, former Governor Mitt Romney considered her for his vice-presidential running mate.

In early 2016, Haley was mentioned as a potential candidate for the Vice Presidency. On May 4, 2016, after Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee following his last competitor John Kasich suspending his campaign, Haley denied interest in the vice presidential nomination.

Haley was described in the Economist as a politician with high approval ratings and as combination of “fiscal ferocity and a capacity for conciliation”, and stated that as a female candidate and ethnic minority she would have appeal.

Among the 40 women, Haley was named in the list of “The 100 Most Influential People” by Time magazine.

“Haley’s supporters are likely pleased that the appointment will elevate her and give her an even higher profile on the national stage. A rare woman of color who is a Republican elected official, Haley has been considered a rising star in the GOP. In fact, some hope Haley will one day take the White House, and even with the nomination, Nikki Haley could still run for president in 2020”, writes Elizabeth Strassner in Bustle.

*The writer is President International Press Syndicate (INPS) North America and the Caribbean and North America Bureau Chief of IDN based in Toronto, Canada. He is Publisher and Managing Editor of South Asian Outlook and IndoCanada Outlook, online publications of INPS.

A study of more than 5,000 Wisconsin lakes shows that nearly a quarter of them have become murkier in the past two decades. It also shows this trend could get worse as a changing climate leads to increased precipitation.

However, the study — led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources — reveals that reducing the amount of agricultural land immediately surrounding Wisconsin’s waterways could improve water clarity by limiting nutrient runoff. It also shows most lakes have stayed the same and some are even seeing an improvement in clarity.

“In the face of increasing precipitation, this analysis provides empirical support for the fact that adapting our landscape is going to be important into the future,” said co-author Monica Turner, a UW-Madison professor of zoology.

Specifically, limiting farming to 10 percent or less of the so-called riparian buffer zone around a lake and the streams flowing into it can improve water clarity. The riparian buffer refers to the vegetation immediately adjacent to a body of water. Implementing such actions also benefits farmers, as they suffer less damage to their croplands during heavy rains, Turner said.

Using more than 25 years of data collected by citizen scientists, the DNR and the federal government, the researchers analyzed Wisconsin’s lakes to identify not just trends in water clarity (an indicator of lake health) but also how the landscape and the climate interact to determine year-to-year fluctuations.

While their results show water clarity in the majority of lakes has not changed and six percent of lakes are on an upward trend, the fact that more lakes are getting worse signals there is work to be done.

“If we want to maintain or improve water clarity, we need to think about trends in precipitation,” said lead author Kevin Rose, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison and now an assistant professor of freshwater ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

The study, published in the journal Ecological Applications, shows that wet years (like the current one) can be especially hard on lakes that typically have greater water clarity, like those found in northern Wisconsin. Clear lakes are more sensitive to the onslaught of nutrients and plant matter flushed in by the rain, which can cause water to turn murky, brown and green.

Mitigating the negative impacts of more rain, however, will require managing land in ways the research team didn’t expect. They approached the study thinking that what happens across an entire watershed, such as where and how the landscape is farmed, would impact water clarity, especially during wet years.

While the results indicate broad-scale land use does matter during dry years, the opposite is true in years with higher precipitation, when water clarity is more dependent on how the land is managed in particular places. Namely, riparian areas with less agriculture fare better and can play a significant role in reducing nutrient runoff, Rose said.

“This study provides on-the-ground evidence that is consistent with what our computer models are telling us,” said Turner, referring specifically to model results produced by the Water Sustainability and Climate Project at UW-Madison. The models indicate that water quality in Wisconsin could decline as precipitation increases into the future without concrete efforts on the landscape to buffer waterways and reverse the trend.

The study, Turner added, also highlights the importance of looking ahead to anticipate how climate and landscape changes will affect Wisconsin’s lakes and what we can do now to prevent future problems while also protecting Wisconsin’s farming industry.

“It absolutely provides evidence for the importance of continuing to look for solutions to sustain the economy of Wisconsin without sacrificing the quality of our water,” she said.

Middle Eastern Bitumen, a rare, tar-like material, is present in the seventh century ship buried at Sutton Hoo, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Pauline Burger and colleagues from the British Museum, UK and the University of Aberdeen.

The seventh century ship found within a burial mound at Sutton Hoo, UK was first excavated in 1939 and is known for the spectacular treasure it contained including jewellery, silverware, coins, and ceremonial armor.

The site is thought to be an example of the European ship-burial rites of the time, and also includes a burial chamber where a corpse was likely laid. Fragments of black organic material found in this chamber were originally identified as locally-produced ‘Stockholm Tar’ and linked to repair and maintenance of the ship.

The authors of the present study re-evaluated these previously-identified samples, as well as other tar-like materials found at the site, using imaging techniques and isotopic analysis and found the samples had been originally misidentified.

By comparing the samples from Sutton Hoo to various reference materials, the researchers’ analysis revealed that the previously-identified ‘Stockholm Tar’ lumps actually displayed the molecular and isotopic characteristics of archaeological bitumen, and specifically bitumen from the Middle East rather than from a local British source. Archaeological finds of bitumen from this period in Britain are extremely rare and the authors state that this finding is the first material evidence for trading of Middle Eastern bitumen northwards into the British Isles.

While the original form and purpose of the bitumen could not be discerned from the remaining fragments, the authors suggest that it may have been included deliberately in the burial chamber, possibly the remaining components of ornamental objects adorning the grave, or perhaps included as a prestigious raw material.

By Elise Harris

This week the Vatican hosted a high-level discussion in the world of science, gathering experts to discuss the progress, benefits and limits of advances in artificial intelligence.

A new conference at the Vatican drew experts in various fields of science and technology for a two-day dialogue on the “Power and Limits of Artificial Intelligence,” hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Sciences.

Among the scheduled speakers were several prestigious scientists, including Stephen Hawkins, a prominent British professor at the University of Cambridge and a self-proclaimed atheist, as well as a number of major tech heads such as Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, and Yann LeCun of Facebook.

The event, which ran from Nov. 30-Dec. 1, was hosted at the Vatican’s Casina Pio IV, the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, which is headed by their chancellor, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo.

Werner Arber, a Protestant and president of the academy who works in the field of evolutionary biology, said that while artificial intelligence isn’t his specific area, it’s important for the Vatican entity to have a voice in the discussion, since their task is “to follow all actual developments in the field of natural sciences” in order to stimulate further research.

As far as the discussion on artificial intelligence is concerned, Arber said it’s important to understand current developments, which include increasing dialogue as to whether research done on natural sciences can then be applied to the field of machinery and robotics.

Part of the debate, he said, has been whether or not machines could eventually take on some of the work human beings have traditionally done. However, he cautioned that there would be some “social-scientific implications,” since this could eventually lead to less work for people.

This is “an ethical aspect, do we want that or not?” Arber said, noting that human beings have a unique thinking and problem-solving capacity, and “it’s not good” if this gets pushed too far to the side.

It’s a “very important task of our human life…so we have to be careful to preserve our duties,” he said.

Also present at the meeting was Demis Hassabis, CEO of British artificial intelligence company DeepMind, founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014. He spoke on the first day of the conference about the possibility of moving forward “Towards Artificial General Intelligence.”

Part of Hassabis’ work involves the science of “making machines smarter,” and trying to build learning systems that allow computer systems to learn directly from data and experience in order to eventually figure out tasks on their own.

In comments to CNA, he noted how he has established an ethics board at the company to ensure that things don’t get out of hand while research is moving forward.

Artificial intelligence “is a very powerful technology,” he said, explaining that while he believes technologies in and of themselves are neutral, “it depends on what you end up using that technology for.”

“So I think as a society we need to think very carefully about the ethical use of technologies, and as one of the developers of this kind of artificial intelligence technology we want to be at the forefront of thinking how to use it responsibly for the good of everyone in the world,” he said.

One of the ways his company’s work is currently effecting Google is through little things such as how to organize photos and recognize what’s in them, as well as the way a person’s phone speaks to them and the optimization of energy that Google’s data centers use.

Hassabis said he thinks it’s “really interesting” to see the wider Catholic community taking an interest in the discussion, and called the Church’s involvement a great way “to start talking about and debating” how artificial intelligence “will affect society and how we can best use it to benefit all of the society.”

Stanislas Dehaene, a professor cognitive neuroscience at the College de France and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, was also present at the gathering, and spoke to participants on day two about “What is consciousness, and could machines have it?”

Dehaene told CNA/EWTN News that “enormous progress” has been made in terms of understanding the brain, and in part thanks to these advancements, great steps have also been taken in modeling neuro-networks which eventually lead “to superb artificial intelligence systems.”

With a lot of research currently being done on consciousness, Dehaene said a true “science of consciousness” has developed to the point that what happens to the brain when it becomes aware of a piece of information is now known “to such a point that it can be modeled.”

“So the question is could it be put in computers?” he said, explaining that this is currently being studied. He said he personally doesn’t know yet whether there is a limit to the possibilities for artificial intelligence, or what it would be.

However, he stressed that “it’s very important” to consider how further advances in artificial intelligence “will modify society, how far can it go and what are the consequences for all of us, for our jobs in particular,” he said.

Part of the discussion that needs to take place, Dehaene said, is “how to put ethical controls in the machines so they respect the laws and they respect even the moral laws” that guide human decisions.

“That is an extremely important goal that has not been achieved yet,” he said, adding that while he personally doesn’t have a problem with a machine making ethical judgments similar to that of a human being, the question “is how to get there” and how to make sure “we don’t create a system that is full of machines that don’t look like humans, that don’t share our intuitions of what should be a better world.”

Another major tech head present for the conference was Professor Yann LeCun, Director of Artificial Intelligence Research at Facebook.

What they try to do at Facebook is to “push the state of the arts to make machines more intelligent,” LeCun told CNA. The reason for this, he said, is that people are increasingly interacting through machines.

Artificial intelligence “would be a crucial key technology to facilitate communication between people,” he said, since the company’s main focus “is connecting people and we think that artificial intelligence has a big role to play there.”

Giving an example, LeCun noted that every day Facebook users upload around 1 billion photos and that each of them are recognized, and artificial intelligence systems then monitor the content of the photo in order to show users more images they might be interested in, or filter those they might object to.

“It also enables the visually impaired to get a textual description of the image that they can’t see,” he said, “so that is very useful.”

In terms of how this technology might transform the way we live, LeCun said that within the next few years or even decades, “there will be transformative applications” of artificial intelligence visible and accessible to everyone.

Self-driving cars, the ability to call a car from your smartphone instead of owning one, no parking lots and safer transportation are all things the LeCun said he can see on the horizon, with medical advances being another area of rapid growth.

“There are already prototype systems that have been demonstrated to be better than human radiologists at picking out cancerous tumors,” he said, explaining that this alongside a “host of other applications” are going to make “a big difference.”

When it comes to the ethics of the discussion, LeCun noted that there are both short-term and long-term concerns, such as “are robots gonna take over the world?”

“Frankly these are questions that we are not worried about right now because we just don’t have the technology that’s anywhere near the kind of power that’s required. So these are philosophical discussions but not immediate problems,” he said.

However, short-term debate points include how to make the artificial intelligence systems that already exist safer and more reliable.

LeCun noted that he has helped set up a discussion forum called “Partnership for AI” that was co-founded by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM in order to facilitate discussion on the best ways to deploy artificial intelligence.

Both ethical and technical questions are brought up, he said, noting that since it’s a public forum, anyone from different fields such as academia, the government, social scientists and ethicists are able to participate and offer their contributions.

Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are suggesting a governing philosophy along the lines of a corrupt municipal police force relying on gangsters to help it keep street crime held in check.

Trump has been naming top Wall Street bankers and hedge fund owners to staff his Commerce Department (former Rothschild banker and billionaire Wilbur Ross), Treasury (former Goldman Sachs executive and hedge fund executive Steve Mnuchin, and more recently, as top “economic strategy advisors”, Blackstone Group CEO Steven Schwartzman and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

The president-elect has actually demonstrated a predilection for considering people who play the “rigged system’ and even actual criminals (albeit unindicted in some cases) in his cabinet and White House advisory staff. Dimon, of course, heads a too-big-to-fail bank that was one of five that pleaded guilty last year to federal felony charges involving a huge currency manipulation conspiracy. Dimon had his bank cop a plea and pay a $5.6-billion fine that allowed him to avoid facing criminal charges himself for the bank’s admitted criminal behavior and even to stay on in his lucrative top spot running the felonious institution .

Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly considering disgraced former General David Petraeus for a position, who in 2015 also copped a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of “mishandling top-secret information” while he was CIA director (a post he had to resign), in order to avoid more serious felony charges of providing such national security secrets to his paramour and biographer Paula Broadwell, and of potentially of lying about it to FBI investigators, also a felony. Petraeus, who did not have to do jail time under the plea deal, is still on two-year’s probation through April 23, 2017 though, and if appointed to a cabinet post by Trump would have to report his new job to his probation officer, and also obtain advance permission for any work-related travel until that date — a historic first for a top government appointee.

Either that or Trump, once inaugurated President, would have to pardon Petraeus before appointing him.

Could the idea of putting the gangsters in charge of national economic and foreign policy and economic regulation in order to fix what Trump calls a “rigged system” work as a governing philosophy?

I guess you’d have to ask how well having a crooked, mob-linked police force in New York, Philadelphia, Boston or Chicago worked in years past at keeping crime in check in those cities. The evidence is not particularly good, I would suggest, having lived in several of those venues.

We should also note that Trump’s idea of appointing top Wall Street weasels to key cabinet posts involved in regulating the economy is hardly unique to him. We can be sure that had the recent election been won by Hillary Clinton, who raked in millions of dollars both in personal gifts (excuse me: speaking “fees”) and in campaign contributions and donations to her family “charity” both before and during the campaign, would have also placed top bankers and capitalists in key cabinet posts, just as Presidents Obama, Bush II and Bill Clinton did in their presidencies.

That said, Trump’s choices seem particularly egregious in terms of the visuals, particularly in the cases of Dimon and potential appointee Petraeus.

Then again Trump himself has been good at skating around potential prosecution, as witness his personal “charitable” foundation’s settlement of a charge of self-dealing, and of a fraud case involving his so-called Trump “University,” as well as various other shady deals during his decades of building an allegedly billion-dollar real estate empire through creative use of the bankruptcy and tax laws.

Looking on the bright side, as the late Alexander Cockburn, who co-edited with Jeff St. Clair th emagazine CounterPunch, once argued in defense of an article I had written for that publication comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, “All US presidents (with the possible exception of Warren Harding)” have shared the Fuerher’s “enthusiasm for mass murder.” Alex claimed that Harding was exempted from the charge because “he was too busy lining his pockets to engage in war crimes.”

Perhaps that could turn out to be the story with the incoming Trump presidency: Maybe we’ll get a president and a cabinet so infected with the greed bug that they’ll devote their time and use their power to enrich themselves and their friends, and spare the world the murderous policies of their predecessors.

By Abhijit Singh

Ahead of Navy Day celebrations on 4 December, Admiral Sunil Lanba, India’s chief of naval staff (CNS), caused a flutter in the media by suggesting that the Navy was scrapping the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) project, India’s premier light fighter jet programme. At a press conference, Lanba remarked that the Navy was looking for temporary replacement jet from a source abroad for carrier-operations as the LCA (Navy) wasn’t “yet up to the mark.”

Given the sensitivity of the aircraft carrier programme, the admiral is unlikely to have made the declaration without consulting senior defence bureaucrats. Even so, he is likely to have placed many officials in the Ministry of Defence (MoD), as well as the Defence Research and Development Organisation, in a spot of bother. After a slow start in the early 1980s, the LCA struggled for over three decades before showing progress in the past few years. Having obtained operational clearance in 2013, the aircraft has now been officially integrated into the Indian Air Force. Oddly, the naval chief’s statement came only a day after the ministry cleared an order for 83 LCA Mk 1As from the government-owned defence manufacture Hindustan Aeronautical Limited (HAL) for the IAF.

This isn’t, of course, the first time that a naval chief has publicly expressed reservations about the LCA programme. In 2012, Admiral Nirmal Verma, then CNS, in an interaction with the media chided the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) for frequent cost and time overruns in the development of the naval version of the aircraft. The Navy, he suggested, was beginning to lose faith in the project.

The Navy’s real problem is that it believes that the LCA is a largely air force-centric programme that isn’t essentially geared to meet aircraft carrier-operations. At many points during its evolution, naval managers are said to have emphasised the need for aircraft systems to be reconfigured to meet the requirements of carrier take-off and landing, but the ADA never reportedly made a serious attempt to undertake the necessary modifications. Now, as then, the problem with the LCA remains the same: its inability to take off with its full weapon load from a carrier top. Naval sources point out that since 2013, the LCA has consistently failed the test of flight from a 200meter deck with full weapons load. In a series of trial sorties at a Shore Based Test Facility (SBTF) in May this year, ADA officials claimed that the aircraft had made the cut by successfully ascending from a short deck with two R-73 close combat missiles. But naval managers clearly weren’t impressed.

Naval aeronautical engineers believe that the LCA’s naval variant is slightly but “significantly” different from its air force version, not least on account of a major modification needed in the aircraft’s landing gear that enables arrested landings on a carrier deck. Unfortunately for the Indian Navy, the ADA hasn’t ever fully committed itself to developing a modified undercarriage. As a consequence, the suspicion of an institutional indifference toward the Navy’s specific needs of carrier operations has only grown stronger.

Another concern has been the lack of a reliable air-to-air refuelling system. Despite renewed efforts, the complex integration of the aerial refuelling probe on to the Tejas fighter hasn’t been properly accomplished. The absence of reliable “hot refuelling” implies a restriction in aircraft mission ranges, which maritime managers have been unwilling to accept.

Why, however, must the Indian Navy be fussy about an aircraft that is only meant to supplement the Mig-29K? Aircraft carrier experts say middle and light category aircraft have different peacetime roles profiles. Given India’s geostrategic interests in the Indian Ocean region, it is important for the Navy to project both hard and soft naval power. High-end combat aircraft like the Mig-29K are meant to exert hard military influence by signaling coercive intent. Equally important, however, is the need for a carrier-borne aircraft to showcase the Indian Navy’s prowess as reliable security agent in the littorals. Indigenous medium-capability assets help in creating a circle of trust, owing to their utility in joint multinational operations. With a leading role in regional forums such as the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) and Milan, the Indian Navy has come to be known as a friendly maritime agency. Its low-end light combat aircraft aids in the cultivation of a benevolent image. In addition, the aircraft’s export to friendly countries would help in the forging of strong working-level partnerships.

Misgivings about the LCA programme, however, go beyond the perceived disregard for specific functionality. In an article in July this year, Admiral Arun Prakash (retd.), a former chief of naval staff, outlined three reasons why the military leadership was apprehensive about the project. Firstly, Prakash pointed out that Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), the huge public sector firm manufacturing the LCA, is a monolithic, indolent giant with a work ethos that “struck dread in the hearts of air-warriors.” The company’s unionised employees were a cause for low productivity and poor production engineering standards that created many maintenance and interchangeability problems on aircraft. Secondly, there was a high failure rate of HAL manufactured components and systems that didn’t inspire confidence among military aviation managers. And lastly, Prakash pointed to the sub-optimal production support, which often left “HAL customers high and dry.”

Scrapping the LCA (Navy) programme, however, will not be without consequences. For one, the Indian Navy will need to start afresh in the search for a foreign source for a new light combat aircraft. Given the stringent provisions of the Defence Procurement Procedures (DPP), especially the need for a domestic manufacturer, this implies a substantial delay in the project. Besides, having invested considerable funds in the LCA programme since 2009, the Indian Navy will need to explain losses, as well as the wisdom of investing in a new project. Not only will it push back delivery of the platforms by a few years, the work-load on the Mig-29K will dramatically increase with involvement in both low-end and high-end missions.

For the moment, the critics of the LCA programme are feeling vindicated. “I told you so” is likely to become a familiar refrain in the coming days — at least until the Indian Navy issues a clarification that its chief was quoted out of context.

This article originally appeared in The Diplomat.

Machine learning is a powerful tool used for a variety of tasks in modern life, from fraud detection and sorting spam in Google, to making movie recommendations on Netflix.

Now a team of researchers from the University of Toronto Scarborough have developed a novel approach in using it to determine whether planetary systems are stable or not.

“Machine learning offers a powerful way to tackle a problem in astrophysics, and that’s predicting whether planetary systems are stable,” said Dan Tamayo, lead author of the research and a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Planetary Science at U of T Scarborough.

Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without having to be constantly programmed for a specific task. The benefit is that it can teach computers to learn and change when exposed to new data, not to mention it’s also very efficient.

The method developed by Tamayo and his team is 1,000 times faster than traditional methods in predicting stability.

“In the past we’ve been hamstrung in trying to figure out whether planetary systems are stable by methods that couldn’t handle the amount of data we were throwing at it,” he said.

It’s important to know whether planetary systems are stable or not because it can tell us a great deal about how these systems formed. It can also offer valuable new information about exoplanets that is not offered by current methods of observation.

There are several current methods of detecting exoplanets that provide information such as the size of the planet and its orbital period, but they may not provide the planet’s mass or how elliptical their orbit is, which are all factors that affect stability, noted Tamayo.

The method developed by Tamayo and his team is the result of a series of workshops at U of T Scarborough covering how machine learning could help tackle specific scientific problems. The research is currently published online in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“What’s encouraging is that our findings tell us that investing weeks of computation to train machine learning models is worth it because not only is this tool accurate, it also works much faster,” he added.

It may also come in handy when analysing data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) set to launch next year. The two-year mission will focus on discovering new exoplanets by focusing on the brightest stars near our solar system.

“It could be a useful tool because predicting stability would allow us to learn more about the system, from the upper limits of mass to the eccentricities of these planets,” said Tamayo.

“It could be a very useful tool in better understanding those systems.”

Employment subsidies have been widely used in OECD countries to counteract the recent job crisis, but their effectiveness is difficult to assess. This column summarises the findings of a recent study analysing a 2012 Spanish employment subsidy given to firms with fewer than 50 employees that make use of a new type of permanent contract. Consistent with other country studies, it fails to find robust evidence for increased employment growth due to the subsidy scheme.

By Elisa Gamberoni, Katerina Gradeva and Sebastian Weber*

Following the financial crisis, unemployment increased across large parts of Europe, reaching all-time highs in some countries. As a result, many European governments embarked on ambitious labour market reforms to spur employment growth. Recent evidence points to the beneficial effects from a multitude of reform initiatives, including measures to increase wage flexibility, limit unemployment benefits, and reduce labour tax wedges (IMF 2016, Guriev et al. 2016).

Employment subsidies

Employment subsidies, including hiring subsidies, have been part of the reform package in several OECD countries (OECD 2009).  While hiring subsidies are not a novelty, analysing their effects can be a daunting exercise as an evident control group or counterfactual is not always easily identifiable. The few existing empirical studies either do not find an impact on employment level (Hujer et al. 2001, Huttunen et al. 2013)¹ or find a short-lasting increase in the employability of an individual.² In the case of Spain, the OECD (2013) in its early assessment of the Spanish labour market reform suggests that “the comprehensive nature of the 2012 reform makes its evaluation a difficult task [and] the inclusion of a large number of provisions, sometimes explicitly targeted at different groups, does not allow the identification of a suitable control group”. In a recent study, we instead make use of this specific differential treatment of firm groups (based on their size) to identify the impact of the employment subsidy scheme that was introduced in Spain (Gamberoni et al. 2016).

The 2012 Spanish labour market reform

The employment subsidy in Spain is provided in the context of a new permanent contract (Contrato de Apoyo a Emprendedores), giving firms financial incentives to permanently employ additional personnel. Companies with fewer than 50 employees (prior to making use of the contract) are eligible to use this new indefinite contract for young and previously unemployed workers. Financial incentives include tax breaks and reductions in social security contributions, which are granted if the newly hired employees remain under the new permanent contract for at least three years.³

The employment subsidy was not the only reform with specific reference to firm size. Various provisions apply to firms below 10, 25, and 50, and above 100 employees – implying more favourable treatment in terms of incentives, flexibility, and severance cost as firm size declines (Table 1). Relative to the pre-2012 reform conditions, only firms between 50 and 100 employees face comparable labour regulations with no specific regulation that is peculiar to them, while firms with between 25-50 employees differ from them only due to the employment subsidy. This constrains the set of considerable treated firms to the range of 25-50, and the control firms to the (symmetric) window of 50-75 employees.

Table 1. Selected 2012 reform measures, by firm size 

The effect on unemployment

The arbitrary size limit of firm eligibility for the hiring subsidy scheme provides for a natural candidate to analyse the behaviour of firms drawing on recent advances in regression discontinuity design,⁴ comparing treated firms on the left to control firms on the right of the 50-employees threshold.

Based on this approach and drawing on the Amadeus firm-level dataset for Spain, we find that in the year after the implementation of the reform employment growth of eligible firms has been about 2% higher than employment growth of firms above the threshold, which could not benefit from the subsidy.

However, this estimation result relies on the assumption that firms did not sort below the 50-employees threshold to make use of the subsidy, and that firms above and below the 50-employees threshold were not affected differently by other existing regulations. Both possibilities cannot be excluded ex ante. First, firms could have allowed temporary contracts to run out and employ new staff under the new permanent contract in the subsequent period. Second, a reform in 2010 created the obligation for firms to submit full balance sheets (as opposed to simplified ones) that must be reviewed by an auditor if, at the end of the fiscal year and over two consecutive years, the company fulfilled at least two of the following three conditions: total assets more than €4 million, turnover more than €8 million, average number of workers greater than 50. Both elements could provide incentives for firms to reduce their employment level below 50 employees prior to 2013. Consequently, employment growth of firms eligible for the subsidy in 2013 would appear higher relative to the ‘control’ group of firms with more than 50 employees.⁵

To control for the effect of pre-existing firm-size contingent regulations or sorting starting in 2011, we employ complementary strategies: difference-in-discontinuities (Eggers et al. 2016, Grembi et al. 2016), and excluding firms that potentially sorted below the threshold.⁶

Irrespective of the robustness method used, estimated effects of the subsidy on employment growth decline to a level well below the initial estimate, and are now statistically insignificant. Figure 1 illustrates this by comparing employment growth in 2013 for firms with employee size of 25-49 (left quadrant) to those with 50-75 employees (right quadrant). Based on the full sample, a polynomial trend suggests that at the threshold employment growth for smaller firms is significantly higher than for larger firms (black solid line). Once firms that are completely unaffected by the 2010 reform are excluded from the dataset,⁷ the polynomial trend shows no noticeable difference for average employment growth to the left and right of the 50 employees threshold (red dotted line) as employment growth for firms with more than 50 employees is corrected upwards. A very similar picture emerges when excluding firms from the estimation sample with an observed employment pattern that would be consistent with sorting to benefit from the employment subsidy.

Figure 1. Employment growth 2013 excluding firms affected by 2010 reform, by firm size

Lessons for future schemes

Analysing the effect of recent labour market reforms in Europe is a daunting task given the lack of an evident control group or a suitable counterfactual. Using impact evaluation techniques, we fail to find robust evidence of an effect on the overall employment growth of eligible firms as a result of the Spanish hiring subsidy scheme implemented in 2012. While the lack of available firm data on actual take up rates of the hiring scheme makes a definite conclusion impossible, the empirical evidence is consistent with firms sorting below the threshold to take advantage of the fiscal incentives and/or avoid stricter reporting requirements as a result of a reform implemented in 2010. Based on the lack of support for an employment-enhancing effect of the subsidy and amidst the associated fiscal costs, caution may be warranted in considering the application and design of similar (size-contingent) hiring subsidy schemes.

As more post-reform data become available, it would be important for future research to assess possible long-term effects of the subsidy, including the effect on job security and productivity gains through the use of the new permanent contract.

Authors’ note: The views expressed in this column are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the ECB or the Eurosystem.

*About the authors:
Elisa Gamberoni, Economist, ECB

Katerina Gradeva, Research Analyst, European Central Bank

Sebastian Weber, Economist, European Central Bank (on leave from the IMF)

References:
Cattaneo, M D, B R Frandsen, and R Titiunik (2015), “Randomization inference in the regression discontinuity design: An application to party advantages in the US Senate”, Journal of Causal Inference 3 (1), 1-24.

Eggers, A C, R Freier, V Grembi, and T Nannicini (2016), “Regression discontinuity designs based on population thresholds: Pitfalls and solutions”, The American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.

Galasso, E, M Ravallion, and A Salvia (2001), “Assisting the transition from workfare to work: Argentina’s Proempleo experiment”, Development Research Group, World Bank.

Gamberoni, E , K Gradeva and S Weber (2016), “Firm Responses to Employment Subsidies: A Regression Discontinuity Approach to the 2012 Spanish Labour Market Reform”, ECB Working Paper Series 1970.

Grembi, V, T Nannicini, and UTroiano (2016), “Do fiscal rules matter?”, American Economic Journal: Applied Econometrics, 8 (3), 1-30.

Groh, M, N Krishnan, D McKenzie, and T Vishwanath (2012), “Soft skills or hard cash? The impact of training and wage subsidy programs on female youth employment in Jordan”, World Bank Impact Evaluation Series 62.

Guriev, S, B Speciale, and M Tuccio (2016), “Wage stickiness and unemployment in regulated and unregulated labour markets: Italian evidence”, VoxEU.org, 13 September.

Hujer, R, M Caliendo, and D Radic (2001), “Estimating the effects of wage subsidies on the labour demand in West-Germany using the IAB Establishment Panel”, Ifo-Studien, 47 (2), 163-197.

Huttunen, K, J Pirttila, and R Uusitalo (2013), “The employment effects of low-wage subsidies”, Journal of Public Economics, 97 (C), 49-60.

IMF (2016), “Time for a supply-side boost? Macroeconomic effects of labor and product market reforms in advanced economies”, IMF WEO Chapter 3.

Lee, D S, and T Lemieux (2010), “Regression discontinuity designs in economics”, Journal of Economic Literature 48 (2), 281-355.

OECD (2009), OECD Employment Outlook 2009. Tackling the job crisis, OECD Publishing 2009.

OECD (2013), The 2012 labour market reform in Spain: A preliminary assessment, OECD Publishing 2013.

Endnotes:
[1] Hujer et al. (2001) estimate a conditional difference-in-differences (DID) regression using West-German firm-level data. They find no effect of existing wage subsidies on the employment level, citing as a main reason possible substitution from non-subsidised to subsidised employment. Huttunen et al. (2013)’s assessment of the low-wage subsidy in Finland also comes to the conclusion that there has been no effect on the employment rate of the eligible groups, which is identified using a DID approach based on the eligibility criteria for the relevant workers.

[2] Groh et al. (2012) for example analyse the impact of training and wage subsidies programmes on female young employees in Jordan based on a randomised experiment, in which a group of participants was randomly assigned a job voucher to reduce employer costs. The authors find that the job voucher led to a large increase in employment in the short-run. However, the impact is no longer statistically significant four months after the voucher period has ended. Galasso et al.  (2001) come to a similar conclusion in their study on the effectiveness of a job voucher and training programme in Argentina (Proempleo).

[3] Firms cannot have engaged in collective or unfair dismissals in the six months prior to the starting date defined in the new contract in order to be eligible. For hiring workers below 30 years of age, tax deductions of up to EUR 3000 are provided after the completion of the probation period. Firms are also granted tax deduction of 50% of the unemployment benefits that an unemployed person would receive at the moment she is hired with the new permanent contract. Recruiting firms are also entitled to additional fiscal incentives in the form of further social contribution reductions: EUR 1000, 1100 and 1200 per year in the first, second, and third year respectively for each young unemployed recruited (between 16 and 30 years old), and EUR 1300 per year for each long-term unemployed over 45 years old over 3 years. The contract entails an extended probation period of one year (with the possibility to end the contract at will during that time).

[4] The applied method, based on local randomisation inference, resembles traditional randomised experiments around the threshold (Cattaneo et al. 2015). Units to the left and right of the threshold must be comparable in terms of their covariates and should have not strategically sorted in order to benefit from the treatment, for the estimation approach to be valid. The design of the subsidy and its speedy implementation are consistent with both these requirements. Thus, by choosing firms in the close vicinity of the threshold, we can assume that all the other factors are ‘evolving smoothly’ with respect to the assignment variable, the level of employment prior to the introduction of the reform (Lee and Lemieux 2010). Therefore, the average treatment effect can be estimated by the difference in the conditional expectation of the outcome variable for units, which are arbitrarily close to the threshold.

[5] Sorting just below the threshold in 2011 (or 2012) in order to become eligible for the new contract is possible by not prolonging temporary contracts, as this option is not preventing firms from applying for the new subsidy in the following period. On average about 30% of the workforce is employed via such temporary contracts and their average duration is about 60 days.

[6] Placebo tests (pretending the reform has taken place in earlier years) support this hypothesis. Results indicate that there is no difference in employment growth for firms just below and above the 50 employees’ threshold in the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. However, employment growth for firms just below 50 employees compared to those just above 50 employees is significantly higher in 2011 – the year before the employment subsidy was introduced and the year after the 2010 reform was implemented.

[7] This is possible by using the other two conditions that make firms subject to tighter reporting requirements as a result of the 2010 reform. Specifically, firms’ employment decision is unaffected by the 2010 reform, if either total assets and turnover exceed or are below the threshold in two subsequent years. In both cases, the employment level is irrelevant

After the border attacks in Maungdaw by Muslim militants, the Tatmadaw (Myanmar national army) has been accused of raping and killing Rohingya and burning their villages by the media and human rights groups. This has rekindled pro-Rohingya jihadist sentiments in the region as well as globally.

By Jasminder Singh and Muhammad Haziq Bin Jani*

On October 9, 2016, some 200 men crossed from Bangladesh into Myanmar’s Rakhine (Arakan) State by boat to attack three border guard posts in Maungdaw Township. According to the Myanmar government, the attackers killed nine policemen and took away more than 50 guns and thousands of bullets. Days later, YouTube videos revealed the emergence of the Bangladesh-based Harakah al-Yaqin militant group which is also known as the Faith Movement.

The videos showed militants armed with AK-47 rifles, inviting “Rohingya brothers around the world” to join the fight. Both Faith Movement and Aqa Mul Mujahidin (AMM) were linked to the attacks by online and government sources; they are new groups that probably evolved out of jihadist networks in neighbouring Bangladesh. Since the attacks, the Tatmadaw has been accused of human rights abuses and heavy-handed tactics.

Jihadists for Rohingya

As early as 10 October 2016, the New York Times reported that seven villagers were shot to death by Myanmar forces. Human Rights Watch has reported that the Tatmadaw has burned down 1,250 buildings. Reuters and Myanmar Times also reported that “Burmese soldiers” had raped Rohingya women in the affected areas. Without access given to international observers, media and humanitarian aid providers, it is impossible to corroborate these claims.

According to an article by Time on 21 November 2016, the Myanmar Government said that “Muslim terrorists burned down the buildings themselves in an attempt to frame the army for abuse and claim international assistance”. The United Nations has weighed in to call for an investigation into allegations of human rights abuses in Myanmar.

Aside from bringing the world’s attention to the alleged human rights abuses, the counter-insurgency in Arakan has attracted the attention of extremists and jihadists from South and Southeast Asia. Online extremists in Indonesia have expressed their desire to mount “jihad” on behalf of the Rohingya, with some supporters hoping that the ‘mujahidin’ will be able to smuggle into Myanmar. The Rohingya crisis has become a rallying cry for jihad and surpasses in gravity when contrasted with issues such as the alleged blasphemy by the governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”). Some social media users in Indonesia have gone to the extent of declaring their readiness to be suicide bombers for the sake of the Rohingya. The Rohingya issue is fast developing into a security threat that would have an adverse impact on peace in the region.

Rohingya Crisis Triggering New Jihad

In May 2013, following the 2012 Rohingya refugee crisis, Indonesians like Chep Hermawan of Gerakan Reformis Islam (GARIS), Jakfar Shidiq of Front Pembela Islam (FPI) and Bernard Abdul Jabbar of Komite Advokasi Muslim Rohingya-Arakan (KAMRA) decided that the only solution to the alleged violence against the Rohingya is by conducting jihad. At the time, Jakfar claimed that a thousand Muslim youths were ready to enter Myanmar to defend the Rohingya. He also claimed that by Ramadhan that year, there would be enough money – 10 billion Indonesian rupiah – to purchase weapons to equip his thousand-man expeditionary force.

Chep Hermawan is also the man responsible for sending several Indonesians to Syria to join the so-called Islamic State (IS) terrorist group; they included Bahrumsyah, the leader of Katibah Nusantara in Syria. Also in 2013, two Rohingya leaders had travelled to Indonesia to meet hardline groups, apparently ‘shopping’ for “fighters, guns, cash and bomb-making instructors”, according to The Jakarta Post.

A similar jihadist flare-up is now developing in the wake of the latest atrocities reported. On 30 October, India Today reported that Pakistan-based militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jamatul Mujahidin and the Pakistani Taliban have given full assistance to the Rohingya militants. On 23 November 2016, Posmetro reported that Ehsanullah Ehsan, the spokesperson of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) called on Myanmar youth to rise and carry out jihad, promising that his group’s training centre, expertise, trainers and personnel are all ready to support them. Ehsan stated that protests, marches and threats have little impact compared to terrorism.

Meanwhile, regional online extremists have begun pledging their support through profile pictures with the IS flag and a hashtag saying “Pray for P_A_R_I_S” which refers to the conflict areas of Palestine, Africa, Rohingya, Iraq and Syria. The Indonesian online jihadist community even furnished their Facebook pages with various Rohingya-related propaganda posts and pictures, including a map which provides a possible travel route for potential Indonesian jihadists to enter Myanmar via Aceh. In addition, Muhammad Wanndy, a Malaysian IS fighter linked to the Puchong grenade attack, called on his supporters to prove that they are not keyboard warriors by killing any Buddhist-Myanmar person they may find in Malaysia or Indonesia.

Strategic Failure

The Tatmadaw may not have expected that reports of their alleged human rights abuses would become fodder for jihadi recruitment. This emerging security threat towards Myanmar may ripple across the region. In August 2013, a bomb exploded in the Ekayana Buddhist Vihara in Jakarta, injuring three people: the bomb attack was in response to the sectarian conflict in Myanmar. In November that year, there was a failed plot to bomb the Myanmar embassy to avenge the killing of Rohingya Muslims.

It is not certain whether Tatmadaw’s alleged latest harsh measures were a result of its flawed threat assessment. Firstly, the details of the attack, particularly the amphibious border-crossing of the Faith Movement from Bangladesh to Myanmar, should point to foreign terrorist networks across the border, where the Bangladeshi government has been, according to the Indian Express, complacent in handling the emerging terrorist threat. The Faith Movement’s videos were uploaded almost immediately after the border attacks on their group’s YouTube and Islamic State (IS)- and Al-Qaeda(AQ)-affiliated Telegram channels.

Again, this points to the more affluent, tech-savvy extremist communities that are growing in South Asia. The Tatmadaw has inadvertently allowed the media to frame their counter-insurgency in a way that fuels jihadist propaganda, despite the Rohingya cause being featured in IS and AQ magazines earlier, before the crisis began. Considering that there may be significant foreign involvement in the emergence of the Faith Movement and AMM, defeating these jihadist groups which are thriving on the back of the Rohingya crisis alone may not be sufficient as more could easily be formed to replace them or to pick up from where they have left off.

Regional Security Considerations

Rather than appearing to be the antagonists, the Myanmar government and security forces would have done better by securing its borders, addressing Rohingya’s citizenship status and grievances, and working with the Rohingya as a strategic partner to alert the authorities of terrorist or insurgent activities. According to Myanmar’s Ministry of Information, interrogations revealed that the detainees were “forced to attend terrorist training” and “threatened to be killed” if they refuse. This further emphasises that there may have been an opportunity to win over the Rohingya.

Beyond security issues along the northern borders of Myanmar, Southeast Asian countries must be vigilant. Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand have significant Rohingya refugee populations. These countries must guard against the possible recruitment or radicalisation of the refugees. It would be unfortunate if these refugees, in their desperation, become members of terrorist organisations or commit terrorist acts in their host countries.

Beyond this, a long-term solution is urgently required to address the plight of the Rohingya minority. Their long-standing grievances and allegations of human rights abuses against them will have to be looked into. The alternative is more internal unrest, massive displacement of Rohingya, and foreign jihadist intervention.

*Jasminder Singh is a Senior Analyst and Muhammad Haziq Jani a Research Analyst with the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

US Vice President-elect Mike Pence telephoned Sri Lanka’s President Maithripala Sirisena December 1, on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump.

According to the Sri Lanka government, during the conversation, President Sirisena conveyed his best wishes to the new Administration under the leadership of President-elect Donald Trump.

The conversation focused on measures for strengthening bilateral relations between Sri Lanka and the United States in the future, according to the Sri Lanka government, adding that Vice President-elect Mike Pence said that they will work towards arranging a visit by President Sirisena to Washington DC for a meeting with President-elect Mr. Donald Trump.

The objective of both countries is to ensure the progress of relations between the two countries based on common values of democratic governance and Sri Lanka’s strategic location in the middle of Asia, according to the Sri Lanka government.

Cooperation directed at securing the safety of sea lanes, countering drug smuggling and working together in disaster management as partners was also discussed.

Following disappointing results from the initial recount efforts in Pennsylvania, CBS reports Jill Stein’s Green Party is dropping its court case seeking a statewide recount of Pennsylvania’s Nov. 8 presidential election, blaming a lack of funds.

According to Philly Voice, an updated count Friday by state election officials shows Trump’s lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton has shrunk from 71,000 to 49,000. If this new number is accurate, Trump’s lead is at 0.8 percent, down from more than 1 percent. That is still quite shy of Pennsylvania’s 0.5 percent trigger for an automatic statewide recount.

On Monday, Jill Stein of the Green Party filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania seeking a statewide recount of presidential votes in a continuation of her mission to contest the election results in three key voting states.

But now, wanted to explore whether voting machines and systems had been hacked and the election result manipulated, as CBS reports, The Green Party is dropping its case…

The decision came Saturday, two days before a court hearing in the case.

Lawyers for the Green Party-backed voters who filed the case say they can’t afford the $1 million bond ordered by the court by Monday at 5 p.m.

However, Green Party-backed efforts to analyze election software in scattered precincts are continuing.

According to a statement, Stein plans to hold a news conference about the recount effort Monday morning outside Trump Tower in New York City.

“The judge’s outrageous demand that voters pay such an exorbitant figure is a shameful, unacceptable barrier to democratic participation,”

“This is yet another sign that Pennsylvania’s antiquated election law is stacked against voters.”

A statement from the Pennsylvania GOP sent Saturday night read, in part:

“The filing of a discontinuance of the Election Contest by Jill Stein’s petitioners tonight is a recognition that their Election Contest was completely without merit, and meant solely for purposes to delay the Electoral College vote in Pennsylvania for President-Elect Trump…

Candidate Jill Stein’s allegations created the false allusion that some unidentified foreign government hacked our state’s voting systems when absolutely no such proof existed. We believe that she always knew that she had no such proof.”

So did Stein really spend all the $6 million-plus she raised or was the decision made to save the scammed millions instead of pressing ahead with a futile unwarranted recount? (or did Soros run out of cash?)

A call by Igor Barinov, head of the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN), to “forcibly” put all Muslim communities and mosques under the central control of Moscow has been denounced by experts on the North Caucasus as a move that not only will provoke violence but also contribute to the spread of Islamist extremism.

Barinov spoke twice to a regional meeting in Pyatigorsk last week. In his first address, he said that FADN has now set as its task ensuring that “all cult buildings are required to reregister with centralized muftiates” so as to isolate independent ones that in his opinion are “often preparing future radicals” (kavpolit.com/articles/spory_o_mechetjah_i_vojne-30097/).

According to Anton Chablin of Kavkazskaya politika, his suggestion “was actively discussed in the corridors” where “activists who had come from Daghestan and Ingushetia predicted that an attempt to ‘centralize’ all Muslims in their republics would involve an enormous number of conflicts between Sufis and Salafis.”

Unfortunately, those expressing that opinion on the sidelines of the Fourth Russian Caucasus conference were not in a position to express the same views from the podium and thus allow Barinov to see very clearly how much or how little support there is for what he is proposing to do.

On the second day of the meeting, Barinov delivered another address, one in which he admitted that “today, despite all the efforts of the federal authorities, there are problem areas in every republic” in the North Caucasus involving militants, their defeat and their reintegration into society.

According to him, “almost all contemporary conflicts are one way or another connected with the redistribution of land,” but, he added, “this is only the tip of the iceberg: the real cause is corruption, the role of ethnic clans in the republic governments, and the criminalization of the regional authorities.”

These problems, Barinov continued, typically have taken on a “religious-ethnic” dimension and have sparked an exodus of the Russian-speaking population. He said that he would “concentrate all efforts of FADN to block this outflow” in the future.

Apparently, many of the independent experts at the meeting but few of the officials disagreed with the FADN head. The latter almost without exception declared that in their respective republics things were good and would get even better. But there was one notable exception: Ramazan Abdulatipov, the head of Daghestan.

He sharply criticized the “main ‘child’ of FADN” – plans to adopt a new federal law on the Russian nation, and he said that Moscow had failed to recognize that his republic and by implication others were doing the best they could in what are difficult economic times for which they are not responsible.