US President Donald Trump and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held their first official meeting Monday in Washington, D.C. and affirmed their longstanding commitment to close cooperation in addressing both the challenges facing our two countries and problems around the world.

No two countries share deeper or broader relations than Canada and the United States. We are bound together by our history, our values, our economy, our environment, and our resolve to improve the lives of our citizens. Our close relationship and ongoing collaboration allow us to successfully meet any challenges we may face over the coming years, and to build a prosperous future for the people of both countries.

Neighbors in Growing our Economies

We recognize our profound shared economic interests, and will work tirelessly to provide growth and jobs for both countries. Canada is the most important foreign market for thirty-five U.S. States, and more than $2 billion in two-way trade flows across our shared border every day. Millions of American and Canadian middle-class jobs, including in the manufacturing sector, depend on our partnership. We affirm the importance of building on this existing strong foundation for trade and investment and further deepening our relationship, with the common goal of strengthening the middle class.

The United States and Canada also recognize the importance of cooperation to promote economic growth, provide benefits to our consumers and businesses, and advance free and fair trade. We will continue our dialogue on regulatory issues and pursue shared regulatory outcomes that are business-friendly, reduce costs, and increase economic efficiency without compromising health, safety, and environmental standards. We will work together regarding labor mobility in various economic sectors.

Given our shared focus on infrastructure investments, we will encourage opportunities for companies in both countries to create jobs through those investments. In particular, we look forward to the expeditious completion of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will serve as a vital economic link between our two countries.

Energy Security and Environment

U.S.-Canada energy and environmental cooperation are inextricably linked, and we commit to further improving our ties in those areas. We have built the world’s largest energy trading relationship. We share the goals of energy security, a robust and secure energy grid, and a strong and resilient energy infrastructure that contributes to energy efficiency in both countries. We collaborate closely on energy innovation, particularly in the clean energy sphere. As the process continues for the Keystone XL pipeline, we remain committed to moving forward on energy infrastructure projects that will create jobs while respecting the environment.

We also look forward to building on our many areas of environmental cooperation, particularly along our border and at the Great Lakes, and we will continue to work together to enhance the quality of our air and water.

Partners in Keeping our Border Secure

We recognize the security of our borders as a top priority. Together, we address security at our shared border and throughout our two countries, while expediting legitimate and vital cross-border trade and travel. We demonstrate daily that security and efficiency go hand-in-hand, and we are building a 21st century border through initiatives such as pre-clearance of people and integrated cross-border law enforcement operations. In addition, our two countries are committed to a coordinated entry-exit information system so that records of land and air entries into one country establish exit records for the other.

Recognizing the success of pre-clearance operations for travelers, we commit to establishing pre-clearance operations for cargo. We intend to accelerate the completion of pre-clearance for additional cities and continue to expand this program. Not only will these efforts enhance efficiency at our shared border, they will also strengthen our shared security. In the spirit of a more efficient and secure border, we will also examine ways to further integrate our border operations, including analysis of the feasibility of co-locating border officials in common processing facilities.

Because we share a strong concern about the increase in opioid-related deaths, our countries will work together on common solutions to protect our people from opioid trafficking.

Given the integrated nature of the infrastructure that supports our intertwined economies, cyber threats to either country can affect the other. We therefore commit to further cooperation to enhance critical infrastructure security, cyber incident management, public awareness, private sector engagement, and capacity building initiatives.

Allies in the World

We are indispensable allies in the defense of North America and other parts of the world, through NATO and other multilateral efforts. Our troops have time and again fought together and sacrificed their lives for our shared values. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) illustrates the strength of our mutual commitment. United States and Canadian forces jointly conduct aerospace warning, aerospace control, and maritime warning in defense of North America. We will work to modernize and broaden our NORAD Partnership in these key domains, as well as in cyber and space.

The United States welcomes Canada’s recently announced decision to launch an open and transparent competition to replace its legacy fleet of CF-18 fighter aircraft. The United States also welcomes Canada’s decision to explore the immediate acquisition of 18 new Super Hornet aircraft as an interim capability to supplement the CF-18s until the permanent replacement is ready. Canada appreciates the cooperation of the United States to facilitate these processes.

The United States values Canada’s military contributions, including in the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIS and in Latvia. Together, we are harnessing all elements of national power to achieve the goal of degrading and destroying ISIS through our military operations to deny it safe havens and to build the capacity of local partners, stop the flow of foreign terrorist fighters into the Middle East region, cut off access to financing and funding, counter the ISIS narrative, and support the stabilization of communities liberated from ISIS.

Empowering Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders

It is a priority of both countries to ensure equal opportunities for women in the workforce. We are committed to removing barriers to women’s participation in the business community and supporting women as they advance through it. As part of this effort, we are creating a United States-Canada Council for Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders. We expect this initiative to promote the growth of women-owned enterprises and to further contribute to our overall economic growth and competitiveness, as well as the enhanced integration of our economies.

The Way Forward

We share a commitment to continue to strengthen our ties for the benefit of our mutual prosperity and security. We look forward to our cabinets following up on today’s meeting with further discussions in their respective areas of responsibility. Our countries deserve our full commitment to increased economic growth, which we will deliver. The partnership between the United States and Canada will continue to be unique and a model for the world.

I was only 11 months older than was she, so our parents always got us matching pjs for Xmas.

I suspected Christmas 2016 would be Dede’s last, so I got us matching jammies and took this final photo with her. She loved the pjs so much, but the gesture even better.

Dede was my blood-sister, but also so much more. My marriage came and went; children come and go and come and go and come and go; but Dede was always there for me. During the highs and lows of being the “Face of the antiwar movement” when many people abandoned the cause and abandonded me: Dede was always there.

When I was planning for her cremation and her memorial, I kept thinking, “this would be so much easier for me if Dede were here.”

The two years I was Dede’s main caregiver and support-person and the 10 days she was in hospice before she died were very tough for me, but there were moments filled with love and grace and I learned so much about cancer, the Cancer Industrial Complex, and about my relationship with my soul-sister.

While I will be hopefully increasing the reach of the Soapbox and working with many people in the true resistance against Empire, I am also planning on writing a book about Dede and especially our final journey together tentatively titled: “Soul Survivor: The Last Campaign of the Miller Sisters.”

The Internet can mobilize people around issues and this mobilization often takes the form of presenting declarations to foreign leaders or gathering signatures on petitions that allow those who are sometimes ignored to force themselves into policy discussions.

In the last few days, three such Internet-based initiatives have come out of Eurasia: a petition drive in Belarus against Russian military exercises there, an appeal to the presidents of Russia and the US to defend the indigenous population of the North against oil drilling, and a call to Washington to treat the ethnic Azerbaijanis of Iran differently than Iranians proper.

Because these appeals touch on issues central to the US-Russian relationship, they may very well have real world consequences by forcing a consideration of the views expressed in them by both Russian and American officials who might otherwise be unaware of the intensity of feelings behind them.

First, two days ago, the Youth Wing of the Belarusian Popular Front announced that it was beginning to collect signatures on a petition to demand that Minsk cancel plans for a joint military exercise with Russia later this years because of the threat it poses to Belarusian sovereignty (by24.org/2017/02/11/no_russian_military_exersises_in_belarus/ and moladz.info/stopzahad2017).

The authors are especially concerned because of reports that the exercise, known as West-2017, will involve the introduction onto Belarusian territory of massive amounts of Russian military equipment, amounts far greater than any exercise could require and thus by themselves a threat to the country’s independence.

Second, the Yamal group “Voice of the Tundra” has released an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Donald Trump asking that the two leaders protect them from the actions of oil and gas companies on the traditional national territories (nakanune.ru/news/2017/2/13/22460834/).

The appeal calls for the two to meet and make their fate one of the subjects of their joint discussion, a recommendation that takes on special meaning because of the importance of oil and gas for Putin and because Trump’s secretary of state was before assuming office deeply involved in the development of Arctic fields in Russia as head of Exxon.

And third, the Azerbaijani National Resistance Organization in Iran appealed to President Trump not to impose travel restrictions on the ethnic Azerbaijanis of Iran even if he does impose them on Iranians because they are a separate people and are oppressed by Tehran rather than being its supporters (haqqin.az/news/92436).

There are an estimated 30 plus million ethnic Azeris in Iran, some of whom are very well integrated into Iranian society but some of whom are oppressed by Iran’s Persian-first policies. They have been subject to repression and have often looked north to Baku or even to Turkey and the West for support.

What makes this appeal so interesting is that it comes at a time when Washington is tightening the screws on Iran and may thus be interested in viewing the Azerbaijani minority as a potential ally – or at least some in the ANRO group are hoping for that. The Southern Azerbaijan issue, however is both delicate and complicated.

For background on this issue, see David Nissman’s The Soviet Union And Iranian Azerbaijan: The Use Of Nationalism For Political Penetration (Westview, 1987). Cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/09/window-on-eurasia-more-than-half-of.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/12/window-on-eurasia-is-iran-planning-to.html.

An international study published Monday involving University of Queensland research has found large numbers of threatened species have already been impacted by climate change.

Associate Professor James Watson of UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Wildlife Conservation Society said alarmingly, the team of international researchers found evidence of observed responses to recent climate changes in almost 700 birds and mammal species.

“There has been a massive under-reporting of these impacts,” he said.

“Only seven per cent of mammals and four per cent of birds that showed a negative response to climate change are currently considered ‘threatened by climate change and severe weather’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species.”

Associate Professor Watson said the study reviewed the observed impacts of climate change on birds and mammals using a total of 130 studies, making it the most comprehensive assessment to date on how climate change has affected our most well studied species.

“The results suggested it is likely that around half the threatened mammals (out of 873 species) and 23 per cent of threatened birds (out of 1272 species) have already responded negatively to climate change,” he said.

Lead author Michela Pacifici of the Global Mammal Assessment Program at Sapienza University of Rome said this implied that, in the presence of adverse environmental conditions, populations of these species had a high probability of also being negatively impacted by future climatic changes.

Associate Professor Watson said the study clearly showed that the impact of climate change on mammals and birds to date has been greatly under estimated and reported on.

“This under-reporting is also very likely in less studied species groups. We need to greatly improve assessments of the impacts of climate change on all species right now,” he said.

“We need to communicate the impacts of climate change to the wider public and we need to ensure key decision makers know significant change needs to happen now to stop species going extinct.

“Climate change is not a future threat anymore.”

The paper was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

A study, led by Newcastle University’s Dr Alan Jamieson, has uncovered the first evidence that man-made pollutants have now reached the farthest corners of our earth.

Sampling amphipods from the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana and Kermadec trenches — which are over 10 kilometres deep and 7,000 km apart — the team found extremely high levels of Persistent Organic Pollutants — or POPs — in the organism’s fatty tissue. These include polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) which are commonly used as electrical insulators and flame retardants.

Publishing their findings Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the study team – from Newcastle University, UK, University of Aberdeen and the James Hutton Institute — say the next step is to understand the consequences of this contamination and what the knock-on effects might be for the wider ecosystem.

According to lead author Dr Jamieson, “We still think of the deep ocean as being this remote and pristine realm, safe from human impact, but our research shows that, sadly, this could not be further from the truth.”

“In fact, the amphipods we sampled contained levels of contamination similar to that found in Suruga Bay, one of the most polluted industrial zones of the northwest Pacific,” Jamieson said. “What we don’t yet know is what this means for the wider ecosystem and understanding that will be the next major challenge.”

A legacy of the past

From the 1930s to when PCBs were banned in the 1970s, the total global production of these chemicals was in the region of 1.3million tonnes.

Released into the environment through industrial accidents and discharges and leakage from landfills, these pollutants are invulnerable to natural degradation and so persist in the environment for decades.

The research team used deep-sea landers – designed by Dr Jamieson – to plumb the depths of the Pacific Ocean in order to bring up samples of the organisms that live in the deepest levels of the trenches.

The authors suggest that the pollutants most likely found their way to the trenches through contaminated plastic debris and dead animals sinking to the bottom of the ocean, where they are then consumed by amphipods and other fauna, which in turn become food for larger fauna still.

“The fact that we found such extraordinary levels of these pollutants in one of the most remote and inaccessible habitats on earth really brings home the long term, devastating impact that mankind is having on the planet,” said Dr Jamieson, who is based in the School of Marine Science and Technology at Newcastle University. “It’s not a great legacy that we’re leaving behind.”

Sink for pollutants

Oceans comprise the largest biome on the planet, with the deep ocean operating as a potential sink for pollutants and litter that are discarded into the seas.

These pollutants then accumulate through the food chain so that by the time they reach the deep ocean, concentrations are many times higher than in surface waters.

“We’re very good at taking an ‘out of sight out of mind’ approach when it comes to the deep ocean but we can’t afford to be complacent.”

“This research shows that far from being remote the deep ocean is highly connected to the surface waters and this means that what we dump at the bottom of the sea will one day come back up in some form another.”

Taking one-fourth the standard dose of a widely used drug for prostate cancer with a low-fat breakfast can be as effective – and four times less expensive – as taking the standard dose as recommended: on an empty stomach.

The study, a multi-center, randomized, phase-II clinical trial to be presented at ASCO’s 2017 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in Orlando, FL, found that the 36 patients who took 250 milligrams of the drug with a low-fat breakfast had outcomes that were virtually identical to the 36 patients who took the standard dose, 1,000 milligrams of the drug on an empty stomach.

The finding has significant financial implications. The drug, abiraterone acetate – marketed as ZYTIGA® – now retails for more than $9,000 per month. Even patients with blue-ribbon health insurance can have co-pays ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 per month.

Patients taking abiraterone acetate typically stay on the medication for 12 to 18 months. Since 2011, according to the manufacturer’s website, more than 100,000 patients in the United States alone have filled prescriptions for abiraterone.

If each of those 100,000 patients had taken the drug for 12 months and, theoretically, paid the list price out of pocket but took the lower dose with food, the 75-percent cost reduction could have saved them more than $6 billion.

Seventy-two patients from multiple centers in the United States and Singapore participated in the study. Patients aged 52 to 89 years (median 74) with advanced prostate cancer whose disease had progressed despite standard initial hormonal therapy, were randomly assigned to take the standard dose on an empty stomach or the low dose with breakfast.

The primary objective of the study was to compare the change in blood levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA), a measure of disease burden and progression. Despite a 75-percent difference in dose, there was no difference in abiraterone activity as measured by variation in PSA levels between the two groups of patients. The time to disease progression also was nearly identical for both arms of the study, about 14 months.

Patients who took the drug with food appeared to have an additional benefit. They were less likely to complain about stomach discomfort than those who took the drug as recommended. The drug’s label recommends fasting for 2 hours before and 1 hour after swallowing the medication. Taking the medication with breakfast is therefore logistically easier for patients.

“We know this drug is absorbed much more efficiently when taken with food,” said study director Russell Szmulewitz, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and a specialist in medical treatment of patients with advanced prostate cancer. “It’s inefficient, even wasteful, to take this medicine while fasting, which is how the drug’s label says to take it.”

“Given the pharmaco-economic implications,” he added, “our results warrant consideration by doctors who care for prostate cancer patients as well as payers.”

Many drugs taken by mouth have a “food effect,” which can alter how the drug is absorbed. Abiraterone has one of the most dramatic food effects. Blood levels of the drug can be up to 17 times higher when taken with a high-fat meal. Taking the drug with a low-fat meal is more predictable. It increases blood levels four to seven fold.

“This is a widely prescribed drug, a mainstay for patients with prostate cancer,” Szmulewitz said. “It is a great medication that has shifted the standard of care.”

Patients with early stage prostate cancer patients are usually treated initially with hormone therapy, drugs that disrupt the production of male hormones such as testosterone, which promotes tumor growth. This can slow or halt progression of the disease.

Over time, however, cancer cells adapt. They develop the ability to grow and spread without relying on hormones, a stage known as castration-resistant prostate cancer. Historically, those patients were treated with chemotherapy, which can have significant side effects.

Abiraterone, approved for treatment of metastatic prostate cancer in April, 2011, added a new layer to the sequence. It “sits between hormone therapy and chemotherapy,” Szmulewitz explained. “It delays disease progression, improves survival and delays deterioration of quality of life.” When its effects diminish, they shift to a similar, competing drug or move on to chemotherapy.

Patients who take abiraterone for prostate cancer should not “conduct such experiments on their own,” Szmulewitz warned. “This was a relatively small study, too small to show with confidence that the lower dose is as effective. It gives us preliminary but far from definitive evidence. Physicians should use their discretion, based on patient needs.”

The study shows that patients with genuine concerns about costs could, with careful guidance and regular follow-up from their doctors, consider the smaller dose taken with a low-fat breakfast. This would enable them to spread the cost of one month’s of pills over four months, a per-patient savings of up to $7,500 each month.

The American Cancer Society estimates that 161,360 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017 and 26,730 men will die from the disease. “If we could reduce the cost of medication for this stage of the disease by a few thousand dollars each month simply by having patients take it with food,” Szmulewitz said, “that would be significant.”

The word ‘replicant’ evokes thoughts of a sci-fi world where society has replaced common creatures with artificial machines that replicate their behaviour. Now researchers from Singapore have shown that if such machines are ever created, they’ll run more efficiently if they harness quantum theory to respond to the environment.

This follows the findings of a team from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT), published 10 February in npj Quantum Information. The team investigated ‘input-output processes’, assessing the mathematical framework used to describe arbitrary devices that make future decisions based on stimuli received from the environment. In almost all cases, they found, a quantum device is more efficient because classical devices have to store more past information than is necessary to simulate the future.

“The reason turns out to be quantum theory’s lack of a definitive reality,” says co-author Mile Gu, an Assistant Professor at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, who is affiliated with CQT. “Quantum mechanics has this famous feature where some properties of quantum particles are not just unknown before they are measured, but fundamentally do not exist in a definitive state prior to the act of measurement,” he says. The physics only specifies the probabilities the system collapses to each possible value once the measurement is performed. That lets the quantum system, in a sense, do more with less.

Co-author Jayne Thompson, a Research Fellow at CQT, explains further: “Classical systems always have a definitive reality. They need to retain enough information to respond correctly to each possible future stimulus. By engineering a quantum device so that different inputs are like different quantum measurements, we can replicate the same behaviour without retaining a complete description of how to respond to each individual question.” Andrew Garner, another Research Fellow at CQT, and Vlatko Vedral, a Principal Investigator at CQT and Professor at the University of Oxford, also contributed to the paper.

The findings advance earlier work. In 2012, Vedral, Gu and others proved a similar result for another class of problems known as stochastic processes. These are systems that have dynamics independent of external stimuli. That result was just put to experimental test by collaborators from Griffith University in Australia. They constructed a real life quantum simulator of a stochastic process [Science Advances 3, e1601302 (2017)].

This proof-of-principle experiment used just two particles of light. The first simulations of input-output processes will probably be small-scale too, but Gu hopes to ultimately see quantum technologies simulating how complex systems will react and evolve in real life situations.

“Input-output processes are ubiquitous in nature,” says Vedral. “Every entity is essentially an input-output process, from neural networks that process past inputs to make future decisions, to seeds that determine when to germinate based on external stimuli,” he says.

“Humans have long been fascinated with the idea of replicating nature through machines, from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mechanical knight to speculative fiction of future androids like Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ that inspired the Blade Runner film,” Gu says. “Perhaps androids in the future, engineered by an advanced civilization obsessed with efficiency, will instead dream of quantum sheep.”

Reference:

J. Thompson et al, “Using quantum theory to simplify input-output processes” npj Quantum Information doi:10.1038/s41534-016-0001-3 (2017)

This work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation Grant 53914 ‘Occam’s Quantum Mechanical Razor: Can Quantum theory admit the Simplest Understanding of Reality?’; the Oxford Martin School; the Ministry of Education in Singapore, the Academic Research Fund Tier 3 MOE2012-T3-1-009; the Foundational Questions Institute Grant Observer-dependent complexity: The quantum-classical divergence over ‘what is complex?’ the National Research Foundation of Singapore and in particular NRF Award No. NRF-NRFF2016-02.

Stanford researchers have developed a new way to estimate crop yields from space, using high-res photos snapped by a new wave of compact satellites.

The approach, detailed in the February 13 issue of the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could be used to estimate agricultural productivity and test intervention strategies in poor regions of the world where data are currently extremely scarce.

“Improving agricultural productivity is going to be one of the main ways to reduce hunger and improve livelihoods in poor parts of the world,” said study-coauthor Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in the department of Earth System Science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “But to improve agricultural productivity, we first have to measure it, and unfortunately this isn’t done on most farms around the world.”

Earth-observing satellites have been around for over three decades, but most of the imagery they capture has not been high-enough resolution to visualize the very small agricultural fields typical in developing countries. Recently, however, satellites have shrunk in both size and cost while simultaneously improving in resolution, and today there are several companies competing to launch refrigerator- and shoebox-sized satellites into space that take high resolution images of the earth.

“You can get lots of them up there, all capturing very small parts of the land surface at very high resolution,” said study-coauthor David Lobell, an associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science. “Any one satellite doesn’t give you very much information, but the constellation of them actually means that you’re covering most of the world at very high resolution and at very low cost. That’s something we never really had even a few years ago.”

In the new study, Burke and Lobell set out to test whether the images from this new wave of satellites are good enough reliably estimate crop yields. The pair focused on an area in Western Kenya where there are a lot of smallholder farmers that grow maize, or corn, on small, half-acre or one-acre lots. “This was an area where there was already a lot of existing field work,” Lobell said. “It was an ideal site to test our approach.”

The scientists compared two different methods for estimating agricultural productivity yields using satellite imagery. The first approach involved “ground truthing,” or conducting ground surveys to check the accuracy of yield estimates calculated using the satellite data, which was donated by the company Terra Bella. For this part of the study, Burke and his field team spent weeks conducting house-to-house surveys with his staff, talking to farmers and gathering information about individual farms.

“We get a lot of great data, but it’s incredibly time consuming and fairly expensive, meaning we can only survey at most a thousand or so farmers during one campaign,” Burke said. “If you want to scale up our operation, you don’t want to have to recollect ground survey data everywhere in the world.”

For this reason, the team also tested an alternative “uncalibrated” approach that did not depend on ground survey data to make predictions. Instead, it uses a computer model of how crops grow, along with information on local weather conditions, to help interpret the satellite imagery and predict yields.

“Just combining the imagery with computer-based crop models allows us to make surprisingly accurate predictions, just based on the imagery alone, of actual productivity on the field,” Burke said.

The researchers have plans to scale up their project and test their approach across more of Africa. “Our aspiration is to make accurate seasonal predictions of agricultural productivity for every corner of Sub-Saharan Africa,” Burke said. “Our hope is that this approach we’ve developed using satellites could allow a huge leap in in our ability to understand and improve agricultural productivity in poor parts of the world.”

Lobell is also the deputy director of Stanford’s the Center on Food Security and the Environment and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

An Oregon bill on advanced medical directive rules could allow patients who suffer from dementia or mental illness to be starved or dehydrated, opponents warned.

“These are patients who are awake, can chew and swallow and want to eat, even though in some cases they may need help in delivering food to their mouths,” Gayle Atteberry of Oregon Right to Life said Jan. 31. “Current safeguards in Oregon’s law protect these patients from this type of cruelty. This bill take away these safeguards.”

The legislation, S.B. 494, would create an appointed committee empowered to make changes to the advance medical directive governing end-of-life decisions.

According to Oregon Right to Life, the bill was drafted in response to the case of Ashland, Ore. resident Nora Harris, who suffered from early onset Alzheimer’s disease. She lost the ability to communicate and the fine motor skills needed to feed herself. She would eat and drink only with assisted spoon feeding.

Harris’ husband had filed a suit to stop the spoon feeding but lost his case in July 2016. Harris herself was represented by a court-appointed attorney, who said that that refusing to help Harris eat would be against state law. The law and Harris’ advance directive authorized only the withdrawal of artificial means of hydration and nutrition. Jackson County Circuit Judge Patricia Crain agreed, the Medford Mail-Tribune reports.

Oregon Right to Life objected to efforts to change the advance directive system.

“If the bill passes, it could allow a court to interpret a request on an advance directive to refuse tube feeding to also mean you don’t want to receive spoon feeding,” the group said. “This is not tube feeding or an IV – this is basic, non-medical care for conscious patients.”

It charged that the process “could easily result in further erosion of patient rights.”

“End of life decisions are very difficult,” Atteberry added. “Families suffer emotionally as they make decisions such as to use or withdraw feeding tubes, possibly place do-not-resuscitate orders, or use heroic treatments. Most of these decisions, however, involve patients in comatose situations, and most of them are free of moral implications. Most of them, also, are end-of-life decisions.”

Those affected by this bill would not be at an end-of-life stage.

“The problem is, for some, especially insurance companies, they are not dying fast enough,” Atteberry said.

She said that current requirements that patients be spoon-fed help reassure families of Alzheimer’s patients that their loved ones are receiving good care.

“Some comfort can be derived from the knowledge that their loved one will be receiving attentive and kind care while in these facilities. Should this bill pass, that peace would vanish.”

The investiture of Thailand’s new Buddhist supreme patriarch took place at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok on Feb. 12 in a royal ceremony presided over by the king.

Venerable Somdet Phra Maha Muniwong was anointed the 20th supreme monk, with other temples across the country joining the celebration by ringing bells.

King Vajiralongkorn named the abbot of Wat Rajabopit as the new supreme patriarch last week after an amendment to the country’s Sangha Act was passed by the National Legislative Assembly on Dec. 29.

The amendment gives the king the right to name the top monk, ending the power of the Supreme Sangha Council to nominate candidates.

Somdet Phra Maha Muniwong, 89, is of Dhammayuttika Nikaya, the Dhammayut monastic order, one of the two orders of Buddhist monks in Thailand.

He succeeds Venerable Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara, who died in 2013.

Syrian government forces conducted coordinated chemical attacks in opposition-controlled parts of Aleppo during the final month of the battle for the city, Human Rights Watch said Monday.

Through phone and in-person interviews with witnesses and analysis of video footage, photographs, and posts on social media, Human Rights Watch documented government helicopters dropping chlorine in residential areas on at least eight occasions between November 17 and December 13, 2016. The attacks, some of which included multiple munitions, killed at least nine civilians, including four children, and injured around 200.

The attacks took place in areas where government forces planned to advance, starting in the east and moving westwards as the frontlines moved, Human Rights Watch said.
“The pattern of the chlorine attacks shows that they were coordinated with the overall military strategy for retaking Aleppo, not the work of a few rogue elements,” said Ole Solvang, deputy emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “The United Nations Security Council shouldn’t let Syrian authorities or anyone else who has used chemical weapons get away without consequences.”

The UN Security Council has yet to take action since a UN-appointed investigation, known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism, identified military units responsible for earlier attacks using chlorine in Syria. The Security Council should impose sanctions on senior leaders in the chain of command, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch called on the Syrian government to immediately stop using chemicals as weapons and fully cooperate with the UN-appointed investigation.

The 192 state parties of the Chemical Weapons Convention should take steps to address Syria’s continued violation of the treaty’s most basic prohibitions and ensure compliance in order to bolster the customary international norm against chemical warfare, Human Rights Watch said.

Syrian government helicopters have dropped chlorine on opposition-controlled territory at least since April 2014. Chlorine has many civilian uses, but the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in October 2013, bans the use of the toxic properties of any chemical as a weapon. Human Rights Watch has also documented that Syrian government forces used sarin in attacks in August 2013, and that the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) has used mustard agent as recently as August 2016.

The most recent chlorine attacks took place during a final push by Syrian government forces and its allies to wrest control of eastern Aleppo from armed opposition groups. After a period of relative calm, Syrian government forces and its allies resumed military operations in Aleppo on November 17, starting with intensive aerial bombardment. The battle continued until December 13, when the parties agreed to a ceasefire and many of the fighters and civilians in eastern Aleppo were evacuated.

By Joyce Karam

After eight years of hand-wringing and not-so-subtle backstabbing between former US President Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, a “monumental” shift in language and substance awaits the Israeli prime minister as he arrives in Washington to meet Obama’s successor Donald Trump.

Netanyahu’s visit on Wednesday will mark the first official meeting that Trump will hold with a Middle Eastern leader in the Oval Office since his inauguration on Jan. 20.
Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet Vice President Mike Pence, and have dinner with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday. He will also meet with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The change in optics will be accompanied by a shift in the discussions, according to experts, where Iran’s regional role and its nuclear program will likely dominate the meetings, followed by exploring ideas to jumpstart the peace process.

“The difference from the Obama administration is monumental,” said David Shor, a foreign policy expert based in New York. The strained relations between Obama and Netanyahu were no secret over the last eight years; Netanyahu dismissed the administration’s calls for a settlement freeze, rebuffed its Iran policies and went behind the White House’s back in addressing the Republican-majority Congress in 2015.

Key to the differences during the Obama days was “the enormous pressure (the administration put) on Israel to make concessions, while basically giving Tehran a free hand in the region,” Shor said.

And in that alone, a sea change is expected from the Trump Cabinet. Upping “the pressure on Iran — especially regionally, with a clear upgrading and enhancing of the US-Israel alliance” is expected, and “Israel surely hopes that Iran will once again be the central focus of American foreign policy in the Middle East,” the expert added.

Two weeks ago, Trump put “Iran on notice” following its ballistic missile test in late January, and rolled out targeted sanctions against companies and individuals worldwide that aid the program. There is also a debate within the administration on designating the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization.

This tempo of US escalation against Iran could employ military tools to curb Tehran’s regional behavior. The New York Times reported on Sunday that US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “was exploring whether the Navy could intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen.” The operation was called off because the ship was in international waters. Such an approach is music to the ears of the Israeli prime minister, who for years has called for a more muscular policy against Iran.

The network of pro-Israel officials that are stacked in Trump’s White House will also bolster the visit, said Shor. “Trump is surrounded with people who hold Israel in a very high regard,” added the expert, citing Trump’s most senior advisers Jared Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law, along with Steven Bannon and Michael Flynn as among the White House officials who have had a close relation with Israel. The New York Times reported that Netanyahu has had long good family relations with the Kushner family, to a point that the Israeli prime minister once slept in Kushner’s childhood bedroom.

“Many around Trump are to the right of Netanyahu,” on policy said Shor. Trump told the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom on Sunday that Netanyahu is “a good man” and that they “always had good chemistry.”

In that same interview, Trump reiterated basic US foreign policy positions on Israel, saying he is “not somebody that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.” Trump also seemingly backtracked on moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, saying that he is “studying” the move and “we will see what happens.”

But such language is not necessarily a threat to Netanyahu, who is facing his own battle with the right back home. The Israeli government would likely rather see “the lion’s share of attention going to Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region … it surely doesn’t want settlements to dominate the discussion as it relates to its relationship with Washington,” said Shor.

Trump is using the pressure on Iran as well to try and build an Arab coalition that would have a key role as well in any peace process. The New York Times reported last week that the Trump administration is “developing a strategy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would enlist Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to break years of deadlock.”

Netanyahu’s visit to Washington is expected to cement a friendlier era in chemistry and politics with the Trump White House, building on a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress and a confluence in regional strategies around pressuring Iran and finding a new approach for the peace process.

By Todd Royal

Yesterday’s problems haven’t changed with a new US president, Brexit moving toward completion, or the Chinese and Russians taking a larger geopolitical role on the world stage. If anything, things are getting worse not better, and no country or alliance wants to step up and deal with the issues plaguing geopolitics. This isn’t a morbid essay, but a realistic look at careening events on the world’s geopolitical-stage.

The Russians are again on the move in Ukraine and the Artic in their biggest repositioning since the Cold War. Russian separatists in Ukraine started making these moves in light of President Trump wanting better relations with Putin. But that hasn’t stopped the Kremlin from destabilizing Ukraine.

Thae Yong-ho, one of the highest-ranking officials in the North Korean government to ever defect, ardently believes Kim Jong-un would attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons if his regime were on the brink of failure. Mr. Yong-ho further elaborated the North Korean leader lives a secretive, isolated life that includes no one having the location of where he even lives. Kim Jong-un is further painted:

“His ability to wreak harm should not be underestimated. If his very survival were threatened, he would lash out and destroy whatever he could and once there was an effective nuclear arsenal, the leader would be prepared to use it.”

Mr. Yong-ho seems to be iterating that nuclear weapons are the only guarantee Kim Jong-un has outside of China protecting its proxy.

In late January, Houthi militants controlled by Iran killed three crewmembers and injured three others in an attack on a Saudi frigate on patrol west of the Hodeidah port in Yemen.  The attack, which is the third carried out on Saudi-coalition ships in the past six months, was actually intended for U.S. warships patrolling the area.  Also in Yemen, Houthi militants killed an American commando who was put in place as part of the first counterterrorism operation authorized by President Trump. Following these offenses, the U.N. is scrambling with the Saudis to monitor a fragile ceasefire that is continuously being violated by the Houthis, who now control Yemen’s capital.

The above actions have prompted President Trump to realign the U.S. with the Saudi-led coalition by promising to enforce the Iran nuclear deal and counter Iranian aggression. U.S. officials further confirmed:

“Tehran test-fired a medium-range ballistic missile on Sunday that violates a U.N resolution passed last year after the nuclear agreement between the P5 + 1 and the U.N Security Council.”

Iran’s provocations caused Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, to put Iran ‘on notice.’ U.S. surveillance satellites detected the launch that flew 600 miles, but Tehran insists it was not illegal since it did not carry nuclear warheads and is not part of the agreement.  Iran’s recent actions reflect the 2016 remarks of Iranian defense minister Hossein Dehqan, who then stated that the missiles would go into production, defying both the U.N. and the spirit of the nuclear agreement.

What this means for balance of power in the region, deterrence that includes NATO or not, along with other nations joining this renewed commitment to check Iranian influence wasn’t spelled out.

And since nothing is being done to check Iran’s hegemonic march in the Middle East, a new Iranian ‘axis of resistance’ has risen according to Foreign Affairs. Tehran has also defied Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention and begun transferring Sunni populations from Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and replacing them with Shia, who are friendly to Iran. This was a popular tactic used by the Nazis in World War II (WWII).

This Iranian ideology has evolved from being crushed by sanctions a few years ago to a state-centered enterprise with military and industrial-means gaining traction along, with the will to engage enemies. This transnational project, supported by organic proxies, has morphed into networks of popular armed movements across the Middle East. The Levant-crescent that starts with Iran encompasses Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey to some extent, along with the acquiescing Russians playing the role of military-industrial supplier to an Iran that is now flush with post-sanctions economic resources. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Shia militias who were once crushed or irrelevant, will now have to be taken on by nation-states with considerable military resources and the will to fight.

In further military decisions abdicating Iranian civilian politicians, Iran appointed Brigadier General Iraj Masjedi, senior advisor to IRGC-Quds Force Chief Qassem Soleimani as its ambassador to Iraq in early January. According to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies research analyst, Amir Toumaj, “This shows Iran’s commitment to ensure that its political and military influence will continue to dominate its western neighbor.”  Iran has also increased influence in Lebanon by having Hezbollah take over the country’s presidential election and get its candidate, Michael Aoun elected, ensuring Iran effectively controls Lebanon.

Who has resources besides the Americans, Europeans, and NATO to check the Iranians, Russians, and now Chinese who have also made very provocative moves recently? Though the Chinese let it be known they were staying out of a renewed Russia-US nuclear arms race, that isn’t really the truth. However, China tested a new version of its long-range missile that is capable of carrying ten warheads. Further the South China Morning Post reported:

“China is stepping up preparedness for a possible military conflict with the U.S. over the South China Sea. The Chinese army believes the chances of war have become ‘more real’ amid an increasingly complex security situation in Asia.”

China, with the aid of North Korea, seems intent on turning the South China Sea into its own private harbor. Perceptions are reality and the possibility of a ‘conflict,’ or ‘war’ between the two great powers of our day has historical allies nervous about who to trust and which side to pick. The post-WWII order could be disrupted with one misplaced shot or a nervous pilot on patrol in East Asia.

Tackling all these challenges requires both economically and militarily dismantling both these entities, and the trend of growing terrorism as well. Unfortunately, the clock can’t be turned back on over a decade of feeble resistance, which has allowed smaller countries to thrive off chaos without repercussions. Now social support is also in place for a more muscular China, expansionist Russia, and ascendant Iran across their spheres of influence. Many of their combatants will die to keep power, but as an example of the other side’s weakness, would the Germans be willing, able or even capable of fielding an army to take on the Russians? While Germany may not be able to overcome their WWII sins, it’s doubtful the Japanese would suffer from that malaise.

Either the facts on the ground change or the means for credible engagement becomes harder each time an un-deterred geopolitical move on the world’s chessboard transpires. Freedom-loving nations must work pragmatically with hard and soft power to begin taking back the pieces that have been lost in the South China Sea, the Levant, Africa, South America and the Central Asian periphery that is being ignored. Russia working with the Taliban proves that Central Asia can’t be ignored any longer no matter how long nations have been at war in that graveyard of dynasties. Marginal pressure will yield failure and warlike conditions unless the old rules of the Cold War are brought back online. Diplomacy and statecraft are necessary tools, but will only yield the slowing down of evil, not stopping its forward progress. Setting false demarcation lines and managing the rise of China, Russia and Iran won’t work now that conflicts across the globe are raging from the Middle East to failed states in Africa. This new form of war – using proxies and obfuscation through their deaths on the battlefield – without paying a political price has to be met with international backing. Countries like Egypt, Vietnam, Columbia, and Mexico need to acknowledge these new realities and do away with historical vocal criticisms leveled at western hegemonic ambitions. Instead Shiism as a political entity, Russian worship of strength – whether Stalin or Putin – and China veering towards Maoism in the form of Premier Xi strengthening his power can only be met with foreign alliances, new and old.

The free world has a choice, either fight or be perceived as lacking any convictions, which means authoritarian regimes win. Washington is trying by scatter-shooting its way to re-engaging ‘special relationships.’ No one wants to admit or even believe that Russia, Iran, and China cause other bad actors like Sudan, Venezuela, and the emergence of authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland to be nothing other than believing placating evil. The solution is muscular deterrence backed by blue-water navies and divisions of NATO infantrymen. Failure by gradually conceding control of Western and East Asian coalitions to authoritarian Axis’ will come at a high cost.

Conflict resolution can be seen as a strength, and not a weakness, but the commitment to only seeking peace without military-deterrence will lead to protracted crisis or war. The choice is freedom-loving people and nations either stand up for human rights, backed by the will to fight, or consider a replay of WWII.

But this time with the technology that nations now possess we could truly witness the wars to end all wars. Let’s surmise hope against hope and believe that deterrence, balance of power, historical alliances, robust militaries and the post-WWII order stay in place by powers that have benefited from this relationship for over seventy years. They need to wake up and come to their senses, otherwise the consequences are difficult to imagine.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the authors are theirs alone and don’t reflect any official position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com, where this article was published.

By Ryan McMaken*

Nowadays, references to the New Orleans flooding of 2005 often speak of the disaster as if Hurricane Katrina was the only reason the city flooded. Rarely mentioned is the failure of the levees build by the Army Corps of Engineers. In fact, incompetently built and poorly maintained government infrastructure was a major contributing factor in the severity and ultimately cost of the disaster. For good reason, more honest observers have called the failure of the levees one of the most disastrous engineering failures in history. And yet, this government-caused disaster is often invoked as evidence of the need for more robust government — to save us from the disasters it causes.

Today, the Oroville Dam in California is near the point of failure. More than 150,000 people have been ordered to evacuate, and California officials are desperately attempting to fix what is a crumbling and poorly maintained dam.

However, if the dam fails, how will the disaster be remembered? Will future commentators admit the role of the California government in laying the groundwork for this disaster? Or will the cause of the likely-deadly Great Oroville Flood of 2017 simply be listed as “rain”?

Build Now, At Any Cost

The Oroville Dam (completed in 1968) is one of many huge dams built in the American West during the mid-twentieth century using immense amounts of state and federal funds. Such dams include the Hoover Dam (finished 1936) Grand Coulee Dam (finished 1942), and the Glen Canyon Dam (finished 1966). Like these dams, Oroville is one of the tallest dams in the United States, and also forms one of the largest reservoirs in the nation.

Dam building became something of an obsession of government agencies from the 1930s to the 1960s with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation competing with each other to build more dams and bigger dams, most of which would have been impossible without enormous amounts of federal dollars and federal control of vast swaths of Western land. The power to tax allowed governments to take on large debts at low interest rates. The dams offered huge risks and huge costs no private party could afford.While these projects in the West were largely federal in nature, California has long been different in that its irrigation systems and dam operations have offered a more prominent role to state-level agencies. Nevertheless, the methods and politics have been similar: present every new dam as an absolutely necessary infrastructure project that must be built as soon as possible, with little regard for present or future cost.

Oroville Dam was no different, and from the very beginning, proponents of the dam lied about its full cost.

In a lengthy analysis of the political battle to win approval for the dam, historian Marc Reisner recounted how Governor Pat Brown — father of the current governor — repeatedly fabricated numbers about the dam’s true cost in order to hoodwink the voters into approving the enormously expensive project through a bond issue in 1959.

Reisner showed that more honest estimates concluded the dam would cost approximately 3 billion dollars — more than 20 billion in 2016 dollars — so Brown simply invented a number of 1.75 billion.1 Reisner concluded that Brown knew that “not one” state would vote for such a huge bond issue, so Brown hid the real cost. To get it passed, Brown did what politicians always do — he engaged in fear-mongering and suggested to Southern California voters that they’d run out of water without the new dam.

But even these methods nearly failed to get the dam approved. 48 of 50 counties in the state voted against the dam. The measure only passed because southern Californians, long used to cheap, subsidized water, were happy to see the rest of the state go into debt to pay for even more water.

Dams Need Maintenance

While everyone likes to see a shiny new dam or railroad or bridge, the problem with big infrastructure projects is that they require maintenance.

Unfortunately, while it’s fun to build new dams and promise cheap water to many voters and powerful special interests, maintaining those projects is less exciting.

As The Mercuy News has reported, 12 years ago, both California and federal officials refused to consider a demand that California heighten precautions and maintenance standards at the Oroville Dam. In response to the demands, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said the dam’s emergency features were perfectly fine and that the emergency spillway “was designed to handle 350,000 cubic feet per second and the concerns were overblown.”

But, in a development reminiscent of the Army Corp of Engineers’ failure in New Orleans, state officials began ordering evacuations when flows over the spillway reached a mere “6,000 to 12.000 cubic feet per second” or “5 percent of the rate that FERC said was safe.”

Basically, thanks to poorly maintained spillways — and perhaps other oversights — the dam itself is being eroded away, and may soon face total failure.

If it does fail, the dam will have failed less than 50 years after its initial — and very, very expensive — construction.

The “experts” assure us that this sort of thing has never happened before, of course, and it’s the fault of global warming or it’s just a fluke.

But, it’s not as if the dam has never been under strain before. As Reisner recounted in 1987:

In February of 1980, in the midst of a long spell of wet Pacific fronts, Oroville Reservoir, despite its capacity of something like a trillion gallons, was full, and the dam was spilling — 70,000 cubic feet per second, the Hudson River in full flood, roaring down the spillway at forty miles per hour, sending a plum of mist a thousand feet in the air.

At the time, the dam was only 12 years old. Today, the now-49-year old dam isn’t looking nearly as robust.

So, while we can try to blame global warming or bad luck or some other cause invented by government officials, the fact remains that extreme weather has always been a part of life in western North America, and the water going over the dam’s spillway right now is well below what government officials have long claimed it could handle. Mother nature hasn’t exceeded the dam’s limits. The problem is that the government officials in charge of the dam have either failed to maintain the dam properly, or they’ve been wrong about the dam’s capacity all along.

Who Will be Blamed?

In the wake of the failure of the levees at New Orleans, the federal government couldn’t even be bothered with launching an independent investigation. We’re just told to instead blame global warming, or mother nature and to thank goodness that the federal government was around to throw money at the problem.

If the Oroville dam fails, we’ll probably see a similar reaction. Even if the dam fails well below its claimed capacity, we’ll be told the dam fell victim to “unprecedented” and “unforseen” events. FEMA will be sent in, and we’ll all be told that this is just another one of those cases that proves just how much we need government in times of crisis.

Never mind, of course, who caused the crisis in the first place.

About the author:
*Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. (Contact: email; twitter.) Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute.

Notes:
1. $20 billion is larger than the entire 2017 state budget of 20 US states.

By Jorge Valero

(EurActiv) — The European Commission predicted in its winter forecast €226 billion in additional spending as part of the fiscal stimulus promised by the new US government, but the economic impact of Trump’s plan will be “very low”.

US President Donald Trump promised a ‘huge’ package to rebuild highways, bridges, airports and schools across America.

“We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none,” he said after he was elected last November.

On Monday (13 February) the Commission agreed with Trump – at least when it comes to the final bill.

Despite the fact that the details of the fiscal stimulus are unknown, the executive estimated additional spending of 0.3% of GDP in 2017 and an additional 1% of GDP in 2018, according to its winter forecast.

This would represent around €226 billion poured into the American economy over the next two years.

The impact on the deficit will also be significant.

According to the forecast, the US deficit will increase to 5.1% of GDP this year, from 4.8% in 2016, and will reach 5.7% in 2018. This figure would be double the largest deficit in the eurozone by then (Spain’s deficit will be 2.9% of GDP in 2018).

Only a few hours after Trump was elected president, as part of its autumn forecast, the European Commission predicted a US deficit of 4.2% of GDP in 2017 and 4% in 2018.

American public debt is expected to accelerate its upward trajectory and will reach almost 110% in 2018.

Despite this massive extra spending, which would include the controversial wall between the US and Mexico, the positive effects on the American economy would be limited. Latest estimates put the cost of the wall at $21.6 billion.

‘Very low impact’

Brussels expects an impact on the US economy of between 0.5% and 0.75% of GDP split across the next two years.

“Its multiplier is likely to be very low, as the combination of loose fiscal policy and tighter monetary policy could spur further appreciation of the dollar and lead to an increase in long-term interest rates,” the winter forecast reads.

But the stimulus would be enough to outpace the European GDP over the next two years.

Accordingly, the Commission improved its growth forecast for the US for 2017 and 2018.

Now the executive expects the US economy to grow at 2.3% of GDP and 2.2% respectively, compared with 2.1% and 1.9% predicted three months ago.

Meanwhile, GDP growth in the eurozone will reach 1.6% this year and 1.8% the following one. For the EU, the economy will grow at 1.8% over the next two years.

The Commission acknowledged that the growth forecast for non-EU developed economies improved, “largely given assumptions of fiscal stimulus in the US”.

In addition to this, the American stock market reached record levels over the last weeks spurred by the extra spending and the loosening of regulations promised by Trump.

Despite these positive effects on the global economy, Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici said on Monday that the US would be “the single most important source of uncertainty” in the months to come.

Among the top concerns, the Europeans are worried about the impact of Trump’s public support for protectionist global trade policy.

A protectionist response from the US government would backfire also on its output.

“The principal downside risk facing the US economy is a potential shift of economic policy towards a more protectionist stance, implying significant losses for the US and global economy,” the winter forecast reads.

Arabic music lovers in the city of love rejoice. Two Arab pop singers are coming to Paris for a unique concert on Feb. 18 at the Palais des Congrès.

Lebanese music icons Wael Jassar and Nawal Al-Zoghbi are set to perform in the historic venue for an audience of around 3,000 people.

The event is organized by 2U2C, the first Lebanese company specializing in international events, in partnership with Radio Orient and Beur FM.

Al-Zoghbi has enjoyed great success in the music industry for several years now, and her last hit was “Am Behki Maa Hali” (I speak to myself), which was released in October. It has been viewed more than 3,700,000 times on YouTube.

Jassar, is, on the other hand, one of the most adulated singers of his generation. Often compared to the much celebrated Arabic singer, George Wassouf, he has given many concerts around the world, and each of his albums has been a chart-topper.

The two singers invited their French fans to the concert in a video published by 2U2C, in which they expressed themselves in Arabic.

With highly talented stars such as Al-Zoghbi and Jassar set to take the stage, the concert in Paris promises to be a memorable evening.

The EU on Monday sharply improved its gloomy predictions for the British economy next year, admitting that the Brexit vote would have less impact than earlier thought, AFP says.

In its winter forecasts, the European Commission said it was pencilling in growth of 1.5 percent for Britain in 2017, much higher than an earlier prediction of a lowly 1.0 percent in November.

“The impact of the vote by the UK to leave the EU in the referendum held on 23 June 2016 on growth has yet to be felt,” the commission said in its forecast.

The EU along with many economic forecasters had made doom-laden outlooks for the British economy, predicting potential calamity if UK voters chose Brexit.

However, the EU did warn that 2018 growth would sink to 1.2 percent as the effects of Brexit, including a weaker currency, crimped on investment and household demand.

After a lag, “the impact of the result of the EU referendum is expected to become apparent later in 2017,” the EU said.

“The factors weighing on private consumption growth are expected to persist and intensify, and business investment is expected to increase only marginally,” it warned.

The EU’s forecasts are still lower than those made by the Bank of England, which this month also raised its forecasts significantly.

The British central bank lifted its growth prediction for 2017 to 2.0 percent and to 1.6 percent in 2018.

Like nearly all economists, I am inclined to explain to people who favor tariffs that such taxes entail inefficiencies. They make the consummations of otherwise desirable trades more costly and hence discourage people’s actions that, absent the tariffs, would result in the creation of new wealth. After all, people who voluntarily purchase goods and services from sellers who reside outside the national borders expect to gain by making those purchases (and, of course, the sellers also expect to gain from the sale), and a gain from trade is the principal form of wealth creation in the world today. It is child’s play for an economist to explain the theory of comparative advantage, however inclined most lay people are to reject the argument despite its iron-clad logic.

Protectionism, as it is misleadingly known, has always been an insider’s game, a political gambit aimed at enriching those to whom the government is especially beholden or seeks to seduce at the expense of other people. Incumbent producers who produce products on which tariffs are imposed succeed in repelling competition by force of the government’s customs officers, which is to say that they succeed in increasing their profits by force, not by offering consumers a better deal.

Peaceful people who avoid the tariff by importing goods surreptitously are not only stigmatized as smugglers, but subjected to criminal sanctions as if they had committed real crimes such as rape or assault and battery. In this way the government not only discourages free trade, but misleads citizens in general into thinking of free trade as a criminal enterprise. What could better serve the interest of an organization—the state itself—that cannot exist except by extortion and robbery? (Of course, the government pretties up its extortion by calling it taxation and misrepresents its robbery by calling it fines, fees, and civil asset forfeitures, but renaming these coercive takings does nothing to alter their criminal essence.)

I am often tempted to point out the foregoing realities to readers or listeners while defending completely free trade, which is merely one form taken by people’s exercise of the general human right to act peacefully in one’s own best interest. I sometimes characterize protectionism as simply a type of pickpocketing disguised as not only a legitimate government policy, but also as one that serves the general public interest by promoting greater employment and overall prosperity. We have been subjected to a great deal of such economic looniness by Donald Trump and his supporters during the past year, as they have ceaselessly reiterated the worst mercantilist fallacies of the past four hundred years.

The principal obstacle for anyone who argues as I do, however, is that ultimately most people do not buy the objection that a tariff is a form of pickpocketing. They reject this argument on the same grounds that they reject similar arguments one might bring against countless other government policies that work in the same way—benefiting politically organized special interests at the expense of consumers in particular and the bulk of society in general. People by and large do not believe in stealing from their neighbors, but they make one gigantic exception to this moral rule: if they themselves do not snatch the loot, but hand over the job to the government, then it is hunky-dory and many of them are all for it.

In this conviction and the political actions that grow out of it, they reveal that their moral sense has been completely disabled by nationalism. With only a few exceptions, people do not object to government as we know it—government that lacks the explicit, voluntary consent of every adult subject to its authority. They view the existing government as legitimate, which means in practice that they do not regard many of the crimes the government routinely commits as crimes at all. As already noted, government as we know it cannot exist except by committing the crimes of extortion and armed robbery, among others. Once people have conceded that government as we know it is legitimate, they have in effect conceded that many of the criminal actions the government carries out, such as the imposition of tariffs, are likewise legitimate.

Therefore, anyone who argues as I do that a tariff is essentially nothing but a form of pickpocketing is unlikely to win over many people. Maybe they can be shown the logic of comparative advantage and persuaded that it is undesirable to create artificial inefficiency. But one is unlikely to get far in persuading them that tariffs are immoral because in nearly every case in which the government’s actions are at issue, they have already thrown morality out the window.

We can have government as we know it or genuine morality—morality as expressed in the natural law—but we cannot have both at once. However much we might try to muddy the moral waters, a stationary bandit is still a bandit, regardless of who ends up holding the loot at the end of the day.

This article was published at The Beacon.

By Shelley Rigger*

(FPRI) — If you were planning to take an Uber in Taiwan, you’re too late: the ride-hailing app has ceased operations on the island. According to a company statement released on February 2, Uber decided to “press pause” on February 10 in the hope of “resetting” the conversation with Taiwan’s government over how (and whether) the company can operate in Taiwan.

The conflict between Taiwan’s government and the California-based tech company stretches back to Uber’s entry into the Taiwan market in 2013. From the beginning, there was a strong backlash from traditional taxi drivers and companies, which see Uber as direct competition. Taiwanese officials found Uber’s response – that it is not a taxi company and should not be subject to the regulations governing commercial passenger transportation services – unconvincing. They imposed escalating restrictions and sanctions aimed at forcing the company to comply with regulations governing taxi services.

For Uber, Taipei’s resistance is a textbook example of a government operating on a 20^th century playbook, choosing to protect a traditional industry at the expense of consumers and workers in the “gig economy.” In its February 2 statement, the company said, “Unfortunately, the government has moved further and further away from embracing innovation and setting the stage for a 21st century transportation policy.”

From Taipei’s point of view, the problem is Uber’s refusal to acknowledge the nature of its own business or comply with relevant regulations and tax requirements. The agency responsible for the issue, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC), questions Uber’s uniqueness (Taiwan’s existing taxi companies also use web-based dispatch services) and its ability to offer safe rides.

A ride-sharing app in Taiwan feels like a solution in search of a problem. The island has excellent transportation services, both public and private, which include competing intercity and local bus companies, extensive subway systems in its two biggest cities, and both high-speed and conventional passenger railways connecting hundreds of towns and cities. Meanwhile, taxis are ubiquitous and inexpensive. Unlike the U.S., where hailing a taxi outside of a handful of city centers is impossible, taxis prowl the streets of even small towns in Taiwan; no matter where you are, you can call a taxi and one will arrive within minutes.

Nonetheless, Uber was an attractive addition to Taiwan’s transportation landscape for many consumers. According to the company, Taiwanese have used Uber for more than 15 million trips since 2013, and there are more than 10,000 drivers signed up to use the app.

While much of the reporting on the conflict centers on taxi companies’ lobbying to block competition, the legal challenge to Uber comes from a different angle. The MOTC has challenged Uber in court, claiming it is in violation of its business registration because it is operating a passenger transport business and evading regulatory and tax requirements.

In November 2015, a court ruled that the MOTC could not ban Uber outright because its business activities included management consulting, data processing, information services, and third-party payment, but not transportation. In February 2016, a higher court reversed that ruling, finding that Uber’s core business is, in fact, hiring drivers to transport passengers for money. In other words: it’s a taxi company.

The 2016 ruling strengthened MOTC claims against Uber and its drivers, who already were subject to stiff fines when they were caught carrying passengers in their personal vehicles. By March of 2016, fines against the company and its drivers (which Uber promised to pay) totaled over $11 million.

In November, the MOTC upped the ante even further when it asked Apple and Google to remove the Uber app from their stores. Meanwhile, Uber was slapped with a bill for $4.25 million in fines and back taxes.

The company shot back with an open letter to President Tsai Ing-wen. It struck at Tsai’s image as a tech-friendly president committed to increasing employment: “President Tsai, by promoting Taiwan as ‘Asia’s Silicon Valley’ and appointing a digital minister, your commitment to establishing a tech-friendly policy environment for startups to thrive is clear.” But, the letter continued, imposing fines and asking for the app to be removed from app stores, “directly threaten the interests of over a million Taiwanese citizens, especially the mothers, fathers, retirees, professionals, and the otherwise unemployed who have come to rely on the economic opportunities Uber has created.”

Not everyone agrees that allowing Uber to disrupt Taiwan’s transportation industry is a sine qua non for tech-friendliness. Even within the tech community, some express resistance to Uber’s heavy-handedness. Its refusal to bend on key issues raises hackles among Taiwanese weary of being pushed around by multinational corporations. A comment on a Tech in Asia story from a reader identified as “Harvey Lee” captures that critique: “The role of regulation is to protect public interest. This is neither an issue about embracing innovation nor an issue about policy adjustment. The fact is that this is a foreign IT platform that profits from the Taiwanese market with minimal return to the local economy yet distributes most of the risks to the locals. Uber may need to consider a more wholistic [sic] business approach.”

In December, Taiwan’s legislature got involved, raising fines against Uber drivers to the highest in the world – and inviting passengers to turn in their Uber drivers to the police. Then, last month, Uber negotiated a deal with the taxi drivers union in Taipei to hire taxi drivers. At the same time, it asked the government to produce regulations appropriate for ride-sharing services – in effect refusing to acknowledge the government’s core position, that Uber is selling taxi services, while inviting taxi drivers to join the app.

The dueling lawsuits, open letters, and PR campaigns have the flavor of a negotiation: according to a Forbes article published after the open letter, “Uber can get away with that language and stay in Taiwan because the government lacks the resolve to kick it out formally. . . . The official hostility could amount to a bargaining chip that will get Uber to comply with government demands: set up a local company, raise driver safety standards and pay more in taxes.”

A source quoted in Forbes was optimistic that the two sides would reach an agreement: “Uber’s case is different, as it involves an innovative new business model that threatens a traditional industry and challenges the interpretation and application of old-fashioned laws. . . . It’s not surprising that matters grew confrontational, parties drew lines in the sand and dug in their heels, but there have been productive discussions and in the end I am confident sensible compromises will be reached.”

That may still be the case – after all, Uber pushed “pause,” not “stop” in February – but the obstacles to compromise appear higher than ever. Taiwan is not the only country in East Asia to challenge Uber’s business model. Japan and Thailand have banned it; South Korea suspended Uber services in order to buy time to figure out the regulatory puzzles. In mainland China, Uber’s problems were so insurmountable that it sold out to Didi Chuxing, a China-based ride-hailing company.

Whether Uber will push “play” in any of these places remains to be seen, but your next Uber ride in Taiwan may not happen for quite some time.

About the author:
*Shelley Rigger, Senior Fellow with FPRI’s Asia Program, is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Donald Trump sold himself to voters as a successful businessman who knew how to get things done, a no-nonsense manager who’d whip government into shape.

But he’s showing himself to be about the most inept, disorganized, sloppy, incompetent president in recent memory, whose White House is nearly dysfunctional.

We’re told Trump is “evaluating the situation” of Michael Flynn. In any halfway competent administration, Michael Flynn would have been fired long ago – if in fact he went rogue and reassured Russia’s government that the sanctions Obama was about to apply would be gone when Trump became president. That was illegal and perhaps even treasonous.

If someone ordered him to do it, they should be fired, too. If it was Trump himself who told Flynn to do the act, Trump’s got a lot of explaining to do.

Sean Spicer is a joke, literally. His vituperative, vindictive press conferences are already rich food for late-night comedy. In a White House that had any idea what it means to be an effective press secretary, Spicer would be out the door.

The Muslim travel ban was totally bungled – unclear, haphazard, none of the agencies that would be enforcing it were consulted, no one on Capitol Hill was consulted.

Trump complains about “how his people didn’t give him good advice” on rolling out the travel ban. Yet the people most directly responsible for it – Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller – have only gained more power in Trumpworld.

There are more leaks out of this White House than any in memory. Aides are leaking news about other aides. They’re leaking examples of Trump’s incompetence and weirdness. They’re leaking the contents of telephone calls to other heads of state in which Trump was unprepared, didn’t know basic facts, and berated foreign leaders.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus seems to have no idea what’s going on. A White House official complained to The Washington Post, “We have to get Reince to relax into the job and become more competent, because he’s seeing shadows where there are no shadows.” Trump’s buddy Chris Ruddy described Priebus as being “in way over his head.”

Infighting is wild. Rumors are swirling that Kellyanne Conway wants Priebu’s job, that Stephen Miller is eyeing Spicer’s job, that no one trusts anyone else.

The New York Times reports “chaotic and anxious days inside the White House’s National Security Council.” Council staff read Trump’s tweets, and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls.

Trump himself is remarkably sloppy with sensitive national security information. For example, on Saturday night he discussed North Korea’s latest missile launch on a mobile phone at his table in the middle of Mar-a-Lago’s private club’s dining area, within earshot of private club members. A guest at the club even posed with the military aide who carries “the football” (the briefcase containing instructions for authorizing a nuclear attack).

The U.S. intelligence community is so convinced that Trump and his administration have been compromised by Russia that they’re no longer giving the White House all of their most sensitive information, lest it end up in Putin’s hands.

A senior National Security Agency official says the National Security Agency is systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, fearing Trump and his staff can’t keep secrets. The intelligence community is concerned that even the Situation Room – the room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings – has been compromised by Russia.

The White House mess is Trump’s own doing. It turns out he’s not a tough manager. He’s not even a good manager. He seems not to have any interest in managing at all.

Instead of whipping government into shape, he’s whipping it into a cauldron of dysfunction and intrigue.

Just like his promises to “drain the Washington swamp” and limit the influence of big money, get Wall Street out of policy making, and turn government back to the people, Trump’s promise of an efficient government is another giant bait-and-switch.