A dominant issue at the Green Party 2017 Annual National Meeting was inclusion of and leadership by oppressed communities. The Green Party began as a party of primarily white environmentalists, but that has been changing over the past decade. In the current corporate kleptocracy, there is a dire need for a party of and by marginalized communities that builds effective political power for transformational change in our society. The Green Party might be that vehicle, but undergoing that change will result in conflict and growing pains as we struggle to practice our values.

Following the election of the new Steering Committee at the Annual National Meeting, outrage was expressed that the three African American candidates lost. The Black Caucus and other caucuses protested, and steps are now being taken to write a proposal to address their legitimate concerns. That will be presented to the Steering Committee and National Committee for debate and consideration.

In addition to concerns about white supremacy in the party, there are also concerns about democracy and independence from the duopoly parties. A negative campaign was waged against the current Steering Committee member who was up for reelection, Andrea Mérida Cuéllar, and a slate of candidates was run to oppose her. It appears that this was retaliation for her efforts to build inclusion and independence. The negative campaign sowed division and distrust within the party. It raises questions about the integrity of the party and whether the Green Party can differentiate itself from the power plays typical of the duopoly parties. This exposé is intended to add to the debate of the future of the Green Party.

Former presidential candidates Jill Stein and David Cobb, the latter who also served as Stein’s 2016 campaign manager, worked behind the scenes to control the outcome of the 2017 election for the Steering Committee of the Green Party. Stein and Cobb wanted to remove Andrea Mérida Cuéllar, a Latina who is a co-chair of the Colorado and national parties. Mérida has done a great deal of work to confront white supremacy in the Green Party, including leading an effort to pass a very strong bylaw amendment in Colorado on the issue. She also led an effort to expand the representation of the Black Caucus and other caucuses by urging they have more delegates to the National Committee.

Stein and Cobb wanted Mérida out of the co-chair position because she blocked their repeated attempts to control and steer the party in directions that benefited their interests over the interests of the party. The strange and divisive move they championed with the recount was a graphic example of that tendency.

In late November, 2016, Stein and Cobb came to the Green Party Steering Committee (SC) asking the Green Party of the United States to serve as a fiscal agent for the post-2016 election recount. The Stein campaign refused to say who their donors were, but they had donors prepared to give up to $100,000 to the recount. The Stein campaign was only legally allowed to take donations of $2,700 while a political party could take up to $100,000 per donor. Mérida opposed this and a majority of the steering committee agreed. Not accepting defeat on this, Stein and Cobb forced the SC to vote three times and three times Andrea and a majority stood firm in opposing the proposal that would have destroyed the reputation of the party as an independent political force. The backstory that emerged affirmed the political commonsense exercised by the SC.

The recount was designed by a Democratic Party lawyer, John Bonifaz, who developed it to change the outcome of the election and make Hillary Clinton president. When Clinton refused to seek a recount, he brought the same proposal to Stein. Stein took the proposal, without any changes, in an effort, as she told Margaret Flowers, to “flip the election.” The Stein campaign used a Democratic Party PR firm, Democratic Party talking points, including on the fake Russiagate scandal, and hired Democratic Party lawyers, including a lawyer in Michigan who was the former Chair of the Michigan Democratic Party for nearly 30 years and who sued to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot. The recount was funded by Democratic Party political action groups MoveOn and Democracy For America and raised millions, more than was spent on the entire Stein campaign.

The recount failed to flip the election, but it did show voting irregularities and Stein did change her rhetoric to focus on a very real and well-known problem – Jim Crow voting procedures in the US, which undermine the right to vote in black communities.

Mérida standing up to Stein resulted in a retaliatory campaign against her, led by Stein and Cobb. Not only did Stein campaign against her re-election as a national co-chair, but people also report that Stein contacted members of the Colorado Green Party to urge Mérida’s removal from leadership at the state level.

During the Green Party 2017 Annual National Meeting in Newark, NJ, Margaret Flowers, Mérida and I were having lunch at a diner where Cobb and three others were also coincidentally having lunch. We were trying to take a break from the toxic atmosphere of the attacks on Mérida. When we left, Cobb’s companions also exitted, among them were Gary C. Frazier, Jr. of Camden and Kohmee Parrett of Chicago . We spoke outside and they urged us to stop the conflict with Cobb. We explained that there would be a lot less conflict if Cobb was not running a campaign attacking Mérida to prevent her from being re-elected. Cobb came out and Parrett asked him if it was true that he was working to prevent Mérida’s re-election. Cobb replied, “Yes, I am doing what I can to stop Mérida from being re-elected.”

Cobb confirmed what we already knew about both him and Stein. Stein and Cobb had created a slate of candidates to run to defeat Mérida. National delegates told us they had been called by Stein and Cobb urging them to vote for the Stein-Cobb slate and to oppose Mérida. People who endorsed Mérida received angry calls from Cobb or Stein. It became a very nasty election. Stein entered a vote as an alternate delegate, voting for her slate of candidates, as did Cobb, who is a delegate.

Despite Stein and Cobb’s efforts, and despite false allegations in the form of complaints posted to the National Committee delegate listserv just before and repeatedly during the SC election, Mérida won reelection easily; she was the second highest vote getter of first-ranked choices. All three African American candidates lost. Two were on the Stein-Cobb slate.

When the results became known, members of the Black Caucus were understandably angry. Even though 88% of the national delegates voted for at least one black candidate, the election loss of three black candidates seemed racist. The Caucus and others took to the street and protested at a fundraiser for the NJ Greens that election night.

At the fundraiser, the seven steering committee members present were confronted with the question of whether they would be willing to resign from the SC. Two steering committee members had not yet arrived at the event. The only way for Stein-Cobb to get rid of Mérida, as they have been working to do for seven months, is for all of the steering committee to resign. So far, only two members have formally resigned in writing.

While the conflict over Mérida was a catalyst, Stein and Cobb took advantage of long standing anger and frustration among some caucuses about the ways that the Green Party has been slow to adopt internal reforms that live up to its values. The pain and anger expressed in Newark is real, even if the specific issue at hand was distorted by behind the scenes electioneering. This manipulation of real grievances is among the most troubling things that occurred.

Where does all of this leave the Green Party? Nothing is resolved regarding the election, as that is still being worked out and discussed in the Black Caucus and other caucuses, among National Committee delegates and by the Steering Committee. Darryl! Moch, with assistance from Stein, presented a proposal at the conclusion of the meeting that will be submitted for the Steering Committee and National Committee to consider.

Out of this there are two things needed. First, we need to get the full story on the extent of Stein-Cobb interference in elections. Did they have any involvement in the negative smears against Mérida? Did they pressure members of the Green Party of Colorado to attack Mérida? Was there any involvement between them and a false, smear letter about Mérida at Standing Rock? Why didn’t Stein and Cobb publicly endorse what came to be considered their slate? Why were they making calls in private instead of being public? Delegates are supposed to represent their state, so was the Stein-Cobb interference a violation of Green ethics? What role did they have with the Black Caucus’ action?

The second task is even more important. The Greens need to continue to face up to internal race issues. The Green Party needs to put systems in place that will ensure black people, youths, women and other groups are represented throughout the party and play key leadership roles. Members of the various caucuses need to be at the forefront in designing these new systems.

All of these issues have been evident. The Green Party Power group, which I was part of, wrote a letter in December of 2016 signed by hundreds of Greens, that called for Greens being an independent party that opposed the corporate duopoly and expanded our ranks by building from the bottom up in dispossessed communities, especially black communities. Among the actions we called for were:

“We urge the Green Party US to actively address issues within the party that perpetuate racial and class dominance, sexism, cis-heterosexism, ableism, and all manifestations of oppressive and White supremacist culture.

“We also urge the Green Party US to encourage members to support working class and front line struggles, to prioritize the voices of those engaged in struggle and to run candidates from communities in struggle.”

In the end, our hope is this becomes an opportunity for growth of the party and expansion with people from communities left behind, neglected and mistreated by the two corporate parties. And, that we define ourselves as independent of both parties and in opposition to a country that was built on ethnic cleansing and racism, taking advantage of workers as well as on militarism and imperialism.

This is an important juncture in the party for it to publicly declare its opposition to all forms of political opportunism that mirror the politics of the kleptocratic political duopoly. Confronting these issues and creating a radical opposition party will make the Green Party a greater influence in US politics.

George Soros, the American multi-billionaire, is causing Binyamin Netanyahu a lot of trouble.

At this particular moment, Netanyahu does not need any more trouble. A huge corruption affair, concerning German-built submarines, is rolling slowly and inexorably towards him.

Soros is a Hungarian Jew, a Holocaust survivor. The Hungarian governing party plastered his face all over Budapest with a text that barely hid its anti-Semitic intent. Soros’ sin is his support for human rights associations in his former homeland. He does the same in Israel, though on a much smaller scale. So Netanyahu does not like him either.

This has created an awkward situation. Netanyahu was about to visit Budapest to meet his Hungarian opposite number Victor Orban, who is suspected of being a mild anti-Semite. Netanyahu considers him a right-wing soul-mate.

The Hungarian Jewish community was upset. They demanded that Netanyahu postpone his visit until the Soros posters were removed.

Eventually most – but not all – of the posters were indeed taken down, and Netanyahu met with Orban. But the entire episode showed that the interests of the State of Israel and the interests of Jewish communities around the world are not automatically identical, as Zionists would have us believe.

There was another incident prior to the Hungarian meeting. A few days earlier, at a public event, Orban had lauded Admiral Miklos Horthy, the head of the Hungarian state during World War II, when Hungary cooperated with Nazi Germany like all of Eastern Europe (except Poland, which was occupied).

So how could Orban laud Horthy on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit?

As a matter of fact, Horthy’s role is still hotly debated. A self-declared anti-Semite and enigmatic person, he succeeded where no other European leader did: he saved many hundreds of thousands of Jews by disobeying and cheating Hitler.

One of them was an aunt of mine, who married a Hungarian Jew in Berlin and was deported by the Nazis to Hungary, where she survived, eventually reaching Palestine. Another was “Tommy” Lapid, a child in Budapest who became a famous personality in Israel. His son, Yair, is now a politician who seeks to supplant Netanyahu. He probably would not exist but for Horthy’s devious actions.

I cannot resist interrupting here in order to tell a historical joke.

After Pearl Harbor, Hitler and his entire gang of foreign collaborators declared war on the US. The Hungarian ambassador in Washington was also instructed to submit a declaration of war to the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who decided to mock him.

“Hungary, Hungary – are you a republic?” he asked.

“No, sir, we are a kingdom.”

“Really? So who is your king?”

“WE don’t have a king, only a regent, Admiral Horthy.”

“An admiral? So you have a big fleet?”

“No, we have no fleet at all, since we have no coastline.” (Horthy became an admiral during World War I, when Hungary was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire which indeed did have a – small – fleet.)

“Curious. A kingdom without a king and an admiral without a fleet. So why do you declare war on us? Do you hate us?”

“No, we hate Romania.”

“So why don’t you declare war on Romania?”

“Impossible! They are our allies!”

Sorry for interrupting myself. Back to Netanyahu.

Just now the Netanyahu government did two things which enraged many Jews throughout the world, and especial in the US.

One concerns the Western Wall (formerly called the Wailing Wall) in Jerusalem. This is the holiest place of Judaism.

Since I am a pious atheist, holy places don’t speak to me. The more so since the Western Wall is not really a part of the Jewish Temple, reconstructed by King Herod some 2000 years ago, but just a supporting wall of the large artificial mound of earth, on which the Temple stood.

The last time I was there was in 1946. The imposing wall was flanked by a narrow lane, which made it seem even higher. After the 1967 war, the entire Arab neighborhood was leveled to make place for a large piazza. The wall was turned over to the ultra-Orthodox, in return for their votes in the Knesset. Men and women were separated, of course.

With the growth of feminism, this became problematical. In the end, a compromise was found: a small part of the wall was set aside for “mixed” prayers of men and women, and also for “Reform” and “Conservative” Jews, who hardly exist in Israel, but constitute the majority among American Jews.

Now, under Orthodox pressure, Netanyahu wants to revoke this compromise, causing great excitement among American Jews.

As if this was not enough, Netanyahu also wants to withdraw the recognition of “Reform” and “Conservative” conversions to Judaism, giving the Orthodox exclusive rights to perform conversions in Israel.

Since there is no separation between state and religion in Israel, a simple law suffices. Indeed, Israeli institutions are becoming more and more religious, so much so, that a new Hebrew word, Hadata (roughly “religiosifiation”), has been invented.

The “Reform” and “Conservative” Jewish institutions in the US do not care about the occupation, about the brutal repression of the Palestinians, about the daily killings. They support the Israeli government through thick and thin. But they care very much about the Wall and about conversions. Like Ivanka Trump, non-Jews often convert in order to marry Jews, so this is an important business.

It all seems like an inherent contradiction, and indeed it is.

Israel is defined officially and legally as a “Jewish and Democratic State”. A new law is about to strike the “Democratic” from the formula, and leave Israel only as a “Jewish State”. It is seen by many as the headquarters of the world Jewish people. Netanyahu has often declared that he considers himself the leader and defender of all the Jews in the world.

If so, can there be a conflict between the interests of the Jews anywhere and the State of Israel?

There can and there has been from the very beginning. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism and a Hungarian Jew, had discussions with the anti-Semitic leaders of Czarist Russia and elsewhere, promising to help rid them of their Jews and take them to Palestine. This common interest underlay many curious alliances at various times.

Anti-Semites always preferred the Zionists. Adolf Eichmann wrote in his confession that he saw the Zionists as the “valuable element” of the Jewish people. And so on.

Abraham Stern, called Ya’ir, an underground leader in British Palestine, split from the Irgun and founded a new group (called the “Stern Gang” by the British) whose main policy plank was to cooperate with Nazi Germany against the British, on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. He sent emissaries to German embassies but was ignored by Hitler. Eventually he was shot by the British.

In the first Years of Israel, when David Ben-Gurion first visited the US as Prime Minister of Israel, he was admonished by his aides not to bring up the subject of immigration, so as not to irritate the US Jews whose money was needed desperately. Ben-Gurion demurred, but did what they said.

At the time, a friend of mine wrote a humorous piece about a community of hugely rich Jews in a remote part of Africa, who owned all the diamond mines in their country. When Israel needed money to buy flour for next month’s bread, the most talented Zionist propagandist was sent there. Knowing the desperate situation of his country, the man gave the most passionate speech of his life. At the end, no eye in the hall remained dry.

The next day the speaker got a message: we were so moved that we decided to turn all our property over to the natives and come to Israel as pioneers.

The declared aim of Zionism is to bring all the world’s Jews to Israel. Herzl himself believed that this would indeed happen, and in one passage he wrote that, once most of the Jews had come to the Jewish state, only they would henceforth be called Jews. All the Jews who chose not to come would cease to be called Jews and be just Germans, Americans and so on.

Wonderful, but if that happens, who will compel Donald Trump and his successors to veto all UN resolutions critical of Israel? Who will be left to fight against the movements – like BDS – that preach a boycott of Israel?

Well, life is full of contradictions. As are we.

Netanyahu’s Hungarian adventures were not over with the Soros and Horthy affairs. Far from it.

While in Budapest, he took part in a closed meeting with the leaders of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Some fool forgot to cut the line to the Journalists outside, and so they could listen in to some 20 minutes of Netanyahu’s secret speech.

To his East European soul mates, extreme right-wing semi-democrats all, our Prime Minister poured out his heart: the liberal West European governments are “crazy” when they impose conditions regarding human rights on their aid to Israel. They are committing suicide by letting in masses of Muslims. They don’t realize that Israel is their last bulwark against this Muslim invasion.

In the Bible of Zionism, “Der Judenstaat”, Theodor Herzl wrote: “For Europe we would constitute (in Palestine) a section of the wall against Asia, serving as an outpost of civilization against barbarism“.

These lines were written 121 years ago, at the height of the colonial era. Repeating them today is, to use Netanyahu’s word, “crazy”.

When Netanyahu and Orban fight against Soros about human rights, Soros is bound to win.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has fired back at US senators who criticized abuses during his ‘war on drugs.’ While the US lawmakers opposed any possible trip by Duterte to America, the leader said he had no intention of visiting the “lousy” country.

“There will never be a time that I will go to America during my term, or even thereafter,” Duterte said on Friday, as quoted by Reuters.

The Philippine leader was also surprised that the senators would think he was willing to go to the US.

“I’ve seen America and it’s lousy,” Duterte said.

The statement came in response to Thursday’s hearings at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the US Congress, where senators accused Duterte’s domestic anti-drug campaign of widespread abuses and casualties.

The co-chair of the commission, Jim McGovern, opposed a visit by President Duterte to the US, saying that he would protest such a move due to multiple violations of human rights by the leader.

Hitting back at the accusations, Duterte advised Washington to look at its own “sins” and threatened to investigate them, referring to civilian casualties during wars in the Middle East.

“It would be good for the US Congress to start with their own investigation of their own violations of the so many civilians killed in the prosecution of the wars in the Middle East,” Duterte stated.

“Otherwise I will be forced to investigate you also. I will start with your past sins.”

The possibility of a Duterte visit stems from an April phone conversation between the Philippine leader and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, when Trump invited him to the White House “to discuss the importance of the United States-Philippines alliance.”

Back then, Trump also congratulated Duterte for his “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

The Philippines’ strongman said that nothing can stop his drug crackdown, including a trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or impeachment. The anti-drug campaign had resulted in more than 7,000 deaths as of March 2017, according to Human Rights Watch.

A total of 204 refugees of Syrian nationality arrived in Spain from Lebanon under the National Re-settlement Program. This group is comprised of 41 men, 40 women and 123 children, according to the Spanish government.

The 204 refugees, who arrived at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, will be re-settled in Almeria (12), Álava (21), Alicante (6), Asturias (5), Badajoz (6), Caceres (10), Ciudad Real (19), Cordoba (5), A Coruña ( 5), Guipuzcoa (13), Huelva (7), Madrid (8), Malaga (14), Murcia (6), Pontevedra (6), Salamanca (12), Seville (39), Zamora (5) and Zaragoza (5).

Spain has now taken in a total of 1,724 applicants for international protection, 1,093 under the relocation program and 631 under the resettlement program.

The Spanish System for the Reception and Integration of applicants/beneficiaries of international protection offers its beneficiaries a stay at a reception centre of the Ministry of Employment and Social Security or of an NGO (subsidised by the government) at which they are guaranteed lodging, meals, legal advice, psychological assistance, social care and advice, accompaniment to education centres, public health and social centres, language learning and basic social skills, guidance and intermediation for vocational training and job reinsertion, cultural activities and economic aid.

Sudden inflows of refugees have been shown to have little or no impact on native wages, but recent research has challenged this consensus, using instrumental variables to show uniformly large detrimental effects. This column argues that these new results were due to problems with the strategy used and, in the case of the Mariel boatlift, the composition of the sample. Correcting for these flaws, the impact of immigration on average native-born workers remains small and inconsistent, with no evidence to show a large detrimental impact on less-educated workers.

By Michael Clemens and Jennifer Hunt*

The recent surge in migration to Europe has brought new attention to economic research on sudden refugee inflows of the past. Previously, Card (1990) found that a large inflow of Cubans to Miami in 1980 did not affect native wages or unemployment. Hunt (1992) found that a large inflow from Algeria to France after independence in 1962 caused a small increase in native unemployment. Friedberg (2001) found that a large inflow of post-Soviet Jews to Israel between 1990 and 1994 did not reduce native wages. Angrist and Kugler (2003) found that a surge of Balkan refugees during the 1990s was associated with higher native unemployment in 18 European countries, but do not interpret the association as causal because it was unstable and statistically insignificant.

Recent studies have challenged these results by re-analysing all four of these refugee waves. This new wave of research claims that earlier work obscured uniformly large, detrimental effects, either by aggregating the affected workers with unaffected workers (Borjas 2017) or through inadequate causal identification (Borjas and Monras 2017), or both.

In a recent paper, we reconsider the published research on refugee inflows to reconcile the new results with the old ones (Clemens and Hunt 2017). We find that, for all four refugee waves, the methods used in the recent re-analyses were subject to substantial bias. Correcting these biases largely eliminates the disagreement between the new and old findings – that is, corrected methods offer strong evidence of small detrimental effects in 1962 France, weak evidence of detrimental effects in 1990s Europe, and no clear evidence of detrimental effects in 1980s Miami or 1990s Israel.

Blunt instruments

The new research on these refugee waves uses instrumental variables to separate correlation from causation, and this is its biggest problem. The simple association between natives’ labour market outcomes and migrant inflows across regions or occupations could arise not from migrants’ effects, but from their choice of where to go. Migrants are likely to choose high-wage areas or occupations, which could mask any negative causal effect they have on native wages. The new research tries to account for this by using prior migration flows as an instrumental variable. This tests the effects of migration that was determined by prior immigration patterns – the instrumental variable – rather than recent economic changes.

But there’s a problem when the instrumental variable (in this case, past migration per population) and the variable affected by migrants’ choice of location or occupation (current migration per population) both have the same denominator (Bazzi and Clemens 2013). Of course, the instrumental variable strategy works only when the two variables are strongly correlated, but any two variables will be strongly correlated if they share the same divisor. Indeed, even random noise will be correlated with a variable of economic interest if both are divided by the same quantity. If a random, ‘placebo’ instrument gives similar results in any instrumental variables study, it implies that the original instrument was doing little work to separate correlation from causation. We show that repeating Borjas and Monras’ (2017) re-analysis of refugee waves with a placebo instrument – random noise divided by population – gives similar results to the original studies. In most cases, the results are actually stronger using this meaningless placebo: the estimates of detrimental effects on natives are a bit larger and more statistically significant.

Kronmal (1993) suggested a simple specification correction to address this problem: rather than divide past migrant flows and current migration flows by population, use past migrant flows alone as an instrument for current migrant flows alone – while controlling for population. When we make this specification correction, none of the results in Borjas and Monras (2017) differs substantially from the original studies of migration in Miami, France, Israel, and Europe.

Shifting composition of survey data subgroups

In re-analysis of one of the four episodes, the 1980 wave of Cubans into Miami known as the ‘Mariel boatlift’, there is a special problem. Though Borjas and Monras (2017) agreed with Card (1990) that the Mariel boatlift did not affect unemployment for native workers, Borjas (2017) has argued that Card’s analysis missed large detrimental effects on wages. Card’s analysis aggregated all workers with a high school education or less, and found no wage effects. Borjas separated out male non-Hispanic workers with less than a high school education, and found a very large and robust fall in average wages for that group in Miami relative to comparison cities after 1980.

Our re-analysis points out a previously unreported problem with the method used by Borjas (2017). The result is highly sensitive to selecting different subsets of workers to study (see Figure 8 in Peri and Yasenov 2017), but why this is so has been unclear. Among the subsamples of non-Hispanic men with less than a high school education that Borjas studied, the fraction that were black is much higher after the boatlift than before it in Miami, but not in the comparison cities. This could not have been caused by Cubans arriving in Miami, because the sample excluded Hispanics. It is likely that it reflected the large and simultaneous arrival of low-income Haitians with less than a high school education (who could not be separated from US workers in the data), and contemporaneous efforts of the Census Bureau to improve its coverage of low-income black men.

Because Haitian blacks earned much less than US blacks, and US black men earned much less than non-black men at this education level, this compositional change would mechanically cause a large, spurious fall in the average wage in the sample. It is enough to explain the entire post-boatlift fall in wages that Borjas (2017) found. Figure 1 shows the jump in the share of blacks at the time of the boatlift (seen by comparing years plotted in red with those plotted in blue) and the strong correlation in Miami between the share of blacks and the average wage.

Figure 1 Miami: Workers with less than a high school education

The fraction of blacks in the sample and wages are also strongly negatively correlated in the comparison cities that Borjas selected (Figure 2), and in an otherwise comparable sample of Miami workers with a high school education (Figure 3). But because the fraction of blacks did not rise at the time of the boatlift for men with less than a high school education in control cities, nor for men in Miami with a high school education only, there was no decline in wages at this time.

Figure 2 Control: Less than a high school education

Figure 3 Miami: High school education only

This is prima facie evidence that a substantial portion of the post-1980 fall in Miami wages was spuriously attributed to the Cuban refugee inflow in Borjas (2017). But it does not establish what portion of the effect that Borjas measured was spurious. When estimates of the impact of the boatlift are adjusted to account for the change in racial composition in the sample, and when the effect of race on wages is allowed to differ by city, the effect found by Borjas is attenuated by more than 50%, and its statistical significance becomes fragile to the choice of dataset and choice of control cities.

A further adjustment recognising that the effect of race on wages differs by education level means the effect is statistically insignificant. The corrected regressions cannot rule out a wage effect of -2% to -8% relative to the Borjas control cities – much smaller than the -45% effect measured by Borjas in the corresponding regressions – but they cannot rule out a zero effect either.

No support for large detrimental effects

The evidence from refugee waves shows detrimental short-term effects on labour market outcomes for native workers in some times and places, but no effect in others. It supports the consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers has been small (Blau and Mackie 2016). It does not support claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school education.

*About the authors:
Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development and Research Fellow, IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Jennifer Hunt, Professor of Economics, Rutgers University and CEPR Research Fellow

References:
Angrist, J D and A D Kugler (2003), “Protective or counter-productive? Labour market institutions and the effect of immigration on EU natives,” Economic Journal 113 (488): F302–F331.

Bazzi, S and M A Clemens (2013), “Blunt instruments: avoiding common pitfalls in identifying the causes of economic growth,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 5 (2): 152–186.

Blau, F D and C Mackie (eds) (2016), The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Borjas, G J and J Monras (2017), “The Labor Market Consequences of Refugee Supply Shocks,” Economic Policy, forthcoming.

Borjas, G J (2017), “The Wage Impact of the Marielitos: A Reappraisal,” ILR Review, forthcoming.

Card, D (1990), “The impact of the Mariel boatlift on the Miami labor market,” ILR Review 43 (2): 245–257.

Clemens, M A and J Hunt (2017), “The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results”, CEP Discussion Paper No. 1491.

Friedberg, R M (2001), “The impact of mass migration on the Israeli labor market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116 (4): 1373–1408.

Hunt, J (1992), “The impact of the 1962 repatriates from Algeria on the French labor market,” ILR Review, 45 (3): 556–572.

Kronmal, R A (1993), “Spurious correlation and the fallacy of the ratio standard revisited,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A 156 (3): 379–392.

Peri, G and V Yasenov (2017), “The Labor Market Effects of a Refugee Wave: Applying the Synthetic Control Method to the Mariel Boatlift,” NBER Working Paper 21801.

I come and stand at every door
But none shall hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen –Nazim Hikmet

On July 18, 2017, at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing focused on “The Four Famines: Root Causes and a Multilateral Action Plan,” Republican Senator Todd Young, a former Marine, asked officials present if ongoing war in Yemen could fail to exacerbate the catastrophe developing there – one of four countries, along with Southern Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, set to collectively lose 20 million people this year, one third the death toll of WWII, from conflict-driven famine. Yemen is being bombarded and blockaded, using US-supplied weapons and vehicles, by a local coalition marshaled by U.S. client state Saudi Arabia.  Yemen’s near-famine conditions, with attendant cholera outbreak, are so dire that in Yemen it is estimated a child dies every 10 minutes of preventable disease.

At the hearing, Senator Young held aloft a photo of a World Food Program warehouse in Yemen, which was destroyed in 2015. Senator Young asked David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program, to name the country responsible for the airstrike that destroyed the food warehouse. Mr. Beasley said the Saudi-led coalition blockading Yemen had destroyed the warehouse, along with the relief supplies it contained.

A July 2016 Human Rights Watch report documented 13 civilian economic structures destroyed by Saudi coalition led bombing between March 2015 and February 2016, “including factories, commercial warehouses, a farm, and two power stations. These strikes killed 130 civilians and injured 171 more. The facilities hit by airstrikes produced, stored, or distributed goods for the civilian population including food, medicine, and electricity—items that even before the war were in short supply in Yemen, which is among the poorest countries in the Middle East. Collectively, the facilities employed over 2,500 people; following the attacks, many of the factories ended their production and hundreds of workers lost their livelihoods.”

Asked about the Saudi coalition’s destruction of four cranes needed to offload relief supplies in Yemen’s port city Hodeidah, Mr. Beasley clarified that the loss of the cranes has vastly impeded WFP efforts to deliver food and medicines. Senator Young read from Mr. Beasley’s June 27^th letter to the Saudi government, only the latest of multiple requests, asking that the WFP be allowed to deliver replacement cranes. Mr. Beasley said the Saudis had provided no reply. Senator Young noted that, in the three weeks since this last letter had been sent, more than 3,000 Yemeni children had died of preventable, famine-related causes.

Medea Benjamin, of the antiwar campaign Code Pink, was at the “Four Famines” hearing, and later thanked Sen. Young for rebuking the Saudi government’s imposition of a state of siege plus airstrikes that prevent delivery of food and medicine to destitute Yemeni civilians:

One day later, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported on a July 19^th coalition airstrike in Yemen, which killed 20 civilians—including women and children—while they were fleeing violence in their home province. The report claimed more than two million internally displaced Yemenis “fled elsewhere across Yemen since the beginning of the conflict, but … continue to be exposed to danger as the conflict has affected all of Yemen’s mainland governorates.”

On July 14, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed two amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would potentially end US participation in the Yemeni civil war. In the past, the White House has provided refueling and targeting assistance to the Saudi-led coalition without congressional authorization. Since October of 2016, the US has doubled the number of jet refueling maneuvers carried out with Saudi and United Arab Emirate jets. The Saudi and UAE jets fly over Yemen, drop bombs until they need to refuel, then fly back to Saudi airspace where US jets perform mid-air refueling operations. Next, they circle back to Yemen and resume bombing.

In the summer of 2006, I joined peace campaigner Claudia Lefko at a small school she helped found in Amman, Jordan. The school served children whose families were refugees, having fled postwar chaos in Iraq. Many of the children have survived war, death threats, and displacement. Claudia had worked with children in her hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts, to prepare a gift for the Iraqi refugee children at the Jordanian school. The gift consisted of strings of paper origami cranes, folded in memory of a Japanese child, Sadako, who had died from radiation sickness after the bombing of her home city, Hiroshima.  In her hospital bed (the story goes), Sadako occupied her time attempting to fold 1,000 paper cranes, a feat she hoped would earn her the granting of a special wish, that no other child would ever suffer a similar fate. Sadako succumbed too rapidly to complete the task herself, but Japanese children hearing of her folded many thousands more cranes, and the story has been told for decades in innumerable places, making the delicate paper cranes a symbol for peace throughout the world. The Turkish  writer, Nazim Hikmet, wrote a poem, since set to music, about the story. Its words are on my mind today, as I think of the malnourished children from the countries of the terrible Four Famines, and from other conflict-torn, US-targeted countries such as Iraq, and Afghanistan. I think of their months or years of terrible hunger. Their stories may have ended already during the first half of 2017.

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

The song about “The Little Girl of Hiroshima” imagines a child who comes and stands at every door, unheard and unseen. In reality, we the living can choose to approach the doors of elected representatives, of our neighbors, or stay at home. We can choose whether or not to be heard and seen. Robert Naiman at Just Foreign Policy points out that many people don’t know yet that the House has voted to prohibit US participation in the Saudi war in Yemen. We can focus on progress made, publicize the House votes on social media, push for a House roll call vote on the Davidson-Nolan prohibitions on Defense Appropriation, and push the Senate to pass the same provisions as the House.  I personally oppose all defense appropriations (I have refused all payment of federal income tax since 1980). I recognize that legislative activism, at the heart of an empire addicted to war, is a tool of limited use; but considering the arriving disaster for which, as too few yet understand, 2017 may be hereafter remembered as the worst famine year in post-WWII history – we have no luxury to reject any tools presented to us.

Billions, perhaps trillions, will be spent to send weapons, weapon systems, fighter jets, ammunition, and military support to the region, fueling new arms races and raising the profits of U.S. weapon makers. But, we can choose to stand at the doors of our leaders and of our neighbors, honoring past sacrifices and the innocent lives we were unable to save, as we redouble efforts to stop war makers from constantly gaining the upper hand in our lives.

We can never reverse the decisions to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we cannot prevent all of the dying that is set to come, this fateful summer, in the countries of the Four Famines.  In the song, lost Sadako, long beyond saving even as she folded paper in her bed, doesn’t ask us to erase her own terrible loss, but to achieve the change we can, and to lose no more time in achieving it:

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.

There are fundamental problems in trying to learn lessons or draw conclusions from the Gulf crisis for the role of small states in international relations.

For one, the Gulf crisis is an epic battle between small states rather than simply one small state being targeted by its larger regional detractors. Indeed, it is the United Arab Emirates against Qatar with the UAE rather than Saudi Arabia as the driver in the crisis.

The problem, moreover, in making comparisons is not primarily that both the UAE and Qatar, whose leaders viscerally dislike each other, have massive war chests on the back of their energy exports and therefore are able to wage and sustain the kind of battle that is being fought.

It is that we are dealing with states that are megalomaniac in their ambition and the length to which they are willing to go to ensure the survival of their regimes. Megalomaniac means that their survival strategies go far beyond the normal strategies adopted by small states. Buried in their megalomania is also a measure of naivete, a naïve belief that the consequences of their actions will not come to haunt them.

The UAE and Qatar have adopted strategies that go far beyond the palette of options most small states believe are available to them in the sense that, despite their differing visions of what they think the political lay of the land in the Middle East and North Africa should be, both strive to shape their region in their mould.

In effect, to achieve their goals the UAE and Qatar act not as small states but as big powers, using the kind of tools big powers use: financial muscle, support of opposition forces to stimulate or engineer regime change, military coups, covert wars, and more recently cyberwar.

In fact, the UAE, or what US secretary of defense James Mattis likes to call Little Sparta, is in the mould of a big state establishing foreign military bases and using its commercial strength to control ports across the broader region.

The parameters of the debate about small states in Singapore, sparked by the Gulf crisis, irrespective of what the different positions advocate, are far more reflective of the behaviour of small states. They accept by definition, whether they argue for a more submissive or more activist policy, in word and deed that Singapore is a small state. That shapes discussion of what Singapore can and should do and within what parameters it can and should stand up for its interests; a public discussion that one would not be having were one in either Qatar or the UAE.

Singapore also has, beyond the ability to have a public debate, another advantage. However, one wants to describe the Singapore system of government, it is a system grounded in institutions, the rule of law, and checks and balances.

Singapore like Qatar and the UAE is consumed by a degree of fear. It is a fear about national security, it is a fear grounded in race riots surrounding Singapore’s birth, the perception of living in a volatile neighbourhood, and the fear resulting from the fallout of convoluted transitions that have wracked the Middle East and North Africa as well as Islam. It is not a fear about the survival of the Lee family as Singapore’s foremost political family.

Neither Qatar nor the UAE has Singapore’s degree of institutionalization. Their fears are grounded in the equation of the survival of autocratic ruling families with national security.

Ironically, a silver lining of the Gulf crisis could be over time that this could change with the wave of unprecedented nationalism that the crisis has unleashed in Qatar as Qataris rally around the Al Thani family that accounts for 20 percent of the citizenry in a nation of 300,000 nationals.

Both Qatar and the UAE project themselves as regional and global hubs that are building cutting-edge, 21^stcentury knowledge societies on top of tribally-based autocracies in which education, in contrast to Singapore, is designed to ensure that citizens have marketable skills and can interact globally rather than develop the skills of critical thinking that could result in criticism.

Similarly, Qataris protested when in 2009, some households in the Gulf state hired Saudis as maids, yet never raised their voice about the widespread abuse of Asian maids. Saudi maids were too close to home. If Saudis could be reduced to the status of a maid, so could Qataris one day. The limitations of modernity are evident. Criticism of Qatar’s labour regime after it won the 2022 World Cup hosting rights did not resonate among Qataris.

Nonetheless, despite their different attitudes towards political Islam, Qatar and the UAE have both developed societies in which religious scholars have relatively little say and Islamic mores and norms are relatively liberally interpreted.

This, however, is where in terms of survival strategies the communalities between Qatar and the UAE stop. To be sure, Qatar and the UAE share building blocks of soft power creation and the manufacturing of national identity some of which are also employed by Singapore that include foreign military bases; world class airlines that service global hubs; museums that both attract tourism and manufacture a national heritage; high profile investments in blue chips, real estate and the arts, sports and the ambition of becoming centres of excellence in multiple fields.

This is also where the comparison with Singapore or any other small state ends, Qatar and the UAE diverge, and where conflict between the two became inevitable. The UAE views autocracy as the key to regional security and the survival of its autocratic regime, no more so than since 2011 when popular revolts toppled the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

As a result, the UAE has backed regime change in a number of countries, including Egypt and reportedly Turkey; supported anti-Islamist, anti- government rebels in Libya; joined Saudi Arabia’s ill-fated military intervention in Yemen; and in the latest episode of its campaign, driven imposition of the boycott of Qatar.

In contrast to the UAE, Qatar has sought to position itself as the regional go-to go-between and mediator by maintaining relations not only with states but also a scala of Islamist, militant and rebel groups across the Middle East and northern Africa. It moreover embraced the popular Arab revolts and supported Islamist forces, with the Muslim Brotherhood in the lead that emerged as the most organized political force from the uprisings.

Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood amounted to aligning itself with forces that were challenging Gulf regimes and that the UAE alongside Saudi Arabia was seeking to suppress. Qatar did so in the naive belief that it could encourage transition everywhere else without the waves of change washing up on its own shores.

Underlying the crisis in the Gulf are issues that go far beyond the place of small states in the international pecking order. The crisis shines a spotlight on key issues that governments have long sought to keep in the dark even though they complicate efforts to combat political violence, advance greater accountability and transparency, and ensure protection of basic human rights.

The crisis makes more difficult the perpetuation of the fact that the international community is unable to agree on a definition of what constitutes terrorism and basic human rights; and it also lays bare the long-muddled distinction between national security and the interests of parties in government – whether autocratic or democratically elected.

There can be little doubt that the diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar was intended to put the idiosyncratic Gulf state on a dog leash. To do so, the two states need to ensure adherence by others to their definitions of national security and terrorism that includes non-violent groups advocating alternative systems of government they view as a threat to the survival of their regimes, as well as those calling for the respect of basic rights including freedom of the press and freedom of expression. In the case of Saudi Arabia, atheists too are defined as terrorists.

The issue of a definition of terrorism is of course a national prerogative but it became acute in the Gulf with the visit of US President Donald J. Trump in May and his focus on combatting political violence. The crisis is in part a result of a long-standing failure of the US to get its allies in the region to agree on what constitutes terrorism and what does not.

The irony of the power struggle in the Gulf is that it involves, in more than one way, the pot blaming the kettle. The battle pits autocracies against one another. None of the protagonists advocates a more liberal system of government for its own people.

The crisis in the Gulf, beyond different strategies to build soft power as part of foreign and defense policy, is rooted in the histories of the independence of the region’s states and concepts of national security that are defined by geography.

The focus on the Muslim Brotherhood is crucial to understanding the Gulf crisis because it goes to the core of the region’s power dynamics. For starters, the role the Brotherhood plays in the make-up of Qatar differs fundamentally from that in other Gulf states.

To understand Qatar, one has to take into account that it is a country sandwiched between two regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of which it views as potential threats. It also is the only country besides the kingdom that adheres to Wahhabism even, if Qataris distinguish between its Wahhabism of the sea as opposed to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism of the land.

The Qataris looked at Saudi Arabia from the outset of independence and decided that their state would be everything that the kingdom was not. There would be no power-sharing agreement with religious scholars. In fact, Qatar until today boasts no prominent religious scholars beyond Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born naturalized Qatari citizen.

The absence of prominent scholars was in part a reflection of ambivalence among Qatari rulers towards Wahhabism which they viewed as both an opportunity and a threat: on the one hand, it served as a tool to legitimise domestic rule, on the other it was a potential monkey wrench Saudi Arabia could employ to assert control.

Opting to generate a clerical class of its own would have enhanced the threat because Qatar would have been dependent on Saudi clergymen to develop its own. That would have produced a clergy steeped in the kingdom’s Wahhabism and inspired by its history of political power-sharing that would have advocated a Saudi-style, state-defined form of Islam.

Qatari religious authority is not institutionally vested. Qatar has, for example, no Grand Mufti as does Saudi Arabia and various other Arab nations; it only created a ministry of Islamic Affairs and Endowments 22 years after achieving independence. “Saudi Arabia has Mecca and Medina. We have Qaradawi — and all his daughters drive cars and work,” said former Qatari justice minister and prominent lawyer Najeeb al Nauimi.

It is against that backdrop that the Brotherhood was woven into the fabric of Qatari society from day one when by design or default Qataris contacted a bookseller in Cairo, a member of the Brotherhood, who helped them import the staffing of their bureaucracy and education system.

Despite Saudi Arabia being the Gulf’s behemoth, the UAE, and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed’s finger prints are all over the Saudi-UAE-led alliance’s demands, particularly with regard to the insistence that Qatar adhere to the designation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and the reform if not shuttering, of the controversial Al Jazeera television network.

In effect, the UAE’s efforts to counter Qatar pre-date the first time-round withdrawal of the Saudi, UAE and Bahraini ambassadors in 2014. The UAE and Qatar have been involved in a covert war since 2011 that involved massive investments in public relations and lobbying firms and the establishment of a United Nations accredited network of fake NGOS and human rights groups.

Two factors drive Bin Zayd’s obsession with the Brotherhood and Jazeera: the fact that the Brotherhood had built a substantial power base within the UAE military, and the results of private surveys conducted among Emirati nationals some years ago that showed that the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, that also controls the UAE’s federal government, had low approval ratings.

Distrust of the Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia dates to the emergence of the opposition Sahwa movement in the kingdom and the Brotherhood’s backing of Saddam Hussein in the wake of the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The two events prompted then Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud to declare after 9/11 that the group was at the root of all the kingdom’s problems.

The move, however, to outlaw the Brotherhood was Bin Zayed’s initiative. Bin Zayed took advantage of the fact that by 2014 Saudi King Abdullah’s concentration span was approximately two hours. It was at the end of a meeting with Mohammed, who was backed by the head of the Saudi court Khaled al Tuwaijri, that Abdullah agreed to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

It was a decision that was at stake in the power struggle that occurred as Abdullah lay on his death bed and that in the initial phase Mohammed lost. Abdullah’s successor, King Salman, not only replaced all of Bin Zayed’s allies in the Saudi court, but also made overtures to the Brotherhood. Ultimately, Mohammed’s back door into influencing the Saudi court and stiffening Saudi resolve was Salman’s son, Mohammed bin Salman, who in a palace coup recently became crown prince.

One major difference and advantage that Singapore has in its positioning of itself is that Indonesia is not Saudi Arabia even if it may be flexing its muscles somewhat, and Malaysia is not the UAE. Qatar has benefitted in the current crisis from the fact that Saudi Arabia despite its financial muscle and moral authority as the custodian of the two holy cities cannot bank on a lot of empathy in the international community. Qatar also exploits the notion that even though big states bullying small states is a fixture of international relations, the Saudi-UAE campaign has taken that to new heights.

The demands tabled by the anti-Qatar alliance involve the kind of reshaping of policies and curtailing of sovereignty normally imposed by an occupying force. If successful, the diplomatic and economic vanquishing of Qatar would serve as a precedent for more global powers like China and Russia, not to mention the Trump Administration. It would legitimize tendencies already displayed by Russia, which, in effect, continues to adhere to the Soviet-era Brezhnev doctrine of “limited sovereignty” within its sphere of influence, as well as by China in the South China Sea.

Singapore’s conclusions from the Gulf crisis in terms of ensuring that it has the capacity to defend itself and stand up for its national interests are lessons that Qatar too is drawing with the boycott forcing it to diversify its suppliers of essential goods and services, expand the network of ports its vessels can call on, and enhance its ability to produce at least some basic items like dairy products.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE appear to have learnt little from their failure to marshal widespread support for their boycott campaign among Muslim and non-Muslim countries alike. If anything, Omar Ghobash, the UAE’s articulate ambassador to Russia, suggested that the two states may risk weakening their position if a potential effort to force the kingdom and the Emirates’ trading partners to choose between doing business with them and dealing with Qatar, fails. It would be a choice many cannot afford to make, and would likely reject as a matter of principle.

Nonetheless, Muslim nations in Asia would be most vulnerable to a more forceful UAE-Saudi campaign that would be designed to force them to align themselves with the two Gulf states. Countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, two of the world’s most populous Muslim states, as well as India, home to the world’s fourth largest Muslim population, fear that Saudi Arabia could threaten to lower their annual quota for the number of pilgrims allowed to perform the hajj and expel millions of migrant workers and expatriates in a bid to force them to join the boycott of Qatar.

The continued inability of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to generate a groundswell of support for their campaign against Qatar suggests that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh need to change their approach. Three options currently present themselves: negotiate a face-saving way out of the crisis, tighten the economic noose around Qatar’s neck, or seek to engineer regime change in Doha.

Despite the jury being out on what the Gulf will look like once the crisis is resolved, what is certain is that the resolution of the crisis will have far-reaching consequences for future norms underlying international relations. No one will be watching the crisis with bigger Argus eyes than small states in the Gulf and beyond, looking for lessons learnt for their own positioning in disputes in geographies near and far—the South China Sea, to name the most obvious example.

A high-fat diet not only creates health problems for expectant mothers, but new research in an animal model suggests it alters the development of the brain and endocrine system of their offspring and has a long-term impact on offspring behavior. The new study links an unhealthy diet during pregnancy to mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression in children.

“Given the high level of dietary fat consumption and maternal obesity in developed nations, these findings have important implications for the mental health of future generations,” the researchers report.

The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Endocrinology.

The study, led by Elinor Sullivan, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Division of Neuroscience at Oregon National Primate Research Center at OHSU, tested the effect of a maternal high-fat diet on nonhuman primates, tightly controlling their diet in a way that would be impossible in a human population. The study revealed behavioral changes in the offspring associated with impaired development of the central serotonin system in the brain. Further, it showed that introducing a healthy diet to the offspring at an early age failed to reverse the effect.

Previous observational studies in people correlated maternal obesity with a range of mental health and neurodevelopmental disorders in children. The new research demonstrates for the first time that a high-fat diet, increasingly common in the developed world, caused long-lasting mental health ramifications for the offspring of non-human primates.

In the United States, 64 percent of women of reproductive age are overweight and 35 percent are obese. The new study suggests that the U.S. obesity epidemic may be imposing transgenerational effects.

“It’s not about blaming the mother,” said Sullivan, senior author on the study. “It’s about educating pregnant women about the potential risks of a high-fat diet in pregnancy and empowering them and their families to make healthy choices by providing support. We also need to craft public policies that promote healthy lifestyles and diets.”

Researchers grouped a total of 65 female Japanese macaques into two groups, one given a high-fat diet and one a control diet during pregnancy. They subsequently measured and compared anxiety-like behavior among 135 offspring and found that both males and females exposed to a high-fat diet during pregnancy exhibited greater incidence of anxiety compared with those in the control group. The scientists also examined physiological differences between the two groups, finding that exposure to a high-fat diet during gestation and early in development impaired the development of neurons containing serotonin, a neurotransmitter that’s critical in developing brains.

The new findings suggest that diet is at least as important as genetic predisposition to neurodevelopmental disorders such as anxiety or depression, said an OHSU pediatric psychiatrist who was not involved in the research.

“I think it’s quite dramatic,” said Joel Nigg, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry, pediatrics, and behavioral neuroscience in the OHSU School of Medicine. “A lot of people are going to be astonished to see that the maternal diet has this big of an effect on the behavior of the offspring. We’ve always looked at the link between obesity and physical diseases like heart disease, but this is really the clearest demonstration that it’s also affecting the brain.”

Sullivan and research assistant and first author Jacqueline Thompson said they believe the findings provide evidence that mobilizing public resources to provide healthy food and pre- and post-natal care to families of all socioeconomic classes could reduce mental health disorders in future generations.

“My hope is that increased public awareness about the origins of neuropsychiatric disorders can improve our identification and management of these conditions, both at an individual and societal level,” Thompson said.

A new study finds that simply paying landowners in the developing world to not cut down trees can significantly reduce carbon in the atmosphere. It may also be a very cost-effective way to help meet goals such as the Paris Accord targets. The study, published today in the journal Science, found that in Uganda, offering small financial incentives to landowners cut deforestation in half. Because the amounts of money involved are fairly small, paying the farmers to conserve and plant trees was an estimated 10 to 50 times more effective per dollar spent than many energy efficiency programs in the U.S.

In Uganda, poverty reduction and environmental conservation interests overlap, but can also come into conflict. Uganda’s forests are home to endangered chimpanzees, but between 2005 and 2010 Uganda had one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, with 2.7 percent lost per year. Seventy percent of Ugandan forests are on private land, often owned by poor farmers, who tend to cut down trees at an even higher rate. Trees are valuable for timber and charcoal for fires, and once land is cleared, it can be used to grow crops.

“It’s critical we figure out how to get a handle on climate change,” said lead author and Northwestern University economist, Seema Jayachandran. “We often focus our environmental programs on our own country, which is important. But it’s easy to forget that a lot of the best opportunities lie in the developing world.” One reason for this is that there are many undeveloped areas which can still be preserved, but another is that these opportunities might be much less expensive than achieving comparable results in a wealthy country.

Jayachandran explained, “Small investments can go much further in poor countries. So we wanted to test if simply paying farmers not to cut down trees could be a win for them and a very cheap way to help manage greenhouse gas emissions.”

Seema Jayachandran and Joost de Laat, economists specializing in poverty at Northwestern University and the Dutch organization Porticus, respectively, teamed up with the research and policy nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Uganda conservation organization Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust (CSWCT). Together with a team of researchers at Stanford, led by Eric Lambin and including Charlotte Stanton, Robin Audy, and Nancy E. Thomas, they set up a scientific test of the idea. Using a randomized controlled trial, they randomly assigned half of a group of 121 villages to a program that made landowners a simple offer. Landowners with forest on their property could get the equivalent of approximately 28 dollars per year for every hectare of forest on their land left untouched (with some exceptions for emergencies). The other group of villages continued as normal as a comparison group.

The team then procured detailed satellite images, with such high resolution that they could essentially see each tree. Using sophisticated “object-based image analysis” methods, they analyzed hundreds of millions of pixels and tracked what happened to the trees for the subsequent two years. Lambin explained, “We used state-of-the-art change detection methods to extract fine-grain information on gain or loss in tree cover from the satellite images.”

The agreement worked, with villages offered the program preserving 5.5 more hectares of forest than villages in the comparison group. This equates to 3,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere, at a total cost of just 46 cents per ton not released over the two years of the study. “Economists tend to be a cynical bunch,” according to de Laat. “Many of our colleagues were sure that the landowners would find loopholes in the contract or just move their deforestation to other nearby land. But they didn’t.” In fact, the researchers found the program attracted some of the landowners who would have done the most tree-cutting without the program – and got them to leave their trees in place.

Annie Duflo, Executive Director of Innovations for Poverty Action, said that this study will be key to informing future conservation programs in the developing world. “This is the first experimental study of its kind to show not just how effective, but how cost-effective, programs like this can be. Good science like this helps us understand how to combat climate change and preserve endangered habitats, while also helping poor farmers.”

By Faisal J. Abbas*

The stars were perfectly aligned for Rex Tillerson. As secretary of state under a Republican president whose party enjoys a majority in both sides of the house, and given the massive damage done to the US interest and traditional allies by the Obama Doctrine, Tillerson could not have had a clearer mandate. This is particularly true given that President Donald Trump seems to have got it right regarding Iran and the controversial nuclear deal.

Unlike his predecessor who — intentionally or not — turned a blind eye to Tehran’s support for terror and its damaging behavior, Trump sought to rectify the situation and reassure long-term regional allies in a bid to undo the damage done by the Obama administration’s “leading from behind” approach (whatever that is).

It is extremely significant that Trump has made it very clear that he is serious about trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Right after his visit to Saudi Arabia in May — his first foreign trip as president — he made Israel his second stop. He was warmly greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who both seemed willing to work closely with the new US administration to get the ball rolling again.

Yet there is only so much the US president can do personally. International affairs should be handled by his secretary of state, and Tillerson has been doing a good job. But he is now faced with his first real regional test: The escalating situation at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Serious consequences

Surely Tillerson must realize that this is not merely an Israeli-Palestinian matter. Given that Al-Aqsa is considered the third-holiest mosque in Islam, the issue affects more than 2 billion Muslims worldwide (nearly 30 percent of the world’s population). It also puts moderate and peace-advocating Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, in a complicated situation. Both countries are US allies and are directly impacted by the escalation.

Neighboring Jordan, whose king is a Hashemite (a direct descendent of Prophet Muhammad), has long been entrusted to act as guardian of Al-Aqsa, a temporary solution that has been accepted by all stakeholders given that Amman has signed a peace treaty with Israel. Jordan feels betrayed by Israel’s unreasonable handling of the situation.

The Palestinian Authority has halted all communications with Tel Aviv, the situation is brewing on the ground, and there is technically nothing that could prevent another Intifida (uprising). Should that happen, Jordan (whose population is predominately originally Palestinian) will definitely be impacted.

Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam and land of the Two Holy Mosques in Makkah and Madinah, has a direct stake in seeing the situation calm down. In the past, Riyadh has used its weight in Washington and its influence on Arab and Muslim countries to contain the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

As a force for stability that is renowned for the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which until today remains the region’s best hope for peace, Saudi Arabia deserves global partners to be equally concerned and offer help when such a crisis happens.

It is odd that Tillerson — who hails from an oil background — showed much more personal interest in the Qatari crisis (a standoff that has had no real humanitarian impact and a very limited regional one, as confirmed even by Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim himself during his recent speech) than in trying to seriously defuse the ticking time bomb in Jerusalem.

If he is not already on a plane, he should head back to the Middle East immediately to talk to Palestinians and Israelis. At the moment the matter is still containable, but as a wise US politician by the name of Henry Kissinger once said: “An issue ignored is a crisis ensured.”

To the Israelis, I repeat what our Arab News columnist Yossi Mekelberg said recently: “The metal detectors (around Al-Aqsa) are not worth insisting on considering the political cost. Israel would be foolish and irresponsible to allow them to become a test of its control of the holy sites.”

It would also be wise — especially given the sensitivity of this particular issue, and with such uncertainty and unprecedented turbulence in the region — to contain the situation diplomatically and as quickly as possible.

• Faisal J. Abbas is the editor in chief of Arab News. He can be reached on Twitter @FaisalJAbbas

The International Police Organization (Interpol) has circulated a list of 173 Islamic State militants who it believes could have been trained to carry out revenge suicide attacks in Europe in retaliation for the group’s military defeats in the Middle East.

The global crime fighting agency’s list was drawn up by U.S. intelligence from information captured during the assault on ISIS territories in Syria and Iraq.

According to a report by The Guardian, European counter-terror networks are concerned that as the ISIS “Caliphate” collapses, there is an increasing risk of determined suicide bombers seeking to come to Europe, probably operating alone.

The list shows the suspects’ names, the date ISIS recruited them, their last likely address including the mosque at which they have been praying while away fighting, their mother’s name and any photographs.

For each of the fighters, an ID has reportedly been created to ensure that each member country in the Interpol network could integrate the data with local databases.

Interpol has asked its national partners for any information they might have about each name on the list, and any other background personal data they have on their files, such as border crossings, previous criminal offences, biometric data, passport numbers, activity on social media and travel history.

Interpol stressed the list’s transmission came as part of its role circulating information between national crime-fighting agencies.

“The purpose of sending these alerts and updates is to ensure that vital policing information is made available when and where it is needed, in line with a member country’s request,” said a spokesperson.

A European counter-terrorism officer said one of the purposes of circulating the list around Europe was to identify those on it who might have been born and raised in European countries.

In 2015 the UN considered there were 20,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria, of whom 4,000 were from Europe.

The ISIS group is currently struggling to come to terms with the loss of Mosul in northern Iraq. The parallel advance on Raqqa, the group’s stronghold in Syria, has been stalled partly due to the severity of the resistance being mounted against the Syrian Democratic Forces made up of an alliance of Kurds, Arabs and US Special forces.

Original article

By Terri Moon Cronk

President Donald J. Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took part in commissioning the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, named in honor of the 38th president, in Norfolk, Virginia, Saturday.

Service members and their families, senior defense and military officials and other dignitaries, including Ford’s daughter and the ship’s sponsor, Susan Ford Bales, were aboard the warship for the ceremony.

Gerald R. Ford enlisted in the Navy following the attack on Pearl Harbor and was commissioned as an officer in the Naval Reserve in 1942. He served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Monterey and participated in actions in the Pacific Theater, including at Makin Island, Kwajalein and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Ford served for 25 years as a U.S. Representative before his appointment to the vice presidency. He became president in 1974, following the resignation of Richard Nixon.

The ship named for Ford is the lead ship of a new class of supercarriers and the first new carrier design in the Navy since the USS Nimitz was commissioned in 1975. The Ford is also the first aircraft carrier to join the fleet since USS George H. W. Bush in 2009. Ford is expected to be in operation in 2020.

The Navy received the Ford on May 31 after the carrier successfully completed acceptance trials on May 26. It features a new nuclear power plant, a redesigned island, electromagnetic catapults and an enhanced flight deck capable of increased aircraft sortie rates. Ford-class carriers will operate with smaller crews than their predecessors in the Nimitz-class.

‘Magnificent Warship’

Mattis called the ship a “magnificent warship [that] joins the best Navy in the world. It is named after a tried-and true member of the Greatest Generation, and that spirit will permeate this ship so long as it sails on the seas, as well as the U.S. Navy spirit of ‘We have just begun to fight,’” he said.

Addressing Trump, Mattis said, “Mr. president, you will send this ship in harm’s way and [it] will happily sail in harm’s way for you, for our nation and for what we stand for.”

Trump called the ship an American symbol of power and prestige wherever it sails in the world.

“Wherever this vessel cuts through the horizon, our allies will rest easy and our enemies will shake with fear because everyone will know that America is coming and America is coming strong,” he said.

“This ship is the deterrent that keeps us from having to fight in the first place,” Trump said. “But this ship also ensures that if a fight does come, it will always end the same way. We will win … we will never lose.”

Nation’s Strength is its People

Having the best technology and equipment is only one part of the American military dominance, he said. “Our true strength is our people. Our greatest weapon is all of you.”

America is fortunate to have warriors who are willing to serve the nation in the greatest fighting force in history, Trump said, adding, “Today, this ship officially begins its role in the noble military history of our great nation.”

He implored Congress to pass a defense budget that “provides for higher, stable and predictable funding levels for our military needs, that our fighting men and women deserve … and you will get [it], believe me,” Trump told the audience.

At the ceremony’s conclusion, Ford Bales gave the order, “Man our ship and bring her to life.”

(RFE/RL) — U.S. lawmakers say they have reached a bipartisan agreement on a bill that would bring new sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Steny Hoyer (Democrat-Maryland), the second-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, said on July 22 that lawmakers from both parties had resolved several issues that were holding up the bill, a similar version of which was passed by the Senate last month.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York) said the new sanctions bill is “strong” and he expected it to be passed soon.

“I expect the House and Senate will act on this legislation promptly, on a broad bipartisan basis and send the bill to the president’s desk,” Schumer said in a statement.

The bill is expected to be voted on as early as July 25 in the House of Representatives.

The Senate will also have to vote on the new bill, which the White House and State Department have voiced reservations about.

The White House had objected to a part of the bill that would require a congressional review if President Donald Trump tried to ease or end the sanctions against Moscow.

Under the new bill, Trump would be required to send a report to Congress outlining why the administration wants to suspend or terminate any sanctions. Lawmakers would then have one month to decide whether to allow such a move.

Trump’s optimistic view of future U.S.-Russian relations has led to concerns within Congress that he would reduce or abolish economic sanctions against Russia imposed after Moscow’s invasion and illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula as well as Russian support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine.

‘Many Transgressions’

Both Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have said they have no intention of ending sanctions against Russia until Moscow reverses course on Ukraine.

Moscow has denied supporting the separatists despite evidence to the contrary.

Members of Congress were also keen to impose sanctions against Russia for its meddling in the 2016 presidential election, which U.S. intelligence agencies say is not in doubt despite Moscow’s denials. Trump has also seemed less than convinced about Russian interference.

“Given the many transgressions of Russia, and President Trump’s seeming inability to deal with them, a strong sanctions bill such as the one Democrats and Republicans have just agreed to is essential,” said Schumer.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said she was concerned that adding North Korea in the legislation could lead to delays.

“It is essential that the addition of North Korea to this package does not prevent Congress from immediately enacting Russia sanctions legislation and sending it to the president’s desk before the August recess,” she said in a statement.

Intense Negotiations

Many lawmakers hope the bill would send a message to President Donald Trump to keep a strong line against Russia.

Senator Ben Cardin (Democrat-Maryland), a ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the deal was agreed to only after “intense negotiations.”

He said in a statement that Congress “is poised to send President Putin a clear message on behalf of the American people and our allies, and we need President Trump to help us deliver that message.”

The new sanctions package in the agreed-to legislation would impose mandatory penalties on people involved in Iran’s ballistic-missile program and any person or entity that does business with them.

The measure would also apply “terrorism sanctions” to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and put in force an arms embargo.

The European Union said in a statement after reports of the agreement in Congress that sanctions against Russia and Iran should be coordinated with Brussels and that “unilateral measures” undermine the effect of the sanctions.

The death of a massive star in a distant galaxy 10 billion years ago created a rare superluminous supernova that astronomers say is one of the most distant ever discovered. The brilliant explosion, more than three times as bright as the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way galaxy combined, occurred about 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang at a period known as “cosmic high noon,” when the rate of star formation in the universe reached its peak. The researchers reported their findings in a paper published on July 21 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Superluminous supernovae are 10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova resulting from the collapse of a massive star. But astronomers still don’t know exactly what kinds of stars give rise to their extreme luminosity or what physical processes are involved.

The supernova known as DES15E2mlf is unusual even among the small number of superluminous supernovae astronomers have detected so far. It was initially detected in November 2015 by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration using the Blanco 4-metre telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Follow-up observations to measure the distance and obtain detailed spectra of the supernova were conducted with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the 8-metre Gemini South telescope. The investigation was led by UC Santa Cruz astronomers Yen-Chen Pan and Ryan Foley as part of an international team of DES collaborators.

The new observations may provide clues to the nature of stars and galaxies during peak star formation. Supernovae are important in the evolution of galaxies because their explosions enrich the interstellar gas, from which new stars form with elements heavier than helium (which astronomers call “metals”).

“It’s important simply to know that very massive stars were exploding at that time,” said Foley, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “What we really want to know is the relative rate of superluminous supernovae to normal supernovae, but we can’t yet make that comparison because normal supernovae are too faint to see at that distance. So we don’t know if this atypical supernova is telling us something special about that time 10 billion years ago.”

Previous observations of superluminous supernovae found they typically reside in low mass or dwarf galaxies, which tend to be less enriched in metals than more massive galaxies. The host galaxy of DES15E2mlf, however, is a fairly massive, normal-looking galaxy.

“The current idea is that a low-metal environment is important in creating superluminous supernovae, and that’s why they tend to occur in low mass galaxies, but DES15E2mlf is in a relatively massive galaxy compared to the typical host galaxy for superluminous supernovae,” said Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the paper.

Foley explained that stars with fewer heavy elements retain a larger fraction of their mass when they die, which may cause a bigger explosion when the star exhausts its fuel supply and collapses. “We know metallicity affects the life of a star and how it dies, so finding this superluminous supernova in a higher-mass galaxy goes counter to current thinking,” Foley said.

“But we are looking so far back in time, this galaxy would have had less time to create metals, so it may be that at these earlier times in the universe’s history, even high-mass galaxies had low enough metal content to create these extraordinary stellar explosions. At some point, the Milky Way also had these conditions and might have also produced a lot of these explosions.”

“Although many puzzles remain, the ability to observe these unusual supernovae at such great distances provides valuable information about the most massive stars and about an important period in the evolution of galaxies,” said Mat Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton. The Dark Energy Survey has discovered a number of superluminous supernovae and continues to see more distant cosmic explosions revealing how stars exploded during the strongest period of star formation.

Researchers at Linköping University have developed a method to increase by a factor of five the computing power of a standard algorithm when performed in one type of standard chip, FPGA. The new method is both simple and smart, but the road to publication has been long.

We are dealing with a programmable integrated circuit known as an “FPGA”, which is an abbreviation for “field-programmable gate array”. This consists of a matrix of logical gates that can be programmed in situ, and can be reprogrammed an unlimited number of times. The first FPGAs came onto the market in 1985, and sales since then have increased dramatically. The market is now dominated by a couple of major players, and is expected to amount to USD 9.8 billion in 2020 (Wikipedia). The researchers have increased in these chips the speed of an algorithm known as the “fast Fourier transform”, which is used in spectral analysis, radar technology and telecommunication.

“Until now, people have believed that once an FPGA is full it cannot accommodate any more. If you want new functionality in this case, you have to completely rebuild the hardware, which is expensive,” says Oscar Gustafsson, senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at Linköping University.

But Carl Ingemarsson, a PhD student at the department, had other ideas. As an undergraduate several years ago, he was challenged to increase the speed of calculation in an FPGA. If the lab group could manage to reach a frequency greater than 450 MHz, they wouldn’t have to carry out the final lab in the course.

“This was what was needed to convince me to examine in depth the way the logic is represented inside the chip,” he says.

He achieved the frequency, skipped the final lab, and at the same time laid the foundation for his doctoral project. The result is that FPGAs today can be made to work five times as fast, or to deal with five times the number of calculations. While it’s true that Carl has only confirmed this in two families of FPGA, there is no reason to believe that it is not also the case for all other families.

“This advance will save huge sums for demanding calculations in industry, and will make it possible to implement new functionality without needing to replace the hardware,” says Oscar Gustafsson.

Carl Ingemarsson’s method is based on ensuring that the signal takes a smarter route through the various building blocks inside the chip.

“Normally, you choose an algorithm that can carry out the desired calculations, and then build up the structure, the architecture, using the required blocks. This is then transferred to the FPGA. But we have also looked at how the logic is built up, the routes the signals take, and what happens to them inside the chip. We have then adapted the architecture and the mapping onto the chip using the results of this analysis.”

A clever change in the signal routes gives the chip a capacity that is five times greater for each hardware unit.

“It should be possible to automate this optimisation of the chip,” says Carl Ingemarsson.

The method was, however too simple, or too ingenious, for the scientific reviewers.

“At one level, it might seem that we haven’t changed anything, we’re still using the same standard components, but we have increased the computing power by a factor of five. This has made it has difficult to get our article published in a scientific journal,” Oscar Gustafsson explains.

But the solution was so clever that someone managed to plagiarise the work before the IEEE decided to publish it. It suddenly appeared at an IEEE conference, using copies of the diagrams, with parts of the text swapped out and completely different authors. All the support documentation in the form of original files and original diagrams was, however, available at LiU: the plagiarism was discovered, and the researcher suspended. The damage had been done, however, and publication of the original article was delayed by at least a year.

Particularly, in the US and some European States, the Israeli and Zionist versions of history are wide-spread. Israel’s narrative relies on a collection of myths aimed at bringing the moral right and the ethical behavior of the Palestinians into twilight and making their claim to their country appear as illegitimate. Israel’s negation of Palestinian existence in the Land of Palestine is, however, a falsification of history.

“Ten Myths About Israel” came out in Germany in 2016 under the title ” What’s wrong with Israel? The Ten Main Myths of Zionism”. The mainstream media ignored it, which could also be the case in the US. It’s sad but that how media power works in favor of Israel.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who lives in exile in Britain, deals in this book with the myths of Zionism and exposes them as legends consisting of half-truths and fabrications of history. The Zionist narrative has only little to do with historical reality and truth.

The “Running Gag” of the Zionist historical narrative is the story of the “empty land” of Palestine, into which people without a land had finally returned after 2000 years of exile. The slogan of a country without a people, for people without a country, is the most prominent expression of the Zionist mythology. For Pappe, it’s less important whether the Jews existed as a people, rather than that the Zionists deny the existence of a Palestinian population but simultaneously claim that the State of Israel represents all the Jews of the world and does everything for their benefit and acts for them. Such a claim is just as daring as the identification of Zionism with Judaism because it takes Jews hostage for Israel’s despising policy.

The Zionists presented the colonization of Palestine with biblical rhetoric; this served only as a means to an end. The highest prophet of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, even considered Uganda and other places instead of the Zionist Promised Land. Finally, they found their roots in Palestine. “From then on, the Bible became both the justification and the guideline of the Zionist colonization of Palestine,” writes Pappe. He describes Zionism as a “colonial settler movement” and Israel as a “Settler Colonial State.”

The author points out that the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1947/48 was “ethnic cleansing.” Likewise, the 1967 June war, which is also called the Sixth Day War, was not an act of self-defense of the “little David” against an overpowering “Goliath,” but an Israeli attack on which the Israeli security establishment has minutely prepared for years.

The claim of being the “only democracy in the Middle East” is put in the right perspective. Israel resembles rather an “ethnocracy” than a democracy in the classical sense of the meaning. The “peace process,” which was highly praised by the Western political establishment ended in the acceleration of the colonization of Palestine and in the establishment of Palestinian regime that has to do the dirty work for Israeli occupier.

In his book, Ilan Pappe gives his backing for the historical truth that the Israeli political establishment must face if it is interested in peace. Israel’s security establishment abuses Judaism because it equates its Zionist expansionist and oppressive policy with Judaism. Enlightenment is, therefore, more than a necessity, which the book does excellently by deconstructing the mythological web that surrounds the history of the State of Israel.

This book is an absolute must for an interested public, the political and the media class to understand what Israel is all about.

Hands up if you know anything about IEMed, the Barcelona Process or UfM. And full marks if you can identify that IEMed stands for the European Institute of the Mediterranean, the Barcelona Process is shorthand for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (Euromed), and UfM betokens the Union for the Mediterranean.

In fact the three bodies represent stages in a long, convoluted road leading towards well-intentioned development programmes for the Mediterranean region, and all three are currently beavering away on worthy activities. More worryingly, they are acting within a political environment which affects their relevance and effectiveness, but which they are unable to control.

IEMed, founded in 1989 in Spain, is essentially a think tank-plus, aimed at encouraging understanding and cooperation between Mediterranean countries. It actively seeks to promote peace, stability and shared prosperity by boosting economic activity, and it supports academic studies on Mediterranean-related matters.

The Barcelona Process or Euromed started in 1995 with a conference organized by the European Union to strengthen its relations with the countries in the Mashriq and Maghreb regions. It aimed to reinforce political and security dialogue; to construct an economic and financial partnership with the EU including a free-trade area by 2010; and to encourage understanding between cultures and societies.

Today Euromed comprises all the member states of the EU, as well as ten southern Mediterranean states including Israel and the Palestinian Authority (or, as it has designated itself, “the State of Palestine”). Syria, once a member, has been suspended.

By its tenth anniversary in 2005, the Process had failed to come anywhere near advancing its three-point programme, and its final declaration failed to be endorsed by the partnership as a whole. The disagreement turned on what was to be understood by “terrorism”. The PA, Syria and Algeria wanted to exclude what they called “resistance movements against foreign occupation”– “foreign occupation” being code for Israel’s existence anywhere in Mandate Palestine.

At the 2005 summit even the founding fathers of the Barcelona Process expressed disappointment about the EMed Partnership and its failure to deliver results.

In the lacklustre performance of the Barcelona Process France’s then-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, perceived a political opportunity. He conceived the grandiose concept of a “Mediterranean Union”, paralleling the European Union. This project was part of his ticket during the French presidential election campaign in 2007.

Once elected, Sarkozy invited all heads of state and government of the Mediterranean region to a meeting in Paris, to lay the foundations of the new Union. Unfortunately his concept had failed to inspire the EU. Some European leaders felt that it would not be sensible to duplicate institutions already in existence under the Barcelona Process. The European Commission thought that a better idea would be to use the existing Barcelona structure to build a more effective organization.

Sarkozy modified his proposal, and it was soon agreed that the project should include all EU member states and be built upon the existing Barcelona process. The Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) is dedicated to supporting, but not funding, socioeconomic developments in the region which meet one or more of three interrelated priorities – human development, integration and stability – and is currently overseeing some 50 such projects spread right across the Mediterranean area. One such, supported by both Israel and the Palestinians, is the Desalination Facility project for the Gaza Strip, endorsed by the 43 Member States of the UfM. The large-scale desalination facility is aimed at addressing the water crisis in the Gaza Strip, where 95% of the water is not drinkable due to the over-pumping of the Coastal Aquifer, the only available water source in the strip.

No one could reasonably object to the encouragement of projects designed to bring improvements to the lives and living standards of the peoples of the Mediterranean, although one could reasonably have asked why it took three separate bodies to do so. Now a fourth looms on the horizon. A new EU-based Partnership on Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA) has been set up to develop more sustainable management of water and agro-food systems. PRIMA, which will be a ten-year initiative running from 2018 to 2028, currently consists of 19 participating countries including Israel but not the Palestinian Authority, and more participants, from both EU and non-EU countries, are expected to follow.

What seems clear is that the main factor leading to the failure of the Barcelona Partnership – political instability – is as potent in 2017 as in 2005, and bears down on the UfM as it will on the new PRIMA initiative. With civil conflicts raging in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iran: with Islamic jihad active across the region; with terrorism still rife in Egypt, Turkey, Israel and elsewhere; with the Gulf states in open conflict with Qatar; with the Israel-Palestine issue as unresolved as ever, an organization titled “The Union of the Mediterranean” seems less practical politics than the expression of a far distant, possibly unattainable, vision.

Amalgamation of the three existing bodies into one effective organization, rationalisation of its operations, and – since public awareness of the existing bodies and their activities is minimal to the point of secrecy – better promotion of its purposes and achievements would seem a sensible way forward, for there is every reason for the good work to continue.

More than 130,000 Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) surgeries take place each year with the majority of patients not requiring pain medication after three months post-operatively. However, researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine’s Annual Meeting today in Toronto, Ontario, Canada found that those patients who were filling opioid prescriptions prior to surgery were 10 times more likely to be filling prescriptions five months after surgery.

“With the ever-increasing opioid epidemic our nation is facing, understanding the risk factors for postoperative narcotic use could aid surgeons and healthcare systems in identifying patients who could benefit from a different pain management and counseling regimen than previously identified,” said Chris A. Anthony, MD, lead researcher from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, in Iowa City, IA.

Anthony and his colleagues identified 4,946 arthroscopic ACLRs that were performed and documented in the Humana Inc. database between 2007-2017 using the CPT code 29888. They evaluated the effect of preoperative opioid demand on postoperative demand by comparing those who did and did not fill prescriptions pre-and post-surgery. Patients were considered preoperative opioid users if they had filled a prescription in the three months preceeding surgery. Individuals were also categorized by those who underwent only ACLR, those who underwent ACLR with meniscus repair, those who underwent ACLR with menisectomy and those with ACLR and microfracture.

According to their analysis, nearly seven percent of patients were still filling opioid prescriptions, three months following surgery with almost five percent still filling prescriptions at 12 months. Nearly 35 percent of patients (1,716/4,946) were filling opioid prescriptions in the three months prior to surgery. Those younger than 25 years were four times as likely to be filling opioid prescriptions at nine months following surgery.

“We hope that our research will help contribute additional information to the baseline opioid medication demand data and continue to increase our knowledge of how to better cope with addiction and pain management following surgery,” said Anthony.

Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years – much longer than the 47,000 years believed by some archaeologists.

The discovery, by a team of archaeologists and dating specialists led by Associate Professor Chris Clarkson from The University of Queensland School of Social Science, has been detailed in the Nature journal this week.

The researchers found new evidence at the Madjedbebe site on Mirarr land within the Jabiluka mineral lease, surrounded by the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

Madjedbebe rock shelter has been excavated four times since the 1970s, most recently by an international team led by Dr Clarkson in partnership with the Mirarr Traditional Owners.

Dr Clarkson said more than 10,000 artefacts were revealed in the lowest layer at the site.

“The site contains the oldest ground-edge stone axe technology in the world, the oldest known seed-grinding tools in Australia and evidence of finely made stone points which may have served as spear tips,” he said.

“Most striking of all, in a region known for its spectacular rock art, are the huge quantities of ground ochre and evidence of ochre processing found at the site, from the older layer continuing through to the present.”

The dig discovered a maxillary (upper jaw) fragment of a Tasmanian Tiger coated in red pigment, giving insight to the central role ochre played in local customs at the time.

Dating carried out by Professor Zenobia Jacobs at the University of Wollongong has revealed that Aboriginal people lived at Madjedbebe at the same time as extinct species of giant animals were roaming around Australia, and the tiny species of primitive human, Homo floresiensis, was living on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia.

In addition to showing the deep antiquity of Aboriginal occupation, the dig revealed new evidence of activities and lifestyle.

Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation Chief Executive Officer Justin O’Brien said a landmark agreement had made it possible for Dr Clarkson and colleagues to dig the site.

“This study shatters previous understandings of the sophistication of the Aboriginal toolkit and underscores the universal importance of the Jabiluka area,” Mr O’Brien said.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned a Russian bill that would force social networks to remove “unlawful” content within 24 hours of notification. It is based very closely on a law that was adopted in Germany on June 30.

The Russian bill shows that when leading democracies devise draconian legislation, they provide repressive regimes with ideas, said RSF. Submitted to the Duma on July 12 by members of President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, the bill’s references to the German law are explicit.

RSF has repeatedly criticized the German law on hate speech in social media as it progressed though Germany’s parliament because of its potential for abuse.

“Our worst fears have been realized,” said Christian Mihr, RSF Germany’s executive director. “The German law on online hate speech is now serving as a model for non-democratic states to limit Internet debate.”

The German law has also inspired the United Kingdom. A UK parliamentary report in April cited the German example when it recommended making social networks pay large fines for failing to remove hate speech quickly enough.

Growing censorship

Passed on first reading, the Russian bill would invite Internet users to report “unlawful” content and would give social networks 24 hours to remove all originals and re-posts. Several Russian legislators have proposed making social networks pay fines of up to 50 million roubles (735,500 euros) if they fail to comply.

To avoid being fined, social networks would be tempted to extend the scope of their censorship, especially as the bill’s definition of what constitutes unlawful content is very vague. Social networks subjected to government scrutiny would be obliged to send all notified content to the authorities every three months.

Subjugated Russian Internet

The proposed law, which if approved could take effect in early 2018, would contribute to the subjugation of Russia’s Internet. Several hastily-negotiated bills in recent months would step up censorship of search engines and messaging services and would restrict access to software for anonymizing communications and bypassing website blocking.

“This proposed law would take mass Internet censorship one stage further in Russia,” said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk. “The goal is clear – to further restrict freedom of expression and information in a country where the number of imprisoned Internet users doubled in 2016.”

Russia is ranked 148th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index.