By Dalga Khatinoglu

Iran will construct 6,500 km in railroads transportation within five years, Hossein Ashoori, member of board and head of international transportation at Iranian Railways, told Trend.

He added that the figure includes the underdeveloped projects as well, while construction of further 3,500 km railroads after 2022 is under study now.

He didn’t mention the needed investment for the projects, but the General Director of Iranian Railways Saeed Mohammadzadeh told Trend June 19 that during the past four years, Iran invested $1 billion annually in railroad projects, and for the next five years the figure would reach $1.5 to $2 billion annually.

Currently, Iranian railroad grid’s length is 10,170 km.

One of the railroad projects is the Rasht-Astara segment with 175 km length, after completion of which, the North-South Transport Corridor will become fully operational.

The International North-South Transport Corridor is meant to connect Northern Europe with Southeast Asia. It will serve as a link connecting the railways of Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia.

The corridor is planned to transport 6 million tons of cargo per year at the initial stage and 15-20 million tons of cargo in the future.

The only remaining section of the project in Iran is the Rasht-Astara segment, which Iran plans to complete in three years through a loan from Azerbaijan. Financial talks continue and an agreement is at the final stage, Ashoori said.

The Rasht-Astara segment would need $1.1 billion worth of investment. Iran and Azerbaijan are negotiating on a $0.5 billion loan.

By Ben Sixsmith

It is and always has been patently obvious that Donald J. Trump is not a conservative. He is no more a man of ideas than he is a man of manners, and his instincts tend towards decadence, impulsivity and egoism instead of restraint, prudence and selflessness.

Nonetheless, people who emphasise that Trump is no conservative often remind me of Christ’s warning about motes and beams. There is no one set of ideas and attitudes that could call “conservative”. It is obvious that conservatism comes in different forms, not least as different people have different institutions to conserve. But anti-Trump conservatives are often hard to place in the traditions of American or European conservatism. Indeed, it can be difficult to know what such commentators are trying to conserve.

Take Noah Rothman of Commentary magazine. Mr Rothman argues that President Trump ignores “some of the most fundamental ideas of conservatism”. Such as?

…the benefits of free-market health care, skepticism toward centrally planned infrastructure projects, the moral imperative of the preventive use of American military force, the centrality of strong family and community bonds, the necessity of failure, the importance of immigrants to the American project, and an incremental approach to political change.

We shall generously assume that Mr Rothman means American conservatism, for Edmund Burke, arguably the father of modern conservatism as a coherent phenomenon, could hardly have believed in the “moral imperative of the preventive use of American military force” when America barely existed.

Even with this generous qualification he is wrong. You will find no insistence on this “moral imperative” in the books of Kirk, Weaver, Babbitt, Voegelin and Nisbet. Nor will you find great emphasis on “the importance of immigrants”. It was the conservative government of Calvin Coolidge that passed the Immigration Act of 1924. Aside from a vague reference to an “incremental approach” this better summarises neoconservatism, which, at best, is a subset of conservatism as a whole.

Rothman goes on to insist that far from Trump being a symptom of conservative failure, he triumphed, somehow, in spite of conservative success. “Because their own cultural victories have not materialized instantaneously,” he writes, “Conservatives have adopted a tendency to undervalue them.”

These include the triumph of free-market capitalism over European socialism, the creation of a series of global frameworks that prohibit protectionist industrial and trade policies, the revitalization of First and Second Amendment freedoms, the scaling back of organized labor’s privileges, and the reformation of the nation’s welfare programs with the aim of inculcating in beneficiaries a work ethic. In terms of policy and governance, America in 2017 is a much more conservative country than it was in 1992. It’s a marvel that so few conservatives recognize their own substantial achievements.

It is astonishing that Rothman can speak of the “triumph of First…Amendment freedoms” when speakers are attacked in universities and academics are driven out of their offices. It is depressing that he can rhapsodise about improvements in the labour market in the face of a steep rise in midlife mortality among whites. It is amazing if he thinks this paltry list stacks up against Middle Eastern chaos, racial tensions, opioid addictions, familial collapse and domestic terrorism as grounds for concern. Something has gone wrong with his conservatism.

Another anti-Trump conservative is Bret Stephens of the New York Times. Mr Stephens writes that no president “has done more to harm the integrity and reputation of conservative ideas as this one”. I do not wish to defend President Trump. On the other hand, reading Mr Stephens’ latest column, I wondered what conservative ideas he purports to defend. Stephens catalogues a litany of “nonimmigrant” sins (crime, out-of-wedlock births) and “immigrant” virtues (academic achievement and entrepreneurialism) without bothering to explain the demographic nuances of these phenomena. Which nonimmigrants? Which immigrants?

Mr Stephens goes on to insist that he thinks of the U.S. as “as a country that belongs first to its newcomers”, who “do the most to remake it”. As an immigrant myself I think it would be outrageous to act as if your new home was more yours than it was people who were born there. As a conservative I think the idea that a country must be “remade” smacks of progressivism.

In the article first quoted here, Mr Stephens charged the late Roger Ailes, founder and one-time Chairman and CEO of Fox News, with engineering the “moral and intellectual decline” of conservatism. The faucet of Fox has long been spewing sewage but that decline was as much caused by those civilised intellectual elements of movement Conservatism which neglected American culture in the heady days of Cold War monomania and capitalist complacence and passed the torch to a bunch of liberal internationalists. It was their foreign disasters and domestic indifference that inspired the frustation that brought the voters to Trump, yet they now pose as the authentic voice of traditional values.

Again, there is no one concept named “conservatism”. Conservatives can be more or less inclined towards interventionism, isolationism, free markets, protectionism et cetera. That much can be discussed. But one should be able to locate oneself in a tradition and be clear on what should be conserved. So-called “Never Trumpers”, despite valid complaints, fail both tests. Serious right-wing critique of Trump’s administration should see further backwards than Ronald Reagan and further forwards than the next tweetstorm. It should speak with both respect for heritage and love for people. It should be authoritative but not indifferent. It should be conservative.

This article was published at Bombs and Dollars.

The European Council adopted a decision on Tuesday to support the regionalization of EU Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions in the Sahel region, namely EUCAP Sahel Mali, EUCAP Sahel Niger and EUTM Mali.

The Council decision allows for the establishment of a regional coordination cell based within one of the EU civilian missions, EUCAP Sahel Mali. The regional coordination cell include internal security and defence experts in G5 Sahel countries, deployed in Mali but also in EU delegations in other G5 Sahel countries, namely Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

In a first phase, the regional coordination cell will conduct an assessment of G5 Sahel countries’ security and defense needs and gaps with a view to the development of a CSDP regional implementation plan that will make recommendations for any subsequent phase. It will also facilitate the organization of training courses by the EU CSDP Missions in the Sahel for G5 Sahel countries security and defense trainees.

The objectives of reinforcing a regional approach in the EU work in the region is to support cross-border cooperation in the Sahel and regional cooperation structures, and to enhance national capacities of the G5 Sahel countries.

The EU supports the efforts the G5 Sahel countries and will work together against terrorism and any other threat to security and peace. On June 19, the Council adopted conclusions on Mali and the Sahel which, in particular, strongly condemn the terrorist attack of June 18 in Bamako (Mali).

The conclusions recall that the EU has a strong integrated approach towards achieving stabilization of the region, including a full range of relevant instruments in the field of diplomacy, long-term development cooperation, support to human rights, stabilization efforts, resilience building, humanitarian assistance, migration management and security, including CSDP missions.

HE Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani has reaffirmed that the dialogue based on clear and correct rules and principles is capable of resolving the current Gulf crisis, but after lifting the blockade imposed by some Gulf countries on the State of Qatar.

In a meeting with a number of journalists on Monday, Al-Thani refused to give specific expectations to end the Gulf crisis before holding a dialogue based on strong foundations.

“We can not expect an end to the crisis, solutions are not yet developed and the countries besieged Qatar have not provided any clear reasons for the steps they have taken,” the Minister added.

“We do not know these reasons. We do not know these grounds why the three Gulf countries boycotted their relations with Qatar. Therefore, there are no steps regarding the crisis and no party has taken any steps,” Al-Thani said.

Al-Thani stressed that the solution must be primarily diplomatic and through dialogue and not through the blockade as the State of Qatar’s choices always depend on diplomatic options.

Al-Thani reiterated that the State of Qatar is with the principle of dialogue to resolve the Gulf crisis, but clarified that dialogue also requires lifting the embargo, adding that, “therefore, you should ask the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia and the countries of the blockade about their requests, as the principle of boycotting is to put your comments and then ask us to answer them and not to put all this boycott without any basis, especially that the State of Qatar is a neighbor has a historical ties with the boycotting Gulf countries and close bonding with their peoples.”

According to Al-Thani, “We are not an enemy to those countries and they are asking us to meet demands that they did not put forward and did not present them directly to the Qatari side, therefore, anything should begin with dialogue and end with dialogue.”

Regarding the Kuwaiti mediation to resolve the crisis, the Foreign Minister reiterated Qatar’s thanks and gratitude for the great efforts exerted by HH the Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, and said that these efforts had started since the beginning of the crisis. He added that HH the Emir of Kuwait has not received any responses so far from the countries besieging the State of Qatar.

Al-Thani reiterated that the State of Qatar can not start a dialogue without knowing the demands of the besieged countries. He said that any dialogue must be based on correct and sound foundations. No one can ask a state to stop something. It does not know what this thing is. “This is not a way of dialogue,” the Minister noted.

Al-Thani said in response to a question that the State of Qatar has shown from the beginning its willingness to sit to the dialogue table but that it should be a sound dialogue. “We are ready to study any demands from the Gulf countries,” he added.

Al-Thani said that the State of Qatar has clear principles and has the right to obtain answers from the Gulf countries on the reasons for the step they had taken, pointing out that Qatar was shocked by the position taken by the countries of the blockade and that “Qatar has become a priority for them instead of other issues.”

In response to a question about Qatar’s continued supply of gas to the UAE, despite the Gulf crisis,  the Foreign Minister said that Qatar could legally do so, but “We have ethics in dealing and we do not want to harm the UAE people, who will be affected by the disruption of electricity as a result of the stoppage of the Qatari gas supply, stressing that the UAE people have no fault in what happens.”

On his visit to a number of European countries at the beginning of the Gulf crisis, the Foreign Minister said that the State of Qatar has excellent relations with European countries and there are common interests between the two sides, therefore it was important that the picture be clarified to them in all aspects besides economic damage and illegal matters resulting from the embargo imposed on the State of Qatar by a number of Gulf States.

In response to a question about a planned visit to Washington soon, Al-Thani referred to the excellent relations between the State of Qatar and the United States, which has a military base in Doha and said it is also necessary to talk with US officials about the siege of a number of Gulf countries to Qatar and clarify the image of Qatar as a result of this embargo, he Minister said.

By Laura Schroeder*

During the day, as merengue blares from a massive speaker and fans whir at full power to counter the stifling heat, Aracelis sits at a sewing machine, reflecting on her previous life. At age 15, she began working in a garment factory in a Free Trade Zone (FTZ) in the Dominican Republic, toiling long hours, almost always without pay. She worked in fear of sexual and verbal harassment from her supervisor. For years, she earned a meager $50 a week and struggled to afford food, medical care, and her children’s education fees. Today, however, due to mounting pressure from advocacy groups on the Dominican government and corporations, Aracelis is paid a living wage and will be able to send her four children to college.[i] Despite these successes, thousands of other individuals across the Western Hemisphere who work in FTZs face similar labor rights abuses.

Also called foreign trade zones or export processing zones (EPZs), FTZs are “special commercial and industrial area…where foreign and domestic merchandise may be brought in without being subject to payment of customs duties.”[ii] Social protection for labor is ensured by both national and international legislation in Latin America; nonetheless, economic globalization inhibits worker rights across the region, particularly for vulnerable populations such as women, who are employed in FTZs.[iii] The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are approximately 500 FTZs in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, employing over 6 million workers. Women constitute 70 percent, and in some cases 90 percent, of workers in FTZs, and often perform labor-intensive tasks in sub-standard work conditions.[iv] While economic globalization and free trade enterprises themselves are not to blame for such abuses, there is an urgent need for governments, multi-national corporations, and international institutions to guarantee to hold one another accountable for the gross violations of worker rights occurring.

FTZs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

In FTZs, raw materials can be stored, sold, assembled, or packaged prior to re-export or entry into the national customs authorities. Within FTZs, international goods can be traded without barriers such as quotas and tariffs, exempting multinational corporations (MNCs) from duties. It has become commonplace for the governments of closed economies to experiment with open commerce by liberalizing special zones within their borders in order to attract foreign investment. In recent decades, liberalizing measures such as deregulation, the reduction of public spending, privatization, and the loosening of labor regulations have made a considerable impact on Latin American workers like Aracelis.[v]

At first glance, it appears that FTZs are beneficial for all parties involved. Individuals are offered jobs in factories where there were few prior employment options. Companies set up more production units, and the governments of developing countries reap the benefits of decreased taxes.[vi] However, despite their purported successes in stimulating local economies and encouraging less inhibited regional trade, they have granted multinational corporations unprecedented economic liberty and the ability to exploit not only markets but the individuals embedded within them. Consequently, a system in which labor rights abuses are tolerated and conveniently overlooked is perpetuated.[vii]

Transnational corporations and governments repeatedly argue that FTZs are economically beneficial for both countries and their citizens. These zones, however, are known to encourage corruption and allow for the relaxation of environmental and labor regulations, including prohibition and discouragement of labor organizing.[viii] Nonprofit organizations have accused some of the corporations that flock to FTZs of participating in a “race to the bottom” in terms of labor rights standards.[ix] ILO conventions related to freedom of association and gender equality, including the 1948 Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention and the 1951 Equal Remuneration Convention, require workers’ gender equality and protect their right to peacefully assemble. Despite these international protections, workers, particularly those in FTZs, face a number of limitations on unionization, collective bargaining, and the right to strike.

The Feminization of Employment

Some of the oldest Free Trade Zones (FTZs) are found in the Americas, but in the initial decades of the 20th century, FTZs became prominent features of the Latin American economic landscape, producing clothing, shoes, and toys in mass quantities. In Uruguay and Argentina, free trade regulations were endorsed around 1920, but during the 1950s and 1960s, there was a rapid surge in their development.[x] U.S.-based companies continue to be a major source of investment in FTZs throughout Latin America, and the United States is a major destination for goods produced.

The last few decades have seen the feminization of employment, and millions of women were incorporated into the workforce during the last third of the 20th century. This process was accelerated with globalization, and by 2008, some 1.2 billion (40%) of the world’s 3 billion workers were women. Women also make up the majority of the world’s working poor, a phenomenon that can be observed in FTZ factories.[xi] Moreover, indigenous people and people of color are employed disproportionately in factories. Latin America is no anomaly, and labor rights abuses in FTZs are overlooked, particularly for women, as seen in case studies of Honduran and Mexican textile plants.

Harmful Conditions in Honduran FTZs

In Honduras, against a volatile political and economic backdrop, workers face a handful of challenges. Workplace violations involving health and safety standards are routinely overlooked. The Metropolitan University of Mexico found that 46 percent of Honduran textile workers, a predominately female sector, suffered from depression and that 62 have muscle disorders from repetitive motions and inadequate ergonomic accommodations.[xii]

In April 2017, hooded figures attacked union leader Moisés Sánchez and his brother Misael, who advocated for improved worker treatment of those working in the melon industry as the motivation for the incidents. Female workers make up 80 percent of this industry and suffer exposure to chemical products, illegal firings, and unpaid overtime work.[xiii] The Honduran government has done little to address poor working conditions or the violent crackdown on union activity. Multinational corporations exercise control over labor practices in Honduran FTZs, disproportionately harming women.[xiv]

Genesis Apparel, an FTZ factory located in the Zip Tex Industrial Park in Choloma, Cortes, has committed worker rights abuses consistent with widespread trends in the region. Unfortunately, the experiences of workers at Genesis are consistent with the experiences of many female workers in environments with lax labor regulations. Genesis, which employs over 1,800 workers, was found to violate a variety of standards. A worker stated, “The air conditioning system doesn’t cool the building. People are always sweating and I have seen at least six workers faint from the heat.”[xv] Workers frequently spend Fridays and Saturdays in factories, laboring 11 hours with 30 minutes of break time. According to the Honduran Labor Code, the standard work day should be 8 hours. The Labor Code, as well as ILO Recommendation 95, state that pregnant workers must not be assigned duties that endanger their health or the health of their children. Genesis has failed to meet this standard, instead creating a work environment characterized by poor air quality and unhygienic facilities, which further endanger all workers, but particularly pregnant women.[xvi]

Misery in Mexican Maquiladoras

A quintessential example of FTZs and labor rights abuses in factories is that of Mexican maquiladoras, foreign-run companies that export products abroad. U.S. corporations own 90 percent of Mexican maquiladoras. Many such maquiladoras are located in export processing zones, and they employ over 500,000 workers, over half of whom are women.[xvii] Prospective female employees were found to face invasive questions and mandatory urine sampling to screen out pregnant women, placing them at a disadvantage for hire. When hired, like Aracelis, women workers experience challenges including sexual assault, forced pregnancy tests, and unlawful dismissals when found to be pregnant. This violates Mexican federal law as well as international law related to gender equality and fair treatment in the workplace. [xviii]

As in many nations, in Mexico, workers face arbitrary dismissals and verbal abuse from superiors in the workplace. In December 2016, nine workers were fired from Lexmark factory on the grounds of “workplace disruption.” They were attempting to form an independent union and advocate for fairer wages. Blanca Estella Moya, one of the fired workers, made 112 pesos, or about six U.S. dollars, a day. She developed tendonitis from the repetitive movements of assembling metal parts for printer production. Her supervisor, “The Dog,” was given his nickname due to a record of sexual harassment.[xix] Across FTZs in Mexico, supervisors in maquiladoras have been found to condition overtime pay to women for sexual favors. [xx]

Future Directions for Dignified Work

Despite the myriad challenges faced by factory workers, there have recently been advances in worker rights across Latin America that serve as models of effective administration of labor legislation. In the past decade, progressive Latin American governments such as Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil have increased and successfully enforced labor protections for workers.

Ecuador took an important step in 2016 with the approval of a union and government-backed labor reform law that includes provisions to protect women and other vulnerable groups. The law holds employers financially accountable for the illegal firing of workers and mandates the creation of the National Council for Work and Salaries, a consultative body focusing on wage policies. The same year, the International Trade Union Federation gave Uruguay a 1 on its scale from 1 to 5, indicating favorable conditions for worker treatment. The right to unionize is enshrined in the nation’s constitution and labor legislation includes provisions on child labor, protections for women, workday length, and minimum wage.[xxi]

Prudent labor policy is essential in tackling economic inequality, perhaps the most intractable problem. Bolivia has realized an increase of 104 percent in the real minimum wage since 2006, according to the ILO. These improvements, when coupled with measures to encourage gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, strengthen not only Bolivia’s economy but its society as a whole. Moreover, labor legislation regarding retirement benefits, pensions, and paid leave has been pushed, strengthening the narrative that labor rights abuses will no longer be overlooked or tolerated.[xxii]

Governments must encourage better labor practices into their operations in FTZs to respect the dignity of workers like Aracelis. Although FTZs vary in terms of compliance with worker rights standards, a more robust, comprehensive system of third party monitoring and enforcement of such standards are sorely needed. Additionally, nations must adamantly condemn the mistreatment of FTZ workers and continue to support fair wages, freedom of assembly, and gender equity legislation in the interest of Latin American workers. More governments would be wise to adopt progressive pieces of legislation in pursuit of these goals. To complement national legislation, the inclusion of labor provisions in both national legislation and international trade agreements is vital. Current language in trade agreements does not wholly comply with ILO conventions and best serves the interest of large corporations; therefore, further incentives for labor protection must be included within trade agreements in order to both allow for increased market access for Latin American goods and enforce worker rights.

Back in the factory in the Dominican Republic, Aracelis feels the pulse of merengue as the sewing machine runs uniform trails of stitching down the rough patch of fabric in front of her. Though she vividly recalls a time when she was unfairly treated in the workplace, now, thanks to a coordinated effort to respect worker dignity, at the end of the day, she will return home with fair wages in her pocket and a smile on her face to greet her children.

*Laura Schroeder, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Additional editorial support provided by Steven Hirsch, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Clément Doleac, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Jordan Bazak and Taylor Lewis, Extramural Research Associates at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and Tobias Fontecilla, Sheldon Birkett, and Alexia Rauen, Research Associates at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Notes:
[i] “Alta Gracia: Showing the World What is Possible.” Fair World Project. Accessed June 02, 2017. https://fairworldproject.org/voices-of-fair-trade/alta-gracia-showing-the-world-what-is-possible/.

[ii] “What is Free trade zone? Definition and meaning.” Dictionary of International Trade. Accessed June 02, 2017. http://www.globalnegotiator.com/international-trade/dictionary/free-trade-zone/.

[iii] http://www.ieim.uqam.ca/IMG/pdf/FPiovesan-Jul05.pdf

[iv] Ahn, Pong-Suhl. “Global Trends in EPZs/SEZs.” International Labor Organization. Accessed June 2, 2017. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—asia/—ro-bangkok/—ilo-jakarta/documents/presentatio/wcms_555942.pdf.

[v] “What is Free trade zone? Definition and meaning.” Dictionary of International Trade. Accessed June 02, 2017. http://www.globalnegotiator.com/international-trade/dictionary/free-trade-zone/.

[vi] “International Free Trade Zone.” International Free Trade Zone | Economy Watch. Accessed June 05, 2017. http://www.economywatch.com/international-trade/free-trade-zone.html.

[vii] “Trade and Labor Rights.” WOLA. Accessed June 05, 2017. https://www.wola.org/trade-and-labor-rights/.

[viii] “Fair Labor Association.” Protecting Workers’ Rights Worldwide | Fair Labor Association. Accessed June 06, 2017. http://www.fairlabor.org/protecting-workers-rights-worldwide.

[ix] “International Labor Rights Forum.” About | International Labor Rights Forum. Accessed June 06, 2017. http://www.laborrights.org/about.

[x] Bergquist, Charles W. Labor in Latin America: comparative essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia. Ann Arbor: UMI Books on Demand, 2003.

[xi] Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick. Theories of Development. New York: The Guilford Press, Page 294.

[xii] “Textile workers in Honduras organize to defend their rights together.” UN Women | Americas and the Caribbean. Accessed June 05, 2017. http://lac.unwomen.org/en/noticias-y-eventos/articulos/2017/03/trabajadoras-textiles-de-honduras.

[xiii] “IACHR Condemns Attack on Union Members in Honduras.” OAS – Organization of American States: Democracy for peace, security, and development. May 21, 2017. Accessed June 05, 2017. http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/media_center/PReleases/2017/056.asp.

[xiv] “Honduran Worker Rights Activists Face Rising Violence.” Solidarity Center. April 24, 2017. Accessed June 05, 2017. https://www.solidaritycenter.org/honduran-worker-rights-activists-face-rising-violence/.

[xv] “Worker Rights Consortium Factory Assessment Genesis Apparel, S.A. (Honduras) Findings, Recommendations and Company Response.” Worker Rights Consortium. March 30, 2016. Accessed June 5, 2017. http://www.workersrights.org/Freports/WRC%20Assessment%20re%20Genesis%20(Honduras)%203.30.16.pdf.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] “Mexico’s Maquiladoras: Abuses Against Women Workers.” Human Rights Watch. May 30, 2012. Accessed June 15, 2017. https://www.hrw.org/news/1996/08/17/mexicos-maquiladoras-abuses-against-women-workers.

[xviii] Pregnancy-Based Sex Discrimination in the Dominican Republic’s Free Trade Zones: Implications for the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper, April 2004). Accessed June 06, 2017. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/wrd/cafta_dr0404.htm.

[xix] Semuels, Alana. “Upheaval in the Factories of Juarez.” The Atlantic. January 21, 2016. Accessed June 16, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/upheaval-in-the-factories-of-juarez/424893/.

[xx] “The Juárez Workers’ Fight Crosses the Border in 2016.” The Juárez Workers’ Fight Crosses the Border in 2016: Grassroots Press. Accessed June 16, 2017. http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2016/01/18/the-juarez-workers-fight-crosses-the-border-in-2016/.

[xxi] “Why Uruguay Leads Latin America in Labor Rights.” World Politics Review. February 02, 2017. Accessed June 05, 2017. http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/21099/why-uruguay-leads-latin-america-in-labor-rights.

[xxii] Ibid.

Two competing visions of ensuring regime survival are battling it out in the Gulf.

To Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the 2011 Arab popular revolts that toppled autocratic leaders in four countries and sparked the rise of Islamist forces posed a mortal threat. In response, the two countries launched a counterrevolution that six years later continues to leave a trail of brutal repression at home and spilt blood elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.

Virtually alone in adopting a different tack based on former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani’s principle of “riding the tide of history,” Qatar, a monarchical autocracy like its detractors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, embraced the revolts and wholeheartedly supported the Islamists. The result is an epic battle for the future of the region that in the short-term has escalated the violence, deepened the region’s fissures, and put the tiny Gulf state at odds with its larger brethren.

Ironically, an analysis of political transition in Southeast Asia during the last three decades would likely prove instructive for leaders in the Gulf. At the core of people power and change were militaries or factions of militaries in the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar that saw political change as their best guarantee of holding on to significant powers and protecting their vested interests.

In the Philippines and Indonesia, factions of the military partnered with civil society to show the door to the country’s autocrat. In Myanmar, internationally isolated, the military as such opted to ensure its survival as a powerful player by initiating the process of change.

Sheikh Hamad, and his son and successor, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, have adopted the principle set forward by Southeast Asian militaries and their civil society partners with one self-defeating difference: a belief that by supporting political change everywhere else they can retain their absolute grip on power at home.

In fact, if there is one fundamental message in the two-week-old Saudi-UAE-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar, it is the recognition of the two countries’ ruling elites that they either thwart change at whatever cost or go with the flow. There are no half-measures.

There is however another lesson of history to be learnt from the Southeast Asian experience: change is inevitable. Equally inevitable, is the fact that unavoidable economic change and upgrading rather than reform of autocracy like Saudi Arabia is attempting with Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the driver’s seat has a limited shelf life without political change.

Gulf autocrats marvel at China’s ability to achieve phenomenal economic growth while tightening the political reigns. It’s a model that is proving increasingly difficult to sustain as China witnesses an economic downturn, a failure to economically squash popular aspirations, and question marks about massive infrastructure investment across Eurasia that has yet to deliver sustainable results and has sparked debt traps and protest across the region.

The Southeast Asian lesson is that political change does not by definition disempower political elites. In fact, those elites have retained significant power in the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar despite radical reform of political systems. That is true even with the rise for the first time of leaders in Indonesia and the Philippines who do not hail from the ruling class or with the ascendancy to power in Myanmar of Aung San Suu Kyi, a long-persecuted daughter of the ruling elite, who has refrained from challenging the elite since winning an election.

The bottom line is that ruling elites are more likely to ensure a continued grip on power by going with the flow and embracing political change than by adopting the Saudi-UAE approach of imposing one’s will by hook or by crook or the Qatari model of playing ostrich with its head in the sand.

The Qatari model risks the ruling Al Thani family being taken by surprise when an inevitably reinvigorated wave of change comes knocking on Doha’s door. More ominous are the risks involved in the Saudi-UAE approach.

That approach has already put the two states in a bind as they struggle in the third week of their boycott of Qatar to formulate demands that stand a chance of garnering international support. Even more dangerous is the risk that the hard line adopted by Saudi Arabia and the UAE will fuel extremism and political violence in an environment starved of any opportunity to voice dissent.

The lessons of Southeast Asia are relevant for many more than only the sheikhdoms that are battling it out in the Gulf. International support for political transition in Southeast Asia produced a relatively stable region of 600 million people despite its jihadist elements in the southern Philippines and Indonesia, jihadist appeal to some elsewhere in the region, religious and ethnic tensions in southern Thailand and Myanmar, and deep-seated differences over how to respond to Chinese territorial ambitions in the South China Sea.

That support also ensured that the process of change in Southeast Asia proved to be relatively smooth and ultimately sustainable unlike the Middle East where it is tearing countries apart, dislocating millions, and causing wounds that will take generations to heal.

To be sure, Southeast Asia benefitted from the fact that no country in the region has neither the ambition nor the ruthlessness of either Saudi Arabia or the UAE.

Southeast Asia also had the benefit of an international community that saw virtue in change rather than in attempting to maintain stability by supporting autocratic regimes whose policies are increasingly difficult to justify and potentially constitute a driver of radicalization irrespective of whether they support extremist groups.

Former US President George W. Bush adopted that lesson in the wake of 9/11 only to squander his opportunity with ill-fated military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, a flawed war on terrorism, and a poorly executed democracy initiative. The lesson has since been lost with the rise of populism and narrow-minded nationalism and isolationism.

A US aircraft on Tuesday shot down an armed pro-Syrian regime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle advancing on Coalition forces in Southern Syria, according to a US-led coalition statement.

“The armed pro-regime Shaheed-129 UAV was shot down by a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle at approximately 12:30 a.m. after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on Coalition forces,” according to the statement.

The coalition forces were manning an established combat outpost to the northeast of At Tanf where they are training and advising partner ground forces in the fight against ISIS. This is the same location where another pro-regime UAV dropped munitions near Coalition forces before it was shot down, June 8, according to the coalition.

“The F-15E intercepted the armed UAV after it was observed advancing on the Coalition position. When the armed UAV continued to advance on the Coalition position without diverting its course it was shot down.”

According to the statement, “The Coalition has made it clear to all parties publically and through the de-confliction line with Russian forces that the demonstrated hostile intent and actions of pro-regime forces toward Coalition and partner forces in Syria conducting legitimate counter-ISIS operations will not be tolerated.”

“There is a de-confliction mechanism in place with Russian forces to reduce uncertainty in this highly contested space and mitigate the chances of strategic miscalculation. Given recent events, the Coalition will not allow pro-regime aircraft to threaten or approach in close proximity to Coalition and partnered forces,” the coalition said.

Second Lady Karen Pence and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue recently teamed up to install a honeybee hive on the grounds of the Vice President’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. This will serve as a “great example” of what people can do to help “reverse the decline” in managed honeybee colonies around the country, the secretary said.

Helping bees and educating people about bee problems is a good idea. However, if the hive is an attempt to reduce media and environmentalist criticism of Trump Administration policies – or put the Pences and Ag Department on the “right” side of the “bee-pocalypse” issue – it will backfire. It will also undermine administration efforts to advance evidence-based science, restore integrity to scientific and regulatory processes, promote safe modern technologies, and support continued crop production and exports.

A steady stream of misinformation has fueled misplaced public anxiety about bees. Being on the “right” side must therefore begin with recognizing that honeybee populations are actually increasing, as the decline in managed honeybee colonies reversed in recent years. Attention to the vice presidential hive should instead focus on preventing and controlling the biggest single threat to honeybees, especially in small-scale hobbyist hives: infestations of Varroa mites.

Anti-pesticide zealots and headline-seeking news media have been talking for years about domesticated bees (and now wild bees) serving as “the canary in the coal mine,” whose health problems portend yet another man-made environmental calamity. The future of agriculture, human nutrition, perhaps all life on Earth could be at risk if bees and other important pollinators “disappear,” they ominously intone.

That is nothing more than fear-mongering. Honeybee populations have been bouncing back nicely since the days when many worried about mysterious large-scale deaths in hives. In fact, the “crisis” was seriously (and sometimes deliberately) overblown, and honeybee populations are now at or near 20-year highs in North America and every other continent, except Antarctica.

Assiduous scientific investigation helped identify the mites, viruses and fungal pathogens that can infest hives, and beekeepers are learning to treat infestations without inadvertently killing bees or entire hives. That process has underscored the hard reality that, for professional and hobbyist beekeepers alike, maintaining healthy hives is complicated and difficult, especially when multiple pathogens invade.

However, in another sense, honeybees truly are canaries in the coal mine. They are harbingers of the ways environmentalist attacks on modern agriculture can damage one of the most productive, competitive and globally vital sectors of the American economy. American agriculture feeds the USA and world, while generating trade surpluses and supporting rural and small town communities across the country.

Unfortunately, determined anti-pesticide zealots have been trying for nearly a decade to use the alleged “bee crisis” to prevent farmers from using advanced-technology neonicotinoid pesticides that boost agricultural yields, reduce the need for other crop-protection insecticides that can harm bees, and reduce risks to humans, birds, other animals, non-pest insects, and bees.

Neonics are now the world’s most widely used pesticide class. They are mainly (some 90%) applied as seed coatings, which lets crops absorb the chemicals into their tissue and allows minuscule amounts to target only pests that feed on and destroy crops. Radical greens have tried for years to blame neonics for higher-than-normal over-winter hive losses, “colony collapse disorder” (in which bees mysteriously abandon their colonies, leaving the queen, food and unhatched eggs behind) and other bee problems.

The mere fact that neonics may be detected in negligible, below-harmful levels in the nectar and pollen of neonic-treated crops, in foliage near neonic-treated cropland, or in the food stored in honeybees hives, has fueled emotional campaigns to ban these crop protection products. The activists simply ignore large-scale field studies that have consistently shown no adverse effects on honeybees at the colony level from field-realistic exposures to neonics. They ignore the fact that bees thrive among and around neonic-treated corn and canola crops in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

Anti-pesticide crusaders are determined to take neonics out of farmers’ pest-control “tool-kits.” They will not let scientific facts stand in their way.

This is the tug-of-war that Mrs. Pence’s beehive has plunged her into. What if her bee colony collapses and dies? Whatever embarrassment this may bring to her skills as a beekeeper (and those of USDA staff who will be charged with keeping the hive alive), activists will claim the bee deaths further confirm that the Trump Administration’s enviro-critics are right – and America’s farmers are wrong.

So what can we learn from the fate of one bee colony on the bucolic grounds of the Naval Observatory in the middle of urban Washington, DC? Potentially plenty – if Mrs. Pence and her USDA aides put on their thinking caps, learn more about “bee issue” realities, use this otherwise empty gesture to dramatize the real issues facing honeybees and their keepers, and help advance the cause of scientific integrity.

In recent weeks, the USDA-supported Bee Informed Partnership at the University of Maryland published its annual survey of honeybee colony losses for 2016-17. Although lower than last year and among the best since the decade-old survey began, over-winter losses of 21% and in-season (summer) losses of 18% are still troublesome numbers. However, a vitally important point must be kept in mind.

Those losses were suffered overwhelmingly by small, backyard, hobbyist beekeepers. (Barely 1% of respondents to the BIP survey are large-scale commercial beekeepers, which skews the survey.) This parallels other studies that show small-scale, hobbyist, backyard beekeepers suffer much higher rates of colony loss than do large-scale professionals, who handle the vast majority of US bees and hives.

Those other studies also show that small-scale beekeepers have the greatest difficulty keeping their bees alive in the face of the scourge of Varroa destructor mites. Epidemic since its 1987 arrival in the USA, this bee parasite is a triple threat. Bee larvae often hatch with Varroa mites already attached to them, and these parasites: (1) suck the bee’s hemolymph blood-equivalent out of them, (2) thereby compromising the bees’ immune systems, and (3) vectoring a dozen or more viruses and diseases into honey bees and colonies, turning what were just nuisance infections before Varroa arrived into devastating epidemics.

This has produced a striking paradox – which Mrs. Pence’s new bee colony could help explain. In the wake of widespread publicity about the supposed bee crisis, tens of thousands of well-meaning people across the USA – from the rural countryside to rooftops in densely populated urban areas – have set out to “help the bees” by setting up hobbyist beekeeping operations of one or a few hives. The problem, studies show, is that these well-intentioned initiatives often end up making things worse for honeybees.

Many newly-minted, nature-loving hobbyist beekeepers believe – contrary to the overwhelming bulk of beekeeping literature and practice – that treating their hives chemically for Varroa mites is “against nature,” and thereby hasten the inevitable disaster to their hives. When those hobbyist hives collapse under the weight of uncontrolled or poorly controlled Varroa mites and related diseases, surviving bees migrate in search of new homes, frequently among the healthy hives of some neighboring professional beekeeper – carrying Varroa mites with them. That’s how hobbyist beekeepers inadvertently contribute to the spread of this honeybee epidemic – and to the spread of misinformation about bee losses.

Mrs. Pence’s colony won’t provide lessons on supposed harmful effects on honeybees from exposure to neonic pesticides. The nearest neonic-treated canola and cornfields are well beyond her bees’ roughly 3-mile flight. However, it’s a golden opportunity to use the colony as an object lesson in what small-scale beekeepers should do to keep their hives alive and thriving: above all, control Varroa mites.

Mrs. Pence’s bee colony could become an exemplar for small-scale beekeepers on how to do right by honeybees. By implementing sound beekeeping practices (particularly properly timed Varroa counts and controls), live-streaming those practices and daily hive activity via the bee equivalent of the Panda Cam, and posting short how-to videos, she could teach millions about bees … and advance hobbyist efforts to help bees. That would help replace failure and disappointment with rewarding fun and satisfaction.

By Chris Doyle*

London woke to yet another terrorist attack on Monday: A man driving a van targeting innocent people, trying to kill and maim for political purposes.

Unfortunately, one person was killed but it could have been far worse. The key difference of course was that this attack was targeted at Muslims coming out of the Finsbury Park Mosque. Yet as with attacks on London Bridge or in Manchester, there can be no excuses, least of all “revenge.”

For years, Muslim communities living in the West have been scolded for not doing enough to combat extremism within their own communities. Politicians lined up, sometimes with reason, to slam their lack of action and tolerance of those who would seek to carry out terrorist attacks.

But the flip side of that coin is that for far too long these same communities have also called on the government, politicians and the media to do more to stamp out anti-Muslim hate speech, incitement and indeed violence against their communities. In the aftermath of the London Bridge attack on June 3, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan released figures showing a fivefold rise in Islamophobic attacks. Many of these were violent and were frequently directed at Muslim women wearing veils. Hate crimes against Jewish communities and sites have also been on the increase.

Much of the British population might see the attack in Finsbury Park as the first against a mosque, given the scant coverage such anti-Muslim violence attracts. Sadly it is not a rarity, with figures showing that between May 2013 and September 2016, over 100 mosques were attacked in the UK. Take the arson attack on the Oldham mosque in the wake of the Manchester bombing. I may be wrong but I can find no trace of any ministerial condemnation of the attack.

British Muslims are buffeted from a number of directions. Aggressive extremists prey on their communities to recruit kids into their ranks and sow division. Many Muslims are fearful of such people. Anti-Muslim coverage in the media also contributes to this climate.

Just as questions must be asked as to why Islamist extremists like Anjem Choudary and Trevor Brooks were regularly given platforms by the likes of the BBC, questions must also be raised about merchants of hate like Katie Hopkins having a regular column in the Daily Mail. In the aftermath of the Manchester attack, she called for a “final solution” to Muslims. One writer in The Sun, Douglas Murray, wrote a column under the headline, “If we want peace then we need one thing — less Islam.” The Sun and The Mail have the two largest circulations of any paper in Britain. A 2015 column in the Daily Star claimed erroneously that cash collected in mosques was funding terrorism.

All this is not simple commentary. It ranks, by any reasonable understanding of the terms, as hate speech and incitement. It is every bit as dangerous as some of the hate speeches spewed out by extremist preachers like Abu Hamza. Questions might also be asked as to why only 0.4 percent of British journalists are Muslim? Greater diversity in the media must be encouraged.

But the challenge lies not just with the media. Politicians have also failed the challenge as well. Only last year, Zac Goldsmith stood for Mayor of London for the Conservatives against Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate. While it is not clear as to who within the Conservative ranks authorized and devised this, a crude dog-whistle campaign was mounted abusing anti-Muslim prejudice. It failed but still Goldsmith has never apologized, and was re-elected in the polls on June 8 as a member of Parliament.

The suspicion remains that the government has not done enough to crack down on far-right extremists. Reports show that one in four of those reported to the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, are far-right activists, up 10 percent over the figures from last summer. Notably just before the attack at the mosque, people were commemorating the life of Jo Cox, the British MP murdered by a far-right terrorist on June 16, 2016. Yet are ministers encouraging a debate as to where and how these extremists got radicalized? Will they pursue social media websites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter in the same way as they have done over Daesh-related postings?

Yet despite all the horror of this attack, the other terrorist attacks preceding it and the fire at Grenfell Tower last week, one thing stands out. Whatever the failings of certain politicians and the media, the British Muslim communities do look stronger, ever more capable of getting their message across or reaching out to other communities. New generations of British-born Muslims are more attuned to their communities’ needs and how to work with other groups and vitally, to isolate the extremists.

What they need now is a government and a system to work them to ostracize the extremists at both ends of the spectrum. British Muslims can be part of the solution. It just needs the government to wake up to that.

• Chris Doyle is the director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU). He has worked with the council since 1993 after graduating with a first-class honors degree in Arabic and Islamic studies at Exeter University. He has organized and accompanied numerous British parliamentary delegations to Arab countries. He tweets @Doylech.

By Mitchell Blatt*

Is Donald Trump a conservative? Are neoconservatives conservatives? Was Ronald Reagan a conservative? This argument has been dividing the Republican Party for years. When Trump entered the primary for the Republican nomination in 2015, it was pointed out that he had a track record of supporting Democratic/liberal policies like abortion rights and healthcare for all. Even while he flip-flopped on many of those issues, he continued to push an economic and social worldview that was out of line with some of the leading players in the Republican Party–a kind of “economic nationalism,” as Steve Bannon described it.

Among the #NeverTrump coalition, Reaganite neoconservatives have strongly represented, including Bret Stevens and Noah Rothman, who come under critique in Ben Sixsmith’s first piece for Bombs + Dollars. For him the question becomes, “Are “Never-Trumpers” still conservative?” I’ll take this to mean, Are small government, pro-free trade, conservatives who support an strong role for America in the world still conservative?, because those are the specific positions under critique. In short, are Reaganesque neoconservatives conservative?

My answer is yes, and here’s why:

First, Sixsmith is right that,

There is no one set of ideas and attitudes that could call “conservative”. It is obvious that conservatism comes in different forms, not least as different people have different institutions to conserve.

Now let me make a case for why the modern-day American conservatism of Reagan fits into the definition:

Conservatives who invoke the memory of Reagan and talk about “small government” generally believe that taxes should be low, and the role of government intervening in the economy and pushing for “progressive” social change should be limited. Many also believe in the value of immigration, immigrants enhancing American culture and adding vitality to the economy, and they cite Reagan’s words to these effects.

Reagan is also associated with a strong foreign policy that advocates a leading role for America in the world. Reagan argued that peace was only possible through strength that offers deterrence and that if America steps back from the world, countries that don’t respect American ideals of human rights (and that often oppose American interests) will fill the vacuum. Reagan’s foreign policy legacy need not be a prerequisite for supporting low taxes, low regulation, and supply-side economics, but neither is an interventionist foreign policy a limit on conservatism.

Finally, social conservatives who oppose abortion and gay marriage and advocate a culture of values shaped by their view of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage are also a part of the Reagan coalition.

It is these values, Reagan Republicans would argue, that have ensured prosperity and freedom in America. They would point to growth they say was caused by Reagan era tax cuts and supply-side economics, after years of “malaise” under Carter and the price controls of Nixon. They would point to Reagan’s Cold War brinksmanship, attributing the fall of the Iron Curtain in large part due to his defense buildup.

Foundational Principles

Going back even further to foundational ideas, they would point to the Constitution and principles attributed to the Founders. The principles of free speech, due process, equal rights under the law, and even, many rock-ribbed Reaganistas would say, the Second Amendment giving them the right to self-defense and to keep tyranny at bay. (Yes, conservatives often say the reason we need gun rights is as a possible defense against a tyrannical government, including elected Senators like Ted Cruz and Republican-backing lobby groups like the NRA. This argument is supported by conservative writers across the spectrum, including those of National Review, The Federalist, The Federalist again, and Breitbart. I don’t personally support this argument, but I am laying out the argument.)

What We Conserve

Rothman mentioned “First and Second Amendment freedoms” specifically. It’s true, America does have more freedom of speech, more protections for negative rights than almost any country in the world, and one of the most dynamic economies in the world. As of 2004, the U.S. ranked third in the world for most patent applications per capita and as of 2012 fifth for most patents granted per capita (population). The Innovation Index puts the U.S. 2nd in the world (behind Korea).

It’s true that there are a lot of crazy college students and they sometimes try to get professors fired for stupid things like arguments over Halloween costumes. This doesn’t mean freedom of speech doesn’t exist in America. The First Amendment ultimately protects people’s rights to hold a protest–no matter how stupid (including Richard Spencer’s)–and doesn’t protect an employee from getting disciplined or shamed by non-government entities.

That terrorists in Syria and elsewhere around the world are dead set on killing people is hardly unprecedented. Thomas Jefferson fought pirates off the coast of Libya in 1801. And the world was a much more dangerous hellhole before the United States was even founded. As Steven Pinker says, the threat of dying in war and violence in modern times is at the lowest it’s been in history.

Finally, it is not the government’s role, from a libertarian perspective, to control everyone’s personal choices. The government can’t step in and make sure no one uses and then gets addicted to drugs, drinks oneself to death, or has a midlife crisis. There was panic about crack and cocaine for past decades, so opioids are not new in the sense of some that some the users are using drugs out of desperation–one possible difference is that there may have been more scorn and legal force put down on the users of crack-cocaine.

As for the above paragraph, it is possible to blame social conservatives on the grounds that their efforts to fill society with morals didn’t work. But on the other hand, social conservatives might argue that liberals were to blame, not them, for pushing destructive cultural forces.

Anyway, all of that being said, America is one of the most prosperous and successful nations in the world today. (I need not echo the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism,” which would say America is THE BEST at everything, to make my point.) The home of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Silicon Valley. The birthplace of rock n roll. Hollywood, for all its faults, creates cultural products that are desired the world over, in countries rich and poor, of all different basis. Those most American images are also powered and enhanced by immigration.

The U.S. economy over the past few years has been growing faster than the economies of its developed world peers in Europe and has a lower unemployment rate than most.

That, of course, happened under Obama’s administration, but if one looks at America and conservatism in the long view and through foundational principles, then many of those principles continued under Obama. He didn’t, for example, pass single-payer healthcare, opting instead for a market-based system, due to opposition from Republicans and institutional forces.

As Rothman said, “In terms of policy and governance, America in 2017 is a much more conservative country than it was in 1992. It’s a marvel that so few conservatives recognize their own substantial achievements.”

Many of those conservative forces came in the sphere of economics and “small government” reforms, even during the Clinton-Gingrich period. Clinton signed a welfare reform bill the Republican Congress supported. Bush came along and cut taxes. Taking the scope back further to the 1980’s, 70’s, and 60’s, America is even more conservative on some of those economic factors: the top tax rates fell over 70%.

Take the scope back to 1776: If conservatives believe that the values of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and support for immigration, trade, and bootstrapping American individualism are the values that made America successful, then those are the values they want to preserve.

On Words and Meanings

Reagan and his successors were and are most certainly conservatives. If not, the word “conservative” hasn’t meant anything for the last four decades, because Reagan-esque Republican Party conservatism is what the word has most often been used to refer to over that time frame.

This is important, the definition and connotation of words and how words function in the English language. Words can and do change and evolve over time. Words change as the culture and background changes.

This important fact is very much the case with labels for political ideology, because politics is always changing. A “conservative” from Edmund Burke’s time was facing a very different culture than do conservatives today. There were arguments about aristocracy, the industrial revolution, child labor, and slavery. What about “classical liberals”? Beliefs in free speech and Enlightenment values have generally been adopted by the mainstream of most major political parties on both sides in the West. There are debates on the margins over what those values mean and how they are applied–and there are radicals on both sides. The point is the political identifiers of 1776 don’t mean exactly the same thing in 2017.

Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatism is different in important ways from Ronald Reagan’s conservatism. Rockefeller Republicans were not Nixon Republicans or Goldwater Republicans. John Kasich is neither Ted Cruz nor Donald Trump. But they can all be fairly called “conservatives.”

Nor should Europeans argue, “Reagan is an American conservative.” Of course politics is different in different countries. Americans would be stupid to argue that the Tories or the Korean Liberty Party “aren’t conservative” just because they oppose a Constitutional amendment protecting gun rights.

The Question of Trump

Now the question is, will Donald Trump’s presidency result in expanding the definition of conservatism further or moving a new variant of conservatism into the defining mainstream position? Will he move the default view of conservatism towards a view that conservatives are “economic nationalists,” skeptical of immigration, supportive of using the government to ensure jobs in industrial sectors like coal, and ready to put up trade barriers to accomplish that?

An honest answer is we don’t know. We can only wait and see. But here’s one reason for doubt: So far Trump hasn’t even been pushing very hard to manifest his purported vision legislatively. With Paul Ryan and Mick Mulvaney writing the legislation to cut healthcare for the working class and cut taxes for the rich, he seems more like a Reagan/Heritage Foundation conservative on important economic issues.

(*He has taken some actions on immigration and trade through executive orders and executive actions, signing a travel ban from specific countries and pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for example.)

*Mitchell Blatt has been based in China and Korea since 2012. A writer and journalist, he is the lead author of Panda Guides Hong Kong guidebook and has contributed to outlets including The National Interest, National Review Online, Acculturated, and Vagabond Journey. Fluent in Chinese, he has lived and traveled in Asia for three years, blogging about his travels at ChinaTravelWriter.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MitchBlatt.

This article was published at Bombs and Dollars.

By Lisa Ferdinando

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is expected to discuss North Korea and a wide range of other strategic issues with Chinese officials at the first iteration of the U.S.-China Diplomatic and Security Dialogue, a senior Defense Department official told reporters.

The discussion, to be held Wednesday at the State Department and hosted by Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is significant, said David F. Helvey, performing the duties of assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs.

The dialogue is bringing together diplomatic and defense leaders from the United States and China to “focus on those issues that are most critical in the U.S.-China relationship, the region and beyond,” Helvey said at a Foreign Press Center briefing at the National Press Building here.

“This discussion elevates the level of dialogue with the Chinese in a way that in our view will enable in-depth consideration in areas of cooperation,” he said.

Managing and Narrowing Differences

In addition, it will allow for exchanges on “ways to manage and narrow the differences between the United States and China on a range of strategic issues that affect both the diplomatic and the defense spheres,” he explained.

Discussions are expected to focus on North Korea, Helvey said. As Mattis has outlined, the “most urgent and dangerous threat to peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region is North Korea,” he added.

“The United States and China have a shared interest in the denuclearized Korean Peninsula,” he said. “Given China’s unique influence, we seek to deepen our cooperation to realize this outcome, which is in the best interest of peace and security in the region and the world.”

Strengthening Relations

Helvey said U.S.-China defense relations are an important aspect of a constructive and results-oriented bilateral relationship.

“Secretary Mattis has stated his desire to strengthen and improve the U.S.-China military-to-military relationship to ensure that it remains a stabilizing element and a supporting element in the overall bilateral U.S.-China relationship,” he said.

Discussions also are expected to include maritime security, defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and exploring practical ways to improve communication to increase understanding and reduce risk, including through additional confidence-building measures, Helvey told reporters.

Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been appointed as crown prince, replacing Prince Mohammed bin Naif, a royal decree carried by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said on Wednesday.

The decree issued by King Salman also appointed Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Naif as interior minister, a post held by the former crown prince.

The SPA report said Mohammed bin Salman was chosen as crown prince by 31 out of 43 members of the Kingdom’s Succession Committee during a meeting at Al Safa Palace in Makkah during the early hours of Wednesday.

The new crown prince has also served in a concurrent capacity as defense minister and chairman of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs.

The United States flew two supersonic bombers over the Korean Peninsula on Tuesday, June 20 in a show of force against North Korea, South Korean officials said, according to the Associated Press.

The U.S. often sends powerful warplanes in times of heightened animosities with North Korea, and flew B-1B bombers several times this year as the North conducted a series of banned ballistic missile tests.

Tuesday’s flights by B-1Bs came shortly after the death of a U.S. college student who was recently released by North Korea in a coma following more than 17 months of captivity.

Seoul’s Defense Ministry said the bombers engaged in routine exercises with South Korean fighter jets aimed at showing deterrence against North Korea.

The U.S. military said the bombers conducted two separate drills with the Japanese and South Korean air forces. It said the flights demonstrated solidarity among South Korea, Japan and the United States “to defend against provocative and destabilizing actions in the Pacific theater.”

The United States stations tens of thousands of troops in South Korea and Japan.

The family of American college student Otto Warmbier said the 22-year-old died Monday, days after his release from North Korea. Analysts say his death will likely cast a shadow on relations between the U.S. and North Korea and compound efforts by South Korea’s new liberal president, Moon Jae-in, to improve ties with the North.

Moon said in an interview with CBS television broadcast Tuesday that Warmbier’s death showed “we must now have the perception that North Korea is an irrational regime,” but that talks are still necessary because “we were unable to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue through only the sanctions and pressure.”
– See more at: http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/242452/#sthash.H7A7ezNd.dpuf

The recent attacks that struck Manchester and London have called attention to the alleged shortcomings of the Prevent scheme. Does the cost of the British counter-radicalisation strategy outweigh its benefits? Which new initiatives should be launched first?

By Romain Quivooij*

On May 24, 2017, the UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd declared that plans were in place to “uplift” the Preventing Violent Extremism or Prevent scheme after the June 8 general election. Major political parties also pledged to review or end this policy, of which the official objective is “to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”.

Rudd’s announcement reflects a change of approach that has been in the making for months. It nonetheless comes at a time of fierce criticism against Prevent, as some perpetrators involved in the Manchester Arena and the London Bridge attacks had previously been reported to the authorities.

Moving in Three Directions

A pioneer programme designed to identify at-risk individuals at an early stage, Prevent remains a work in progress that has been undergoing several phases of development. The effectiveness of its current strand suffers from a lack of public confidence, which should prompt the recently formed government to prioritise the adoption of trust-building measures.

The Prevent strategy is commonly described as a two-stage process.

An early version was applied between 2007 and 2011. It involved financial support for a wide variety of youth and community projects such as open debates and cultural festivals. With an overall cost of nearly £150 million (SGD 269 million), Prevent’s first public release came under fire for a lack of a clear direction and a misallocation of state resources.

The then Home Secretary Theresa May pointed out that “funding sometimes even reached the very extremist organisations that Prevent should have been confronting”. As a result of these flaws, a more targeted round came into effect in 2011. Prevent’s second step initially focused on fewer geographic areas and was restricted to violent extremism and terrorism.

The revised programme relies on an annual budget of around £40 million (SGD 72 million) and acknowledges the importance of collaborating with “key sectors and institutions” such as education, health and criminal justice. In addition to preventive work, one-to-one interventions are conducted with individuals that are deemed to be radicalising.

Government action taken since 2015 suggests the gradual emergence of a third cycle that combines organisational aspects of previous periods. This is evident in the growing number of locations estimated to require priority support and a planned increase in funding.

The role of public bodies has also been significantly expanded by the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act that placed a legal obligation on local councils, schools, prisons and hospitals staff to report people they would have concerns about.

Success Story or Complete Failure?

The application of Prevent’s 2011 strand and its 2015 update version resulted in mixed trends.

The 2011 review showed progress in project management and the definition of primary objectives such as challenging ideologies of all terrorist groups. Prevent was praised by the government as instrumental in stopping dozens of individuals from leaving for Iraq and Syria.

The authorities cited local examples of community and faith outreaches as best practices, including engagement work carried out by members of a charity in Birmingham to counter the arguments used by extremists groups.

However, the strategy is impeded by three shortcomings that undermine its impact. First, Prevent’s methodology and its recently introduced mandatory implementation in places like schools and hospitals remains contested. By Home Office Minister of State Susan Williams’s own admission, “much-enhanced” training of frontline professionals is still needed.

Second, Prevent has been increasingly driven by a security-focused agenda. This is notably reflected in the leading role played by the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the Home Office, which may erode faith in a programme officially intended to support vulnerable individuals.

Third, a highly negative image of Prevent has been festering for years among segments of the public, in particular some Muslim communities that perceive it as an intrusive surveillance and stigmatisation tool directed against them.

Old Challenges, Hard Policies

In the wake of the London Bridge attack, Prime Minister Theresa May referred to new counter-terrorist legislation. Suspects would be especially targeted by a set of measures that could range from longer detention periods without charges to extended curfews. The authorities are likely to consider tougher rules of social media governance, in line with May’s request for international agreements to fight online extremism.

Prime Minister May further warned that “difficult and often embarassing conversations” were needed to defeat extremism, adding that Britons should not live “in series of separated and segregated communities”.

These projects have to pass legal review (which led to the failure of similar attempts in the past) and, if adopted, be devoted adequate resources. Most proposals are premised on the basic idea that a higher level of focused surveillance would have increased the chances of avoiding attacks, or at least reducing their kinetic impact.

Potential measures such as those dedicated to online extremism seem nonetheless to be irrelevant. There is so far no indication that social media played a major role in the radicalisation of perpetrators, nor that it was used as a key tool of planning and execution. More crucially, this action plan will not bear fruit over the long term if the forthcoming Prevent revision once again fails to develop a climate of sustainable trust.

Rethink Role of Home Office

A two-pronged effort of organisational restructuring and public outreach is required. The damaging confusion between counter-radicalisation and counter-terrorism that has long been plaguing Prevent should lead the authorities to rethink the role of the Home Office.

Improved public relations and communication would also help address Muslim communities’ concerns and the lack of transparency that critics associate with the strategy. The UK government seems to favour this last course of action, as media reports indicate that Prevent would soon be renamed “Engage”.

If a cosmetic change leads the programme to rely on a more refined approach to the dynamics of violent and non-violent radicalisation, it would be a promising start.

*Romain Quivooij is an Associate Research Fellow with the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University.

This will be PM’s fifth and shortest bilateral visit to the US since he took office.

By Manoj Joshi

Next week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in the US for his long anticipated meeting with President Donald Trump. Given the circumstances, expectations are low, but the visit will be important in defining Indo-US engagement in the Trump era.

Officials are saying this is a “get to know you” kind of visit minus the hoopla that surrounded Modi’s first visit to the US as PM in 2014. This will be Modi’s fifth and shortest bilateral visit to the US since he took office, he made another visit to attend the multilateral Nuclear Security Summit in March 2016.

Use of diaspora

Unlike China or Mexico, India was not in Trump’s cross-hairs prior to becoming President. In his campaign speeches, he did lump India, along with China, Japan, Mexico and others for “ripping off” the US and taking away American jobs. But later in October, a month before the election, he participated in a fund raiser organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) funded by Shalabh Kumar, and in his keynote address he said, “India and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House.”

During the current visit, Modi will avoid the kind of diaspora event he staged at New York’s Madison Garden. Given Trump’s allergy to immigration and immigrants, this could possibly provoke a negative reaction. The Modi team is well aware there are limits to using the diaspora to push Indian policy.

The first issue that Modi will seek to deal with is that of H1B visas. The US allocates 65,000 of these visas to allow US companies to bring highly specialised foreign workers and in 2016 more than two lakh Indians had applied. Related to this is the anti-out sourcing stand of the Trump Administration which could impact on the $150 billion per annum IT industry in India.

There is a fundamental clash of interests between a Trump programme of America First and Modi’s Make in India idea. The challenge is to find the middle ground and see whether the two sides can cut a deal towards mutual gain.

Islamic radicalism

The second issue is that of China. Since he became President, Trump has bewildered the world with his shifting stances. Perhaps the most dramatic has been the shift on China where through the campaign he attacked China, promising to get tough on it on a range of areas from trade to the South China Sea.

But as President he has shifted track. Concern over America’s China policy is important for India which has reached out to the US and even made significant commitments such as committing itself to a mutual basing agreement and signing up on a Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia Pacific and the Indian Ocean with a view of balancing China’s rising power.

Third, India would like to fit its Pakistan concerns relating to Pakistan within President Trump’s hardline views on Islamic radicalism. But the US attitude towards Islamic radicalism seems confined to the Arab world and the Sunni/Shia interface. This is related to India’s hope of closer cooperation with the US whose position on Afghanistan is still evolving.

India is waiting for a broader long term US strategy for stabilising Afghanistan. However, it is clear from the limited increase in trainers and advisers being undertaken by the Pentagon that the US will pursue some form of “reconciliation” which could involve negotiations with the Taliban and the good offices of Pakistan. This would not fit into the Indian calculus, and it remains to be seen whether New Delhi is willing to adjust its position to meet American goals.

Gulf approach

Fourth, there is the issue of the Middle East, the one area where US and Indian interests have never quite been aligned and where the Trump disruption is at work. From the point of view of interests, this is arguably the most important external region for India.

This is where it gets 60 per cent of its oil and gas and from where an estimated 7 million of its citizens send back remittances worth $35 billion (Rs 2,25,600 crore) annually. Trade with GCC countries is of the order of $138 billion (Rs 89,00,000 crore).

Here, the US hardline on Iran threatens to throw a spanner in the works of our policy which seeks to carefully balance ties between the Saudi Arabia, GCC, Iran and Israel. The experience so far is that in dealing with the Trump Administration, it is the President himself who matters. He does not hesitate to upend policies recommended by his Cabinet colleagues or go back on his own views.

For this reason, the key outcome will be in the chemistry that develops through the Modi-Trump dinner meeting. There is nothing to suggest that this could go awry, but then, with Trump, you never know.

This article originally appeared in DailyO.

Macron’s new party, with solid legislative win in France, could be revolutionary for integrating Europe

By Jolyon Howorth*

The Macron phenomenon is essentially threefold: statistical, political and programmatic.

The statistical story is paradoxical. Media projections of the Macron phenomenon suggested an overwhelming victory for the young president. In the first round of the French presidential election on April 23, Emmanuel Macron attracted more than 8.5 million votes, representing 23.8 percent of votes cast and 18 percent of registered voters. In the second round on May 7, he netted 20.7 million votes, 66 percent of votes cast, but still a minority, 43 percent, of registered voters. In the first round of legislative elections on June 11, Macron’s freshly minted party, La République en Marche, LRM, drawing support from across the political spectrum and in alliance with another centrist party, attracted only 7.3 million votes, representing 32 percent of votes cast and 15 percent of registered voters. In the second round, LRM elected 350 deputies, fewer than the 400 that had been predicted. This was due to a record – and premonitory – rate of abstentions, over 57 percent. Analysts suggested that French voters drew back from giving Macron a “hegemonic majority,” conscious that serious opposition in the parliament is both necessary and healthy for democracy. In reality, the political culture of the Fifth Republic attaches overwhelming importance to the presidential ballot and tends to see parliamentary elections as confirmation of the presidential result. With a series of primaries and an electoral cycle in full swing since September 2016, many voters had seen enough of the ballot box. The distraught leaders of the two mainstream parties, as well as Marine Le Pen’s Front National, decimated by the Macron effect, vociferously questioned the legitimacy of Macron’s “majority.”

The political story is potentially revolutionary. Macron’s overt objective in running for the presidency was to destroy a two-party system that had seen socialists and conservatives alternate as presidential candidates for more than 50 years, to the detriment of a hypothetical center that struggled for visibility. Macron succeeded spectacularly in that ambition, creating a once unimaginable centrist tsunami.

Since the French Revolution, the French right, as theorized by the political scientist René Rémond, has comprised three camps: authoritarian/populist; liberal/conservative; counter-revolutionary/nationalist. The latter has traditionally constituted a noisy minority in French politics, but Marine Le Pen succeeded to a large extent, playing on popular anger against globalization and the European Union, in turning her father’s crypto-fascist movement into a following that could attract almost 11 million voters, or 34 percent of votes cast, in the presidential election’s second round, twice the number that had rallied to her father in 2002.

In the legislative elections, the Macron effect reduced that figure to fewer than 3 million votes the Front National netting just eight deputies in the 577-member National Assembly, including, for the first time, Le Pen herself. Macron succeeded in smashing the populist wave in France that many commentators had feared might attract a majority in the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Macron also succeeded in badly wounding the mainstream right party, Les Républicains, which, under presidents Chirac and Sarkozy, had managed to reconcile its authoritarian/populist and liberal/conservative strands. By 2016, Les Républicains were riven by growing tensions between these two tendencies. Macron’s appointment of the liberal-leaning Edouard Philippe as prime minister and his successful courting of many other liberal conservatives wreaked havoc within the party, whose presence in the National Assembly plummeted from 230 to 130.

Conservatism in France is now caught in an uncomfortably receding space between Macronism and the Front National.

On the left, the Parti Socialiste suffered from President François Hollande’s inability to resolve his party’s contradictions between a left-wing that views the business of governing as a betrayal of socialist ideals and a right-wing that sees no alternative, in a world of globalization, to embracing significant chunks of the neoliberal economic agenda. By choosing as its presidential standard-bearer a representative of the left, Benoît Hamon, rather than the standard-bearer of the right, former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the party effectively signed its own death warrant. Hamon scored a derisory 6.35 percent of votes cast in the presidential elections. Candidates from the formerly governing Parti Socialiste performed disastrously in the legislative elections, their numbers in the National Assembly collapsing from 284 to 44 with Hamon eliminated in the first round. The Parti Socialiste is today both politically and financially bankrupt.

Macron has insisted that, in France, two ideological currents previously thought to be incompatible – cultural and political liberalism traditionally defended by the left, and economic and commercial liberalism traditionally defended by the right – can in fact be rendered compatible within one broad political family. A recent opinion survey shows that Macron supporters are closer to the left on cultural liberal issues and closer to the right on economic liberal issues. Macron has suggested that, rather than a clear split between these two currents within liberalism, there is a continuum. How extensive and durable that continuum proves to be is a function of the statistical paradox examined earlier. Millions of French voters – a clear majority – remain resistant to Macronism. Given the electoral collapse of both mainstream left and mainstream right, the fate of the centrist continuum, as the new government sets about governing, will be decided not only in the street – the last available platform for the radical left – but also in internal battles within the ranks of La République en Marche. With 350 deputies, half of them political novices drawn from civil society, the party has plenty of scope for internal dissension. Macron considers the old cleavage between left and right to be out of date.  The main cleavages henceforth will be between centrist “progressists” and “conservatives” of both left and right as well as between Europeanists and nationalists.

The third story behind the Macron phenomenon is a program that aspires to be revolutionary. The first law to be enacted aims at eliminating corruption in political life. Economic policies involve an unprecedented attempt to combine key features of economic liberalism – greater flexibility in employment, lower company taxes, encouragement of industrial and commercial innovation, massive professional retraining programs – with generous state protection and increased benefits for those on the lowest incomes. The state and the market are cast as symbiotic partners. Reducing inequalities is paramount, involving major reform in housing and health policies. Domestic challenges include reforming the labor market through wholesale revision of an arcane code that runs to more than 3,000 pages, developing a new model of growth based on harnessing the digital economy, encouraging entrepreneurship, raising significant tax revenues from internet companies, reducing taxes on firms that invest in growth, and funding research and development in environmental transition. Macron invited all US climate scientists to relocate to France.

The French economy’s structural problems are toxic. The nation has not had a balanced budget since the 1960s. The debt to GDP ratio of 96 percent is among Europe’s worst. Macron intends, where all his predecessors failed for want of trying, to reverse that situation by bold initiative. His leadership style is executive. He consults widely but decides alone – and then expects total loyalty in implementation. To date, this has worked extraordinarily well.

Outside France, there are two priorities: to re-launch European integration through a balanced and dynamic Franco-German axis; and to generate a new deal for Africa, in part to stem the flow of migrants. If Macron succeeds at only half of what he intends, he will prove to be a transformational president. If he fails, Marine Le Pen will be back with a vengeance.

*Jolyon Howorth has been a visiting professor of political science and International affairs at Yale since 2002, dividing his teaching among the Political Science Department, the Jackson Institute and Ethics, Politics and Economics. He has published extensively in the field of European politics and history, especially security and defense policy and transatlantic relations – with 15 books and more than 250 journal articles and book chapters. He is the Jean Monnet Professor of European Politics and Emeritus Professor of European Studies at the University of Bath.

For decades, HIV has successfully evaded all efforts to create an effective vaccine but researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology (LJI) are steadily inching closer. Their latest study, published in the current issue of Immunity, demonstrates that optimizing the mode and timing of vaccine delivery is crucial to inducing a protective immune response in a preclinical model.

More than any other factors, administering the vaccine candidate subcutaneously and increasing the time intervals between immunizations improved the efficacy of the experimental vaccine and reliably induced neutralizing antibodies. Neutralizing antibodies are a key component of an effective immune response. They latch onto and inactive invading viruses before they can gain a foothold in the body and have been notoriously difficult to generate for HIV.

“This study is an important staging point on the long journey toward an HIV vaccine,” said TSRI Professor Dennis R. Burton, Ph.D, who is also scientific director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) Neutralizing Antibody Center and of the National Institutes of Health’s Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID) at TSRI. “The vaccine candidates we worked with here are probably the most promising prototypes out there, and one will go into people in 2018,” says Burton.

“There had been a lot of big question marks and this study was designed to get as many answers as possible before we go into human clinical trials,” added senior co-author Shane Crotty, Ph.D., a professor in LJI’s Division of Vaccine Discovery. “We are confident that our results will be predictive going forward.”

HIV has faded from the headlines, mainly because the development of antiretroviral drugs has turned AIDS into a chronic, manageable disease. Yet, only about half of the roughly 36.7 million people currently infected with HIV worldwide are able to get the medicines they need to control the virus. At the same time, the rate of new infections has remained stubbornly high, emphasizing the need for a preventive vaccine.

The latest findings are the culmination of years of collaborative and painstaking research by a dozen research teams centered around the development, improvement, and study of artificial protein trimers that faithfully mimic a protein spike found on the viral surface. At the core of this effort is the CHAVI-ID immunogen working group, comprised of TSRI’s own William R. Schief, Ph.D., Andrew B. Ward, Ph.D., Ian A. Wilson, D.Phil. and Richard T. Wyatt, Ph.D., in addition to Crotty and Burton. This group of laboratories in collaboration with Darrell J. Irvine, Ph.D., professor at MIT, and Rogier W. Sanders, Ph.D., professor at the University of Amsterdam, provided the cutting-edge immunogens tested in the study.

The recombinant trimers, or SOSIPs as they are called, were unreliable in earlier, smaller studies conducted in non-human primates. Non-human primates, and especially rhesus macaques, are considered the most appropriate pre-clinical model for HIV vaccine studies, because their immune system most closely resembles that of humans.

“The animals’ immune responses, although the right kind, weren’t very robust and a few didn’t respond at all,” explained Colin Havenar-Daughton, Ph.D., a scientific associate in the Crotty lab. “That caused significant concern that the immunogen wouldn’t consistently trigger an effective immune response in all individuals in a human clinical trial.”

In an effort to reliably induce a neutralizing antibody response, the collaborators tested multiple variations of the trimers and immunization protocols side-by-side to determine the best strategy going forward. Crotty and Burton and their colleagues teamed up with Professor Dan Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who coordinated the immunizations.

The design of the study was largely guided by what the collaborators had learned in a previous study via fine needling sampling of the lymph nodes, where the scientists observed follicular helper T cells help direct the maturation steps of antibody-producing B cells. Administering the vaccine subcutaneously versus the more conventional intramuscular route, and spacing the injection at 8 weeks instead of the more common 4-6 weeks, reliably induced a strong functional immune response in all animals.

Using an osmotic pump to slowly release the vaccine over a period of two weeks resulted in the highest neutralizing antibody titers ever measured following SOSIP immunizations in non-human primates. While osmotic pumps are not a practical way to deliver vaccines, they illustrate an important point. “Depending on how we gave the vaccine, there was a bigger difference due to immunization route than we would have predicted,” said Matthias Pauthner, a graduate student in Burton’s lab and the study’s co-lead author. “We can help translate what we know now into the clinic.”

Researchers argue they need greater access to urban properties if they are to win the war against rats.

People around the world denounce rats for fouling foods, spreading disease, starting fires, and even disabling motor vehicles. One might assume because of the threat city rats pose to health and safety, scientists would be hot on their tails–tracking every movement, monitoring each disease they carry, and discovering new tools to control their populations and movements.

But that’s wrong. According to a new article published in the Journal of Urban Ecology, a team of researchers and pest management professionals in the US and Australia have identified why scientists are losing the international war against rats and what needs to change in order to empower scientists to keep pace.

Rats are actually the least studied wildlife in the city, according to the article. Despite the current rates of human urbanization and climate change, scientists face near prohibitive difficulty studying the animals.

The authors suggest that rats are among nature’s most perfectly adapted organisms. They closely shadow human settlements, but do so without being directly threatened–or seen–by humans. Consequently, these animals are also difficult to control or research.

The authors suggest that if researchers had greater access to private residences or businesses that would allow them to stow expensive scientific equipment and monitor rats in private, they might see improvements in pathogen surveillance, better understand population distribution, and importantly, test several novel control methods being developed by the team.

“They are the bane of urban environments, associated with poverty, disease, and fines by public health authorities” said Jason Munshi-South, co-author of the paper and associate professor of biology at Fordham University. “Business owners plagued with rats are reluctant to tell anyone, or to share their residences with researchers”.

One successful method the team has employed is providing free, confidential, extermination services to willing residences who will allow their rats to be studied before exterminated. However, it is a challenge getting this message out to owners. In order to spread the message, Michael H. Parsons, lead author of the paper and a visiting research scholar at Fordham University is also offering up to a $1,000 USD reward for information leading to a viable research site in Manhattan.

“We neglect to study them at our own peril”, added Parsons. “No war has ever decimated 1/3 of the human population. Rats have.”

Illegal wildlife traders may be turning their attention to the Darknet, a new INTERPOL research report has found.

Experts from the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation found limited, but clear evidence of criminals using the Darknet to sell illicit wildlife products from critically endangered species such as rhino horn, elephant ivory and tiger parts and products.

Funded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), the US Department of State and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), the ‘Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Darknet’ researchreport also showed the majority of trading was in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Conducted between December 2016 and April 2017, the research found 21 advertisements, some dating back to 2015, offering rhino horn products, ivory and tiger parts.

David Higgins, Manager of INTERPOL’s Environmental Security programme said the emerging use of the Darknet was part of an overall increase in the use of online platforms for the illicit trade in wildlife.

“Criminals will always seek to identify new areas to make a profit from their illicit activities and the Darknet is no exception,” said Mr Higgins.

“We need to ensure that law enforcement in member countries has the support and resources they need to tackle wildlife crime in both physical and virtual marketplaces to help protect our wildlife and our shared global biodiversity,” said Mr Higgins.

“The good news is that researchers found very limited amounts of products available for sale on the Darknet,” said Tania McCrea-Steele, IFAW Global Wildlife Cybercrime Project Lead. “The bad news is that INTERPOL researchers found adverts selling parts of some of the most critically endangered species on earth on one of the most difficult to regulate Internet platforms.”

“We simply can’t ignore the opportunities the Darknet offers to criminals wanting to peddle wildlife in secret,” said Ms McCrea-Steele.

“Criminal networks are adapting new ways to traffic wildlife illegally and law enforcement must stay ahead of their game and collaborate at greater scale. Ultimately our efforts will succeed if wildlife species affected by this illicit trade continue to thrive in their natural habitats,” said Philip Muruthi, AWF Vice President for Species Conservation.

The report says wildlife traders are likely to be attracted to the Darknet because of its strong anonymity and security mechanisms, with sellers already familiar with the encryption technology, financial instruments and communication methods commonly used in this anonymous space.

As much as 96 per cent of the Internet is not indexed by standard search engines, making the Deepweb of which the Darknet is a part of, about 500 times the size of the World Wide Web. It is typically used to promote illegal services or crime areas such as drug trafficking, financial crime, cybercrime and online child sexual exploitation.

The growth in e-commerce and the potential interest in this crime area demonstrates the need for law enforcement officials to analyse the Darknet when investigating wildlife criminals.

Deterrents to using the Darknet as a ‘marketplace’ for wildlife products highlighted in the INTERPOL report could be the general low level of enforcement in relation to illicit wildlife products making trade elsewhere easier, high and inconsistent prices, buyers’ concerns that they may be scammed and the difficulties attached to shipping products.

The research focused specifically on rhinoceros, elephants and tigers, which are all endangered species with any international trade in their parts or products strictly forbidden. In South Africa – which has the largest population of white and black rhinos worldwide – the number of rhinos poached for their horns increased more than 90-fold between 2007 and 2015, with 1,054 killed in 2016 alone.

In 2016, more than 20 tonnes of poached elephant ivory, which is prized as ‘white gold’ in parts of Asia and China, as well as the United States, was seized by law enforcement globally.

Asian big cats are killed for their parts, such as their skin, claws, teeth, bones and blood, which are used for traditional medicine and tiger bone wine, among other uses.

INTERPOL has a long standing partnership with IFAW to combat global wildlife crime both on and offline. In 2013, an INTERPOL project supported by IFAW to identify the drivers and scale of the illegal online trade in ivory, revealed hundreds of items worth approximately EUR 1.45 million for sale on Internet auction sites across nine European countries during a single two-week period.

The French naval ships ‘Mistral’ and ‘Courbet’ arrived Tuesday at Sri Lanka’s Colombo harbor on a goodwill visit.

The two ships were welcomed in compliance with naval customs by the Sri Lanka Navy, upon their arrival.

The naval vessel ‘Mistral’ consists of 431 ship’s crew including 56 officers. Meanwhile, there are 157 naval personnel onboard ‘Courbet’ together with 18 officers.

The two ships are expected to stay in the country until 26th of this month and their crew is scheduled to take part in a range of activities organized by the SL Navy.

Sri Lanka’s State Minister of Defense Ruwan Wijewardene made a visit to the French ships  and was received by the Commanding Officer of the ship ‘Mistral’ upon his arrival at the ship. He was also accorded a guard turnout by the French naval personnel onboard the ship. During his visit to the ship State Minister Wijewardene had a friendly discussion with French naval officers. Before his departure the State Minister also signed the visitor’s book.