Spectacular sunsets and sunrises are enough to dazzle most of us, but to astronomers, dusk and dawn are a waste of good observing time. They want a truly dark sky.

Not Ned Molter, a UC Berkeley astronomy graduate student. He set out to show that some bright objects can be studied just as well during twilight, when other astronomers are twiddling their thumbs, and quickly discovered a new feature on Neptune: A storm system nearly the size of Earth.

“Seeing a storm this bright at such a low latitude is extremely surprising,” said Molter, who spotted the storm complex near Neptune’s equator during a dawn test run of twilight observing at W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii. “Normally, this area is really quiet and we only see bright clouds in the mid-latitude bands, so to have such an enormous cloud sitting right at the equator is spectacular.”

This massive storm system, which was found in a region where no bright cloud has ever been seen before, is about 9,000 kilometers in length, or one-third the size of Neptune’s radius, spanning at least 30 degrees in both latitude and longitude. Molter observed it getting much brighter between June 26 and July 2.

“Historically, very bright clouds have occasionally been seen on Neptune, but usually at latitudes closer to the poles, around 15 to 60 degrees north or south,” said Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and Molter’s adviser. “Never before has a cloud been seen at or so close to the equator, nor has one ever been this bright.”

At first, de Pater thought it was the same Northern Cloud Complex seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, after the iconic Great Dark Spot, imaged by Voyager 2 in 1989, had disappeared. But de Pater says measurements of its locale do not match, signaling that this cloud complex is different from the one Hubble first saw more than two decades ago.

A huge, high-pressure, dark vortex system anchored deep in Neptune’s atmosphere may be what’s causing the colossal cloud cover, said de Pater. As gases rise up in a vortex, they cool down. When its temperature drops below the condensation temperature of a condensable gas, that gas condenses out and forms clouds, just like water on Earth. On Neptune, however, methane clouds form.

As with every planet, winds in Neptune’s atmosphere vary drastically with latitude, so if there is a big bright cloud system that spans many latitudes, something must hold it together, such as a dark vortex. Otherwise, the clouds would shear apart.

“This big vortex is sitting in a region where the air, overall, is subsiding rather than rising,” said de Pater. “Moreover, a long-lasting vortex right at the equator would be hard to explain physically.”

If it is not tied to a vortex, the system may be a huge convective cloud, similar to those seen occasionally on other planets, like the huge storm on Saturn that was detected in 2010. However, such a cloud would be expected to smear out considerably over a week’s time.

“This shows that there are extremely drastic changes in the dynamics of Neptune’s atmosphere, and perhaps this is a seasonal weather event that may happen every few decades or so,” said de Pater.

A windy planet

Neptune is the windiest planet in our solar system, with the fastest observed wind speeds at the equator reaching up to a violent 1,000 mph. To put this into perspective, a Category 5 hurricane has wind speeds of 156 mph. Neptune orbits the sun every 160 years, and one season is about 40 years.

The discovery of Neptune’s mysterious equatorial cloud complex was made possible by the new Keck Visiting Scholars Program, launched this summer, which gives graduate students and post-doctoral researchers experience working at the telescope, while contributing to Keck Observatory and its scientific community.

“This result by Imke and her first-year graduate student, Ned, is a perfect example of what we’re trying to accomplish with the Keck Visiting Scholars Program,” said Anne Kinney, chief scientist at Keck Observatory. “Ned is our first visiting scholar, and his incredible work is a testament to the value of this program. It’s just been an outrageous success.”

Molter is one of eight scholars accepted into the program this year. His assignment during his six-week stay at the Observatory was to develop a more efficient method for twilight observing, making use of time that otherwise might not be used. Most observers in the Keck Observatory community peer deep into the night sky and cannot observe their targets during twilight.

“Ned had never observed before, and he’s very bright, so when Anne told me about the program, I knew he would be the perfect student for it,” said de Pater. “Now that we’ve discovered this interesting cloud complex in Neptune, Ned has a running start on a nice paper for his Ph.D. thesis.”

“I loved being at Keck. Everyone was extremely friendly and I had a ton of personal interaction with the support astronomers and observing assistants,” Molter said. “Being able to go behind the scenes to see how they run the telescopes and instruments every day, getting 10 nights of observing and engineering time on the telescopes and going up to the summit twice to see the incredible engineering behind this gigantic machine has turned me from a student into an actual observer. It was an incredible opportunity.”

The Keck Visiting Scholars Program is sponsored by Roy and Frances Simperman, with major contributions from the M.R. and Evelyn Hudson Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, Edge of Space, Inc., Thomas McIntyre, and Jeff and Rebecca Steele.

Molter and De Pater will continue to analyze their data and propose for more twilight observing time at Keck Observatory this fall so they can learn more about the nature of this storm and get an idea of what it will be doing over time.

Having a better understanding of Neptune’s atmosphere will help give astronomers a clearer picture of this icy giant’s global circulation. This has become increasingly more important in the exoplanet realm, as a majority of exoplanets found so far are nearly the size of Neptune. While scientists can calculate their size and mass, not much is currently known about exoplanets’ atmosphere.

Medical discrimination based on people’s size and negative stereotypes of overweight people can take a toll on people’s physical health and well-being, according to a review of recent research presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

“Disrespectful treatment and medical fat shaming, in an attempt to motivate people to change their behavior, is stressful and can cause patients to delay health care seeking or avoid interacting with providers,” presenter Joan Chrisler, PhD, a professor of psychology at Connecticut College, said during a symposium titled “Weapons of Mass Distraction—Confronting Sizeism.”

Sizeism can also have an effect on how doctors medically treat patients, as overweight people are often excluded from medical research based on assumptions about their health status, Chrisler said, meaning the standard dosage for drugs may not be appropriate for larger body sizes. Recent studies have shown frequent under-dosing of overweight patients who were prescribed antibiotics and chemotherapy, she added.

“Recommending different treatments for patients with the same condition based on their weight is unethical and a form of malpractice,” Chrisler said. “Research has shown that doctors repeatedly advise weight loss for fat patients while recommending CAT scans, blood work or physical therapy for other, average weight patients.”

In some cases, providers might not take fat patients’ complaints seriously or might assume that their weight is the cause of any symptoms they experience, Chrisler added. “Thus, they could jump to conclusions or fail to run appropriate tests, which results in misdiagnosis,” she said.

In one study of over 300 autopsy reports, obese patients were 1.65 times more likely than others to have significant undiagnosed medical conditions (e.g., endocarditis, ischemic bowel disease or lung carcinoma), indicating misdiagnosis or inadequate access to health care.

Studies show that negative attitudes among medical providers can also cause psychological stress in patients, Chrisler said. “Implicit attitudes might be experienced by patients as microaggressions — for example, a provider’s apparent reluctance to touch a fat patient, or a headshake, wince or ‘tsk’ while noting the patient’s weight in the chart,” she said. “Microaggressions are stressful over time and can contribute to the felt experience of stigmatization.”

A medicalized view of weight conceptualizes fatness as a disease and weight loss as a cure, said Maureen McHugh, PhD, a psychologist who also presented research on fat shaming during the symposium. “A weight-centric model of health assumes that weight is within an individual’s control, equates higher weight with poor health habits, and believes weight loss will result in improved health,” she said.

Chrisler argued that there is no research that has shown exactly how much weight is too much. Other predictors of illness, such as genetics, diet, stress and poverty, also play a role, yet being fat often leads to the assumption that a person is unhealthy, she said.

Fat shaming on social media has become prevalent and weight is the most common reason children are bullied in school with 85 percent of surveyed adolescents reportedly seeing overweight classmates teased in gym class, McHugh said.

Evidence confirms that fat shaming is not an effective approach to reducing obesity or improving health, McHugh said. “Rather, stigmatization of obese individuals poses serious risks to their psychological health,” she added. “Research demonstrates that weight stigma leads to psychological stress, which can lead to poor physical and psychological health outcomes for obese people.”

It is essential for weight stigma to be addressed in psychology and the medical profession–in training, in theory and research, and in working with fat clients, both Chrisler and McHugh argued. Treatments should focus on mental and physical health as the desired outcomes for therapy, and not on weight, McHugh concluded.

The cold-loving fungus (Pseudogymnoascus destructans, or Pd) that causes white-nose syndrome, a disease that has killed millions of North American bats during hibernation, could also spread in summer months. Bats and humans visiting contaminated caves and mines can inadvertently contribute to the spread of the fungus, according to a recently published study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

USGS scientists tested samples collected from bats, the environment and equipment at eight bat hibernation sites in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia. They found that bats occupying such sites in summer can harbor the Pd fungus on their skin, and that Pd is more readily detectable in their guano, or feces.

The scientists also detected Pd on clothing and equipment taken inside and near caves and mines used by bats. These detections demonstrate that gear exposed to fungal-infected environments is a potential mechanism for Pd spread, even during summertime when the prevalence of WNS is low. WNS is not known to affect humans, pets, livestock or other wildlife.

“Our findings provide insights into additional means by which Pd may be dispersed and further contribute to the spread of this devastating disease that threatens agriculturally and environmentally valuable bat populations,” said Anne Ballmann, a USGS scientist and the lead author of the report. “This information will further help inform managers working to control the westward movement of WNS in North America.”

Between July 18 and August 22, 2012, Ballmann and her colleagues collected swabs from bat wings, cave walls and equipment used in and near the study sites. They also collected guano from individual bats and floor sediment in underground summer roost sites.

Findings include: Pd was detected on 40 bats and in environmental samples from seven of the eight study sites; Guano accounted for 93 percent of the bat-associated Pd detections; Equipment, including trapping equipment and a backpack, from three WNS-impacted sites in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio tested positive for Pd DNA; and Fungal DNA from Pd was more readily detected in sediment samples than on swab samples from cave walls.

No bats showed visible signs of WNS during the course of this study, even though the disease-causing fungus was found. Although exposure to Pd does not result in WNS during summertime, the study showed that the fungus that causes the disease can be transported by bats and people visiting contaminated sites in summer.

First detected in New York State in the winter of 2006-2007, WNS has spread to 31 states and five Canadian provinces. The disease is named for the white fungus that infects the muzzle, ears and wings of hibernating bats. Scientists at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center discovered, characterized and named the fungus that causes WNS, and pioneered laboratory techniques for studying effects of the fungus on hibernating bats.

New insights into the lifeways – and death rites – of the ancient people of Ireland are being provided through funerary studies led by a researcher at the Department of Anatomy at New Zealand’s University of Otago.

The findings, which have been published in the journal Bioarchaeology International, are part of a project applying modern techniques and research questions to human remains that were originally excavated more than 100 years ago.

The new paper, whose lead author is Dr Jonny Geber, focuses on the 5000 years-old Passage Tomb Complex at Carrowkeel in County Sligo in the north-west of Ireland. This site is one of the most impressive Neolithic ritual landscapes in Europe, but despite that, is relatively unknown.

The research team analysed bones from up to seven passage tombs that included both unburnt and cremated human remains from around 40 individuals. Much remains unknown about these Stone Age people.

Dr Geber said he and his colleagues determined that the unburnt bone displayed evidence of dismemberment.

“We found indications of cut marks caused by stone tools at the site of tendon and ligament attachments around the major joints, such as the shoulder, elbow, hip and ankle,” he said.

Dr Geber said the new evidence suggest that a complex burial rite was undertaken at Carrowkeel, that involved a funerary rite that placed a particular focus on the “deconstruction” of the body.

“This appears to entail the bodies of the dead being ‘processed’ by their kin and community in various ways, including cremation and dismemberment. It was probably done with the goal to help the souls of the dead to reach the next stages of their existence.”

This study has been able to show that the Carrowkeel complex was most likely a highly significant place in Neolithic society in Ireland, and one which allowed for interaction and a spiritual connection with the ancestors.

The evidence suggests that the people of Neolithic Ireland may have shared similar beliefs and ideologies concerning the treatment of the dead with communities beyond the Irish Sea, according to the researchers, Dr Geber said.

According to a prediction made by the U.S. Department of Energy, wind energy could provide 20 percent of electricity in the U.S. by the year 2030. This has motivated researchers from the University of Utah’s Department of Mechanical Engineering to investigate the performance capabilities and financial benefits of vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) in urban and suburban areas.

A VAWT is a wind turbine design where the generator is vertically oriented in the tower, rather than sitting horizontally on top. While there are many VAWT designs, the one used in this study is called the straight-blade Darrieus type or H-rotor turbine.

According to the researchers, small VAWTs possess the ability to effectively operate in the presence of high turbulent flow, which makes them ideal energy harvesting devices in urban and suburban environments. In an article in this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, from AIP Publishing, the authors present results indicating that an optimally designed VAWT system can financially compete with fossil-fuel based power plants in urban and suburban areas, and even spearhead the development of a net-zero energy building or city.

To establish their results, the team input actual, time-resolved wind speed data into a numerical simulation that determined the total amount of energy captured by a turbine over a year of operation. Their wind data was accrued over the year 2009 from 3-D sonic anemometers mounted on the top of traffic posts, about 9 meters, or 30 feet, above ground, and positioned at nine different urban and suburban sites around Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The researchers simulated 13 different wind turbine configurations, with a focus on four particular design parameters: height-to-diameter aspect ratio (H/D), blade airfoil shape, turbine solidity and turbine moment of inertia. The main performance measure used to identify the optimum design configuration was the percent of energy captured by the turbine over the course of the year relative to the available energy in the turbulent wind during the same time period.

Of the 13 design configurations, the optimal turbine design had the lowest moment of inertia. Interestingly, however, the researchers confirmed that even with the moment of inertia eliminated as a design parameter, this configuration was still the most ideal.

They also analyzed the various turbine designs for the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) at one of the test sites and found the values for blade characteristics necessary for economically viable options. The optimal design configuration at this site produced electricity at a cost 10 percent lower than the average national electricity unit price.

“This is not the end of our research, and I think that we have more to study on the turbine design configuration and its operating conditions that would allow for enhancing the amount of energy captured by the turbine. […] It’s exciting,” said Lam Nguyen, one of the lead researchers on the project. Nguyen is currently expanding his research with a former advisor.

Following their conclusion that an optimal design configuration for VAWTs could lead to a lower electric cost, the team knows the work is not finished.

Beijing has declared an area the size of West Virginia off-limits to civilian vessels, ahead of extensive three-day naval exercises near the coast of North Korea. A similar drill took place in the area at the end of July.

The announcement only said that the drills would last between 6 am on Saturday and 6 pm Tuesday, and would involve “large-scale military operations.”

China commissioned 18 ships last year. While it currently only operates one Soviet-made aircraft carrier, trials are ongoing on the second vessel, wholly built in a local shipyard.

According to local analysts, the timing and choice of location for the current exercises is more to do with reasserting China’s regional power than an immediate need to test new hardware.

“This is a very normal part of diplomacy – there are talks and negotiations, but there is always in the background some sort of drum-beating,” Collin Koh from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University told the South China Morning Post (SCMP), saying that the drills are primarily a signal to Washington that North Korea is still under its protection.

Koh warned that while the drills do not represent immediate escalation, there is an element of “danger” as regional powers “are all quite heavily armed and are operating in quite a constricted space.”

Another reading of the drills is as a signal for Pyongyang to simmer down, after North Korea launched another ballistic missile on July 28, boasting that it could now reach the entirety of the US mainland. While the Pentagon and South Korean military said it was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Russian military said it was only of intermediate range.

In recent days North Korea’s rhetoric has been as belligerent as ever, as Pyongyang cautioned Washington against trying restrict its missile and nuclear program.

“Every minute and every second, the new reality that US mainland is on the knife’s edge of life and death is forcing US administration to wave a white flag and fundamentally change her North Korea policy,” declared a piece in the official party newspaper Rodong Sinmun. “It is not the denuclearization of N. Korea, but the security of US mainland which should be the top priority of Trump administration.”

China’s naval exercises will take place as the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, and their Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov meet in Manila during a forum of ASEAN top diplomats. Their talks will likely touch upon the issue of potential sanctions against North Korea over its missile tests, as well as the existing tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and US placement of its THAAD missile defense system in South Korea.

Beijing’s growing naval capability may add another wrinkle to the talks, in particular its desire to take control of the key waterways of the South China Sea, which also caused concern to the Obama administration.

(Civil.Ge) – Georgia’s President Giorgi Margvelashvili wants the United States to appoint a special representative for Georgia for “contributing to U.S.-Georgia cooperation and for more rapid and effective implementation of joint initiatives.”

The idea was first voiced at the meeting of Vice President Mike Pence and Giorgi Margvelashvili on August 1. The President’s administration said in its press release of the meeting that Margvelashvili introduced the idea to the Vice President, who “found the President’s initiative interesting.”

“All this (US support to Georgia) will work more efficiently if we elevate our cooperation to a higher level, to the status of a special representative,” the Georgian president noted in his August 3 interview with the Voice of America.

“This is a standard practice when relations between two countries is given special intensity and special importance,” he added.

President Margvelashvili’s initiative was met with skepticism among the ruling party lawmakers and the government, who said they were not informed of the initiative.

“I personally do not see the need to introduce a new element in the U.S.-Georgia relations, but if the president offers it, we can discuss it. But I have to underline once again, that it was a surprise, members of the Government have not been informed of the initiative,” said Victor Dolidze, the State Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration.

The initiative, however, was positively assessed by representatives of the parliamentary opposition parties.

“This can be welcomed. The United States has a special representative for Ukraine, for example, and we could also discuss the possibility of the appointment of such representative in the context of the Russian occupation [of Georgia],” said MP Tinatin Bokuchava of the United National Movement.

In the words of European Georgia’s MP Giorgi Tugushi, “any format that will do more to promote the issue of Georgia and will draw more attention of our American partners to Georgia’s problems, including occupation, is very important and good.”

Tengiz Pkhaladze, Georgian President’s Foreign Affairs Secretary, made additional clarifications on the initiative on August 2, saying that the appointment of special representatives is “a proven practice” and “does in no way diminish the role of the ambassador, the Foreign Ministry or any incumbent diplomat.”

On June 14, when United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, Republican Congressman Ted Poe of Texas asked him about the government’s policy towards Iran. “Well,” Tillerson paused, “our Iranian policy is under development.” Poe asked Tillerson directly whether the U.S. government supported “a philosophy of regime change, peaceful regime change?” Tillerson responded: “Our policy towards Iran is to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government. Those elements are there, certainly.”

In other words, Tillerson said, the U.S. government was committed to overthrowing the current government in Iran by peaceful means. What they mean by “peaceful” should not be taken lightly. No regime-change operation is ever peaceful. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is conducting an inter-agency review of the sanctions on Iran and of the various options available to the U.S. for action against Iran. These options include military force. There is belligerence in the air.

On July 17, a month later, President Donald Trump certified to Congress that Iran was in compliance with the international nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The President has to conduct this certification exercise every 90 days. If the President does not certify the deal, then the U.S. Congress has 60 additional days to abandon the deal. The White House spokesperson said: “The President has made very clear that he thought this was a bad deal—bad deal for the United States.” Trump had wanted to refuse to certify the deal this time, and in the previous round. His national security team convinced him that this deal was valuable. One staff member said that Trump only signed on after he made it clear that the next time things would be different.

The American Right remains fundamentally opposed to the deal. John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote recently that the nuclear deal “remains palpably harmful to American national interests”. Trump shares this view. They believe—against all evidence—that the deal allows Iran to retain its nuclear programme because international verification on the ground in Iran is “fatally inadequate”. Bolton urged Trump to make withdrawal from the nuclear deal the administration’s “highest priority”.

There is widespread enthusiasm in the White House to walk away from the deal and to use the full vitality of U.S. power to suffocate Iran. But elements in the U.S. intelligence services and in the diplomatic community are not keen on further confrontation with Iran. It would, they argue, confound U.S. policy in Iraq and against the Islamic State.

Iran complains that the U.S. has already violated the spirit of the JCPOA. In May, at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) Brussels headquarters, and in July, at the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Trump asked his European allies to stop doing business with Iran. This was done privately. When she was asked about it, Trump’s White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders affirmed that Trump had told European leaders “to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran”. The JCPOA, however, clearly prohibits “any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran”. These are “sanctions” of a new kind.

The American Right recognises that the nuclear deal cannot be easily undone. European states do not have the appetite to return to a confrontation with Iran. The Europeans are eager to bring Iranian energy into their countries and they see the utility of engaging Iran on the multiple crises in West Asia. This is why U.S. Senator Bob Corker said that since Trump was “fully committed” to the American Right’s anti-Iran policy, new sanctions were needed to punish Iran for its “non-nuclear behaviour”. In other words, since Iran tested ballistic missiles, the U.S. has now placed new sanctions on 18 individuals, groups and networks.

The theory here is that the pressure on firms to stop doing business with Iran and new “non-nuclear” sanctions on Iran would encage the country once more. It would harden the positions of the Iranian leadership, Washington hopes, and drive it to do something provocative that would allow Trump to refuse to recertify the JCPOA in October. It would set the stage for a much more dangerous confrontation with Iran.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said that Iran would “respond” to these sanctions, but he did not say how. What he did say was that Iran was grateful to the Europeans, China and Russia for “steadfastly employing perseverance to safeguard the JCPOA”. Do the Europeans, the Chinese and the Russians have the means to prevent a U.S. war? Will the Russians intervene militarily in Iran—as they did in Syria—to provide the country with a nuclear umbrella?

Message to Iran

The U.S. already has military bases on the doorstep of Iran—in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and elsewhere. There are at least 125,000 U.S. troops on the edge of Iran and thousands of warships and aircraft at the ready.

Iran has long seen its ballistic missile programme as being a deterrent, however feeble, against this massive military encirclement. That the U.S. has decided to place new sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile tests has sent a clear message to Iran: the U.S. will put as much pressure on Iran as possible to prevent it from developing anything like a deterrent capability.

Iran’s head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said that the U.S. should move its bases out of a 1,000-kilometre range from the Iranian borders. This would mean that the U.S. base at Shindand (Herat, Afghanistan), which is merely 200 km from the Iranian border, and the U.S. base in Bahrain, less than 100 km from Iran, would have to be removed. If the U.S. did not withdraw, Jafari intimated, then Iran would maintain its missile programme. The programme, he said, “is defensive and never would be subject to bargaining and negotiation at any level”.

Pressure on Iran from the U.S. is not only from the bases that ring the country but also on the ground in West Asia, from Iraq to Lebanon. Tillerson told Congress that the Trump administration was aware of “Iran’s continued destabilising presence in the region, their payment of foreign fighters, their export of militia forces in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, their support of Hizbollah”. The U.S., he said, was “taking action to respond to Iran’s hegemony”. There is a fantasy narrative in Washington, D.C., that Iran is the one that is aggressive in West Asia and that the U.S.—with its history of regime change and the presence of its military bases—is merely there to block Iranian ambitions.

Syria-Iraq border

Iran has indeed been eager to open up the land route from its border through Iraq to Syria. It would prefer to resupply the government of Bashar al-Assad through the much cheaper road that runs across the region than fly in military and civilian supplies. The road is open from Damascus to Syria’s border with Iraq and it is open from Iran’s border across Iraq. A U.S. base and U.S. proxies along the Iraq-Syria border are keen to create a buffer state to block Iran’s access to the road. This border post in south-eastern Syria is crucial and the two sides now face each other in a dangerous standoff.

The White House press secretary said that the U.S. had a “shared interest with Israel to make sure that Iran does not gain a foothold, military base-wise, in southern Syria”. Armed action by U.S. proxies, trained in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-run camp in Jordan, against Syrian government troops backed by Iranian-led militias has been a flashpoint along the edge of southern Syria.

Meanwhile, along Lebanon’s border, tensions have risen over a potential Israeli strike against Hizbollah’s highly fortified positions. Israel has already been collaborating with various Syrian rebel groups, including Al Qaeda-backed groups, in the region near the occupied Golan Heights. Israeli aircraft have regularly been striking Syrian military targets to prevent any advance by the Syrian Army towards the de facto border with Israel. Israel would also like to expand its Golan Heights holdings and create a large buffer zone with Syria. These manoeuvres have been fully backed by the Trump White House.

Dangerous signals come from the new sanctions and from the hot wars between U.S. proxies, including Israel, and the Iranian-backed forces. When Trump was in Saudi Arabia in May, he suggested that the conflict between the U.S. and Iran was a “battle between good and evil”. Religious language such as this evokes the words of former President George W. Bush before he launched the illegal war on Iraq in 2003. It is Iran, Trump suggested, that “spreads destruction and chaos” in the region. This came the day after Iran re-elected its moderate President, and along the same time as the U.S. pledged to sell Saudi Arabia, a country spreading destruction and chaos in Yemen, arms worth $110 billion.

There is an appetite for war in the Trump White House and amongst its Israeli and Saudi partners. The war this time will be against Iran. If West Asia is in chaos now, there is no adequate word to describe its fate if that full-scale war actually begins.

Before recommending a practical way to reverse the devastating impact of Congressional Republicans’ attempts to strip tens of millions of Americans of health insurance coverage, and the  non-stop anxiety and dread that comes with such cruel and vicious legislation, note the impact of having gerrymandered (the politicians pick the voters) Washington rulers.

The arrogant Republicans in Congress have good health insurance, life insurance, pensions, salaries and expense accounts paid by you the taxpayers. This perversely has led them to drop any empathy their residual consciences might have possessed before they came to Capitol Hill – many as millionaires.

At the same time, in a country that spends well over $3 trillion a year on ‘healthcare’, the GOP’s various bills leave millions of families fearing loss of insurance, reduced coverage, larger deductibles, unaffordable co-pays and inscrutable insurance and billing fine-print trap doors. This is producing serious fear, anxiety, depression and in many cases absolute terror for sick children and ailing parents.

We have the New York Times to thank for bringing this vast human toll, day after day, night after night, to their readers. In a recent article, reporter Jan Hoffman interviews people who are wondering “whether they would be able to continue screenings and treatment.” Hoffman writes that patients “are postponing” – so as not to set up a preexisting condition –   “or accelerating major medical decisions, weighing whether to move to more insurance-friendly states” and worrying about “their own inability to control critical matters in their own lives.”

“‘I’m so done,’ moaned Cathy McPherson, 58, a retired court clerk in Sonora, CA, with hypertension…It’s what I think about all the time and I am totally burned out. They go over and over it. Can you stop? Just stop it for a little bit?’”

The Times also interviewed a psychologist, Nancy Molitor in Wilmette, IL, who describes “escalating anxiety about healthcare for all her patients. Many want to spend entire sessions about how to handle the stress and the feelings of fear, powerlessness, rage and frustrated paralysis.”

Perhaps Meghan Borland, who, with her husband, owns a small business in Pleasant Valley, NY, gives voice to this preventable despair in the USA most pointedly. They have a two year-old daughter, Amelia, receiving chemotherapy for leukemia. Meghan said, “For months it’s been: Here’s a bill, we’ll vote. No, we won’t. Now it will change. Maybe not. Will that one person in the Senate vote or not? Except for us, this is not a game.”

Well it’s a stupid, but lucrative, ideological game for the Republicans, whose various factions juggle their corporate paymasters and reactionary dogmas, as they try to give the rich and powerful another $800 billion in tax breaks at the expense of millions of their neighbors’ lives and livelihoods.

Without health insurance, about 35,000 Americans die each year; many more stay sick or injured because they cannot afford insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time. About 30 million people fall into that helpless, hurtful category.

Those tens of millions more Americans who are underinsured can barely figure out where they are covered and how much they have to pay or go without.

For the most vulnerable of these Americans, the choice is morbidly clear: pay or die.

In Canada, everybody has a Medicare card to use a system that is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal. They hardly see a bill. They have better health outcomes, cover everyone and spend less than half per capita than does the corporate dominated US that excludes tens of millions of human beings from healthcare. Canadians do not have the anxieties, dread or fear of losing all their personal savings or bringing financial ruin on their families, as so many Americans do.

In Canada, no one has to decide whether to take or not to take another job based on health insurance factors. They are free to choose any physician or hospital – no narrow networks, with hidden charges, in that country.

In Canada, where there is public funding and private delivery of healthcare, profits are not the king, people come first. The large majority of citizens, liberals and conservatives, love their healthcare system, especially when they hear of the horrors going on south of their border in the US (Canadians need to be more alert to corporate forces trying to undermine, restrict budgets and bad-mouth their system, which is a shining example of what is possible with equitable public investment in healthcare).

A majority of Americans, including a significant number of conservatives, favor single payer, full Medicare for all. So do a majority of physicians and nurses, currently in thralldom to corporatist dictates.

How to get there from here? Listen to Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire and sage from Omaha; he favors full Medicare for all as being more efficient and humane (A single payer system has far less administrative costs and billing fraud). Then he tells us the pathway to turning this whole madness and mayhem around. To paraphrase what he once said, there are only 535 members of Congress (100 senators and 435 representatives), and we’re over three hundred million people. Why can’t we control these legislators?

Imagine if a very rich, enlightened person pledged one billion dollars to fund the organizing of a few thousand serious volunteers in every Congressional District, each having four full-time advocates. Working with these volunteers, each dedicating 300 to 400 hours a year in Congressional watchdog associations,  this watchdog initiative would immediately represent a majority of Americans. Within 36 months, with a consequential election in 2018, our country would have comprehensive, universal, affordable, simpler single payer (full Medicare for all), saving lives, livelihoods and endless family anguish and fear.

That would be quite an historical achievement for any one of numerous billionaires each worth at least $10 billion. Any takers?

For more information, visit singlepayeraction.org and read my small paperback, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think.

Just got back from an event-filled two-plus weeks in the UK and I though I should share a few thoughts and impressions.

We visited briefly in Edinburgh, Scotland, London, Exeter and Oxford, the ancient university town where our daughter Ariel was graduating with a DPhil in Education — the primary purpose of our visit.

The first thing that struck me coming strait from the States was the scarcity of clearly overweight people. Sure you see a few, but not the huge number of really dangerously overweight people one sees everyday in the US, where bad food products are shamelessly pushed like addictive drugs. Perusing the supermarkets in Britain, it’s clear why this is so: the shelves aren’t bulging with oversized boxes of sugared cereal, potato chips, corn ships and other amalgams of starch, sugars and fats of all types, or aisles full of sweets.

Restaurant meals also offer normal sized portions, not huge quantities of foot that beckon guests to eat until they can’t stand up easily as in all too many US establishments.

The second thing I noticed — even outside of London — was a wide array of newspapers, ranging from junk like the Sun and the Daily Mail to serious journals of the center right like the Financial Times and the Times to left-leaning papers like the Guardian and the Independent. And people actually read the things.

Back in Philadelphia, the two options are the Inquirer and the Daily News, both desiccated shadows of their former selves and owned by the same publisher. If you’re lucky, and are near Center City, you might also find on newsstands a few copies of the NY Times and maybe even a Wall Street Journal, but don’t count on it.

The political scene, meanwhile, bears some small, superficial resemblance to the US at the moment, with a dysfunctional conservative government in power, and a leftist “resistance” in the wings, but that’s where all similarity ends.

By Victor V. Claar*

You may already be aware that many state and local public pensions are in trouble. By one estimate, the nation’s state, county, and municipal governments face a combined funding shortfall of about $5 trillion.

How did this happen? It depends on who you ask, but one can point to various culprits that include roller-coaster stock prices since 2001, the fact that baby boomers are moving into retirement, a drop in tax revenues driven by the Great Recession, and the nation’s recent household and business migration patterns—including the exit of both from historically vibrant cities like Detroit. After Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013 its pensioners saw their benefits cut considerably.

Now it’s not unreasonable to think that our elected officials and their agents bear a share of the blame, too. I suspect that various politicians and bureaucrats in charge of such funds don’t plan for others’ futures as carefully as they might plan for their own—especially when it comes to individuals who will enter retirement long after a given politician has left office.

But what you may not know is that many private pension funds are in trouble, too. 

Though most private employers long ago shifted from traditional pension plans into 401(k) retirement plans for their workers, there remain a significant number of workers who continue to make contributions into traditional pension funds—funds that promise a defined monthly benefit following retirement. Such funds are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), an agency of the U.S. government. Created by an act of Congress in 1974, the PBGC is intended to function as a backstop for troubled private pensions—much like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) provides guarantees for depositors in the event of a bank default.

The PBGC insures two types of private pensions: single-employer and multiemployer. Single-employer pensions operate just like their name suggests: a single employer offers a traditional pension plan to its workers. For single-employer pension funds to be covered under PBGC’s single-employer program, PBGC requires payment of an annual premium, which is currently $69 per worker each year.

Multiemployer plans are pension funds created through collective bargaining between labor unions and two or more employers. In the multiemployer case, then, it is the union—rather than the employer—who is responsible for the pension. The annual premium paid by multiemployer plans to PBGC’s multiemployer program is currently $28 per worker each year.

Alas, due to regular crises in private pension funds, the PBGC itself is in crisis. According to the PBGC itself, “PBGC’s fiscal year 2016 annual report shows a financial deficit in its Multiemployer Program net position of $59 billion. PBGC’s Single-employer Program shows a deficit of $21 billion.” Though the PBGC claims that the single-employer program is likely to rebound during the next ten years, they estimate that the multiemployer program will run out of money by 2025.

This is very bad news for the 4,000 members of the Cleveland Iron Workers Local 17 pension plan, many of whom had their benefits reduced by more than half back in February. The Cleveland pension plan was granted the ability to write down its obligation to its members under a relatively new piece of legislation called the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act (MPRA). Passed in 2014, the MPRA made it possible for distressed multiemployer pension funds to apply to the PBGC for permission to pay pensioners less than they had been promised. Since the distressed PBGC multiemployer program is incapable of guaranteeing the benefits of the ten million or so Americans enrolled in multiemployer plans who are counting on their pensions, troubled pensions can lawfully gain exemptions from paying what they had promised to their members. Troubled multiemployer pensions may be classified into one of three categories depending upon their straits: “endangered,” “critical,” or “critical and declining.” Once a pension falls into the “critical and declining” category, the MPRA allows multiemployer plans to pursue a reduction in benefits.

But the Cleveland Iron Workers are not the only pensioners in peril. In 2016 the U.S. Department of Labor classified 86 multiemployer pensions as “critical and declining,” including Iron Workers Local 17.

What lessons may be found in this tragedy?

1. When the terms of a contract are strictly enforced, people are more likely to honor them.

If there is an overarching lesson of bailouts such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the multiemployer version of PBGC, or the MPRA, it is that people are less likely to honor their contracts when it’s likely that a third party will make it lawful to violate the terms of the contract. In the case of the MPRA, union-driven pension funds no longer must make good on their promises to their members. Economists have long referred to this problem as “moral hazard,” the tendency to overpromise and underdeliver if you believe you will not be held accountable for the consequences.

Two of my former colleagues at Henderson State University, Glenna Sumner and Anita Williams, demonstrate that an economy in which “fuzzy” contracts become the norm will experience a decline in the value of its assets, both individually and overall. It’s simply quite difficult to make plans if you doubt whether today’s contract terms will be enforced tomorrow, and it’s even harder to accurately assess the value of any asset that is likely to be affected by “fuzzy” contracts.

2. The rank-and-file don’t like it when they feel forgotten, and they vote accordingly.

I know correlation doesn’t imply causation, but the narrow Trump victories in the 2016 presidential election in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—and their ensuing morning-after analyses—suggest that one variety of Trump voter was a disgruntled working-class guy in Sheboygan who used to vote with the Democrats but felt forgotten by both his party and politicians in general. If even a handful of union workers in these states had recently received their “critical and declining” notices, it’s certainly possible that their votes tipped the electoral outcomes in those states.

3. Planning for the future is best carried out at the most personal level possible.

There are really good reasons most firms and workers with retirement plans have shifted from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans: Every saver has more flexibility in deciding when to save, how much to save, and what kinds of assets to invest in. At the same time, most individual firms, an increasing number of state and local governments and agencies, and even a few unions have learned that stepping out of the pension business makes their lives easier and keeps their workers happier.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also be interested in Confronting the Retirement Funding Calamity: A Christian Perspective by Brian Porter and Todd P. Steen. 

About the author:
* Victor V. Claar is associate professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, where he holds the BB&T Distinguished Professorship in Free Enterprise. He is a coauthor of Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy, and Life Choices, and author of the Acton Institute’s Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution.

Source:
This article was published by the Acton Institute

As ASEAN celebrates its 50th anniversary it is instructive to ask whether the grouping has achieved its primary goal of creating an ASEAN Community.

By Barry Desker*

On 8 August, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bangkok Declaration commemorating the founding of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The regional grouping’s signature achievement is that it has created an environment of regional security and growing mutual confidence among member states, which promoted economic growth and internal stability. It has also facilitated regional relationships with the major powers as well as international and regional organisations.

Initially, ASEAN provided the gel which helped the pro-Western governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand broaden their international support in response to the threats of domestic communist insurgencies and a widening war in Indochina. But progress was slow. As newly independent states, the focus was on building a sense of nationhood, not creating a commitment to a broader regional identity. This changed in 1975 following the emergence of communist regimes in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and an awareness that the United States was unlikely to intervene to combat the threat posed by communist insurgencies after its defeat in Vietnam.

Most Successful Regional Body after EU

While strengthening economic cooperation provided the public rationale for the first ASEAN Summit held in Bali in February 1976, security considerations shaped the internal dynamics of the process leading to the Summit. The Bali Declaration of ASEAN Concord was the key document arising from the Summit. Its political provisions included a commitment to settle intra-regional differences by peaceful means as well as agreement on the establishment of the ASEAN Secretariat.

A major outcome of the Summit was the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), which became the foundational instrument for ASEAN in the ensuing decades. As the Treaty is open for accession by other States in and outside Southeast Asia, it now boasts 35 states parties, including all ASEAN countries and major powers.

The Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in December 1978 provided the sternest test for ASEAN. The effective ASEAN response at the United Nations led to the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, Vietnam’s military withdrawal from Cambodia and prevention of a Vietnamese fait accompli. This resulted in international recognition of ASEAN as the most successful regional organisation after the European Union.

Underlying Reality

Nevertheless, the underlying reality is that ASEAN succeeded because of the consensus among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. This was facilitated by the end of the Cold War, highlighted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as well as China’s efforts to break its diplomatic isolation following Western sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen massacres. This paved the way for Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia to join ASEAN from 1995 to 1999.

Until the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in November 2007, ASEAN was essentially a diplomatic community linking the foreign ministries of the region. As the ASEAN states, with the exception of Singapore, were commodity producers, their economies were competitive, not complementary.

Substantive ASEAN economic cooperation was only agreed at the fourth ASEAN Summit held in Singapore in 1992, which declared that an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) would be established within 15 years.

Although ASEAN has played an important role in promoting trade liberalisation, the most significant deregulatory measures took place at the national level when ASEAN states were faced with collapsing economies during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.

Two-tier ASEAN

But the lack of pre-conditions for membership has resulted in a ‘two-tier’ ASEAN. While the six earlier members plus Vietnam could meet the demands for greater economic integration, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos remain mired in their least developed status.

The adoption of the ASEAN Charter in November 2007 marked the institutionalisation of a hitherto loosely structured organisation. The creation of a legal personality, an enhanced role for the Secretariat, the establishment of an inter-governmental human rights body, promotion of a ‘people-oriented’ ASEAN and adoption of the principle of ‘shared commitment and collective responsibility’ were significant outcomes contained in the Charter.

Supporters of ASEAN see the establishment of the ASEAN Community at the end of 2015 as a demonstration of its institutional maturity. Considerable attention within ASEAN is given to the three community pillars – political-security, economic and sociocultural. However, there is poor cross-sectoral interaction and the lack of a ‘whole of ASEAN’ approach.

The focus of ASEAN policymakers is on their own sectors and enhancing cross-sectoral coordination is a work in progress. One cause is that the ASEAN Secretariat continues to be poorly funded and is ineffective in playing a bridging role. The gap between rhetoric and commitment is seen in the humble budget for the ASEAN Secretariat at US$20 million in 2017.

Limits to Regional Institution Building

More importantly, those of us who participate actively in ASEAN activities need to recognise the limits to regional institution building. Aside from Thailand, the ASEAN countries only became independent after World War II. Although ASEAN states are old societies (except for Singapore), they are new states.

Loyalties are centred on the local level. Clan, village, religious, language and ethnic ties tend to be emphasised. Only in recent years is commitment to the nation-state receiving greater support, especially in the urban areas, with better education, improved connectivity and greater capacity of the central government.

The challenge for each of the ASEAN states is to build a sense of loyalty and commitment to the state. Ethnic, religious and class cleavages test the stability of ASEAN states. ASEAN has helped to ensure a more secure external environment but we need to recognise that the greatest challenges confronting member states at this time are internal.

A commitment to ASEAN only exists among policymakers, academics, journalists and those who participate in ASEAN-centred activities. By contrast, for most of the diverse peoples living in Southeast Asia, the idea of an ASEAN Community with shared values and a common identity looking towards a common destiny is a wish still to be fulfilled.

*Barry Desker is Distinguished Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and its founding dean from 2007 to 2014. This first appeared in the July/August 2017 issue of ASEAN Focus, a publication of the ASEAN Studies Centre at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

Agriculture and food production seem to be under constant threat from climate change, policy failure and new diseases in meeting the demand of an ever-increasing world population. Yet, innovative endeavours and technological advancements have given hope that adaptation, invention and international cooperation can overcome the looming challenges, with positive implications for ASEAN’s approach to food security.

By Ong Keng Yong and Jose Ma. Luis P. Montesclaros*

The World Agricultural Forum (WAF) 2017, held in Singapore in July 2017, provided useful insights on the key issues faced globally in food and agriculture. There has been growing uncertainty on whether global efforts will succeed in slowing climate change.

Agricultural production may aggravate the situation, with deforestation and agricultural emissions from livestock, soil and nutrient management contributing as much as 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, according to the latest comprehensive report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014. With the largest population among world continents, Asia’s farming practices will play a major role in shaping future climate.

Integrated Solutions

There is also a rising tide of protectionist measures, in the form of tariff and non-tariff barriers, as well as the threat of export restrictions on the part of major producers. India banned export of non-Basmati rice in April 2008 triggering the food price crisis of 2007-08. These imperil food importing countries, and may pave the way to another crisis, especially when compounded with natural disasters such as droughts or floods.

In addition, food-borne diseases are fast evolving, and developing resistance to the very treatments intended to address them, a phenomenon known as anti-microbial resistance. ASEAN is all but immune to these developments.

Rather than feeling overwhelmed, WAF 2017 left participants inspired, as it offered a number of interesting integrated solutions that can allow ASEAN to adapt to the increasingly complex and inter-connected challenges.

Innovation and Technology

The first insight is in innovative inventions that can make agriculture more sustainable and climate smart. This is relevant given that the ASEAN Ministers of Agriculture and Forestry (AMAF) Work Plan towards the ASEAN Economic Community 2025 includes objectives like increasing crop, livestock and fishery/aquaculture production (2016-19) and improving productivity, technology and product quality to support small producers (2017-19).

Digital agriculture offers a myriad of opportunities in realising the AMAF Work Plan. These include drones that spray fertilisers and pesticides over large areas of plants, as well as robotics and automation in the supply chain to spare individuals from more “dirty, dangerous and difficult” manual tasks. Further technologies, such as data sensors, can give farmers information on the optimal quantity of production inputs (e.g. seeds, nutrients) and the environment (e.g. temperature, humidity) to boost yields.

The next insight is in investments, which enable key technologies. The understanding is that investment promotion for the food sector can be improved by making it more technology-focused. Global venture capital investments in agricultural technologies (Agtech) grew from just US$ 500 million in 2012 to approximately $3 billion in 2015, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group and AgFunder, an online Agtech investment platform. While many countries in Southeast Asia were already destinations for these investments, there seems to be a divide as Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar have not yet availed themselves of these kinds of opportunity.

Integration As Way Forward

Moreover, WAF 2017 has shown that ASEAN is not immune to food security threats faced globally, but neither is ASEAN alone in addressing them. Moving forward, there is need for better integration so that these developments reach smallholder farmers, to meet growing consumer demand.

Supportive infrastructure will be needed, such as allowing for more mobile telecommunications operators and expanding the wireless technology coverage. Telecommunications services will enable farmers to track yields, and will also allow for the entry of digital technologies.

A further step is for farmers to share data with one another, to spread best practices that optimise the use of inputs. The private sector can also provide farmers with insurance mechanisms to shield them from financial shocks caused by bad harvests. Information dissemination campaigns will be required so that farmers will learn about funding opportunities as well as the benefits of insurance.

As regards anti-microbial resistance, Singapore is currently coordinating ASEAN’s efforts in reducing use of anti-microbials in agricultural production, developing regional laboratory testing capabilities, and promoting exchange of information among member states. Linkages with countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands, through NTU’s Food Science and Technology Programme and Food Technology Centre, allow for more information on better management systems which can supplant over-use of anti-biotics for boosting yields.

Lastly, job creation is a key policy imperative for developing countries, as well as the developed economies. An effective policy in bringing agriculture to the 21st century actually yields more employment, and not just in doing the manual jobs on the farms. There are innovative enterprises and emerging technologies to support food production and to package food exports.

It will be important to engage and encourage the youth to enter into agri-entrepreneurship, and to venture into jobs related to agriculture. Similar initiatives such as the Youth Engagement Event, which took place alongside WAF 2017 and engaged over a hundred Singaporean youth and students in Singapore, will be needed to secure the food production base for generations to come. This initiative is worth emulating in other ASEAN countries as well.

Beyond ASEAN Integrated Food Security (AIFS) Framework

ASEAN created the AIFS framework in 2009, with primary objectives of ensuring long-term food security, and improving the livelihood of farmers, in the region. This is translated into a Strategic Plan of Action on Food Security (SPA-FS) in the ASEAN Region for 2015-2020, which is reviewed periodically to ensure objectives are achieved.

WAF 2017 provided comprehension of global developments in the field of food and agriculture that can aid in SPA-FS reviews, with the next one scheduled for 2018. Beyond this, WAF 2017 also showed that the food and agriculture sector alone is not sufficient to address emerging threats to food security.

In a similar vein, the AIFS alone is not enough. Strategies in other sectors/industries, including information technology, telecommunications, finance, insurance and education, will need to be calibrated accordingly to enable solutions that help secure the region’s future food security and agriculture.

*Ong Keng Yong is Executive Deputy Chairman of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Jose Montesclaros is an Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies, RSIS. This is the final essay in the series on the World Agricultural Forum 2017 held on 6-7 July 2017 in Singapore, co-organised by the WAF and RSIS.

By Doug French*

Sin City’s projected 5,000 new apartment units for this year makes no noise nationally in the latest real estate craze. “In 2017, the ongoing apartment building-boom in the US will set a new record: 346,000 new rental apartments in buildings with 50+ units are expected to hit the market,” writes Wolf Richter on Wolf Street. That is three times the number of units that came on line in 2011.

Richter continues, “Deliveries in 2017 will be 21% above the prior record set in 2016, based on data going back to 1997, by Yardi Matrix, via Rent Café. And even 2015 had set a record. Between 1997 and 2006, so pre-Financial-Crisis, annual completions averaged 212,740 units; 2017 will be 63% higher!”

I’ve written before about the high-rise crane craze in Seattle, but that’s nothing compared to New York and Dallas, that are adding 27,000 and 25,000 units, respectively. Chicago is adding 7,800 units despite a shrinking population and rents decreasing 19 percent.

Not surprisingly, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are financing this rental housing boom. I wrote recently, the GSEs made 53% of all apartment loans in 2016, down from their combined 68% market share in 2012. “So, their conservator, The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), recently eased the GSE’s lending caps so they can crank out even more loans.”

A French investigation into possible corruption in business deals related to Qatar’s winning of World Cup hosting rights moved the 2022 tournament a step closer to becoming enmeshed in the two- month-old Gulf crisis.

Taken together with the almost simultaneous announcement of the milestone transfer to Qatar-owned French club Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) of Brazilian star Neymar, the two events highlight Qatar’s perennial difficulty in capitalizing on its massive investment in sports as part of its public diplomacy and soft power strategy.

The investigation casts a shadow on Mr. Neymar’s transfer from FC Barcelona at a record-breaking cost of $260 million as a demonstration of Qatar’s ability to resist the two-month old UAE-Saudi-led diplomatic and economic boycott of the Gulf state; move ahead with its infrastructure plans, including World Cup-related projects; and continue to heavily invest in a multi-pronged soft power ploy of which sports is a key pillar.

The investigation links former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to millions of euros involved in business deals that were allegedly part of a three-way deal to ensure French support for Qatar’s World Cup bid as well as the vote of one-time French star Michel Platini, who headed European soccer body UEFA and was a member of FIFA’s executive committee before being banned from involvement in soccer on corruption charges.

Qatar’s successful World Cup bid has been mired in controversy from day one. Allegations of wrongdoing in the bid, enhanced by FIFA’s multiple corruption scandals that have rocked the world body for the past seven years, and criticism of the Gulf state’s controversial labour regime that have been revived by the Gulf crisis, meshed with Eurocentric assertions. Eurocentric critics charged that Qatar did not deserve to host the World Cup because it was too small, boasted temperatures not conducive to performance, and had no soccer legacy.

The criticism of Qatar, although never convincingly countered by the Gulf state, had largely faded into the background until June when a UAE-Saudi-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar raised questions of Qatar’s ability to move ahead with preparations for the tournament. The questions were fuelled by feeble attempts by Qatar’s detractors to revive the criticism and suggest that it should be deprived of its hosting rights.

Qatar, while denying any wrongdoing in its bid, has taken several steps to counter criticism of its controversial kafala or labour sponsorship regime, including becoming the only Gulf state to engage with its critics, and legal reforms that were welcomed by human rights groups and trade unions, but deemed not far-reaching enough.

Qatar faces a crucial hearing in November by the International Labour Organization (ILO) that will serve as barometer of the Gulf state’s response to the criticism of the living and working conditions of migrant workers, who constitute the majority of its population. The ILO’s conclusion is likely to take on added significance against the backdrop of the Gulf crisis. Human rights groups have argued that the crisis offers Qatar an opportunity to secure a moral high ground by abolishing rather than reforming the kafala system.

Qatar, in a move designed to reassure expatriates and project itself as being in the forefront of labour reform, said earlier this month that it would offer permanent residence to a select group of expatriates. The offer that does not apply to the vast majority of migrant workers is unlikely to deflect the criticism.

Alongside the looming revival of attention on labour, the French investigation revives the focus on the integrity of the Qatari World Cup bid that already is the subject of a Swiss enquiry and looms large on the background of the indictment on corruption charges in the United States of numerous FIFA officials.

France’s interference in the FIFA vote on the Qatari World Cup bid was documented in a lengthy expose in French soccer magazine France Football. The magazine detailed a meeting engineered by then president Sarkozy in 2010 between Mr. Platini, then Qatari crown prince and current emir Sheikh Tamim bin Haman Al-Thani, and a representative of PSG. The three-way deal cut at that meeting allegedly involved Mr. Platini agreeing to vote for the Qatari bid in exchange for Qatar acquiring the French club, creating a French sports television channel, and investing in France.

Britain’s The Daily Telegraph reported that French investigators were examining whether Mr. Sarkozy may have received funds from deals linked to the 2010 meeting, including the sale to Qatar of a five percent stake in French water management company Veolia as well as the purchase in 2010 of PSG by Oryx Qatar Sports Investments, believed to be a Qatari government investment vehicle.

The British paper, quoting French sources, reported that €182 million “may have been siphoned off the side lines” of the deals and also used for payments to World Cup officials. A spokeswoman for the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office in Paris said they were “carrying out two separate preliminary inquiries” into Veolia and the World Cup bid. She said there was no established link between the two inquiries and Mr. Sarkozy was not “formally and personally targeted at this stage.”

The investigation coupled with the revival of the labour issue and the looming ILO hearing moves Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup into the firing line in the Gulf crisis. Qatar was so far able to deflect concern that the crisis would affect its ability to host the tournament because it would take place 5.5 years from now by which time the crisis would have long been resolved, and that it was able to move ahead with preparations despite a rise in the cost of construction materials because of the UAE-Saudi-led boycott.

The French investigation and the labour issue, however, opens opportunity for a new line of attack. Perhaps, a silver lining for Qatar in the looming battle over its World Cup hosting rights is the fact that this line of attack, like much else in the Gulf crisis, would have a pot-blames-the-kettle character. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Gulf states have labour regimes like that of Qatar.

US intelligence officials have asserted that the UAE engineered the Gulf crisis by orchestrating the hacking of a Qatari government website that created the excuse of the boycott of the Gulf state.

Much of the sabre-rattling in the Gulf crisis focuses on influencing policymakers and international public opinion with efforts to resolve the crisis stalemated and the international community unwilling to support the anti-Qatar alliance’s demands that target the Gulf state’s sovereignty and ability to chart its own independent course. The emergence of the World Cup as a new battleground offers Qatar an opportunity to grab the bull by the horns. It’s an opportunity Qatar has so far availed itself only half-heartedly.

By Cheryl Pellerin

Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis updated the press Friday on U.S. operations with local partners in Yemen against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and in Somalia against al-Shabab.

In Yemen’s Shabwah Governorate yesterday, according to the United Arab Emirates’ Ambassador to the United States, Yemeni government armed forces launched a major operation against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula with support from UAE and U.S. forces.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula

Today, Davis said, a small number of U.S. forces “are supporting our regional counterterrorism partners in ongoing operations in Yemen against [al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula] to degrade the group’s ability to coordinate external terrorist operations and to use Yemen territory as a safe place for terror plotting.”

Shabwah Governorate has a heavy al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula presence, he added.

U.S. support in this part of Yemen is a continuation of what U.S. forces have been doing there since Jan. 29, when a raid by U.S. forces killed an estimated 14 al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula terrorists.

According to a U.S. Central Command news release at the time, “the raid is one in a series of aggressive moves against terrorist planners in Yemen and worldwide,” and that similar operations have produced intelligence on al-Qaida logistics, recruiting and financing efforts.

U.S. support to the Yemeni people enhances stabilization efforts in the region, he added, noting that eliminating the influence of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in the region “will significantly degrade extremist activity in the area and set conditions for stabilization efforts in Yemen.”

Davis said U.S. forces continue to conduct air strikes in Yemen against terrorist targets.

“Since Feb. 28 we’ve conducted more than 80 strikes against [al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula] militants, infrastructure, fighting positions and equipment, and this is based upon the authorities granted in the operation that began” with the January raid, he said.

Al-Shabab in Somalia

On July 30, U.S. forces took part in a raid near Tortoroow in southern Somalia that targeted a senior member of al-Shabab.

“We can now confirm,” Davis said, “that the strike killed one of al-Shabab’s senior leaders, Ali Mohammed Hussein, also known as Ali Jabal.”

The senior al-Shabab terrorist was one of the organization’s leaders, he added, responsible for leading al-Shabab forces operating in the Mogadishu and Banadir regions, and planning and executing attacks against the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

Hussein used the Lower Shabelle region, a known al-Shabab safe haven, as a hub for these activities, Davis said, adding that his removal disrupts al-Shabab’s ability to plan and conduct attacks in Mogadishu and to coordinate efforts among al-Shabab regional commanders.

“We continue to work there in Somalia in coordination with our partners with the Somali Defense Forces and other allies,” he said, “to systematically dismantle al-Shabab and to help achieve and bring stability and security throughout the region.”

A cyber security researcher widely credited with helping to neutralize the global “WannaCry” ransomware attack earlier this year has been arrested on unrelated hacking charges, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday, August 3, Reuters reveals.

Marcus Hutchins, a 23-year-old British-based malware researcher who gained attention in May for detecting a “kill switch” that effectively disabled the WannaCry worm, was detained by the FBI in Las Vegas on Wednesday, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said. He was among tens of thousands of hackers who had descended on the city during the annual Black Hat and Def Con conventions.

An indictment filed in a U.S. District Court in Wisconsin accused Hutchins, also known online as “MalwareTech,” of advertising, distributing and profiting from malware code known as “Kronos” that stole online banking credentials and credit card data. Hutchins’ alleged activity took place between July 2014 and July 2015, according to the indictment.

Hutchins, who faces six counts related to Kronos, was indicted along with an unnamed co-defendant on July 12, but the case remained under seal until Thursday, a day after his arrest.

Hutchins appeared before U.S. Judge Nancy Koppe in Las Vegas on Thursday. Dan Coe, a federal public defender, told the court Hutchins “had cooperated with the government prior to being charged.”

The hearing was scheduled to continue Friday afternoon to determine whether he will be represented by private legal counsel or a public defender.

Hutchins showed no emotion as Koppe read the charges against him.

Last week I wrote an article and did an interview explaining that in my reading of the new Russia sanctions bill just signed by President Trump, there is a measure opening the door to a US government crackdown on some of the non-mainstream media. In particular, Section 221 of the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act” would punish “persons” who are “engaging in transactions with the intelligence or defense sectors of the Government of the Russian Federation.”

At first one might think this is reading too much into the text, however as a twelve year Capitol Hill veteran bill-reader I can assure you that these bills are never written in a simple, expository manner. There is always a subtext, and in this case we must consider the numerous instances where the Director of Central Intelligence and other senior leadership in the US intelligence community have attempted to establish the idea that foreign news channels such as RT or Sputnik News are not First Amendment protected press, but rather tools of a foreign intelligence organization.

You can see in the current atmosphere, where anti-Russia hysteria has spread like typhoid, how readily-accepted such a notion would be by many. The reds are under our beds and the Russkies have taken over our airwaves.

I don’t think the crackdown will stop at Russian government funded news organizations like RT and Sputnik, however. Once the initial strike is made at the lowest hanging fruit, the second wave will target Russia-focused organizations not funded by governments but that challenge the official US government line that Russia is our number one enemy and its government must be overthrown. Popular private alternative websites like The Duran and Russia Insider will likely be next on the list for prosecution.

Sound farfetched? Think of it this way (I can assure you the neocons do): if the Russian government and RT are opposed to sanctions and you operate a website that also takes a line in opposition to Russia sanctions are you not doing the work of Russian intelligence? Are you not seeking to influence your readers in a manner that Russian intelligence would want? Are you not “engaging in transactions” even over the airwaves?

And after this second wave you can be sure there will be a push to move on other alternative media that has nothing to do with Russia but that opposes US interventionist foreign policy: ZeroHedge, Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul Institute, ConsortiumNews, etc.

Crazy, you say? Don’t forget: this war against us already started last year when the Washington Post ran a front page article accusing all of the above of being Russian agents!

What would be next? Do you read any of these alternative news sites? Do you pass along articles that oppose US sanctions policy toward Russia? You are engaging in transactions. You will be subject to “sanctions” as described in the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,” which is now the law of the land.

This would never happen, you might say. The government would never compile, analyze, and target private news outlets just because they deviate from the official neocon Washington line.

Perhaps not yet. But some US government funded “non-governmental” organizations are already doing just that.

The German Marshall Fund has less to do with Germany these days than it did when founded after WWII as a show of appreciation for the US Marshall Fund. These days it’s mostly funded by the US government, allied governments (especially in the Russia-hating Baltics), neocon grant-making foundations, and the military-industrial complex. Through its strangely Soviet-sounding “Alliance for Securing Democracy” project it has launched something called “Hamilton 68: A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation on Twitter.”

This project monitors 600 Twitter accounts that the German Marshall Fund claims are “accounts that are involved in promoting Russian influence and disinformation goals.” Which accounts does this monitor? It won’t tell us. How does it choose which ones to monitor? It won’t tell us. To what end? Frighteningly, it won’t tell us.

How ironic that something called the German Marshall Fund is bringing Stasi-like tactics to silence alternative media and opinions in the United States!

So what does the “Hamilton 68” project do? In its own words it firstly “shows tweets from official Russian propaganda outlets in English, and a short post discussing the themes of the day. This is Russia’s overt messaging.”

But it goes further than that. It tracks and stores information about others who have no connection to Russia but who “on their own initiative reliably repeat and amplify Russian themes.” This is what the German Marshall Fund calls a “network” of second tier disinformation distributors.

What does this “network” of people with no connection to Russia but who amplify Russian “themes” do?

It “reflects Russian messaging priorities, but that does not mean every name or link you see on the dashboard is pro-Russian. The network sometimes amplifies stories that Russia likes, or people with like-minded views but no formal connection to Russia.”

So, according to the self-proclaimed alliance for securing democracy you might not even know it when you are pushing Russian state propaganda!

Do you see what they are doing here? They are using US and other government money in an effort to eliminate any news organization or individual who deviates from the official neocon foreign policy line on Russia, Syria, Ukraine, etc. They are trying to eliminate any information that challenges the neocon line. To criminalize it.

In fact they admit that they are seeking to silence alternative viewpoints:

Our objective in providing this dashboard is to help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin. Exposing these messages will make information consumers more resilient and reduce the effectiveness of Russia’s attempts to influence Americans’ thinking, and deter this activity in the future by making it less effective.

The very Soviet-sounding “Alliance for Securing Democracy” project description ends with a suitably authoritarian warning, ripped from the pages of 1984, Darkness at Noon, or Erich Honecker‘s “how-to” guide:

We are not telling you what to think, but we believe you should know when someone is trying to manipulate you. What you do with that information is up to you.

Chilling, no? And much of it is being done with your money by your government and in your name.

That is why the neocons and their myriad think tanks (government-funded in many cases) would like nothing more than to shut down our upcoming Peace and Prosperity 2017 Conference, to be held right at their front door! They cannot stand an open debate about Washington’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy. They don’t want to talk about all their failed wars — and they really don’t want to talk about the wars they have planned and are pushing.

We are not the anti-Americans. They are. They hate the First Amendment. They hate debate. They hate us.

How can we fight back? One very easy way is to show them a full house at our conference! Just by showing up you are poking a neocon in the eye.

Can you imagine how furious they were when last year’s Peace and Prosperity Conference was broadcast on CSPAN?

Thanks to the support of our very generous Host Committee we can keep the ticket price as low as possible. We want to see all of you there! You will get a full day of fantastic and insightful speakers, the opportunity to network and plot with like-minded individuals, and a very nice luncheon with plenty of coffee and tea to boot! We also managed to get a great rate at the hotel to save you some money!

And you’ll drive the neocons nuts! What are you waiting for! Book your ticket today!

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres Friday received a notification from the delegation of the United States expressing the country’s intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change as soon as it is eligible to do so, his spokesman has confirmed.

The notification came two months after President Donald Trump announced his intention to leave the accord.

“As the Secretary-General said in a statement on 1 June 2017, the decision by the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement is a major disappointment for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote global security,” said UN Spokesman Stéphane Dujarric in a note sent tonight to correspondents.

Under article 28 of the Paris Agreement, a Party may withdraw at any time after three years from the date on which the Agreement has entered into force for that Party, and such withdrawal takes effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal. The United States accepted the Paris Agreement on 3 September 2016 and the Agreement entered into force for the United States on 4 November 2016.This means that the US must stay in the pact until at least 2019.

The communication says the US intends to exercise its right to withdraw, unless it identifies suitable terms for reengagement.

The Secretary General welcomes any effort to reengage in the Paris Agreement by the United States, Mr. Dujarric said.

“It is crucial that the United States remains a leader on climate and sustainable development. Climate change is impacting now. He looks forward to engaging with the American government and all other actors in the United States and around the world to build the sustainable future for our children and future generations,” he added.

The Spokesman said that the Secretary-General is the depositary of the Agreement, and will circulate the text of this communication as a notification, in English and French, early next week.

On July 4, leaders of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) were received by President Lenín Moreno, in this way breaking the seven-year distancing imposed by the previous government led by former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017). However, the position of the current government is not clear in relation to the indigenous proposals, but at the same time, the indigenous contributions towards the creation of the Plurinational State, presented in this gathering, are not clear either.

In the days prior to taking office, on May 24, Moreno announced his desire to come to a closer understanding with one of the most representative social groups in the country, and the one that had been hardest hit by the Correa government: the indigenous movement. “With CONAIE we are the same and we must be together,” said Moreno.

Indigenous leaders seemed apprehensive in accepting the presidential invitation. “We cannot attend a dialog while our brothers are imprisoned or are being prosecuted,” told Latinamerica Press Katy Betancourt, Women’s representative and member of the Government Council of CONAIE.

Jorge Herrera, president of CONAIE, established as a condition to start any dialogue with the Moreno government, the pardon of the indigenous persons sentenced during the Correa government and the amnesty for all those who were prosecuted and criminalized for protesting and demanding their rights during that same period. To formalize their position, CONAIE organized a commission made up of some 300 members who arrived at the National Assembly to present a list of 177 names of people looking for amnesty; they then marched to the Government Palace and presented the names of 20 people subject to pardons. To the lists were attached more than 8,000 signatures of support from citizens from throughout the country.

In the National Assembly, the list was received by its new President José Serrano from the government party, who showed his displeasure and, in a comment of 38 seconds, only said that a commission would be established to analyze case by case. The National Assembly has the faculty to grant amnesty in case where there are persons prosecuted or sentenced for any crime, although only related to political activity, such as the taking of hostages or a death occurring in the framework of a social protest, just to mention the most serious.

Meanwhile, a commission of the national government has started the analysis of the request for pardons, something granted on June to five social leaders who had recently been sentenced to six months prison terms for the crimes of attack and resistance during the indigenous strike against the Correa government in August of 2015.

So the CONAIE then decided to attend, on July 4, to a first meeting with Moreno, and it was with a march of over 2,000 people that they arrived to the Plaza Grande, which had been out of limits for them for the previous seven years. A delegation of 60 leaders entered the palace to hold a dialogue with the president.

At the beginning of the meeting, Moreno announced a new pardon; this time of Shuar leader Tomás Jimpikit, who in last September had been sentenced to a year in prison, also for having participated in the national strike in August 2015. He also announced his decision to reinstate the comodato of the house of the CONAIE — given during the government of former President Rodrigo Borja (1988-92) as an act of recognition of their political existence and as restitution for the neglect in which the Ecuadorian state had kept the indigenous populations — that had been terminated in December 2014 by the Correa government. The house of the CONAIE was defended by the indigenous people until the Correa decided to suspend his decision to evict them.

Moreno also made known his decision to return to the CONAIE the administration of bilingual education and the creation of an indigenous university, although he did not precise the budget that would have been created in order to comply with this offer.

The indigenous proposals

The indigenous leadership, somewhat surprised at the presidential announcements, handed in their proposal titled “Urgent plan for the implementation and construction of the Plurinational and Intercultural State,” which describes five points that must be considered by the national government:

1. Construction of the Plurinational State: stresses the freedom of association, recognition of the community governments, territorial authority, community water management, and the respect to indigenous justice. It also demands to comply with prior consultation and the prohibition of mining in water sources, protected areas and high biodiversity areas.

2. Change in the economic model: in general the request is for the reformulation of the laws of Land, of Water, of Popular and Solidarity Economy, of Mining, and of Seeds; a real change in the productive matrix that allows the abandoning of extractivism.

3. Democracy and Human Rights: demands the reform of the Integral Organic Penal Code (COIP) to dismantle the judicial structure that criminalizes social protest, and the respect of the right to communication, taking to practice the constitutional alignment that establishes that 33.33 percent of the radio and television frequencies must be under the control of the indigenous populations.

4. Planning and decentralization: planning according to the regional diversity of the country and where the community systems of organization are respected and also that they include a plurinational and intercultural perspective.

5. Combat corruption and impunity: prevent that impunity prevails and to sanction those who have committed acts of corruption.

The indigenous proposal is too general and it was also addressed by Moreno in a generic manner, without reaching any agreements with important changes. All the proposals will be dealt by roundtables with different sectors of Ecuadorian society.

Carlos Pérez, president of the Kichwa Confederation of Ecuador (ECUARUNARI), the largest indigenous organization in Ecuador inside CONAIE, showed to be skeptical about the results from the meeting held with Moreno.

“We are giving the government an opportunity to analyze. We want the territories, not spoliation; we want a moratorium to extractivism and this point is not negotiable. I see the dialogue very complex, very difficult, because we will not be satisfied with a little candy,” said Pérez after the dialogue held with Moreno that lasted over three hours.

Alianza PAIS in crisis

Although no significant concessions were made to the indigenous movement, the meeting provoked the rejection of Correa, who wrote on his Twitter account: “Gives premises for 100 years to CONAIE, one more unnecessary slight to my government. Strategy to ‘differentiate’ himself is not only disloyal, it is mediocre.”

The way of expression of Correa shows what is taking place inside the government party, where three groups battling to lead the new government have been detected. On one side, the followers of Correa want to maintain his hyper-presidential model and prevent any criticism to him or his officials, especially those who have been touched by the corruption scandals. They are willing to stop any outreach initiative of Moreno with other political sectors, especially with the indigenous movement.

In an opposite position are those denominated “Leninists,” who support the initiatives of Moreno and announce changes of style, favoring dialogue and bringing back peace in the country. Included in this group are former militants of the Alianza PAIS party who were thrown out by Correa and who now have returned to the government with important positions, as is the case of Gustavo Larrea, founder of the government party and who was ousted by the former President and who has returned as presidential adviser.

Also active is a large group led by Serrano who, from the presidency of the National Assembly, has consolidated himself as a third option and observes from afar the development of the Correa-Moreno confrontation. Serrano has proposed a law of dialogue, but directed from the National Assembly and under its control, a law that could prevail over the dialogue proposal decreed by Moreno.

In conclusion, the first 50 days of the Moreno government have been marked by the calls to dialogue, the corruption claims and the confrontations with Correa, who on July 10 abandoned the country to live in Belgium, the birthplace of his wife. There has not been time to outline the economic guidelines, or has not wanted to outline them due to the complexity of this scenario. Moreno has only said that “they could have been a little more restrained at the moment of leaving the accounts in better shape,” during the presentation of the “National Strategy for the Transparency and Fight against Corruption” on July 11. This is the first reference of what the country is in for in economic matters.