Former Penn State president Graham Spanier got off easy—two months in jail followed by several months of house arrest. It is indisputable that he did nothing to stop the predatory behavior of child molester Jerry Sandusky. But as I learned long ago, Spanier is not a man who gets upset about patently offensive behavior.

In 1997, I contacted him about a female student who created a huge bloody vagina with real human hair, constructed in the shape of a grotto, with a statue of the Mother of Jesus placed inside it. Her “artwork” was placed on the grounds of the campus. I asked for disciplinary action, and Spanier got back to me saying that steps had been taken “to educate and sensitize” the offending student. I brought this issue to national attention on CNN’s “Crossfire.”

Spanier obviously didn’t take my complaint seriously. Within a few months, the same student struck again. Her new “artwork” consisted of a five-by-five matrix of panties with a cross stitched to the crotch. It was defended by the Director of Visual Arts and left on display at the campus art gallery.

Spanier’s judgment, and his tolerance for intolerance, has finally caught up with him. Had he acted like a man, much damage on his campus could have been avoided.

There was much excitement and euphoria around the world when the draft agreement was signed in Paris climate conference in December 2015, when the countries agreed to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degree celsius , while pursuing efforts to keep temperature rise to 1.5 degree celsius. This was followed by another event on 22nd April, 2016 when 175 countries signed the Paris Agreement at a ceremony in New York

Counter productive decision of President Trump

Former US President Obama enthusiastically supported the decisions of the climate conference and pledged US support. Of course, at that time, the Republican Party in USA and Donald Trump criticized the decisions and threatened that Republican Party would not honour the commitment made by Obama administration , if it would be voted to power in the Presidential poll.

However, nobody in the world thought that the successor for Barrack Obama would go to the extent of dishonouring the commitment made by US government. To the utter dismay of the world community, Republican President Trump has now thought it fit to carry out the threat to withdraw US support from the Paris agreement.

It is shocking that President Trump has taken this decision on such serious matter without a second thought. Obviously, he has not cared to think about the adverse implications to the world at large because of his counter productive decision.

Alarming trend and need for urgency

There is alarming situation due to increase of global warming in recent years. Is President Trump and his administration not aware of this?

Between 1880 and 2010, the mean temperature in the world increased by one degree celsius and between 2010 and 2015, it was reported to have increased further by 0.15 degree celsius

United Nations Weather Agency has reported that extraordinary temperatures are “said to become the new norm”.

Going by current trends in global warming, the earth would have become warmer in 2018 by 0.1 degree celsius compared to 2015 level, moving closer to 1.5 degree celsius warming level.

The world realizes that there is little time to act and very urgent steps are required to address the climate change issues but is President Trump not concerned about this at all ?

Different perspectives on Paris climate declaration

While extraordinary efforts were put forth to discuss the issue in Paris climate conference among the world governments and some unanimous decisions were taken , some quarters thought that the conference agreed on the need to aggressively address the climate change issues but failed to detail with clarity as to how it would be done.

Further, it was thought that aggregate pledges to reduce greenhouse emissions made by the nation states of the world fell far short of what is needed to begin to address the looming catastrophic climate change. Another criticism was that Paris Agreement failed to acknowledge the need to decarbonize the world economy and made no reference to fossil fuels such as crude oil, coal in the agreement.

What the critics wanted was more efforts and not less as President Trump seems to think.

Inappropriate decision of President Trump

While many countries have signed the agreement , the ground reality is that the interest and responsibilities between the countries diverge widely, ranging from the strong industrial economies of the global north such as USA, Canada and others to industrializing nations such as China and India to the most vulnerable nations already facing climate change disruptions, such as Kiribati, Tuvalu ad Vanuatu.

President Trump seems to think that China and India pose high level of threat to the global climate, as they use fossil fuels in a big way and are rapidly expanding the industries. However, the contribution of countries like India to global warming is much less than the countries like USA, as the level of industrialization of USA and other industrialised countries are much more than countries like India.

President Trump is ignoring this fact and ground reality that USA also has to contribute substantially to reduce the global warming by initiating positive actions on it’s soil and cooperating with other countries. It is shocking that President Trump is distancing himself from the mainstream and scientific views on threat of global warming and consequent ecological damage all over the world.

The global warming impact will be total and would affect the entire world community. Trump’s America cannot escape from this grim scenario.

If President Trump thinks that the decisions of the Paris climate conference need changes he should discuss in the world forum and seek corrective measures instead of running away. But, his decision to unilaterally withdraw is nothing but short sighted approach and amount to lack of responsibility to the needs of the world.

The World cannot afford to ignore the negative decision of President Trump, as America is also a polluter and contribute to the global warming.

One only hopes that the wisdom would prevail and the world opinion would assert itself to force President Trump to retract from his disastrous decision.

The US unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent in May, a new low for the recovery and the lowest level since 2001. However, this decline in employment was the result of people leaving the labor market, as the number of people reported as employed in the household survey actually fell, with the overall employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) dropping from 60.2 percent in April to 60.0 percent in May.

The establishment survey showed further evidence of a weakening labor market as the pace of job growth slowed in May to 138,000. There were also substantial downward revisions to the prior two months’ job growth numbers, which brought the average for the last three months to just 121,000.

The big job gainers were restaurants (30,300) and health care (24,300), together the two sectors accounted for 40 percent of job growth in May. While the job growth in restaurants is somewhat above the 22,000 average for the last year, it appears that the pace of employment growth in health care is slowing. It averaged 30,000 a month in 2016, compared with just 21,000 so far in 2017.

Other job gainers were education services, which added 14,700; temporary employment, which added 12,900; and professional and technical services, which added 10,900 jobs. Employment growth in education services is erratic, so the May number is likely to be followed by a decline next month. The temp job growth is in line with past figures, it certainly does not suggest a hiring boom. The weak employment growth in professional and technical services is disappointing. These tend to be higher paying jobs requiring considerable skills. Job growth in the sector averaged 23,000 a month over the last year.

Retail trade shed another 6,100 jobs, its fourth consecutive drop. The job loss is concentrated in the department store sector. This is likely to continue. Construction employment rose by 11,000 in May after losing a total of 1,000 jobs in the prior two months. This is likely a weather story with the warm winter pulling employment growth forward. Nonetheless, with non-residential construction falling and residential construction flattening, growth in the sector is likely to be weak going forward.

There is a similar story in manufacturing, which lost 1,000 jobs in May, after adding 11,000 in each of the prior two months. The sector is not likely to be a big source of job gains, especially if the jump in the trade deficit reported for April is not reversed.

In addition to the weak job growth, wage growth appears to be moderating rather than accelerating. The year-over-year increase in the average hourly wage is just 2.5 percent. Taking the average of the last three months compared with the average of the prior three months, wages are rising at just a 2.2 percent annual rate.

The situation in the household survey was mixed. The drop in employment was among prime-age workers, with the EPOP falling from 78.6 percent to 78.4 percent, with both men and women seeing small declines. On the plus side, the unemployment rate for African American men over 20 fell 0.8 percentage points to 6.5 percent, the lowest level since April of 2000. However this was entirely due to men dropping out of the labor force as employment actually fell.

All the duration measures of unemployment rose modestly in May. The quit rate rose modestly to 11.7 percent, which is still below pre-recession peaks and well below the peaks hit in 2000. Involuntary part-time employment fell for the fourth consecutive month to a new low for the recovery. It is now only slightly larger relative to the size of the labor force than before the recession. Voluntary part-time rose by 320,000 but is still slightly below the peak hit in November.

The summary data continue to show little evidence for the story that the labor market is increasingly benefiting the most educated workers. While the unemployment rate for college educated workers edged down by 0.1 percentage point, so did the EPOP. It now stands 0.4 percentage points below its year-ago level. In terms of EPOPs, those with high school degrees and less than high school were the biggest gainers in the last year.

There is certainly little evidence in this report that the labor market is overheating or is likely to do so any time in the foreseeable future.

During the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected as the president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the “just war” in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. In accordance with the flawed distinction, he pledged that he would withdraw American troops stationed in Iraq.

The unilateral intervention in Iraq by the Bush Administration was highly unpopular in the American electorate. Therefore Obama’s election pledge of complete withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq struck a chord with the voters and they gave an overwhelming mandate to the ostensibly “pacifist” contender during his first term as the president.

In keeping with the election pledge, President Obama did manage to successfully withdraw the last American soldier from the Iraqi soil in December 2011 during the first term as the president, but only to commit thousands of American troops and the US Air Force to Iraq just a couple of years later during the second term as the president when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014.

The borders between Iraq and Syria are poorly guarded and highly porous. The Obama Administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Assad regime in Syria for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014 was bound to backfire sooner or later.

More to the point, however, when President Obama decided to withdraw American troops from the unjust war in Iraq, at the same time, he pledged that he would commit additional American troops and resources into the purportedly “just war” in Afghanistan. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan jumped from 30,000 during the Bush Administration to more than 100,000 during the supposedly “pacifist” Obama Administration.

And now, the “steady hands” of the American deep state, the Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, have advised the Trump Administration to further escalate the conflict in Afghanistan by deploying 3,000 to 5,000 additional troops to a contingent of 8,500 US troops already stationed in Afghanistan as “trainers and advisors.”

If more than 100,000 US troops at their peak during the Obama Administration’s tenure failed to achieve any long-term objective in Afghanistan, then how do Generals Mattis and McMaster expect from 3,000 to 5,000 additional troops to salvage the failed Afghan policy of the successive US administrations?

If the Trump Administration adopted an attitude of appeasement towards the diktats of the deep state, then it will only be a first step before the quagmire in Afghanistan will suck in tens of thousands of additional US troops and resources in the coming years.

Coming back to the topic, no one can dispute the assertion that the notions of “just wars” and “good militants” do exist in the vocabulary; empirically speaking, however, after witnessing the instability, violence and utter chaos and anarchy in the war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, the onus lies on any “liberal interventionist” to prove beyond doubt that the wars and militants that he justifies and upholds are indeed just and good.

More surprisingly, however, if Afghanistan was an occupied country during the years of Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1988 then how did it become a free country after the American occupation of Afghanistan since 2001-onward?

Furthermore, if the Afghan so-called “Mujahideen” (freedom fighters) nurtured by the Carter and Reagan Administrations with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and Saudi money constituted a legitimate resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, then by what principle of consistent logic, the resistance against American occupation of Afghanistan can be reviled as “terrorism”?

In international politics, the devil always lies in the definitions of the terms that we employ. And the definition of the term “terrorism” has been deliberately left undefined by the Western powers to use it as a catch-all pretext to justify their military presence and interventionist policy in the energy-rich Islamic countries.

More to the point, there is a not-so-subtle distinction between a terrorist and an insurgent: an Islamic insurgent believes in something and wants to enforce that agenda in the insurgency-hit regions, while a terrorist is just a bloodthirsty lunatic who is hell-bent on causing death and destruction. The distinguishing feature between the two is that an insurgent has well defined objectives and territorial ambitions, whereas a terrorist is basically motivated by the spirit of revenge and the goal of causing widespread fear.

After invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and when the American “nation-building” projects failed in those hapless countries, the US policymakers immediately realized that they were facing large-scale and popularly-rooted insurgencies against foreign occupation; consequently, the occupying military altered its CT (counter-terrorism) approach in the favor of a COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy.

A COIN strategy is essentially different from a CT approach and it also involves dialogue, negotiations and political settlements, alongside the coercive tactics of law enforcement and military and paramilitary operations on a limited scale.

The phenomena which is currently threatening the Islamic countries is not terrorism, as such, but Islamic insurgencies. Excluding al Qaeda Central which is a known transnational terrorist organization, all the regional militant groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, al Shabab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, and even some of the ideological affiliates of al Qaeda and Islamic State, like Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, the Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan, Sinai and Libya which have no organizational and operational association with al Qaeda Central or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, respectively, are not terror outfits, as such, but insurgent groups, who are fighting for the goals of liberation of their homelands from foreign occupation and for the enforcement of Sharia in their respective areas of operations.

The goals for which Islamic insurgents have been fighting in the insurgency-wracked regions are irrelevant for the debate in hand; it can be argued, however, that if some of the closest Western allies in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, have already enforced Sharia as part of their conservative legal systems and when beheadings, amputations of limbs and flogging of criminals are a routine in Saudi Arabia, then what is the basis for the US declaration of war against Islamic insurgents in the Middle East who are deliberately, but erroneously, labeled as “terrorists” by the Western mainstream media to manufacture consent for the Western military presence and interventions in the energy-rich region under the pretext of the so-called “war on terror”?

Notwithstanding, the root factors that are primarily responsible for spawning militancy and insurgency anywhere in the world is not religion but socio-economics, ethnic differences, marginalization of disenfranchised ethno-linguistic and ethno-religious groups and the ensuing conflicts; socio-cultural backwardness of the affected regions, and the weak central control of the impoverished developing states over their remote rural and tribal areas.

Additionally, if we take a cursory look at some of the worst insurgency-plagued regions in the Middle East, deliberate funding, training and arming of certain militant groups by regional and global powers for their strategic interests has played the key role.

Back in the eighties during the Soviet-Afghan war, the Afghan jihadists did not spring up spontaneously out of nowhere. The Western powers with the help of Saudi money and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies trained and armed those “freedom fighters” against their archrival the Soviet Union. Those very same Afghan “Mujahideen” later mutated into the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Similarly, during the Libyan and Syrian uprisings, the Western powers with the help of their regional client states, once again, trained and armed Islamic jihadists and tribal militiamen against the “unfriendly” regimes of Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

And isn’t it ironic that those very same “cute rebels” later mutated into Ansar al-Sharia and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in Libya; and the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and scores of other jihadist groups in Syria?

By Nick Cunningham

The U.S. shale industry might have just received a huge windfall with the nine-month extension of the OPEC cuts. Shale output was already expected to come roaring back this year, but the extension of the cuts provides even more room in the market for shale drillers to step into.

The sky is the limit, it seems. However, there are growing signs that the U.S. shale industry could be reaching the end of the low-hanging fruit. Or, more specifically, drilling costs are starting to rise and the enormous leaps in production that can be obtained by simply adding more rigs also appears to be running into some trouble.

According to the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report, productivity (as opposed to absolute production) is set to fall next month in the Permian Basin. In other words, the average rig will only be able to produce an estimated 630 barrels per day of initial production from a new well, down 10 b/d from the 640 b/d that such a rig might have produced in May. That is convoluted way of saying that the ever-increasing returns on throwing more rigs at the problem might be hitting a ceiling.

This is a very notable development – it is the first time that the EIA predicts falling well productivity per rig since it began tracking the data several years ago. Still, because the rig count has increased so much, there will still be more production coming out of the Permian. It’s just that as drillers gobble up all the best spots to drill, it will become more and more difficult to find easy pickings.

Moreover, simply drilling the wells is only one part of the equation. As Collin Eaton of Fuel Fix notes, companies are drilling wells at a faster pace than contractors can frac them. The shortage of completion crews means that the backlog of drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs) has shot up over the past year, rising by more than 60 percent to 1,995 in April 2017 from a year earlier.

The strain on contractors means that drilling costs will also rise. Oilfield service companies bore the brunt of the market downturn over the past three years, forced to slash their rates because of the lack of work. Oil producers have consistently and repeatedly boasted about their “efficiency gains,” but much of the cost-savings came from soaking service companies.

That could be at an end. The rise in drilling activity means that oilfield service companies finally have more leverage to hike their prices. The results could be an upswing in costs for producers. Service costs could jump by 20 percent this year, according to an estimate from S&P Global Platts.

But it isn’t all rosy for service companies either. Fuel Fix notes that they have to rebuild their rig fleets after scrapping so many during the last few years. Also, finding enough people to return to work after savagely cutting payrolls will be a challenge.

Overall, however, production is still expected to increase. Generous financing from Wall Street will ensure that capital is not a limiting factor. Consequently, the shale industry will continue to shower West Texas with money, rigs and people. Oil will flow in larger volumes this year and probably next year, barring another downturn. The Permian, for instance, is still expected to add more than 70,000 bpd of additional output between May and June.

Also, OPEC’s determination to prevent another downturn in prices provides some certainty to shale drillers. OPEC is erasing some of the risk for drillers to deploy resources in the Permian. On an annual basis, the EIA estimates that U.S. oil production will average 9.3 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2017 and a staggering 10.0 mb/d in 2018.

But if well productivity has peaked, the marginal barrel will be a bit trickier to produce next year than it was in, say, late 2016.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Has-Permian-Productivity-Peaked.html

By Dina El-Rifai*

All right, America. We need to have a talk.

The president recently returned from Saudi Arabia, where he gave his Muslim hosts a speech about the threats of “radical Islamist terrorism.”

Because Trump steered slightly clear of his usual vitriol toward Muslims — he’s repeatedly claimed in the past that “Islam hates us,” and never misses a chance to complain about “Radical Islamic Terror” — some folks in the media credited Trump for not saying anything “overtly” Islamophobic.

Even liberal-leaning outlets like The Atlantic and Vox judged the speech “politically correct” and “uncharacteristically inoffensive,” respectively.

They seem to have missed the fact that Trump’s language, while perhaps less direct than what he says to crowds of his supporters in the United States, was still drenched in the demonization of Muslims. And worse, the speech pointed to an escalation of militarism and violence against Muslim communities.
islam-muslims-praying

(Photo: Flickr/Tinou Bao)

In other words, some folks are missing the forest for the teleprompter. Trump may have sounded more polite, but he advanced the same divisive ideas that make all of us less safe.

Right-wing extremists are increasingly visible in the U.S. — from Dylann Roof in South Carolina to the man in Portland who recently stabbed three people for defending Muslims on a train. Yet Trump’s speech still characterized violence and extremism as an exclusively Muslim phenomenon.

Indeed, Trump seemed to cast the Middle East as the home and source of all terrorism, calling whole groups of people there “barbaric criminals” and “foot soldiers of evil.” For this reason he insisted that “Muslim nations must be willing to take on the burden to defeat terrorism and send its wicked ideology to oblivion.”

But since when is bombing people into peace a thing?

After all, the U.S. dropped 20,000-plus bombs on Muslim-majority countries just in the past year, and has terrorized and killed millions in the name of a war on terror. This country runs torture camps like Guantanamo and strips people of their civil and human rights. Who are we to define good and evil?

Yet once again, the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims are being divided into “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” The “good Muslims,” according to this idea, support those “war on terror” policies that result in the expansion of violence against mostly innocent people. The “bad ones” don’t — and so we’re called terrorists.

But Trump went a step further by defining good Muslims as the wealthy ones in business with the United States (or himself). Trump valorized those who will profit off the violence that he calls for, including through a $110 billion arms deal for Saudi Arabia to buy American weapons.

Those weapons will be used in Yemen, where a Saudi-led bombing campaign has killed more than 10,000 people and left 7 million civilians facing starvation.

So in his supposedly more polite and presidential speech, Trump defined whole groups of people as barbarians, and those who profit off the destruction and death of those people as civilized beacons of peace and goodness.

This isn’t some new, miraculously un-Islamophobic Trump. Just because his speechwriters know how to modify his word choice doesn’t change the hateful, violent, dangerous, anti-Muslim message that calls for the destruction of entire communities.

*Dina El-Rifai is a Policy Fellow at the American Friends Service Committee. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

US Vice President Mike Pence will give the Keynote Address at the Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America to be held in Miami, Florida, on June 15, according to the White House.

The conference, co-hosted by the Governments of the United States and Mexico, will bring together the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras on June 15-16 to discuss the region’s economic, security, and governance agendas.

“I look forward to affirming President Trump’s support for the Northern Triangle countries’ commitment to improve security, governance, and economic prosperity in their countries and calling on our partners – governments, businesses, and development organizations – to redouble their efforts toward achieving this common goal,” said Vice President Pence.

Following his remarks, the Vice President will participate in a series of bilateral meetings with President Salvador Sánchez Cerén of El Salvador, President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras, and President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala.

Ninety Limosa harlequin frogs (Atelopus limosus) bred in human care are braving the elements of the wild after Smithsonian scientists sent them out into the Panamanian rainforest as part of their first-ever release trial in May.

The study, led by the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, aims to determine the factors that influence not only whether frogs survive the transition from human care to the wild, but whether they persist and go on to breed.

“Only by understanding the trials and tribulations of a frog’s transition from human care to the wild will we have the information we need to someday develop and implement successful reintroduction programs,” said Brian Gratwicke, international program coordinator for the rescue project and Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) amphibian conservation biologist. “Although we are not sure whether any of these individual frogs will make it out there, this release trial will give us the knowledge we need to tip the balance in favor of the frogs.”

The Limosa harlequin frogs, which were released at the Mamoní Valley Preserve, have small numbered tags inserted under their skin so researchers can tell individuals apart. The scientific team also gave each frog an elastomer toe marking that glows under UV light to easily tell this cohort of frogs apart from any future releases. Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation doctoral student Blake Klocke is currently monitoring the frogs daily at the site, collecting information about survivorship, dispersal, behavior and whether the warm micro-climate in the area provides any protection against disease.

The study is also looking at whether a “soft release” boosts the frogs’ ability to survive. Thirty of the newly released frogs spent a month at the site in cages, acclimating to their surroundings and foraging on leaf-litter invertebrates. Eight of these frogs, and eight that were released without the trial period, are wearing miniature radio transmitters that will give Klocke and the team a chance to look at differences in survival and persistence between the two groups. The researchers also collected skin-bacteria samples from the soft-release frogs to measure changes during their transition from captivity to the wild.

“The soft release study allowed us to safely expose captive-bred frogs to a more balanced and varied diet, changing environmental conditions and diverse skin bacteria that can potentially increase their survival in nature,” said Angie Estrada, Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech and a member of the team leading the soft release, which was funded through a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) grant. “It allowed us to monitor health and overall body condition of the animals without the risk of losing the frogs right away to a hungry snake.”

Limosa harlequin frogs are especially sensitive to the amphibian chytrid fungus, which has pushed frog species to the brink of extinction primarily in Central America, Australia and the western United States. The Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project brought a number of individuals into the breeding center between 2008 and 2010 as chytrid swept through their habitat. The Limosa harlequin frogs in this release trial are the first captive-bred generation of the species and only part of the rescue project’s total insurance population for the species.

“After all the work involved in collecting founder individuals, learning to breed them, raising their tadpoles, producing all their food and keeping these frogs healthy, the release trial marks a new exciting stage in this project,” said Roberto Ibáñez, in-country director of the rescue project and STRI scientist. “These captive-bred frogs will now be exposed to their world, where predators and pathogens are ever-present in their environment. Their journey will help provide the key to saving not only their own species, but Panama’s other critically endangered amphibian species.”

British police said they are dealing with an incident on London Bridge after reports of a van hitting multiple people there.

In an unprecedented move, the Metropolitan police have tweeted, advising people to “run, hide and tell.”

Police cars, ambulances and helicopters have arrived at the scene, according to various eyewitness reports on Twitter.

The Metropolitan Police said they will release further information after making sure it is “accurate,” following social media reports that there was an attacker with a knife and gunfire heard in the area.

Conflicting accounts claimed that between one and three attackers jumped out of the van after it hit people and proceeded to stab people.

At least five people were injured on the bridge, the BBC reported. It was not immediately clear how grave the injuries were.

Dramatic footage reportedly taken from inside the London Bridge Bar showed police ordering all the patrons to get on the ground and take cover.

The FBI is helping Qatar investigate a hacking incident, which led to a media war with neighbouring states after fake comments from the country’s ruler were published on Doha’s national news agency late May.

FBI investigators are in Doha to help with the probe to discover how false comments attributed to ruler Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani were published on Qatar News Agency’s site.

Qatar asked the US for help investigating the incident, a source told AFP.

The controversial comments from Qatar’s ruler were picked up by Saudi and UAE media who have cast doubt on Doha’s claims about the hack.

“American support was requested and a team sent which has been in Doha since last Friday, working with Qatar’s interior ministry,” the source said.

Two other unnamed countries are also helping with the probe with the results expected to be made public as early as next week as Doha continues to come under sustained media attacks from Saudi and UAE newspapers.

Among the controversial comments attributed to the emir was a favourable reference to Saudi Arabia’s regional foe Iran.

It follows President Donald Trump’s visit to Riyadh, where the US government spoke in support of Saudi Arabia in its soft war against Iran.

Others included favourable comments about Iran-backed Hizballah, Muslim Brotherhood-alligned Palestinian movement Hamas, and Israel.

Doha has denied all the comments and said it had been the victim of a “shameful cybercrime”.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have both used the comments as a pretext to attack Qatar over long-standing issues such as Doha’s backing of Islamist groups and affable relations with Iran.

Meanwhile a number of Qatari news sites have been blocked in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt.

It mirrors the diplomatic crisis in 2014, when several Gulf states pulled their ambassadors from Doha due to Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have both clamped down on Muslim Brotherhood activists and supported Arab regimes hostile to the Islamist movement.

Kuwait is attempting to reconcile the feuding states, with the Qatari emir meeting Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah last week.

Original source

By Luke Hunt

Cambodians go to the polls June 4 to elect more than 12,000 district officials following a campaign marred by threats of war, the jailing of opposition supporters and an economy that’s struggling to cope with job seekers.

Importantly, commune elections are a key indicator for the ruling Cambodia People’s Party (CPP) that performed poorly at national elections four years ago after the youth vote sided with the opposition and sharply reduced the government’s number of seats in parliament.

Since then, defamation laws have been criminalized and supporters of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) jailed.

Those laws forced CNRP leader Sam Rainsy into early retirement and Kem Sokha, his former deputy is now in charge. A solid performance this weekend will improve his chances of becoming prime minister at national elections due mid next year.

CNRP parliamentarians have also been bashed and a prominent political commentator, Kem Ley, was gunned down in broad daylight last year. Media outlets have been told they will be closed if they fail to obey election guidelines.

The government insists opposition supporters are not being targeted for political reasons but rather the police and courts were holding lawbreakers to account. Others have doubts.

Post-war baby boomers have emerged as a major political demographic in recent years. They are better educated and demand better paid jobs. Unlike their parents, they do not support Hun Sen en masse just because he ended three decades of war in 1998.

That could be behind his threats of war, recently repeated before an audience of 4,000 Cambodian Christians, telling them: “The only option is that the CPP must win elections at all stages … to ensure the lives of millions of people, we are willing to eliminate 100 or 200 people.”

Relations between the government and the major religions here — Buddhism, Islam and Christianity — are solid but those at the Christian rally were wary.

“It was a big threat, a very big threat,” said Sunny Amjad, activities coordinator at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Phnom Penh. His sentiments were echoed by Thai Pahna, a catechism instructor and a spokesman for St. Joseph’s.

“The election means so much for Cambodians and for me. Though we are Catholic we must go and vote, in support of the country,” he said.

“I cannot say what will happen in the future but I don’t fear an outbreak of war. It does instill fear in my parents as they are old and have faced the hardships of the past but to me it is just a political message reminding us that war once happened,” he said.

Cambodia is overwhelmingly Buddhist and that can influence politics here. Four monks were briefly detained last weekend by police with electric batons after urging voters not to support political parties that use intimidation to pressure voters.

“Relations between the government and religion are excellent but there are concerns, including illegal Vietnamese immigration and de-forestation,” Thai Pahna said. “Change is also good for democracy and we hope to see some new faces in the communes.”

Mu Sochua, a senior CNRP figure, said the advent of social media and access to independent information had undermined threats of war among the nation’s youth who are more concerned about the country’s faltering economy.

Cambodia has relied heavily on China to bolster its economy in recent years but a massive blow out in debt and a slowdown in industrial output has caused the People’s Republic to stumble on the financial front, casting doubts over aid and investment here.

Despite the slowdown, government spokesman Phay Siphan was confident the CPP would perform well at the June 4 commune elections.

“Everywhere we go the people; they cheer us, even in the remote villages,” he said.

Mu Sochua expects the CNRP to win 60 percent of the overall vote up from 30 percent in 2012. Analysts said the CPP would be happy to limit any swing against it to 10 percent after winning 60 percent of the overall vote four years ago.

US President Donald Trump left Israel on Tuesday afternoon, May 23, 2017, after a visit lasting just 28 hours. In the words of the leader in the Jerusalem Post the next morning, “his major contribution to the peace process so far has been his successful resuscitation of non-cynical discourse on the prospects of peace. But the truly hard work has barely begun.”

Widely noticed, and extensively remarked upon, was the fact that throughout his tour of the Holy Land, which included a meeting with PA President Abbas in Bethlehem, the words “Palestinian state,” “two-state solution,” “settlements,” or “embassy” never passed Trump’s lips. What he did say, more than once, was that he firmly believed that peace between Israel and the Palestinians was possible.

During his meeting with Arab leaders in Riyadh, Trump had been impressed by their apparent willingness to engage with Israel, but they made it clear that normalizing relations between the moderate Sunni states and Israel was dependent on a successful outcome to Israel-Palestinian peace talks. All the same there were indications that a warming of relations could occur earlier, if positive steps were taken by Israel leading towards a settlement. Media reports in early May 2017, just prior to Trump’s visit, revealed that an unreleased discussion paper had been shared among several Gulf countries which proposed the lifting of some trade restrictions, opening direct telecommunications links, and allowing Israeli aircraft to overfly their countries. Other incentives could include issuing visas to Israeli sports teams and trade delegations for events in Arab states, and opening the region for Israeli trade and business.

Accordingly – at odds with recent statements by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – Trump adhered to the traditional view that a settlement of the Israel-Palestinian dispute was the key to unlocking an unprecedented empowerment of the region. Reflecting the position expressed to him by the Arab leaders, Trump indicated that a peace settlement would bring in its train widespread economic cooperation across the Middle East, including Israel, ushering in an era of industrial, technological and commercial development never previously experienced.

In his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2014 Netanyahu had tentatively proposed an alternative scenario, apparently the exact opposite, that he subsequently repeated on more than one occasion. He said:

“After decades of seeing Israel as their enemy, leading states in the Arab world increasingly recognize that, together, we and they face many of the same dangers. Principally this means a nuclear-armed Iran and militant Islamist movements gaining ground in the Sunni world…Many have long assumed that an Israeli-Palestinian peace can help facilitate a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world. But these days I think it may work the other way around – namely that a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world may help facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

In fact the two points of view are not chalk and cheese. If the Sunni Arab world had not already realized that they shared vital – indeed existential – interests with Israel, Trump would have found little sympathy among his Arab hosts with the idea of future close cooperation with Israel.

Netanyahu’s vehement opposition to the nuclear deal concluded between the western world and Iran in 2016 had been music to the ears of many Sunni Arab states, especially those in the Gulf, which had long suffered from Iranian-inspired efforts to destabilise and overthrow their regimes. Iran’s ambitions to dominate the Sunni states of the region and impose its own brand of Shi’ite Islam on them had made that non-Arab, albeit Muslim, state a feared enemy.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates do not recognize Israel, yet remarks by Israeli minister Israel Katz on February 27, 2017 seemed to let the cat out of the bag. “Yes, there is cooperation between Israel and these countries,” said Katz, “which cannot be discussed in detail. This cooperation is going to be significantly upgraded, because the US is going to lead it. The first goal is to block Iran and push it out of the area.”

Israeli-Arab cooperation across the region is a fact of life. The Israeli and Egyptian military have long been collaborating closely in the Sinai peninsula, fighting jihadist terrorists. Israeli-Jordanian relations blossomed in the autumn of 2016 when the two sides signed a 15-year gas purchase agreement valued at $10 billion, under which Jordan will buy 45 billion cubic meters of gas from Israel.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with his strong Muslim Brotherhood roots, supports Hamas and rarely misses an opportunity to lambast Israel, yet June 2016 saw a formal end to the six-year rift between the two countries following the Mavi Marmara affair, and the restoration of diplomatic relations. In the first quarter of 2017 Turkish exports to Israel increased by 20 percent and Israeli exports to Turkey rose by 45 percent.

As for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Israeli technology firms are engaged in secret, extensive business dealings with them. Media reports claim that “trade and collaboration in technology and intelligence are flourishing between Israel and a host of Arab states, even if the people and companies involved rarely talk about it publicly.”

So Trump has a solid foundation on which to build his Israel-Palestinian peace initiative, should he choose to do so. His next step, if earlier reports are to be credited, is likely to be some form of US-led, but Arab-dominated, conference aimed at setting the parameters of future face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Provided with a “regional umbrella”, and encouraged by Trump’s obvious desire and support for a successful outcome, PA President Abbas might at last feel sufficiently protected to engage in meaningful discussions with Israel.

The economic engagements in a Globalizing South Asia and its impact on new trade avenues can no longer be stratified and sanctified by regionalism, nationalism or localism. Rather; an analysis of the security environment of a particular area must address the global ramifications and repercussions that may have an overt or covert impact on the specific area of territorial integrity of a country including India.

The new economic engagements should not be a catalyst to decimate regional alliances like SAARC and its economic activities under SAFTA that requires being re-calibrated to be in tune with the new economic realities of this region. At the same time, socio-political sagacity has doubled the expectations of the people across the globe, and at the same mounted tremendous pressure upon states and the societies. The territorial integrity scenario after 9/11 has emplaced a new definition of national security that is impregnated with the US orientation and may not be standard for all nation–states, while posing a dichotomy that in an inter–dependent world territorial integrity cannot be ensured contrary to the principle of sovereign equality.

However, there is another narrative of supremacy called globalization that refers to various processes embracing political, social, economic, technological and cultural metamorphosis. Globalization encapsulates the ambit of the uniformity of political ideas and practices; the degree of economic integration, creating a unique policy framework, and the diffusion of technologies, etc. Thus, this system put in place by the United States eventually worked so efficiently that it appeared as something that had evolved naturally — but it was an illusion of high order, it was a work of political panache and serious interactions deviant to international economic order based on the principles of competitiveness, openness, and multilateralism.

Consequently, this has changed the global security environment resulting in the rise of terrorism. In this context, China has presented the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as an all-powerful engine of economic growth for the states along the new Silk Route. China’s BRI has to create a modern day silk route that is enormous and humongous in scale and stature if measured against actual orientation of this course.

Therefore, BRI is a new economic entity that is destined to carve out its geoeconomic and politico-strategic relevance in an environment of trust deficit in the South Asia region. India has not participated in this colossal venture, despite the fact India supported the idea of economic engagement and economic diplomacy as an instrument of confidence building measures (CBMs) among all the nation-states.

Art, culture, sports, science, trade and people to people contacts has always been advocated, promoted, and perceived by India as an integral part of Track-II Diplomacy in South Asia — notwithstanding the fact that Pakistan has occupied a large chunk of India’s land in Kashmir, which known as the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), and a portion of Western PoK that has been transferred to Pakistan to China. In the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, China had captured a huge part of Ladakh in the North-East of J&K and this border dispute is still being negotiated by both the countries.

On the other hand, China is deliberately raising questions on Arunachal Pradesh and its integration within India. Additionally, China started developing trans-border infrastructure in the disputed territory of Kashmir (India) in the 1960s along the Karakoram Highway, which has solidified the presence of China in PoK. Thus, both China and Pakistan constructed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) from Kashgar in China to Gwadar in Baluchistan-Pakistan for their economic prosperity. But CPEC as part of new silk route has deprived all the stakeholders along the road in Pakistan and India. Nevertheless, trade and business have been chosen as a mollifying point by the successive governments in India since 1950. Trade relations with India with its South Asia plus countries are good, barring few aberrations.

India has a serious trajectory of reservations to justify its absence at the BRI Forum inaugurated in Beijing, but one of the most important is the sovereignty of India over PoK — as this part of PoK has been used to build BRI. Moreover, India’s MEA office expressed its profound concerns and affirmed that “no country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Such statements may have implications detrimental to India’s economic growth in the long run. India could have justified its participation at BRI Forum by reiterating and renewing the claim of its national sovereignty and territorial integrity over PoK, and it would have been difficult for China and Pakistan to create any discord at the opening ceremony. Moreover, India is an economic giant and political force to reckon with and has one of the biggest bazaars in the world, and no country can afford to ignore its anxieties for long. Therefore, India could have joined BRI Forum or should join in future for the following reasons:

• That India is an economic might and no country in the world howsoever big or small has the temerity to isolate or ignore it and its concerns relating to territorial integrity;
• That India occupies an indispensable geostrategic location in the South Asian region which empowers India to claim its national sovereignty within the architecture of BRI Forum by resorting to credible trade negotiations;
• That India can create bottlenecks for the smooth functioning of BRI if its concerns are not addressed pragmatically as China has been doing against India’s bid to enter into NSG and vetoing India’s efforts to get Hafiz Saeed declared an international terrorist in UN Security Council;
• That India, as part of BRI Forum, will be better equipped to neutralize Pakistan in the affairs of Kashmir. Economic engagement through BRI Forum will strengthen the existing doctrine of bilateralism between India and Pakistan;
• That India must not put Chinese incursions into Indian territories on the backburner, rather India must diplomatically raise such issues with repercussions of economic nature contrary to the gamut of political camaraderie at multilateral platforms. There must be the unified approach of India toward both China and Pakistan at the anvil of bilateralism;
• That China will not be able to risk economic loss at the cost of political friendship with Pakistan and India can make the SAARC grouping more growth-oriented and make efforts to convert the SAARC into EU (European Economic Union) as SEU (SAARC Economic Union);
• That India along with SAARC member states must seriously consider the expansion of the SAARC by drafting Iran and Myanmar into it to balance Sunni Pakistan with a Shia Iran on many issues of international and regional economic importance in the field of agriculture, energy, and counter-terrorism drives, etc.;
• That India must re-invigorate, re-galvanize, and re-cast its relationship with Russia in the light of contemporary dimensions of a multi-polar world order to checkmate the Chinese hegemony in South Asia. Meanwhile, India must re-engage with Western governments on the issue of discouraging right-wing nationalism, promoting pluralism, and believing in diversity;
• That India must participate in creating cross-border infrastructure in a manner of seeking a lasting peace, cooperation, and development in Kashmir. It is possible only if Pakistan and China show their credible sincerity and take adequate CMBs by emplacing a political framework for economic engagement in a Globalizing South Asia;
• That India should seriously embark upon modernization of existing infrastructure in the J&K and create an inalienable integration with the whole of India regarding education, health, central administrative and police services, respect for Kashmiriyat (Kashmir-ness), Insaniyat (Humanity), and Jamhuriyat (Democracy) for the overall development of the state. India must review its foreign policy on Tibet and must not recognize Tibet as an integral part of China if the China does not recognize India’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh.

It can aptly be concluded that India is confronted with a Dragon Orbit that is determined to engulf entire maritime and littoral lines in South Asia in the garb of new silk route (BRI) to establish itself as a new centre of economic propulsion. Primarily, India must strive to abdicate its political cynicism towards the parts of North-East, all Islands, and small nation-states in the vicinity.

The integration of Kashmir with India is not only a finality of territorial sovereignty and integrity, but also it is a psychological, mental and unity discourse beyond the boundaries of bilateralism that rejects all sorts of interventions and mediations. Therefore, Chinese interference in Kashmir at the instigation of Pakistan is bound to be boomeranged in economic, political and strategic parlance in future.

Therefore, BRI project and CPEC venture are of vast economic importance and any action that might derail China could not tolerate these initiatives. In this conspectus, China is bound to address the Indian anxieties while having a re-think on its infrastructural projects in Kashmir and India must accelerate its socio-economic and development agenda in Arunachal Pradesh. Therefore, India should formulate a two-fold approach to BRI; firstly, it should join BRI Forum and secondly, it must engage SAARC member states in meaningful dialogue for economic dividends for the intra and extra SAARC region de novo.

About the author:
Nafees Ahmad, Ph. D., LL.M., Assistant Professor, Faculty of Legal Studies-South Asian University-New Delhi [an International University established by the SAARC Nations]. Dr. Nafees Ahmad is an Indian national who holds a Doctorate (Ph.D.) in International Refugee Law and Human Rights wherein he concentrated on International Forced Migrations, Climate Change Refugees & Human Displacement Refugee, Policy, Asylum, Durable Solutions and Extradition Issus. He conducted research on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from Jammu & Kashmir and North-East Region in India and has worked with several research scholars from US, UK and India and consulted with several research institutions and NGO’s in the area of human displacement and forced migration. He has introduced a new Program called Comparative Constitutional Law of SAARC Nations for LLM along with International Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law and International Refugee Law. He has been serving since 2010 as Senior Visiting Faculty to World Learning (WL)-India under the India-Health and Human Rights Program organized by the World Learning, 1 Kipling Road, Brattleboro VT-05302, USA for Fall & Spring Semesters Batches of US Students by its School for International Training (SIT Study Abroad) in New Delhi-INDIA nafeestarana@gmail.com, drnafeesahmad@sau.ac.in

(RFE/RL) — British police say they have responded to at least one “terrorist” incident in London, with witnesses saying several pedestrians had been struck down by a car on London Bridge and several other people had been stabbed near the site.

Police early on June 4 said the incident is being treated as a “terrorist” act. A few minutes earlier, Prime Minister Theresa May had said the “terrible incident” is being treated as “potential act of terrorism.”

There were no immediate official details on casualties, but witnesses said they saw several people injured, and the BBC reported that more than one person had died.

British police earlier said they had also responded to an incident at the Borough Market area, possibly involving the same assailants as the nearby London Bridge incident.

The BBC reported that police were searching for three possibly armed suspects involved in the attack that occurred around 10 p.m. London time (2100 GMT).

Multiple news agencies quoted witnesses as saying they had seen several injured on the ground near the London Bridge incident.

Unconfirmed reports also quoted witnesses as having seen people with serious knife wounds near London Bridge. Sky News quoted witnesses as saying they had heard shots fired.

The London Ambulance Service said it was sending multiple vehicles to London Bridge.

BBC reporter Holly Jones, who was on the bridge, said she saw a van “probably traveling at about 50 miles an hour.”

“He swerved right round me and then hit about five or six people,” Jones reported.

No information was available about the potential incident at Borough Market.

“As well as London Bridge, officers have also responded to an incident in Borough Market,” the police said. “We have armed police at the scenes.”

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter, “Whatever the United States can do to help out in London and the U. K., we will be there – WE ARE WITH YOU. GOD BLESS!”

In another tweet, he wrote: We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”

The U.K. has been under high alert after recent terror incidents and ahead of the June 8 general election.

On March 22, three people were killed and at least 29 were hurt when a driver struck pedestrians on Westminster Bridge near Parliament in London. The car then crashed into the fence around Parliament and the driver attacked an officer with a knife.

More recently, a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a music concert by U.S. pop singer Ariana Grande in Manchester on May 22.

What happens if the TSA catches someone with a firearm at one of their checkpoints? It happens a lot. Last year the TSA found 3,391 guns in carry-ons at checkpoints. This happened to a friend of mine this week. Here’s what he told me.

He and his wife were going through the TSA checkpoint to go to their flight when the TSA found a handgun in her purse. She carries it regularly and had forgotten to leave it home before her flight. The TSA allowed my friend to take his wife’s handgun back to their car in the airport parking lot. A TSA employee accompanied my friend to the car and watched him lock the handgun in the car’s glove compartment. They then left on their flight, gun-free.

My friend’s story reminded me of another story I’d read in the news a few months ago. Guitarist Rick Derringer had been found with a handgun at a TSA checkpoint, was charged, pleaded guilty and was fined $1,000. Some people are charged; some they let go.

There are several differences in the two cases, including the fact that Derringer actually carried his gun on a plane and the TSA discovered it after he arrived in the US on an international flight. Also, Derringer claimed to have carried the gun regularly on past flights, whereas my friend’s wife forgot she had it in her purse. But, if she’d gotten past the checkpoint with the forgotten gun, she also would have carried it on the plane.

I’m not passing judgment here on the TSA, Rick Derringer, or my friend’s forgetful wife. I’m just passing along this story because I thought it would interest some readers of The Beacon.

My guess is that readers will have many different reactions to it, depending on lots of things, including where they are living. I conjecture that people living in rural areas are more comfortable with the idea of people carrying guns, as would be people in the South compared with people in the Northeast or on the West coast.

I’m surely oversimplifying by stereotyping people by where they live, but I will note that my home state of Florida, which has a population of just under 21 million has issued 1.6 million concealed weapon permits. About half the population is under 21 and so not eligible for a permit, so easily more than 10% of the population is permitted to carry a concealed firearm. Not all of them do, of course, but it gives you an idea of the comfort level many Floridians have regarding carrying firearms.

In this context, it is easy to picture TSA employees, many of whom will hold concealed weapons permits themselves, sympathizing with a forgetful woman who had a firearm in her purse as she went through TSA screening, and allowing her husband to take it back to their car.

Some readers will view this as an innocent mistake; others will see it as a violation of the law that should have been punished. I don’t know what the consequences are for people found with firearms by the TSA except in these two cases (Rick Derringer’s and my friend’s). Should they be prosecuted, like Derringer, or let go, like my friend?

This article was published at The Beacon.

While western couples get their longed-for child, Indian surrogate mothers are left with a feeling of having sacrificed more than they have gained. Surrogacy can never become a win-win situation, according to anthropologist Kristin Engh Førde.

“Can we really do this, can we defend it?” the desperate couple asks in their hotel room in Mumbai.

They have done a lot of research before coming to India, but are still not convinced whether it is possible to find an ethically justifiable way to go through with surrogacy.

“The room quivered when I interviewed them,” said Kristin Engh Førde.

“So much was at stake. They feared having to choose between two extremely strong desires. Between being the type of people they wanted to be – the people their entire social universe presupposes that they are – or having this baby that they so deeply desire.”

But the couple that introduces chapter four of Førde’s PhD thesis on surrogacy in India is atypical for the selection of parents she has interviewed.

“The last time I spoke to them they had concluded that this isn’t ethically justifiable,” said the anthropologist.

The rest of the parents reach the opposite conclusion. Following ethical considerations, they conclude that it is a win-win situation for them and the Indian woman who will be carrying forth the baby on their behalf. They believe that they have stayed clear of dishonest actors and found ethically responsible clinics.

One of Førde’s findings is precisely this: When you are privileged, you also have the privilege to define the world according to your own standpoint. With support from the way in which surrogacy has been organised in India, it is perfectly possible to see the exchange as a pure win-win situation.

Another of Førde’s findings is, on the other hand, that it is impossible to defend surrogacy in India as an arrangement between equals. It gives highly unequal results for the involved parties. The western parents can bring a baby home with them. The Indian woman who has given birth to their baby, earn a sum of money that isn’t sufficient to get her out of poverty. The women are often left with a sense of loss: they have given someone a huge gift, but aren’t even close to be receiving the equivalent in return.

Just have to have a child

India’s golden days as surrogacy destination was over in 2015, when a new legislation made surrogacy for foreigners illegal. When Førde did her fieldwork in 2012 and 2013, India was still the place to go. The clinics preferred by Scandinavians were located in the city Mumbai.

Women in India’s surrogacy industry have been subject to a good deal of research. The parents-to-be have received much less scholarly attention, however. Førde has spoken to thirty-two of them – seven heterosexual couples, seven gay couples, two men whose partners were not available for interviews, and two single men.

And they just have to have a child.

“For instance, I’m talking to single fathers who have had a child on their own. It is more important for them to have a child than a partner,” said Førde.

“The fact that you have a good marriage or a good relation to your nieces and nephews doesn’t mean that you don’t feel a need for having your own children. Having your own child, who is just yours, can’t be replaced by anything. Many of the people I spoke with thought that a life without a child was a poor one.”

Would have adopted

One common objection in surrogacy debates is that it is better to adopt. However, this is practically impossible for the gay men in the material. The heterosexual couples have often tried but failed for various reasons.

“The majority of the people I spoke to would have preferred adoption. It would have been cheaper, and it would have required less research, concern, and criticism.”

The myth that those who make use of surrogacy are so obsessed with continuing their own genes that adoption is not an alternative finds no support in Førde’s study.

“Many of them seem less obsessed with reproducing their own genes than most people are,” said Førde.

“What’s important is to have a child that is just yours. This constrasts with constellations where a gay couple and a lesbian couple have a child together, or a gay couple has a child with a single woman. In such cases, there are three or more parents, but this is not what they want. It’s the nuclear family they’re after.”

Don’t get to meet the surrogate

Before they decide to try surrogacy, the so-called intended parents have worked their way through what most of them perceive as moral dilemmas. One couple choose not to go through with it, the rest conclude that this is justifiable. It is good for them and good for the surrogate – the woman who will be giving birth to the baby on their behalf.

“How can they not know that the surrogates are left with relatively little after this major undertaking, as you’ve also found in your own research?”

“I personally spent several months trying to find out how the surrogates felt about this. It cost me a lot of effort,” Førde said.

“This is one of my most important findings. Who gets to define the reality is closely connected to power. As privileged you also have the privilege to perceive the world as it appears from your own point of view as the truth. At the same time, other truths remain invisible to you.”

Førde has called her thesis Intimate distance. A woman will be giving birth for you, but you don’t get to meet her during her pregnancy and just barely after. Intimate, yet with major distance.

The way in which the clinics operated strengthened the structural distance between the white western childless couples or individuals and the non-white, poor Indian women.

“Many of the parents-to-be also have an understanding that it is better for the surrogates if they don’t get too close to them. They imagine that entering her sphere would be a violation of her privacy,” said Førde.

“This is their paradoxical project: to find out how she experiences it without talking to her.”

Keeping a certain distance is a prerequisite for the process to be legitimate, according to both the future parents and the clinics.

“But not according to the surrogates,” Førde emphasised.

“I never heard any such concern from them. Rather, they perceive the distance as a disadvantage, it weakened their negotiating position.”

Like buying fair trade coffee

But what about available research and not least news reports concerning surrogacy and exploitation of women?

The parents-to-be had put a lot of work into investigations, according to Førde.

“Some thought that research from the US was transferable to India.” But according to Førde, “the surrogates are in a much stronger position in the US. The surrogate often chooses who she wants to give birth for, and there is often frequent contact between surrogate and parents both before and after birth if this is something the surrogate wants. ”

One man had seen a documentary from Gujarat in India during the period when he and his husband were considering surrogacy in India. He said that he was shocked and had nightmares afterwards, thinking, “We are not that kind of people”.

“But then he met someone who had been to a clinic in Mumbai,” said Førde.

“This clinic has promoted itself as an ethical alternative specifically directed at the Scandinavian market.”

According to the anthropologist, the clinic has accommodated the western customers’ wishes. They knew how to talk about and represent things in a way that appealed to Scandinavians. For instance, they had hired a psychologist for the surrogates. This was something that the parents liked, but according to Førde, it was neither useful for nor appreciated by the surrogates.

“Benefiting from conversations with a psychologist requires a competence which is strongly connected to a western mind-set and way of living.”

But the western adjustment worked; the clinic had many Scandinavian customers.

“Many ended up thinking that the ethical problems were related to internal Indian circumstances rather than to surrogacy itself, or to the global relations that facilitate this.”

Førde compares it to buying fair trade coffee.

“We’re looking for ways to compensate for structural inequality. We’re all trying to do things on micro level to make up for what is structured on the macro level.”

“Some had seen or heard gross descriptions of bad conditions and unethical practice, and had reacted to that. But they strongly believed that it was possible to create ethical enclaves within a ‘dirty’ market. A part of their ethical project was to steer away from the bad actors and find those who sold in ethics as part of their package.”

When desperation becomes profit

According to Førde, we can’t place too much responsibility on individuals.

“These parents often face a banal moralism which takes for granted that they are highly self-centred and unscrupulous people, but they are not,” she claimed.

“They are marginalised people in a society that strongly emphasises the importance of having children.”

“It’s a mistake to assume that those who choose surrogacy are less morally reflective or that they have less integrity than others. The problem is not the individuals’ weak morals, but the dilemmas that arise when peoples’ emotions and inner desperate desires become profit. When the market enters these areas of human life, moral integrity and our ability to make assessments are seriously tested,” according to the researcher.

“But aren’t these individual acts the basis for the structures on the macro level?”

“This touches upon a classic debate within the social sciences. I belong to the academic tradition that is interested in how power relations structure our choices and experiences. Our scope of action – both our alternatives for action and our repertoire for thinking about the world in which we live are structured by the social relations we’re born into.”

“I don’t mean to deprive people of their free will, but I don’t think transnational surrogacy exists simply because some western individuals have low morals.”

Moralising is no solution

According to Førde, it is not only the underprivileged that lack insight into the power relations restricting their lives. The privileged also have difficulties seeing that their experiences and opportunities are shaped by structures they benefit from.

“I also went on fieldwork with privileges. I can do my fieldwork because I’m an educated white western woman. It was an enormous realisation for me to understand that there is nothing I can do to disclaim my postcolonial privileged position as white. It is written in my body, it is what I am.”

“But you’ve become aware of these privileges?”

“It helps. You can compensate to some extent. The parents were also aware of their privilege. But you can’t disclaim privileges as an individual choice, it is impossible.”

According to Førde, the moralism dominating the debates on issues such as surrogacy does not bring us any step further.

“I’ve experienced that people use their energy on moralising rather than looking for causes and solutions on the structural level. But it doesn’t help to judge your overworked neighbours because they have an au pair or congratulate yourself because you don’t. Again: it reduces phenomena that are founded on global and gendered inequality to questions of individuals’ moral character. People’s reproductive marginalisation is also a dilemma that we have to take into consideration.”

“Perhaps the reality is that some people can’t have children, and they just have to accept that?”

“It is, but who should be excluded from reproduction is a political question and no longer a ‘natural’ consequence of biological variation, if that has ever been the case. Society already helps people who can’t have children on their own through reproductive technology and adoption. As of today, infertile heterosexual and lesbian couples are offered help, whereas homosexual male couples are excluded. This is problematic and should be discussed.”

Gay men major part of the market

In Førde’s material, just over half of the intended parents are gay men.

While the heterosexual couples had been through several attempts to have a baby – IVF treatment, adoption – surrogacy was often the gay couples’ first attempt.

“To the heterosexuals, surrogacy was often regarded as a sad final stop; they had tried everything and ended up with something far different from what they had first imagined. The gay men had not tried everything and failed at each and every attempt, they did not to the same extent carry the stories of disappointment as part of their baggage,” said Førde.

“To them it was more like, ‘Wow, we can do this, finally we can also have a child’.”

Gay men represented a major part of the group who left Scandinavia to go to India for surrogacy until 2015.

“The number of couples who are infertile because of the woman is limited, and this is a solution for them. But there are many gay couples who want to become parents, and the fact that commercial surrogacy became a possibility for them contributed to a growing desire for children,” says Førde.

Surrogate, not mother

The thesis is also based on in-depth interviews with twenty-seven surrogates.

Six of the women were in the process of surrogacy, whereas the rest had finished between four weeks and three years ago. A major part of the women considered becoming surrogates again. Approximately half of them had also donated eggs.

In western debates there have been much discussion concerning the terms we use to talk about surrogates. The Indian women didn’t seem to have any strong opinions about this, according to Førde.

“American surrogates often have a policy when it comes to the use of terminology, but the Indian women didn’t. This may have to do with the fact that their experiences with surrogacy were less articulated. Many of them had barely spoken about their experience with anyone before I interviewed them. They had to a very little degree made use of their language in order to sort out their experiences the way western surrogates seem to have done.”

The researcher has deliberately chosen to use the term ‘surrogate’ instead of ‘surrogate mother’.

“I think it works, because it leaves open what kind of experience this is, and that it varies between individuals and over time. The term ‘surrogate mother’ connects the experience to certain connotations in our culture, and does not capture the complex and disparate experience conveyed by the Indian women.”

It’s not that surrogacy doesn’t have anything to do with motherhood, but this was about something completely different from being pregnant with and giving birth to one’s own children. Additionally, many experienced that the way in which they perceived their own relation to the child changed through the various phases of the process.

Desperation, class, and patriarchy

A commonly used argument in favor of surrogacy is that this is a win-win situation. A childless couple gets a baby. A woman, who is often portrayed as independent and capable of making her own choices, chooses to carry and give birth to this child for a sum of money that will put an end to her poverty.

“The story about an autonomous woman who chooses to use her body as she pleases and makes money on it does not go down well in the Mumbai slum,” Førde emphasised.

“These women’s stories are about desperation produced by the class society and the Indian patriarchy. They are financially and socially marginalized, and this background is the reason why they become surrogates.”

The women that Førde has spoken with are not just poor; they are often poor women who have lost direction in life. Something has gone wrong – a sort of social fall, often related to marriage. Their husband has died, they’ve gone through a divorce, or their husband is not able to provide for them.

“They are forced to make money for their family and their chances for succeeding are extremely low. They have no education and very little experience on the job market. Some have a major debt to pay, such as a hospital bill.”

Working as a house cleaner, which was the alternative for many of the women, would only be a drop in the ocean.

“Many feel that surrogacy is a chance they have to take. And it’s important for them to distance themselves from the choice. It was not something they wanted; it was something they had to do.”

A medical baby

Just like the so-called intended parents, the surrogates also have to work with ethical dilemmas. They have to make it morally acceptable for themselves to be pregnant with someone else’s baby and to give the baby away after birth.

“The fact that they are paid for it doesn’t make it justifiable,” said Førde.

“On the contrary, they have to distance it from prostitution and from giving away their child.”

The surrogates’ way of doing this is known from other research. The relation to the pregnancy and the baby must be made into something different from what it normally is. The way in which the child was conceived was central here. The child was a ‘medical baby’.

“The story they make about the surrogate child is that it is a baby created outside their own body, from medications, which was nourished from medications during pregnancy, and in a way belonged to the medicinal more than to themselves.”

And it’s important for the women to emphasize that they’re not doing it for the sake of the money – they’re doing it for the sake of their own children.

“Their stories are often quite far from the neoliberal story of reproductive workers in a global market,” said Førde.

“They go far in making it about a gift economy. The money is not the final station; it’s a means in order to do good. Being a surrogate becomes equivalent to being a good mother – they do this because they are good mothers to their own children.”

“The women do not present themselves – and probably do not think of themselves – as modern, liberated women who choose to do what they please with their body, but rather as desperate, powerless mothers who are willing to sacrifice their own health and respectability for their children.”

And it is preferable that her surroundings don’t know what she’s done. There is no acceptance for surrogacy in the local community, and it has been very tough for some of those whose story has been revealed.

The money doesn’t change lives

The win-win arguments ultimately fail, however, because the money that the women make from being surrogates – approximately 30.000 to 35.000 Norwegian kroner when Førde did her field work – does not suffice. At least it is not enough to permanently put an end to their poverty.

“That is probably the most depressing of all my findings,” said Førde.

“There are many reasons why the money doesn’t suffice,” according to the anthropologist. “First of all, it is not a huge sum of money in the first place. If the goal is to buy a house, the money from a surrogate pregnancy is not enough to buy property in Mumbai, not even a very humble one. Additionally, many of the women have major debts to pay. Handling large sums of money and making them last are also a skills which might not be within reach for someone who can’t read or write,” Førde emphasises.

The researcher got particularly close to one of the women whom she has chosen to call Lata in her thesis. Since Lata could speak some English, she and Førde could talk without the use of an interpreter. This led to a different type of contact than with the rest of the women. Lata spent her money on renovating her 12 m2 house. She tiled the floor, bought a fridge, installed a WC and put in a window. Through egg donation, she could later afford to put in a flush button on her WC.

“She was proud of it. She said, ‘my children have better lives than before.’ And her marriage became better as a result,” said Førde.

But she didn’t have money to implement her original plan, which was to invest in social mobility by sending her children to a better school where they could learn English and qualify for middle class jobs.

“She could perhaps have sent one of them to such a school for one or two years instead of renovating the house. That’s how little money it is.”

Dream about a life-long relation to the parents

Førde met women who grieved the loss of the baby they had given away for a long time, but this was not the most common experience.

Many described a sense of loss that had more to do with the feeling that they had given something big and received very little in return.

“They had helped a child to life with their own bodies; they had given their pain, love, care, and sacrifice. It was like, ‘I have made her a mother, and I am left behind with a life that hasn’t changed at all.’ This was the loss.”

In the beginning, they had entered surrogacy as if it were ‘only a job’. During the process, what they gave was often redefined as a gift.

“The Indian women seemed to have a different understanding of money and close relations than the western parents. The same applies to close relations and people who are socially unequal. For the western parents, and perhaps especially the Scandinavians, this was perceived as very demanding and full of dilemmas. It was uncomfortable for the parents to enter relations with a debt of gratitude, and have a relation with someone that they had an unsettled moral obligation towards,” said Førde.

“The surrogates often dreamt about such an undefined obligation, a little like, ‘if everything goes to hell, there is someone who can save me. Like I saved them.’ This would have been perceived as unmanageable for many of the parents.”

Lata’s dream was to be able to negotiate her own contract and thus add a gift element to it. Instead of getting a one-time payment, she wanted the clients to take responsibility for her own children’s education.

Regulating and fighting inequalities

“Given your findings, that surrogacy is not a win-win situation but is rather based on and imbued with unequal relations that are reproduced – can you imagine ways to do this that would make it more equal? That would involve less exploitation and more fairness?”

“I’m not sure. There would have to be an explicit ambition that the inequality should be taken into consideration, and an explicit goal to compensate for it rather than strengthen it,” Førde said.

“Such efforts are not made in the global surrogacy market today. The scope of the inequality is not recognised, which is necessary for this to happen. It is global inequality that structures the world; it also applies to those who manufacture our t-shirts.”

“Lata’s dream was to negotiate her own contract, could this not have been something?”

“Yes, I think having direct contact with the people you are being a surrogate for would be beneficial. The surrogates’ position should also be strengthened in all possible ways, for instance by paying for their doctor and lawyer, and an interpreter that is not paid by an intermediary. But this would also have made it less attractive for many intended parents. It would be more expensive, but the inequality – both social and cultural – would be much more importunate. The distance is probably part of what is attractive for those who choose India.”

The transnational surrogacy industry in India seems to be a finished chapter. But Førde is quite certain that new low-cost destinations are due to appear soon.

“I find it difficult to imagine that this will be an unproblematic exchange of respective goods, when it is founded on structural inequality. At the same time, I find it difficult to decide that this shouldn’t be legal. Moreover, a global prohibition is hardly realistic. It is the same dilemma as we see in the prostitution debate and the debate concerning au pairs.”

The surrogates, the prostitutes, the au pairs. Cheap t-shirts and fair trade coffee.

“Should we just give up, then?”

“I don’t believe in letting the principles butt against each other so intensely that we fail to help the women who are in the middle of this. The demand must be as much regulation as possible, which compensates for the inequality in the best possible way. This is the preliminary solution.”

“The real solution is of course to liberate the world’s women and fight to neutralise the inequality between people.”

Facts: Surrogacy in India

• India’s first baby from gestational surrogacy – where the baby is a product of artificial insemination – was born in 1994.
• In 2002, entering into agreements on surrogacy was legalised by the Indian Supreme Court. Following this there was a boom in the commercial surrogacy industry.
• In 2007, Oprah Winfrey’s popular American TV show visited a couple who had made use of surrogacy in India. This is often considered the starting shot for the global interest in traveling to India for surrogacy.
• Various estimates have concluded that in 2012, 25.000 children had been born through surrogacy in India. Another estimate says that between 2500-4000 children are born through surrogacy each year.
• In 2012-2013, the cost of having a child through surrogacy in India was approximately one third (between 200.000 and 500.000) compared to that of the US.
• Between the years 2009 and 2013, between 350 and 500 Scandinavian children were born through surrogacy in India.
• A new legislation on surrogacy from 2015 made it illegal for foreigners to make use of surrogacy in India. The authorities wish to ban commercial surrogacy for Indian couples

By Ana Maria Touma

Romania’s state-funded Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes on Thursday submitted a demand for the Attorney General’s office to investigate 771 deaths in the now infamous Communist-era orphanages for children with disabilities.

The listed deaths occurred in three centres for children with disabilities – at Sighetu Marmatiei, in the north, Cighid, in the north-west, and at Pastraveni, in the east – between 1966 and the fall of the regime in 1990.

Researchers said they are just a small fraction of a much wider investigation that is needed into Romania’s 26 “special orphanages”, whose personnel are accused of inhumane treatment of children.

Most the deaths on the ICCMER list submitted to prosecutors occurred as a result of pneumonia or chronic encephalopathy, but researchers say the illnesses were triggered by the inhumane conditions: cold, lack of proper hygiene and medical care, starvation, rat infestation, and violence and beatings.

After the fall of the regime, images of starving, naked and sick children found in overcrowded Romania’s orphanages shocked the world.

But, despite many media reports and requests by human rights organisations, Romania has never investigated the deaths or prosecuted possible crimes.

The infamous orphanages appeared after the government in 1966 banned abortions, initiating one of the most restrictive demographic policies in the world, historians at the ICCMER say.

“Forced population growth … with no respect for human beings and without ensuring decent living conditions, resulted in an increase in birth deaths as well as infant deaths, but also increased the number of children born with congenital malformations, both physical and psychological [so] … many children simply ended up orphans or abandoned,” a report by the institute reads.

Historians and researchers on the ICCMER team say the Communist authorities used to categorise children with disabilities as “reversible”, “partially reversible” and “non-reversible.” The former were given some treatment to integrate them into society while the latter were discarded in centres.

However, parents were still obliged to cover the costs of medical care in the centres, regardless of their financial situation. Care of orphans with disabilities, including those abandoned at birth, were not included in the state budget.

“For the Communist ideology, only healthy people mattered The ‘scraps’ were hidden, and at the end, discarded,” the ICCMER report reads.

Some healthy children were labeled disabled and ended up in the grim facilities because the state did not have enough budget cash to put them in other orphanages.

Several Romanian organisations that advocate for the rights of children who grew up in the Communist-era orphanages have urged governments to admit and apologise for the inhumane treatment and sexual abuse of an estimated 500,000 children kept in orphanages before the end of the Cold War.

By James Borton and Sandra Erwin

While Vietnam, a war-hardened nation, can’t choose its neighbors, it can certainly choose its friends. Once-implacable foes burdened by a bloody and tragic history, Washington and Hanoi increasingly share overlapping strategic interests that are evident when President Trump hosted Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. Their May 31 meeting is significant since Phuc is the first Southeast Asian leader to visit the White House under the new administration, and it offers the possibility of a bilateral trade deal amidst looming security issues surrounding China’s ongoing aggressive behavior in the South China Sea.

Both nations have a common interest in containing China’s island building activities, and the United States regards Vietnam as a key partner in efforts to patrol contested waters. Just last week, the Trump administration agreed to give Vietnam’s coast guard six US-made coastal patrol boats.

Since Washington lifted the arms embargo last year, Vietnam has been in talks with Western and U.S. arms manufacturers about their need to boost their fleet of fighter jets, helicopters, and maritime patrol aircraft. According to many analysts, this regional security cooperation in the South China Sea now includes joint naval exercises. In Vietnam’s efforts to foster a new partnership, US Navy and Coast Guard vessels have been allowed to dock for repairs and maintenance in Cam Ranh Bay, a former American deep-water port during the Vietnam War.

As part of this widening military-to-military engagement, The US Navy has made several port visits in Da Nang, and fostered regular Pacific Partnership visits in Vietnam.

A tighter security alliance with the United States is certainly a goal of Phuc’s administration, said Michael Green, who served on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration and was in the White House in 2005, when Vietnam’s prime minister made a historic first-ever visit.

Green, who is now vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, heard from officials in Hanoi that Phuc would like to forge an alliance with Trump similar to the one Trump formed with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe.

“I know they want to lock in the kind of relationship that Abe did,” said Green. “Vietnam is not a country that wants to distance itself from the United States because Donald Trump is president.”

Hanoi wants the summit to “go well,” Green said.

For the United States, the stakes are high as well. A US Navy ship in recent days set off alarms when it sailed within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s artificial islands as part of the Navy’s broad “freedom of navigation operations.”

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said these are routine operations that the Navy has been conducting since 1979 and are not meant to be “confrontational,” he added. “We do them in the South China Sea. We do them all over the world. They sure get a lot of attention when they happen.”

It is no secret that Vietnam regards China as an existential threat and Phuc would like to see the United States more engaged in the South China Sea, claims CSIS military strategist Anthony Cordesman.

Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries believe only the United States can curb China’s aggressive actions. One option for the Trump administration is to increase arms sales or transfers of equipment to allies like Vietnam to help shore up their navies.

Vietnam’s defense budget in 2016 was about $4 billion, and it received $12 million in foreign military aid from United States, Cordesman said. There has been speculation for some time that the U.S. will sell or transfer older models of the U.S. Navy P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft to Vietnam.  Such an acquisition would make sense, said Cordesman, as it would give Vietnam a modern capability to patrol waters and track submarines. “The P-3 is not the cutting edge, but it’s modern enough, and it’s affordable.”

A lot of Vietnam’s military equipment is out-of-date Russian gear. The United States might consider providing some newer ships and weapons to replace aging missile corvettes and frigates. Or it could help modernize older vessels with US-made anti-ship missiles, air-defense systems, and sensors.  Under Trump’s proposed budget plans, Vietnam could also find US military donations becoming loans instead.

A military force that is “interoperable” with the United States sends a powerful message, said Cordesman. “It doesn’t have to be a threat to China but it certainly acts as a signal and to some extent a deterrent,” he said. Vietnam is not interested in arming for war, but wants to “be more credible from a negotiating position.”

Former U.S. State Department official Steve Ganyard, now a partner at the consulting firm Avascent, said there is “great anticipation for the prime minister’s visit and hopes of signing a variety of agreements, defense included.”

The US and Vietnam, signed a Comprehensive Partnership in 2013, which covered trade, development, and maritime security, but without calling for specific action. Vietnam has applauded the Trump administration’s strong language when the White House referred to “China’s military fortress” in the South China Sea. However, this rhetoric has quickly faded since the administration has called upon China to pressure North Korea to forego any further nuclear and missile tests.

Washington continues to strengthen its security cooperation with Vietnam, including helping the government build its maritime security capabilities by providing more than $45.7 million since 2014 through the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing and law enforcement capacity-building programs.

All this reinforces that the “US-Vietnam partnership is a critical component of US foreign policy in the Asia Pacific region,” says US Department of State spokeswoman Katrina Adams.

US defense firms realize that Vietnam is still an emerging economy that can’t yet afford “gold-plated” weapons, Ganyard said. But he expects Vietnam to step up its military modernization as the economy improves. “Its capabilities for high-tech innovation are unmatched by any other ASEAN country. And they are more than willing to develop what they can’t buy.”

Since 2009, bilateral military cooperation between America and Vietnam has continued to increase security linkages between both nations. The shared geopolitical interests appears to have been solidified when China first claimed its “nine-dash line” in an attempt to validate its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. Last year’s international tribunal in The Hague delivered a sweeping rebuke of China’s reclamations of atolls and rocks, and found that its expansive claim to sovereignty over the waters had no legal basis. However, China’s has disregarded the international ruling and continued with the militarization of their reclaimed islands.

“It is an open secret that Vietnam is in the market for coastal radar and maritime patrol aircraft, such as the P-3 Orion. It is a buyer’s market as the U.S., Japan, Australia, and other countries acquire the P-8 Poseidon and retire the Orion. Japan could be a supplier,” claims Carl Thayer from the Australian Defense Force Academy.

The anticipated arrival of Vietnam’s delegation of more than 100 diplomats and business leaders bolsters assurances that Trump will travel to Vietnam in November to attend the APEC Summit. As a sign of expanding business interests between the two countries, the Washington-based US-ASEAN Business Council is hosting a formal dinner reception.

“If the two countries enter a mutually beneficial free-trade agreement that was recently suggested by many American firms doing business in Vietnam, such an agreement will reflect the growing trend and vast potential of our economies and help create more jobs for Americans and Vietnamese alike,” says Dr. Tran Tuan, Minister of Industry and Trade.

While Vietnam was disappointed when the Trump administration signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), it is eager to know what economic turn the new administration takes on its “America First” campaign.

Prime Minister Phuc seeks to control any impact of the new administration’s efforts to reduce trade by offering to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the U.S.

“They also want to get a reading on how the Trump administration plans to engage the region economically after the President canceled the TPP, in which Vietnam would have been a major beneficiary,” claims Murray Hiebert, a senior advisor and Southeast Asia director at CSIS in Washington, D.C.

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.

Russia and Nigeria have taken steps to deepen their economic and political ties, after Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Geoffrey Onyeama, held diplomatic talks with his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, during an official working visit to Moscow on May 29-31.

Lavrov held talks with Onyeama and his delegation on May 30. The foreign ministers discussed issues pertaining to the steady development of bilateral ties in political, trade, economic and humanitarian areas. They concentrated on prospects of cooperation in the nuclear industry, hydrocarbon processing, infrastructure projects and exports of Russian industrial products to Nigeria.

The ministers further held an in-depth exchange of views on international and regional issues, focusing on countering terrorism and extremism, settling crises in Africa, primarily in the Sahara and the Sahel, and fighting pirates in the Gulf of Guinea.

After the closed meeting, Lavrov told a media conference here that the meeting noted a strong potential for cooperation in areas such as hydrocarbon production and processing, nuclear power industry and agriculture, and further expressed mutual interest in continued military-technical and military cooperation and training civilian specialists and law enforcement officers for Nigeria at Russian universities.

“Certainly, the complicated problems that persist on the African continent require coordinated actions of the Africans themselves, with the support of the international community,” Lavrov said.

Russia consistently demands that Africans, first, find the “keys” to African problems, and that the international community should provide moral, political and material support to these efforts. Russia, for instance, has advocated for the fastest possible elimination of instability on the continent, primarily in the Sahara-Sahel zone, South Sudan, Mali and the Central African Republic.

The Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, however, noted Nigeria’s considerable contribution to peacekeeping efforts in all these regions, and added that Russia would be ready to contribute to common efforts to strengthen regional stability through the appropriate efforts at the UN Security Council, through our bilateral relations with African countries, including training peacekeepers and equipping peacekeeping contingents in African countries.

Russia and Nigeria plan to step up an uncompromising fight against international terrorism that threatens national security in both countries and, objectively, the security of all countries. With regard to Nigeria, this of course refers to the heightened activity of the Boko Haram terrorist organization that was associated with so-called ISIS.

“We will continue to support the Nigerian government’s efforts to fight this evil. Of course, the well-known initiative of President Vladimir Putin on establishing a wide-ranging anti-terrorist front based on international law and without attempts to artificially bar someone from taking part in it remains relevant,” Lavrov stressed in his comments at the media conference.

Dr Maurice Okoli, Chairman and CEO of Markol Group, which is based in Moscow but with business links to Nigeria, China and Britain, explained that the visit of Nigerian Foreign Minister Geofrey Onyeoma and his business delegation to Russia came at the right time when Nigeria as a country is facing numerous challenges.

“Russia and Nigeria have enjoyed a very good political and economic relationship that has lasted for many years and this visit will definitely lift that relationship to another level. We are also looking forward that the visit will touch political and economic issues for the mutual benefits for both countries. It is our hope that this visit will help to boast cooperation between Nigeria and Russia especially in the area of fighting Boko Haram insurgency thereby improving security and stability in Nigeria and the region in general,” Dr Okoli wrote in remarks and observations to GNA interview.

Dr Okoli added: “Russia as country has experienced islamic insurgency in the past and having great wealth of experience in handling such issues, i have no doubt that Russian government advise and support will be of an immense value in dealing with the problem of Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and west Africa sub region.”

There is high optimism among business elite and, of course, conditions for raising especially Russia-Nigerian economic cooperation. Russia plans to help Nigeria explore for oil and gas. Nigeria has expressed interest in Russia, helping it build nuclear power plants, petroleum pipelines, railways and other infrastructure. Both Russia and Nigeria have a wealth of minerals – and some could be the basis of additional commerce between the two. Nigeria’s natural resources include gold, bauxite, zinc, tantalum, iron ore and coal.

Nigeria and Russia are both “large economies” and “rich in natural resources,” Goodie Ibru, head of the Chamber of Commerce of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, said at one of the bilateral economic conferences held previously, adding that “although Nigeria is smaller in terms of technology and infrastructure development, there’s a lot for both countries to benefit from.”

The Federal Government of the Republic of Nigeria has, indeed, expressed its support for any Russian genuine and legal investment. Without doubts, Nigeria remains “one of the best countries in the world to do business because of guaranteed return on investment.”

And also quite recently, Ibrahim Usman Gafai, Charge d’Affaires and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in Moscow, told Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview that economic relations between both countries have steadily developed during the past few years with a number of leading Russian companies establishing their presence in Nigeria.

Tellingly, Russian investment in Nigeria covers such areas as energy, iron and steel, and hydrocarbon. Over the years, the diplomatic relationships have also witnessed the establishment of Russia-Nigeria Business Council (RNBC) which oversees economic activities between the two countries.

So far, the two countries have held three meetings of the Joint Commission, the last was held as far back in 2009. The Joint Commission is the platform for the two countries to sit down and draw up agreements and Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on how to conduct businesses and investment in each other’s country.

Russia’s trade figures with Nigeria and many African countries are hard to find. Interestingly, Russia and Nigeria’s two-way trade was a modest $350 million in 2013. Authorities in both countries have repeatedly said that it should be many times larger, given that Russia is the biggest market in the former Soviet Union and Nigeria the biggest market in Africa.

“Unfortunately, trade volume between Nigeria and Russia has been comparatively low and highly skewed in favor of Russia. There has been an attempt to balance the current trend through boosting economic relations between the two friendly nations,” Ibrahim Gafai acknowledged in the GNA interview.

On the other hand, Russian businesses are also encouraged to participate in various annual trade fairs organized by different Chambers of Commerce in Nigeria. In addition, the Moscow’s Nigerian Embassy will continue to call on the two countries to create an investment forum to showcase their potentialities in each other’s territory.

But, the major challenge facing investors from both sides of the divide is dearth of information on each other’s business environment. This has, over the years, created a condition of uncertainty and misgivings among prospective investors.

As part of the initiatives to contribute to revamping the Nigerian economy, Nigerians under the auspices of Nigerians in Diaspora Organization in Europe (NIDOE), the Russian Chapter in collaboration with Russia-Nigeria Business Council, Institute of African Studies and Russian ministries and agencies have adopted corporate strategies in identifying and wooing potential Russian businesses and industry directors to invest in Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Within the context of strengthening the entire relations, it is also necessary to foster cooperation with support from the Intergovernmental Russian-Nigerian Mixed Commission for Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation, and also by stepping up direct contacts between members of the Russian and Nigerian business communities as suggested by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

By Bhaskar Roy*

In the darkness of the night of May 24-25, the statue of Lady Justice, an adaptation of the Greek goddess Themis, was removed from the premises of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. This was a demand from the extreme Islamists, the Hifazat-e-Islam and the Awami Olama League. It was done rather surreptitiously, blocking all roads leading to the site with security cover, in the shadow of darkness. This was done because huge protests were expected from liberals, secularists, intellectuals and artists who are the backbone of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s dream of a modern and inclusive nation in a Muslim majority country. Independence was won at great sacrifice of blood and lives.

Sk. Mujibur Rahman was a giant among the leaders of Bangladesh, trusting and forgiving, even to those who were against him. In the hindsight of history, that may have been his mistake and he paid for it with his life.

When news spread about what was about to happen, progressive students started marching towards the Supreme Court, but were met with teargas shells water cannons and rubber bullets. Police arrested four protesters, including student leader Liton Nondi. This added salt to their wounds. The police registered a case against them and 140 other unidentified persons under section 307 of the penal code relating to attempt to murder.

Is there an attempt to find a scapegoat or a fall guy, just in case? According to Bangladeshi media reports (bdnews24.com, May 27), Awami League General Secretary Obaidul Qader and BNP standing committee member Moudud Ahmed, in a rare moment of unanimity said that the removal of the statue was the decision of Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, and not the government. It is well known that Justice Sinha was under pressure from the government. Prime Minister Sk. Hasina in a meeting with the Ulema in April said she personally did not like the statue and had asked the chief justice to remove it or relocate it to another place (Daily Star, May 27).

It is encouraging to note that Awami League General Secretary Obaidul Quader emphasised (May 27) that Hifazat’s demand to remove all statues was not acceptable. He went on to say that sculptures relating to heritage and upholding the spirit of the Liberation War will not be removed. In fact, he hinted they would be added. This may bring a sense of relief to the liberal civil society in Bangladesh. Earlier this year the Prime Minister dismissed a Hifazat demand not to celebrate the Bengali New Year (Pahela Baishak) saying this was cultural celebration and had nothing to do with religion.

It must however, be understood that radical Islamists very well know that there is nothing religious about Pahela Baishak. But what they really objected to under the cover of religion was the liberal nature of this celebration accompanied by songs, dance and recitation of poetry. This demonstration of free spirit is anathema to the distorted interpretation of the religion as evidenced by the rules of radical groups and terror outfits such as the Islamic state or Daesh. Traces of this kind of movement have been witnessed in the Kashmir valley, India, where some elements among the militants recently tried to divert the so-called azadi movement to establish Daesh ideology. It must also be kept in view that Daesh is peeping over the shoulders of Pakistan, and its influence is beginning to filter into India and Bangladesh, notwithstanding denial by the two governments.

The removal of the statue of Lady Justice from the forecourt of the Supreme Court has been declared by the Hifazat as their first success. Two of their leaders publicly declared (May 29) they would not tolerate any “idols” in public places. The group’s Dhaka Vice Chairman, Mujibur Rahman Hamidi vowed to ensure that no “idols” remain in the country, and warned that the ‘Islamic people’ would launch movements if any one tried to build them in the future.

This was a direct challenge to the government’s position on retaining and building more sculpture celebrating the spirit of liberation and heritage. Hifazat is cleverly trying to remove these statues, a very dangerous development. They and their partners like the Awami Olama League and genetically connected parties like Jamaat-e-Islami network which are with the BNP’s 18 party alliance, would have no problem in selling out to the Madrassas in the country.

Another victory of the Hifazat and Olama League was forcing the government to remove the writings of several highly acclaimed and progressive writers like Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Golam Mustafa, Humayum Azad, Sanaul Haque and Wazed Ali from the school curriculam. The radicals have been agitating for exclusion of poems written by “Hindus and aethists”. Art, literature and progressive history are the foundation of a flourishing culture. Recall the Renaissance period of Europe and Martin Luther’s protestant struggle against Rome. Currently, even the Vatican is on a progressive reform road under Pope Francis.

In Bangladesh, sadly regressive religious ideology is beginning to take root. And this is being held up as the success of people’s movement!

It is imperative to revisit Hifazat’s 13-point demand of 2013. In the ensuing period the activities of this organisation with their partners like the Awami Olama League and behind-the-stage support of Jamaat, the Hizb-ut-Tehrir and others, lands greater clarity to this movement.

In brief, the demands represent a long term programme to overturn the 1952 Language Movement and the high ideals of the 1971 Liberation War. It is a prescription similar to that of Ziaul Haque of Pakistan, which has torn the country and has forced the country into confrontation with its three immediate neighbours – India, Afghanistan and Iran. But Pakistan has a strong civil society where, incidentally, women have been frontline players and have challenged the ultra-radicals and held their ground. The Pakistani military establishment including the ISI have used this ideology in its foreign policy and have been fighting the extremists at great cost. How will Bangladesh manage its own radicals? Not by compromise surely.

The Bengali women stand challenged. Radicalizations has serious implications for their advancement, freedom, human rights and contribution to the national economy. At a time when the most religious Islamic nations are beginning to slowly loosen restrictions on women, Hifazat Incorporated is trying to reverse this trend in Bangladesh. As it is said “women hold up half the sky”. What happens to this half of the sky in Bangladesh? It crashes down? Knowing the spirit of the Bengali woman, they will fight.

The demand for a blasphemy law (by the radicals) has very wide implications including for free speech, intellectual discussions, the minorities and practice of their religion and declaring Qadianis (Ahmediyas) as non-Muslims. Although enumerated in different points in the 13-point demand, they are different parts of a whole. Promoting and nurturing culture is seen by the ultra-radicals as a serious threat to their programme. Therefore, they want a re-engineering of the Constitution, which is an obstacle to their nefarious agenda. Religion must be protected and respected. But Hifazat Incorporated wants their interpretation of Islam even against Muslims who do not conform to their readings.

Crucially, the Hifazat Inc. movement is not a straight forward issue. It has wheels within wheels with foreign connections. Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI, is very much present as proved beyond doubt in the last three years or so. The banned terrorist organisation, the Jamatul Mujahidin Bangladesh (JMB) and the neo-JMB continue to be active. They have similar ideological persuasion.

Such large movements require significant amount of funding. It may be recalled that at the peak of JMB militancy and its subsequent fall, investigations revealed that NGOs from Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia were funding these radical extremists illegally. It is possible that some of these fundings continue clandestinely.

Receiving funding from Saudi Arabia, to build thousands of mosques is fraught with dangerous consequences. All the above are vehicles of Wahabi-Salafi ideology. Would Bangladesh like to travel down this road?

For all its virtues, democratic politics is very difficult to manage on a straight road, especially in a country like Bangladesh where anti-liberation and anti-secular forces have been allowed to thrive by successive governments.

Agreed that politics makes strange bedfellows, partners must be chosen wisely as the next general election approaches. Sheikh Hasina is the enduring target of the radical forces, followed by the Awami League itself. The stability and ethos of the region is at stake. One rotten brick may ultimately bring down the entire edifice.

*The writer is a New Delhi based strategic analyst. He can be reached at e-mail groughohart@yahoo.com