The White House responded to testimony on Capitol Hill about surveillance of the Trump campaign and its reported interactions with Russia by downplaying the roles the accused played, shifting suspicion to Democrats and attacking the media narrative.

On Monday, FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers testified to the House Intelligence Committee that they had yet to discover any evidence that Trump Tower in New York had been wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign. However, Comey did confirm that the bureau is investigating possible Russian interference in the election, including alleged links between Moscow and Donald Trump’s campaign.

The five-hour hearing was not yet over when White House press secretary Sean Spicer stepped to the podium for the daily briefing, promising to respond to the testimony as best he could to “the first of several” House and Senate hearings on the investigation, which began after an early-morning tweet storm from the president in early March in which Trump blamed then-President Barack Obama for “wiretapping” Trump Tower.

“The president is happy” that the House Intelligence Committee is “pursuing the facts in this,” Spicer said. “Following this testimony, it’s clear that nothing has changed, senior Obama intelligence officials have gone on record to confirm that there’s no evidence of a Trump-Russia collusion,” he said, referring to Obama’s CIA director and director of national intelligence. “We take them at their word.”

Spicer pointed to “new information” that came about during the hearing about the intelligence-gathering process that is “newsworthy” regarding the unmasking of Americans identified in intelligence reports and the illegal leaks of their names ‒ specifically that of Trump’s former national security adviser, General Michael Flynn ‒ which, Spicer reminded reporters, “is a federal crime.”

The biggest questions to come out of Monday’s hearing, Spicer said, were how and why Flynn was unmasked, when his name is protected by law from being disclosed. A lot more questions need to be asked about government surveillance as well, he continued.

The White House appeared to blame “certain political appointees in the Obama administration” for the leak of Flynn’s name, pointing out that Comey had testified that they, along with senior Department of Justice and intelligence officials, had access to the identities of unmasked US citizens.

Before President Obama left office, Michael Flynn was unmasked and then illegally his identity was leaked out to media outlets, despite the fact that, as NSA Director Rogers said, that unmasking and revealing endangers quote national security,” Spicer said, noting that the focus should be on the threat such leaks pose to national security, citing in particular Comey’s remarks that such leaks became “unusually active in the time frame in question.”

When asked if Trump would withdraw his accusations against his predecessor after Comey said there was no evidence, Spicer said no, pointing out that there would be more hearings on the subject. He then went on the offensive against the press and Democrats, saying that the narrative that the Trump campaign and transition teams were in collusion with Russia was false.

“Investigating it and having proof of it are two different things. You look at the acting Obama CIA director said that there’s smoke but there’s no fire,” Spicer said. “There’s a point at which you continue to search for something that everybody has been briefed hasn’t seen or found.”

Most of the accusations of collusion with Russia refers to people who were “hangers-on around the campaign,” Spicer said, noting that “the greatest amount of interaction” many of those people had with the Trump campaign was receiving “a series of cease-and-desist letters.”

“When you read a lot of this activity about associates,” Spicer said, using air quotes, “there is a fine line between people who want to be part of something that they never had an official role in and people who actually played a role in either the campaign or the transition.”

Flynn “was a volunteer of the campaign,” while Paul Manafort “played a very limited role for very limited amount of time,” Spicer said, glossing over the fact that Flynn was officially Trump’s foreign policy adviser and that he was floated as a potential vice presidential candidate. Manafort was Trump’s campaign chair for two months at the end of the primary season, though Spicer said later he was not “dismissing Paul Manafort as a hanger-on.”Roger Stone was a long-time associate of Trump’s who “worked briefly on the campaign,” Spicer said. “They have talked from time to time,” but the press secretary was unsure of the last time Trump had spoken with Stone.

“To look at some individual that was there for a short amount of time or, separately, individuals who really didn’t play any role in the campaign and to suggest that those are the basis for anything is a bit ridiculous,” he added.

When asked about a Trump tweet from Monday morning about a potential DNC connection to Russia, Spicer sought to shift focus away from Trump’s claims and interactions and towards suspicion about the Democrats.

“The Democrats… are quick to point fingers, and yet, when it comes to discussing their own collusion or questions involving their involvement with Russian officials or buy-offs to the Russians, there’s no discussion there,” Spicer said.

The press secretary was referring to the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers, and he wondered why the party rebuffed the FBI’s request to look at the hacked servers more than once. “What are they hiding? What were they concerned of?” Spicer asked. He also raised the question of Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia, including the Obama administration’s “Russian reset” and a deal that “gave a Russian company one-fifth of the US uranium supply. Where is the questioning about that?”

The FAO’s latest sobering report warned of the need to significantly increase investments in agriculture to meet the anticipated 50% increase in food demand by 2050. Asia as a net food and animal feed deficit region needs to up its game.

By Paul Teng and Christopher Vas*

The latest report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is sobering. Issued in February and titled “The Future of Food and Agriculture – Trends and Challenges”, it warned of the need to significantly increase investments in agriculture to meet the anticipated 50% rise in food demand by 2050. This will be driven by population increases but more notably, by rising incomes, which in turn fosters diet changes towards higher consumption of protein and processed food.

All this is occurring on the back of the growing urbanisation of Asia, where by 2050, more than 50% of the region’s people will live in cities. This is concurrently accompanied by a declining farmer population which is fast ageing and farming less land each year. Asia, where more than 60% of the world’s people live, is particularly vulnerable to several of the challenges highlighted by the FAO report. As it will certainly not be “business as usual”, new thinking is critically needed to improve supply of food.

Three-point Action Plan Needed

Increase crop yields and reduce yield gaps to raise total production:

Currently crop yields may be reduced from 50% to much higher depending on seasonal weather, pests and diseases, weed infestation, water availability, fertiliser use and the farmer’s crop management know-how. These reductions constitute a gap in productivity.

The adoption of scientifically-developed modern crop varieties with higher capacities to tolerate stresses has been attributed by experts to the yield advantage that is conferred to farmers in food exporting countries. Brazil, for example, invested heavily in breeding soybean varieties which could grow in semi tropical conditions and poor soils and resist pests and diseases; this has contributed to it being a major soybean exporter today.

Asian governments must not shy away from using modern science and technology to rapidly increase both the potential and on-farm yields of important food crops, and accompany this with effective technology transfer systems. The FAO report indicates that new multi-billion dollar investments will be needed. Reports from a food security assessment index called the Rice Bowl Index has further shown that consistently across Asia, farm level yields are an important factor in conferring food security robustness in agri-producing countries.

Harnessing the potential of urban and peri-urban farming:

The concept of space and not just land requires mindset changes on the part of urban planners. In most cities, there is much unused or under-utilised space which can be turned into productive food areas for farming vegetables. These are exemplified by rooftops, public space between buildings, underground space, and even the waters around small islands for aquaculture.

Consequently, an exciting area for substantive contributions to food supply is to harness unused space in urban environments to grow food, or space in the periphery of cities, i.e. peri-urban space, for agriculture. FAO estimates that currently urban peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contributes up to 20 percent to the world’s food supply.

Growing Global Urban Farming Movement

Clearly, with the emergence of new technologies, new ways of farming and new mindsets, there is now a fast growing urban farming movement across the globe. Asian countries like Korea, Japan, Singapore and even China have embraced this, but more could be done to make this sector an important complement to rural farming, especially with respect to fresh supplies of vegetables and dairy products.

City states like Singapore are developing the beginnings of a vibrant UPA sector, with commercial farms based on vertical vegetable farming and indoor artificial lighted farms. The range of food items which lend themselves to urban farming is potentially large due to proximity to market, but this needs to be made an explicit part of a country’s food security strategy to secure the requisite amount of policy and investment support. This topic was sadly missing from the FAO report.

Reducing losses in the production and supply chain:

Crop production incurs large losses up to the time the crop is harvested, and further losses and waste in the post farm transport and processing to meet modern supply chains. It has been estimated that these losses can reach up to 50 percent, and are often higher in developing than developed countries.

Beyond such losses, food is also wasted at the tail end of supply chains by Food and Beverage outlets, retailers and consumers due to excesses or compliance with quality standards which price appearance over substance, such as the discarding of fruits and vegetables with blemishes which are still nutritionally and safety-wise, good food. Technology advancements and public education are two essential thrusts to reduce loss and it has been estimated that halving food losses will result in more than enough food to feed the world’s growing population without other investments.

Five New Areas for Action

In a recent keynote address at the International Conference on Food and Agriculture held 6-7 March 2017 in Los Banos, Philippines, the first author, in addition to the three-point plan, proposed five more areas for action, some of which require government intervention:

Improving the domestic and regional food supply chains through improved logistics, infrastructure and policies;

Improving ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ with adaptation measures;

Improving the participation of smallholder farmers in Asia’s food supply chains, especially through private-public sector partnerships;

Improving food safety;

Increasing consumption of new types and sources of food, such as indigenous vegetables, insects and synthetic protein.

Some of the anticipated outcomes from taking action in the above eight areas will at the very least continue to sustain current food availability but may significantly add new supply sources. Pursuing these avenues is in no way a comprehensive approach that will address the food security challenge for Asia. It only forms one part of the solution as a necessary but not sufficient condition. In any case, the time for action is now if positive outcomes are desired by 2050 to help Asia avert the food crises of the 1960’s.

*Paul Teng is Principal Officer, National Institute of Education and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. Christopher Vas is Director of Murdoch University’s first offshore R&D centre, the Singapore Centre for Research in Innovation, Productivity and Technology (SCRIPT). Both were members of the Second Murdoch Commission which published the 2016 report on “Food Security, Trade and Partnerships”. This is the first of a two-part series on the Future of Food in Asia.

Catholics and Protestants marked, on March 15, two years since 15 Christians in Lahore were killed by Taliban bombers.

More than 2,000 attended the memorial service at a convent in Youhanabad, the largest Christian settlement in Lahore.

Twelve priests concelebrated Mass led by Father Emmanuel Yousaf Mani, director of the Pakistani bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission. He also commemorated the dozens wounded and the security guards who tried to stop the bombers from entering St. John’s Catholic Church on March 15, 2015.

Forty-two Christians are in jail for lynching two Muslims suspected of being involved in the attacks minutes after the bombings.

“It has been two years and the case of the 42 is still pending, we demand their freedom,” said Father Mani, denying rumors they had already been sentenced.

Lahore suffered two terrorist attacks in February and security at the service was tight.

“We should remember the courage of the locals who gave their lives and saved many inside the church. I pray that God accepts their martyrdom. They are our heroes,” Father Mani said.

Regional officials in Belarus have little experience in dealing with protests and have not been given the kind of guidance one might expect, Vladimir Matskevich says. As a result, the regions are allowing things to happen that the center might not and thus are on the way to becoming “the main threat” to Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime.

The Belarusian analyst says he expects the current wave of protests to peak between March 26 and April 26 and then recede but adds that “in the current unique situation, no one can guarantee that the protests will not revive again in the summer” (eurobelarus.info/news/society/2017/03/20/vladimir-matskevich-regiony-mogut-stat-glavnoy-ugrozoy-dlya.html).

The Minsk regime clearly already sees that “people are going out into the streets not at the urging of opposition politicians but because they are fed up with the current situation” and thus it recognizes that the “old means of dealing with protests” by force alone isn’t going to stop them, especially since economic projections remain extremely bleak.

That sense is dictating what the Lukashenka regime is trying to do: first, making sure that the opposition doesn’t have a chance to link up with the people in the streets; and second by finding a way for the government to officially suspend the infamous vagrants tax decree without Lukashenka himself having to take any public step in that direction.

Until that happens, Matskevich says, that decree and others like it will “hang like the sword of Damocles over the heads of Belarusians” and the regime will use the threat that it is about to enforce them all if people do not calm down and stop their street protests.

What has made the street protests of the last two months so threatening to the regime is that those who have gone into the streets are those who voted for Luakshenka in the past, “residents of small cities, workers of state enterprises, government officials and so on.” Indeed, this wave is beginning to reach “the force structures,” Matskevich continues.

Lukashenka’s hyper-centralized power vertical up to now works only for transmitting orders downward. On the one hand, that means that the center often remains uninformed about what is happening in this or that region. And on the other, it means that the center often doesn’t provide guidance to the regions. In the absence of such guidance, each region works on its own.

“Officials heard the words of Lukashenka for example during his meetings with journalists and experts, but they all the same wait orders and not words. Note that in all the actions outside of Minsk, the powers that be have acted variously: In Orsh, for example, they arrested journalists, but in Pinsk, they didn’t arrest anyone.

“This need not be treated as the self-action of the authorities,” Matskevich says. “They simply didn’t receive any directives or orders” and so were forced to make decisions on their own. And because there haven’t been any protests in many of these places, they have no precedent for action.

That puts them in a very different situation that the one officials and courts operate under in Minsk where there is a long tradition of having to deal with protests and political opposition, the commentator says; and that opens the way outside of the capital for officials to behave more honestly and humanely than many might expect.

I spent much of this past week in Washington – talking with friends still in government, former colleagues, high-ranking Democrats, a few Republican pundits, and some members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. It was my first visit to our nation’s capital since Trump became president.

My verdict:

1. Washington is more divided, angry, bewildered, and fearful – than I’ve ever seen it.

2. The angry divisions aren’t just Democrats versus Republicans. Rancor is also exploding inside the Republican Party.

3. Republicans (and their patrons in big business) no longer believe Trump will give them cover to do what they want to do. They’re becoming afraid Trump is genuinely nuts, and he’ll pull the party down with him.

4. Many Republicans are also angry at Paul Ryan, whose replacement bill for Obamacare is considered by almost everyone on Capitol Hill to be incredibly dumb.

5. I didn’t talk with anyone inside the White House, but several who have had dealings with it called it a cesspool of intrigue and fear. Apparently everyone working there hates and distrusts everyone else.

6. The Washington foreign policy establishment – both Republican and Democrat – is deeply worried about what’s happening to American foreign policy, and the worldwide perception of America being loony and rudderless. They think Trump is legitimizing far-right movements around the world.

7. Long-time civil servants are getting ready to bail. If they’re close to retirement they’re already halfway out the door. Many in their 30s and 40s are in panic mode.

8. Republican pundits think Bannon is even more unhinged than Trump, seeking to destroy democracy as we’ve known it.

9. Despite all this, no one I talked with thought a Trump impeachment likely, at least not any time soon – unless there’s a smoking gun showing Trump’s involvement in Russia’s intrusion into the election.

10. Many people asked, bewilderedly, “how did this [Trump] happen?” When I suggest it had a lot to do with the 35-year-long decline of incomes of the bottom 60 percent; the growing sense, ever since the Wall Street bailout, that the game is rigged; and the utter failure of both Republicans and Democrats to reverse these trends – they gave me blank stares.

By Nazir Ahmad Mir

By Joyce Karam

FBI Director James Comey sent US politicians scrambling yesterday after an unusual hearing in Congress, uncovering an official intelligence investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the presidential election and into potential ties to Donald Trump’s campaign.

Comey, testifying alongside National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers, openly contradicted Trump’s allegations of being the victim of wiretapping by his predecessor Barack Obama. “I have no information that supports those tweets,” Comey said.

Extended probe

The more-than-five-hour hearing at the House Intelligence Committee sent shockwaves across Washington yesterday.

Comey for the first time announced that the FBI is conducting an investigation into alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 US election.

“I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” Comey told the committee.

He went a step further, saying: “It includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts… and whether any crimes were committed.”

This is a significant and unusual announcement to be made by the head of the FBI, said James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, a publication that focuses on Russia.

“Prior to Comey’s testimony, we only knew that there was an ongoing investigation because of articles published by the Washington Post, New York Times and others that relied on leaks and unnamed sources,” Miller told Arab News. Now “we know those leaks may have been telling the truth.”

Also of significance was Comey’s refusal to comment on or deny statements that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the election.

Comey identified three goals for Russian meddling in the election: “Undermine US democracy, help him (Trump) and hurt her (Hillary Clinton).” These goals were confirmed by the FBI “at least by December.”

Miller said if the FBI investigation obtains evidence that the “Trump campaign had direct or indirect ties to the Kremlin, or that Trump himself was compromised because he was being blackmailed by the Russian government,” it would constitute “a massive national security threat.”

Miller added: “We could be talking treason if some of these allegations are true. While we still have no proof that the allegations are true, we know the FBI has been investigating these claims since at least last summer.”

NSA and FBI: No wiretapping

Asked about Trump’s tweets two weeks ago that Obama wiretapped him, Comey said he has “no information that supports those tweets,” adding that both the FBI and the Justice Department “have looked” internally and could not confirm it.

Miller said those statements, and that the FBI, the Justice Department and the NSA “are now on record saying there’s no substance whatsoever to Trump’s claims that Obama ordered a wiretapping of Trump Tower, or that British intelligence was spying on Trump,” imply that he “lied about our former president and about our most important ally for political reasons.”

Politically, this will “diminish trust with US allies, and raise questions if the president is going to publicly throw them under the bus for political gain,” Miller added.

Perhaps the biggest political wedge between Trump and the heads of US intelligence was how each viewed Russia. Asked by the committee if Russia “was our adversary,” both Comey and Rogers said: “Yes.”

In terms of policies, Miller said: “The interests of the Putin regime and the US government almost never align.”

Hence “the US should be highly suspicious and alarmed when a president, with ties to the Kremlin, is excited about working with (Vladimir) Putin while at the FBI has his campaign under investigation.”

The last piece of the ice sheet that once blanketed much of North America is doomed to disappear in the next several centuries, says a new study by researchers at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Barnes Ice Cap, a Delaware-sized feature on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, is melting at a rapid pace, driven by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that have elevated Arctic temperatures. The ice cap, while still 500 meters thick, is slated to melt in about 300 years under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions.

The results provide compelling evidence that the current level of warming is almost unheard of in the past 2.5 million years, according to the authors. Only three times at most in that time period has the Barnes Ice Cap been so small, a study of isotopes created by cosmic rays that were trapped in rocks around the Barnes Ice Cap indicated.

“This is the disappearance of a feature from the last glacial age, which would have probably survived without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions,” said Adrien Gilbert, a glaciologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia in Canada and lead author of the new study published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

While the melting of the Barnes Ice Cap will likely have negligible effects on sea level rise, its end could herald the eventual dissolution of the larger ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica, said CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, a study co-author.

“I think the disappearance of the Barnes Ice Cap would be just a scientific curiosity if it were not so unusual,” said Miller, the associate director of CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who has conducted research on Baffin Island annually for the past five decades. “One implication derived from our results is that significant parts of the southern Greenland Ice Sheet also may be at risk of melting as the Arctic continues to warm.”

Elevated sea rise created by a melting Greenland would automatically cause the Antarctic Ice Sheet, whose dimensions are controlled by sea level, to also shrink in size, Miller said.

The Barnes Ice Cap is part of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that has covered millions of square miles of North America episodically since the start of Quaternary Period roughly 2.5 million years ago. The ice sheet grew and shrank over time as Earth went through various climate cycles, and the ice was a mile thick at present-day Chicago about 20,000 years ago. It started receding substantially around 14,000 years ago when Earth slipped out of its last ice age.

The ice cap stabilized about 2,000 years ago until the effects of the recent warming caught up with it. Miller was conducting research on Baffin Island in 2009 when he realized the ice cap had shrunk noticeably as compared to images from a few decades earlier. He recruited Gilbert and Gwenn Flowers from Simon Fraser to develop a model of how the ice cap might behave in the future.

In the new study, the researchers used their model to estimate when the ice cap would disappear under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. They project that under all future emission scenarios the ice cap will be gone within 200 to 500 years. For a moderate emissions scenario that assumes Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions will peak around the year 2040, they project the ice cap to be gone in 300 years.

“The geological data is pretty clear that the Barnes Ice Cap almost never disappears in the interglacial times,” Miller said. “The fact that it’s disappearing now says we’re really outside of what we’ve experienced in 2.5 million-year interval. We are entering a new climate state.”

The Barnes Ice Cap is like a canary in a coal mine, said Miller, who also is a professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Geological Sciences. Even if humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the ice cap would still disappear in the next few centuries.

In 2010, the project received a boost from Waleed Abdalati, current director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (a joint venture of CUBoulder and NOAA), who was NASA’s chief scientist at the time. Abdalati supported the flight of a NASA plane monitoring ice loss in the Arctic to revisit the Barnes Ice Cap.

In addition to measuring changes in the ice cap’s height, researchers used ice-penetrating radar aboard the aircraft to reveal its hidden, sub-glacial topography. The measurements were key for the computer model subsequently developed by Gilbert and Flowers to predict the evolution of the Barnes Ice Cap.

Although the top ten countries remain the same as last year, there has been some shuffling of places in the report released Monday. Norway moved up from fourth place to overtake Denmark at the top of the ranking. It was followed by Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Finland. Canada dropped from sixth to seventh place, beneath the Netherlands.

This is the fifth annual World Happiness Report. It was edited by Helliwell of CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) and the University of British Columbia; Richard Layard, Director of the Well-Being Programme at the London School of Economics; and Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Canada was also highlighted for its success in multiculturalism and integration. It is sometimes suggested that the degree of ethnic diversity is the single most powerful explanation of high or low social trust, however Canada bucks this trend. While U.S. communities with higher ethnic diversity had lower measures of social trust this finding did not hold true in Canada. Canadian programs that promote multiculturalism and inter-ethnic understanding helped build social trust and decrease economic and social segregation, the authors note.

“Canada has demonstrated a considerable success with multiculturalism; the United States has not tried very hard,” writes Sachs. The next report for 2018 will focus on the issue of migration.

The World Happiness Report looks at trends in the data recording how highly people evaluate their lives on a scale running from 0 to 10. The rankings, which are based on surveys in 155 countries covering the three years 2014-2016, reveal an average score of 5.3 (out of 10). Six key variables explain three-quarters of the variation in annual national average scores over time and among countries: real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption, and generosity.

The top ten countries rank highly on all six of these factors:

1. Norway (7.537)
2. Denmark (7.522)
3. Iceland (7.504)
4. Switzerland (7.494)
5. Finland (7.469)
6. Netherlands (7.377)
7. Canada (7.316)
8. New Zealand (7.314)
9. Australia (7.284)
10. Sweden (7.284)

Using a technique that avoids the use of high-dose chemotherapy and radiation in preparation for a stem cell transplant, physicians at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System have documented the first cure of an adult patient with congenital dyserythropoietic anemia. CDA is a rare blood disorder in which the body does not produce enough red blood cells, causing progressive organ damage and early death.

The transplant technique is unique, because it allows a donor’s cells to gradually take over a patient’s bone marrow without using toxic agents to eliminate a patient’s cells prior to the transplant.

Dr. Damiano Rondelli, the Michael Reese Professor of Hematology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says the protocol can be used even in patients with a long history of disease and some organ damage because of the minimal use of chemotherapy.

“For many adult patients with a blood disorder, treatment options have been limited because they are often not sick enough to qualify for a risky procedure, or they are too sick to tolerate the toxic drugs used alongside a standard transplant,” said Rondelli, who is also division chief of hematology and oncology and director of the stem cell transplant program at UI Health.

“This procedure gives some adults the option of a stem cell transplant which was not previously available.”

For more than 30 years, Northbrook, Illinois, resident David Levy’s only course of treatment for CDA was regular blood transfusions to ensure his organs and tissues received enough oxygen. Levy was 24 when the pain became so severe he had to withdraw from graduate school.

“I spent the following years doing nothing–no work, no school, no social contact–because all I could focus on was managing my pain and getting my health back on track,” Levy said.

By age 32, Levy required transfusions every two to three weeks; had lost his spleen; had an enlarged liver; and was suffering severely from fatigue, heart palpitations and iron poisoning, a side effect of regular blood transfusions.

“It was bad,” Levy said. “I had been through enough pain. I was angry and depressed, and I wanted a cure. That’s why I started emailing Dr. Rondelli.”

Rondelli says that because of Levy’s range of illnesses and inability to tolerate chemotherapy and radiation, several institutions had denied him the possibility of a stem cell transplant. UI Health’s advances in curing sickle cell patients opened up a new possibility. Rondelli performed Levy’s transplant in 2014.

“The transplant was hard, and I had some complications, but I am back to normal now,” said Levy, now 35. “I still have some pain and some lingering issues from the years my condition was not properly managed, but I can be independent now. That is the most important thing to me.”

Levy is finishing his doctorate in psychology and running group therapy sessions at a behavioral health hospital.

Rondelli said the potential of this approach to stem cell transplantation is very promising.

“The use of this transplant protocol may represent a safe therapeutic strategy to treat adult patients with many types of congenital anemias — perhaps the only possible cure,” Rondelli said.

This case report is published in a letter to the editor in the journal Bone Marrow Transplantation.

Add rapid, mobile testing for Zika and other viruses to the list of things that smartphone technology is making possible. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a smartphone-controlled, battery-operated diagnostic device that weighs under a pound, costs as little as $100 and can detect Zika, dengue and chikungunya within 30 minutes.

Testing for these mosquito-borne viruses currently requires a laboratory, and patients can wait days for results. The tests require instruments that are roughly the size of a microwave oven and can cost up to $20,000. This makes rapid testing unrealistic for limited-resource clinics in developing countries where the viruses are prevalent.

The Sandia team describes its rapid-testing prototype in a paper published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, “A smartphone-based diagnostic platform for rapid detection of Zika, chikungunya and dengue viruses.”

Smartphone technology is a key feature of the device. “In addition to creating an app that serves as a simple interface to operate the device, we were able to adapt smartphone camera sensors to replace traditional laboratory sample analysis tools, allowing for unprecedented mobility,” chemical engineer and lead author Aashish Priye said.

Laboratory in a box

The Sandia team’s device is based on the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) diagnostic method, which eliminates the need to process a biological sample, such as blood or urine, before testing. Conventional viral testing involves transporting a sample to a laboratory, extracting DNA or RNA from it and then multiplying the genetic materials through a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This process involves heating and cooling the sample many times, so that any viral DNA/RNA in the sample is replicated enough to be detected.

Repeatedly heating and cooling the sample is power intensive and demands the complexity of PCR machines. Detection of the copied viral material also requires expensive components such as fluorimeters. The complexity and expense of traditional PCR machines have been major hurdles in moving PCR devices outside of laboratories and into the clinics where they are most needed.

Like PCR, LAMP copies viral DNA/RNA, but without the heating and cooling cycle, a heavy-duty power source isn’t needed. The addition of a few carefully designed biochemical agents allows a LAMP box to test a sample that is heated only once to 65 degrees Celsius (150 degrees Fahrenheit) for half an hour.

LAMP also eliminates the need for extra sample preparation before testing. “We’ve demonstrated that the chemistry we’re using can amplify viral RNA directly from raw, unprocessed samples,” said Sandia chemical engineer and project lead Robert Meagher. “That is the ideal for a point-of-care testing scenario because you don’t want to have extra equipment for isolating DNA or RNA.”

Meagher and his team previously developed a method to combine LAMP with an additional detection technique so they could test multiple viruses simultaneously. This other technique, known as quenching of unincorporated amplification signal reporters (QUASR), involves tagging fragments of synthesized viral DNA called primers with fluorophores — molecules that emit bright light signals. The primers incorporate into the heated and amplified sample DNA. QUASR then causes samples containing viral DNA/RNA to appear bright, while negative reactions remain dark.

One-touch testing

For the Zika project, Meagher’s team developed a novel algorithm that allows a smartphone sensor to act as a fluorimeter, detecting QUASR LAMP light signals if they appear. LAMP works so simply that the user need only place the smartphone on top of the LAMP box and open an app. The app turns on the heater to initiate the LAMP reaction.

Once the 30-minute testing period is up, the smartphone photographs the sample. The app then employs a novel image analysis algorithm to accurately determine the color and brightness of the glow emitted from the LAMP reaction. This smartphone-based image analysis offers much greater detection certainty than the lab technician’s naked eye.

Zika virus has been linked to severe fetal abnormalities, including microcephaly and congenital blindness, as well as neurological disorders that can strike people at any age. By enabling diagnosis in half an hour, the device could help clinicians make faster decisions about patient care and isolation, and rapidly alert public health authorities so they can take measures to prevent spread of the virus.

Furthermore, Zika, dengue and chikungunya are spread by the same mosquito type and have similar early symptoms. Sandia’s prototype diagnostic tool could enable care providers to test quickly for all three at the same time, preventing misdiagnoses. The same tool can also be adapted to detect other human or animal pathogens.

The cost of making a LAMP box prototype to test for these viruses depends largely on the cost of the phone selected for use with it.

“There are billions of smartphones in the world, even in developing countries, and this tool doesn’t require the highest-end smartphone on the market,” Priye said. “It only needs to have an optical sensor and be able to run the app.”

The smartphone used in Sandia’s successful tests of the prototype cost a mere $20. Ultra-accessible and ultra-portable, the Zika box prototype could one day become a staple in point-of-care clinics worldwide.

The last thing the region needs is more “attention” from the European Union.

By David B. Kanin*

Frederica Mogherini, the EU’s ersatz Foreign Minister, returned from a recent trip to the Balkans and solemnly told European potentates “there is no other power in the World that has had so much good on the Western Balkans as the EU.” This bragging gets to the heart of the matter. All sanctified rhetoric from Brussels about a “European path” for benighted Balkan states has nothing to do with the Balkans, but rather amounts to self-serving self-righteousness by a ruling class that exploits southeastern Europe for its exaggerated self-narrative.

Another European diplomat was quoted as saying “We have neglected the Balkans and now see it is increasingly fragile.” This is doubly false. The Euros have done anything but “neglect” the region. Since the 1980s succeeding generations of officials, NGO mavens, military personnel, and others have descended on Balkan troubles spots to issue lectures, give instructions, and assert that ”Europe” can implement a principled and strategically sound foreign and security policy. Branislav Radeljic has done a good job chronicling the serial inconsistencies and fecklessness (my term, not his) of European rhetoric regarding Kosova since the 1980s.

The Balkans are not “increasingly fragile,” even though Kosova, Macedonia, and – to an extent – Bosnia are in the midst of crises that could lead to serious violence. The diplomat’s statement carries the embedded assumption that the region has been less than fragile at some time in recent memory. (Is she or he nostalgic for the vice-regal regime of Paddy Ashdown?) In fact, there has been no movement in the Balkans toward poorly defined and conceived notions of democracy, multi-cultural politics, transparency, or civic society. These terms are slogans, not strategies; their mention signifies teleology not analysis. The expression “democratic backsliding” regarding the Balkans is nonsense – there never was institutional, structural development toward functional democracy in the first place.

The region is trapped in a feedback loop going back to the 1870s. Since then, various Wests have pushed their coercive utopias and have cooperated with the local Big Men at the center of the patronage networks that have never ceased to dominate politics and commerce underneath the cover of whatever forms of law and government are in vogue.

As things stand – just like with all previous security systems imposed on the Balkans since 1878 – the most likely future for the region is another round of violence as the prevailing security cap either weakens gradually or collapses more suddenly as a consequence of rivalries among local potentates and external powers.

Predicting which event in which part of the region or among which of the great powers will spark that fighting will remain very difficult – but some day something dangerous is likely to surprise everyone involved. The double crisis involving Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Bulgaria’s declaration of independence (1908-1909) was sparked by two ambitious and short-sighted foreign ministers, exploited by a “crafty” Tsar of all the Bulgarias, but did not lead to the larger conflict that might have developed. The Balkan Wars (1912-1913) started as a somewhat cooperative venture among Balkan states seeking to feed on the carcass of the Ottomans’ European holdings, morphed into a virulent squabble among Balkan victors, but then burned themselves out. The assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary the next year at first seemed a much lesser crisis than its predecessors, but then turned in a different direction.

Your guess is as good as mine as to whether current crises will defuse themselves or spark serious violence. Bosnia remains permanently and indelibly dysfunctional, but so far no one wants to go back to war and it appears reaction to the most recent of the irresponsible performances by Milorad Dodik and Bakir Izetbegovic have crested. The Macedonian side of Macedonia’s political deadlock is highlighted by the duel for patronage supremacy (and, as a derivative element, political authority) by the less-than impressive Nikola Gruevski and Zoran Zaev. The real story there is the serious diminution of the influence of Ali Ahmeti on the ethnic Albanian side of the equation, the impact of that development on the agreement reached in Ohrid in 2001 that – much more than the country’s constitution – constitutes the basic law of Macedonia, and on the question of cross-border Albanian relations.

As for Kosova, squabbles over gaudy nationalistic decorations on trains, the detention in France of Ramush Haradinaj, and the so-far stillborn Association of Serbian Municipalities continue to reflect the stunted, unilateral declaration of independence mismanaged by US diplomacy between 2006 and 2008. The EU-mediated deal on normalization in 2013 ensured there will be no ”normalization.” That deal left Serbia and the notional Association of Serbian municipalities in Kosovo with agreed-to international status. Kosova, on the other hand, saw its own status kicked into the gutter. Belgrade and Pristina periodically will go through the motions of negotiating on phone codes, transportation arrangements, airspace, and other details, but there has been, is, and will be only one real issue – Kosova’s status. US, NATO, and EU cold shoulders to Kosova’s reasonable desire to morph its security forces into an Army is the latest setback to Pristina’s weakening effort to craft universally recognized sovereignty. If the EU really wants to show some leadership it should shake off its intellectual paralysis and make it clear to both sides that neither will become members of that shaky club unless they mutually —and non-violently — agree on Kosova’s status.

However current events turn out, the fact remains that the Balkans is the one region of Europe in which borders and rivalries over the material, memorial, and cultural stakes of identity were not decided by the wars during the first half of the 20th century that permanently destroyed Europe as a locus of world power. The Balkan region has been partitioned and re-partitioned and will be partitioned again. There is nothing wrong with recent calls for new partitions except that they should not be advertised as “solutions” — new territorial arrangements will define the pattern of future conflict rather than prevent new conflicts and rivalries for great power support.

It also should be remembered that any new partitions must be accompanied by managed population transfers – the mismanagement of the 1947 dismantlement of Britain’s collapsing Indian Raj put paid to the notion that such arrangements can lead to some sort of civic, multi-cultural or Herderian-inspired inter-national conciliation.

Balkan societies might finally dismount the treadmill that has led to so much suffering over the past century and more if, for the first time, authorities and civic notables demonstrate leadership. Progress would involve turning away from all the outsiders – none have anything to offer but platitudes and pain – and forge regional arrangements based on shared material needs rather than the memetic pathogens of nationalism, religious obscurantism, and patronal pride of place. This does not (necessarily) mean creating some sort of federation along the lines imagined by Prince Michael Obrenovic or Tito, but it would involve expanding current cooperation and negotiations over roads, railroads, and pipelines into regional economic arrangements devoted to building Balkan-wide transportation, trading, diplomatic, and cultural arrangements cleansed of the polluting interventions by serial Wests, Russia, and the rest of what is mis-termed the “international community.” Such work would be difficult and more than a little disorienting, but such dizziness is necessary if deep patterns of dependence are to be broken. Consultations with Africans, Latin Americans, and others similarly fouled by their experiences with foreign hegemons might produce useful conceptual cross-fertilization. There once was something called the “non-aligned movement.” It had its problems, but the idea might be worth dusting off.

*David B. Kanin is an adjunct professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University and a former senior intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of TransConflict.

New NASA research reveals that the giant Martian shield volcano Arsia Mons produced one new lava flow at its summit every 1 to 3 million years during the final peak of activity. The last volcanic activity there ceased about 50 million years ago–around the time of Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, when large numbers of our planet’s plant and animal species (including dinosaurs) went extinct.

Located just south of Mars’ equator, Arsia Mons is the southernmost member of a trio of broad, gently sloping shield volcanoes collectively known as Tharsis Montes. Arsia Mons was built up over billions of years, though the details of its lifecycle are still being worked out. The most recent volcanic activity is thought to have taken place in the caldera — the bowl-shaped depression at the top — where 29 volcanic vents have been identified. Until now, it’s been difficult to make a precise estimate of when this volcanic field was active.

“We estimate that the peak activity for the volcanic field at the summit of Arsia Mons probably occurred approximately 150 million years ago–the late Jurassic period on Earth–and then died out around the same time as Earth’s dinosaurs,” said Jacob Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s possible, though, that the last volcanic vent or two might have been active in the past 50 million years, which is very recent in geological terms.”

Richardson is presenting the findings on March 20, 2017, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The study also is published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Measuring about 68 miles (110 kilometers) across, the caldera is deep enough to hold the entire volume of water in Lake Huron, and then some. Examining the volcanic features within the caldera required high-resolution imaging, which the researchers obtained from the Context Camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The team mapped the boundaries of the lava flows from each of the 29 volcanic vents and determined the stratigraphy, or layering, of the flows. The researchers also performed a technique called crater counting–tallying up the number of craters at least 330 feet (100 meters) in diameter–to estimate the ages of the flows.

Using a new computer model developed by Richardson and his colleagues at the University of South Florida, the two types of information were combined to determine the volcanic equivalent of a batting lineup for Arsia Mons’ 29 vents. The oldest flows date back about 200 million years. The youngest flows probably occurred 10 to 90 million years ago–most likely around 50 million years ago.

The modeling also yielded estimates of the volume flux for each lava flow. At their peak about 150 million years ago, the vents in the Arsia Mons’ caldera probably collectively produced about 1 to 8 cubic kilometers of magma every million years, slowly adding to the volcano’s size.

“Think of it like a slow, leaky faucet of magma,” said Richardson. “Arsia Mons was creating about one volcanic vent every 1 to 3 million years at the peak, compared to one every 10,000 years or so in similar regions on Earth.”

A better understanding of when volcanic activity on Mars took place is important because it helps researchers understand the Red Planet’s history and interior structure.

“A major goal of the Mars volcanology community is to understand the anatomy and lifecycle of the planet’s volcanoes. Mars’ volcanoes show evidence for activity over a larger time span than those on Earth, but their histories of magma production might be quite different,” said Jacob Bleacher, a planetary geologist at Goddard and a co-author on the study. “This study gives us another clue about how activity at Arsia Mons tailed off and the huge volcano became quiet.”

By Matthew Tempest

(EurActiv) — Theresa May will trigger Article 50 on 29 March, her office announced today (20 March), starting two-years of unprecedented negotiations for a country to leave the 28-member bloc for the first time.

Downing Street’s announcement of the date – as promised, by the end of March – came after an earlier expected announcement was torpedoed by the declaration of Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to hold a second referendum on independence.

A scheduled 6 April EU summit to discuss Brexit will now take place “within four to six weeks”, a source told AFP. Britain’s planned notification on 29 March “does not leave sufficient time” for a meeting that had initially been scheduled for 6 April, the source said.

Officially, Brussels reacted at its daily midday press conference, with Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas telling reporters: “Everything is ready on this side” and “we are ready to begin negotiations”.

The long-expected news came as May was in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, as part of a short tour of the UK’s devolved parliaments and assemblies, ahead of the 29 March date.

In Brussels itself, the news was delivered by the UK’s new ambassador, Tim Barron, who informed Council President Donald Tusk this morning.

In London, May’s spokesman said: “We want the negotiations to start promptly.”

Chief Brexit minister, David Davis, whose official title is Secretary of State for Exiting the EU – more dramatically said: “We are on the threshold of the most important negotiation for this country for a generation.”

The UK voted 52% to 48% to leave the EU in a referendum last June – although with no options or guidance on what form that so-called Brexit would take.

May has since hardened the government’s stance – after taking over as prime minister from David Cameron – into a ‘hard Brexit’ which will see the UK (including Scotland, which voted to remain) leave the single market and end free movement of people.

The Article 50 notification, under the Lisbon Treaty, gives two years for divorce talks – although that must also include ratification by the European Parliament, and is subject to a vote of national parliaments.

Michel Barnier, a French diplomat, will lead negotiations for the Commission, with Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt representing the Parliament.

At stake are also the several million EU citizens currently in the UK and UK nationals living or working in the EU, plus the future of the Northern Irish border with the Republic of Ireland.

Separately, last Monday (13 March) Sturgeon announced that such a hard Brexit would constitute the ‘material change’ enabling the Scottish Parliament to hold a second independence referendum.

Her preferred date was before the end of Brexit negotiations, from autumn 2018 to spring 2019, but that has been rejected by May.

The UK only joined the EU in January 1973, and then re-affirmed membership in a 1975 referendum, before voting to leave last year.

Before a future trade deal between the UK and EU is negotiated, Brussels is demanding a ‘divorce’ bill of around €60bn, for Britain’s ongoing liabilities to the bloc.

Also at stake are various EU bodies located in the UK, and separately, the Euratom treaty on civil nuclear power.

The British government initially denied its parliament any say on triggering Article 50, before the Supreme Court insisted MPs have a say. Despite various objections from the House of Lords, that legislation was passed earlier this month.

If both the EU and UK agree, the two-year deadline set by Article 50 could be extended. On the other hand, if talks are not completed or break down, the UK would leave the EU and revert to World Trade Organisation tariffs.

Sir Alex Ferguson is set to return to manage Manchester United – for Michael Carrick’s testimonial, The Sun says.

The legendary former Old Trafford boss is expected to take up his seat in the dugout on June 4 to take charge of a Manchester United 2008 XI.

The opponents on the day will be a Michael Carrick All-Stars XI, to be played at Old Trafford.

The confirmed list of players for the United team includes Edwin van der Sar, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs.

The problem with letting the Turks take Raqqa and presumably the entire Euphrates Valley that is now held by ISIS is that the Turks are endeavoring to hem in the Kurds. To do this, Turkey hopes to establish its Arab proxies in a new “Euphrates state” in eastern Syria. This would partition Syria into three states: a western Asad-ruled state; an eastern Turkish and Sunni Arab rebel-ruled state, and a northern Kurdish state.

Asad’s army has already taken a large swath of territory east of Aleppo, which cuts off Turkey’s access to Raqqa from al-Bab. Turkey has proposed taking Raqqa from the north at Tel Abyad. This approach would penetrate the Kurdish region at its middle and cut it in two. This objective of splitting the autonomous Kurdish region in two is the main reason Turkey offered to take Raqqa.

If the United States helps or allows Turkey to attack the Kurds at Tel Abyad, it will have no Kurdish allies to attack Raqqa or any other part of ISIS territory.

*I would like to thank Barry Posen and Charlie Kupchan for sharpening some of these arguments. This article was published at Syria Comment

China’s Minister of Defense General Chang Wanquan who is on a official visit to Sri Lanka called on President Maithripala Sirisena on Monday at the official residence of the President.

Sirisena recalled the long term relationship between Sri Lanka and China thanked for the support given by China for the independence and national security of Sri Lanka.

Sirisena also extended thanks for the Chinese government for the training opportunities which have been provided to Sri Lankan security forces for a long time. Sirisena commended the assistance given to Sri Lanka by the Chinese government during the crucial period of war in the country.

Sirisena expressed his trust over China’s continues provision of required training for the security forces in Sri Lanka.

Sirisena stated that the two countries will come into several agreements. He said those agreements will not do any harm to the pride, independence and national security of Sri Lanka.

General Chang Wanquan said that a strong foundation has been built for the betterment of the economy, society and the people under the current President of Sri Lanka. He conveyed the congratulations by the President of China on this regard.

General Wanquan further stated that China’s objective is to strengthen the long term relationship with Sri Lanka. He recalled that the diplomatic relations between China and Sri Lanka have a history of sixty years.

By Chintamani Mahapatra*

The nature, intensity and direction of the US’ relations with friends, foes, partners and the marginalised countries entered a period of unprecedented uncertainty with Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election.

That Trump’s foreign policy approach would be drastically different from that of his predecessors’ was amply clear from the days of the election campaign. Trump fought the election on a platform that raised questions about the relevance of long-standing alliances; portrayed possibility of redefining the country’s adversaries; and held mere hopes of continuity of policy as far as Washington’s emerging strategic partnerships with some countries are concerned.

India fits in the last category of nations. Since the post- World War II era, US-India relations have always been marked by highs and lows, and convergences and divergences. The Cold War calculations – and not the merits of bilateral relations – shaped the US’ policy towards India during the approximately four decades of the Cold War era. However, the end of the Cold War too witnessed ups and downs in the relationship.

It was only in the early years of the 20th Century, with the then US President Bill Clinton’s visit to India that a new paradigm of US-India relations began to emerge. Months after Clinton’s India visit, the Democratic Party lost the 2000 presidential election and George W. Bush of the Republican Party became the US’ president. For a brief while, it appeared that the new paradigm of US-India ties would die in its inception.

However, such apprehensions were misplaced and short-lived. Eight years of the Bush White House witnessed a carefully nurtured US relationship with India that cemented a strategic partnership with the conclusion of the Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement. Defence and security cooperation between the two countries too tremendously improved with bilateral military exercises, trade in sophisticated arms and ammunitions, and defense technology transfer from the US to India.

The Obama Administration picked up the thread where his predecessor had left and the Indo-US strategic partnership witnessed vertical growth and horizontal expansion. There were several hiccups in the process but those were deftly handled and the strategic relationship did not get derailed.

Significantly, there was no indication at all during the 2016 election campaign that the outcome of the election would in any way negatively affect US-India ties. After all, bipartisan consensus on sustaining and improving Washington’s relationship with India has existed in the US for years.

While Trump was by and large an outsider to the beltway foreign policy consensus and was not a mainstream Republican Party leader, even his statements and remarks displayed no sign that a Trump Administration would alter the US’ policy towards India in any significant way. In fact, candidate Trump had aired many views against Pakistan, China and many other countries, but not against India.

Soon after Trump’s victory, the Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrated activism to engage with the new US Administration. India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval landed in Washington to connect with the Trump transition team. While Prime Minister Modi and President Trump exchanged views over a phone call, news leaked that they invited each other to visit their respective countries. More recently, India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar visited Washington to exchange notes with various branches of the US government with a view to further strengthen the India-US bilateral. Despite all these efforts, there are critical issues that may adversely shake the India-US strategic partnership, unless handled dexterously and in a timely manner.

First, the economic nationalism of the Trump White House should not come on the way of Prime Minister Modi’s “Make in India” initiative. Second, the Trump Administration’s job creation and retention measures should not excessively hit the Indian workforce employed by American and Indian IT companies. Third, the Trump Administration’s Afghanistan policy should not clash with India’s core interests in that country. Fourth, the Trump Administration should keep the Kashmir issue outside his political bargaining with Pakistan. Fifth, the Trump Administration’s disproportionate confrontation or measured cooperation with China should not outshine or overshadow Washington’s policy towards this region. Last but not least, Trump’s immigration policy should in no way hamper the interests of the Indian-American community. A series of attacks on the Indian-Americans in the US threatens to weaken the very constituency that has become a social bridge linking peoples of both the countries.

It must be noted that the above menu of issues is for both the US Administration and Indian policymakers to work on to manage the difficult political and bureaucratic transition in Washington and ensure that the India-US strategic relationship does not get negatively impacted.

* Chintamani Mahapatra
Rector and Professor, JNU, & Columnist, IPCS

A short communiqué from the royal cabinet put an end, in a way, to the political career of the volatile and unpredictable head of government-designate Benkirane of the PJD (Parti de la Justice et du Développement.)

He had five months to form a government, but he was unable to do so for two main reasons. Firstly, he wanted to keep the same coalition, with few additions from other parties and that is not possible in politics because each political situation requires a different approach and Benkirane did not show necessary leeway needed in such a situation. Secondly, the negotiating opposition was not ready to make him gifts, in the least. For them a good Benkirane is a “dead” Benkirane, politically speaking, and that is what has happened ultimately.

Benkirane, the eternal jester

Prime Minister of Morocco Abdelilah Benkirane. Photo Credit: US White House.

Benkirane acted like a neophyte in politics, his party had more seats in the parliament, this time around (125 out of 395,) but that did not give him the majority because the Moroccan electoral system was designed in such a way that no party can have a majority and the leading party, as such, is made to form a coalition government.

With him gone from the Moroccan political scene, a tumultuous jester who never missed an opportunity to crack a joke or shed a tear or two and a true figure of a Greek melodrama, indeed, a new era begins for the Islamists. An era that will either make them or break them.

Having dismissed Benkirane, King Mohammed VI, willing to keep the game fully democratic, called upon number 2 of the Islamist party: El Othmani to form the government. El Othmani is totally the opposite of the ebullient Benkirane; he is a quiet psychiatric doctor with an eternal smile symbolizing his overwhelming goodness and predisposition to listen and compromise. Will he be able to nurse the ailing government to good health from its post-natal crisis?

The PJD’s hard choices

After five months of stalled negotiations between the PJD and opposition parties headed by the RNI (Rassemblement National des Indépendants,) the monarch, on return home from a long journey in Africa terminated Benkirane’s designation by making use of Article 47 and Article 42 of the 2011 constitution, but, nevertheless, gave the PJD another chance.

Needless to say that the Islamist party is, currently, faced with difficult choices, a catch-22 situation, indeed. Party members have accepted the new reality imposed on them and have, ultimately, disassociated themselves from their secretary general, but this might, in the long term, create havoc within the ranks of their political organization. Besides, their religious think tank and policy-making organization behind the scenes; MUR (Mouvement Unicité et Réforme) might consider the move of the establishment as a diktat to weaken the resolve of this political entity, which thinks of itself as the true and legitimate representative of the masses.

PJD party cadres and members could give El Othmani a free hand in forming the government, but, then, reject the outcome to put the establishment in a difficult position and, thus, force its hand to appoint a technocratic government, a solution which will be badly perceived internationally, or, last but not least, call for new general elections. The PJD will hope that such new general elections will bring them more seats and, consequently, put them in a more comfortable position bearing in mind, however, that a contrary scenario could occur. A possibility that, in the end, will make all choices hard, if not difficult to stomach.

Compromise

The choice of El Othmani, a physician who is a respected psychiatrist is probably not fortuitous; he might just be the right person to nurse back to health the ailing unborn government. He will be receiving first Akhnnouch, the head of RNI, and other party bosses on his psychoanalyst couch to try to find a compromise, and a compromise he will find, for sure, because none wants to fail this time round.

The political opponents of the Islamists insist on including the socialist minority party USFP (Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires) and this was the stumbling block of the last round of negotiations and the chances are that El Othmani will accept them in because he is a practical person and does not want to lose everything for one or two government positions offered to this declining and outdated party, anyway.

El Othmani, is a magician with a legendary smile and a big heart and with his wand he will, undoubtedly, come up with a magical solution that will make everyone happy and make him the hero of the day.

But a compromise solution is not only on the shoulders of the PJD, it is, also, on the shoulders of the opposition because for sure they would not want to go back to square one and disappoint their membership and especially the establishment, this time round, bearing in mind that the general public is made to believe that it is the pig-headedness of the opposition that led to the present political dead-end.

A solution is a must

Chances are that a coalition government will see light soon and the difficult birth travail will be eased out by the excellent physician El Othmani, who does not want to have in his hands a still born baby but a newborn infant screaming with life at the top of his/her lungs. His opponents, on the other end, cannot afford either a failure for fear to be accused by the rank and file of being the consistent stumbling block for a democratic solution.

All in all, it must be made clear that the democratic political contest has put the PJD on the top of the list of political parties, so this popular choice has to be, totally, respected by the political opponents otherwise all the parties have to go back before the electors in a new general election, as is the case in any sane democratic environment.

Since 2011, Morocco has a new constitution that has opened the door on what might be called “incremental democracy” and the spirit of this political transition has to be respected fully by all political players, otherwise democracy-hungry masses will be infuriated and that might lead to uncontrollable and dire consequences.

If Morocco was and is an exception in the MENA region, this is due mainly to the fact that democracy is nurtured by the monarchy and political players alike. It might take time to achieve and that is something that everyone accepts, but nothing must stall its progress ever, for fear to unleash popular discontent.

For these reasons and more, El Othmani must succeed in his political mission sooner than soon and everyone concerned has to help him out at once.

*Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.