Representative Brad Sherman (D-California) has introduced a resolution to impeach President Donald Trump for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” including obstruction of justice over the president’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

The initiative, submitted to the House of Representatives, claims the president has “prevented, obstructed and impeded” a federal investigation into his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn.

Trump “sought to use his authority to hinder and cause the termination of such investigation(s) including through threatening then terminating James Comey who was until such termination the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” reads the proposed resolution.

In May, Trump abruptly fired Comey as the FBI director was leading an investigation into potential collusion between Trump’s aides and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential race.

A month later, Comey testified in Congress on the conversations he had with the president, which he said led him to believe that Trump asked him to stop looking into Flynn.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy,” Comey remembered Trump saying, according to Comey’s written notes of their meeting.

The conversation took place on February 14, according to Comey’s memos ‒ the day after Flynn was fired over misleading Vice President Mike Pence about contacts he had with Russia’s ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.

However, when asked during the June Congressional hearing if Trump “at any time” asked him “to stop the FBI investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 US elections,” Comey replied: “Not to my understanding, no.”

Even though many Democrats have accused Trump of obstruction of justice, party leaders seemed reluctant to formally back an initiative to impeach him when the calls first came in May.

Currently, the only co-sponsor on Sherman’s proposed House resolution is Representative Al Green (D-Texas).

Green was the first Congressman to call for Trump’s impeachment from the House floor in May.

“President Trump is not above the law. He has committed an impeachable act and must be charged,” Green said in a statement.

“Our mantra should be ‘I.T.N. – Impeach Trump Now,’” he said.

Impeachment is a three-part process outlined in the Constitution. It begins in the House of Representatives, where a simple majority can vote to impeach a federal official for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The definition is vague and has long been debated. In 1970, then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford defined an impeachable offense as “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

Once the House has voted to impeach, the issue heads to the Senate, which holds a trial. If the official in question is the president, then the chief justice of the US Supreme Court is the presiding judge, otherwise it is the vice president in his role as president of the Senate. The Senate needs a two-thirds majority, or 67 out of 100 votes, to find an official guilty and remove that person from office.

Only two presidents ‒ Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999 ‒ have ever been impeached by the House, both of which history has judged to be highly partisan proceedings. Neither was convicted by the requisite two-thirds majority in the Senate. President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, rather than go through an impeachment vote in the House.

Is Russia an existential threat to the West? Is it just another geopolitical adversary? The answer to this question can determine Western action and Western goals. If we consider the Second World War definition of the West, which is limited to Western Europe and North America, policy prescription will be radically different than when one compares an ever expanding NATO and EU. This is important, and has been a major factor in punditry’s analysis of US President Donald Trump’s meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Hamburg G20, at a time of extreme global turmoil.

What we know so far is that there has been external interference in the US presidential election, by cyber attacks, originating from Russian mainland. That’s the US joint Intel assessment. Although the assessment claims that the cyber attack was ordered by Vladimir Putin, no public evidence was forwarded to corroborate that claim, and it is all classified. Nor is there any evidence of any active collusion between Russian intelligence and Trump campaign, yet, nor any clear indication of whether Russian interference decisively tilted the vote count.

Reporting continues to attempt to flesh out details, as investigations continue. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported last week that a Republican operative, Peter Smith, who claimed to have had communications with former Trump official advisor Michael Flynn, was actively seeking Clinton emails from hackers. Matt Tait, a cybersecurity professional who was a source for the Journal‘s reporting, wrote that he was contacted by Smith, who represented himself as working with the Trump campaign, to verify emails he said he had received on the dark web.

Whatever else turns out, Russia is still a geopolitical adversary of the United States and Europe. It is imperative for countries to have a clear coherent grand strategy and one based on a clear understanding of the issues. In light of that, we asked three International Relations experts, two from US, one from UK, on how should the West deal with Russia.

Here’s what they said.

Richard Betts (Director of the International Security Policy program in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University):

“The most important question is how to strike the balance between two opposing goals. One is to buttress NATO and make clear that the newest members in the Baltic States will be protected against Russian attack. The other is to de-escalate tension between the United States and Russia and reach a mutually acceptable understanding about Russia’s security interests and influence in its border areas. Old fashioned diplomacy could work this delicate balance out, but modern democratic politics makes it hard to use the secrecy, subtlety, and compromises that may be necessary.”

Andrew Bacevich (Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University):

“Among both Europeans and Americans there is a tendency to exaggerate the current Russian threat. That threat is real, but quite modest. Russia is a declining power. Putin is not Stalin. So the most important issue facing the West with regard to Russia is to see that nation for what it is, a precondition for keeping the Russia “problem” in perspective. It is certainly the case that the United States faces problems of far greater significance than dealing with Russia.  East Asian security, climate change, and our own domestic cohesion are three examples. The United States needs to keep its priorities straight. In that regard, Russia qualifies at best as a second-order concern.”

Matthew Rendall (Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham):

“The priority should be reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war. US and Russian missiles remain on high alert, which means that if one side receives warning of an incoming attack, it could quickly launch  in response. False warnings occurred a number of times during the Cold War, and again in 1995, when Russia mistook a US research rocket for a possible attack. Though this never led to war, neither country was led by the ignorant and impetuous fool who now enjoys sole authority to launch the US arsenal. Even if negotiations produced no agreement, they might at least sensitize Trump to the risks.  With poor short-term prospects for co-operation on most other questions, not stumbling into Armageddon is one area in which the sides have a clear mutual interest.”

The Oregon governor is expected to sign into law a proposal requiring Oregon insurers to cover abortion on demand and increasing taxpayer funding for abortion, drawing strong criticism from Catholic leaders.

“By insisting on complete insurance coverage of abortion, including late-term and sex-selective abortions, the legislature shows itself intolerant of widely-held opposing views and will compel thousands of Oregonians to support what their conscience rejects,” the Oregon Catholic Conference said.

“House Bill 3391 forces insurance companies to cover abortion on demand and it forces all Oregon taxpayers to help finance an extremist abortion agenda that does not enjoy majority support.”

The Oregon House of Representatives passed the bill July 5 by a 33-23 vote. The Senate passed the bill 17-13.

The initial version of the bill’s religious exemptions were so narrow that the Catholic-run Providence Health System threatened to exit the state’s insurance market. The bill’s backers increased exemptions to the bill, but some objecting lawmakers said the provisions did not go far enough, the Catholic Sentinel reports. The exemptions apply to churches and other religious nonprofits.

Under the bill, the Oregon Health Authority must now provide abortion coverage where religious organizations will not.

The bill aims to counter expected changes in federal health care policy. It increases state spending by $10.2 million, most of the funding aiming to provide free coverage of exams, drugs, devices, and procedures. Abortion is considered a procedure under the law.

Under the Oregon Medicaid program, over $2 million is spent each year to pay for about 3,500 abortions, the Associated Press reports. The proposed bill sets aside about $500,000 over the next two years to expand free reproductive health coverage, including abortion, to immigrants.

The Oregon Catholic Conference voiced hope that Oregon Gov. Kate Brown will not sign the law.

The conference encouraged citizens opposed to H.B. 3391 to support the proposed 2018 ballot initiative called the Stop Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. The proposal would bar state funds for any abortion that is not medically necessary or when spending is required by federal law.

The petition needs 117,000 signatures from registered Oregonian voters in order to qualify for the ballot.

A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded — has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica, after a rift in the ice, monitored by the Swansea University-led MIDAS project, finally completed its path through the ice.

The calving occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July, when a 5,800 square km section of Larsen C finally broke away.

The final breakthrough was detected in data from NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite instrument, which images in the thermal infrared at a resolution of 1km. The iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, weighs more than a trillion tonnes and its volume is twice that of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes.

The iceberg weighs more than a trillion tonnes (1,000,000,000,000 metric tonnes), but it was already floating before it calved away so has no immediate impact on sea level. The calving of this iceberg leaves the Larsen C Ice Shelf reduced in area by more than 12%, and the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula changed forever.

The development of the rift over the last year was monitored using data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites — part of the European Copernicus Space Component. Sentinel-1 is a radar imaging system capable of acquiring images regardless of cloud cover, and throughout the current winter period of polar darkness. The detachment of the iceberg was first revealed in a thermal infrared image from NASA’s MODIS instrument, which is also able to acquire data in the Antarctic winter when cloud cover permits.

Although the remaining ice shelf will continue naturally to regrow, Swansea researchers have previously shown that the new configuration is potentially less stable than it was prior to the rift. There is a risk that Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbor, Larsen B, which disintegrated in 2002 following a similar rift-induced calving event in 1995.

Professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University, lead investigator of the MIDAS project, said, “We have been anticipating this event for months, and have been surprised how long it took for the rift to break through the final few kilometres of ice. We will continue to monitor both the impact of this calving event on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, and the fate of this huge iceberg.

The iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict. It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters.

The recent development in satellite systems such as Sentinel-1 and MODIS has vastly improved our ability to monitor events such as this.”

The Larsen C Ice Shelf, which has a thickness of between 200 and 600 metres, floats on the ocean at the edge of The Antarctic Peninsula, holding back the flow of glaciers that feed into it.

Researchers from the MIDAS Project have been monitoring the rift in Larsen C for many years, following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the sudden break-up of the Larsen B shelf in 2002. They reported rapid advances of the rift in January, May and June, which increased its length to over 200 km and left the iceberg hanging on by a thread of ice just 4.5 km (2.8 miles) wide.

The team monitored the earlier development of the rift using a technique called satellite radar interferometry (SRI) applied to ESA Sentinel-1 images. While the rift is only visible in radar images when it is more than 50m wide, by combining pairs of images, SRI allows the impact of very small changes in ice shelf geometry to be detected, and the rift tip to be monitored precisely.

Dr Martin O’Leary, a Swansea University glaciologist and member of the MIDAS project team, said of the recent calving: “Although this is a natural event, and we’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change, this puts the ice shelf in a very vulnerable position. This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history. We’re going to be watching very carefully for signs that the rest of the shelf is becoming unstable.”

Professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University added: “In the ensuing months and years, the ice shelf could either gradually regrow, or may suffer further calving events which may eventually lead to collapse – opinions in the scientific community are divided. Our models say it will be less stable, but any future collapse remains years or decades away.”

Whilst this new iceberg will not immediately raise sea levels, if the shelf loses much more of its area, it could result in glaciers that flow off the land behind speeding up their passage towards the ocean. This non-floating ice would have an eventual impact on sea levels, but only at a very modest rate.

Last year, the existence of an unknown planet in our Solar system was announced. However, this hypothesis was subsequently called into question as biases in the observational data were detected. Now Spanish astronomers have used a novel technique to analyse the orbits of the so-called extreme trans-Neptunian objects and, once again, they point out that there is something perturbing them: a planet located at a distance between 300 to 400 times the Earth-Sun separation.

Scientists continue to argue about the existence of a ninth planet within our Solar System. At the beginning of 2016, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) announced that they had evidence of the existence of this object, located at an average distance of 700 AU or astronomical units (700 times the Earth-Sun separation) and with a mass ten times that of the Earth.

Their calculations were motivated by the peculiar distribution of the orbits found for the trans-Neptunian objects (TNO) of the Kuiper belt, which apparently revealed the presence of a Planet Nine or X in the confines of the Solar System.

However, scientists from the Canadian-French-Hawaiian project OSSOS detected biases in their own observations of the orbits of the TNOs, which had been systematically directed towards the same regions of the sky, and considered that other groups, including the Caltech group, may be experiencing the same issues. According to these scientists, it is not necessary to propose the existence of a massive perturber (a Planet Nine) to explain these observations, as these are compatible with a random distribution of orbits.

Now, however, two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid have applied a new technique, less exposed to observational bias, to study a special type of trans-Neptunian objects: the extreme ones (ETNOs, located at average distances greater than 150 AU and that never cross Neptune’s orbit). For the first time, the distances from their nodes to the Sun have been analysed, and the results, published in the journal ‘MNRAS: Letters’, once again indicate that there is a planet beyond Pluto.

The nodes are the two points at which the orbit of an ETNO, or any other celestial body, crosses the plane of the Solar System. These are the precise points where the probability of interacting with other objects is the largest, and therefore, at these points, the ETNOs may experience a drastic change in their orbits or even a collision.

Like the comets that interact with Jupiter

“If there is nothing to perturb them, the nodes of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects should be uniformly distributed, as there is nothing for them to avoid, but if there are one or more perturbers, two situations may arise,” explains Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, one of the authors, to SINC. “One possibility is that the ETNOs are stable, and in this case they would tend to have their nodes away from the path of possible perturbers, he adds, but if they are unstable they would behave as the comets that interact with Jupiter do, that is tending to have one of the nodes close to the orbit of the hypothetical perturber”.

Using calculations and data mining, the Spanish astronomers have found that the nodes of the 28 ETNOs analysed (and the 24 extreme Centaurs with average distances from the Sun of more than 150 AU) are clustered in certain ranges of distances from the Sun; furthermore, they have found a correlation, where none should exist, between the positions of the nodes and the inclination, one of the parameters which defines the orientation of the orbits of these icy objects in space.

“Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU,” says De la Fuente Marcos, who emphasizes: “We believe that what we are seeing here cannot be attributed to the presence of observational bias”.

Until now, studies that challenged the existence of Planet Nine using the data available for these trans-Neptunian objects argued that there had been systematic errors linked to the orientations of the orbits (defined by three angles), due to the way in which the observations had been made. Nevertheless, the nodal distances mainly depend on the size and shape of the orbit, parameters which are relatively free of observational bias.

“It is the first time that the nodes have been used to try to understand the dynamics of the ETNOs”, the co-author points out, as he admits that discovering more ETNOs (at the moment, only 28 are known) would permit the proposed scenario to be confirmed and subsequently constrain the orbit of the unknown planet via the analysis of the distribution of the nodes.

The authors note that their study supports the existence of a planetary object within the range of parameters considered both in the Planet Nine hypothesis of Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin from Caltech, and in the original one proposed in 2014 by Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institute and Chadwick Trujillo from the University of North Arizona; in addition to following the lines of their own earlier studies (the latest led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias), which suggested that there is more than one unknown planet in our Solar System.

Is there also a Planet Ten?

De la Fuente Marcos explains that the hypothetical Planet Nine suggested in this study has nothing to do with another possible planet or planetoid situated much closer to us, and hinted at by other recent findings. Also applying data mining to the orbits of the TNOs of the Kuiper Belt, astronomers Kathryn Volk and Renu Malhotra from the University of Arizona (USA) have found that the plane on which these objects orbit the Sun is slightly warped, a fact that could be explained if there is a perturber of the size of Mars at 60 AU from the Sun.

“Given the current definition of planet, this other mysterious object may not be a true planet, even if it has a size similar to that of the Earth, as it could be surrounded by huge asteroids or dwarf planets,” explains the Spanish astronomer, who goes on to say: “In any case, we are convinced that Volk and Malhotra’s work has found solid evidence of the presence of a massive body beyond the so-called Kuiper Cliff, the furthest point of the trans-Neptunian belt, at some 50 AU from the Sun, and we hope to be able to present soon a new work which also supports its existence”.

Men who are tall and obese are at increased risk of high grade prostate cancer and prostate cancer death, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Medicine.

A research team led by the University of Oxford, UK found that while height was not associated with overall prostate cancer risk, risk of high grade disease and death from prostate cancer increased by 21% and 17% respectively with every additional ten centimeters (3.9 inches) of height. Higher BMI was also found to be associated with increased risk of high grade tumors, as well as increased risk of death from prostate cancer. Waist circumference, which is seen as a more accurate measure of obesity than BMI in older adults, was associated with an 18% greater risk of death from prostate cancer and a 13% greater risk of high grade cancer with every ten centimeters (3.9 inches) increase in waist circumference.

Dr Aurora Perez-Cornago, the lead author said: “The finding of high risk in taller men may provide insights into the mechanisms underlying prostate cancer development, for example related to early nutrition and growth. We also found that a healthy body weight is associated with a reduced risk of high grade prostate cancer and death from prostate cancer years later. The observed links with obesity may be due to changes in hormone levels in obese men, which in turn may increase the risk of aggressive prostate cancer. However, the difference in prostate cancer may also be partly due to differences in prostate cancer detection in men with obesity. ”

The study is among the first to differentiate between high grade and advanced stage tumors while investigating the links between height and obesity and prostate cancer. Most previous research did not group tumors into subtypes according to how far the tumor had spread (stage) and how abnormal tumor cells were when compared to normal cells (grade). Instead, stage and grade were grouped together in combined categories of aggressive or non-aggressive tumors.

Dr Perez-Cornago said: “Our data illustrate the complex association of adiposity and prostate cancer, which varies by disease aggressiveness. These results emphasize the importance of studying risks for prostate cancer separately by stage and grade of tumor. They may also inform strategies for prevention, but we need to do further work to understand why the differences in risk exist.”

The researchers used data from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), a prospective European cohort of 141,896 men, collected in eight countries – Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Germany and Greece. The data included 7,024 incident prostate cancers, 726 high-grade and 1,388 advanced stage prostate cancers, and 934 prostate cancer deaths.

The authors caution that in older adults such as the participants in this study, who were on average 52 years or older, BMI as a measure of overweight and obesity may be less sensitive than in younger cohorts. This may have led to an underestimate of the prevalence of obesity. Nonetheless, waist circumference, which is seen as a more accurate measure of obesity than BMI in older adults, was associated with a greater risk of prostate cancer death and high grade disease.

Further work is needed to understand whether the higher risk of aggressive prostate cancer in men with obesity is due to an increased risk of developing aggressive forms of the disease or to differences in prostate cancer detection.

Turkish security forces killed five suspected Daesh “Islamic State group” militants in the central Turkish province of Konya, as the country remains on high alert just days before the first anniversary of the failed coup.

“During the operation, the five terrorists were neutralised after they resisted armed forces and four security forces were lightly injured,” the provincial governor’s office said in a statement.

Police also seized five Kalashnikovs, a gun and ammunition, among other weapons, during the raid.

According to the Dogan news agency, the raid was part of an investigation into whether the suspects were plotting attacks on celebrations of the thwarting of last year’s failed coup.

The governor’s office’s statement did not confirm whether the suspects were indeed planning attacks.

Police initiated the raid after sunrise, targeting a house thought to have belonged to an IS cell. A total of 10 addresses were raided, according to Dogan.

Turkey has been on alert following a series of attacks thought to have been perpetrated by IS and Kurdish separatist militants over the last 18 months.

The country’s interior ministry said in a report on Tuesday that there had been 14 major terrorist attacks conducted by Islamic State including 10 suicide bombings, one bomb attack and three armed attacks. A total of 304 people were killed in these attacks, including 10 police officers and one soldier.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed last week that 3,000 IS militants had been killed by Turkish forces in northern Syria.

He added that Turkey had deported 5,000 terror suspects and banned another 53,000 people from entering.

Original source

By Sean Cronin

The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has been accused of “flip-flopping” over whether Hezbollah should be completely banned in the UK.

A spokesman for the mayor’s office told Arab News that he had not called for a total ban on the organization, despite a number of media outlets reporting that Khan had agreed to write to the UK’s home secretary to make such representations during an exchange last week in the London Assembly.
London Assembly member Andrew Boff said: “The mayor was explicit in his answer just days ago that he would be writing to the home secretary urging her to ban Hezbollah in its entirety.

“If he is reneging on that commitment it is the third time he has changed his mind on this issue in a matter of weeks. He is flip-flopping in order to give a changing audience what it wants to hear.”

Khan appeared to have agreed to a call by Labour member Andrew Dismore to write to Home Secretary Amber Rudd to make “urgent representations” to ban Hezbollah in its entirety during an exchange in the London Assembly on July 6.

Dismore asked the mayor: “Can I ask you to make urgent representations to the home secretary to make a long overdue decision to proscribe Hezbollah in its entirety as it has been in so many other countries?”

In his response, the mayor said he was “happy to make representations to the home secretary” but without detailing specifics of what he intended to write.

The row erupted following the appearance of Hezbollah flags at the annual Al Quds Day parade in London last month.

The mayor was questioned in the London Assembly after some marchers waved flags at the parade, which is usually held on the last Friday of Ramadan, and which was originally launched by Iran’s late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Hezbollah is also among the 60 groups defined as foreign terrorist organizations by the US Department of State, while the group’s military wing is also named in the EU’s list of terror groups.

The UK government proscribed the military wing of Hezbollah in March 2001. That ban was extended to its Jihad Council in 2008. Those wings of Hezbollah are among 71 banned organizations that also include Hamas.

Hezbollah’s political wing is not however subject to a ban in the UK.

The UK home secretary has the power to proscribe an organization and freeze its assets while membership of such groups carry jail sentences of up to 10 years.

The intervention of the mayor of London has focused attention on the political and military activities of the armed militia that emerged in the wake of the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1982.

Terror experts said that there should be no separation between its political and military wings and that a total ban was necessary.

“Hezbollah is a vicious terror and criminal organization with both American and European blood on its hands,” said David Ibsen, executive director of the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit organization formed to combat extremist ideologies.

“The idea that there is a separation between Hezbollah’s political and military wings is a dangerous fantasy.”

“Policymakers and security officials who indulge this absurd fiction are only emboldening one of the world’s most proficient terror organizations and facilitating Hezbollah’s penetration of European communities.”

Tally Helfont, the director of the program on the Middle East at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute believes that the distinction between the military and political wings of Hezbollah is a rhetorical one and reflects “different power levers” all working toward the same hegemonic ambitions.

“It is all smoke and mirrors,” she said. “Countries across the globe, from the United States to the Gulf states, have deemed the activities of this violent organization to be acts of terror, carried out to sow chaos and do the bidding of Iran. Making a distinction between a political wing and a militant wing is simply a matter of perpetuating the false narrative that group is peddling and amounts to a PR win for Hezbollah, and for Iran.”

The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) policy institute says that the separate treatment of Hezbollah’s political and military wings in Europe allows it to use front companies to fundraise and recruit.

“In 2016, the German government exposed a Hezbollah money-laundering operation in Europe that enabled it to amass nearly $2 million a week over two years. In turn, Hezbollah can use this to threaten the very countries that hesitate to fully ban the organization. These terror finance sources should be plugged,” said FDD Senior Vice President Toby Dershowitz.

“It is noteworthy that Hezbollah does not view itself as bifurcated into political and military wings; the group’s top leader — Hassan Nasrallah — fully controls the organization in its entirety.”

The EU designated Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist entity in 2013 following the bombing of a bus full of Israeli tourists in the Black Sea city of Burgas in 2013. Five Israeli tourists were killed along with the driver and the bomber.

The Hezbollah media office did not immediately respond to questions when contacted by Arab News.

Israel has been loudly protesting the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) resolution placing Hebron on the UN’s endangered heritage list. But Israel cannot sweep the truth under the rug. Issa Amro, 37, is proof that Hebron is endangered. Amro, head of the group Youth Against Settlements, is highlighting that danger and Israel is trying to shut him up.

Under Israeli occupation Hebron is a divided city, as are many cities in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel discriminates on the basis of religion and race, justifying public denunciations of it as an “apartheid-like” state. Jews are treated with privilege and benefit, and non-Jews are seen as an impediment the Israelis wish would just go away.

Through his activism, Amro documents Israel’s civil rights violations and the violent activities of the illegal settler movement. Settlers have stolen homes and properties, and beaten and harassed residents, including old men, women and children. It is a daily occurrence, but Israel does not file criminal charges against settlers, only against non-Jews.

Amro has organized protests against settler expansion and the abuses of Israeli soldiers, who are stationed in Hebron to protect radical settlers, not the civilian population. He is on the frontline of the fight for civil rights and justice in Hebron, which the UNESCO resolution addresses.

All of Amro’s protests have been nonviolent. They have been effective in spotlighting the activities of settlers, who often engage in unpunished violence against Hebron’s non-Jews. Rather than crack down on settler violence, Israel focuses on persecuting Palestinian activists such as Amro.

Israel’s actions are much like those of the Soviet Union against Jewish dissidents in the 1970s to bully and silence them. The Soviet gulag was more than just a prison system; it was a government policy to silence criticism.

Israel led the fight to expose the brutality of the Soviet Gulag, yet its own gulag is no different, filled with thousands of Palestinian political prisoners and dissidents who, like Jewish dissidents incarcerated by the Soviets, are described by Israel as violent terrorists. Israeli settlers in Hebron are among the most violent and hate-driven of the nearly-800,000 settler population.

Israel claims Amro “incited violence” by holding up signs denouncing Kiryat Arba as an illegal settlement. The only violence was from settlers and Israeli soldiers, who pounced on protesters with clubs and weapons. Amro denied the charge, which was backed by “testimony” from three Israeli soldiers who live and work with the fanatic settlers of Kiryat Arba. Israel wants to end Amro’s protests; UNESCO is not making it easy for that to happen.

It is not the only international organization paying attention to the plight of civilians in Hebron, which is holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Amnesty International has come down hard on Israel’s oppression of Amro and other activists, including his colleague Farid Al-Atrash, calling all the Israeli charges “baseless.”

Amnesty said: “Some of the charges (against Amro), such as ‘participating in a march without a permit,’ are not internationally recognizable criminal offenses.” It noted that one of the assault charges against him refers to an incident on March 20, 2013, that took place while he was in Israeli detention.

Amro has pointed out that 99.74 percent of all criminal charges against Palestinians result in convictions and jail time. That is because the system is rigged. The judge and prosecutor are Israeli soldiers. They have brought 38 witnesses — soldiers and settlers — to testify against Amro, whose trial is now taking place in Israel.

“It is a kangaroo court system where there is no justice at all,” he said. “The charges against me are an effort to shut down my human rights work and stop me from speaking up for my people.”

Amro has documented how the situation is even worse than UNESCO has described, noting that Israel moved from creating “segregated streets” in Hebron to enclosing entire Palestinian neighborhoods. “The gate is locked at 11 p.m. each night and families are imprisoned inside. So even as I prepare for the surety of my conviction, I am working to end this new injustice,” he said.

In an encouraging show of support, 32 members of the US Congress gave Secretary of State Rex Tillerson a letter urging him to compel Israel to withdraw the charges against Amro and other civil rights dissidents. Israel cannot talk about Hebron unless it wants to openly discuss its persecution of him. That is why the UNESCO resolution is so important.

By Faisal J. Abbas*

The US-Qatar MoU on combatting terrorism and its financing, which was announced on Tuesday during the visit by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Doha, is an important development.

There is no doubt that the agreement goes hand-in-hand with the demands of the Anti-Terror Quartet (ATQ), made up of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt.

Of course, the Qataris will argue that they acted unilaterally on this, and perhaps US diplomats will try to save Doha some face and claim that discussions began before the current crisis. This is partly true, as the Americans — like the Saudis and Emiratis before them — definitely would have talked to officials in Doha numerous times in the past.

However, no sane person would deny the reality that Doha has been under tremendous heat ever since the ATQ announced its boycott last month. At the time, even Tillerson himself advised Qatar — in a strongly worded public statement — to “do more, more quickly” to combat extremism.

It does of course remain a mystery why Qatar would accept, and act on such demands made by the US, yet consider the same requests a breach of its sovereignty when demanded by its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) or Arab countries.

Is it time to celebrate?

However, the main question now is whether or not this means that Doha has finally decided to give up on supporting terrorist groups and causing turmoil in the region.

I would say it is not time to party just yet. If anything was evident from the recent classified documents obtained by CNN, which show that Qatar had signed similar agreements in 2013 and 2014, it is that Doha cannot be trusted to mean what it says.

As such, I know for a fact that the ATQ countries will be watching closely — something Washington should also do in my opinion. In fact, the US administration should listen to the advice of its former Ambassador Dennis Ross, whose main criticism of Doha is its lack of transparency.

“The Qataris were not transparent with us in terms of what they did in Libya. I wanted them to be much more transparent than they were. I was concerned with their support for the (Muslim Brotherhood) and Hamas,” Ross recently told Sky News Arabia.

Given that most seem skeptical of Doha meaning what it says, I would argue it is now going to take some concrete steps by Qatar for anyone to start believing it this time.

Qatar could start by stripping citizens that are on the UN or US terror lists of their nationality, in the same way Saudi Arabia denounced Osama bin Laden in the past. It could also ban the Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf Qaradawi (who also has been given Qatari citizenship) from preaching at mosques, or blessing suicide attacks while speaking on Al Jazeera.

• Faisal J. Abbas is the editor in chief of Arab News Twitter: @FaisalJAbbas.

By Jim Garamone

“Lafayette, we are here.”

In July 1917, American soldiers — newly arrived in France — marched through Paris to pay their respects at the tomb of a man who embodied French assistance to the United States during the American Revolution — Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette.

American service members will once again march through Paris as part of the Bastille Day parade down the Champs-Elysees on July 14. They represent the firm alliance between France and the United States that Lafayette epitomized in the American Revolution and the Doughboys represented during the War to End All Wars.

President Donald J. Trump and Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will observe the parade and meet the American participants in it.

The United States would probably have remained a colony of England were it not for France’s assistance. Lafayette served alongside General George Washington during the Revolution and French soldiers and sailors were instrumental at the Battle of Yorktown — the victory that cemented America’s independence from Great Britain.

An Old Debt

The American soldiers of 1917 were well aware of the debt the United States owed France. America’s entry into the Great War on April 6, 1917, was viewed by many as a way for America to repay the French people for their help 140 years earlier.

And the French needed it. The Western Front stretched across France like a near 500-mile cancer. The French and the British had been fighting the Germans in the trenches since 1914 and millions had already died or been wounded.

Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, the Marne, the Aisne were all battles that ended in stalemates, but with a price in blood once unthinkable.

The Nivelle offensive of April 1917 — named after the new commander of French forces, Gen. Robert Nivelle — was designed to break the stalemate. The French attacked along the Chemin des Dames — a nearly impregnable German position along a ridge. The army took about 115,000 casualties with about 28,000 dead.

And then they stopped fighting.

Men in nearly half of the French divisions on the Western Front simply refused to obey orders to return to the offensive. The French Army had lost more than a million men killed up to that point, and the failure of the Nivelle Offensive was just too much. They mutinied.

The French government replaced Nivelle with Gen. Philippe Petain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun. Petain moved to improve morale and conditions for the French soldiers. Amazingly, the Germans never heard about the mutiny.

Reinforcements

Across the continent, Russia was lurching toward peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary. That would mean more than 1 million troops could reinforce German forces on the Western Front.

All this made the arrival of American force that much more important. On June 26, 1917, the first American troops arrived in the port of St. Nazaire. There were 14,000 soldiers in what was called the 1st Provisional Division. It was provisional because the United States Army had not operated in division-sized units since the American Civil War. Later in the year, the provisional unit would double in size and become the 1st Division — today’s famed 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One.

Training was a problem and the troops barely knew how to march, but the arrival of the forces of the new ally was important for military and civilian morale, and the U.S. forces marched to Lafayette’s Tomb.

Parisians saw the American forces carrying their 1903 rifles and wearing the broad-brimmed campaign hats now worn by drill sergeants, drill instructors or military training instructors in the Army, Marine Corps and Air Force. The French crowds mobbed the American troops along the route, according to the memoirs of Gen. John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force.

The parade was a good morale booster for a people worn down by the endless casualty lists, but it would be some time before American military might would be felt on the battlefield. The Big Red One entered the front lines in October 1917.

In time, the American contribution would be decisive. Petain recognized this and said his strategy was to “wait for the tanks and the Americans.”

They did arrive. More than 2 million soldiers, Marines and sailors served with the American Expeditionary Force in France. The numbers and their increasing combat effectiveness were instrumental in convincing the Germans to sign an armistice in November 1918.

It was not without its cost. The United States lost 117,465 dead and 204,002 wounded.

In waters close to the Bay of Cadiz in the early morning of last Wednesday, the Spanish Tax Agency seized over three million packs of contraband tobacco found in six containers being transported by a tug boat and cargo ship heading for the Huelva coast.

The seizure, carried out as part of Operation ‘Escudo’, is the largest ever conducted by the Spanish Tax Agency and in itself represents between one-fourth and one-third of all the manufactured tobacco products seized by the agency in one year throughout Spain.

In this operation, the Spanish Tax Agency was supported by the British authorities and the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation on the Borders of EU Member States (FRONTEX).

Operation ‘Escudo’ was launched on 24 June when, in international waters 50 miles to the north of Tunisia, three vessels were spotted transferring tobacco.

At the time, investigating officers discovered that the tobacco was being transferred to a cargo ship (the ‘Falkvac’), which, given its characteristics, could not complete a sea voyage independently and, in fact, was being towed by a tug boat (the ‘Eisvogel’).

This transshipment technique – entirely inappropriate for standard and lawful tobacco transshipment activity – immediately arose suspicion among investigators at the Customs Department of the Spanish Tax Agency, which ordered the seizure and analysis of the cargo and transport documentations. Following this analysis, it was found that this international criminal organisation engaged in cigarette smuggling has a significant number of vessels of varying size engaged in this unlawful trafficking activity.

After discreet surveillance of the tug boat and cargo ship, at 01:15 hours on 5 July, a Spanish Tax Agency Customs Surveillance patrol boat intercepted the two vessels in waters close to the Bay of Cadiz as they were supposedly sailing towards a shipyard on the Huelva coast.

Once the officers from the Customs Surveillance Department of the Spanish Tax Agency boarded the two vessels, they discovered that the Falkvag was carrying six containers but sailing without a crew and lacking the essential conditions to sail. At the same time, they also discovered that the tug boat Eisvogel was in contravention of the rules of navigation. Six people were travelling on board the tug boat. All of them were arrested, of which three are Italian, two are Croatian and one is Rumanian.

One feature of the modus operandi employed by this international criminal organisation consists of using a vessel with no engine and unfit to sail as merely a floating platform on which to carry the contraband tobacco. That vessel is steered by a tug boat under the guise of a tow contract, under which the organisation tries to avoid liability and the penalties for the offences committed.

Once the convoy was taken to port, the Customs Surveillance officers registered the goods they found in the containers: over 6,000 crates of tobacco containing over 3,200,000 packs of contraband tobacco, with a possible market value of approximately 12 million euros.

All actions have been reported to the Criminal Investigation Court of Cadiz, and the vessels, seized goods and arrested individuals have also been handed over.

Qatar’s Foreign Ministry Secretary General Dr. Ahmed bin Hassan Al Hammadi met on Wednesday with Iranian Ambassador to Qatar Mohammad Ali Sobhani.

The meeting reviewed bilateral relations between the two countries and means of boosting and developing them. In addition, the meeting reviewed the latest updates on the Gulf crisis as well as a number of issues of common concern, according to Qatar’s Foreign Ministry.

The meeting follows on Qatar and the United States signing Monday a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that strengthens the existing strategic framework for combating terrorism. The memorandum lays out a series of steps the two countries will take over the coming months and years to interrupt and disable terror financing flows and intensify counterterrorism activities globally. The agreement includes milestones to ensure both countries are accountable to their commitments.

The US has accused Iran of supporting terrorism in the region. In addition, the Arab Quartet of Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are currently maintaining sanctions against Qatar for what they consider that country’s support of terrorism.

On July 11, unidentified persons attacked Russian tourists near Gudauta in Abkhazia. One of the tourists received a fatal wound and died.

“The Foreign Ministry of Russia is deeply concerned about this event and hopes that the law-enforcement agencies in the Republic of Abkhazia will do their best to find and apprehend the criminals,” the Russian Ministry said, adding the Russian Embassy in Sukhum is monitoring the investigation and is providing all the necessary assistance to the victims of the attack.

The Republic of Abkhazia is recognised only by Russia and a small number of other countries. While Georgia lacks control over Abkhazia, the Georgian government, the United Nations and the majority of the world’s governments consider Abkhazia part of Georgia,

By Filip Rudic

Although Kosovo fought to break away from Serbia in 1999 and proclaimed independence in 2008, Serbia continues to pay off its foreign debt because it considers the former province a part of its own territory.

Serbia will pay almost a billion euros to cover Kosovo’s foreign debt because it refuses to recognise the former province’s independence, National Bank data obtained by BIRN shows.

According to the National Bank data, Serbia is paying off a 932.73 million euro debt which was incurred between the 1970s and 1990s, when Serbia and Kosovo were both part of Yugoslavia.

It has already paid almost 650 million euros, and has just over 300 million left to pay to various creditors.

The debt was restructured during 2002-2005, and Serbia is not paying any foreign debt that Kosovo has incurred since then.

“Serbia pays this debt because it considers Kosovo a part of its territory,” said the governor of the National Bank of Serbia, Jorgovanka Tabakovic.

Most of the money is owed to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (433.31 million euros), the Paris Club (297.2 million euros) and the London Club of creditors (169.85 million euros).

Smaller amounts are owed to the Council of Europe Development Bank (5.79 million euros), the European railway company Eurofima (4.62 million euros), Kuwait (18.1 million euros) and the European Union (430,000 euros).

Serbia has also paid a 3.44 million euro debt to Libya, as well as 1.57 million owed to the former Czechoslovakia.

Belgrade has been steadily repaying since 2002, and currently owes 304.54 million euros to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Paris and London Clubs and Kuwait.

The debt to the EBRD is due to be repaid by December 2031, the debt to the Paris Club is due by March 2041, to the London Club by 2024 and to Kuwait by July 2034, the National Bank told BIRN.

Serbia took over Kosovo’s share of the debt of the former Yugoslavia in 1991. Kosovo was barred from any involvement as Belgrade scrapped its autonomy in 1989.

After that, Serbia paid Kosovo’s debts until UN sanctions were imposed on Belgrade in 1992. It resumed paying the debts in 2001.

The debt question remains unsolved, as Serbia refused to discuss it with Kosovo during talks in Vienna in 2006-2007.

Kosovo experts say the question should be settled and that Pristina is ready to repay its share of the Yugoslav foreign debt, provided that Serbia submits the documentation it removed from Kosovo after Serbia was forced to withdraw from the ex-province in 1999

Despite the substantial costs associated with subsidised employment programmes targeting low-skilled youths, little is known about their effectiveness in easing school-to-work transitions. This column evaluates the effectiveness of such programmes for high-school dropouts in France with various types of labour market experience. Work experience, even in the market sector, is not always sufficient to increase the chance of very low-skilled youths being called for interview by an employer, suggesting that measures such as temporary jobs in the non-market sector or hiring subsidies in the market sector should be conditional on getting a certification of skills at the end of the employment period, at least for previously unskilled youths.

By Pierre Cahuc, Stéphane Carcillo and Andreea Minea*

In 2015, the share of youths aged 15-29 who were not in education, employment, or training (NEETS) was, on average, 15% in OECD countries, and high-school dropouts represented one third of these. As most dropouts remain out of employment for long periods of time, with lasting consequences for their personal and professional pathways (OECD 2016), this disadvantage tends to be very persistent. Among the many programmes that have been tried out for low-skilled young NEETs in the past 30 years, subsidised employment has been an important lever of employment policies, especially in France. However, despite the substantial public finance costs associated with the implementation of such measures, little is known about the effectiveness of specific interventions in easing school-to-work transitions among under-educated youths.

Previous research suggests that private sector subsidies perform better than public sector ones (Heckman et al.1999, Kluve and Schmidt 2002, Card et al. 2010, 2015, Kluve et al. 2016). Nevertheless, doubts may remain as to the relevance of these results, as most of them have not been obtained in a framework that allows perfect control of selection effects. In a new study, we evaluate the efficiency of programmes for unemployed youth by measuring the chances of getting a callback from employers for high-school dropouts with various types of labour market experience (Cahuc et al. 2017). The method involves sending résumés of young people who, over a three-year period following their leaving high school, have been either (i) unemployed, (ii) unemployed with some temporary work experience, or (iii) continuously employed in non-subsidised or subsidised jobs in the market or the non-market sector, with or without a certification of acquired skills. In all cases, young applicants did not finish high school and never got further education before entering the labour market.

We sent 5,388 applications over a period of six months in 2016 to actual job offers posted in France for receptionist and gardener positions. This strategy ensures that résumés can vary in one dimension only, which serves to identify the effects of different labour market experiences on the probability of receiving a callback. For instance, in our framework, the résumés of individuals who held a subsidised job in the past are identical in all respects to those who held a non-subsidised job. Since some otherwise identical job experiences are subsidised while some are not – which is specified in the résumé by mentioning France’s well-known youth employment programme, Emploi d’avenir – any significant stigma effect attached to contract subsidisation can be identified. The same holds for having held a job in the market or non-market sector, and getting a certification of skills or none.

On average, the hardest-to-place youths in France exhibit a low callback rate of about 8% in response to their applications. To analyse the experimental data, we estimate a linear probability model that enables us to examine the effect of our fictitious applicants’ profiles on the probability of being called back by employers. Figure 1 reports the main results of our estimations. Having some patchy work experience during the period of unemployment does not improve the relative situation of the candidates compared with unemployed without any work experience during their long unemployment spell. This result is consistent with those of Farber et al. (2016) and Nunley et al. (2016), who provide evidence that low-level temporary jobs which do not match the previous education and employment experience of the applicants do not increase their probability of receiving a callback.

A second finding that emerges from the analysis is that employment experience, either in the market or non-market sector, does not appear to increase applicants’ callback rate. For high-school dropouts, being employed for three years on fixed-term contracts, either in the market or non-market sector, subsidised or not, but without qualifying training does not improve the chances of a positive callback, even among employers from the market sector. These results are striking, as it is often claimed that getting a job in the market sector is a pathway to employment. They are nevertheless consistent with those of Fremigacci et al. (2016), who find that men unemployed for one year who apply for waiter jobs in France do not have lower callback rates than men employed on fixed-term contracts over the last year.

Figure 1 The effect of individual pathway on the probability of callback

However, when employment is paired with training providing certified skills, callback rates are significantly increased even if the vocational degree acquired corresponds only to the lowest level of certification available in France. Getting this vocational degree leads to a 42% rise in the probability of callback – a substantial effect on the employment prospects of youth with few or no qualifications. The impact of skill certification is large but very heterogeneous. Skill certification has a stronger impact when the youth occupied a subsidised job rather than a non-subsidised job, and the impact is even stronger if the job in which the experience has been certified was in the non-market sector. Indeed, given the design of the Emploi d’Avenir programme, which links subsidisation to the provision of training by employers, the monitoring of training of youth employed in subsidised jobs is likely stronger that in non-subsidised jobs. It is also likely that more time can be devoted to studying and training in the non-market sector than in the market sector. All in all, recruiters may expect youths who acquired certified skills in subsidised jobs in the non-market sector to be more skilled/effective than youth who acquired skill certification in other types of job.

Our results are thus consistent with previous research showing that accruing work experience, even in the market sector, is not always sufficient to get callbacks more frequently for very low-skilled youths. They suggest that employment support measures, such as temporary jobs in the non-market sector or hiring subsidies in the market sector, should be conditional on getting a certification of skills at the end of the employment period, at least for previously unskilled youths. Furthermore, we also show that the effect of skill certification is more pronounced in tight labour markets where the unemployment rate is low. This finding implies that additional measures supporting the geographical mobility of youths could add important leverage to the employment effect of training.

*About the authors:
Pierre Cahuc, Director, CREST Macroeconomic Laboratory; Professor of Economics at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris); CEPR Research Fellow

Stéphane Carcillo, Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, OECD Department of Economics, Sciences Po

Andreea Minea, Sciences Po, CREST

References
Cahuc, P, S Carcillo and A Minea (2017), “The Difficult School-to-Work Transition of High School Dropouts: Evidence from a field experiment”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 12120.

Card, D, J Kluve and A Weber (2010), “Active Labour Market Policy Evaluations: A Meta-analysis”, Economic Journal 120 (548): F452-F477.

Card, D, J Kluve and A Weber (2015), “What Works? A Meta Analysis of Recent Active Labor Market Program Evaluations”, IZA Discussion Paper No. 9236.

Farber, H S, D Silverman and T von Wachter (2016), “Determinants of Callbacks to Job Applications: An Audit Study”, American Economic Review 106(5): 314-18.

Fremigacci, F, R Le Gall, Y L’Horty and P Petit (2016), “Le Conformisme Des Recruteurs : Une Expérience Controlée”, TEPP working paper.

Kluve, J and C M Schmidt (2002), “Can training and employment subsidies combat European unemployment?”, Economic Policy 35: 409-448.

Kluve, J (2010), “The Effectiveness of European Active Labor Market Programs”, Labour Economics 17: 904-918.

Nunley, J M, A Pugh, N Romero and R A Seals (2016), “The Effects of Unemployment and Underemployment on Employment Opportunities”, ILR Review.

Chinese troops have been deployed to the country’s first overseas military base, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Beijing says the base will be used for logistical purposes, such as resupplying ships taking part in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

Ships carrying personnel from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were dispatched to set up the base in Djibouti on Tuesday, state news agency Xinhua reported, declining to mention the number of troops that were deployed.

Referring to the facility as a “support base,” the Chinese media outlet said its purpose will be to ensure China’s successful performance of missions in the region, including peacekeeping and humanitarian aid in Africa and western Asia. It did not say when operations would begin at the base.

It went on to state that the base will also assist with overseas tasks including military cooperation and joint exercises, as well as jointly maintaining security of international strategic waterways.

The decision to build the base in Djibouti came after “friendly negotiations” between the two nations, according to the PLA Navy, as cited by Xinhua.

In a front-page commentary, the People’s Liberation Army Daily said the facility will increase China’s ability to ensure global peace, particularly because it has many UN peacekeepers in Africa and is very involved in anti-piracy patrols.

It added that China will under no circumstances be seeking military expansionism or become involve in arms races.

Meanwhile, an editorial in the state-run Global Times seemed to refer to the facility as a proper base, rather than a logistics facility.

“Certainly this is the People’s Liberation Army’s first overseas base and we will base troops there. It’s not a commercial resupply point. It makes sense there is attention on this from foreign public opinion,” the editorial states.

It went on to state that China’s military development is about protecting its own security, not about “seeking to control the world.”

However, the base has sparked concern in India, with New Delhi worrying that this could be the first of many Chinese outposts in the Indian Ocean, Reuters reported. Beijing, which is rapidly modernizing its military, has denied that claim.

The deployment comes after a Pentagon report in May claimed that China was eyeing military presence overseas and modernization of its military to “deter or defeat adversary power projection and counter third-party intervention – including by the United States – during a crisis or conflict.”

Beijing responded by saying it is “firmly opposed” to the report, which is said included “irresponsible remarks” and “disregarded facts.”

The small country of Djibouti, situated between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, is home to some 887,000 people and is favored for its strategic location at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, on the route to the Suez Canal. The nation is also home to US, French and Japanese military compounds.

Japanese government sources said last year that Tokyo will be expanding its base in Djibouti, to counter what it sees as growing Chinese influence in the region.

“China is putting money into new infrastructure and raising its presence in Djibouti, and it is necessary for Japan gain more influence,” one source told Reuters at the time.

By John O’Shea and Robert Moffit*

Attempts to change the Medicaid program have been widely and inaccurately characterized as a way for conservatives to deny care to people. However, the reality is that Medicaid fails to provide timely access to care and in many cases provides lower quality care. Yet, Obamacare’s architects claimed success for having expanded Medicaid’s sub-par services to more people, further exacerbating these problems.

The current Senate health reform bill1 takes steps in the right direction by recognizing that health care “coverage” is not the same as health care and that simply pouring more taxpayer money into a failing, open-ended system is not the best way to help those in need. The bill rightly creates a pathway to transition to a more focused program that centers on the needs of the most vulnerable recipients—the disabled, elderly, children, and pregnant women in poverty—and gives people additional private option

Increased Medicaid enrollment will not achieve increased access to high-quality health care for the following reasons. Medicaid:

• Fails to ensure health care access,
• Provides inadequate physician reimbursement rates,
• Hinders continuity of care,
• Fosters of a culture of bureaucracy,
• Furthers reliance on emergency departments, and
• Provides inferior quality care.

Medicaid Coverage Fails to Ensure Health Care Access

Medicaid’s low physician reimbursement rates and administrative hassles make it difficult, if not impossible, for many physicians to incorporate Medicaid patients into their practices. Moreover, the Medicaid population disproportionately resides in medically underserved communities with serious shortages of primary care providers. These factors result in low participation rates, which in turn lead to reduced access to care for Medicaid beneficiaries.

Proponents of Medicaid expansion and even recent survey data2 suggest that most doctors participate in the program, but objective data challenge that claim.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics show that the percentage of physicians accepting new Medicaid patients was 68.9 percent and the percentage for only primary care physicians dipped to 66.8 percent. Meanwhile, 84.7 percent accepted new privately insured patients and 83.7 percent accepted new Medicare patients.3
• Self-reported data from a voluntary survey of California physicians show physician participation in Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program) declined from 69 percent in 2013 to 63 percent in 2015.4

Medicaid’s Low Physician Reimbursement Rates Undermine Access to Quality Care

Quality care means getting the right treatment for the right condition at the right time, which depends on access to a doctor. Physicians are less likely to accept Medicaid patients in their practice because Medicaid payment rates for medical services are set at artificially low levels—in some cases even below the cost of providing the services. As a general rule, Medicaid reimbursement rates are substantially lower than the fixed Medicare payments and substantially lower than the rates paid by privately insured patients.

Reimbursement rates vary across states and, not surprisingly, state reimbursement rates are directly correlated to physician participation rates. New Jersey, which reimburses physicians for services under Medicaid at only 45 percent of what it reimburses for Medicare, is also at the bottom in terms of access to care.5

This trend also holds true in specialty care. A 2016 study in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons found wide variations in payment across states, with many state Medicaid programs paying far less than Medicare and private insurance for common, essential surgical procedures, raising concern that this may act as a disincentive for surgeons to care for Medicaid patients, especially in states with very low reimbursement rates.6

A 2017 analysis in Health Affairs found that, even when Medicaid patients get appointments, they experience significantly longer wait times in the doctor’s office before being seen.7

The wait times were longer in states that had lower reimbursement rates.

Obamacare’s anemic attempt to address the low physician reimbursement rates in Medicaid was a failure. The Medicaid primary care payment increase expired on December 31, 2014.8

The payment increase was intended to address the need to maintain provider networks for those currently enrolled in Medicaid in light of the Obamacare-mandated expansion of Medicaid eligibility (later made optional by the U.S. Supreme Court), which was expected to cover millions of additional enrollees. This increase in payment rates was fully federally funded. Despite $7.1 billion in taxpayer money spent on increased payments for services, nothing indicates that the payment increase had any effect on recruiting Medicaid primary care providers.9

Medicaid and Discontinuity of Care

“Churning” in Medicaid—people cycling on and off the program—also hinders access. Churning makes it difficult to maintain continuity of care and contributes to the total number of uninsured.

From 1998 to 2003, 30 percent of Medicaid enrollees had at least one uninsured spell, compared to only 12 percent of individuals with private coverage.10

Medicaid and a Culture of Bureaucracy

Substantial administrative burdens are another reason that provider participation rates are so low in Medicaid. These burdens include reimbursement delays; rejection of claims for seemingly capricious reasons; pre-authorization requirements for many services; and complex rules and regulations for claim filing procedure.

Of these, reimbursement delays within the program are especially problematic. Like reimbursement rates, reimbursement wait times vary widely across states: Kansas has an average of 37 days, while Pennsylvania’s is 115 days. In every state, however, the average wait time for Medicaid reimbursement is appreciably longer than the average wait time for payment from private insurers.13

As expected, in the states where providers face low reimbursement and long wait times, the number of physicians who accept Medicaid patients was particularly low. However, in states with high reimbursement rates but long wait times, physician participation was not significantly higher, suggesting that raising reimbursement rates without addressing wait times will not improve access.

Other studies of various physician groups, such as pediatricians, have corroborated the findings that the factors of reimbursement rates and wait times contribute to low physician participation in Medicaid and that fixing one without addressing the other is unlikely to close the access gap.14

Medicaid and Emergency Department Reliance

A clear example that Medicaid coverage does not equal access to health care is the continued reliance on the emergency department (ED) by Medicaid enrollees.

A 2014 examination of the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which expanded Medicaid through random-lottery selection of potential enrollees beginning in 2008, found that expanded Medicaid coverage produced no detectable changes in physical health, employment rates, or earnings, and also increased emergency department (ED) visits by 40 percent in the first 15 months, including increases in visits for conditions that may be most readily treatable in primary care settings.15

A follow-up study in 2016 found that the increased use of the ED in Medicaid persisted for at least two years and therefore was not due simply to “pent-up demand” that would dissipate over time. Medicaid enrollees’ ED use in California surged by an even more dramatic 75 percent in the two years following the massive eligibility expansion authorized by Obamacare, according to data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.16

Nationwide statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also show no reduction in the traditionally high rates of ED use for non-urgent reasons among adults with Medicaid during and immediately following the Affordable Care Act implementation, suggesting that increasing “coverage” by adding more people to the Medicaid roles may not be the best solution in terms of improving access to primary care.17

Medicaid’s Poor Quality Care Problem

If Medicaid patients overcome these other barriers to access, evidence suggests that the care they receive in the doctor’s office may be inferior to the care received by privately insured patients.

Discussions of the Medicaid program routinely overlook these persistent quality deficiencies. For example, a 2015 study in Health Affairs found that after patient and provider characteristics were controlled for, Medicaid-insured visits were less likely than privately insured visits to include several preventive services, including clinical breast exams and Pap tests.18

Previous studies regarding cardiac and cancer patients have revealed extensive shortcomings in the quality of care delivered through Medicaid. For example, a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology examined outcomes from coronary artery bypass surgery and found that Medicaid status was independently associated with a worse 12-year mortality than for patients with other types of insurance. In fact, Medicaid enrollees had a 54 percent greater 12-year risk-adjusted mortality than patients enrolled in other types of insurance plans.19

Controlled studies of cancer patients have also found differences in quality of care and clinical outcomes between Medicaid patients and patients with private coverage. According to a study in the journal Cancer, researchers found that Medicaid patients who were diagnosed with breast, colorectal, or lung cancer had a two-to-three times greater risk of dying from their disease than patients with other types of insurance, even after controlling for other factors, such as site and stage of the cancer and the gender of the patients.20

More recently, a report in the Journal of Pediatric Health Care also found that privately insured patients had higher rates of medication adherence than Medicaid patients. Moreover, “patients with Medicaid plans also had 20 percent more inpatient hospitalizations, 48 percent increased odds of emergency department visits and 42 percent fewer outpatient visits compared with those who had a private plan.”21

Expand Access to Quality Care: Medicaid Premium Support

The Medicaid payment policies in the Senate and House bills both offer the states federal payment alternatives: a per-capita payment system for different Medicaid populations or a state block grant with enhanced managerial flexibility for state officials. Both bills put Medicaid on a more predictable budgetary path, and replace automatic federal spending for Medicaid as an open-ended entitlement—an approach long recommended by many health policy analysts.22

These steps could encourage the highest and best use of federal Medicaid funds for the affected Medicaid populations.

To secure better access to care, Congress should consider the creation of a Medicaid premium support program for the able-bodied Medicaid population. Congress should fund assistance to Medicaid patients through a direct defined contribution payment system (a “premium support” program) for these beneficiaries to enroll in private health plans. The Senate bill takes a step in this direction by providing lower-income individuals access to tax credits to purchase private insurance, rather than put them into Medicaid.

Such a policy would mainstream Medicaid beneficiaries into the same competitive private health insurance coverage that is available to their fellow citizens. This would mean that they would have access to the same doctors and networks of medical professionals that most Americans enjoy through the private sector. Unlike at present, then, when many Medicaid beneficiaries cannot find a doctor to care for them, these individuals could secure superior medical care, especially primary care.23

Conclusion

The Medicaid status quo is not effectively serving the health care needs of the disabled, elderly, children, and pregnant women in poverty. Policymakers should ignore hyperbolic political rhetoric claiming that conscientious reforms to secure and improve the safety net for Medicaid’s core populations and to provide better options for coverage and care to others will result in a situation in which “thousands will die.”24

Obamacare expanded the poorly performing Medicaid and claimed success for doing so. These new recipients can fare better under a new system that broadens their access to quality care. A Medicaid premium support program can accomplish that worthy end.

*About the authors:
John O’Shea, MD, is Senior Fellow in Health Policy in the Center for Health Policy Studies, of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation, and Robert E. Moffit, PhD, is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Health Policy Studies.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation

Notes:

Two new studies, one by the Moscow Institute of Sociology and a second by the Romir Organization, show that Russians know very little about their ancestors beyond two generations back, a reflection of the traumas of the 20^th century but a phenomenon that makes it vastly more difficult for them to integrate into a common nation.

The Romir survey, conducted in June found that few Russians can name all their relatives three generations back, that two-thirds of Russian households do not have family archives, and that despite a recent uptick in interest in the past the share of Russians focusing on the history of their families remains small.

As Mariya Nedyuk of Izvestiya notes, “sociologists link such a ‘short’ family memory to the fact that the country experienced such a large number of shocks,” as well as the fear of talking about the past in Soviet times and the illiteracy of most of the Russian population before the 20^th century (iz.ru/616331/mariia-nediuk/korotkaia-pamiat-na-predkov).

Andrey Milekhin, the head of Romir, says “it is possible that the role of inertia of Soviet times when studying history outside of official frameworks wasn’t permitted and that going into the history of one’s own family (and especially telling this to one’s children) was at times simply dangerous” (nazaccent.ru/content/24666-opros-rossiyane-ne-pomnyat-svoih-predkov.html).

The Institute of Sociology study found that 60 percent of those surveyed “did not know whether there were among their ancestors those who during the revolution and civil war supported the Whites or suffered from the terror” at that time. Equally large fractions didn’t know about what happened to their ancestors under Stalin (kommersant.ru/doc/3330116).

This absence of knowledge represents “a kind of ‘family trauma,’” experts say. Dmitry Travel of St. Petersburg University says that his research has found that most Russians have large gaps in their knowledge about their families, gaps that increase as one goes back earlier in time.

Vasily Zharkov, a political psychologist at the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences, says that fear in Soviet times played a major role in this: his own grandmother did not acknowledge until July 1991 that she had had relatives who fought for Admiral Kolchak.

The absence of memories about one’s own family has serious consequences for society as a whole. People find it difficult to fit themselves into a national narrative or even to identify as members of the nation if they do not know where their ancestors came from. Being part of an imagined community is easier if one knows something about where one comes from.

Vladimir Petukhov of the Institute of Sociology says that the situation in Russia is especially dire: “Even in Germany with its Nazi past, memories about ancestors have not broken off.” But because the Soviets created a situation where it was dangerous to talk about the past, Russians have learned not to. Overcoming that will be extremely difficult.

If you haven’t yet read the Bionic Mosquito’s blistering refutation of “libertarian” neocon Cathy Young’s Reason Magazine piece on why Russia is the ultimate evil that must be sanctioned and smashed, do yourself a favor and take the time to do so.

In the Reason piece dissected by the Mosquito, Cathy Young — a Russian immigrant — slams Ron Paul and others with similar views on US/Russia relations (opposing Cold War 2.0 and NATO provocations on Russia’s borders) as being “pro-Russia” (as opposed to anti-interventionist and anti-WWIII).

Hers is the same garbage we have heard from the neocons and “humanitarian” interventionists for the past 13 years: if you oppose war on Iraq, you are pro-Saddam; if you oppose blowing up Libya, you are a Gaddafi lover; if you don’t want to arm a bunch of crazed jihadis to overthrow secular Syria, you are an Assad apologist; and if you dare to suggest we attempt peaceful relations with Russia no matter our differences you are — of course — Putin’s puppet.

The warmongers always lie and the people must be lied into war, as Goering knew so well.

Young believes that the US government must support “pro-freedom” (read: anti-Russian) countries on Russia’s borders because to just leave them alone “would be a net loss for liberty and, arguably, for America as well.”

Young comes from the Trotskyite branch of the (faux) libertarian movement, where the libertarian’s struggle is not to get his government off his back so that he/she can live as a free person, but rather to demand that US government resources be used to force (their view of) libertarianism (“pro-freedomism”) across the globe. That’s why she desperately calls for more “NGO” money to be flushed down the “democracy promotion” rathole in hopes that the “non-governmental” sector and the CIA can continue to work hand-in-hand to prop up some governments deemed friendly to the US government and to undermine and destroy.

Below is an appetizer from the Mosquito, but don’t miss the rest of the meal here.

Better Dead Than Traditionally Wed

By Bionic Mosquito

This one runs a bit long…

Introduction

Russia’s Global Anti-Libertarian Crusade: How Vladimir Putin’s desire for domination and acceptance is scrambling American politics, by Cathy Young and published by Reason.com.

Yes, it’s all Putin’s fault – even at Reason Magazine.

The beltway mainstream libertarians are coming out in force for war with Russia, and criticizing the libertarians who are against war with Russia.  Their desire for the libertine overwhelms any concerns they might have regarding war with Russia.

Now they don’t say all of this in so many words, but one need not be a high school graduate to see where this is all headed.

Let’s allow Cathy Young to set the stage:

• NATO expanding to Russia’s borders should not be seen as a threat by Russia, but as an olive branch of peace;
• The EU should not be viewed as an unaccountable bureaucracy, but an organization dedicated to advancing liberty in Europe;
• Western involvement in color revolutions (if it even occurs) – even on the doorsteps of Russia – should not be seen as destabilizing, but as advancement of liberal democracy;
• Creating turmoil throughout the Muslim world should not be viewed as a threat to Russia – which not only directly borders this Muslim world but is also home to something in the order of 10 million Muslims, but instead seen as a move toward expanding freedom.

And how are libertarians who might believe otherwise viewed?

…pro-Russian (or at least anti-anti-Russian) arguments have become fairly common not just among conservatives but among a contingent of libertarians, such as former Rep. Ron Paul and Antiwar.com Editorial Director Justin Raimondo.

And why?

…Ron Paul–style libertarians are inclined to see Russia as a check on U.S. foreign adventurism and Russia hawks as hardcore proponents of the American imperial leviathan.

An incomplete view is the most charitable way I can describe this, although for a libertarian even just this might be reason enough to be “anti-anti-Russian.”

And why are these beltway mainstream libertarians against Russia?  (Emphasis added)

Schindler cites a 2013 speech in which Putin deplored the rejection of “Christian values” by “many Euro-Atlantic countries,” defended Russia’s right to protect traditional morality, and criticized attempts to export “extreme Western-style liberalism” worldwide. (The main example of Western decadence and liberal extremism was, of course, same-sex marriage.)

Get the picture?  Do you think my title was a joke?  And for this, the West must go to war against Russia.  And any libertarian (or anyone else) who disagrees is, by definition, on Putin’s payroll.  (He must not have my wiring instructions.  I’m still waiting.)

The Death of Democracy

As if – at least as it is currently practiced in much of the West – this would be a bad thing….

The dominant narrative in the U.S. foreign policy establishment and mainstream media casts Putin as the implacable enemy of the Western liberal order…In this narrative, President Donald Trump is…a witting or unwitting instrument of subversion, useful to Putin either as an ideological ally or as an incompetent who will strengthen Russia’s hand by destabilizing American democracy.

To the extent democracy is both worthwhile (a position I do not grant) and meaningful, American democracy was destabilized years ago – all on its own doing.  What was the Kennedy assassination but a destabilization of democracy?  What about the lies and false flags intended to drive the people toward a passion for war?  How can there be anything approaching a stable democracy when the mainstream media so blatantly and regularly lie to the public, acting as nothing more than press agents for the state?

At its extremes, the Russian subversion narrative relies on a great deal of conspiratorial thinking. It also far too easily absolves the Western political establishment of responsibility for its failures, from the defeat of European Union supporters in England’s Brexit vote to Hillary Clinton’s loss in last November’s election. Putin makes a convenient boogeyman.

I read this and scratch my head.  Democracy’s failures can be seen in Brexit or in Hillary’s election loss?  What on earth does that even mean?  Was there a vote or wasn’t there?

Is Reason a Neocon Tool?

Nonetheless, there is a real Russian effort to counter American—plus NATO and E.U.—influence…

What libertarian thinks in such terms?  A libertarian would want to see the influence of the American government, NATO, and the EU all countered and reduced.  Bad enough we are under the yoke of unbelievably massive state governments, NATO and the EU are entities of force and coercion even above and outside of the state.  I wish the United States would work to counter NATO and EU influence – how could a libertarian think otherwise?  Thank God someone is doing it.

Of course, one could say that the state – any state – should not be used to counteranything.  OK, I agree.  So, get the US out of NATO; get the US out of military bases around the world.  Let’s keep in mind: on whose borders has NATO encroached since the end of the Cold War?

A Call For More Government Action…

…as opposed to less government action.

What should American policy be toward Putin’s Russia?

How about stay out of their business?  How about stay out of their neighborhood?  How about no more destabilizations of its neighbors?  How about that for an American policy?

No, not at Reason.

While “democracy promotion” in countries with no homegrown liberal tradition is a project likely to remain discredited for the foreseeable future…

Talk about an understatement.  Have you seen the results?  But, there is a bigger question: under what aspect of libertarian theory does the idea of “democracy promotion” by one government toward another country fall?

…support for genuine grassroots pro-freedom aspirations in countries that look to America for leadership is a far more complicated matter.

Under what aspect of libertarian theory does the idea of “support for genuine grassroots pro-freedom aspirations” by one government toward another region fall?

Ukraine, Georgia, and even the Baltic states may not be paragons of liberal capitalism today. Yet if they were bullied into a return to Russian vassalage, it would be a net loss for liberty and, arguably, for America as well.

Isn’t it their business?  Does it do any good for such smaller countries to rely on the good graces of some government five thousand miles away while at the same time being antagonistic toward its own neighbors?  How much liberty has been lost by those in the Ukraine today because of this?

Read the rest of the Mosquito here.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.