In 1952, shortly before his death, Joseph Stalin came up with the idea of “draining” the Caspian Sea so as to be able to get to the oil and gas resources on its bed; but he was dissuaded from trying by water specialists who pointed out that redirecting the Volga, Terek and Kura rivers would be insufficient and that Moscow didn’t have enough pumps.

This week, the Tolkovatel portal offers a glimpse into this intriguing story by drawing on the comments of Nikolay Baybakov, onetime Soviet oil minister and Gosplan director, and KGB head Ivan Serov in memoirs that were published by Prosveshechniye last year (ttolk.ru/2017/06/20/зачем-сталин-хотел-осушить-каспийско/).

They are intriguing both as an example of the way in which Stalin was on occasion at least dissuaded from doing something he thought he wanted to do by experts who pointed out the obstacles and costs and as an indication that in that regard he was less willful than some of his successors who became backers of the ill-fated but much-discussed Siberian river diversion plan.

The idea of draining the Caspian to get at the oil on its seabed arose almost as soon as oil was discovered there, with companies and officials working to reclaim for the land small portions of the sea already at the end of the 19th century and making plans for a bigger “draining” operation in 1909-1912.

Those plans were never realized because of the revolutionary turmoil, although in 1927, some 300 hectares were reclaimed from the Caspian Sea and rapidly filled with oil wells. Such small efforts might have continued, but the launch of the first Soviet oil drilling platform in the Caspian in 1949 changed the thinking of some in Moscow.

That platform proved so expensive and could be used only in shallow water that Soviet planners began to consider more radical solutions. One of these involved “draining” the entire sea so that the Soviet Union could get more oil given that the Western Siberian fields had not yet come on line. Ivan Serov describes what happened in 1952 in his recently published memoirs.

At that time, Serov was deputy minister of state security and curator of the Volga-Don canal construction project. His deputy told him that Stalin had called him to come with a map of the Caspian to discuss the future of the sea. On his return, the deputy said that Stalin had ordered the preparation of plans to “drain” the Caspian Sea.

“I looked at him with surprise,” Sergov says, “but he looked at me seriously.” His deputy said he had told Stalin that this was “possible” but that he would have to “calculate” how much it would cost. He noted that Stalin had dismissed Mikoyan’s objections that this would cost the Soviet Union hard currency from caviar exports. Stalin said that was irrelevant: “’we need oil.’”

Soviet government exports got to work, calculated the enormous cost of diverting or damming the rivers feeding the Caspian, and recognized that even if that step were taken, there weren’t enough pumps in the USSR at that time to drain the remaining water from the bottom of the sea.

They reported this to Stalin who said that clearly it wasn’t an idea whose time had come. Everyone supported that, and Serov says that he “thought to himself: ‘Thank God that he didn’t decide to drain the sea.’”

The Senate’s bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not a healthcare bill. It’s a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a dramatic reduction in healthcare funding for approximately 23 million poor, disabled, and working middle class Americans.

America’s wealthiest taxpayers (earning more than $200,000 a year, $250,000 for couples) would get a tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years, representing what they save from no longer financing healthcare for lower-income Americans.

That’s not all. The bill would save an additional $400 billion on Medicaid, which Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump are intent on shrinking in order to cut even more taxes for the wealthy and for big corporations.

If enacted, it would be the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich from the middle class and poor in American history.

This disgrace is being proposed at a time when the nation’s rich own a higher percentage of the nation’s wealth and receive the highest percent of America’s income since the era of the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century.

Almost all of the transfer is hidden inside a bill that’s supposed to be a kinder and gentler version of its House counterpart, which Trump called “mean, mean, mean.”

Look closely and it’s even meaner.

The Senate bill appears to retain the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for poorer Americans. But starting in 2020, the subsidies would no longer be available for many of the working poor who now receive them, nor for anyone who’s not eligible for Medicaid.

Another illusion: The bill seems to keep the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. But the expansion is phased out, starting in 2021.

The core of the bill – where its biggest savings come from – is a huge reduction in Medicaid, America’s healthcare program for the poor, elderly, and disabled.

This, too, is disguised. States would receive an amount of money per Medicaid recipient that appears to grow as healthcare costs rise.

But starting in 2025, the payments would be based on how fast costs rise in the economy as a whole.

Yet medical costs are rising faster than overall costs. They’ll almost surely continue to do so – as America’s elderly population grows, and as new medical devices, technologies, and drugs prolong life.

Which means that after 2025, Medicaid coverage will shrink.

The nonpartisan Urban Institute estimates that between 2025 and 2035, about $467 billion less will be spent on Medicaid than would be spent than if Medicaid funding were to keep up with the expected rise in medical costs.

The states would have to make up the difference, but many won’t want to or be able to.

One final major deception. Proponents of the bill say it would continue to protect people with preexisting conditions. But the bill allows states to reduce insurance coverage for everyone, including people with preexisting conditions.

So insurance companies could technically “cover” people with preexisting conditions for the cost of, say, their visits to a doctor, but not hospitalization, drugs, or anything else they need.

The Senate bill only seems like a kinder, gentler version of the House repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but over time it would be even crueler.

Will the American public find out? Not if McConnell can help it.

He hasn’t scheduled a single hearing on the bill.

He’s shut out major hospitals, physician groups, consumer advocates and organizations representing millions of patients with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses.

McConnell thinks he’s found a quiet way not only to repeal the Affordable Care Act but also to unravel Medicaid – and funnel the savings to the rich.

For years, Republicans have been looking for ways to undermine America’s three core social insurance programs – Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The three constitute the major legacy of the Democrats, of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. All continue to be immensely popular.

Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is almost part of that legacy. It’s not on quite as solid a footing as the others because it’s still new, and some wrinkles need to be ironed out. But most Americans support it.

Now McConnell believes he can begin to undo the legacy, starting with the Affordable Care Act and, gradually, Medicaid.

But he knows he has to do it in secret if he’s to be successful.

If this shameful bill is enacted, McConnell and Trump – as well as every Republican senator who signs on – will bear the burden of hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, were they not so determined to make rich Americans even richer.

Catholic bishops in the Philippines have joined the fight against the proliferation of “fake news,” saying that deception is “a sin against charity.”

The Catholic bishops’ conference urged people to refrain from “patronizing, popularizing and supporting identified sources of ‘alternative facts’ or ‘fake news.'”

In a pastoral exhortation released on June 21, the bishops called on Filipinos not to be “purveyors of fake news” and “to desist from disseminating” false information.

The bishops said spreading “fake news” is a “sin against charity because it hinders people making right and sound decisions and induces them, instead, to make faulty ones.” These often have disastrous consequences to people and to communities, they said.

“The active involvement of citizens in creating a nurturing society steeped in justice depends on the truth,” said the church leaders.

A number of Catholic bishops have become victims of “fake news” and deceptive memes on social media when they criticized the government’s war against narcotics.

The bishops said “deceit and lies” should be exposed with facts. They urged netizens to identify sources of “fake news” so that people will be alerted.

The proliferation of “fake news” on social media has become a recent phenomenon in the Philippines, especially with the election of President Rodrigo Duterte last year.

The president’s supporters have turned to social media to attack critics of government policies.

In the Philippines, 58 percent of the 60 million population have access to the internet that is mostly used for social media.

For many Americans, the warmer weather of summer means more time spent outside: More gardening and yard work, more hikes in the woods, more backyard barbecues. But for this year in particular, some experts predict warmer weather will lead to more ticks.

That potential boom in ticks could lead to another boom–in Lyme disease, a bacterial illness transmitted specifically by deer ticks. When ticks attach for at least 36 hours–what studies have shown is typically the lower bound needed to transmit Lyme-causing bacteria–many patients develop a bullseye-like rash at the site of the bite within seven to 10 days. If they’re not treated quickly, within weeks patients can develop symptoms such as headaches, heart arrhythmias, rashes and facial paralysis. Within months, Lyme can lead to arthritis, most commonly of the knee.

The standard treatment for Lyme disease is a course of antibiotics, such as oral doxycycline if the patient is older than 8 years old or amoxicillin if the child is younger than 8–typically two weeks for early symptoms and longer for late symptoms. While the data showing when symptoms clear has been well established for adults, says Mattia Chason, M.D., a third-year resident at Children’s National Health System, little was known about how quickly symptoms typically resolve in children. That paucity of data can leave physicians and their families unsure about whether a child might need a repeat dose of antibiotics–or a different kind–or whether lingering symptoms might have a different cause.

To answer this question, he and colleagues–including Dr. Chason’s mentor, Roberta L. DeBiasi, M.D., M.S., chief of Children’s Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases–looked at data in the electronic medical records of 79 children who were admitted to Children’s main hospital with a laboratory-confirmed diagnosis of Lyme disease from June 2008 to May 2015. The research team was particularly interested in children who had a headache–a strong marker of the early disseminated form of the disease–or pain and swelling of the knee, a strong marker of the late form of the disease.

They found that after children with the early form of Lyme disease started treatment, their Lyme-associated headaches resolved rapidly–most within one to three days¬–no matter how long headaches were present before they came to the hospital for treatment.

However, for those with knee pain and swelling, the majority took between two to four weeks to resolve. The longer symptoms had been in place before treatment started, Dr. Chason says, the longer they tended to take to disappear.

The team also looked at a phenomenon called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, characterized by a constellation of symptoms, such as fatigue, generalized musculoskeletal pain and cognitive slowing, that can occur six months after an initial diagnosis of Lyme. Only two children out of the 79 met the criteria for this diagnosis, suggesting that it’s exceedingly rare in the pediatric population.

Taken as a whole, Dr. Chason says the findings provide a guide to doctors and family members alike on when to expect relief from Lyme symptoms. “Patients who come in with early symptoms tend to resolve rather quickly,” he said. “But for those with later symptoms, resolution can take quite some time. Those patients should see their doctors if there’s any suspicion of Lyme to get treatment sooner rather than later.”

Children’s infectious disease experts routinely advise parents about how to protect their children from Lyme disease. Their tips:

• Help kids avoid exposure by either wearing long sleeves and pants–a tough sell in warm weather–or using repellents with 20 percent to 30 percent DEET. These repellents can be used on babies as young as 2 months old, Dr. Chason says, and are safe for most individuals.
• Check for ticks anytime a child has spent time outside. The best way to perform them, Dr. Chason says, is to check the child each night. Before bath or bedtime, remove the child’s clothes and check every part of his or her body, including their hair, armpits, buttock region and the creases of the knee.
• Remove ticks gently with tweezers to try to get as much of the arachnid out as possible.
• Know what deer ticks look like. If you are unsure how to identify this species, save the tick or take a photo for your pediatrician to view.
• If a tick has been attached for at least 36 hours, consult your child’s pediatrician for advice on whether the child will need prophylactic antibiotics.

In a 1999 paper, Erik Demaine — now an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, but then an 18-year-old PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada — described an algorithm that could determine how to fold a piece of paper into any conceivable 3-D shape.

It was a milestone paper in the field of computational origami, but the algorithm didn’t yield very practical folding patterns. Essentially, it took a very long strip of paper and wound it into the desired shape. The resulting structures tended to have lots of seams where the strip doubled back on itself, so they weren’t very sturdy.

At the Symposium on Computational Geometry in July, Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi of the University of Tokyo will announce the completion of a quest that began with that 1999 paper: a universal algorithm for folding origami shapes that guarantees a minimum number of seams.

“In 1999, we proved that you could fold any polyhedron, but the way that we showed how to do it was very inefficient,” Demaine said. “It’s efficient if your initial piece of paper is super-long and skinny. But if you were going to start with a square piece of paper, then that old method would basically fold the square paper down to a thin strip, wasting almost all the material. The new result promises to be much more efficient. It’s a totally different strategy for thinking about how to make a polyhedron.”

Demaine and Tachi are also working to implement the algorithm in a new version of Origamizer, the free software for generating origami crease patterns whose first version Tachi released in 2008.

Maintaining boundaries

The researchers’ algorithm designs crease patterns for producing any polyhedron — that is, a 3-D surface made up of many flat facets. Computer graphics software, for instance, models 3-D objects as polyhedra consisting of many tiny triangles. “Any curved shape you could approximate with lots of little flat sides,” Demaine explained.

Technically speaking, the guarantee that the folding will involve the minimum number of seams means that it preserves the “boundaries” of the original piece of paper. Suppose, for instance, that you have a circular piece of paper and want to fold it into a cup. Leaving a smaller circle at the center of the piece of paper flat, you could bunch the sides together in a pleated pattern; in fact, some water-cooler cups are manufactured on this exact design.

In this case, the boundary of the cup — its rim — is the same as that of the unfolded circle — its outer edge. The same would not be true with the folding produced by Demaine and his colleagues’ earlier algorithm. There, the cup would consist of a thin strip of paper wrapped round and round in a coil — and it probably wouldn’t hold water.

“The new algorithm is supposed to give you much better, more practical foldings,” Demaine said. “We don’t know how to quantify that mathematically, exactly, other than it seems to work much better in practice. But we do have one mathematical property that nicely distinguishes the two methods. The new method keeps the boundary of the original piece of paper on the boundary of the surface you’re trying to make. We call this watertightness.”

A closed surface — such as a sphere — doesn’t have a boundary, so an origami approximation of it will require a seam where boundaries meet. But “the user gets to choose where to put that boundary,” Demaine said. “You can’t get an entire closed surface to be watertight, because the boundary has to be somewhere, but you get to choose where that is.”

Lighting fires

The algorithm begins by mapping the facets of the target polyhedron onto a flat surface. But whereas the facets will be touching when the folding is complete, they can be quite far apart from each other on the flat surface. “You fold away all the extra material and bring together the faces of the polyhedron,” Demaine said.

Folding away the extra material can be a very complex process. Folds that draw together multiple faces could involve dozens or even hundreds of separate creases.

Developing a method for automatically calculating those crease patterns involved a number of different insights, but a central one was that they could be approximated by something called a Voronoi diagram. To understand this concept, imagine a grassy plain. A number of fires are set on it simultaneously, and they all spread in all directions at the same rate. The Voronoi diagram — named after the 19th-century Ukrainian mathematician Gyorgy Voronoi — describes both the location at which the fires are set and the boundaries at which adjacent fires meet. In Demaine and Tachi’s algorithm, the boundaries of a Voronoi diagram define the creases in the paper.

“We have to tweak it a little bit in our setting,” Demaine said. “We also imagine simultaneously lighting a fire on the entire polygon of the polyhedron and growing out from there. But that concept was really useful. The challenge is to set up where to light the fires, essentially, so that the Voronoi diagram has all the properties we need.”

Qatar’s Ambassador to Germany, Sheikh Saud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, stressed this week Qatar’s rejection of allegations that the country has ties to terrorism. Additionally, Al Thani said that Qatar has never backed extremist groups and will not support such groups in the future.

In an interview with the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, the Ambassador said that Qatar has rejected those allegations from the outset, adding that there is no proof of such support.

According to Al Thani, such allegations have been directed at Qatar in a sudden manner, and that there have many meetings held under the GCC umbrella over the last few months, none of which saw these allegations surface.

With regard to allegations of Qatar supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Thani said that the State of Qatar only deals with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas when they are part of a government in a given country. The ambassador gave an example of that during the presidency of Mohammed Morsy in Egypt, adding that Qatar “stopped dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood once they stopped becoming part of the Egyptian government.”

Al Thani added that such was the case with Hamas, stressing that Qatar does not deal with any of those groups as political parties.

Al Thani said that it was normal that family members of the GCC have differences, but stressed that it was important for them to discuss those differences in order to reach a friendly and an acceptable solution. Al Thani added that the important matter is that no side intervenes in the internal affairs of the other.

On the impact of “the siege imposed” by those countries on Qatar, Al Thani said that work is progressing normally. According to Al Thani, alternatives have been found to all the important basic needs for their citizens. His Excellency said that they also developed an emergency plan to deal with such a crisis, adding that Turkey and other countries around the world including Europe are sending food products to Qatar. His Excellency also highlighted that Qatari companies are working more actively to overcome these obstacles.

Al Thani said that the crisis with GCC countries did not impact preparations for World Cup 2022 and that work is progressing on schedule. The Ambassador said that they already finished building the first stadium and that the World Cup will be unique and one that belongs to the entire Arab World that gives hope to people in the region, and particularly youth.

On demands to close Al Jazeera, Al Thani said that the State of Qatar will not sacrifice freedom of opinion and freedom of press, as they represent an important value. His Excellency added that such a step does not fit with the 21st century, is unacceptable, and is considered and interference in internal affairs.

Officials in Pakistan say an overturned oil tanker burst into flames Sunday, killing at least 150 men, women and children who had rushed to the scene to gather leaking fuel. Authorities say more than 100 people were injured in the explosion and many of them are in critical condition.

The tanker was traveling on the main highway from the southern port city of Karachi to the Punjab provincial capital of Lahore when the driver lost control of the vehicle. An announcement over a mosque’s loudspeaker that an overturned tanker truck had sprung a leak sent scores of villagers racing to the scene to gather spilled fuel. Then the wreck exploded, engulfing people and several nearby vehicles.

Fuel is a high value commodity in Pakistan, and despite the risks, the possibility of obtaining it for free draws many to accident scenes.

It is not clear what caused the tanker to explode.Local police said the driver of the tanker survived and was taken into custody.

The disaster happened on the eve of Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Roads are usually crowded at that time with people traveling to be with their families for the Eid celebrations.

Thousands of demonstrators formed a human chain around the American embassy in the South Korean capital, Seoul, to register their disapproval of the US-built THAAD missile defense system in their country.

According to organizers, 3,000 people attended a march through the center of Seoul, holding signs that read ‘Koreans hate THAAD’ and ‘Yes to peace talks,’ as well as banners directed at US President Donald Trump.

“The deployment of THAAD, which is unnecessary for the defense of the Korean Peninsula, should be pulled back,” said one of the speakers at the rally, quoted by local news outlet Yonhap. “The South Korea-US summit to come next week should be a venue where the review of the THAAD deployment should be assured.”

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and Trump are due to meet for the first time in Washington next week, with THAAD expected to dominate the agenda.

Moon, a center-left politician, who was sworn in last month after a corruption scandal brought down the previous right-wing administration, has been a fierce critic of the way in which the sophisticated defense system has been deployed and has ordered a full investigation.

On Thursday, Moon told Reuters that according to the “original agreement,” only one missile battery, consisting of six missile launchers, was due to be deployed in 2017, with five others due to be imported and brought online thereafter. Instead, two were brought online a week before last month’s election, and four were “covertly” brought into the country as the previous government realized that they were facing defeat, with the public not told until they were already in the country.

“For some reason that I do not know, this entire THAAD process was accelerated,” said Moon.

Washington said that all steps were agreed with the government and comply with NATO guidelines.

“The US trusts the South Korean official stance that the THAAD deployment was an Alliance decision. We have worked closely and have been fully transparent with the South Korean government throughout this process,” United States Forces Korea wrote to the Korea Herald on Friday, when asked to respond to Moon’s comments.

Trump has been angered by Moon’s insinuations of impropriety and the purported ingratitude of South Koreans, who would be receiving a state-of-the-art defense system against North Korea’s recently bolstered missile-launching capacities, and has charged that Seoul owes Washington $1 billion in THAAD expenses.

Moon’s office has been attempting to limit the stand-off between allies following the Reuters interview, saying his government is not fundamentally opposed to THAAD, but is merely trying to follow procedures.

“The president’s remark came as a part of his effort to explain that the South Korean government is not trying to postpone the deployment of THAAD. It was aimed to highlight the government’s effort to follow the legitimate process for the deployment,” it said in a statement.

The THAAD issue has become a nexus of several agendas and developments, meaning that backing down now will likely result in a loss of credibility for at least some of the involved actors.

North Korea’s frequent missile tests this year have demanded a response, but Moon has advocated charting a more diplomatic course with Pyongyang, and also wants a clean break with the messy practices of the previous government.

Trump has called for the total isolation of North Korea and has also threatened force. Trump further believes that NATO allies are not making sufficient contributions.

By Fatjona Mejdini

As the ballots start to be counted around midnight, preliminary results from the Albanian general elections are set to be released early Monday morning.

Albanians are tensely awaiting election results which will be announced only on Monday after the long process of transporting votes from the polling station to the counters has taken place.

On Sunday voting for the general elections began at 7am local time and continued until 8pm – one hour later than expected as polling station closures were postponed on account of the low turnout.

The Central Electoral Commission, CEC, announced at 9pm that the turnout was around 45 per cent. Calculation shows that more than 1.5 million people voted out of a potential 3.4 million in the electoral rolls. In 2013 electoral turnout stood at around 53 per cent, and more than 1.7 million people cast their ballot.

After 8pm, the process of transporting the votes, accompanied by police and party representatives started.

The Sunday voting process started peacefully although some incidents marked the day.

Several incidents were related to the Socialist Movement for Integration, formerly led by Ilir Meta, now the president-elect.

Meta travelled in to the northwestern Lezha region where a shooting was reported in the coastal town of Shengjin. Meta accused police there of being biased and “defending criminals instead of citizens” after no arrests were made.

Police initially reported that shootings occurred in a restaurant in the port area. They said that at the site of the shooting a shell casing was found and that no one seeking treatment for a gunshot had sought help in area hospitals.

The Socialist Party, PS, in Lezhe (the region in which Shengjin is located) stated in a press release that it considered Meta’s statements “a reflection of a political desperation and loss of logic,” emphasising that Meta is already president-elect and such political maneuvers are disrespectful of the position.

Over the course of the afternoon, local media reported clashes between supporters of LSI and PS in Durres, Shkoder and Vlora, while police intervened to prevent further escalation.

PS and LSI have run the governing coalition for four years although the relationship between them started to grow bitter after Rama signed a political deal with opposition Democratic Party, PD, leader Lulzim Basha to end a three-month political stalemate.

Over the course of the day there were also reports of people pressuring voters, according to the interior ministry.

Earlier in the day the deputy prime minister, Ledina Mandija in an interview with News 24 said that the Prosecutor’s Office had received information that certain armed groups had been travelling in cars with no license plates and had been involved in vote buying. The incidents were reported in Delvine, Lezhe, Lushnje, Velipoje and Shkoder.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Saturday, June 24 invited North Korea to the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, saying sports could serve as a peace maker, AFP reports.

The South and nuclear-armed North Korea are separated by one of the world’s most heavily armed borders and remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

But the centre-left Moon is known to favour engagement with the North to bring it to the negotiating table in a break from his conservative predecessors who took a hardline stance.

“I believe in the strength of sports that has been brokering peace,” Moon said.

“If a North Korean delegation takes part in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, I believe it will greatly contribute to realizing the Olympic values of friendship and peace,” he said, according to a script of his remarks released by the presidential Blue House.

Moon also suggested the two countries pool their athletes to form joint teams for the games to achieve better performances.

The president was speaking at the opening of the World Taekwondo Championships in the southern county of Muju.

Also on hand was North Korea’s top sports official Jang Woong, the country’s sole IOC member, together with a North Korean delegation of athletes.

In March, Jang reportedly said in Japan that there was no reason for the North to stay away from the Olympics, but that the games would be hosted by South Korea.

In Seoul on Friday he said he would discuss the idea of co-hosting the Winter Games with Olympic chief Thomas Bach when he meets him in South Korea next week.

He was speaking after South Korea’s sports minister Do Jong-Hwan was quoted as saying some skiing events for the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics could be held in North Korea, although officials insist he was misunderstood.

However, Do does plan to raise the idea of inviting North Korean players to join South Korea’s women’s ice hockey team for the Pyeongchang Olympics, a spokesman of the ministry said.

South Korea considered sharing some events at the Seoul 1988 Olympics with the North, but talks broke down and the North boycotted the Games.

Muhammad bin Salman will be the youngest in line to become king and bucks the trend of senior and aging princes ascending the throne.

By Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty

A midst the deepening quagmire in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, blockade of fellow Arab neighbour Qatar and rising tension with regional rival Iran, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud pulled a rabbit out of the hat. The king issued a royal decree nominating his youngest son, 31-year-old Muhammad bin Salman, as the new Crown Prince. This decision is not completely unexpected, but the timing is a surprise. The new Crown Prince, born in August 1985, is the king’s son from his third wife, Fahda bint Falah bin Sultan. He has also been appointed as Deputy Prime Minister. The Crown Prince is the second in line to the throne and the second most powerful post in the Saudi Kingdom. Muhammad will become the next king, if no further upheavals take place in the ruling Saudi family, said to comprise over 15,000 princes of varying importance and pedigree.

He will be the youngest in line to become king and bucks the trend of senior and aging princes ascending the throne.

A deep churn

This latest unexpected move indicates a deep churning within the Saudi Royal family.

Media reports have said that 31 out of the 34 Council of Princes approved the nomination of Muhammad. He replaces his half-brother Muhammad bin Naif whose father, Naif bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, was the half-brother of King Salman and one of the Sudairi seven. Hassa bint Al Sudairi was one of the favourite wives, among more than a hundred, of King Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The octogenarian Salman is in poor health and appointing his favourite son to succeed him, seems to stem from his desire to fix the succession for his progeny.

Who is Muhammad bin Salman and what explains his meteoric rise in the Saudi ruling hierarchy? Salman became king in January 2015 and soon replaced the incumbent Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud who was in his seventies.

The relatively younger, Muhammad bin Naif in his fifties, was then appointed Crown Prince. This was a generational change since Muhammad bin Naif was a grandson of the Kingdom’s founder and son of Salman’s brother Naif, and one of the Sudairi seven. Muhammad bin Salman was appointed Deputy Crown Prince. While these relationships may get convoluted for the general reader, in the Saudi Royal family, pedigree matters.

Naif bin Abdul Aziz was a powerful interior minister and his son was also in the ministry and in charge of counterterrorism, a responsibility he took seriously. He was also at the receiving end of an assassination attempt which caused injuries not made public. Muhammad bin Naif has been divested of all responsibilities, which have been taken over by the new Crown Prince. The new Crown Prince was in charge of defence and energy, the two most important subjects after the interior ministry. The new interior minister, 34-year-old Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Naif is very close to Mohammed bin Salman. The Crown Prince will now be the all-powerful boss of all these ministries.

Muhammad bin Salman has also been an economic czar and he gave his country the 2030 Vision, which seeks to diversify revenues, imposes austerity measures and includes partial privatisation of the state owned ARAMCO, the giant oil company which has the monopoly over oil production and sales. While being young, energetic and dashing, he has dragged the Kingdom into a proxy war with Iran in Yemen that Saudi Arabia is far from winning. With oil prices hovering around USD 45, the Kingdom’s revenues have plummeted putting severe strain on its budget, which comes mainly from oil exports.

The challenges ahead

Muhammad dons the mantle of Crown Prince at a time when Saudi Arabia faces huge challenges.

As defence minister, he cozied up to the Trump administration by pushing through the huge deal for defence hardware purchases from the US. The Obama administration was not in the good books of Saudi Arabia because of the nuclear deal with Iran. The Saudis and the Israelis were against the nuclear deal, which gave Iran respite from sanctions and allowed it to flex its muscles in the region.

The rapid rise of the new Crown Prince must have also angered other members of the royal family, particularly the older ones who are more experienced, equally educated and competent. The royal family tends to keep differences within the family and rewards those who fall in line with the king’s decision. Hence, don’t hold your breath for a revolt. The royal family tends to zealously protect its corporate interests, which has made its members fabulously wealthy. There is no public manifestation of any discord.

Saudi TV has repeatedly shown an obsequious Muhammad kissing the hand of elder cousin, the sacked Crown Prince, saying that he will continue to consult him and other elders. It is unlikely that he will toe anyone’s line. In return the former Crown Prince has pledged allegiance to the new Crown Prince. By all accounts, the new Crown Prince is popular among the Saudi people, 70% of whom are in his age bracket. He has been carefully projected in the media as an industrious and ambitious leader who wants to modernise the country. A former American Ambassador has also called him impulsive.

Young Saudis, eager for change, celebrated the surprise announcement on social media. The Saudi stock exchange surged but economic and foreign policy challenges have not abated.

Regional balance

The new Crown Prince had taken the lead in war in Yemen, the blockade of Qatar and a more aggressive stance towards Iran. He is said to have spearheaded the setting up of the so-called “Sunni NATO” with the former Pakistani army chief as its commander. In Syria, he is reported to have set up the, hardline Salafi militia, Jaish Al Fatah that has allied with the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat Al Nusra, to fight the Assad government. The conflict in Syria continues and has caused immense misery among fellow Muslims and Arabs. Over half the Syrian population has become refugees and over 500,000 people killed and several Syrian towns and cities destroyed.

The new Crown Prince is also known for his tirade against Iran. He has framed his animosity towards Iran in harsh sectarian rhetoric. He vowed to take the struggle inside Iranian territory. Iran had blamed him for the death of over 2,000 Iranians during the Haj pilgrimage in 2015 when his convoy created a stampede. The execution of the well-known Saudi Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al Nimr angered Iranians who had at the time rioted and attacked the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. That was when Saudi Arabia broke off diplomatic relations with Iran.

But his tirade against Iran has endeared him to the Trump administration. Reportedly, he is a close friend of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, no doubt built on business links. His visit to Washington and Trump’s visit to Riyadh appears to have cemented ties between Riyadh and Washington.

The official statement from Washington has welcomed the new appointment. Iran has called the appointment a “soft coup”.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz has called the appointment good news and alleges that he has met with Israeli officials. This may not be surprising, as the common enemy Iran has brought Israel and Saudi Arabia gradually closer. The Saudi royal family has ruled for over a century and has to adjust to new economic and security challenges thrown up by a region torn apart by war. There are new alignments underway with Russia, Iran, Turkey and Qatar closing ranks. The downing of a Syrian Air Force aircraft and Iranian Drone by American aircraft are signs of a dangerous drift that could erupt into conflict.

The new Crown Prince should heed the advice of his more experienced elders if he desires to mature into a statesman and a true leader. And since age is on his side, he could rule Saudi Arabia for many decades to come.

This article originally appeared in Catch News.

By Mohammad Moradi*

The crisis in Yemen is entering its 27th month at a time that not only this crisis, but also the situation in entire Middle East has seen remarkable changes. The ongoing crisis in the Arabian Peninsula in which Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states have cut ties with Qatar, is a phenomenon which will affect the situation in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, to a lesser extent, Qatar, were known as the three sides of the attack on Yemen. Therefore, the speed of war on Yemen is expected to change as a result of this development. In fact, Saudi Arabia has once again turned into a center of crisis and tension for the entire region. The most important question posed in this paper is what differences exist between Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s regional approaches and behavior with regard to Yemen?

Cholera spreading due to blockade of Yemen

Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen, which started more than two years ago, was also accompanied with air, land and marine blockade of this country as well. Demolition of Yemen’s infrastructure and Saudi Arabia’s frequent attacks on the country’s health centers in addition to preventing entry of medicines have pushed Yemen toward a human catastrophe in the past two months.

A cholera epidemic as a result of the war in the country has so far killed 859 people in 20 provinces of Yemen while over 100,000 have been also affected.[1] Escalation of protests by international bodies to Saudi Arabia’s military assault on Yemen in the past few months, is a clear indication of how grave the situation is in this impoverished Arab country.

Saudi-led alliance trying to occupy Yemen’s Hudaydah port

Under Saudi blockade, Yemen’s Hudaydah port, located 226 kilometers from the capital city, Sana’a, is considered as the most important port of entry for economic aid to Ansarullah forces and their allies. For this reason, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have made great effort in the past few months to occupy or, at least, complete the siege of Hudaydah.

In many areas, Saudi-led alliance’s forces have managed to advance and this issue has set off the alarm for the intensification of the crisis in Yemen, because if Hudaydah is completely besieged, the human catastrophe in Yemen will further deepen.

Tensions in Doha-Riyadh relations and Qatari forces leaving Yemen

Perhaps, the ongoing tensions in the Arabian Peninsula can be considered as the most important variable affecting the Yemen crisis in recent days. As a result of this crisis, Qatar was expelled from the Saudi-led alliance and its forces immediately left their positions in the southern Saudi Arabian province of Najran. This can be important in that Najran, Jizan, and Asir provinces of the kingdom have been scene of frequent clashes between Yemeni and Saudi forces in the past two years.

In fact, Saudi Arabia has done its best to suppress Yemeni forces in that region and used help from Bahraini and Qatari forces to achieve this goal. The success of Yemen’s Ansarullah forces in southern Saudi Arabia can ring the alarms for the country’s capital city, Riyadh. Withdrawal of Qatari forces will change the balance in favor of Ansarullah and their attacks on southern regions of Saudi Arabia will probably increase in frequency.

Comparing activism of Iran and Saudi Arabia in the region

The most important point regarding the crisis in Yemen and the crisis in the Arabian Peninsula is related to approaches taken to the region by Tehran and Riyadh. Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy under King Abdullah was a mixture of conservatism and focusing on domestic conditions in the country.

However, after King Salman’s team gained power at the Saudi royal court, that policy was changed and replaced with an aggressive one. Following the adoption of this new policy, the type and intensity of Riyadh’s interventions in wars of Iraq and Syria increased and Yemen was attacked as the trump card of Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud.

To make the situation worse, election of US President Donald Trump was constructed as a green light for the continuation of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive and interventionist policy in the region. In addition, by signing a contract to buy 110 billion dollars of weapons from the United States, Saudi Arabia has not only intensified its faceoff with Iran in the region, but also challenged other countries along the southern rim of the Persian Gulf. The first output of this state of affairs was the confrontation with Qatar. In fact, imposing a blockade by Saudi Arabia and its allies on Qatar, which imports more than 90 percent of its foodstuff, showed that Salman’s team still insists on continuing its irrational policy, because the faceoff with Qatar has driven a wedge between Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well.

Mohammad bin Salman is actually taking advantage of the king’s illness in his pursuit of such aggressive measures so as to further restrict the power of the Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, on the one hand, and intensify his confrontational approach to Iran, on the other hand. Such behavior by Saudi Arabia has added fuel to instability in the region during the past three years. Riyadh has shown in the past two years that in times of political hardship, it will take it out on its southern neighbor, Yemen. Now that Riyadh’s new measures against Qatar have elicited negative global reactions, intensification of Saudi Arabia’s attacks on Yemen can be expected. This comes as Iran’s approach to regional issues has been based on rationality and dialogue. Iran has consistently called for reduction of tensions and resolution of crisis through dialogue in Yemen. Iran’s approach to other regional crises, including those in Syria and Lebanon, has been also based on dialogue.

In conclusion, as long as Saudi Arabia continues to take “intervention and warmongering” as the axis of its foreign policy, any expectation about improvement in regional conditions and resolution of regional crises, especially the war in Yemen would be unrealistic. Meanwhile, Iran’s approach to the region, which emphasizes dialogue and resolution of problems through political means, can be put on agenda as the most secure way to get out of the existing dire straits.

* Mohammad Moradi
West Asia Expert

*These views represent those of the author and are not necessarily Iran Review’s viewpoints.

[1] http://aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/cholera-epidemic-kills-859-in-yemen-who/839250

By Jason Steinhauer*

(FPRI) — It seems we are in the midst of a crisis of information—or, rather, a crisis of misinformation. The epidemic has been dubbed “fake news,” a term initially coined by the news media to describe stories on the internet posted by websites of questionable integrity. The term has since been turned back on the media, in America at least, by the Conservative political establishment— including by current President Donald Trump who levies accusations of the “fake news mainstream media” against the likes of CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others. We now have a constant back and forth in the public sphere: the media accuses online outlets of being fake, and politicians, in turn, accuse the media of being fake.

To the media, the fake news moniker is a convenient straw man for an industry grappling with its own future. From January 2001 to September 2016, the newspaper publishing industry in the U.S. lost over half of its employment, from 412,000 to 174,000. In contrast, employment in the internet publishing and web search portals industry increased from 67,000 jobs in January 2007 to 206,000 jobs in September 2016. How do you argue for your existence when technology may be making you obsolete? You assert that your competition is “fake”—lacking credibility, untrustworthy, inferior—and that you are “real:” authentic, venerable, defending institutional norms and values. Indeed, Mark Thompson, President & CEO of The New York Times Company at the Detroit Economic Club, made this argument in December 2016. The topic of his address was fake news. His solution? To subscribe to the Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and others. “If you as a citizen are worried about fake news, put your money where your mouth is and pay for the real thing,” he concluded.

The American media’s preoccupation with fake news is, in part, a manifestation of an anxiety held by traditional news publishers as they grapple with the influence of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other online media outlets. There has always been fake news, long before modern newspapers came into being, and there will continue to be fake news long after newspapers are gone. Subscribing to the New York Times will not, in itself, resolve the problem. In 1807, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson complained about the veracity of newspapers in a letter to John Norvell, claiming that “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper” and that “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.” It bears reminding that in Jefferson’s day, American newspapers had no pretense of being objective: on the contrary, they were mouthpieces for political interests, and, in fact, partisan newspapers helped Jefferson win the presidency over John Adams in 1800—often using tactics Jefferson later admonished. In the 1830s, there was a famous “moon hoax” by the New York Sun newspaper, in which the paper claimed to have evidence of life on the moon. That was, perhaps, the epitome of fake news. It helped sell newspapers, though. And those familiar with the Spanish-American War will know that U.S. newspapers of that era were filled with falsified accounts of Spanish cruelty in Cuba, not to mention misleading reports about the explosion of the USS Maine. Their reports helped to propel the U.S. into war with Spain. Even before newspapers, in societies without widespread literacy, misinformation, false information, and “fake news” was circulated via rumors, oral storytelling, songs, letters, pamphlets, imagery, and reports.[1] In America, fake news is not solely confined to the printed word; for a generation, talk radio and television have spewed conspiracy theories and information of questionable integrity, so much so that it helped to spawn a satirical genre of “fake news” in the form of The Onion, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. False information, disseminated to achieve a political, ideological, financial, or comedic effect, is not new and will continue regardless of the medium.

Our generation’s crisis around fake news is really a technology story—similar to the ways that the printing press, penny press, radio, and television altered the information landscapes before us. Our technology is the internet, and it is the pervasiveness, virality, and speed of the World Wide Web that has engendered our urgency around today’s fake news. The web and social media are powerful tools that can spread fake news around the world in an instant. They can also spread the facts that refute it. Like any tool, the challenge is to ensure that we educate the people who use the thing, even as we improve the thing itself. In 2016, the Stanford History Education Group released an 18-month study of more than 7,000 American students that found the ability of students to reason about information on the internet was “bleak.” Students could not differentiate a story by a journalist from a story by an advertiser, and, on the whole, students did not take the time to investigate whether websites or social media accounts had biases or hidden agendas. The question, it seems, is not what to do about fake news, but rather what to do about citizens who lack the tools or skills to recognize it—or worse, prefer it because it aligns with, or reinforces, their viewpoints. To quote philosopher Michael Lynch, the internet is “both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer—often at the same time.”

Fake History: The Lesser-Known Crisis

The consequences of fake news are very real. Inaccurate or purposefully misleading information in the news media has the power to influence our politics, our governments, and the policies we make for the future. Over the long term, however, it is information about the past that has the power to shape our identities, our nations, our institutions, and our opinions of others. Any zealousness to combat “fake news” must be matched with an equal—if not greater—zealousness to fight “fake history.” “Fake history” is a long-term phenomenon that has been emerging before our eyes. And unlike the “real news” that counteracts “fake news” every day in the public sphere, the “real history” that counteracts “fake history” has gradually disappeared from public view.

To foreground this discussion, I would like to recall an op-ed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in February 2014. Titled, “Professors, We Need You!” Kristof lamented that academics were largely invisible in the public sphere. Their invisibility was not, according to Kristof, a problem for academics. It was a problem for America. America—the policymaking establishment and the nation at large—needed the minds of academics to enact sensible policy and help to solve pressing social problems, Kristof wrote. By sequestering their wisdom within academic journals and burying their ideas beneath inaccessible prose, scholars did a disservice to themselves, to policymakers, and to the American people. Society could only be enriched through the contributions of the country’s sharpest minds resolving the nation’s most pressing issues.

Kristof’s column publicized a sentiment that had been growing for the better part of a generation: namely that academia had grown so specialized and jargonized that it ceased to have real bearing on the world. Academic history was no exception. Over the course of a generation, historians had veered toward hyper-specialization, researching topics of limited (or no) public appeal; and consumed with peer review and tenure evaluation at the expense of the public interest. Not coincidentally, historical scholarship all but disappeared from the public sphere. Historians published prolifically, but fewer and fewer non-experts were reading. The average sale of a scholarly monograph is now estimated to be a few hundred copies—at best.[2] A 2014 report found that the average academic journal article was read in its entirety by about 10 people. Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually—82 percent of those in the humanities are not cited once. No one refers to 32 percent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social sciences. Brilliant as academic research may be, its visibility and influence on the world at-large is, sadly, often minimal.[3]

One outcome of this retreat has been a society-wide dearth of “historical literacy.” I avoid saying “loss” of historical literacy because I am not convinced we in America ever much had it, nor am I prepared to say that today’s levels of historical literacy in America are below previous generations. But much like print journalism is in a state of anxiety regarding the standards it is fighting to uphold, so too is history in a similar state. Americans simply do not know—or do not place much effort into recognizing—“good” history, from “bad,” soundly researched scholarship from popularized myth. As a result, what is meant by the word “History,” what the word signifies, what it encompasses, what gets presented as history, and, most critically, how it gets communicated are all shifting quickly beneath our feet. What history has come to mean since it coalesced into a profession in the second half of the 19^th century—a discipline concerned with the careful use of evidence to make interpretive arguments about the past—is evolving right before our eyes.

To understand this necessitates that we make the distinction between the past and history. The past comprises the infinite number of events that have occurred right before this very moment. As you read this sentence, you are in the present. Now? The reading of that previous sentence is in the past. The past—what human beings have done up to this very moment—remains a topic of infinite interest to human beings. The trouble is that the past and history, though not synonymous, are used interchangeably in today’s America. History deals with the interpretation of things that have happened in the past. More precisely, history deals with the interpretation of things that have actually happened. Historians call these things facts. Historians substantiate facts with evidence: documents or otherwise that prove with some certainty that events actually occurred. History is concerned with evidence: presenting it and explaining it. And therein lies the rub. For not everyone will look at facts and evidence and come up with the same explanation about how and why something happened as it did. Future historians may find copies of my writings and use them as evidence to suggest that indeed, during my lifetime, I was a writer who wrote about history. But those future historians may disagree about the reason that I wrote. Some may hypothesize that it was my career at the Library of Congress that motivated me. Others may say that, in fact, it was my family’s experience during Holocaust. Each of these arguments would be based on evidence, and offer an interpretation of the fact of my writing within the larger context of my life and the world around me. Thus, as John Arnold writes, “History is above all else an argument. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.”[4] Since history deals with interpretations of past events grounded in evidence—and since new events are always occurring and new evidence is always being found—history is an ongoing, ever-changing argument that seeks to make some sense of the infinity of human actions that have occurred prior to this moment and have had a determinative effect on where we are today. Though both are valuable and interesting, history is much more than simply a recitation of what has happened in the past.

I would suggest that many Americans cannot differentiate between the past and history. This is evident on television, where in the U.S. we have a History channel whose programming now includes “Pawn Stars,” “Swamp People,” “Counting Cars,” “Ax Men,” and “The Marijuana Revolution.” A significant portion of the History Channel’s programming is, in fact, stories of people who live in the present and there is very little interpretation based on evidence. On the web, there are social media accounts such as @HistoryInPics that boast more than 4 million followers.[5] @HistoryInPics posts photographs taken in the past without interpretation, with captions not always based on evidence and largely on snark, and in some instances images that are actually fictitious, and thus not history because they are not interpretations of events that have actually happened.[6] Our web browsers have a history tab, a tab that is simply a list of websites we have visited in the past (this may resemble a chronicle, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as a description of events in the order that they happened, but in fact, mostly resembles what we call a list). Our Gmail accounts have an “archive” function—but an archive functions according to deeply reasoned practices of archival integrity and is arranged and described according to strict archival standards. The U.S. National Archives disposes of more than 90 percent of the material it accessions, whereas Gmail, contradictorily, asserts that users never have to delete anything. The “archive” function of Gmail is actually the opposite of archiving in many ways. The “archive” function would more aptly be named “move”—i.e. you move your email from one virtual holding place to another.

There are reasons why web browsers use the term “history,” why Gmail uses the term “archive,” and why @HistoryinPics did not choose the handle @ThePastinPics. There is a reason why famous American writers David McCullogh (a journalist by training), Michael Beschloss (who has a business degree from Harvard), and Doris Kearns Goodwin (a former U.S. government official) refer to themselves as historians and not, simply, writers. It is because the terminology of history carries connotations of authority, credibility, and reverence. Yet, ironically, much of what involves the past in mainstream American culture would not be considered historical—at least not as the history profession defines it. Not coincidently, little of what involves the past in mainstream culture involves historians. Even when a historian’s work finds the public eye, the historian is usually not the person celebrated for it. It is usually a journalist or a playwright who steers the conversation—someone who has a public platform, access to an audience, and communicative credibility with that audience. Media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly each have best-selling history books that have far outsold those written by academic historians.[7] Fortune 500 companies use old photographs—some in the public domain, some not—for the purposes of driving web traffic, increasing clicks, and maximizing advertising dollars. Governments and elected officials frame their policies as being “historic” as means of pre-certifying their lasting significance. History is seemingly everywhere yet nowhere. This is the “history” of today in America. Consequently, it should be no surprise that many Americans lack the ability to distinguish good history from bad.

History Communication

History—the analytical interpretation of the past based on critical assessments of evidence—is being transformed by our communications revolution. In a world where we receive the majority of our information from visual media such as the web, television, and mobile phones—and we lend the creators and users of these platforms the authority to dictate what we should or should not pay attention to—what passes for history is too often bits of information about the past circulated on the web, stripped of context, devoid of analysis, and intended to advance a political, ideological, financial, or personal agenda. Much like this environment has had a transformative effect on what gets called journalism and news, so too has it had a transformative effect on what gets to be called history. It creates the conditions for “fake history” to thrive. If historians are to reclaim the definition of history and instill historical literacy into our populations, historians will have to wade bravely and confidently into this complex communications environment. Many are already doing so, attempting to reclaim real history from fake history in the same way that journalists are attempting to reclaim real news from fake news.

To combat this will not be easy, and will require a multi-pronged strategy. Many of the strategies being employed to identify and flag fake news stories can also be effective in identifying fake history. Nearly all of these strategies are being directed by technologists; companies such as Google and Facebook, or vigilantes such as the Baltic elves, identify disinformation online and refute it—a reactive approach. But historians and scholars have a role to play, too: a proactive approach. We must saturate television, the web, and social media with real history and honest scholarship. It is not enough for historians to write a 400-page monograph and hope that elected officials or citizens will read it. Historians must adapt to the seismic shifts in communication and the new ways that people communicate via TV, the web, and mobile devices. Historians must win back market share in the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of people’s attention—and to do so will require changing how and where we communicate our scholarship, as well as replicating our scholarship across multiple media and freeing it from behind paywalls. In an era of constant demands on people’s time, minds, and eyeballs, unfortunately the rules of the market apply to history. And academic historians have a very small percentage of the information market share in the U.S. Wikipedia, Google, Glenn Beck, Michael Beschloss, and @HistoryinPics have more—and taken together they have sizably more. To earn back market share, historians must communicate content in a manner appropriate to the medium and that appeals to audiences beyond academia. More significantly, an entire generation of digital natives needs to be shown what comprises good history. They must be shown that good, honest scholarship that critically interprets past events is worth their time and attention—and that engaging with this material will make them smarter, more knowledgeable, and better able to shape the world for good. Such is the daunting task historians are now facing.

How history gets communicated will have a determinative effect on the profession’s future. As much as we historians value monographs and journal articles, we must also embrace web videos, listicles, crowd-sourced knowledge, GIFs, memes, podcasts, blogs, social media, imagery, emojis, and more—and incentivize and reward historians for using these media. For this reason, I and others have proposed that History needs History Communicators, and have created the field of History Communication. Just as science has Science Communicators, History Communicators, like Science Communicators, are historians who step beyond the walls of universities and institutions and participate in public debates; engage in conversation with policymakers and the public; communicate history in a populist tone that has mass appeal across print, video, and audio; and advocate for policy decisions informed by historical research. History Communicators teach historical literacy: the critical analysis of sources, argument and counter-argument, how to evaluate evidence and how to prove a hypothesis. Most importantly, History Communicators stand up for history against simplification, disinformation, or propaganda, and explain basic historical concepts that those of us in the profession take for granted. History Communicators are historians and skilled communicators. They are engaging. They are dynamic. They tell stories, wield metaphors and analogies effectively, are succinct, and are able to distill complex ideas into accessible language. They are skilled rhetoricians, scintillating orators, and are able to connect emotionally as well as intellectually with audiences. They are skilled at modes of persuasion, not solely appealing to logic and reasoning but also to the character, values, and emotions of audiences. They are able to communicate across multiple media and have a strong presence on social media. They are diverse, both in age, ethnicity, and appearance. They are a different type of historian than the profession has ever produced.

A Call to Action

We have seen what occurs when there is a widespread lack of historical literacy in a population. It is not solely that government officials and political candidates speak carelessly or dangerously about the past, or that state actors use falsehoods to deliberately sow instability into a region. It is that citizens lack the ability, motivation, and intellectual self-confidence to disentangle myth from fact, ideology from honest inquiry. That is what must compel us to act. Much like fake news will never go away, fake history will not disappear either. Strongmen and demagogues will continue to use the past as a method to incite and divide society. We need real history that confronts it, communicated widely, popularly, and effectively—and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.

The above articlew is adapted from a series of lectures delivered by public historian Jason Steinhauer in Lithuania in May 2017 at the invitation of the U.S. embassy in Vilnius. The lectures were delivered seven times at various institutions and universities, slightly modified each time to fit the audience. The version is based on the original text with minor adjustments.

About the author:
*Jason Steinhauer is the inaugural director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University and is the creator of the field of History Communication

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

Notes:
[1] See, e.g., Krisna Ruette-Orihuela & Cristina Soriano, “Remembering the Slave Rebellion of Coro: Historical Memory and Politics in Venezuela,” Ethnohistory 63:2 (April 2016) doi 10.1215/00141801-3455331.

[2] Harnum stated that sales per monograph were 300-400 copies in 2007; estimates are it is even lower today.

[3] Statistics taken from “Prof, no one is reading you,” The Strait Times, April 11, 2015. Accessed June 2, 2015. http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/more-opinion-stories/story/prof-no-one-reading-you-20150411

[4] John H. Arnold. History A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press (Oxford: 2000), p.13.

[5] Follower count as of June 19, 2017. Source: http://www.Twitter.com/HistoryInPics

[6] One example: @HistoryinPics posted a photograph of John Lennon playing guitar with Che Guevara. The two are never known to have met, and the photograph was confirmed to be doctored.

[7] This observation was noted at the 2015 Annual Historical Association meeting in New York and repeated at the 2016 AHA meeting. For sources, see Bookscan’s list of top history bestsellers for 2014. The list also includes Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks.

A three-week-old, Saudi-UAE-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar threatens to complicate newly promoted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reform plans and undermine the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Middle East’s most successful regional association.

Designed to impose Saudi Arabia and the UAE ‘s will on a recalcitrant Qatar, the boycott suggests that power politics irrespective of cost trump the need for reforms in Prince Mohammed’s world.

The stakes for 31-year old Prince Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family are high. Failure to deliver sustainable economic and social reforms could undermine the prince’s popularity whose age has allowed him to connect with significant segments of the kingdom’s youth, who account for two thirds of the population, in ways his predecessors could not.

“The isolation of Qatar is but one example of how the politics of the Gulf Arab states are getting in the way of economic diversification and transformation,” said Karen E. Young, a senior scholar at The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, in an analysis of the impact of the Gulf crisis on the region’s economic reform plans. Ms. Young noted that the depth of the crisis and the hardening of positions on both sides of the divide “suggests that economic growth and the liberalization of these political economies are secondary priorities for all parties involved.”

Irrespective of how the Gulf crisis is resolved, it already has damaged institutional as well as informal building blocks of a restructuring of the Saudi as well as the region’s economy. The GCC that groups Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, has suffered a body blow that it may not survive.

Continued Qatari membership is in doubt with the Gulf state’s refusal to accept Saudi-UAE demands that would end its at times provocative policies and render it a vassal of the kingdom. Kuwait and Oman are likely, in the wake of the crisis, to be more reticent about further regional integration, having long charted relatively independent, albeit less boisterous, courses for themselves.

The fragility of GCC unity beyond Qatar was already on public display three years ago when then US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel backed a Saudi push for greater military integration. In a rare public statement against Gulf union, Omani Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Yousef bin Alawi al-Ibrahim, a one-time representative of a separatist movement, rejected the proposal in no uncertain terms.

“We absolutely don’t support Gulf union. There is no agreement in the region on this… If this union materializes, we will deal with it but we will not be a member. Oman’s position is very clear. If there are new arrangements for the Gulf to confront existing or future conflicts, Oman will not be part of it,” Mr. Al-Ibrahim said.

The Omani official argued that the Gulf’s major problems were internal rather than external and should be the region’s focus. Earlier, Ahmed al-Saadoun, at the time speaker of the Kuwaiti parliament, also rejected a Gulf union, saying that as a democracy Kuwait could not unite with autocratic states.

This week, UAE State Minister for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash suggested that Qatar and the GCC would have to part ways if the Gulf state refused to accept demands by its detractors that effectively emasculate it and put it under guardianship. It’s unlikely that Kuwait and Oman would back such a move, which could split the six-nation association down the middle. Kuwait responded to the crisis by seeking to mediate while Oman helped Qatar circumvent the boycott by allowing Qatari vessels to dock at its ports.

Complicating Prince Mohammed’s reform plans, laid out in a document entitled Vision 2030, is the kingdom and the UAE’s handling of the crisis as well as a renewed 20 percent drop in oil prices since January. The crisis, beyond the balance between power politics and economic necessity, raises questions about key issues needed to inspire confidence in an effort to diversify the kingdom’s economy, streamline its bloated public sector, and strengthen the private sector.

Sanctions imposed on Qatar challenge concepts of equitable rule of law, the principle of freedom of movement, security of private ownership, and a modicum of freedom of expression in a region in which that basic right is already severely restricted. The sanctions include a ban on travel to Qatar; ordering Saudi, Emirati, and Bahraini nationals to leave the Gulf state; expelling Qatari nationals; shuttering offices of Qatari companies and ejecting Qatari-owned assets, including thousands of Qatari camels and sheep; prompting expelled Qataris to fire sell assets held in the Gulf states opposed to it; and closing airspace for flights to and from Doha.

Restrictions on freedom of expression were taken to new heights with a ban on expressions of sympathy for Qatar that in the UAE could earn someone sporting an FC Barcelona jersey with the logo of Qatar Airway, the sponsor of the Spanish soccer giant, 15 years in prison. Space for creativity, a prerequisite for building a 21st century knowledge economy, was further cast in doubt by the Gulf states’ unprecedented effort to force closure of more freewheeling Qatari media, including the controversial Al Jazeera television network.

As the crisis drags on, concern is likely to rise among the Gulf’s trading partners, oil and gas customers, and migrant labour suppliers. Those concerns are reinforced by fears that protagonists on both sides of the Gulf divide are likely to emerge from the crisis bruised and with their reputations tarnished irrespective of how the dispute is resolved.

A survey of young Saudi men conducted by Mark C. Thompson, a Middle East scholar at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals laid out what is at stake for Prince Mohammed. Mr. Thompson concluded that youth in the kingdom were willing to buy into Vision 2030’s concept of providing economic deliverables in exchange for acceptance of an absolute monarchy that limits basic freedoms.

“There was consensus amongst these young men that reducing unemployment, providing affordable housing and decent healthcare should be the government’s ‘top priorities’ as these issues are considered the most contentious and problematic in wider society: as one young man argues ‘basically if we have these then everything else is satisfactory’,” Mr. Thompson said.

The scholar noted however that initial enthusiasm for Prince Mohammed’s vision “has evaporated amongst some young men, who complain that whilst they were hopeful when the Vision was launched, as the months have passed they see few tangible results.” Mr. Thompson argued that performance was crucial because Prince Mohammed’s reform plans, the boldest to date, come on the back of earlier promises of change by Saudi leaders that never materialized.

Further undermining confidence is the fact that Prince Mohammed’s plan involves a unilateral rewriting of the kingdom’s social contract that offered a cradle-to-grave welfare state in exchange for political fealty and acceptance of Sunni ultra-conservatism’s austere moral and social codes. “The problem is that Vision 2030 has become synonymous with cutting salaries, taxing people and stop-ping benefits,” Mr. Thompson said.

Saudis have, since the introduction of cost-cutting and revenue-raising measures, seen significant rises in utility prices and greater job uncertainty as the government sought to prune its bloated bureaucracy and encourage private sector employment. Slashes in housing, vacation and sickness benefits reduced salaries in the public sector, the country’s largest employer, by up to a third.

‘I was an intern at a SANG (Saudi Arabian National Guard) hospital and most people there were angry about the Vision because their salaries were being cut. The soldiers around here are also angry because they work all the time. It’s unfair to take SAR 1000 ($266.50) from a 5,000 salary. My military father is angry because most of his salary and allowances have been cut. Some people’s incomes have already been reduced by 30% (except if you are a soldier in the south). It seems that the government wants to solve the current economic problems by force. They are doing this by raising taxes but not explaining anything to us. Prices keep rising regardless!” Mr. Thompson quoted a medical student as saying.

Increased grumbling and online protests persuaded the government in April to roll back some of the austerity measures and restore most of the perks enjoyed by government employees. Mr. Thompson cautioned that to succeed, implementation of Prince Mohammed’s “vision needs to be accountable and transparent, in other words a model of good governance… It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that young Saudis feel they are part of the National Transformation Plan, because if young Saudis believe they can make meaningful contributions to national development, then they will contribute.”

A foiled attempt this month by the Islamic State to attack the Grand Mosque in the holy city of Mecca was likely an effort to undermine Prince Mohammed’s reform plans that involve a loosening of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservativism’s strict and austere social codes and morals. A siege of the mosque in 1979 prompted the government to give the kingdom’s ultra-conservative religious establishment greater control of public mores.

The kingdom’s religious establishment has criticised Prince Mohammed’s social liberalization effort, including introduction of modern forms entertainment, but largely endorsed his economic plans. Social change has been embraced by a significant swath of Saud Arabia’s youth.

A 24-year-old speaking to The Guardian, cautioned however that ultra-conservatism maintains a hold on significant numbers of young people. “You know that the top 11 Twitter handles here are Salafi clerics, right? We are talking more than 20 million people who hang on their every word. They will not accept this sort of change. Never,” the youth said.

By Jamshed Baruah

While UN member states are negotiating at the United Nations headquarters in New York a legally binding instrument prohibiting nuclear weapons, experts from around the world will be gathering in Vienna from June 26 to 30 to review monitoring and verification technologies crucial to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT),

The forthcoming gathering – officially known as ‘The CTBT: Science and Technology 2017 Conference (SnT2017)’ – is the sixth in a series of multidisciplinary conferences designed to “further enhance the strong relationship between the scientific and technological community and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty Organization (CTBTO) as well as with policy-makers.”

CTBTO’s Science and Technology Conferences provide a forum for scientists from around the world to exchange knowledge and share advances in monitoring and verification technologies of relevance to the CTBT. Such interaction helps ensure that the Treaty’s global verification regime remains at the forefront of scientific and technical innovation.

According to the CTBTO, a verification regime to monitor the globe for nuclear explosions is nearing completion with around 90% of the 337 planned International Monitoring System (IMS) facilities already in operation. The system, says the CTBTO, has proved its capabilities to detect even small nuclear tests during the announced nuclear tests by North Korea in 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2016.

In addition to nuclear test monitoring, scientists use CTBTO data in a wide range of applications, from observing volcanoes and icebergs, to studying marine mammals and improving disaster mitigation strategies, and much more.

What distinguishes the 2017 Conference from previous such gatherings is its special focus on youth and young scientists, with active participation of members of the CTBTO Youth Group .

The importance of the SnT2017 taking place parallel to the UN Conference on prohibiting nuclear weapons also lies in the fact that the CTBT bans all nuclear explosions, thus hampering both the initial development of nuclear weapons as well as significant enhancements. The Treaty also helps prevent harmful radioactive releases from nuclear testing.

But the Treaty has yet to enter into force. So far it has been signed by 183 States and ratified by 166. However its demanding entry-into-force provision requires 44 particular “nuclear technology holder” States to ratify the Treaty for it to enter into force.

Eight of them have yet to ratify: China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and the United States (China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the United States have already signed the Treaty).

A special event during the SnT2017 will be the Interactive Globe, which will enable visitors to experience the IMS “at work” with the interactive 3-D visualization of how the four technologies – seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound, and radionuclide – interact to detect nuclear tests, as well as a range of other phenomena and events, from tsunamis and meteors, to tracking radioactivity after the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011.

According to a CTBTO media release, the eleventh and final hydroacoustic station in the IMS was certified on June 19, 2017, completing the hydroacoustic part of the network which monitors the globe 24/7 for signs of nuclear explosions under the CTBT.

One of the CTBTO’s longest running and most complicated engineering endeavours, hydroacoustic station HA04 was installed in Crozet Islands (France) in December 2016 after nearly 20 years of overcoming a number of challenges and hurdles.

Commenting the certification, CTBTO Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo said: “This is a momentous occasion not only for the CTBTO, but for the international community. The completion of the hydroacoustic portion of the IMS brings us one step closer to achieving full and increasingly sensitive coverage of the globe, and thus closer to making the planet safer and more secure from nuclear testing.”

HA04 is one of eleven hydroacoustic stations monitoring the oceans for signs of nuclear explosions. Low frequency underwater sound, which can be produced by a nuclear test, propagates very efficiently through water. Consequently these underwater sounds can be detected at great distances, sometimes thousands of kilometres, from their source.

“This means that the IMS requires only a few hydroacoustic stations to provide effective monitoring of all the world’s oceans for signs of nuclear explosions,” adds the CTBTO.

A new analysis shows that individuals with high levels of genetic variation and elevated exposure to ozone in the environment are at an even higher risk for developing autism than would be expected by adding the two risk factors together.

The study is the first to look at the combined effects of genome-wide genetic change and environmental risk factors for autism, and the first to identify an interaction between genes and environment that leads to an emergent increase in risk that would not be found by studying these factors independently. A paper describing the research appears online in the journal Autism Research.

“Autism, like most human diseases, is complex,” said Scott B. Selleck, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. “There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of genes involved and up until now — with very few exceptions — these have been studied independently of the environmental contributors to autism, which are real. Our team of researchers represents a merger of people with genetic expertise and environmental epidemiologists, allowing us for the first time to answer questions about how genetic and environmental risk factors for autism interact.”

The team looked at copy-number variation — deletions and duplications of repeated elements in the genome that lead to variation among individuals in the number of repeated elements — as a general measure of genetic variation and five types of air pollution — traffic-related air pollution, nitrogen oxides, two sizes of particulate matter, and ozone — in a large set of individuals with autism and a well-matched set of typically developing controls. The study participants — obtained through the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and Environment (CHARGE) Study, a population-based case-control study led by Irva Hertz-Picciotto, professor of epidemiology and chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health at University of California Davis, and one of the leaders of the research team — includes cases and controls matched for age, sex, and geographic location. Each of 158 cases and 147 controls were genetically scored for genetic deletions, duplications, and total changes in copy number. Environmental exposures for each participant were determined based on residential histories using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air Quality System.

“This study used unique resources,” said Hertz-Picciotto. “By mapping the homes of the mothers during their pregnancies, we were able to estimate their levels of exposure to several types of air pollutants that are monitored by the U.S. EPA. This allowed us to examine differences between cases of autism and typically developing controls in both their prenatal pollutant exposure and their total load of extra or deleted genetic material.”

Evaluation of each of the risk factors showed that duplications, total copy-number variation, and particulate matter in the environment had the largest individual impact on risk for autism. However, when the researchers evaluated interactions among the various risk factors they saw a large effect of ozone among children with either duplications or total copy-number variation. Ozone on its own had very little effect on risk for autism, such that in studies that did not take interactions among risk factors into consideration, it may have been ignored. Interactions among the various other factors, even those with large individual effects, appeared to have very little effect on risk.

“This study showed the effect of a pollutant not previously associated with autism risk. This study may be one example of how taking genomic variation into account can help us identify new risk factors for autism,” said Heather Volk, assistant professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“If we just look at the raw numbers, before any statistical assessment, we see a ten-fold increase in the risk of autism for individuals in the top 25 percent for level of genetic variation and in the top 25 percent for exposure to ozone as compared to the individuals in the bottom 25 percent for each of these measures,” said Selleck. “This increase in risk is striking, but given what we know about the complexity of diseases like autism, perhaps not surprising. It demonstrates how important it is to consider different types of risk factors for disease together, even those with small individual effects.”

The researchers speculate that the large effect of the interaction between ozone exposure and copy-number variation could be the result of the fact that ozone is an oxidizing agent, and is known to produce reactive oxygen species, like peroxides, that cause cellular stress and can alter cell function in many ways. High levels of copy-number variation may indicate a compromised state that is primed for the type of damage that ozone can cause.

By John Feffer*

The Saudi war in Yemen is really directed at…Iran. Donald Trump’s first overseas visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel was specifically targeted at…Iran. The Saudi-led isolation of Qatar is actually about…Iran.

The escalation of U.S. military actions against the Syria government is… well, do I really need to spell this out any further?

Donald Trump has identified several number-one enemies to target. Throughout the campaign, he emphasized the importance of throwing the full weight of the Pentagon against the Islamic State. More recently, his secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, identified North Korea as “the most urgent and dangerous threat to peace and security.”

Other threats that have appeared at one time or another in the administration’s rotation include China, Cuba, the mainstream media, former FBI director James Comey, and Shakespeare (for writing Julius Caesar and then somehow, from the grave, persuading the Public Theater to run a scandalous version of it).

Through it all, however, Iran has loomed as the primary bogeyman of the Trump crowd. Fear of Iranian influence has prompted the administration to all but cancel the 2015 nuclear deal, intensify a number of proxy wars, consider pushing for regime change in Tehran, and even intervene in the mother of all battles between the Shia and Sunni variants of Islam.

You’re worried about Trump and the nuclear football? The prospect of blowback from an all-out U.S. assault on the Islamic State keeps you up at night? A preemptive strike against North Korea, which Mattis acknowledges would be disastrous, has you rethinking that upcoming trip to Seoul?

Sure, those are all dystopian possibilities. But if I had to choose a more likely catastrophe, it would be a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran. After all, everything seems to be pointing in that direction.

The Fate of the Deal

The nuclear deal that Iran signed with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany and the European Union is hanging by a thread. Trump made no bones about his distaste for this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He promised to tear it up.

He hasn’t done so. It’s not just that he’s gotten pushback from the usual suspects in Washington (diplomats, foreign policy mavens, talking heads, journalists). Even members of his inner circle seem to see value in the agreement. Mattis, who is otherwise hawkish on Iran, has stood by the JCPOA and diplomacy more generally. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has, albeit reluctantly, acknowledged that Iran has lived up to its side of the agreement. Then there are all the American jobs on the line from the Iranian purchase of Boeing jets.

Even though Trump hasn’t torn up the agreement, he has certainly attempted to give it a good crumple. He has directed the Treasury Department to apply additional sanctions on Iran’s missile program. He’s considering the option of declaring the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. Congress, meanwhile, is pursuing its own complementary set of sanctions against Iran (though, because it’s bundled with sanctions against Russia, the legislation may not meet Trump’s approval).

None of this violates the terms of the JCPOA. But it challenges the spirit of the accord.

Adding insult to injury, Trump damned Iran with faint condolences after the recent terrorist attacks in Tehran. “We grieve and pray for the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in Iran, and for the Iranian people, who are going through such challenging times,” Trump wrote. “We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”

Talk about bad taste. After September 11, Iranians gathered for candlelight vigils to mourn the mostly American victims of the attacks. The Iranian government didn’t say anything about chickens coming home to roost after U.S. military interventions in the Middle East, for that would have been inappropriate (though accurate).

But Iran might yet have to make a statement that echoes Trump’s tone-deaf remark: States that tear up international agreements risk falling victim to the evil they promote.

Proxy Wars

The conflict is escalating in Syria, where Iran backs the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the United States supports a shifting set of anti-regime groups.

Both countries could decide to team up against the Islamic State. And indeed, Iran launched a missile attack against ISIS in Syria this last weekend in retaliation for the terrorist attacks in Tehran. As after September 11, when Tehran and Washington briefly worked together, cooperation against Sunni extremists would seem a no-brainer.

But the would-be caliphate, having lost most of Mosul and now teetering on the verge of conceding its capital in Raqqa, is shrinking at a rapid clip. Which may well explain why the United States has been wading deeper into the Syrian conflict. For the first time since the war in Syria began, U.S. forces shot down a Syrian government plane this last weekend. It’s only the latest in a series of attacks on Assad’s forces, according to The Atlantic:

Three times in the last month, the U.S. military has come into direct conflict with the combined forces of the Assad regime, Iran-supported Shiite militias, Hezbollah, and possibly even Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The clashes have reportedly resulted in the deaths of a small number of pro-regime forces, and are much more strategically important than the much-ballyhooed U.S. air strike on the al-Shayrat airfield back in April in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons.

Several administration figures, notably Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Derek Harvey in the National Security Council, are eager to confront Assad and his Iranian backers more aggressively. Mattis, however, has reportedly opposed several of their risky propositions. Regardless of the Pentagon chief’s somewhat more risk-averse behavior, both Iran and the United States are maneuvering to control as much territory as possible in the vacuum created by the collapse of ISIS.

Even The Washington Post, which generally supports the JCPOA, is enthusiastic about the U.S. intervening more forcefully in the new great game in Syria. “The United States doesn’t have a strategic reason to control southern and eastern Syria,” The Post editorial board opines, “but it does have a vital interest in preventing Iran from establishing a dominion from Tehran to the Mediterranean with Russia’s support.”

How soon the Post forgets. The Iraq War against Saddam Hussein begat the war against the anti-occupation forces, which in turn generated a war against the Islamic State, which now promises to escalate into a war against the axis of Russia, Iran, and Syria. Thus have so-called national interests morphed into endless war.

Meanwhile, over in Yemen, the Saudis are bogged down in a war of their own that’s going nowhere (except in producing a severe humanitarian crisis). The Trump administration has been mulling for several months a boost in U.S. participation in that war. At the least, this would mean lifting certain restrictions on the assistance Washington is already providing the Saudi-led coalition — surveillance, refueling, and the like. Then there are the additional arms that Trump wants to provide Riyadh.

Now that the Navy SEALS have conducted two raids in Yemen under Trump — the most recent taking place last month — the prospect of more permanent boots on the ground may not be far off. Recall how the United States became involved in Vietnam to help out the failing French in order to prevent presumed Soviet expansion.

Yemen, where we may yet send troops to help the failing Saudis prevent presumed Iranian expansion, is the very definition of quagmire.

Regime Change?

Last week, Rex Tillerson was testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In response to a query from Ted Poe (R-TX), a big fan of the Iranian radical group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and its efforts to destabilize Iran, Tillerson said,

Our policy towards Iran is to push back on this hegemony, contain their ability to develop obviously nuclear weapons, and to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government. 

It was the first public indication of regime-change sentiment from the administration.

But it’s not the only sign. Cohen-Watnick, the liaison on the NSC to the intelligence community, has reportedly confessed to other administration officials of his desire to oust the Iranian regime through espionage. And the fellow that’s now leading the Iran operation at CIA is Michael D’Andrea, otherwise known as the “dark prince,” a long-time operative who is fully capable of pursuing the harder line that Cohen-Watnick wants to see.

But wait, didn’t Iranians just overwhelmingly back the reformist Hassan Rouhani in elections last month? This popular government has engaged in domestic reforms and external engagement of the “Great Satan.” In other words, Iranians have changed their own regime — peacefully — since the days of the more confrontational Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Of course, Washington has overturned the wishes of Iranian voters in the past, helping to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.

Whenever oil interests (Tillerson) intersect with chickenhawk ambitions (Bannon), talk of regime change is sure to follow.

Clash of Civilizations

When Donald Trump said a few nice things about Islam on his first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia, liberals back home breathed a sigh of relief. At least the new president wouldn’t follow senior advisor Steve Bannon’s more extreme narrative of a new crusade against the infidels.

“This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations,” Trump said. “This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it. This is a battle between good and evil.”

But even as he rejected the larger religious frame, Trump has embraced a different kind of war: a clash within a civilization. The battle lines between Sunni and Shia have hardened throughout the Middle East, and Trump is wading into this mess firmly on the side of the Sunni. And not just any Sunnis, but the most extreme Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam as represented by the ruling sheikhs of Saudi Arabia.

Let’s be clear: Trump is not making a doctrinal statement by siding with extremist Sunnis. He knows nothing about Islam and is not interested in learning. This is about power — who will control the Middle East.

In the past, however, the United States in its infinite naiveté thought that it could control outcomes on the ground in the region. Today, that naiveté has developed into a kind of aggressive ignorance as the Trump administration simply follows the Saudi lead, with Israel pushing from behind. In this way, the United States will be propelled toward war with Iran.

But wait, actually, Donald Trump himself anticipated this outcome.

Back in 2013, Trump said,

We will end up going to war with Iran because we have people who don’t know what the hell they are doing. Every single thing that this administration and our president does is a failure.

Who knew that Donald Trump could be so prescient? The president has proven himself high-performing in at least this one regard: self-fulfilling prophecies.

*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

By Emma Claire Foley

In an age where sources of renewable energy are becoming an increasingly cost-efficient means of providing electricity, Russia is still going nuclear.

Nuclear energy is losing its luster in many parts of the world. In the United States, the drop in the cost of renewables production is making them a more attractive electricity-generation option than nuclear power. France, a country long associated with nuclear power, is also looking to reduce its reliance on reactors. And even China is now investing more in developing wind farms than it is in nuclear infrastructure.

Russia, though, is bucking the trend. Nuclear energy accounts for 11 percent of domestic power production, while the share of wind and solar power generation remains negligible, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Overall, more than 40 percent of Russian power is generated by natural gas. Meanwhile, hydropower is the main renewable source of power in Russia, responsible for a roughly 20-percent share of the overall mix.

Russia has taken steps in recent months to develop its wind power potential. But development efforts are hampered by legislation that requires at least 40 percent of all renewable-energy infrastructure to be locally produced. To meet the requirement, Russia needs to find a substantial amount of foreign investment.

In the realm of international trade, Russia is trying to turn its slow embrace of renewables into an advantage.

Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, is by far the most active player these days in the international market for nuclear power technologies. Rosatom currently has agreements to provide plants, fuel or expertise in 20 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. With the notable exception of the Barakah Atomic Energy Station in the United Arab Emirates, which is being built by the Korea Electric Power Corporation, Russia is the most heavily involved of any nuclear-exporting countries in developing nuclear power facilities in the Middle East.

Rosatom’s most recent move in the Middle East was a deal, sealed in late May, to construct Egypt’s first nuclear power plant, pending final approval by the Egyptian government. The pact is the latest of four bilateral agreements signed by Egypt and Russia concerning the nuclear power station at El Dabaa, approximately 200 miles west of Cairo on Egypt’s north coast. The first of these, signed in late 2015, covered the construction and maintenance of the plant for a 10-year period, and included a stipulation that Russia would provide fuel for the plant for 60 years.

The plant would consist of four VVER-1200 reactors, a new design based on the earlier VVER-1000 model developed in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. The first VVER-1200 was brought online earlier this year at Russia’s Novovoronezh plant. It is projected to begin producing power in 2024.

Egypt is one of four countries in and around the Middle East where Rosatom has built, or plans to build, nuclear power facilities. Rosatom’s subsidiary, Atomenergostroy, which handles the company’s overseas construction projects, has contracts to build plants in Jordan and Turkey. In addition, it is building additional reactors at Iran’s Bushehr facility. The company will provide financing, staff, and fuel, while retaining ownership of the plants and receiving revenue from the power they produce.

Russia has provided approximately 50 percent of the financing for Turkey’s plant at Akkuyu, and will provide fuel for its operation once construction is complete. Upwards of 85 percent of the financing for the El Dabaa project in Egypt is to come in the form of loans from Russia, a country in the midst of an economic downturn brought on by the global fall in fossil fuel prices.

Egypt is also exploring options for a second nuclear power plant to be built on its coast.

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union provided supplies, facilities, and training to Middle Eastern countries in an effort to promote nuclear power. The governments of Jordan and Egypt expressed interest at the time in developing nuclear power facilities in the mid-1950s, and the Soviet Union began construction on a research reactor in Egypt in 1961. Similar reactors were built in Iraq in 1967 and in Libya in 1981. In 1995, Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy signed a contract to take over construction of the Bushehr plant.

In 2010, Rosatom was granted the right to open offices in embassies abroad by a change in laws governing its operations. It did so in Dubai and Beijing in April of 2016, and the company’s website now boasts over $133 billion USD in overseas orders for its products.

Rosatom has also partnered with the International Atomic Energy Agency to fund nuclear infrastructure development internationally, pledging $1.8 million as well as equipment and expertise to equip countries that hope to develop nuclear power capacities in the future.

Experts have expressed concern that these ambitious development plans are proceeding without adequate plans for disposal of nuclear waste. The Bellona Foundation, an organization that conducts independent research into international nuclear and environmental issues, has been critical of the lack of planning for nuclear waste processing and disposal, and has pointed out that dependency on Russia for nuclear fuel may leave countries particularly vulnerable in the event of a sour political climate.

As temperatures climb and growing seasons change, milk producers across Switzerland must cooperate with one another to improve their grassland management practices if they want to break even, says an official agriculture report.

Dairy cow breeders in Switzerland are already struggling to cover production costs due to market liberalisation and lower prices. But according to a report from the national agricultural research centre, Agroscopeexternal link, farmers must also manage the effects of climate change to ensure that they can continue to produce enough fodder to feed their herds. The report is based on research conducted in the Jura mountains of northwestern Switzerland between 2014 and 2016.

In Switzerland, temperatures have risen by about 1.7 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. Over time, the increased risk of drought is particularly threatening for dairy cow breeders, Agroscope noted in its press release last week. The Jura region is especially sensitive to lack of water due to its permeable soil, and in 2015 the area experienced especially severe grassland yield losses of 20-40% due to drought.

Farmers can and must develop new land management practices to counter these challenges, the report argues. Cattle breeders can start by taking advantage of the longer grass growing season caused by climate change, and grazing their cattle more in the spring and fall – a practice which could create significant savings on imported cattle fodder.

But these practices must be planned and managed carefully: many grasslands in the Jura hills are already over-grazed, and the Agroscope report suggests several strategies for ensuring a healthy balance between cost savings, efficient fodder production, and sustainable land management.

These include modifying the breeds and numbers of cattle grazed in certain areas, collaborating with crop farmers to create a balanced equilibrium between fodder supply and demand, and developing temporary grasslands and pastures with more drought-resistant grass species. The report also recommends cooperation and networking efforts between lowland and mountain farmers, as operations in each area are affected differently by periods of drought and rainfall.

In 1992, Chile recorded 100,000 immigrants; in 2013, there were more than 400,000; and today, slightly under half million. They have settled mainly in the Metropolitan Region, Valparaíso, and in the big north, and they work mostly in services, mining, industry, agriculture, construction, health and education.

According to the National Socio-Economic Characterization Survey 2009 (CASEN), 54 percent of the immigrants are women. For the Department of Immigration and Naturalization (DEM) the total number of immigrants represents 2.08 percent of the national population of 18 million people. A 73 percent corresponds to South American immigration from: Peru (31.7 percent), Argentina (16.3 percent), Bolivia (8.8 percent), Colombia (6.1 percent), Ecuador (4.7 percent), Brazil (3 percent), and Venezuela (1.9 percent), according to 2016 figures.

In 2005, Chile ratified the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, adopted by the United Nations in 1990, but domestic legislation has not yet adapted to the international regulation. Chile’s legislation does not guarantee the principle of family reunification established in article 44 of the Convention. Another abnormal situation is that of children whose parents are in irregular situation; they are classified as “children of visitor foreigners,” something that tramples the International Convention on Children’s Rights, as this gives rise to stateless children, also denying them access to children protection public policies.

The flow of migrants from Colombia and Haiti has increased in the last few years. Social and cultural prejudices, classism and racism — that operates equally against Chilean population of low income, Mapuche or other indigenous peoples — affect in particular Colombian, Dominican and Haitian Afro-descendants. However, the average education level of migrants is 12.6 years, higher than that of working-age Chileans, which is 10.3 years.

The migrant population represents 5 percent of the labor force (CASEN 2013), and 65 percent work as employees or laborers; 62 percent work in the private sector, and 8.4 percent do domestic work; of the migrant women (34 percent work in this category, under minimum working and wage conditions, informality and noncompliance with the law). According to the DEM, in 2011, while 70 percent of males are employed, only 48 percent of the women had a contract.

In the opinion of Manuel Hidalgo, Peruvian economist and head of the Association of Immigrants for Latin American and Caribbean Integration (APILA), the administrative barriers are caused by the complexity that Chile has when processing the recognition of academic titles and degrees obtained abroad.

“It is a complex case in regards to Haiti, a country with which Chile has no agreements on the matter,” he tells Latinamerica Press. “It only has agreements with 12 countries. There is another barrier present when it comes to access jobs as a professional in the public sector, as for many of them, a requirement is to be a naturalized citizen. Socio-cultural barriers are mistrust, social and cultural prejudice from employers that is linked to a sort of nationalism mixed with racism, which makes it difficult to properly asses the competence, skills, level of education, qualification and experience of the immigrants.”

Holding centers

Rodolfo Noriega, a lawyer and president of the Committee of Peruvian Refugees in Chile, tells Latinamerica Press that “the Migration Bill has a Secret Registry of Immigrants dependent of the Interior Ministry. Why having a special registry? If it is entrusted to the police and they are the only ones with access to it, it is obvious that they are linking the presence of immigrants with a security issue.”

Particularly worrying, he adds, is that there are special holding centers: “We identified one at Calle Seminario 11, in Santiago. The police had to acknowledge this to the Human Rights Commission of the Senate. The national head of the International Police had to acknowledge that it was a holding center for foreigners.”

Hidalgo says that “the migration project that President [Michelle] Bachelet pledged to send in her government program, in substitution of the one that [former President Sebastián] Piñera submitted for administrative process during his government [2010-2014], has not been sent yet. Piñera submitted it in 2013 and was unanimously rejected by academia, religious organizations working with migrants — Jesuit Migrant Service and Scalabrinian Network —, as well as organizations from all migrant communities; reason why the process bogged down indefinitely.”

“In 2014 [at the start of the Bachelet presidency], Rodrigo Sandoval, the new head of the DEM, pushed for a participatory consultancy process to generate a new project, with regional meetings and extensive dialogue with academia, migrant defense organizations and the migrant communities themselves. The indication at the end of 2014 was that the project that came out of the consulting process would be submitted for administrative process in the first semester of 2015. It is two years later, and this still has not happened,” he adds.

With their sights on the presidential elections this November, the right wing has started using a xenophobic discourse as an elections pitch. The last survey of the non-governmental Center of Public Studies (CEP), of April/May 2017, reveals that the appreciation of the cultural and economic contribution of migration, as well as their right to access education under equal conditions, “is gaining increasing popularity in Chilean society, diluting the myth that ‘they take away jobs from Chileans’. But it also points out that the perception that ‘migrants raise the crime rates’, has risen to 41 percent. This goes to show the impact of the propaganda from the right-wing populism, clearly chauvinist, that pretends to take advantage of this issue for the elections,” states Hidalgo.

No respect for human rights

In Revista Sur, journalist Bárbara Barrera, denounced that in Calle San Luis, in the community of Quilicura, nearly one-hundred immigrants live in “overcrowded conditions, in a 5 square meters room that costs them 130,000 pesos a month (US$195), where they share two bathrooms and a kitchen. Guedelin Orzil, Haitian, had to give birth in a wheelchair in San José Hospital, because the healthcare personnel did not tend to her. Her infant son fell onto the floor and the hospital did not run any tests. Situations like these ones put in evidence the need for public policies to make it possible to improve the quality of lives of immigrants.”

According to Noriega, the joint report of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) “Employment Situation in Latin America and the Caribbean,” published on May 11, provides a piece of already confirmed information: 79 percent of immigrants in Chile have an education level of 10 years or more, but a big majority work performing manual labor and domestic work.

“There are a series of barriers preventing immigrants with qualifications and specializations to find employment in their professions or fields,” Noriega says. “The first one is to have a formalized residence and identity documents. Another problem is the recognition of studies and degrees. So basically this situations of over-qualification converge with an irregular immigration status, the no recognition of completed studies, a situation that affects all, but mostly Peruvians, Colombians and Bolivians, and in particular the language barrier that affects non-Spanish speakers like Haitians, Nepalese, Filipinos and Africans.”

Noriega explains that Law Decree 1.094, or Immigration Law, is a migration model based on selectivity, to prefer certain immigrants over others for their qualifications and their contribution to the “national interest,” as the Law literally states, and adds that this model adheres, in very close fashion, to projects of both Piñera and Bachelet. Both projects “have a vision of service to the market-based system, an economic-based approach, putting aside the so called ‘rights approach’, that they misunderstand on purpose, I believe.”

On his part, Hidalgo says that the biggest majority of immigrants occupy underestimated jobs: “Jobs no longer wanted by the domestic workforce or those where there is a definite supply deficit, such as nannies or the health sector. It is not easy for them to access employment that their degrees and work experience make them qualified, because there are administrative and socio-cultural barriers.”

Many of them send remittances to their countries, disregarding their own life conditions: they live in tenements, in overcrowded conditions, lacking sanitary conditions, among others. For years, the migrant communities have been demanding the regularization of their migratory visas, an amnesty for those who are in an irregular situation, a measure that Chile already took in 1997 and 2007-2008.