Israeli forces on Sunday at dawn opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats off the coast of the Gaza Strip, according to witnesses.

Witnesses told Ma’an that Israeli naval forces opened fire at the fishing boats while at sea in both the northern and southern Gaza Strip.

No injuries were reported.

Shortly after the fisherman were shot at, Israeli naval forces detained two fishermen and confiscated their boats off the cost of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, according to the head of the fishermen’s union Nizar Ayyash.

Ayyash told Ma’an that Israeli naval forces detained brothers Shafiq and Saadi, confiscated their fishing boats boats and took the boats to Israel’s Ashdod port.

An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an she would look into reports of the incidents.

Israeli military incursions inside the besieged Gaza Strip and near the “buffer zone” which lies on both land and sea sides of Gaza, have long been a near-daily occurrence.

Palestinians who work near the “buffer zone” often come under fire from military forces, as the Israeli military has not made clear the precise area of the designated zone.

The Israeli army regularly open fires on Palestinian fishermen and farmers along the border areas, despite a ceasefire agreement that ended the 2014 war.

The practice has in effect destroyed much of the agricultural and fishing sectors of the blockaded coastal enclave.

Israeli forces also regularly detain Palestinian fisherman off the coast of Gaza working within the fishing zone, generally for alleged security reasons.

According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), Israeli forces detained 71 fishermen and confiscated 22 fishing boats throughout 2015.

The center said that Israeli naval forces also opened fire on Palestinian fishermen at least 139 times over the course of the year, wounding 24 and damaging 16 fishing boats.

Authorities in Ghana have closed a fake “US Embassy” in the capital, Accra. It was run by a criminal network that issued illegally obtained authentic visas for a decade, the US State Department said.

Until it was shut down this summer, the fake embassy was housed in a run-down, pink two-story building with a corrugated iron roof and a US flag flying outside. Inside hung a picture of President Barack Obama.

“It was not operated by the United States government, but by figures from both Ghanaian and Turkish organized crime rings and a Ghanaian attorney practicing immigration and criminal law,” the State Department said in a statement released to Arab News on Sunday.

English and Dutch-speaking Turkish citizens posed as consular officers and ran the operation. Investigations also uncovered a fake “Dutch Embassy,” the State Department said. Officials in The Netherlands were not available for comment on Sunday.

The crime ring issued fraudulently obtained but legitimate US visas and false identification documents, including birth certificates, at a cost of $6,000 per person, the statement said.

During raids that led to a number of arrests, authorities seized authentic and counterfeit Indian, South African and Schengen visas along with 150 passports from 10 different countries, a laptop and smartphones.

The statement did not say how the gang obtained the authentic visas, nor did the State Department say how many people were believed to have illegally entered the US and other countries using visas issued by the crime ring which paid bribes in order to operate.

“The criminals running the operation were able to pay off corrupt officials who looked the other way, as well as to obtain legitimate blank documents to be doctored,” the statement said.

There was no immediate comment from Ghana’s Criminal Investigations Division.
Visas for Western countries are in high demand in Africa and embassies say the visa market is one targeted by organized crime.

The genuine US Embassy in Ghana is in a prominent and heavily fortified complex in Cantonments, one of the capital’s up-market neighborhoods. Lines of people queue outside each day for visa appointments and other businesses.

The fake embassy was open three mornings a week and did not accept walk-in appointments. Instead, the criminals advertized on billboards in Ghana, Togo and Ivory Coast and brought clients from across West Africa to Accra where they rented hotel rooms for them in nearby hotels.

US authorities conducting a broader security operation were tipped off about the fake embassy and assembled a team, including the Ghana Detectives Bureau and police as well as other international partners, to close down the ring’s operations.

The 7th Session of the Shoura Council, constituted by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman on Friday, has 20 new female faces.

Ten women members retained their posts out of 30 women appointed by the late King Abdullah to the Council for the first time in royal decrees issued in January 2013.

The historic decrees gave women a 20 percent quota in the Council, a body appointed by the King to advise him on policies and legislation.

The new female members are Ahlam Hakami, Asma Al-Zahrani, Iqbal Darandi, Jawaher Al-Anzi, Jawhara Al-Yami, Hamda Al-Joufi, Raeda Abu Nayyan, Samiyah Bukhari, Sultana Al-Badaiwi, Aliyah Al-Dahlawi, Fatima Al-Shahri, Fawziyah Abal Khail, Kouthar Al-Arbish, Latiefa Al-Buainain, Lina Almaeena, Mouda Al-Khalaf, Noorah Yousef, Noorah Al-Musaed, Noorah Al-Shaaban and Noorah Al-Murai.

King Salman extended the term of Dr. Amal Al-Shaman, Dr. Hanan Al-Ahmadi, Dr. Fatimah Al-Qarni, Dr. Firdous Al-Saleh, Dr. Mastourah Al-Shammari, Dr. Muna Al Mushait, Huda Al-Hilaisi, Dr. Zainab Abu Talib, Dr. Latifa Al-Sha’lan and Dr. Nihad Al-Jishi.

A number of prominent female members such as Dr. Thuraya Obeid, Dr. Hayat Sindi, and Thuraya Al-Arrayed were among the 20 outgoing members.

While reconstituting the Council for a period of four years, the King reinstated Sheikh Abdullah Al-Asheikh as the council’s president, Muhammad Al-Jafri as deputy president and Yahya Al-Samaan as assistant president.

Among the outgoing male members, there were 18 members who completed the maximum period of 12 years.

Asheikh succeeded Sheikh Saleh Bin Humaid as president of the Council in 2009.

Speaking to the Saudi Press Agency, Asheikh thanked King Salman, Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Naif, and Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman for giving him and the new members an opportunity to serve the nation and the people through playing a key role in the Kingdom’s top consultative body.

Original source

In nanotechnology control is key. Control over the arrangements and distances between nanoparticles can allow tailored interaction strengths so that properties can be harnessed in devices such as plasmonic sensors.

Now researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology use dendrimers that mimic the electron valency of atoms and link them into arrays using molecules that coordinate with the dendrimer as they would form a covalent electron pair in their valence shell – “electron pair mimicry”.

Kimihisa Yamamoto, Ken Albrecht, and colleagues at Tokyo Tech considered the dendritic polyphenylazomethine (DPA), which has a structure that branches out from a central core. “Lewis acid” molecules coordinate to the “Lewis base” sites of DPA. Analysis of the ratio of SnCl2 Lewis acid molecules coordinating with each dendrimer revealed step increases from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16, which mimics the valency of the Bohr atom that has 2, 8, 18, and 32 electrons in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd , and 4th orbitals. This reflects the increase in the number of molecules that can coordinate with the dendrimer with increasing distance from the core, as the number of dendrimer branches and electron density increases.

Yamamoto’s team analysed the coordination of DPA with a stronger binding Lewis acid – triphenylmethylium (TPM) – bound to the rod-like molecule phenylene ethynylene. The phylene ethynlene backbone is rigid enough that the acid cations at either end cannot then bind to the same dendrimer. Instead a polymer chain of dendrimers forms. Using a different starting dendrimer (ZnPG4 instead of DPAG4) – which has a core valency of four instead of two – led to the formation of two dimensional polymerisation of the dendrimers, producing a 2D array of nanocontainers for that can accumulate other Lewis acids into the outer orbitals.

The work describes “a new aspect of atom mimicry” conclude the researchers. “The geometry and pitch can be controlled by the design of the dendrimer and the linker and are potentially applicable to plasmonics (after seed-mediated growth) and nanoelectrode grids (which are also useful as electrocatalysts).”

Bohr atom

The Bohr model of the atom set out by Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford in 1913 describes the atom as a positive nucleus surrounded by electrons in different shells or energy levels. Each shell has a prescribed number of electrons that can occupy it – that is, two electrons can occupy the first shell, eight the next, and eighteen the next, and so on.

While there are aspects of the atom behaviour that the model does not cover, it is particularly successful at explaining the spectral emission lines. When excited, an electron can jump to the next energy level. When it returns to the initial energy level, the difference in the energies is emitted as light at the specific wavelength equivalent to the energy difference.

Where a shell is not full, the atom can bond with another chemical species. In this way the valency of an atom describes how full the electron shell is and how readily bonds can form. The electron density gradient of dendrimers moving radially from the core to the more branched outer regions dictates how many Lewis acid coordinating molecules it can accommodate and in this way it mimics the energy levels of the Bohr atom.

What is a Lewis acid

A Lewis acid is a chemical species that can accept a lone pair of electrons from a chemical that can donate a lone pair, that is, from a Lewis base. This behaviour is defined by the electron structure of the chemical. Lewis acids include acidic compounds but also metal cations.

When the dendrimer coordinates with the Lewis acids it takes the place of the Lewis base that would donate an electron pair. The researchers describe the di-Lewis acid compound (linker molecule) as electron pair mimicry.

Isosbestic points

When two chemicals react the amount of light absorbed can change depending on how much light the products versus the reactants absorb. If the products and reactants absorb the same amount of light at a particular wavelength, it is described as the isosbestic point.

The researchers used isosbestic points to identify the step increases in Lewis acid reacting with the dendrimers. A wavelength shift in the isosbestic point indicates coordination of the Lewis acid to the subsequent layer of the dendrimer.

By Michael Lelyveld

Contradictions in China’s energy and environmental policies are challenging antipollution efforts despite projections of progress toward long-term goals.

In its annual World Energy Outlook released this month, the International Energy Agency (IEA) gave positive ratings to both China’s and world efforts to stem global warming.

“The prospective changes to the global energy scene are not yet enough to deliver the necessary containment of CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions. But we are making progress,” wrote IEA executive director Fatih Birol in introducing the near 700-page report.

The agency cited encouraging trends in the national commitments of over 190 countries to limit the rise of world temperatures to 2 degrees Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial age.

“So far, the two-degree target is not out of reach,” said study coauthor Laura Cozzi at a prerelease press conference, but she stressed that greater efforts will be needed to meet the goal by the end of the century.

IEA officials noted that 2015 was a no-growth year for CO2 emissions, while non-carbon renewable energy sources accounted for more than half of new generating capacity for the first time.

All nations have contributed to global warming, but climate trends continue to depend heavily on China as the largest energy consumer and carbon emitter. Although the country leads the world in developing renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, it also burns about half the world’s coal.

In its long-range forecast tables, the IEA projects that China’s annual CO2 emissions will reach a high by around 2030 before declining to account for 24.2 percent of the world total in 2040 compared with 28.3 percent in 2014.

By contrast, U.S. emissions have already peaked with annual volumes dropping 6.1 percent from 2014 to 2020 and nearly 25 percent by 2040. The U.S. share of world CO2 will fall from 16 percent to 10.7 percent, the forecast said.

The projections are for the IEA’s central “new policies scenario,” which assumes that declared national intentions will be implemented.

Changes in coal policies

At the online prerelease press conference, IEA officials declined to address questions on possible shifts in U.S. policies after the recent presidential elections and potential effects on the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

During the campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump called global warming a “hoax.” But as president-elect, Trump told The New York Times last week that he is keeping “a totally open mind” with regard to climate change.

It remains unclear whether the new administration will support the Paris accords.

But changes in China’s coal policies may cast an equally large cloud of uncertainty over the IEA projections that have been prepared during the past year.

Under rising international pressure, China set targets for reducing its massive production overcapacity in the steel and coal industries, which has been blamed for low prices, pollution and job losses at home and abroad.

In February, China’s government pledged to cut up to 150 million metric tons of annual steel capacity and as much as 1 billion tons of coal by 2020. But at the same time, it approved economic stimulus projects that increased demand for coal and steel.

Policy contradictions came to a head over the past month with a steep drop in coal inventories that roughly doubled prices for the high-polluting fuel this year.

Faced with a price crisis, China’s government moved in both directions at once, insisting that it will meet the 2020 targets for capacity cuts while authorizing coal mines to boost production by 1 million tons per day.

The increase threatens to reverse the declines in China’s coal consumption since 2014, which encouraged climate change activists to hope that a major CO2 source had already peaked.

According to China’s official figures, coal use fell 2.9 percent in 2014 from the year-earlier high of 4.24 billion tons, dropping by another 3.6 percent in 2015. In the first half of 2016, coal consumption was down 5.1 percent from a year before to 1.82 billion tons, the government said.

But that was before the recent shortages and the surge in output. If the trends continue, consumption could rise again and perhaps test the 2013 high.

“Since the capacity cuts were blamed for causing a supply shortage, it will not be easy to resolve the combination of a short-term crunch and a long-term excess,” an analysis by the official Xinhua news agency said last week.

Volatility in production

The IEA study voiced confidence in China’s efforts to reduce coal use over time. It projects that coal demand will decline at an average annual rate of 0.5 percent through 2040.

But the report includes a reservation that reflects the current policy reversal and could spell trouble for the forecast ahead.

“Despite the efforts of policymakers to smooth the transition, there remains a risk that the volatility in coal production and pricing in China will increase over the coming years,” it says.

“It cannot be excluded that exceptionally strong electricity demand growth, coupled with poor hydropower availability … and a surge in industrial production … might, over the medium term, lead to a new, transient spike in coal demand that exceeds the historical peak,” the study says.

Despite the reservation, the IEA stressed that “all fundamentals point to Chinese coal demand having now entered a slow decline ….”

When asked about risks to the forecast from China’s increased output, the IEA responded by largely restating the wording of the study without elaborating on how long the “transient spike” might go on. But the reference to the “medium term” suggests that higher coal consumption could continue for years.

Despite the growth of renewable energy and electric cars, the importance of China’s coal consumption to climate change may be hard to overstate.

China’s coal demand accounted for 51.6 percent of the world’s total in 2014 and will still amount to 42.6 percent in 2040, the IEA projected.

Coal was responsible for 83 percent of energy-related CO2 emissions in 2014 and will still contribute 69 percent of the total in 2040, according to the forecast data.

Consumption could rise

Although the IEA expects a gradual decline in coal use, China’s newly-released five-year plan for the electricity sector suggests that consumption could rise again.

Coal-fired generating capacity will expand by as much as 19 percent during the period, Bloomberg News reported, although the plan by the National Energy Administration calls for non-fossil power to increase by 48 percent.

“Coal consumption growth over the next five years is projected to be stronger than previously expected,” Helen Lau, an analyst at Argonaut Securities Asia Ltd. told Bloomberg.

Environmental groups including Greenpeace East Asia have been highly critical of China’s rapid construction of new coal-fired power plants at a time when the generating capacity of existing plants is severely underutilized.

The IEA report provides an explanation for China’s addition of new coal-fired capacity while utilization of existing plants continues to decline to less than 50 percent.

In industrialized Western countries, “alarm bells ring with investors when coal plant utilization drops below 70 percent,” the report said. But capital costs for plants in China are far lower.

Under the country’s regulated electricity tariffs, China’s power plants can run profitably with utilization rates as low as 32 percent, it said.

The calculations may be challenged by the recent price hikes for coal, but China’s cost structure could support higher consumption for years.

Beyond the policy conflicts and questions about the projections, China’s citizens have been left with a more basic contradiction.

Despite the official reports that coal use has been dropping for nearly three years, smog alerts in northern regions have been on the rise.

“Most people I know in China don’t think it’s getting any better,” said Kristen McDonald, China program coordinator at Pacific Environment, a San Francisco-based nongovernmental organization.

“They see these data and say, ‘Maybe it’s getting better elsewhere—not here,'” McDonald said.

The United States and 16 Pacific Island governments initialed amendments to the Multilateral Treaty on Fisheries at a ceremony in Nadi, Fiji on December 3, 2016.

According to the US State Department, the revisions to the Treaty will generate higher economic returns from fisheries for Pacific Island countries, while supporting the continued viable operation of the US fishing fleet in the region.

“The positive outcome reflects strong commitments to the Treaty by the parties and relevant stakeholders, including the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) and the US fishing industry, and a further enhancement of political and economic ties between the United States and the Pacific Island region,” the US State Department said in a press statement.

The Pacific Island parties to the Treaty include 16 members of the FFA: Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Republic of Kiribati, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Republic of Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Republic of Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Kingdom of Tonga, Tuvalu, and Republic of Vanuatu.

The Multilateral Treaty on Fisheries (also known as the South Pacific Tuna Treaty) entered into force in 1988. The parties have been negotiating amendments to modernize the Treaty and extend its terms of access since 2009. Based on the progress demonstrated by these Treaty amendments, the United States rescinded its decision to withdraw from the Treaty, which would otherwise have taken effect in January 2017, according the US State Department.

The revisions to the Treaty include the general terms of fishing access for the US purse seine fishing vessels to waters under the jurisdiction of Pacific Island parties through 2022.

“Greater flexibility in the fishing arrangements, as well as opportunities for new forms of commercial cooperation, will benefit both US industry and the Pacific Island parties,” the State Department said, adding, “The US government intends to continue providing $21 million annually pursuant to a related agreement to support economic development in the Pacific Island region.”

By Radosa Milutinovic

As they start to lay out their closing arguments on Monday, the prosecutors at the UN war crimes court in The Hague are expected to ask for a life sentence for the military leader they accuse of seeking to permanently remove Bosniaks and Croats from large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina which were controlled by Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-95 war.

Mladic has been on trial for over four years, accused of the genocide of over 7,000 men and boys from Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in several other municipalities, terrorising the population of besieged Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

According to the prosecutors, he used military force to implement a joint criminal enterprise spearheaded by the Bosnian Serb political leadership and former president Radovan Karadzic, aimed at creating a Serb state.

But Mladic, now aged 74, has denied committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

His defence insisted that there was no such criminal enterprise, and claimed that the war was actually caused by the Bosniak-led Party of Democratic Action, which wanted a “unitary Islamic state dominated by Muslims”.

However, faced with overwhelming evidence gathered by the Hague Tribunal while Mladic was the run for 16 years before being captured in Serbia in 2011, the defence did not contest the fact that crimes were committed.

‘A self-fulfilling prophecy’

Among the most striking pieces of evidence that were aired during the trial were Mladic’s own words, jotted down in his notebooks, which were recovered by the prosecution and presented in court.

Several experts, called by the Hague prosecutors, also claimed that Mladic said at the very start of the conflict in May 1992 that the main wartime goal agreed by the Bosnian Serb authorities at the time – separating Serbs from Bosniaks and Croats – meant there would be “genocide”, because “people are not coins or keys you can move from one pocket to the other”.

The prosecution argued that this became a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, with Mladic willingly accepting persecution and the commission of crimes, which culminated with the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995, in order to “build the borders of the new Serb state”.

Prosecutors attempted to prove Mladic’s alleged genocidal intent in Srebrenica by using his own words, spoken on July 11, 1995, the day when Bosnian Serb forces overran the enclave.

Mladic told reporters that “the time has come to take revenge on the Turks [Bosniaks]”.

Prosecutor Peter McCloskey said that “five days after this comment, Mladic’s troops captured and killed more than 7,000 men and boys”.

Mladic also told Bosniaks in Srebrenica on July 12, 1995 that they would “survive or disappear” – which, according to the prosecution, proved he had a “murderous plan”.

But these claims were disputed by the defence, which called military expert Mitar Kovac to argue that such a statement represented “an expression of professional responsibility aimed at protecting the lives of all”.

A day later, on July 13, 1995, Belgrade-based journalist Zoran Petrovic-Pirocanac was in Srebrenica and filmed dozens of Bosniaks being killed in Kravica, the first site of the mass execution of the men and boys from Srebrenica.

The prosecutors tried to prove Mladic’s responsibility for this and other atrocities, using the testimonies of former Bosnian Serb troops, most notably Hague Tribunal defendants Momir Nikolic and Drazen Erdemovic. Both men were convicted by the Tribunal of committing crimes during the Srebrenica massacres after signing plea agreements.

Nikolic told the court that he saw Mladic make a hand gesture which he understood to mean that the Bosniak prisoners from Srebrenica would be killed.

Another former Bosnian Serb soldier, Srecko Acimovic, who said he refused an order to kill Bosniaks in Srebrenica, claimed that those responsible for actually implementing the massacres were Bosnian Serb Army officers Ljubisa Beara and Zdravko Tolimir.

According to prosecutor McCloskey, the two men were in charge of “most of the work of persecuting and killing”. Both were sentenced to life in prison for their role in the massacres.

Prosecution military expert Richard Butler told the court that they could not have organised the transportation and killings of thousands of prisoners without the knowledge and approval of Mladic.

Mladic’s defence, however, tried to prove that he “never ordered a single crime in Srebrenica”, or in other places. It also tried to prove that many Bosniaks were actually killed in fighting around Srebrenica.

Defence expert Dusan Pavlovic claimed that “at least 4,000 to 4,500 Bosnian Army fighters and civilians” were killed during an attempt to break through the Bosnian Serb Army’s lines around Srebrenica and flee through the woods to safety.

Other defence witnesses said that Mladic never gave orders while in Srebrenica, while some also tried to put the blame on police, instead of military personnel under his general command.

Witness Nedjo Jovicic, who saw the killings in Kravica, claimed he saw policemen killing people, not soldiers.

Ex-servicemen Dragan Todorovic said meanwhile that Mladic’s ‘assistant’ Dragomir Pecanac acted on his own volition and took Erdemovic and other Bosnian Serb soldiers to kill Muslims.

Defence military expert Kovac also insisted that the Bosnian Serb military-political leadership did not plan the “massive crime” which was committed in Srebrenica.

The defence also called witnesses who disputed Momir Nikolic’s testimony and denied that Mladic made any hand gesture indicting that Bosniak prisoners would be killed.

‘No ethnic cleansing’

Among Mladic’s witnesses, mostly former officers who denied that Bosniaks and Croats were persecuted and testified that they willingly left their homes, was former MP and current Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik.

“I can say today that I am totally confident that the official policy of that time was not ethnic cleansing,” Dodik told the court.

The defence also sought to prove that Mladic was not responsible for persecution in Bosnian Serb detention camps.

Journalist Ed Vulliamy, a prosecution witness, called detention camps near Prijedor “concentration camps”, but defence witnesses such as Miso Radic suggested that the crimes in such camps, such as the killing of 150 men in the Keraterm detention centre, were committed by policemen and not military officials under Mladic’s command.

Several former camp detainees testified about the horrific conditions and suffering in detention centres in Prijedor – but defence witnesses claimed that Bosniaks went to the centres voluntarily, seeking protection from Serb paramilitaries.

‘Reign of terror’

In its attempt to prove that Mladic used Bosnian Serb artillery to shell and terrorise civilians in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during the 1992-95 siege, prosecutors presented a video recording of him ordering his units to “blow the minds” of people in the city by firing on districts in which there were few Serb inhabitants.

Former United Nations official David Harland testified that Karadzic and Mladic used the shelling of Sarajevo to terrorise the city’s population.

Several former UN peacekeepers who were deployed in Sarajevo agreed with his assessment. But they also accepted defence claims that the Bosnian Army provoked shelling by Mladic’s forces, although they said that the Serb response was disproportionate.

Mladic’s witnesses, mostly Serb officers, laid the blame for attacks at the hands of Bosniak military officials, claiming that the Bosnian Serb Army only responded to attacks.

Military expert Kovac meanwhile denied that Sarajevo was under siege at all.

One of the mostly hotly-contested issues was the shelling of the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo, when scores of people were killed in two separate attacks.

While prosecution expert Richard Higgs and Sarajevo investigators said the mortar shell was fired from the Serb side, defence ballistic experts argued that this was impossible and said that the massacres were staged.

Mladic’s lawyers also called several UN peacekeepers who said that the Serbs were not responsible for the marketplace attacks and that the Bosniaks staged the massacres to ensure NATO would intervene on their side.

Finally, the prosecution and defence agreed that Mladic’s forces captured more than 200 UN peacekeepers in the summer of 1995 – but while the prosecution said they were hostages, the defence called them prisoners of war.

Ahead of the start of the closing arguments in the case, Mladic’s lawyer told news agency AFP on Friday that the former Bosnian Serb military chief does not have “high hopes” of acquittal, as he believes the court is politically biased.

“He thinks that if they were to judge him according to the facts, he would be acquitted. But if it’s a political trial he will be convicted,” said lawyer Branko Lukic.

The verdict is expected next autumn.

(RFE/RL) — Austrian far-right candidate Norbert Hofer has been defeated in Austria’s presidential race by rival candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, who is supported by the Green Party.

Hofer’s Freedom Party of Austria conceded defeat in the December 4 runoff as initial projections showed Van der Bellen leading with a tally of around 54 percent to Hofer’s 46 percent.

The victory for Van der Bellen, 72, concludes a tumultuous presidential race in Austria that saw two runoffs as he and Hofer, 45, offered very different visions of the country’s future.

Austria’s Norbert Hofer. Photo by Franz Johann Morgenbesser, Wikipedia Commons.

A victory for Hofer would have made him the first far-right head of state in a European Union member state.

Hofer, who was trained as an aeronautical engineer, had promised to “put Austria first” by introducing strict border controls and banning Muslim women from wearing the all-encompassing burqa in public.

He also had told voters that “Islam has no place in Austria” and had threatened to fire the government if it did not get tougher on migrants from the Middle East.

By contrast, Van der Bellen strongly supports the European Union and advocates liberal migrant policies.

As he cast his ballot on December 4, he said that “what happens here today has relevance for all of Europe.”

He is a former economics professor who has often called himself “a child of refugees.”

The EU hailed his victory as bolstering European unity at a time of many challenges.

“It is my pleasure to extend my wholehearted congratulations on your election. … On behalf of the European Council and personally, I wish you every success,” European Council head Donald Tusk said in a statement.

The Austrian president, elected for a term of six years, has a largely symbolic position and cannot intervene in the daily running of the country, which is in the hands of the prime minister.

However the president does have the power to dismiss the government.

Austrian public opinion swung widely during the presidential race, which began with six candidates competing on April 24.

In April, Hofer obtained 36 percent of the votes, the best result for the far-right Freedom Party of Austria in any Austrian national election since World War 2.

Van der Bellen came in second with 20 percent of the vote, setting up a runoff between the two men.

In the first runoff on May 22, Van der Bellen narrowly upset his rival, taking 50.3 percent of the votes.

However, Hofer’s party cited irregularities and demanded a rerun, a demand upheld by the Constitutional Court on July 1.

In conceding defeat after the second runoff on December 4, Hofer placed a message on his Facebook page calling on all Austrians to stick together in accepting the results, adding that he was “incredibly sad” to have lost.

Former U.S. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is turning to a federal court in her effort to recount the state of Pennsylvania’s ballots from the recent presidential election that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win, but lost to billionaire businessman Donald Trump.

Stein dropped her attempt to have Pennsylvania recount the votes after a state judge ordered her to post a $1 million bond.

Jonathan Abady, lead counsel to Stein’s recount efforts, said in a statement, “the state court system is so ill-equipped to address this problem,” that “we must seek federal court intervention.”

One of Stein’s lawyers informed a Pennsylvania court in a filing about her decision to withdraw her recount attempt that “Petitioners are regular citizens of ordinary means. They cannot afford to post the $1,000,000 bond required by the court.”

Stein is expected to ask a federal court Monday to aid her in recounting the Pennsylvania ballots.

She has also mounted campaigns to recount the votes in Michigan and Wisconsin.

President-elect Trump has called Stein’s recount push a “scam” and has engaged lawyers in all three states to thwart her efforts.

Stein stands to gain little from a recount, since she won only one percent of the popular vote.

She has raised about $7 million for the recount effort and other associated costs.

A statement on Stein’s website said the recount effort was not meant to help Clinton. Rather, the website said the move “is about protecting our democracy.”

Election experts say there is almost no chance the election results would be overturned. But with Clinton’s national lead in the popular vote now more than two million, any changes to the vote count in her favor could heighten the debate over the legitimacy of Trump’s stunning upset win.

U.S. presidential elections are not decided by a national popular vote. Instead, they are decided by individual races in the 50 states and the national capital city, Washington, with each state’s importance in the overall outcome weighted by its population. Winning presidential candidates have to amass a majority of 270 votes in the 538-member Electoral College based on the state-by-state results, with the vote winner in each state winning all of that state’s electoral votes, in most all cases.

By winning numerous states by relatively narrow margins, Trump won in the Electoral College, 306-232. Clinton would need to prevail in all three of the recount states to reverse the outcome.

A recent survey of construction companies involved in World Cup-related infrastructure projects in Qatar raises questions about whether the Gulf state and world soccer body FIFA are doing all that could do to enforce international standards for the living and working conditions of migrant workers as well as adherence to human rights.

The issue of Qatar and FIFA’s sincerity is underscored by the fact that a majority of 100 companies operating in Qatar as well as the United Arab Emirates, which prides itself on enacting the region’s most advanced labour-related legislation and regulation, felt no need in a recent survey to be transparent about their commitment to labour and human rights. The apparent lack of pressure on companies suggests that Qatar and FIFA have so far passed on opportunities to enforce adherence to standards.

Both Qatar and FIFA have been under pressure from human rights groups and trade unions to reform the Gulf state’s onerous kafala or labour sponsorship system that deprives workers of basic rights and puts them at the mercy of their employers. The pressure on Qatar coupled with economic difficulties as the result of tumbling energy prices have prompted virtually all Gulf states to tinker with their labour regimes.

To be sure, Qatar has responded to the pressure by becoming the only Gulf state to engage with its critics. It has also promised to legislate initial reforms that fall short of activists’ demands by the end of the year. Several major Qatari institutions, including the 2022 World Cup organizing committee and Qatar Foundation, have adopted standards and model contracts that significantly improve workers’ living and working conditions.

Those standards have yet in their totality to be enshrined in national legislation. Even that however would not resolve all issues, first and foremost among them the requirement of an exit visa to leave the country.

An Amnesty International report published earlier this year charged that migrant workers involved in World Cup-related infrastructure were still subjected to “appalling” human rights abuses six years after the hosting of the tournament was awarded to Qatar and at the halfway mark since the hosting rights were awarded to the Gulf state. The 2022 Qatari committee has said issues in the report have since been addressed.

Qatar moreover recently announced that a major international union, Building and Wood Workers International (BWI), would be included in inspections of World Cup construction sites in the Gulf state. Italian company Salini Impregilo, one the companies surveyed, earlier signed an agreement with BWI and Italian construction unions to promote and respect human rights and has allowed BWI to visit its worker accommodations in Qatar.

The onus on FIFA to ensure adherence to workers and human rights meanwhile is about to increase with the soccer body’s decision to take over responsibility for preparations of World Cups starting with the Qatar tournament.

FIFA earlier this year endorsed a report it had commissioned from Harvard international affairs and human rights professor John Ruggie, a former United Nations Secretary-General special representative for business and human rights. Mr. Ruggie provided advice on how FIFA should embed the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights into everything it does.

Less than a quarter of the companies approached for the survey by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre deemed it appropriate to respond despite FIFA and Qatar’s public commitments to workers and human rights. Less than 40 percent of the companies approached publicly expressed a commitment to human rights and only 17 percent refer to international standards. Only three publicly acknowledge rights of migrant workers.

The survey noted that three UAE companies – Arabtec, BK Gulf (a subsidiary of UK-headquartered Balfour Beatty), Habtoor Leighton Group, and Al Jaber Group – that had failed to respond to the survey were recipients of the Emirates’ 2016 Taqdeer Award for excellence in labour relations.

Similarly, none of the companies with headquarters in Asia — China, India, Japan, Malaysia and South Korea – responded.

“The lack of response represents a missed opportunity to demonstrate the actions they are taking to adhere to the Workers’ Welfare Standards of Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy,” the 2022 Qatari committee, the survey noted.

The survey singled out several companies that had taken steps to improve safeguards for migrant workers. Those companies include Vinci (QDVC), a joint venture between Qatar Diar Real Estate Investment Company, a subsidiary of the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund, and France’s VINCI (QDVC) Construction Grand Projects. Ironically, Sherpa, a French human rights group, accused VINCI last year of employing forced labour and “keeping people in servitude.” VINCI, which employs 3,500 people in Qatar, denied the charges and threatened to sue Sherpa.

The survey said the willingness of companies to publicly detail their commitment to workers and human rights was important because “transparency on human rights issues has been an important driver of progress in other sectors. It generates examples of best practice that can be shared publicly with others and replicated, and enables accountability such that civil society, investors and others can hold companies to their stated actions, or call them out for inaction.”

Beyond health, safety, worker accommodation and timely payment of wages, the survey identified fair recruitment based on the principle of the employer pays, freedom of movement, worker input, and supply chain accountability as key issues that companies needed to address. The survey noted that the most progressive companies had found ways to circumvent Gulf restrictions on freedom of association and collective organisation.

Best practices included personal storage compartments in workers’ living quarters provided by Vinci (QDVC) and Laing O’Rourke to ensure that workers have sole custody of their passports in a country in which employers often illegally confiscate travel documents.

Vinci (QDVC) alongside Laing O’ Rourke, Multiplex, Salini Impregilo, SNC-Lavalin ensure that recruitment companies that illegally charge workers exorbitant fees reimbursed those recruited. Workers often arrive in Qatar and other Gulf states heavily indebted as a result of recruitment fees even though they are banned by law in Qatar and the UAE.

Carillion, Laing O’Rourke and Salini Impregilo said they supported the principle of freedom of association by providing workers in the Gulf with alternative means of expression and collective organising through worker welfare committees.

“Committed and concerted action by the construction industry holds the potential to prevent exploitation and drive genuine improvements in the lives of millions of workers around the world. While our outreach has identified some promising leading examples, the entire sector has a long way to travel to fulfil its human rights commitments,” the survey concluded.

President-elect Donald Trump told a Cincinnati audience this week that he intends to make some big changes in US foreign policy.

During his “thank you” tour in the midwest, Trump had this to say:

We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past. We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. …In our dealings with other countries we will seek shared interests wherever possible…”

If this is really to be President Trump’s foreign policy, it would be a welcome change from the destructive path pursued by the two previous administrations. Such a foreign policy would go a long way toward making us safer and more prosperous, as we would greatly reduce the possibility of a “blowback” attack from abroad, and we would save untold billions with a foreign policy of restraint.

However as we know with politicians, there is often a huge gap between pronouncements before entering office and actions once in office. Who can forget President George W. Bush’s foreign policy promises as a candidate 16 years ago? As a candidate he said:

I am not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world saying ‘this is the way it’s got to be.’ … If we’re an arrogant nation they will resent us, if we’re a humble nation but strong they’ll welcome us.

Unfortunately as soon as he took office, George W. Bush pursued a completely different foreign policy, attacking countries like Iraq at the urging of the neocons he placed in positions of power in his White House and State Department.

Some people say that “personnel is policy,” and that much can be predicted about Trump’s foreign policy by the people he has appointed to serve his Administration. That is where we might have reason to be worried. Take Iran, for example. While Trump says he wants the US to stop overthrowing governments, on the issue of Iran both the candidate and his recent appointees have taken a very different view.

Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, has said the following about Iran: “I believe that Iran represents a clear and present danger to the region, and eventually to the world…” and, “…regime change in Tehran is the best way to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

Trump’s CIA choice, Mike Pompeo, has said of President Obama’s Iran deal, “The Iranian regime is intent on the destruction of our country. Why the President does not understand is unfathomable.”

And Trump’s selection for Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, was even more aggressive, saying, “The Iranian regime in my mind is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East. …Iran is not an enemy of ISIS. They have a lot to gain from the turmoil in the region that ISIS creates.”

Donald Trump’s words in Cincinnati don’t seem to match up with the views of the people that he’s assigning to high places. At least when it comes to Iran.

While I hope we can take President Trump at his word when it comes to foreign policy, I also we think we should hold him to his word – especially his encouraging words last week. Will the incoming president have the ability to rein in his more bellicose cabinet members and their underlings? We can be sure about one thing: if Trump allows the neocons to capture the State Department, keeping his foreign policy promises is going to be a lot more difficult.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

When US President-elect Donald Trump held a telephone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, China immediately protested and conveyed its objection. Obviously, China has fears that Trump’s taking the initiative to talk to the Taiwanese President may lead to USA recognizing Taiwan in a more positive way than that has happened in the last few decades.

In 1979, the US cut off diplomatic ties with Taiwan, while getting closer to China. The US took this unprincipled stand to appease China, keeping its business and trade opportunities with China in view.

When the US decided to cut off diplomatic ties with Taiwan to placate China, China virtually started taking the US for granted and assumed that the US recognized Taiwan as part of China and this would be the fundamental principle of the US-China relationship.

When Trump called the Taiwanese President, China concluded that this act amounted to a violation of such understanding between both the countries.

It remains to be seen as to how Trump will react to China’s protest. In all probability, Trump will have anticipated such a reaction from China and perhaps, did not mind this.

China’s unreasonable stand

In any case, the ground reality is that Taiwan and China remain as two separate countries — and many countries have economic relationships with both Taiwan and China.

As a matter of fact, China itself has extensive trade relationships with Taiwan and many Taiwan-based industries have invested in China. This, obviously, means that China recognizes Taiwan as sovereign country for all practical purposes.

In such circumstances, China objecting to the telephone conversation of Trump with Taiwan’s President should be rejected with contempt.

China’s over bearing attitude

The world knows that the government of China is not a paragon of virtue.

There are many instances where China has conducted with over bearing attitude and aggressive postures with least consideration for fairness, particularly while dealing with it’s neighboring countries.

Of course, the immediate example is China’s occupation of Tibetan territory forcefully , which has now persisted for over six decades. It has mercilessly suppressed freedom of speech in Tibet and have objected to any country receiving the Dalai Lama.

While China is still occupying considerable area of Indian territory after the China India war in 1962, China now claims that Arunachal Pradesh in India should be part of China. It has even gone to the extent of denying proper visa to any one from Arunachal Pradesh visiting China.

Pakistan gifted away part of the Kashmir area to China, though India claims that it is a disputed territory and Pakistan’s gifting of the area to China is illegal and objectionable. China does not care about India’s objections.

There are so many examples of China’s aggressive postures, which include the dispute with neighboring countries including the Philippines over South China Sea, its disputes with Japan regarding Senkaku island, its troubled relationship with Vietnam, etc.

Considering China’s overbearing and aggressive attitude in relations to neighbors, China’s now objecting to Trump’s conversation with the Taiwanese President is similar to the act of a pot calling the kettle black.

US relation with China at the cost of Taiwan

The US has significant trade and business relationship with Taiwan, though the US does not recognise Taiwan as a sovereign country.

The US has sold arms and military equipment worth around 12 billion dollar to Taiwan during the last three decades and has vibrant import export trade and other type of relationship with Taiwan.

At the same time, the US has been walking the extra mile during the last several years to keep China in a good humor, considering the trade and business potentials.

Despite the fact that the communist government in China is nearly a totalitarian regime with political rights denied to the people, the US which claims itself to be a champion of liberty and freedom, has no hesitation in cementing relationship with China during the last four decades.

If China claims that Taiwan belongs to China, the fact is that Taiwan claims that China has forcefully annexed its territory and says that Taiwan has legitimacy to claim that entire China is its own. However, the US has ignored such claims of Taiwan and humiliated Taiwan by cutting off diplomatic ties even while continuing trade relationships.

The US knows that Taiwan is too small a country to protest and is willing to put up with such humiliation and this is what has been happening since 1979.

The US is always known to throw its principles to the dustbin with regard to its relations with other countries, when its economic and strategic interests are involved.

Refreshing approach of Trump

President-elect Trump’s initiative to speak to Taiwan’s President is in sharp contrast with the policy adopted by President Obama and other earlier Presidents.

It gives an indication that Trump will not go to any extent to appease China at any cost, as the past US Presidents have done.

This approach will certainly put China in its place and gives hope to several neighboring countries in Asia who fear China’s expansionist approach and overbearing attitude.

Mutual dependence

It is a fact that billions of dollars of American investment and valuable technology has flowed from USA into China during the last few decades, which have considerably contributed to the industrial and economic growth of China.

Such investment has created a scenario where the US cannot allow any issues with China to go out of hand. At the same time, China also depends extensively on the US market to export its products. If the US would bloc imports from China, the harm to the interests of China would be very high.

The ground reality is that both these countries depend on each other to a considerable extent.

When Trump spoke to the Taiwanese President, he clearly knew that China’s options are also very limited. China simply cannot walk away from the US.

The shadow-boxing between the US and China is likely to continue, with Trump not relenting any time soon.

Transport is a key contributor to economic growth,  prosperity and tosocietal well-being. Physical links across Asia and the Pacific have increasingly improved throughyears of steady investments in the Asian Highway, a project endorsed by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) commission at its 48th session in 1992 to promote intergovernmental agreements to develop a regional highway network,and the Trans-Asian Railways, as well as through the facilitation of land transport projects. These intertwined projects have resulted in a network of 140,000 kilometers of roads being developed in 32 countries, which,in turn has enabled better connectivity within Asia as well as between Asia and Europe,and contributed to the development of other related infrastructure.

Further deepening Asian transport connectivity, however, requires that we consider some additional imperatives. For instance, we must ensure that regional connectivity is seamless and promotes multi-modal connectivity to allow for the most cost-effective and time-efficient delivery of goods from one point to another.

To this end, some important regional initiatives, such as the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity, China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, and the Eurasian Economic Union, provide strategic visions that will help forge broader regional and international transportation connectivity in our region. Moving forward, these initiatives must develop missing corridors and link Asia better with internal and outside markets in order to better promote seamless connectivity. Beyond this, we as a region must also develop a better understanding of how to harmonise these plans with the principles of sustainable development.

To promote regional transport sector development that is in sync with and reinforces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we must focus our efforts on three areas.

First, we must urgently curb the transport sector’s contribution to the Asia-Pacific region’s GHG emissions. Asia’s motorized transport emissions are responsible for 23 per cent of global aggregate emissions and are set to rise to 31 per cent by 2030. If no action is taken, transport will become the single largest emitter of GHGs, responsible for 46 per cent of the share of global emissions by 2035. Success in meeting the global climate change targets laid out in the Paris Agreement will require both reducing transport emissions and strengthening the resilience of transport infrastructure to the effects of climate change.

Second, tackling traffic congestion in our cities will help us unlock bottlenecks to economic growth by speeding up transportation and reducing costs associated with the movement of goods.To illustrate the heavy effects of such bottlenecks, traffic congestion in Bangkok, where the UN ESCAP is headquartered, costs roughly 6 per cent of Thailand’s annual GDP.

Third, sustainability of transport calls for a careful response to the public health dimension of transport. Road accidents continue to be one of the leading causes of fatalities in our economies, killing over 700,000 people annually in the Asia-Pacific and injuring many more. The economic costs of road accidents are estimated to be 3per cent of global GDP. Asia-Pacific’s low and middle income countries are shouldering road accident costs as high as 5per cent of GDP, which is in many cases greater than the total value of their overseas development assistance.

Recognizing these needs and challenges, the UN ESCAP, with support from the Government of the Russian Federation, is organizing a Ministerial Conference on Transport in Moscow on the 5to 9 of December 2016 to provide an opportunity to our member States to develop a new five-year regional action programme for sustainable transport. At its core, the regional action programme will promote integrated intermodal transport systems to balance, link and coordinate the varied modes of transport such as roads, railways, maritime and aviation, in order to achieve optimum economic, social and environmental performance.

This programme will facilitate greater intra-regional investment and trade in the region, and will also guide the transport sector to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing resources, improving transport modal choices and increasing efficiencies. Through enhancing road safety, advocacy, policy, legislation, infrastructure facilities and cross-border operations this programme will enable remote and poor, rural communities better access to markets, investment, health, education and social needs. The programme will also enable countries of the region tobe better equipped to develop and implement evidence-based policies and plans to address urban transport challenges in order to underpin future economic growth.

Implementing this new regional action programme will be a challenging, but ultimately critical task if we are to realize the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda. ESCAP, as the regional arm of the United Nations in the Asia-Pacific, will support the countries of the region to take the visionary steps and work together in order to ensure the contribution of the transport sector to sustainable development.

*Dr. Shamshad Akhtar is the Executive Secretary of the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). She will be speaking about Asia’s new energy realities and the implications for regional energy security at the Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW) 2016.

The past year’s political events, especially the campaign for the presidency as it converged on a contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have illuminated the way in which ideology, with the identity politics that springs from it, drives a dialectical process: political domination creates resentment, which feeds reaction and, on occasion, revolution against a previously entrenched ruling class and its belief system.

The various interest groups and institutions linked with the espousal of political correctness—in short, Hillary’s base—had become more and more pervasive and intrusive for fifty years or so. No doubt the members of this ideological bloc took for granted that they could, and would, only march toward greater and greater power over the populace until that glorious day when the last remnants of the old, despised social order, including the belief systems that supported it, would be crushed once and for all beneath the wheel of history that they had insisted on giving a boost lest the inexorable “progress” be slowed or—perish the thought—halted.

Meanwhile, however, the scores of millions of Americans whose ideas and social actions did not comport with the progressive agenda grew more and more resentful, but the political process failed to cough up a champion who would, and could effectively, lead a counter-revolution by the “deplorables” against the detested cultural and political establishment.

Enter Trump, seemingly on a lark, because his manner of speaking and campaigning amounted to little more than thumbing his nose at political correctness and its adherents. Yet, no doubt to the surprise of the Clinton camp, he elicited an enthusiastic and growing response from millions of people united by little more than resentment and, in some cases, hatred of their self-anointed betters. This kind of popular rebellion was not supposed to happen; the deplorables were supposed to recognize that they were on the losing side of a long historical-cultural conflict and act in a way that validated their acceptance of defeat. But the make-America-great-again group was not buying it, and they leaped at the chance to embrace a political leader who would proudly endorse their burning desire to spit out political correctness like a rotten fish.

So the contest for the presidency boiled down not to a clash of alternative public-policy packages so much as to a battle between two groups that identified with glaringly different cultural assumptions and values. In effect, the election was above all a referendum on political correctness. People who had tired of being called every sort of insulting name—racist, sexist, ignorant, backward, religious, in short everything that the Clinton crowd fancied it was not—rose on their hind legs and began to buck vigorously. One suspects that Trump himself must have been surprised by the magnitude and enthusiasm of the following he attracted. After all, he is not a sociologist, a political scientist, or even an experienced politician. However one might label him, though, he had stumbled onto a cultural time-bomb waiting for a detonator. Thus, he was not so much the man of the hour as he was the right tool for the task a great many people yearned to see carried out.

(For a much longer, more academic discussion along similar lines, see the recent article by Angelo M. Codevilla.)

This article was published at The Beacon

It is particularly difficult to foretell what the foreign policy of a US president-elect will be. We have plenty of examples of US presidents who – after coming into office – did not follow through on their electoral campaign pledges.

Even though Obama did actually conclude the agreement with Iran – as promised during his first presidential campaign – he was able to do that only in his second term, after having embittered the sanctions for years. While George W. Bush presented himself as an “isolationist” – in opposition to Bill Clinton and his humanitarian interventionism – he ended up launching two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, restraining from others just because of the poor-performances in these two. Richard Nixon, who won two terms on anti-communism, ended the war against the Vietnamese Communists and stroke a deal with Maoist China. Both Wilson in 1916 and Roosevelt in 1940 campaigned on an isolationist platform, just to lead their country into the first and second world war as soon as they were re-elected.

Forecasting the foreign policy stances of the upcoming administration is now even harder than with those of the past, considering that the President-Elect is not a long-time politician, and we do not even know who his Secretary of State will be. Even though a Republican-controlled Congress is certainly good for President Trump, the GOP is now bitterly divided among opposing factions, with Trump’s “populist” wing fighting an internecine war against the mainstream conservatives within the party, many of whom did not even endorse him in the general election. In fact, regardless of the success of the insurgent candidate, Congress is still filled up with Tea Partiers and establishment Republicans, potentially harboring resentment towards the rising pro-Trump hardliners. This internal conflict may well produce an hostile Congress for President Trump, especially when it comes to the most controversial points of his agenda, such as a review of foreign trade strategies towards fair trade.

So, before trying to figure out the potential consequences for Europe, let’s try to define at least some general elements of Trump’s hypothetical foreign policy.

First of all, Trump has outlined a non-interventionist policy: no more wars for state-building or regime change. He want to spend less in military intervention and more in military supremacy, which means more R&D and less operational costs. This would imply sharing responsibilities with US allies, as well as leaving them more strategic freedom in and the pursuit of their particular interests.

He also wants to normalize relations with Russia, that have reached the bottom on Ukraine and Syria. He thinks that NATO is too expensive for Washington, whereas European allies are acting as free riders . NATO is the 28-nations – almost 70-years old – military alliance that unites US, Canada and Europe. Conceived as defensive alliance against USSR, experienced a consistend expansion of its membership in the years following the end of the Cold War, welcoming many former communist Eastern European countries; at the same time, it switched its focus from European defense out-of-area operations. Those are offensive military operations such as in Yugoslavia and Serbia, during the ‘90, or in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Gulf of Aden in last fifteen years. However – since the Ukrainian crisis – NATO is redirecting its resources to the defense of its Eastern border, along an arc of tension with Russia ranging from the Arctic to Syria.

The July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA), strongly wanted by President Obama, has been harshly criticized by Trump. Under this deal, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran will only enrich uranium up to 3.67%. The main criticism on this deal is that the Iranian nuclear programme is suspended, rather than aborted, and in the meantime the Islamic Republic could be strengthened by the lifting of sanctions while keeping a regional stance opposed to the US. It is unlikely that Trump will reject the agreement as a whole, since that would require to negotiate a new one (and many years were needed for the current) or to come back to direct confrontation with Iran, which would mean major efforts in the Middle East for Washington – something Trump wants to avoid. So, the most probable outcome could be that the US introduces new extra verification measures of Tehran’s compliance of the Agreement, and promptly withdraws from it if any violation is observed.

Trump is a vocal opponent of international free trade agreements, such as the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Transatlantic Trade and Investement Partnership (TTIP), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), seen as factors of de-industrialization and industrial outsourcing, especially in China and Mexico.

Assuming that these vectors remain sound and Trump Administration manages to implement them at least in part, we could try to forecast some effects on Europe.

First, we have to consider that major European NATO members have been reducing their defence spending since the end of the Cold War. Not considering the US, it is only since 2015 that NATO defence expenditures are growing, as a consequence of Russian assertiveness in Eastern Europe. NATO guideline is to spend 2% of the GDP for Defence but, in recent years, only 3 out of 28 members follow this rule: United States (currently spending 3.61% of the GDP), United Kingdom (2.21%), and – surprisingly – Greece (2.38%). Greek good will, which is not diminishing but even increasing under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, is due to Athen’s dependance on foreign loans, sometimes informally swapped with arms purchasing. Since 2015, two more countries abide by the 2% rule: Estonia and Poland. No wonder, since they are the most anti-Russian countries in NATO and the most vocal supporters of a military buildup on its Eastern border.

Anyway, all that said, the remaining 23 members out of 28 spend for defence less than the recommended 2%: for example France 1.78%, Turkey 1.56%, Germany 1.19%, Italy 1.11%, Spain 0.91%. Since 2012, the US alone spends yearly more than all European allies altogether. Moreover, the limited improvement this year is due to the build-up on the Russian border – a military build-up that Trump will probably do not go along with.

It is highly improbable that Trump wants to dismantle NATO and – even if this was the case – it would be almost impossible for President Trump to realize it without facing insuperable obstacles. Most probably, Trump will just follow on Obama’s path in trying to lead from behind – just avoiding to mess up with Russia again. The theory of “leading from behind” arose in business circles, with Linda Hill of the Harvard Business School acknowledged as its mother. In foreign policy, it means to encourage others to take the initiative, while quietly establishing the strategy and leading the game. This, however, is a delicate art, because is a very short step from leading from behind to be led from the front.

About Obama’s doctrine, Charles Krauthammer wrote on The Washington Post: “It’s been a foreign policy of hesitation, delay and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the (fictional) international community to do what only America can”.

The experience of Libya in 2011 isn’t indeed comforting, with the UK and France pressing for a military intervention against the Gaddafi regime, only to leave afterwards a country broken into pieces and exposed to Islamist infiltration, even by ISIS.

But that’s not solely Europe’s fault, nor it is completely US’ fault: the responsibility is on the West as a whole, as London and Paris messed up Libya, like the US had messed up Iraq before, while our Arab allies are messing up Syria. Consequences are evident: with the treat of al-Qaida doubled up by ISIS, a lot of states in the region are either failed or on the verge of failing, Europe is under pressure from terrorist attacks and from an unprecedented flow of immigrants, with those two factors giving a huge contribution to Brexit and other displays of popular distrust towards the European establishment and institutions.

That’s why I think that the new line dictated by Trump – although challenging – will be positive for Europe We are facing problems that cannot be resolved without Russia’s help, not to say with Russia’s enmity. Think about the Syrian conundrum: a major Arab state has collapsed, and very hardly could be recomposed after five years of savage civil, ethnic and religious war, in which interests of many regional and world powers conflicted one another. Tensions in Eastern Europe compel both Russia and NATO to increase military expenditures, while mutual sanctions are harming both economies.

Even though the European establishment is complaining about Trump’s stance on Russia and the mutual exchange of compliments between him and President Putin, we have to keep in mind that it was the United States to push for a confrontation with Russia, while many EU countries – such as Italy – were in favor of improving relations with it.

In fact, Italo-Russian relations have been free from critical issues since the Soviet-Yugoslav “separation” in 1948 and, even though Italy was part of the Western bloc, it often kept pushing for an improvement in its relations with the USSR.

A few years after the end of the Second World War, Manlio Brosio – then Italian ambassador in Moscow (and future NATO Secretary General – looked for Soviet support for his project of a neutral Italy, but failed in his attempt. Ten years later, politicians such as Amintore Fanfani, or public managers such as Enrico Mattei, launched the “New Atlantism” doctrine, according to which – while remaining loyal to the west – Italy would act independently, seeking friendly relations with Communist and Mediterranean countries. After the end of the Cold War, Italy has always been one of the warmest supporters of cooperation with Russia, especially during the government of Silvio Berlusconi, whose friendship with Putin was well-known. In 2002, during a meeting presided by Berlusconi in Pratica di Mare, Russia and NATO signed an historical cooperation agreement.

This agreement could well be the starting point for a new approach to collective security in Europe: one that seeks to engage, rather than confront Russia.

However, not everyone in Europe will agree, especially among the Eastern countries such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania or Hungary that – still recalling the period of Soviet domination – mistrust the Russians. It is true, anyway, that recent elections in Moldova and Bulgaria, both former Communist states, have witnessed the victory of Russia-friendly candidates. Those Eastern countries are also very conservative and suspicious of pro-immigration and liberal policies of Western Europe. In the mid-long-term, this factor could orient them towards Russia again.

Great Britain – a traditional rival of Russia – has in recent years led the front of anti-Russian countries opposed to a lifting of sanctions. But now that London seems next to leave the EU, and considering that the British usually follow a line dictated in Washington, it could be well possible that their stance towards Russia will soften a lot.

A major obstacle remains in Germany, where the German social-democratic party – relatively pro-Russian, for west-European standards ­– is going through a difficult time. Power is still strongly in the hands of the Christian-Democrats and especially of Angela Merkel, who is toying with the idea of assert herself as the new leader of a liberal Western front, opposed to both Trump and Putin. Apart from her mania of grandeur, she is also following the objective national interests of Germany: the great winner of the process of European integration. Free trade, combined with a common currency (and so the inability for competitors, such as Italy, to conduct a competitive devaluation) have given Germany the economic dominance in the European Union. If Russia wants to move forward her influence in Eastern Europe, it has to confront face German opposition.

However, regardless of Russia’s intentions, confrontation with Berlin may be inevitable, with the Germans pushing to expand their own influence in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus.

Another major obstacle to a Russia-West rapprochement is still the US: while it is true that Trump wants friendship, he could do that also through some minor concessions, such as a limited area of influence in the so-called Near Abroad, as Russians call the former Soviet countries with whom they still have critical security links. Trump is as famous to be a tough negotiator, as Putin is to be astute politician and, despite their good intentions, it is not guaranteed that they will find an agreement – because a very big deal it is required between Russia and the US.

Another side of Trump’s program concerns energy, where he promises to encourage the production of shale oil and gas, which is now limited by environmentalist legislation. Over the past decade, the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has provided access to large volumes of oil and natural gas that were previously uneconomic to produce. The United States has approximately 610 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale natural gas resources and 59 billion barrels of technically recoverable tight oil resources. As a result, the United States is ranked second globally after Russia in shale oil resources and is ranked fourth globally after China, Argentina and Algeria in shale natural gas resources. But the tight oil and shale gas industries in the US have been suffering, mainly because of the increasing production from the Gulf states that, lowering prices, is pumping it out of business.

While in late in 2014 there were almost two thousands oil and gas rigs active in the US, in last July only 500 were still operating. Even though Trump cannot fully control some market fundamentals, as a large oversupply and sluggish demand, after his election U.S. shale producers are redeploying cash, rigs and workers, cautiously confident the energy sector has turned a corner. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the OPEC cartel is poised to slash crude output, with an agreement struck in September by the Saudis and Russians to cooperate in the world oil markets. If all signs are true, prices could well go up in the upcoming months, giving oxygen to the US industry.

Trump’s victory also brings back on the agenda the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the US Gulf Coast (where many refineries are located): a project blocked by Obama on the ground of its impact on the environment. The main target of the Keystone pipeline is to replace imports of heavy oil-sand crude from Venezuela with more reliable Canadian heavy oil, even though a good portion of the oil that will gush down the KXL will probably end up being sold on the international market.

Now, under the Trump Administration both US and Canadian oil & gas could arrive in greater amount to Europe: a net importer of energy, especially from Russia, which counts for 29% of total solid fuels imports, 30% of oil and 37% of gas. For years now Washington and Bruxelles have been trying to reduce European dependency from Russian energy, worried that this can translate in political dependency. In late February, the U.S. started exporting oil and gas to Europe, 40 years after the oil embargo imposed by the U.S. Congress.

Let’s move now to the Middle East and North Africa. As said before, the situation there is tragic and the West carries some responsibilities for contributing to open the Pandora’s box of regional contradictions, intervening in countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria to replace a brutal political order with no order at all.

If the US disengages from the region, however, the risk is to barter the restraint from reckless “adventures” overseas with an overall loss of initiative on the international scenario, with Europe unable to afford more military and security burdens, because of a contentious public opinion and of a very difficult time for economy. Without the US, therefore, it is very likely that also Europe will disengage from North Africa and the Middle East.

Anyway, at least for now, America is not going away from the region anytime soon, especially considering the emphasis that Trump put on ISIS’ global threat during the campaign trail. According to the upcoming National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn, Islamic radicalism is the enemy number one for the US. This will translate in a solid partnership with secular Arab leaders such as Egypt’s al-Sisi, whereas is still unclear how the Trump Administration will deal with Erdogan or the Saudis, whose links with Islamic radicalism are very suspicious.

Gen. Flynn believes the US is losing a global war against Islamist extremism that may last for generations, but he stresses that this war has to be fought also domestically, against any ideological infiltration. Trump and Flynn want to go after Islamism as Americans used to do with Communism. That brings us back to Europe again. Whereas only 1% of the US population is Muslim, Islam is thriving in Europe, due to ongoing immigration and to the higher fertility rate of Muslim communities, which is of 2.2 children per woman, while that of non-Muslim is 1.5. According to the Pew Center, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to increase by 63%, growing from 43 million in 2010 to 71 million in 2050, becoming more than 10% of the total population. Anyway, in countries such as France, they already are almost 10% of the population and, In some key cities – Paris and London, for example – Muslims exceed 15%. As it is well known, Europe is facing big problems in integrating even second or third generations of immigrants, especially Muslims. Muslim vote is beginning to matter in many European countries and important Muslim politicians are emerging, such as Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, or Rachida Dati, former French Minister of Justice, or Sajid Javid, the British Secretary for Local Government. Only the former is by a leftist party and they are not suspicious of Islamism. Anyway, according to the 2014 Jenkins Commission Report, in the UK the Muslim Brotherhood “[has] at times had significant influence on the largest UK Muslim student organisation, national organisations which have claimed to represent Muslim communities (and on that basis have sought and had a dialogue with Government), charities and some mosques”.

If the Trump Administration is going to consider Political Islam as an ideological enemy – such Communism during the Cold War – it will likely work on barring its way in Europe. The US has a long history of interfering in European domestic politics and Trump has already given a taste by meeting Nigel Farage a few days after his victory in the election. It could well be that the Trump Administration will try to advise the Western European leadership against persisting in their open doors policy toward Muslim immigrants, or to favour those political forces more akin with its ideas: usually the Right, maybe also the anti-globalist one, as the National Front in France, UKIP in UK, the Northern League in Italy, AfD in Germany. The leaders of all these forces, plus the Hungarian President Viktor Orban, in fact rejoiced at Trump’s victory. Breitbart, the news website which spearheaded Trump campaign and from whom the new White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon comes from, already has a London bureau, but is now planning to open new branches in France and Germany.

A few days ago, Francois Fillon has surprisingly won the the Right primaries in France. The hardliner among main candidates, Fillon is pro-Russian, very conservative, quite Thatcherist, and unfavourable to mass immigration. Very probably he will compete for the presidency with the far-rightist Marine Le Pen.

Even if society in the US remains very different from that of Europe, the rampant globalization of recent decades has made it quite close compared to half a century ago. Both the US and Europe have experienced massive deindustrialization with a geographical concentration of the remaining high-tech industries in a few islands of happiness – whose wealth is striking, when compared to the many rust belts of the Western world. Both the US and Europe have seen a deep financialization of their economies and have been overwhelmed by the so-called politically correct way of thinking. It’s true: in the U.S. you can find also the Bible Belt, but if we consider the European Union as a whole, we could see a Catholic Belt in its Eastern countries, opposed to Sweden (a European California) or London and Paris (European New Yorks), or in general the more liberal Western countries.

Exactly as in the US, also in Europe, post-modernism is currently hegemonic in colleges and mainstream media, which are trying to inculcate it also in the common man. Finally, the massive immigration flows of last decades into Europe are making its society more and more resembling to the composite ethnic mix of North American society – even in the trend towards communitarian vote. According to reliable statistics, the last time white voters in the US favoured in majority a democratic presidential candidate was in 1964: Lyndon Johnson. Since then, Carter, Clinton and Obama won the elections thanks to the decisive vote of minorities. If you look to the Brexit vote, for example, you will find out that the social group more favourable to remain in the European Union were not Scottish nor Irish, but the new minorities: Asians, Blacks and Muslims. In such similar environments, it is predictable to find similar political trends and demands: Trump’s victory in the US may be soon followed by populist successes in Europe.

In conclusion, we can say that, regardless of his real actions once in office, Donald Trump is already influencing European politics by encouraging the already rampant rightist and populist parties. This will translate in more regulation of the immigration flows, abatement of the EU supranational power on European countries, and better relations with Russia. That is true even if those populist forces do not win any election: in fact, more traditional parties and politicians are compelled to adopt at least some of their requests not to lose approval and power. But, if President Trump will maintain his electoral promises, even greater changes are looming in Western politics and society . A lasting conservative and populist turn could affect the Western system, leading to a possible inclusion of Russia into it.

In the past few years India has been trying to emerge as a regional power with sufficient individuality of its own with partial and sporadic success. It is attempting to recalibrate its foreign policy into a more proactive one than the non-aligned philosophy has followed in the past 60 years or so.

However, its bilateral relations with China is a key determinant, a central factor that has to be taken into account in the formulation of India’s foreign policy. As a corollary, it is true that China cannot afford to ignore or sideline its relations with India on the broader world stage. China offers India a double-edged sword.

On the one hand it promises great economic opportunities while on the other it presents equally significant strategic challenges. Like dealing with any other double-edged sword, this too requires nimbleness of action to ensure that its benefits are accrued.

Challenges to Formulating a Coherent China Policy

There are five major challenges that face India—randomly explained below—which will make it extremely difficult to formulate a viable foreign policy in relation to China: economic disparity, geo-strategic competition, growing Chinese assertiveness, military imbalance and China-Pakistan alliance.

First is the necessity to address the economic disparity between the two nations. India cannot hope to catch up with China, even though the Chinese economy has now slowed where the growth rate is slightly less than that of India. The economic gap between the two economies, which might increase into the future, will remain a distinct disadvantage for India. This is further exacerbated by China restricting Indian access to its domestic market.

Even so, bilateral trade has increased by 7.9 per cent for the three years from 2013. The total bilateral trade in 2015 was US $ 71.64 billion and at the same time India had a trade deficit of US $ 44.87 billion. This trade deficit is continuing to increase and is not a compatible situation for India. China exports to India 3.5 times more than it imports from India. Within these skewed trade relations, formulating a strategic China policy that will be in India’s favour will be a herculean challenge.

The second challenge is to mitigate the geo-strategic competition between the two nations, especially in the maritime domain. China has been acquiring naval facilities all along the choke points in the Indian Ocean Sea Lines of Communications (SLOC) for the past decade. This has increased its strategic presence in the region. This ‘string of pearls’ strategy has almost completely encircled India, even though India has a distinct geographical advantage in the Indian Ocean; an ocean that bears its name.

In order to overcome this inherent disadvantage China is enhancing its ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific region through concerted efforts. For example, Chinese submarines have been replenishing in both Sri Lanka and Pakistan, although the Chinese government has brushed aside any suggestions of their berthing in these ports.

One of China’s major initiatives in the Indo-Pacific is the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, a concept of building a ‘maritime highway’ that will also involve building new or upgrading existing port facilities in the region. This initiative will see a series of agreements linking China to Europe by sea and is a direct challenge to India. The initiative is meant to enhance the economic capabilities of the less developed nations along a predesignated route, which will be in turn enhance Chinese interests. It will ensure that trade and resources flow in a predetermined manner.

The most affected countries will be China, Japan and India. The SLOC in the Indo-Pacific will be critical for successfully implementing this concept. It will also lead to China being able to create a dominant and continuous presence in the immediate maritime region of India. Viewed in a purely altruistic manner, this is a laudable concept and will benefit all the participants.

India does not have the strategic weight to counter this initiative with an alternate proposal of equal or higher advantage for the region. It is therefore caught in a cleft stick. It will definitely benefit from joining the group as a member of the Maritime Silk Route. However, China will not permit it to join as an equal partner. For India, joining as a ‘regular’ member will be tantamount to accepting Chinese leadership of the initiative, which is being played out in the Indian Ocean, which it considers its own backyard. This is an unpalatable situation for India, but one without any solution.

The third challenge is the growing Chinese assertiveness in the region that directly brings into question India’s status amongst the regional nations. China uses economic diplomacy to great advantage. It deploys extensive resources aimed at increasing strategic cooperation with the recipient nation. Further, this initiative is oriented towards India’s immediate neighbours. For example, as early as 2005, China replaced India as the largest trading partner for Bangladesh and is rapidly closing the gap in the case of Sri Lanka.

China’s support for the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and its negotiations with Sri Lanka for a bilateral Free Trade Agreement is also part of the broader narrative in the economic arena. These initiatives bring into focus the reliability or otherwise of India as a security and economic partner of the smaller nations.

India seems to be unsure about using its growing economic muscle to improve relations and entrench its influence with its neighbours. Indecisiveness in instituting noteworthy initiatives in this area of contention is clearly visible in the Indian discomfort. India’s traditional non-aligned policy could be adding to this discomfort as it lacks experience in engaging with smaller nations in the security sphere.

The fourth challenge is the existing and growing military imbalance between the two nations. This imbalance impinges directly on the activities across the long border between the two countries. China has assiduously cultivated and maintains a studied strategic ambivalence in terms of territorial claims and disputed areas. The ambiguity regarding their stance, especially in the North-Eastern sector of the border, is kept in a slow boil by periodic assertions of Chinese sovereignty over India territory to ensure that the issue is not put to rest.

India for its part has never been able to crystallise a coherent counter-argument against these claims—at times vague and at other very precise—that are made and withdrawn with equal facility.

Historically China has played this game with India with great élan. Since 2003, there have been no less than 19 rounds of talks between Special Representatives of the two countries to sort out the border issues, with absolutely no progress. China continues with cross-border incursions with impunity, a standard modus operandi for the Chinese to up the ante at will.

India on the other hand ardently holds on to international norms and hope—a combination that is not a good strategy to achieve assured national security. India can perhaps learn by taking a leaf out of Chinese actions, which are all—from the tactical to the strategic—statements aligned to achieving grand strategic objectives. An overview of Chinese border management indicates the areas where it will not negotiate, since those are the areas where consolidation is taking place. This is a proactive policy.

On the other hand India accepts whatever is being thrust at it by the Chinese government. There is no decisive action or even reactive push back, just staid diplomatic ‘protests’ that are lodged and readily ignored by China. In the current global security environment a ‘protest’ being lodged is simply ignored by all.

India is strategically on the back foot. On all counts of national power—diplomacy, economy, military and information—China is streets ahead; and the gap is widening on a daily basis. In an unbiased assessment it would seem that Indian policy makers have no idea how to react to the border provocations—both physical and virtual—that China manipulates regularly. In the final analysis it is seen that, the fundamental dictum that national security policy cannot be built on reactions to the adversary, but that the adversary should be made reactive, has not fully sunk into the Indian security establishment.

China-Pakistan Alliance

Noting that independent India has fought wars against both China and Pakistan, the fifth challenge is the growing China-Pakistan alliance, which is decidedly anti-Indian in its concept and functioning. Further, it continues to evolve to ensure that this orientation is always maintained.

The recent Chinese ‘gift’ of US $ 46 billion as an aid package to Pakistan is only the latest form of ratification of the long-standing relationship.

Further, China has been the primary source for Pakistan to have achieved nuclear status. This has done irreparable long-term damage to India’s geo-political stance in the region. The concerted efforts by its two major neighbours have forced India to move towards the US to create its own strategic security architecture. Even so, the move is tentative from the Indian side, since it is still unsure of the ambiguous stand that the US adopts in regard to Pakistan.

India clearly understands that becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council and being an active member of other prominent global groups such as the G-8 and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) are important steps to counter the China-Pakistan anti-India stance. However, India’s efforts have almost always been thwarted by the Chinese veto.

Under these circumstances, the US is an automatic choice for support for India. Even so, the answer to the China-Pakistan nexus to destabilise the nation is for India to develop ‘stand-alone’ capabilities, while creating a bilateral working balance with China that also includes security discussions. To achieve this effectively, it will need to enhance its own power and regional influence, something that is currently lacking.

To date China, mostly encouraged by Pakistan, plays an anti-Indian role in most of the international forums. The time for strategic restraint that India has so far exercised is over and it needs to assert its position as a responsible regional power. The non-alignment that India has preached and practised for most of its independent history is a sensible policy for tranquil times. However, volatile geo-strategic times, like the present, need pragmatism, independent judgement and a national power structure that can be forcefully applied. National security cannot be placed at risk through blind adherence to traditional values and harking back to an ancient culture.

Times, and the world order have changed.

Pragmatic China – Esoteric India

Modern China is pragmatic in the extreme and realises that other than India no other Asian power has the potential to challenge its rise to global status. In this race for primacy, economic and military power are the two elements that China banks on to lead. China’s ambition is to replace the US as the ‘Number One’ state in the world and to re-establish itself as the historic ‘heavenly kingdom’. This is the dream around which all Chinese strategies are formulated, fine-tuned and actioned.

Keeping India constrained is vital to achieving this focused objective. The collective Indian ethos is nowhere near being this focused and it also suffers from the disadvantages of being a dissonant democracy as opposed to the ‘non-participatory’ democracy that China practices. India in its own inimical fashion continues to enunciate its ancient and rich culture and esoteric values, essentially based on a ‘live and let live’ tradition. It was for this reason that India succumbed to foreign invaders and their rule for more than a millennia and it seems as if no lessons were learned from that part of Indian history.

Modern India’s core value of conflict avoidance is not compatible with the pragmatism of China. The thinking in the policy-making circles is still stilted as demonstrated by a recent article that was written by a political advisor who has a military background. This article tries to prove that the unmitigated military humiliation and defeat that was inflicted on India by China in 1962 was actually a ‘victory’ for the non-aligned policy that was pursued by the then Nehru-government. This kind of obfuscation of reality continues to cloud strategic thinking in India. The world has moved on, the value chain has changed irrevocably and a nation that does not or cannot adapt with agility will be left behind. India is on the cusp of achieving such a dubious distinction.

India suffers from a sense of under confidence on the world stage, as a people and as a nation, because it is beset with historically generated doubts. However, more recently there are clear indications that the younger generation are overcoming this cultural cringe. Currently the policy-making institutions continue to struggle under self-imposed doubts and the legacy of a failed non-alignment policy.

The current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is attempting to rectify these legacy mistakes. There is also evidence of small steps being taken to change the traditional defensive crouch in foreign policy and national security initiatives to a more proactive and offensive stance. The open statement regarding Baluchistan and the so-called ‘surgical strikes’ are recent examples of this new-found confidence.

The Indian government is also being more pragmatic in its dealing with China. The need of the hour now is to be engaged with restraint, especially in matters of security and to get the balance between the two right. The Chinese initiatives to isolate India have to be assertively countered. India has to make viable overtures to its smaller neighbours, not in an overt manner of which it has been previously accused, but in a transactional manner, providing economic and security assistance. The current relations have to be improved and this will pose considerable challenge.

India has, at least in its own eyes, always taken a principled stand on matters of international importance. It now has to decide the balance that it wants to maintain, and perhaps more importantly, is acceptable to the body politic, between power, influence and principle. The world is a dynamic entity, a fact that China clearly understands and adapts to very well.

India seems to have a less than optimum understanding of the inconsistencies of the real world and is still attempting to get a clear view of the strategic necessities that constitute national security. Further, the strategic thinking at the national level has not kept pace with the reality of its rapidly increasing economic success. The agility of a state to recognise and accept the global dynamism and then to turn it to its advantage is a litmus test for the veracity of state policies and development processes.

India-Japan Partnership and the Chinese Discomfiture

China has been extremely wary of the growing closeness of India and Japan and with good reason. A partnership between the two nations stands directly in the way of China achieving hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region, even without the US underpinning their strategic efforts. It is clearly possible that the nations of the region would prefer the overarching influence of an Indo-Japanese combine to that of China. And China is acutely aware of this.

It was also indicative of Chinese arrogance and sense of power that it warned both the Indian and Japanese Prime Ministers to ‘keep off’ the South China Sea (SCS) issues in their bilateral meeting. It is also indicative of both these nation’s attitude to China that there was a joint statement made that explicitly referred to China flouting international conventions in the South China Sea.

Japan has moved away from its long-held position on nuclear deals to sign the Civilian Nuclear Deal with India. This indicates the premium that it places on improving relations with India, which has been labelled a ‘Special Strategic Relationship’. The Indo-Japanese nuclear deal has been a blow to China’s stonewalling India’s entry into the NSG. As a repercussion India should expect renewed effort to keep it outside the ambit of the Group.

Along with the reference to the SCS, the joint statement also referred to state sponsored terrorism, albeit without naming Pakistan, and the North Korean missile threat, both of which are tacitly supported by China. This was a direct political statement and could not have made China ‘happy’. Japan has clearly and unequivocally supported India’s strategic initiatives to counter Chinese manoeuvres in the Asia-Pacific.

India must move forward very carefully in the domestic arena. There are far too many China apologists in the policy making apparatus, the political entity, as well as in the so-called intelligentsia who would be more than happy to muddy the waters and drive a wedge between Japan and India. India should also be aware that China would have started to trigger such moves within their sympathisers. India will do well to further strengthen its relationship with Japan in the overarching strategic reckoning, especially as the US is being buffeted by uncertainty following the recent Presidential election.

The elephant in the room is the Chinese ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative in which India is the only non-signatory South Asian nation. The OBOR is probably leading the smaller Asian, and South East Asian nations into a ‘debt trap’ with China not expanding on the strategic intention of the initiative. China persuades the partnering countries that the projects are in their interest while in actuality it helps China invest its surplus foreign exchange reserves. Further, it also secures contracts for Chinese companies that are facing the problem of surplus capacity in a slowing domestic market.

Only a US-India-Japan collaboration will be able to create a viable alternative to present to the regional nations. The joint India-Japan statement advanced this vision through emphasising the role that Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) has so far played. China is further discomforted by the joint declaration that the two nations believed that the ODA had a ‘shared and principle regional vision’. This could be implicitly construed as indicating that China’s vision of OBOR was neither ‘shared’ nor ‘principled’.

As democratic nations, Japan and India share a number of common beliefs—they share the principles of peaceful dispute settlement and the rule of law; they are committed to regional institutions such as ASEAN and the East Asia Summit; and the concept of the Indo-Pacific as an interconnected geo-political and economic zone. There are also other commonalities—a high dependence on seaborne trade, especially to meet their energy needs, that emphasise the importance of SLOC; and the understanding that the safety and security of the SLOCs equates to freedom of navigation.

China interprets the SLOCs and allied issues in a different manner. It has unequivocally stated that freedom of navigation does not apply to military vessels and therefore views the sailing of US warships in the SCS as an offensive manoeuvre. China has also stated that it does not intend to abide by the recent ruling by the Arbitral Tribunal against its claims. India on the other hand attempts, at every opportunity, to leverage the ruling by explicitly mentioning the importance of the UNCLOS. The battlelines are drawn.
The fundamental fact is that both Japan and India want to maintain the current balance of power in the region. They are also pragmatic enough to accept that China is emerging as a power that cannot be ignored. The fear is that China’s rise to power will not be peaceful in the conventional sense of the term. While the amount and type of disruptions cannot be predicted, both India and Japan are preparing for the worst—a withdrawing, isolationist US and a belligerent China.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that China is acting according to a well-crafted strategy aimed at making it a ‘great power’. India on the other hand is still reactive to Chinese initiatives and its own funding projects in the region are not knitted together towards a common aim point. It has been suggested that Indian investment in South Asia has generated ‘good will’ for it. However such good will is almost always transitory when weighed against pragmatic national economic interests.

Currently China’s trade routes, both land and maritime, encircle India with unmistakable hard power overtones. The enlarged and increasing strategic footprint that China has in the Indo-Pacific region necessitates the development of an appropriate counter policy from India. This is compounded by the inherent distrust that India harbours against China. At the same time the bilateral trade with China is unbalanced in China’s favour, making the policy development for containment a fine balancing act. India’s gradual improvements in relations with the US is a cautious move being done without alienating or alarming China. China has exposed and taken advantage of India’s vulnerabilities in relations with its South Asian neighbours. India is still stumbling in the darkness, unable to formulate a cohesive move to retake the initiative.

Competition for strategic influence in the Asia-Pacific region exists between India and China. This will only get further exacerbated as China seeks to establish its position as a regional hegemon and global power. China will pursue this objective regardless of any other nation’s ambitions and needs. India therefore perceives China as denying its rightful regional primacy, its place in the sun. With India’s reactive foreign policy, it is easy to see that at least for the moment China is in the driver’s seat in directing the bilateral relations.

India has to make a few decisions that will have a long-lasting impact on its foreign policy vis-à-vis China. First, it has decide whether to contain or confront. Depending on the decision to this crucial question, the rest of the policy development will take place. Either way, it will need concerted policy agreement within the political body of the nation, something that is still not achieved in India. It will also require careful nurturing of regional relationships and the building up of military capabilities.

India has to craft a policy of proactive employment of national power in a judicious mix that underplays its hard power for the demonstration of its soft power.

India has to develop the confidence to stand up for itself and to stand its ground. In doing so it must showcase its inherent strengths—its vociferous democracy, adherence to the rule of law and support for human rights; it must display to its smaller neighbours its belief in the concept of ‘non-interference in another nations domestic issues’. It has to demonstrate the innate ‘goodness’ of an ancient civilisation. Then, perhaps, the scales will start to balance.

India and Russia recently signed deals for S-400 air defence missile program, Kamov 226T helicopters, etc. The question remains what about the transfer of technology?

For several experts in the field of National Defence and Security, ‘Make in India’ has been more than just a mere slogan, and an amalgamation of all the ongoing projects, procurements and forward planning in India’s security sector.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his bid to transform the otherwise lackadaisical approach of India’s Defence Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and Defence Research and Development Organisations (DRDOs) as well as Private Companies envisioned a progressive approach strongly backed by a strategy built on the ethos of credibility and immediate deliverables, job creation, thus adding strength to India’s indigenous defence industry under his mission “Make in India”.

Marred by project delays and issues of Request for Information (RFI), Request for Proposals (RFP) and Transfer of Technology (ToT), licensing issues with Russia, United States, India’s defence sector is currently undergoing massive transformation, a natural corollary to Modi’s frequent visits to other countries and subsequent discussions with his counterparts on defence and security.

The revised Defence Procurement Policy is also being projected as the game changer. However financial, political and strategic investments in projects meant to modernise India’s defence industry exhibit a very uneven path. Whether it is the MMRCA, Tejas or AWACS statistics reveal that India is yet to achieve a great breakthrough in defence, compared to China or Pakistan as in the case of AWACS.

The Cabinet Committee on Security has time and again sanctioned several projects, but uneven investments have often defeated the very purpose of rapid military transformations, to tackle new asymmetrical threats. If statistics provided by the defence ministry are to be believed, India has signed five deals of more than Rs 2,500 crore since May 2014. Projects for Tactical Communication Systems (TCS), Futuristic Infantry Combat Vehicle (FICV) (worth $ 7.5 billion) for the Indian Army, construction of seven Shivalik class frigates (Project 17 A) for the Navy, by Mazagon Docs Limited and Garden Reach Steel Industry, amounting to Rs 45201 crores are currently under consideration.

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is currently in the process of building basic trainer aircraft HTT 40 and Sukhoi MK 1 aircraft in line with the 272 target set for 2018 by the Indian Air Force. There are several such deals being planned, but deadlock over Rafale continues to make headlines.

Meanwhile, reacting to the commercial deadlock over Rafale prices with Dassault, other players such as Lockheed Martin (F 16), Saab (Gripen) are now streamlining their business strategy, to meet the requirements of the Indian industry under Make in India. Saab is willing to partner with Indian companies, giving India complete software control to build the Gripen fighter in India. Saab is also keen on setting up an aeronautic training academy in India.

For a strong indigenous defence industry both outside support and internal political commitments are very crucial. Integral to any development program, is the need to provide a conducive socio-economic and political environment where any proposed idea can take roots. The liberalisation of the FDI Policy in Defence, which shifted the fulcrum of indigenisation from ‘state of the art technology’ to ‘modern technology’ was indeed a welcome change.

The buzz word, Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured’ (IDDM) now stands at 30:70, (Imports 30%) focus remaining on indigenisation. The FDI policy was revised to fill critical gaps in technology aiding job creation and growth if Indian industry. Despite the very obvious reports on project delays, falling production targets in the case of the Ordnance Factories, and sudden inflow of private players such as Reliance and Mahindra for example in the defence arena, ‘Make in India’ is a progressive move aimed to strengthen India’s defence industry.

However, there is no systematic explanation for India’s dialogues with Russia and the US over defence procurements and projects. The very crucial aspect of Transfer of Technology (ToT) especially nuclear propulsion (for example, in the case of nuclear supercarrier) has often caused unnecessary delays in signing of agreements between Original Equipment Makers (OEM’s) and India. Offset policy (2012) allows Joint ventures through the non-equity route.

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar recently stated that the real impact of Make in India will be seen in 2017. Parrikar stressed on the need to outsource certain products in order to maintain a healthy production chain. So the question remains: Can private players deliver better? Is the budget enough to meet the requirements of Make in India? Will the dynamics of a Russia- US power play (add China for good measure), affect India’s position as a strong defence power in South Asia and subsequently on the global stage? It was in 2001 when private players first entered the defence domain, with a 26% FDI bid. But terms and conditions laid out by the government were so stringent, that deliverables were far from being met. Technical education lagged behind affecting human resource availability.

One very important aspect of defence modernization is the ongoing Research and Development (R&D) in the field of security that has been crafted to meet the requirements of the modern day battlefield. Advancement in information technology and the changing nature of threats, whether man-made or accidental, on land, sea, air and even the virtual space now coerces one to assess the outcomes of procurements, acquisitions and mergers, in defence manufacturing sector.

The pace with which technology is becoming obsolete is a real problem. Defence preparedness calls not just for military modernisation but also reforms, which are capable of accelerating the R& D processes in the field of security. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that no one player or OEM can fully manufacture critical equipment. Several components are now procured from various producers, making the procurement procedure lengthy and complicated. These can cause unnecessary delays too. Another point of view currently attracting a lot of attention is that opening the doors of the security sector to foreign players will jeopardise India’s position as a strong defence power.

That foreign players are still not fully convinced with the idea of ‘Make in India’ especially shifting their production bases to India, a market which has inherent haphazard supply chain structures, is a different question altogether. Lastly, more than flooding the market with success stories, the focus should be on the needs of the defence forces and on the operational efficacy of equipment manufactured under Make in India. Positive market trends have indeed widened the horizons of defence manufacturing in India but India still needs a little more political and financial push to achieve a higher degree of self-reliance in defence technology.

Funding solutions to the crisis in Haiti requires both ideas and innovation. That is why I support the fellowship work of UNHCR innovation and its sister partnership UNHCR ideas, and the wise leadership under whose custody those organisations function with a view to raising money not just from conventional sources but from miscellaneous private sector partners using cutting-edge contemporary means.

By Matthew Parish*

The depth of poverty and human misery immediately visible upon arrival in Port-au-Prince is heart-rending to all but the most callous. A scene of pure devastation greets every visitor, as though one is viewing a battlefield in the immediate aftermath of the most catastrophic devastation. More than six years after a devastating 2010 earthquake, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption still lies in ruins. Nevertheless the families of the faithful in Haiti continue to worship and pray there every Sunday under the umbrella of UNICEF tarpaulins. The extent of the devastation is so great that it can be seen from the air on a clear day when descending into Toussant L’Ouverture Airport. This remains so even six years on.

Children drink from open sewers. People transport their ragged belongings in wooden carts pulled by anaemic oxen. Youngsters live amidst gargantuan rubbish dumps. The elderly search for new rags to clothe them in piles of community garbage. Accommodation, where it does exist, consists barely of corrugated aluminium shacks covered by dirty curtains and scraps.

Malnourished infants queue and beg for food. If any scene could more remind one of the horror of Hieronymus Bosch, it is a visitor’s first impressions of Haiti. Yet there is profound difference between Haiti and Bosch: the innocent citizens of Haiti did nothing to deserve their miserable fates. They live in hell on earth when by virtue of the persistent suffering they have incurred throughout their recent history, surely they are better regarded as citizens of Heaven.

In January 2010 a catastrophic 7.0 Richter scale earthquake struck Léogâne, a mere 25 kilometres from Haiti’s capital. The government infrastructure, even before the earthquake, was so debilitated that is was impossible accurately to measure the damage caused. But by most estimates between 100,000 and 300,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake while up to 250,000 homes and 30,000 commercial buildings were destroyed, leaving millions of people homeless and exposed to the cruel elements while businesses were rendered asunder.

Nevertheless the reaction of the international community was immediate and generous, and UN involvement, spearheaded by the United Nations Development Programme, has made much progress in rebuilding not just shattered communities but also the core of the nation itself. The offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees distributed vital aid to some 8,000 earthquake survivors. The Commissioner’s Donor Relations and Resource Mobilisation Service launched an expanded operations plan and budget, with a view to providing material support to extremely vulnerable individuals. Under the auspices of the coordinating UN agencies, a range of admirable results were achieved. Virtually all of 10 million cubic metres of debris were removed from Haitian streets. Over 96% of displaced people were returned to their homes. And lessons were learned. A 2015 guide on urban risk management was developed by UNDP. The Lidé project was a UN drive to promote youth entrepreneurialism in the wake of economic collapse. Substantial new knowledge databases were established to develop mechanisms assisting the poorest people affected by natural disasters, in particular women and minority groups.

Nevertheless a lot remained to be done, even by early 2016. Electoral and judicial reforms were necessary, guided by the expertise of specialist staff in the UN agencies. Poverty reduction and fighting contagious diseases remained a priority, in particular TB and HIV/AIDS. Substantial areas of Port-au-Prince remained dangerous slums. Healthcare remained ruinous. Government capacity was improved, but from so low a level that basic social services remain mostly unavailable to the majority of the population. Physical reconstruction has likewise been slow. According to the World Food Programme:

Persistent chronic poverty and inequality, environmental degradation and continuing political uncertainty threaten achievements Haitians have made over the past five years.

The Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Haiti herself acknowledged the limited nature of the UN’s achievements given its finite resources, when she said that much more needed to be done In order to strengthen stability, preserve the democratic gains and ensure sustainable development in Haiti. Despite nations’ generosity, there is so much more to be done and so much greater resources required. She must have one of the most difficult jobs in the world, yet she embraces it with fortitude and determination worthy of divine tribute.

Much has been made of Haiti’s cholera crisis, and a number of complaints have been levelled at the United Nations in this regard. To any fair-minded person, the United Nations must accept its due share of responsibility for the cholera outbreak that caused such human suffering. The outgoing UN Secretariat has rightly made due admissions in this regard, and the Secretary General-elect can and must ensure that such failures are never repeated. He knows this, and he is committed to achieving it. Moreover the Office of the Spokesperson of the outgoing Secretary General has been honourable in his acknowledgment of culpability when he said:

Over the past year, the U.N. has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera … a new response will be presented publicly within the next two months, once it has been fully elaborated, agreed with the Haitian authorities and discussed with member states.

This process, long overdue, is already beginning in anticipation of the new Secretary General taking office. Mr Guterres knows that the United Nations must forge solutions to these problems and not just engage in soul-searching introspection. In the words of the UN’s Haiti Cholera Response Unit:

It is clear that the Government, UN and partners must continue to focus on maximizing efforts during the dry season to minimize the number of suspected cases and to capitalize on the gains made over the last two years.

Nevertheless the challenge of accountability must be addressed. As a private lawyer working with international organisations for many years, I understand all too well the axiomatic quality of an adequate responsibility mechanism. Legal accountability is a particularly complex question, because it is difficult to preserve diplomatic immunity while ensuring that there is no impunity. But one must pay a lot of attention in trying to find the right equilibrium between those two aspects that are absolutely crucial.

Such was the state of multilateral intervention in Haiti. And then, just as multilateral donor funding was drying up and the achievements of international intervention were under review, came Hurricane Matthew in late September 2016. In the words of TIME Magazine’s Matthew Ellliott, “tragedy has a way of visiting those who can bare it the least”. A long-distance cyclone of unusual ferocity, Matthew triggered widespread flooding, further destruction of property, flash floods, homes being flattened, the virtually complete destruction of the town of Jérémie, the death of at least a further thousand people, some 175,000 more were left homeless, and perhaps 1.2 million people left in need of civil assistance. Three archdiocesan leaders were killed in the aftermath, as well as many other priests and persons of religion. Once again, the spectre of mass graves emerged in Haiti as the country simply lacked the Holy Men necessary to bury the dead.

In an extraordinary and inspiring telegram expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the people of Haiti, His Holiness the Pope decreed:

His Holiness Pope Francis wishes to express his sorrow and to join in prayer in the suffering of all those who have lost loved ones. He conveys to them his sincerest condolences and assures them of his deep sympathy in these painful circumstances. He entrusts the departed to the mercy of God, that He welcome them in His light. He assures them of his spiritual closeness and his affection for the injured, and for all those who have lost their homes and possessions in the disaster. Welcoming and encouraging solidarity in this new hardship the country must face, the Holy Father entrusts all Haitians to the maternal protection of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and imparts to them, as a sign of consolation and hope, a special apostolic blessing.

It is hard not to sympathise wholeheartedly with these profound, compassionate, benevolent and hallowed words of support from one of the world’s most erudite spiritual leaders. Such sentiments are particularly important because according to the Rev. Reginald Jean-Mary of Miami’s Notre Dame d’Haiti, “the church is like a central living womb for the community”. Haiti is a country that rests upon its spirituality to survive all adversity.

But all these fine sentiments lead in turn to the natural question, what is being done by the community of civilised nations in response to this new crisis facing this nation that has the curse forever to be faced with natural disasters it barely has the institutional capacity to resist? Given such a moral imperative to act, why are the necessary actions not taking place?

Haiti is a country where so much can be done by the international community, given generosity of international commitment and experienced and devoted staff working in the field. On his own visit to Haiti, the philanthropist Bill Gates reported:

We drove into the city of Mirebalais to see the new hospital run by PIH and the Haitian government. I was blown away. The hospital opened last summer and was built using money donated after the 2010 earthquake (people who were injured in the quake still need ongoing treatment). As you can see from the video here, they spared no expense to make it a first-class facility. There’s a machine for performing CAT scans. There’s a sophisticated system for keeping medical records. The staff can send digital images to Harvard and get input from specialists there. They have modern incubators for premature infants. The hospital gets electricity from an enormous solar array (plus a diesel generator at night).

Above all, funding solutions to the crisis in Haiti requires both ideas and innovation. That is why I support the fellowship work of UNHCR innovation and its sister partnership UNHCR ideas, and the wise leadership under whose custody those organisations function with a view to raising money not just from conventional sources but from miscellaneous private sector partners using cutting-edge contemporary means. On a recent visit to Haiti in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, Argentine President Mauricio Macri both applauded the admirable work of the UN mission there and lamented the fact that it was being wound down just at the time when the country faced renewed crisis. He is right.

As the union of enlightened and humane nations, we can and must do more. Any other course would be so reprehensible as to amount an unforgivable abrogation of the civilised world’s elementary ethical responsibilities to its fellow human beings. The United Nations Organisation was created precisely to uphold values of common humanity and dignity. Its member states cannot afford to sweep away those principles at so critical a juncture in the future of this impoverished country. With the right will, anything can be done. To return to Bill Gates:

Even understanding all the challenges, I felt hopeful about the opportunity for more Haitians to improve their lives. You know you’ve had a good trip if you can visit a country as poor as Haiti and leave feeling optimistic about its future.

An advanced numerical model is helping researchers better understand the variability of the Red Sea’s climate patterns.

Red Sea climate data covering the period between 2000 and 2014 has been reconstructed highly accurately at smaller time and space intervals than ever before. KAUST researchers used an advanced numerical weather modelling system that incorporates all weather data from the region1.

The system, called the Advanced Research version of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-ARW), was developed by the United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction to reconstruct and forecast weather data based on current conditions.

Ibrahim Hoteit, Associate Professor of Earth Science and Engineering in the Physical Sciences and Engineering Division, and colleagues took advantage of the advanced computational facilities at KAUST to customize the system and generate ‘high-resolution’ regional climatic data (covering relatively small timescales and geographic areas) over the Red Sea.

To do this they combined ‘low-resolution’ global reconstructed climatic data (covering relatively large geographic areas and timescales) with available satellite and in situ observations over the region.

“The study generated and validated much-needed high resolution atmospheric and wave datasets for the Red Sea and adjoining region,” said Hoteit. “These high-resolution datasets more accurately describe the regional climatic features of this region than available global products.”

The model revealed that the maximum temperatures in summer months are in north Sudan and the central Arabian Peninsula. In the winter, the maximum temperatures are found in the Tokar region: a 110-km-wide valley approximately in the middle of the African side of the Red Sea.

The model also clearly shows the evolution and duration of the ‘Red Sea Convergence Zone’ and the conditions that favor its intensification. In the winter, tropical and extra-tropical wind systems converge in this zone in the middle of the Red Sea, leading to localized cloudy skies and drizzle in an otherwise largely cloud- and rain-free area, explains KAUST Research Scientist Hari Dasari, the lead author of the study.

The research highlights the utility of the WRF-ARW for producing high-resolution data in the Red Sea region, which can further help understanding Red Sea circulation, its ocean surface processes and marine biodiversity, the researchers say.

The team is currently working on minimizing uncertainties in the model’s predictions and improving the quality of the generated data sets, said Hoteit. They are also developing new higher-resolution datasets covering longer time periods for the entire Middle East region.

In addition, they are using the model to study some extreme events that recently affected Saudi Arabia-such as the Jeddah floods of November 2009 and January 2011, and the Mecca storm of September 2015-with the aim of assessing their predictability.

Finally, they plan to build a seasonal prediction system of the atmospheric circulation over the Saudi Arabian peninsula.

By Riley Walters*

This article is a continuation of a series of papers on cyber attacks against U.S. companies since 2014[1] and 2015.[2] While the means of cyber attacks vary, the pattern of targets has been relatively consistent. Large databases, as well as point-of-sale systems, continue to be targeted for financial gain. Hackers with possible ties to nation-states continue to target infrastructure as well as systems for political insight.

Because reporting companies may not realize their systems have been compromised until long after the attack began, the list below is organized by date of when attacks or breaches were publicly announced, rather than when they might have occurred.

December 2015

• Bowman Dam (infrastructure). Iranian hackers reportedly gained control of this New York dam’s sluice system in 2013, although the controls were manually disconnected at the time of the cyber breach.[3] In March 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted one of the hackers employed at an Iran-based computer company with possible ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.[4]
• Hyatt Hotels Corporation (hotel). The hotel chain owner announced that it had identified malware on payment processing systems used at a number of locations.[5] Weeks of investigation revealed that malware had affected the systems at 250 locations between August and December 2015.[6] The malware collected payment information specific to credit card information.[7]
• MacKeeper (technology). Security researcher Chris Vickery discovered in Shodan (a specialized search engine and online database) the usernames, passwords, and other information for 13 million users of MacKeeper, a performance optimizing software for Apple computers.[8]
• A Whole Lot of Nothing LLC (spam e-mail company). The DOJ arrested three men linked to a hacking and scamming scheme that originated as early as 2011. The group targeted the personal information of almost 60 million people—often contained in targeted corporate databases—to be used in spam campaigns. Their operations ultimately generated $2 million in illegal profits.[9]
• Voter records. Vickery found the information of 191 million registered U.S. voters in a public-facing database.[10] While there were only 142 million register voters in 2014, information in the database goes as far back as 2000—meaning it could still contain the information of deceased registered voters. There also may be instances of duplication from combining multiple databases. As of yet, no one has come forward as the owner of the database.
• Alliance Health (online health portal). The online portal that facilitates support and information communities across health providers may have exposed personal health information of its 1.5 million users. The exposure likely came from a misconfiguration with its MongoDB database installation.[11] Forty thousand individuals were eventually informed their information had been exposed for 30 months.[12]

January 2016

• Voter records. Vickery discovered another public-facing database, storing upwards of 56 million voters’ information.[13]
• The Wendy’s Company (restaurant). Wendy’s first reported it would be investigating a possible breach that compromised customer payment information at its franchise stores. By June, investigators determined that at least 1,025 Wendy’s locations had been affected, beginning as early as fall 2015.[14]

February 2016

• U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation (government). A hacker with the Twitter handle @DotGovs released online the names and contact information of 29,000 Department of Homeland Security and FBI employees.[15]

March 2016

• Verizon Enterprise Solutions (network management). One-and-a-half million Verizon Enterprise customers’ contact information was possibly compromised by a security vulnerability. A prominent hacker offered access to the online database for $100,000.[16]

May 2016

• LinkedIn (online social networking). Updating the impact of a 2012 breach that saw the exposure of 6.5 million users’ passwords, the company confirmed that the true number is now likely closer to 167 million users, 117 million of whom had both their e-mails and passwords exposed.[17]
• Myspace (online social media). The same hacker who advertised the compromised LinkedIn database online claim to have a database of Myspace users’ credentials—427 million passwords and 360 million e-mail addresses.[18]
• Noodle & Company (restaurant chain). The food chain first began investigating its networks after unusual activity was noticed by its credit card processor. Malware led to customers’ credit and debit card information being compromised at a number of its locations between January and June.[19]

June 2016

• Democratic National Committee (political organization). The political organization’s networks were illegally accessed by two separate cyber groups with possible affiliation to the Russian government’s Russia Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and Federal Security Service (FSB).[20]
• Voter information. Chris Vickery found another online database holding 154 million U.S. voters’ information and discovered that an IP address based out of Serbia had been interacting with the database as early as April 2016.[21]
• CiCi’s Pizza (restaurant chain). News of this point-of-sale breach affecting customers’ payment information first broke on KrebsOnSecurity. CiCi’s Pizza eventually acknowledged the breach and that the compromise to its systems began as early as March 2016.[22] CiCi’s Pizza has 135 locations.

July 2016

• Citibank (banking). Ninety percent of Citibank’s networks across North America were taken offline after an employee in charge of the bank’s IT systems, following a poor performance review, sent malicious code to 10 core Citibank Global Control Center routers, shutting down nine of them. He has since been sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and fined $77,200.[23]

August 2016

• Dropbox (online). The number of account credentials exposed in a 2012 breach was increased to 68 million users.[24] Hackers were reportedly able to access accounts utilizing a Dropbox employee’s password and credentials, possibly taken from the 2012 LinkedIn breach.[25] Yevgeniy Nikulin was indicted on October 20, 2016, for his involvement with both the Dropbox and LinkedIn breaches.[26]
• Banner Health (health care). Almost four million patients, physicians, and customers were affected. The breach was first noticed on July 7, 2016, affecting payment card information. A subsequent breach led to the unauthorized access of patients’ personal identifiable information, such as birthdates, claims information, and possibly social security numbers.[27]
• Oracle MICROS (payment). Operator of 330,000 cash registers globally, this point-of-sale service was reportedly infected by malware.[28] The exploit has a possible connection to the Carbanak gang, an Eastern European hacker group linked to stealing $1 billion from up to 100 banks worldwide,[29] and may also have ties to a Russian security firm.[30]

September 2016

• Yahoo Inc. (online). The online company reported that more than 500 million of its users’ names, e-mail addresses, birthdates, phone numbers, and passwords were compromised in a 2014—possibly state-sponsored—breach. Yahoo began investigating the breach after 280 million users’ information was being offered for sale on the dark web.[31]
• SS&C Technology (technology). Tillage Commodities Fund, one of SS&C’s clients, was scammed for $5.9 million by reported Chinese hackers. The hackers sent SS&C staff scam e-mails ordering wire transfers of Tillage’s money.[32]

October 2016

• Dyn (online). The domain name service server was taken offline a number of times, attributed to widespread denial of service attacks. Internet-facing devices were used in this attack after being formed into a botnet through malware. The outage affected how users could access popular sites such as Twitter, Netflix, and The New York Times.[33]
• U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) (government). In November 2015, a former employee at the OCC downloaded swaths of information onto two portable storage devices before his retirement, leading to the unauthorized removal of more than 10,000 unclassified records.[34]

November 2016

• Friend Finder Networks (online). The company behind adult online websites such as Adultfriendfinder.com reported that the accounts of 412 million users were exposed online.[35] The online servers were reportedly breached by hackers in October.[36] No credit card information was exposed, but usernames, e-mails, passwords, and date-of-last-visit became available.

Conclusion

This list of successful and notable cyber incidents hardly scratches the surface of the number of smaller attacks or breaches that occur on a daily basis. With this in mind, Congress and the Administration should continue to encourage the sharing of threat information. Either through formal methods with the government and information-sharing centers or through informal communication, threat information sharing can help mitigate the spread of malicious software. The U.S. should continue to improve and encourage the use of existing avenues of information sharing such as those created by the Cybersecurity Act of 2015.[37]

Serious discussions need to take place on how to empower the private sector to engage in more active defense of its networks. The U.S. should create a defined system of active cyber defense that enables private companies to do more to defend their networks. This system should not allow unrestricted “hack back,” but should permit firms to use more assertive cyber tools that improve investigatory and attribution capabilities. Despite the potential threats that malicious actors may pose to U.S. online databases and network systems, the Internet and electronic devices continue to drive the economies of the world. The U.S. needs to take cybersecurity seriously while at the same time allowing innovation to continue to thrive.

About the author:
*Riley Walters is a Research Associate in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy, of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, at The Heritage Foundation.

Source:
This article was published at The Heritage Foundation

Appendix: Additional Resources on Cybersecurity and Cyber Incidents

Steven Bucci, Paul Rosenzweig, and David Inserra, “A Congressional Guide: Seven Steps to U.S. Security, Prosperity, and Freedom in Cyberspace,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2785, April 1, 2013, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/04/a-congressional-guide-seven-steps-to-us-security-prosperity-and-freedom-in-cyberspace.

David Inserra and Paul Rosenzweig, “Continuing Federal Cyber Breaches Warn Against Cybersecurity Regulation,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4288, October 27, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/10/continuing-federal-cyber-breaches-warn-against-cybersecurity-regulation.

Riley Walters, “Continued Federal Cyber Breaches in 2015,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4488, November 19, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/11/continued-federal-cyber-breaches-in-2015.

Riley Walters, “Cyber Attacks on U.S. Companies in 2014,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4289, October 27, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/10/cyber-attacks-on-us-companies-in-2014.

Riley Walters, “Cyber Attacks on U.S. Companies Since November 2014,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4487, November 18, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/11/cyber-attacks-on-us-companies-since-november-2014.

Notes:
[1] Riley Walters, “Cyber Attacks on U.S. Companies in 2014,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4289, October 27, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/10/cyber-attacks-on-us-companies-in-2014.

[2] Riley Walters, “Cyber Attacks on U.S. Companies Since November 2014,” Heritage Foundation Issue Brief No. 4487, November 18, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/11/cyber-attacks-on-us-companies-sincve-november-2014.

[3] Danny Yadron, “Iranian Hackers Infiltrated New York Dam in 2013,” The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/iranian-hackers-infiltrated-new-york-dam-in-2013-1450662559 (accessed November 30, 2016).

[4] News release, “Seven Iranians Working for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Affiliated Entities Charged for Conducting Coordinated Campaign of Cyber Attacks Against U.S. Financial Sector,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, March 24, 2016, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/seven-iranians-working-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps-affiliated-entities-charged (accessed November 30, 2016).

[5] News release, “Hyatt Notifies Customers of Malware Activity,” Hyatt Hotels, December 23, 2015, http://newsroom.hyatt.com/news-releases?item=123450 (accessed November 30, 2016).

[6] “Hyatt’s Malware Attack Hit 250 Hotels,” Fortune, January 15, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/hyatts-malware-attack/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[7] News release, “Hyatt Completes Payment Card Incident Investigation,” Hyatt Hotels, January 14, 2016, http://newsroom.hyatt.com/news-releases?item=123453 (accessed November 30, 2016).

[8] Brian Krebs, “13 Million MacKeeper Users Exposed,” KrebsonSecurity, December 14, 2015, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/13-million-mackeeper-users-exposed/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[9] News release, “Three Men Arrested in Hacking and Spamming Scheme; Targeted Personal Information of 60 Million People,” U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of New Jersey, December 15, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/three-men-arrested-hacking-and-spamming-scheme-targeted-personal-information-60-million (accessed November 30, 2016).

[10] Dissent, “191 Million Voters’ Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database (UPDATE2),” Databreaches.net, December 28, 2015, https://www.databreaches.net/191-million-voters-personal-info-exposed-by-misconfigured-database/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[11] Dissent, “Misconfigured Database May Have Exposed 1.5 Million Individuals’ PHI: Researcher (UPDATE2),” Databreaches.net, December 22, 2015, https://www.databreaches.net/misconfigured-database-may-have-exposed-1-5-million-individuals-phi-researcher-2/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[12] “Alliance Health Reports 30-Month Health Data Exposure,” HIPPAA Journal, February 17, 2016, http://www.hipaajournal.com/alliance-health-reports-30-month-health-data-exposure-8317/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[13] Max Metzger, “Mystery Database Leaks Conservative’s Personal Details,” SC Magazine, January 5, 2016, http://www.scmagazineuk.com/mystery-database-leaks-conservatives-personal-details/article/463052/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[14] Brian Krebs, “1,025 Wendy’s Locations Hit in Card Breach,” KrebsonSecurity, July 8, 2016, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/07/1025-wendys-locations-hit-in-card-breach/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[15] Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Hacker Publishes Personal Info of 20,000 FBI Agents,” Motherboard, February 8, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-publishes-personal-info-of-20000-fbi-agents (accessed November 30, 2016).

[16] Brian Krebs, “Crooks Steal, Sell Verizon Enterprise Customer Data,” KrebsonSecurity, March 24, 2016, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/03/crooks-steal-sell-verizon-enterprise-customer-data/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[17] Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Another Day, Another Hack: 117 Million LinkedIn Emails and Passwords,” Motherboard, May 18, 2016, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/another-day-another-hack-117-million-linkedin-emails-and-password (accessed November 30, 2016).

[18] Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Hacker Tries to Sell 427 Million Myspace Passwords for $2,800,” Motherboard, May 27, 2016, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/427-million-myspace-passwords-emails-data-breach (accessed November 30, 2016).

[19] “Notice of Data Security Incident,” Noodles & Company, June 28, 2016, http://www.noodles.com/security/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[20] Dmitri Alperovitch, “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee,” Crowdstrike, June 15, 2016, https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[21] Chris Vickery, “Another U.S. Voter Database Leak,” MacKeeper, June 26, 2016, https://mackeeper.com/blog/post/239-another-us-voter-database-leak (accessed November 30, 2016).

[22] Brian Krebs, “Cici’s Pizza: Card Breach at 130+ Locations,” KrebsonSecurity, July 19, 2016, http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/cicis-pizza-breach/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[23] News release, “Former Citibank Employee Sentenced to 21 Months in Federal Prison for Causing Intentional Damage to a Protected Computer,” U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Texas, July 25, 2016, https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/former-citibank-employee-sentenced-21-months-federal-prison-causing-intentional-damage (accessed November 30, 2016).

[24] Joseph Cox, “Hackers Stole Account Details for Over 60 Million Dropbox Users” Motherboard, August 30, 2016, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-stole-over-60-million-dropbox-accounts (accessed November 30, 2016).

[25] Kate Conger and Matthew Lynley, “Dropbox Employee’s Password Reuse Led to Theft of 60M+ User Credentials,” Tech Crunch, August 30, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/30/dropbox-employees-password-reuse-led-to-theft-of-60m-user-credentials/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[26] News release, “Yevgeniy Nikulin Indicted for Hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring” Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, October 21, 2016, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/yevgeniy-nikulin-indicted-hacking-linkedin-dropbox-and-formspring (accessed November 30, 2016).

[27] News release, “Banner Health Identifies Cyber Attack,” Banner Health, August 3, 2016, http://www.modernhealthcare.com/assets/pdf/CH10636283.PDF (accessed November 30, 2016).

[28] Brian Krebs, “Data Breach at Oracle’s MICROS Point-of-Sale Division,” KrebsonSecurity, August 8, 2016, http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/08/data-breach-at-oracles-micros-point-of-sale-division/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[29] Press release, “The Great Bank Robbery: Carbanak Cybergang Steals $1bn from 100 Financial Institutions Worldwide,” Kapersky Labs, February 16, 2015, http://www.kaspersky.co.in/about/news/virus/2015/Carbanak-cybergang-steals-1-bn-USD-from-100-financial-institutions-worldwide (accessed November 30, 2016).

[30] Brian Krebs, “Carbanak Gang Tied to Russian Security Firm?” KrebsonSecurity, July 18, 2016, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/07/carbanak-gang-tied-to-russian-security-firm/ (accessed November 30, 2016).

[31] Robert McMillan, “Yahoo Says Information on at Least 500 Million User Accounts Was Stolen,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/yahoo-says-information-on-at-least-500-million-user-accounts-is-stolen-1474569637 (accessed November 30, 2016).

[32] Jon Marino, “China Hackers Swipe Millions in Data Breach,” CNBC, September 16, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/16/china-hackers-swipe-millions-in-data-breach.html (accessed November 30, 2016).

[33] Riley Walters and Jacob Jordan, “U.S. Must Remain Vigilant to Counter Cyberattacks,” Daily Signal, October 26, 2016, http://dailysignal.com/2016/10/26/how-a-cyberattack-took-down-twitter-netflix-and-the-new-york-times/.

[34] News release, “OCC Notifies Congress of Incident Involving Unauthorized Removal of Information,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, October 28, 2016, http://www2.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2016/nr-occ-2016-138.html (accessed November 30, 2016).

[35] “Sexual Secrets for Hundreds of Millions Exposed in Largest Hack of 2016,” Leaked Source, November 13, 2016, https://www.leakedsource.com/blog/friendfinder (accessed November 30, 2016).

[36] Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Hookup Service ‘Adult FriendFinder’ May Have Been Hacked—Again,” Motherboard, October 19, 2016, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hookup-service-adult-friendfinder-may-have-been-hacked-again (accessed November 30, 2016).

[37] Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, S.754, 114th Cong., 1st Sess., https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/754/text (accessed November 30, 2016).