By Perparim Isufi

Bajram Rexhepi, the first elected Prime Minister of Kosovo, has died in a hospital in Turkey after suffering a stroke earlier this year.

Bajram Rexhepi, the first elected Prime Minister of Kosovo following the 1999 war of independence, died on Monday at the age of 63 in a hospital in Turkey, where he had been receiving treatment for months following a stroke in April this year.

News of the death of Rexhepi was confirmed by his Kosovo Democratic Party, PDK.

A surgeon by vocation, he was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, the armed force that took on the Serbian police and military, in 1998-1999.

Immediately after the war he became mayor of the northern town of Mitrovica at a time when the town was splitting along ethnic lines into a Serb-controlled north and a Kosovo Albanian-controlled south – a division that remains to this day.

In 2002, he was elected Prime Minister of Kosovo based on a broad coalition agreement between three largest parties. He served as head of Kosovo government until 2004.

In the 2007 mayoral elections he was again elected mayor of Mitrovica. In 2010 he was appointed Interior Minister, a position he held until 2014.

He then returned to his professional duties as a doctor in Mitrovica, away from politics.

Kadri Veseli, the head of the PDK, on Facebook expressed sorrow concerning the death of his former colleague.

“I am saddened by the news of the death of Bajram Rexhepi, former Kosovo Prime Minister and former PDK Vice-President. It is a great loss for the country. His contribution to Kosovo was huge and people of Kosovo will remember him as a great and very responsible worker,” Veseli said.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi also voiced his sadness on the death of his long-time collaborator.

“Devastated by news of the untimely demise of former PM, minister, dear friend and colleague Dr Bajram Rexhepi. Condolences to family, friends,” Thaçi wrote on Twitter.

Rexhepi was born in Mitrovica in 1954, gradùated from the university of Pristina and completed his studies in Zagreb.

By Tushar Ranjan Mohanty*

On August 17, 2017, one Police Qaumi Razakar (PQR), Jamshed Ahmed (42), was killed and another PQR, Gulzar (30), was injured in a firing incident at the Northern Bypass within the jurisdiction of the SITE Superhighway Industrial Police Station in Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh. Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Malir Town, Rao Anwar disclosed that the two Razakars were standing at a Police chowki (Post) near the bypass, when motorcycle borne terrorists opened fire on them. This was the third attack on the Police in Karachi by the newly-emerging terrorist formation, Ansar-al-Shariah Pakistan (ASP). The group claimed responsibility for the attack in pamphlets thrown at the crime scene immediately after the attack.

ASP had claimed the August 11 killing of Traffic Police Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Muhammad Hanif and his driver, Fida Alam, in the Hussainabad area of Azizabad Town in Karachi. DSP Hanif was on his way home from office when motorcycle borne terrorists opened fire on his vehicle according to Senior Superintendent of Police, Central, Muqadas Haider.

On July 24, Traffic Police Head Constable (HC) Mohammad Khan, was killed and HC Mohammad Kamran injured when four unidentified assailants riding pillion on two motorcycles opened indiscriminate fire near Paradise Bakery on the Abul Hasan Ispahani Road in the Gulzar-e-Hijri locality of Sohrab Goth in Karachi. Counter Terrorism Department SSP Omar Shahid Hamid stated, “Apparently, today’s incident appeared to be part of a recent wave of attacks on law enforcers in the city.” Contrary to the security agencies’ assumption that ASP had committed this crime, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack. Ahmed Mansoor, a TTP spokesperson, sent out an email to the media declaring that no ‘new outfit’ was involved in the attack.

On June 23, unidentified terrorists shot dead four Policemen, who were sitting at a roadside eatery for Iftar in the SITE Town area of Karachi. SITE town SP Asif Ahmed Bughio stated that the four Policemen were about to break their fast at a restaurant located between the Siemens and Habib Bank traffic intersections, when motorcycle-borne terrorists opened indiscriminate fire, killing ASI Mohammed Yusuf and constables Shabbir, Khalid and Israr. ASP claimed responsibility for the attack. Counter Terrorism Department SSP Raja Umar Khattab disclosed that the Police found a pamphlet from the scene of the crime which the assailants threw there before fleeing. The pamphlet warned of the launch of Operation Rad-ul-Artedad (End of Apostasy) against Security Forces (SFs). According to the message, the attack was carried out in agony over the release of bloggers accused of blasphemy, Government ‘indifference’ towards Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, ‘fake’ arrests and encounters involving terrorists, and continued diplomatic and military ties with Iran and Russia. According to varying media reports, five bloggers – Professor Salman Haider, Waqas Goraya, Aasim Saeed, Ahmad Raza Naseer, and Samar Abbas – were ‘picked up’ from capital Islamabad and parts of Punjab Province between January 5 and 7, 2017. Though reports claimed that all five of them were released by their ‘abductors’ and they returned home on January 28, 2017, recent reports indicate that one of them, Samar Abbas, is still missing. While the three others did not disclose about their ‘abductors’ out of fear, one of them, Waqass Goraya, told the BBC that a “government institution” with links to the military held him and tortured him “beyond limits”. All five men were vocal critics of militant Islamist groups and Pakistan’s military establishment, and expressed their views on the internet. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui , is a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted by the United States on February, 3, 2010, for attacking American soldiers in Afghanistan on July 17, 2008. She is serving her 86-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center of Carswell in Fort Worth of Texas.

On July 21 an incident claimed the lives of three Policemen and a 12-year-old boy, when six unidentified assailants opened fire on a Police van parked near Darul Uloom in the Korangi Town area of Karachi. Arif Aslam, Superintendent of Police (SP), Landhi Town, confirmed that an Awami Colony Police mobile unit was the target of the attack. The dead were identified as Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Qamar Din, Constable Babar Ali and Constable Amjad.

Four attacks on the Police personnel within a span of one month and ten such incidents in the current year bring the total number of law enforcers killed to 17. Among all the cities of Pakistan, Karachi remained the most troubled. According to official statistics published on February 9, 2017, almost 1,538 Policemen had been killed in the Karachi Range between 1995 and 2016. The maximum number of killings (261) were registered in 1995. Thereafter, the killings crossed three digit only in 2012, 2013 and 2014, across a span of 22 years, making these the three worst years for the Karachi Police in recent times, with 123 dead in 2012; 165 in 2013 and 136 in 2014.

The Pakistan Rangers’ (Sindh) Operation has been a blessing for the Karachi Police, as the killing of Policemen in the city has dramatically declined. The Rangers were called in on September 4, 2013, when violence in the city was at a peak, with 1,668 fatalities, including 165 Policemen. By 2016, only 29 Policemen were killed, as against 136 in 2014 and 67 in 2015. However, 2017 appears to be seeing a reversal of this trend, with 17 Policemen already killed, as against 13 in the corresponding period of 2016.

Although terrorist groups such as TTP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) have long targeted SF personnel all over Pakistan, the emergence of ASP in Karachi, specifically targeting security personnel, has created a new headache for the enforcement agencies. Since the name of this outfit first emerged in April 5, 2017, when it claimed responsibility for the targeted killing of Army Colonel (Retd.) Tahir Zia Nagi at the Baloch Colony, Karachi, ASP has claimed involvement in four attacks on SFs. According to Counter Terrorism Department SSP Raja Umar Khattab, the newly-formed group has its roots in Libya, and was also operating in other countries of the Middle East. The US and UK have already banned ASP, which Khattab added, “has been formed the way the al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) was formed, by merging different splinter terrorists groups.”

The chief of the Sindh Counter Terrorism Department, Additional Inspector General of Police (AIGP) Sanaullah Abbasi, stated on July 27 that ASP was behind all recent killings of Police personnel: “Ansarul Shariah Pakistan is a reality and we believe that it is involved in the recent wave of terror in the metropolis.” This assessment suggests that ASP is a professional, combat-trained and media savvy, formation, suggesting a higher level of education in its leadership. The group is likely to target only officials and state institutions, and has regretted the deaths of “civilians” in collateral damage, vowing to “pay compensation to the families of such victims”. ADGP Sanaullah Abbasi observed, “This is a different and dangerous narrative of the new terrorist [groups] and needs to be countered aggressively.” The increase in frequency of attacks in the past month indicated that this group might have ‘additional resources’, allowing it to step up attacks, he added.

However, the Red Book of the Sindh Counter Terrorism Department, released on August 3, 2017, did not mention ASP. The Red Book was issued with profiles of suspects wanted by the Government in connection with terrorist activities, suicide attacks and sectarian violence, and included profiles, with photographs, criminal records and rewards offered for both Sunni and Shia terrorists, and lists their association with various terrorist organisations.

Contrary to their previous assumption that a single outfit, ASP, had been targeting Policemen and retired law enforcement personnel, Counter Terrorism Department chief Sanaullah Abbasi stated, on August 6, that his organization had concluded that there were numerous splinter groups — of either TTP or LeJ – responsible for the spate of attacks in recent months: “There are multiple groups involved in targeted killings of policemen in the city”, he claimed, and their modus operandi were different in each case. TTP has formed a special cell to target law enforcement personnel, particularly those operating in the East and West zones of the Police’s organisational structure.

While the state and security apparatus claimed that it had eliminated the strongholds and infrastructure of the TTP in Karachi, there are apprehensions that the banned outfit was attempting to re-establish its financial network in the city in a bid to increase its capability to launch terrorist attacks. Officials claim that, although LeJ’s capacities had ‘almost’ been wiped out in Karachi, its activities were increasing, particularly in upper Sindh, with the help of ‘Afghans’ and financial support from the Islamic State.

The recent wave of terrorist attacks against enforcement personnel in Karachi puts a question mark against the claims of the state’s enforcement agencies regarding their counter-terrorism operations in this national commercial and financial hub, and their assertions that the ‘lifeline’ of the terrorist groups had been cut off.

* Tushar Ranjan Mohanty
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

By Deepak Kumar Nayak*

On August 16, 2017, orchestrating the first violent incident of the current year (2017) in the State, suspected Naxalites [Left Wing Extremists (LWEs)] of the Red Flag faction of the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist-New Democracy (CPI-ML-New Democracy-Red Flag), killed a farmer, identified as Rayala Bhaskar (55), of Narsampet, a hamlet under Pandurangapuram Gram Panchayat (village level local-self government institution) and a supporter of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), at Narsampet village in Palwancha mandal (administrative sub-division) in Khammam District. According to reports, around 15 Naxalites owing allegiance to CPI-ML (New Democracy) Ravi Dalam (armed squad) allegedly barged into Bhaskar’s house of and dragged him out before battering him to death in full public view. The Naxalites were said to have nursed a grudge against the deceased for reportedly seeking the help of the members of Chandranna faction of the CPI-ML (New Democracy), to resolve an internal issue in the village. CPI-ML (New Democracy) had split into two in 2013 – CPI-ML (New Democracy) led by Chandranna and (CPI-ML-New Democracy-Red Flag) led by Rayala Subhash Chandra Bose aka Ravi.

According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), this is the only incident of LWE-linked violence in the State in 2017, thus far (data till August 20). During the corresponding period of 2016 as well, one fatality (a Maoist) was reported, and that was the only LWE-linked fatality in the State through 2016. On August 8, 2016, Naxal renegade Mohammed Nayeemuddin aka Nayeem aka Balanna, was killed in an exchange of fire with the Police in Shadnagar Town of Mahbubnagar District. Nayeemuddin was wanted in over 100 criminal cases including the killing of Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, Kota Srinivas Vyas and his associate at Lal Bahadur Stadium in Hyderabad, then in Andhra Pradesh (now in Telangana) on January 27, 1993.

An overview of the fatalities, suggests that LWE-related violence in Telangana has been declining since the State came into being on June 2, 2014. According to the SATP database, Telangana recorded six Maoist-linked fatalities, including four civilians, one SF trooper and one Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadre in 2014; four, including two civilians and two Maoists in 2015; and one fatality each in 2016 (Maoist) and 2017 (civilian, all data till August 20). Since its creation, the State has recorded 12 fatalities, including seven civilians, one SF trooper and four Maoists.

The Sakler incident, in which at least eight members of the CPI-Maoist Venkatapuram ‘area committee’, which operates in the Bhadrachalam area of Khammam District in Telangana, were killed in an encounter with Security Forces (SFs), along the Telangana-Chhattisgarh border in the Sakler area of Sukma District in Chhattisgarh State on March 1, 2016, had weakened the Maoists’ revival plan in Telangana. Meanwhile, media reports on March 22, 2017, revealed that, while taking stock of losses suffered in recent encounters in Chhattisgarh due to lack of a strong courier system, CPI-Maoist was seeking to extend its activities and to establish a faithful courier system in Telangana. Accordingly, the CPI-Maoist leadership planned to recruit new cadres and couriers, offering huge amounts, and started recruitment near the Telangana-Chhattisgarh border. The Maoists were focusing particularly on Guttikoyas (a scheduled tribal community hailing from Chhattisgarh, who had escaped from the conflict zone of Chhattisgarh and settled in the border villages of the Khammam and Warangal Districts in Telangana), as well as unemployed tribals, by luring them with their propaganda.

Meanwhile, a July 31, 2017, report revealed that the CPI-Maoist Telangana State Committee (TSC), with the Adilabad District Committee, Khammam District Committee and Khammam-Karimnagar-Warangal Divisional Committee, the Special Guerrilla Squad and 92 cadres, had been tasked to intensify activities in the Andhra-Odisha Border (AOB) region. The Maoists are also in the process of forming village level teams to strengthen their strongholds in the AOB region, where the CPI-Maoist suffered a major setback in two successive encounters, with around 30 Maoists killed on October 24 and 27, 2016.

Further, an August 16, 2017, media report cited intelligence agencies to claim a revival of the CPI-Maoist project to build rocket launchers, a potential game changer in their pattern of warfare. Agencies believe that the Maoists were working on improving rocket launchers, since earlier attempts to put them to full use against SFs had failed. A top Telangana State intelligence official reportedly disclosed, “They have a central technical committee that is focusing on improvising rocket launchers. Their factory is now located in Dandakaranya.”

Meanwhile, citing intelligence inputs on possible Maoist attacks on three irrigation projects in Telangana, the Union Home Ministry (UHM) deployed three companies of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) for their protection; one at the Kaleswaram Lift Irrigation Project at Medigadda in Karimnagar District; a second at the Tupakulagudem Barrage; and the third either in the Adilabad or Khammam District, depending on emerging requirements. A senior official of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) disclosed, on May 18, 2017, “The Home Ministry is sending three companies of CRPF, each comprising 135 personnel, to these sites in a week. The Force’s Central Region Director General Sudeep Lakhtakia has already issued an order. In all, 405 CRPF personnel will be deployed at the three project sites.”

Further, the Centre has allocated CRPF’s 39th Battalion to take up anti-Naxal operations along the Telangana-Chhattisgarh borders and the AOB region. CRPF Commandant V.V.N. Prasanna Kumar on August 10, 2017, stated, “We launched operations from Chinavutapalli village recently, and our priority is to provide security to Velagapudi. The forces will also take up anti-Maoist activities on AOB and in Kothagudem-Bhadradri District in Telangana”. The battalion was also meant to provide security for the Andhra Pradesh (AP) Secretariat, as well as the Chief Minister’s residence and Camp Office located in the Capital Region.

Meanwhile, at least 109 Maoists have been arrested since the formation of the Telangana State on June 2, 2014, of whom at least 45 Maoists were arrested in the current year (data till August 20, 2017). Some of the prominent cadres arrested in 2017 included, ‘area committee member’, Madivi Chukka aka Diwakar (28), from Unjupalli forest area under Charla Police Station in Khammam District on August 7, 2017; Madhu, a ‘regional Committee Secretary’ of the CPI-ML (New Democracy), in Mahabubabad District on July 25, 2017; Revolutionary People’s Committee (RPC) ‘militia commander’ Kalma Lakma aka Mahesh (22) and Chetna Natya Manch (CNM – a Maoist cultural outfit) ‘militia commander’ Podium Idamaiah (25), near Taliperu dam in Charla mandal of Bhadrachalam Division in Bhadradri Kothagudem District on June 23, 2017; and ‘militia commander’ Madivi Idama, from Jayashankar Bhupalapally District on April 19, 2017.

Similarly, at least 48 others have surrendered before SFs, including at least 13 in the current year (data till August 20, 2017). Some of the notable surrenders include Manuguru Local Operating Squad (LOS) ‘commander’ Sodi Devaiah aka Mallesh (22), who surrendered at Bhadrachalam in the Bhadradri-Kothagudem District on August 12, 2017; and Mallam Jogaiah, a militia ‘commander’, who was wanted in 16 cases of Maoist violence including two murders, and who also surrendered at Bhadrachalam on July 5, 2017.

Meanwhile, in the run up to the 50th anniversary of the ‘Naxalbari armed uprising’, the CPI-Maoist Sabari-Charla Area Committee (SCAC), urged people to fight against “sand and mining mafia” to protect the interests of Adivasis in the Agency areas, in Bhadradri Kothagudem District, through posters that appeared on May 19, 2017. Further, on May 23, 2017, suspected Maoists erected a banner and put up handwritten posters near the Taliperu Medium Irrigation project site in the Charla mandal in Khammam District, calling upon people to spearhead the “new democratic revolution”.

On July 20, 2017, CPI-Maoist distributed pamphlets commemorating their ‘martyrs’ memorial week’, celebrated annually between July 28 and August 3. The pamphlets were distributed on NH 153 at the Tadwai mandal headquarters in the name of the CPI-Maoist TSC. Hundreds of pamphlets were also found in the Tadwai and Pasra Forest areas in Kamareddy District, through which the party called upon the public to observe the ‘martyrs’ memorial week’ and pay homage Maoist martyrs. The Maoists accused the State and Central Governments of resorting to anti-people policies while protecting the interests of corporate and multi-national forces as part of their globalisation policy, and alleged that the Governments were spending huge amounts on strengthening the Police wing to suppress revolutionary forces that were questioning their misdeeds.

Clearly, the inherent danger from the Maoists persists in Telangana. January 4, 2017, media reportage indicated that Maoist recruitment had slowly intensified and recruits were being trained in what is considered their ‘safe bastion’, Chhattisgarh. The Maoists are anxious to engineer a revival in their erstwhile areas of dominance, prominently including Telangana which was long one of the worst afflicted regions of the country. Their effective neutralization across much of this fledgling State goes to the great credit to the enforcement agencies of undivided Andhra Pradesh, and the continued efforts of the successor State Police of Telangana. There is, nevertheless, little scope for complacency, as the Maoists are far from giving up arms, and a significant section of their ideologically committed top leadership remains actively at large.

*Deepak Kumar Nayak
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

The Indian army’s higher leadership must reflect on its role as the sword arm of the republic, and have a clear vision of itself as the upholder of law.

By Manoj Joshi

One of the more edifying aspects of the otherwise depressing picture emerging from the Charlottesville incident has been the quick and uniform condemnation of the happenings by the top brass of the US armed forces.

This is in sharp contrast to the waffling and subsequently condemnable conduct of their commander-in-chief, Donald J. Trump and significant sections of the civilian elite.

On August 13 itself, John Richardson, the US chief of naval operations shared on Facebook:

The following day, the army chief Mark Milley declared:

No place for racial hatred or extremism in @USMC. Our core values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment frame the way Marines live and act.

— Robert B. Neller (@GenRobertNeller) August 15, 2017

“The army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our values and everything we’ve stood for since 1775.” He was followed by his air force counterpart David Goldfein and the chief of the National Guard Bureau Joseph Lengyel.

Their strong stand speaks a great deal of the current intellectual make up of the US military leadership, something that has been forged in the fires of the various wars the US has fought, and the many mistakes and transgressions its military has made.

There is, of course, something about the quality of the US military’s higher leadership. Take Richardson, for example, he is not only an experienced submariner, but he is also an MA from MIT and has done an attachment with the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Or the army chief Milley, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is a BA from Princeton, an MA from Columbia and a graduate of a prestigious MIT National Security programme.

Importance of upholding the military morality 

Wars and the military are not normally supposed to be associated with moral issues or ethical conduct. But any smart general knows that upholding a just cause can be a war-winning factor. This, more than anything else, is the lesson of the Second World War. If his forces are seen to be on the side of a good cause, half the battle is already won.

This is especially true in our contemporary conflicts, which do not have the goal or the option of obliterating the adversary as the Mongols had in the 13th century or the Chinese with the Xiongnu people but instead prevailing over adversary forces who function among a sea of non-combatants.

Military morality and ethics have been written down in the Hague and Geneva Conventions to avoid unnecessary suffering and safeguarding human rights with the view of restoring peace. The Second World War gave us the Nuremberg tribunalwhose central message was that merely following orders, even of a duly constituted authority, was not an excuse for committing war crimes and human rights violations. Militaries talk a great deal about honour, and rightly so. For example, no honourable military man would shoot a surrendered enemy. Likewise, modern militaries look down on rape and ill-treatment of civilians. But politicians’ sense of morality is sometimes flexible.

There is no doubt that following Clausewitz, politics must always be in command in war. But there are also important points where the politician must be challenged. There is the well-known incident when General Eisenhower rejected Churchill’s suggestion to use poison gas against the German sites firing V-2 rockets on London. Honour was in upholding the law, and in this case, the international law laid down by the Hague and Geneva Conventions. But honour is also linked to the sense of self-worth of a military, how its leaders view themselves and the forces under their command. This is what has driven the American generals to categorically oppose the stand of their commander-in-chief.

People will argue that most wars have seen flagrant breaches of Hague and Geneva codes, and they are not wrong. Even so, most armies strive to show themselves to be morally and ethically superior, especially in the information technology era where victory is often about dominating the narrative in cyberspace and elsewhere.

Modern war, as our experience with Iraq and Afghanistan reveals, is about winning hearts and minds. No one will argue that the Americans have done a good job in either. The former was a war of choice, built on a patently false premises and many war crimes were committed. The latter was seen as a war of necessity arising out of the al Qaida’s attack in the US. Yet somehow the US has not been able to get the upper hand, perhaps because they are too disconnected to the people they are fighting amidst.

Our experience in Sri Lanka was an object lesson. Though we were on the morally right side, we were unable to capture the narrative because we were fighting among a people who were not ours and our army was simply not trained or oriented for that kind of a war.

The Indian context

The Indian experience has been different in Jammu and Kashmir since, unlike the US in Iraq or India in Sri Lanka, there is no option of walking away. Nevertheless, all commanders there know that at the end of the day, winning hearts and minds is the key to prevailing in an insurgency-like conflict. Neutralising individual jihadi leaders like Burhan Wani, Mehmood Ghaznavi or Yasin Itoo does not happen purely through army action, but good intelligence obtained, probably through the auspices of the J&K police which in turn has come from the fact that there are people in the Valley who support the counter-insurgency efforts.

It is in this shadow battle that Indian forces must appear superior, not just in weapons and men, but their cause and conduct. And this is why the recent Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) judgment on Machil is a body blow to the effort. The case was fairly open and shut and as much was determined by a court martial and confirmed by senior officers upto the army commander of the northern command. Yet, from the outset there were efforts to delay and subvert the course of  justice in the case.

The army had convicted five personnel including a colonel and a captain by a court martial in 2015 for the staged killing in 2010 of three Kashmiri civilians and branding them as militants. They had been given a life sentence. The tribunal’s reported judgement makes for shoddy reading citing issues like their attire and proximity to the Line of Control to cast doubt over the prosecution’s case.

In many ways the court martial system is an anachronism, but the services feel it is important for maintaining the discipline and morale of the forces. There is, however, a lesser justification for taking up criminal cases such as those of rape and murder through the system.

However, because of the presence of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA), things are complicated because in many instances of killings of civilians, the AFSPA is invoked, and often rightly. In the Machil case, the ideal would have been to hand it over to the civilian authorities, but the army chose the courts martial route wherein it tries its own personnel. And the personnel were duly convicted.

The AFTs were originally set up to ease the burden on civilian courts of a rash of cases relating to promotion issues. However, they did have the power to look at other disputes, including court materials. The experience of the AFTs has not been an entirely good one. The government is not particularly happy with the proceedings of the AFTs, while their judges are usually sound in their legal background, the military officers there lack any kind of judicial experience or knowledge when they are appointed. As a result, the government has tightened the authority of the defence secretary over the appointments of the tribunals and inquiries against its members.

In other words, they have underscored the fact that the tribunals function under the Ministry of Defence and not the regular courts system. Now the higher courts of the land must lay out clear guidelines of conduct. Justice on issues of murder and other such issues is simply too important to be left to such tribunals.

Meanwhile the Indian army’s higher leadership needs to reflect on its role as the sword arm of the republic. Being involved in counter-insurgency roles makes its tasks difficult. But it needs to have a clear cut vision of itself as the upholder of law, a force that privileges honour above everything regardless of the politicians in power.

This article originally appeared in The Wire.

With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, it’s unlikely Trump will be impeached or thrown out of office on grounds of mental impairment. At least any time soon.

Yet there’s another way Trump can be effectively removed. He can be made irrelevant.

It’s already starting to happen. The howling manchild who occupies the Oval Office is being cut off and contained.

Trump no longer has a working majority in the Senate because several Senate Republicans have decided the hell with him.

Three Republican Senators voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, dooming his effort. Almost all voted to restrict his authority over Russian sanctions.

They’re also pushing forward with their own inquiry into Trump’s Russian connections. Republican senators Thom Tillis and Lindsay Graham have even joined Democrats in introducing legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired.

Republicans in the House won’t fund his wall. Many refuse to increase the national debt in order to pay for his promised tax cuts.

After Charlottesville, many more are willing to criticize him publicly. Last week Tennessee’s Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, even questioned Trump’s  “stability” and “competence,” saying Trump hasn’t shown he understands “the character of this nation” and that without that understanding, “Our nation is going to go through great peril.”

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz reports that GOP leaders are “personally wrestling with the trade-offs of making a cleaner separation with the president.”

It helps that Republican patrons in big business are deserting Trump in droves. Last week, CEOs bolted his advisory councils. Many issued sharp rebukes of Trump.

These are the people who raise big bucks for the GOP. Their dumping Trump makes it easier for elected Republicans to do so, too.

Even James Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox CEO whose media outlets include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post – among the loudest mouthpieces for Trump – is ditching him.

Last Thursday Murdoch wrote “what we watched last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the president of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people,” and pledged $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League.

This doesn’t mean Fox News or the Wall Street Jounal will call for Trump’s ouster. It does mean their commentators and editorial writers now have clear license to criticize him.

Hey, America as a whole is abandoning him. Trump’s approval hit an all-time low of 34 percent last week.

Even parts of his base are dropping him. A new News/Marist poll shows his approvals have fallen below 40 percent in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three states that were key to his election, which he won by a whisker.

Inside the administration, there are moves to contain and isolate the manchild.

On foreign policy, the Axis of Adults – Chief of staff General John Kelly, national security advisor General H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson – are asserting tighter control, especially after Trump’s tweetstorm over North Korea.

Reportedly, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are stepping up attempts to constrain him as well.

“You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill,” another White House aide told Axios’s Mike Allen.

Plus, Stephen Bannon is gone.

All this means that, although Trump will still hold the title of President, he’s on the way to being effectively removed from the presidency. Neutered. Defanged.

We’re not out of danger. Trump will continue to rant and fume. He’ll insult. He’ll stoke racial tensions. He could still start a nuclear war.

But, hopefully, he won’t be able to exercise much presidential power from here on. He’s being ostracized like a obnoxious adolescent who’s been grounded.

When the media stop reporting his tweets, his isolation and irrelevance will be complete.

I was a Fulbright professor of journalism in 1991, posted for a year in the Graduate School of Journalism at China’s prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai.

Over the year I made many friends among the faculty and especially among my graduate students, many of whom had been democracy activists, either in Beijing or in Shanghai, during the events of the Tiananmen occupation and eventual crushing of that movement. during 1989, the year before my arrival.

At the time I was in China, there were very few statues of Mao Zedong, the celebrated leader of the victorious Chinese Communist revolution. Because of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and earlier anti-rightist campaigns he had orchestrated, his reputation had understandably and deservedly suffered badly.

As a result, while Mao statues had been ubiquitous all over China only a decade earlier, by the time I arrived (20 years after having graduated with a degree in Chinese language and plans to go to China to witness and write about the “glories” of the Cultural Revolution), I found in Shanghai only two remaining statues of the Chairman — one inside the entrance gate to Tongji University, a technical school, and one inside the front gate of Fudan University.

The Tongji statue featured a younger Mao posed in a romantic stance waiving to his people. The Fudan statue had a more forbidding stance: quite tall, featuring the chairman in his formal Mao suit, feet together, and arms clasped behind his back, looking sternly down at the viewer. This statue had been designed to look even bigger and more imposing than it was by the enlargement of the feet and the bottom of the legs (sort of like an R Crumb character), with the body shrinking to a much too small head at the top to give the illusion of height.

I asked a friend, a Fudan professor who had lived through the anti-rightist campaign of the ’50s as well as the Cultural Revolution, why those two statues had been left standing, while all the others seemed to have been eliminated in Shanghai and most of China.

He smiled wanly and said, using a very Chinese turn of phrase, “They left the statues so we would never forget…and so that we would never forget.”

I puzzled over his words for a moment and then I got it. He meant that the Party officials who run the two universities, which had been hotbeds of rebellion in 1989 and of democracy activism in earlier years, wanted their faculties and students both to remember the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (by then Mao was a very controversial figure among the Chinese people, revered as almost a god by some, and reviled by others), and also to remember what can happen to those who stand against the Chinese state and the absolute authority of the Communist Party.

The monuments to the Confederacy in the US are much the same as those Mao statues in Shanghai: functioning as both historical memorials and as current objects of intimidation.

After the massive suffering and death caused by the Cultural Revolution and other Maoist campaigns during the years after 1949, many people in China didn’t want to be reminded of it all by having to look at monumental edifices glorifying the psychopath responsible for those events. But of course there were many who also thought of Mao as the father of their country and revered him, sometimes, as with the cab drivers who would ride with a red-and-gold framed photo of Mao hanging from their rear-view mirror as a good luck charm, treating his image almost like an image of Buddha or Guanyin.

Just so, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, many people in both the South and North wanted to move on, and to forget the belligerence. But some people wanted to remember the cause by celebrating the leaders of the white rebellion that was Southern secession, and like those Party officials at Tongji and Fudan, they wanted to remind the freed black slaves who was boss: the resurgent whites who had lost the war. Hence a spate of erecting statues of the likes of Gen. Lee and Gen. Jackson.

My own feeling is that statues honoring the generals of the Confederacy, and the CSA’s president Jefferson Davis, are not just an outrage — these guys are all traitors to the United States, and were fighting not for “states’ rights” as often alleged by their defenders, but for the preservation of the vile and absolutely indefensible institution of slavery — but are an insult to any black resident of the city in which they are allowed to continue to stand. (Richmond, BA, with it’s Monument Drive lined with statues of Confederate generals, is toda 57% black.)

As two of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s great great grandsons recently stated in a letter to the mayor of Richmond, VA published also in Slate magazine, the Confederate statues erected in the South are not about glorifying heroes of some virtuous battle, but rather were erected later in the 19th Century and on, after Reconstruction had ended, in an era when white supremacy was resurgent — with the violent help of the Ku Klux Klan, a tsunami of lynchings, and the introduction of segregation and poll taxes — to keep black people in their “place,” terrified, and out of political and economic power.

The two direct Jackson descendants, Jack Christian and Warren Christian, in calling for the removal of Confederate statues including those of their famous/infamous ancestor Gen. Stonewall Jackson, write:

Instead of lauding Jackson’s violence, we choose to celebrate Stonewall’s sister—our great-great-grandaunt—Laura Jackson Arnold. As an adult Laura became a staunch Unionist and abolitionist. Though she and Stonewall were incredibly close through childhood, she never spoke to Stonewall after his decision to support the Confederacy. We choose to stand on the right side of history with Laura Jackson Arnold.

They go on to write:

Confederate monuments like the Jackson statue were never intended as benign symbols. Rather, they were the clearly articulated artwork of white supremacy. Among many examples, we can see this plainly if we look at the dedication of a Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina, in which a speaker proclaimed that the Confederate soldier “saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South.” Disturbingly, he went on to recount a tale of performing the “pleasing duty” of “horse whipping” a black woman in front of federal soldiers. All over the South, this grotesque message is conveyed by similar monuments. As importantly, this message is clear to today’s avowed white supremacists.

I agree.

There is a gross hypocrisy in President Trump’s at least feigned emotional defense of the “beautiful” statues of Lee, Davis, Jackson and other Confederate “heroes,” and of the “good people” whose only goal, he claims, is allegedly defending their “cultural heritage.” This is not about protesting some “PC” attack on the Confederacy, or about fighting to preserve the historical record.

Recall the chest thumping and media gloating we witnessed as statues of Saddam Hussein were torn down by the American victors of the illegal invasion of Iraq? Recall too the US excitement and patriotic enthusiasm of the “USA! USA!” crowd as Russians began tearing down statues of Stalin and even Lenin across the former Soviet Union? There were and still are many Iraqis who liked Saddam and the modern Arab state he created. There are millions of Russians who still revere Lenin for ending the Tsarist state and bringing Russia into the modern world. There are even millions of Russians who revere Stalin for making their country a world power and for defeating the invading Nazi army in World War II. Yet were any Americans decrying the erasing of that history in Iraq or Russia? I’m not saying Lenin’s and Stalin’s statues shouldn’t be torn down — certainly Stalin’s should — but what makes Stalin any different in a qualitative way, from Lee or Jackson or Davis?

My feeling is that we don’t need statues of white supremacist traitors who fought this nation’s bloodiest war in the name of perpetuating slavery in order to help us remember this nation’s history. And if bigots, fascists and white supremacists want to have statuary to remind them about or to celebrate its most sordid chapters, they can put them up on private land and pay the costs for maintaining them. Memorials to such vile men don’t belong in public spaces supported by public tax dollars — especially the tax dollars paid by descendants of the people that the subjects of those statues fought to keep enslaved.

If we have to have them, maybe we could require that they be accompanied by one of their most famous defenders: Donald J. Trump. (I’m thinking of the nude sculptures of a naked Trump with small hands and tiny genitals that were produced by sculptor Joshua Monroe and places strategically around the country during the campaign by an anarchist group.

By Elise Harris

As he arrived to Russia for his official three-day visit, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the Holy See has a special role on the global scene given its attention to both spiritual and diplomatic themes.

“The Holy See simultaneously performs both a spiritual and a diplomatic role,” Cardinal Parolin said in an Aug. 20 interview with Russian news agency TASS. “That is why the Vatican diplomacy is of special nature.”

“It does not rely on any other force, except for taking care of every person and every nation through dialogue,” he said, adding that with these aspects in mind, discussion with his Russian counterparts will focus on “the issues which are of mutual interest for us, as well as crises in different parts of the world, which are both distant and very near.”

The meeting with Patirarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in particular serves as proof of the openness that has come as a result of his historic meeting with Pope Francis in Havana last year, Parolin said, noting how both Kirill a nd Francis “spoke of rapprochement as a shared path.”

“When we walk this path together and conduct fraternal dialogue, we can feel the moments of unity. This path requires the search for truth, as well as love, patience, persistence and determination.”

Cardinal Parolin spoke to TASS the day before his official Aug. 21-24 visit to Russia, during which he is set to meet with several heavy-hitters including Patriarch Kirill, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and several other high-level members of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The interview touched not only on the Holy See’s diplomatic task, but it also focused largely on relations between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches, specifically in terms of preserving traditional Christian values. Parolin also spoke of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies so far during his brief tenure, and the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

Traveling with Parolin as part of his official delegation is Msgr. Visvaldas Kulbokas, adviser to the apostolic nunciature of Russia and an official in the Relations with States section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.

On Aug. 21, the first day of this visit, Parolin met with the Catholic cardinals and bishops of Russia, and in the evening presided over Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Moscow, after which he held a friendly encounter with clergy and the laity.

He also met with Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, President of the Department for External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate.

Tomorrow morning, Aug. 22, is dedicated to a working session with Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, while in the evening Parolin will meet with Patriarch Kirill, and will hold a brief press conference afterward.

On Wednesday, Aug. 23, the last day of his visit, Cardinal Parolin will head to Sochi for his official meeting with President Putin. No other official meetings are on the schedule before the cardinal returns to Rome Aug. 24.

In his interview with TASS, Cardinal Parolin said the Vatican has been “working on the idea of the visit to Russia for a long time,” and that it is finally possible largely as a result of the February 2016 meeting between Pope Francis and Kirill.

“That meeting was the first step that had been expected for a long time,” he said. Not only did it strengthen contracts between representatives of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches, “which became more frequent and filled with concrete content,” but it also prompted the churches “to look at the discrepancies we had in the past and their causes in a new way.”

Although tensions can still be felt as the result of differing opinions on various issues, Parolin said Francis and Kirill’s meeting “helped us see the unity we are striving for, the unity which is required by the Gospels we profess.”

“It is very important that we have this renewed mutual positive view that every servant of the God, priest and believer will share,” he said, stressing that in his opinion, this is the condition “for the fulfillment of new and, I would say, unprecedented steps in the development of the ecumenical dialogue and the rapprochement of our Churches.”

When asked how their Churches can work together to preserve traditional values and not impede efforts for modern democracy, Parolin noted that unfortunately “there is no shortage of challenges that the modern world produces.”

It’s not just about preserving values so much as “the very concept of human personality and human dignity,” he said, pointing to the specific challenges presented by showing respect for humanity and his work, striving for social justice, interpersonal relations and relations among States.

“These are all challenges of a peaceful existence,” the cardinal said, noting that when their Churches insist on following the Gospel and upholding the values found in scripture, “they do so not to humiliate a modern person or to put unnecessary pressure on him but to show the path to salvation and fulfillment.”

“When performing this mission, which never ends, it is extremely important to establish effective cooperation between different religious denominations,” he said, adding that greater mutual understanding between Churches and the exchange of experiences “may become an important contribution to understanding of these problems.”

Pointing to the Catholic Church’s decision to “loan” relics of the well-loved Orthodox Saint Nicholas, consisting of several bone fragments currently housed in Bari, to Russia over the summer, Parolin said the gesture served as a “spiritual uplift” of sorts for the Russian Orthodox Church.

“There is no doubt that this event and other similar initiatives, which can be called the ‘ecumenism of the saints,’ give an opportunity to fully feel what already unites Christians,” he said.

The relics were sent from Bari to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow from May 22-July 12, and were venerated by President Putin and thousands of Orthodox faithful.

Not only was the event important for the spiritual life of believers, but it also served as an example for future initiatives and gave “a new impetus” to dialogue on “more complex” issues in Church relations, he said.

When it comes to fighting terrorism, Parolin said there are two important factors to keep in mind, the first being the decisions on the part of governments “which are often dictated by concrete situations.”

“When one faces a situation of this kind, one has to make a certain choice based on the politicians’ assessments,” he said. “No doubt, the need to tackle terrorism is evident for the Church, but all actions must be weighted in order to prevent a situation in which the use of force would trigger spiraling violence or lead to violations of human rights, including the freedom of religion.”

On the other hand, the Church is always guided by a “long-term perspective,” he said, which first of all involves fostering personal development, particularly among younger generations, as well as “solid dialogue between religions.”

“During the past decades, the Holy See has been making all possible efforts to establish, strengthen or restore dialogue on the cultural and religious levels and in the social and humanitarian sphere,” the cardinal said, adding that he is “absolutely convinced that life under the guidance of the Gospel would in itself make an important contribution into forming the society and culture.”

Asked about some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial policies since taking office, including his decision to pull out of the 2016 Paris Climate agreement, and what the Vatican expects from Trump, Parolin voiced hope that the two States can move forward in mutual respect.

The meeting in May between Pope Francis and Trump “was held in the atmosphere of mutual respect and I would say, with mutual sincerity” in which both men were able to voice their thoughts and concerns.

Parolin voiced his hope that despite Trump’s determination to “fulfill the electoral promises” and despite Washington’s withdrawal from the Paris accord, “pragmatic approaches will prevail in continuation to the US administration’s decision to keep the climate change discussion running.”

“We, in our turn, can only wish that President Trump, just like other members of the international community, does not neglect the extremely difficult task of tackling the global warming and its negative consequences.”

The cardinal then said that in his opinion, international relations are “increasingly dominated” by policies and strategies “based on open clashes and confrontations.”

Describing this phenomena as a “’dialogue of the deaf,’ or, worse, (policies that) fuel fears and are based on intimidation with nuclear or chemical weapons,” Parolin said he believes there is a common realization that such approaches “do not lead to correct solutions and fail to ease tensions between states.”

He pointed to how Pope Francis’ insistence that “building peace is a path,” explaining that this path “is a lot thornier than war and conflict.”

“Building peace requires a patient and constructive dialogue with mutual respect instead of focusing all attention to own national interests,” Parolin said. “This is all that is expected from the leaders of global powers.”

Liberals, progressive and Democrats should think critically about the negative impacts of widespread media bias on American democracy. There simply is no doubt that virtually all mainstream media regularly show their strong bias against president Trump and his administration. These media have convinced themselves that they are working to save American democracy from an incompetent, corrupt and dangerous president. And those on the left eat up the negative coverage, which means more money for the anti-Trump networks, newspapers and magazines. Never mind that he was elected fairly and legally.

It seems that the leftist media would only be happy if Trump was driven out of office by any means. Such a victory would confirm the undemocratic power of a free press that replaces a military coup with a media one..

Here is my point: More Americans should seriously consider the larger question of whether such a perversion of freedom of the press undermines our democracy. Why? Because instead of fairly presenting genuine news the opinion loaded negative coverage has the goal of bringing down Trump and overturning the election result.   The press establishment overwhelmingly filled with liberals and progressives wanted Hillary Clinton and refuse to accept defeat. After all, despite a mighty effort, the media failed to elect Clinton.   It continues to seek retribution by bashing Trump and ignoring the many failings of the Clinton campaign.

The press probably feels some responsibility for Trump’s success during the primary season. Coverage of Trump’s beating up of his Republican opponents was extreme. Now the press is getting even.

To dispel any doubt about the widespread perception of media bias, consider a June 2017 Rasmussen survey of likely American voters. “Fifty percent (50%) think most reporters are biased against the president, up two points from January. Just four percent (4%) think most reporters are biased in Trump’s favor. Given the president’s testy relationship with the media, however, it’s not surprising that 76% of Republicans and 51% of voters not affiliated with either major political party believe most reporters are biased against the president, a view shared by only 24% of Democrats.” Perhaps the most important finding is that “Nearly 90% of voters who Strongly Approve of the job the president is doing think most reporters are biased against Trump and rate media coverage of him as poor.”

These results support the view that all the negative coverage may strengthen the Trump base, which largely have stopped reading and listening to what they think is fake news. News based on reporting of facts has been replaced by opinion and a near total emphasis on what Trump says rather than on what he and his administration have does. In other words, rhetoric preempts accomplishments, and those positive accomplishments from a conservative perspective are also viewed negatively by the leftist press. Information about governance is purposely kept out of the media limelight to allow Trump rhetoric to get endless vicious criticism.

Often, such surveys are dismissed. So consider the 2017 study prepared by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard. It revealed what reasonable people would consider a disturbing level of media bias against president Trump. Here are the fractions of negative news coverage towards Trump: CNN and NBC, 93%; CBS, 91%; New York Times, 87%; Washington Pose, 83%.   FOX had the most equal coverage, with 52% negative.

Those who like the biased anti-Trump media coverage should reflect on how all that coverage robs them of getting solid information on myriad local, state and world events. In other words, the biased media dominance inevitably leads to a dumbing down of the public about what is really happening that merits news coverage as well as details about what is happening in the sphere of public policy. Journalism itself has been degraded to such a degree that for much of the population no one believes anything coming from the opinion-loaded media.   Apologists for the left and right unload opinions rather than enlightening information and analysis.   Rational people do not trust the press.

The core issue is whether the press is giving itself too much credit for presenting the truth. In fact, what is happening is the presentation of opinion not objective facts that reveal the truth. Truth requires objectivity and a concerted emphasis on undisputed facts. Instead, opinion, even in so-called news stories, is routinely presented.

Biased media hiding behind freedom of the press should disgust all Americans. We all are being robbed of huge amounts of news and information.   Amazingly, for example, network CBS news used its whole hour broadcast to presenting anti-Trump laced coverage of the recent Charlottsville event. That is virtually a nightly occurrence at CNN where only anti-Trump diatribes are presented in multiple shows. The front pages of the main newspapers are the same. Real news from all over the country and the world is not given to the public the way it used to be.

The credibility of the media has taken a lethal blow. What they deem good for their business now will ultimately backfire as Americans for years to come seek and find alternative news sources or eliminate news from their lives. A truly informed public is needed for a quality democracy, and we are losing that.

Yes, a free press is vital for democracy. But a deeply biased press is not.

As to these crazy times, Ruben Navarrette Jr. summed them eloquently: “President Trump and the media deserve each other. Both are driven by ego and take criticism personally. Both will twist the facts to defend themselves and push their agenda. …Americans are fed precooked narratives by the Fourth Estate. We’re told what’s important and what isn’t, what to focus on and what to ignore, and — above all — what to think. …I sure miss journalism.” So many of us do.

According to Libyan publication ‘The Libyan Observer’, a human rights activist has filed an official complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing renegade Libyan General Khalifa Haftar of orchestrating war crimes, stemming from the war in Benghazi which has left hundreds of people dead.

The complaint details accusations of the crime of ‘denying quarter’, which according to the Rome Statute of the Internaitonal Criminal Court is the refusal to take prisoners and to show no clemency.

Haftar launched the ‘Dignity Operation’ in Benghazi in May of 2014, since then he also set up an armed group inder the name of ‘Libyan National army’. Throughout the three year war groups under his comAmand have committed numerous crimes against their rivals accusing them of ‘terrorism’.

The ICC previously issued an arrest warant for senior commander of the Saiqa militia, Mahmoud Al-Werfalli, who is a close ally of Haftar over war crimes in Benghaziz.

Original article

The ambition of the EU-funded INJECT project is to enhance journalistic creativity while improving workflow within busy newsrooms. At the heart of the project is the use of a digital toolkit, now being piloted. The toolkit has been developed since the project’s inception six months ago, with the help of journalists who have provided the necessary feedback for iterations of the technology.

Now the testing will go a step further as the toolkit reaches real working conditions. The pilot is taking place within the teams of three Norwegian local newspapers based in Hordaland, Sunnhordland and Hallingdølen, with plans to extend the number and type of journalists that participate in the testing. The team is investigating the effectiveness of the tool’s algorithms and the degree to which it actually adds value to journalists’ output.

Igniting the creative spark

INJECT (Innovative Journalism: Enhanced Creativity Tools) took its motivation from the increasing pressures experienced by newsrooms to produce fresh and engaging content on a 24/7 news cycle, with reduced resources but against a backdrop of increased competition. These challenges are also set against a context in which the accountability for the accuracy of facts is increasingly at a premium.

Crucially, INJECT was designed to be more than simply a search engine as it works from an algorithm developed specifically to help journalists not only find information, but also explore options for crafting a story’s angle. One way it does this is by offering what the project refers to as ‘Creative Sparks’, which appear when a journalist hovers their mouse over keywords. These are suggested approaches for writing a story, such as those emanating from background information about the individuals or places involved in the story. The toolkit will also offer explanatory and interactive fact cards or footnotes, which help journalists build their article with clear references.

Going with the (work)flow

INJECT uses techniques developed by studies into human computer interaction and artificial intelligence, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), enabling reporters to research widely and quickly across multiple databases, delivering fresh sources and data. The toolkit is designed to be plugged directly into content management systems and includes functionality that will provide users with dashboards, allowing more effective management of information. For example, work displays will avoid the need to constantly switch between documents or browser tabs, when writing an article.

Speaking about INJECT’s innovative approach, Professor of Journalism George Brock at City, University of London, has said, “INJECT aims to do something which no other software for journalism attempts: to combine creative search techniques and ways of telling the reader more about background and sources. And this help is easy to use and fast.”

The tool is currently able to run on GoogleDocs, WordPress, as a TinyEMC plug-in, and as a standalone web version. It is capable of searching 1.5 million news sources, in English, Norwegian and Dutch. It is also extendable to news organisations’ own archives. Indeed, the Norwegian archives are currently integrated, enabling the local newspapers in the pilot to search through sources in their own language.

It is expected that the tool will be fully operational in the Norwegian newsrooms this autumn. Pending the outcome of the current pilot phase it will also be rolled out more widely around this time. The plan is for the tool to be made available across newsrooms in multiple European countries, during the summer of 2018.

Cordis Source: Based on project information and media reports

Researchers from Umeå University in Sweden describe a new method to study biochemical changes that occur in the pancreas during the development of diabetes. The method, recently published in Scientific Reports, is based on molecular spectroscopy and can be used to extract biochemical profiles (or “fingerprints”) containing information about disease progression.

The method could facilitate improved understanding of the mechanistic processes on molecular and cellular levels that are key to the development of diabetes.

The method uses vibrational microspectroscopic technology, including Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) and Raman microspectroscopy. Different compounds have unique molecular vibrations that can be detected using infrared light or laser. These vibrations contain information about the sample’s chemical composition, including molecular characteristics, prevalence and structure. It is usually very difficult to interpret the extremely complex results and vast amount of data that this kind of assessment produces. By using advanced statistical methods, researchers can filter out “noise” such as, for example, natural variations. This results in a better overview and allows researchers to focus on the important factors.

“This method is well-suited for studying biological samples, since it does not damage the sample, does not require external markers such as antibody labels, and can be used in microscopy settings. The method can for example be used to determine which cell types are affected in a certain tissue, where and how,” said András Gorzsás, researcher at the Department of Chemistry and co-author of the article.

The pancreas is a key organ for the development of diabetes, one of the greatest health issues in the world. According to the International Diabetes Federation, the number of individuals with diabetes is expected to rise from today’s 415 million to more than 640 million by 2040. Despite the global prevalence of diabetes, researchers had limited methods to study biochemical changes directly in the pancreas.

Filtering out noise in complex data provides overview

In the Scientific Reports article, the researchers describe how a method for multivariate statistical analysis enables them to handle multiple variables simultaneously and thus analyze complex data from vibrational microspectroscopy of the pancreas. Using this method, which until now has been used primarily to study plant tissues, the researchers show that it is possible to discover previously unknown biochemical changes in the pancreas during disease development. In addition, previously known changes in the tissue may also be detected, but at even earlier stages of disease progression compared to what has been described by other techniques.

“By using this method we can create biochemical fingerprints of all changes occurring in the pancreas. The fingerprints inform us of what cell type we are looking at, which animal model it comes from and how far the disease has progressed. These fingerprints are so precise that even unknown samples can be classified if there is available reference material,” said Ulf Ahlgren, Professor of Molecular Medicine and co-author of the article.

A non-destructive technique

The method can be used to analyze both mice and human pancreas from the outside of the organ, i.e. without the need to obtain tissue samples. Moreover, the researchers demonstrate in a transplantation experiment that pancreatic tissue (so called Islets of Langerhans) may be studied in vivo (i.e. in the living organism). In addition to studying mechanistic aspects of diabetes development and manifestation, the researchers hope that the method can be used to develop better prognostic and diagnostic tools for diabetes.

“I believe this possibility to study pancreatic tissue and especially the biochemistry of the insulin-producing Islets of Langerhans in the living organism is a very interesting opportunity for diabetes research. The method could prove useful for example to study the direct effects of anti-diabetic therapies on the biochemical composition and function of insulin-producing cells” said Ulf Ahlgren.

The researchers are also hopeful that their findings can lay the foundations for developing better tools for identifying cancer tissue to be surgically removed as part of pancreatic cancer treatment. The study was a collaborative effort with researchers at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, and Karolinska institutet. The research was made possible by funding from the Swedish Research Council and the Kempe Foundations

The Sri Lanka Corps of Military Police (SLCMP) together with the Police carried out a combined island wide raid on Friday to arrest Army personnel who are Absent Without Leave (AWOL) or had deserted their posts from respective formations around the country.

According to Military Spokesman, Brigadier Roshan Seneviratne, the one day island-wide operation has brought in 777 deserters including one officer and 776 other rank personnel to custody.

Authorities are continuing with their operations to arrest tri forces deserters and the special operation carried on Friday was intended to arrest Army deserters, he further stated.

As of August 19 authorities have arrested nine tri-forces officers and 5,641 other rank personnel during raids conducted since the end of the General Amnesty on midnight December 31, 2016.

Artificial intelligence has been around since the 1950s, and has gone through many cycles of hype and ‘winters’. Based on a survey of senior executives from over 3,000 companies in ten countries, this column describes how artificial intelligence is experiencing a new spring and is here to stay. The authors also argue that it can bring firm-level productivity and profit growth, with employment dynamics that may not be as bad as anticipated by some.

By Jacques Bughin and Eric Hazan*

Leading artificial intelligence (AI) expert Andrew Ng once characterised AI as “the new electricity” that will transform every sector of the economy (Ng 2017). However, we have had many cycles of hype and ‘winters’ before with AI, which has been around since the 1950s. In recent research, we decided to assess how the new wave of AI is developing and have found evidence that a set of technologies may finally be blossoming, both technically and economically (Bughin et al., 2017).

Our work also turned up additional factoids regarding two other issues heavily debated by economists: the evolution of total productivity growth (Crafts and Mills 2017), and the future of work (Frey and Osborne 2013, Autor 2015, Acemoglu and Restepo 2017). Our emerging messages are that AI is still in its infancy, but it is here to stay. Based on a stratified survey of C-level executives from about 3,000 companies in more than ten major countries, the link between the adoption of AI and expected benefits suggests that AI can bring some material firm-level productivity and profit growth, while employment dynamics may be not as bad as anticipated by some economists, and many luddites. Sure, substitution will happen in favour of smart capital, but the companies adopting AI are also the ones pushing for more employment too, especially those companies which leverage AI as a way to innovate and expand output, in consistency with other stylised facts of technological change and employment (Spiezia and Vivarelli 2000).

A new spring for AI

To put it simply, the Industrial Revolution was about machines enhancing human muscle power. The AI revolution is about machines enhancing human brain power. In our work, we have adopted a functional view of AI, that is, we focus on proven technologies such as computer vision, natural language processing, virtual assistants, smart robotics, and autonomous vehicles, all of which are underpinned by a new generation of machine-learning algorithms.

The accuracy of computer vision, for instance, has been increasing all the time. Five years ago, machines were able to correctly recognise images 70% of the time, while humans succeeded 95% of the time. Better data, improved algorithms, and faster computers have raised machines’ accuracy rate to 96%. And as humans, we remain stuck at 95%. Regarding smart robotics, Amazon has managed to improve performance to a stage where robots can reduce click-and-ship time from one hour to 15 minutes, and in half the space needed when humans have to do the back-office jobs.

There are three reasons why AI is experiencing a new spring and will not go way.

• First, more and more of clever investors, from venture capital and private equity, have tripled their AI investments over the past three years are now investing billions in AI. And even if this is small option bets – about 3% of total venture capital funding today – it is growing very quickly, even faster than biotech.
• Second, while private equity and venture capital firms can still be wrong, of course, we found that corporate investment in AI is already three times the amount of private equity and venture capital firms. Among the corporations betting on AI, the most bullish are high-tech companies such as Intel and Samsung, along with the digital native players, such as Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon. Automotive companies are active, too — think about GM acquiring Cruise Automation for more than $1 billion last year. For anyone questioning the wisdom of paying so much for relatively new companies, it is worth noting that AI investments are already paying off — remember Kiva, the robotics company Amazon bought for $775 million in 2012? Kiva robotics used for logistics in Amazon reported to generate returns on investment of 50% for its new owner.
• Third, the set of AI technologies we focus on are actually being deployed (see Figure 1). In our survey of more than 3,000 businesses, we found two-thirds of the companies are AI-aware. They fall into three clusters. About 20% are already serious adopters – mostly deploying machine learning or computer vision technologies, mirroring the investments made by venture capital, private equity, and high-tech firms. About an extra 40% of firms have begun to experiment or are partial adopters. The others are not yet experimenting or implementing, but still this means that a majority is trying. And more: out of the 40% who are not adopting, the main reason isn’t that they don’t believe in AI. Our research shows there is a mix of commercial and technical obstacles; regarding the later, 28% of firms don’t feel they have the technical capabilities to implement.

Figure 1 The degree of AI awareness by technology

Figure 2 State of AI adoption by sector

The likely economics of AI diffusion

If AI is making inroads into firms, the next question is how this will diffuse, and under what economic equation. We used a simple model in which the profit-development expectations of an industry/firm are related to the extent of its adopting AI at scale. As AI adoption is likely to depend on industry/firm health, we proceeded in two-step estimations: first, we made a logistic model of adoption; then we used the fitted adoption as a regressor in the profit equation. We are obviously aware of the limitation of our data, so our analyses must be taken with caution, but they are the first large-scale evidence of AI on supply economics.

AI diffusion drivers

We first aggregated the data by 15 industries, and then went on to dig deeper by company. Regarding the industry lens, the sectors leading on AI are high-tech, telecoms, and automotive, followed by media and finance (Figure 2). Those sectors are both the most digitised, and the ones predicting high future demand for AI-based business models, and products and services. In fact, it appears that AI is not something companies can easily leapfrog to. Companies need to have started the digital journey to be ready to adopt AI; in fact, the cross-industry correlation between our digital index (a measure of digital assets and usage developed in Digital Europe by MGI) and the same measure adapted to build the AI index (a measure of AI investments and usage) is up to 0.55, and strongly significant. Further, the sectors with a high propensity to adopt AI are also the sectors with the largest spread in profit margin and revenue growth, reflecting sectors facing larger disruption.

We went on to develop correlates of company adoption of AI technology by sector, a step made possible because we have collected roughly 200 companies for 15 industries. Acknowledging all the caveats of survey answers and the longitudinal nature of our panel, we nevertheless found five strong correlates on the probability to adopt AI at scale for each of the five AI-based technologies, across the 15 industries we studied. The analysis at the firm level confirms the industry lens of a link between digital maturity and AI adoption, and between profit expectations and pace of AI adoption. Using the odd ratio to rank the factors, from the smallest to highest effect, we discovered the following stylised facts:

• Adoption is more visible among larger companies — in particular, the effect is the most pronounced within the tech giants, who are already taking major options in AI (see above).
• In almost every industry, AI-adopting companies have significant support from the C-suite; the CEO and other leaders of the business understand and support the adoption of AI technology.
• Adoption is systematically more frequent for companies that already have invested in tech infrastructure that is amenable to AI, which means companies that have invested in big data and cloud-based architecture.
• Companies are more inclined to adopt AI right at the core of their businesses, close to the areas where they are creating the most value.
• Companies that invest in AI have already anticipated a strong business case that relies as much on growing revenues as on cutting costs.

Linking performance and AI diffusion

We used variables described in points 2 through 4 as valid instrumental variables (IV) correlated with AI adoption, to estimate the effect of AI adoption on profit margin development of companies (we omitted the variable “size” as well as the variable “expected benefits” for IV because both could be correlated directly to profit margin development; typical validity tests confirm our list of IV variables cannot be rejected). The equation was estimated industry by industry, with a set of firm control (headquarters location and level of existing profit margin, among others). We found that the IV effect of AI adoption was statistically positive for 12 out of the 15 sectors, even if the variance explained remains limited (on average, between 8-15% of profit development variance among firms of the same industry). This effect, however, ties well with the fact that in our sample, more than 70% of AI adopters anticipate that AI will bring significant competitive advantage in their industry (versus 45% for non-adopters).

AI and our economic future

In passing, the above can be leveraged to discuss two important issues that economists put forward nowadays. The first is whether AI can be part of the solution to restore the apparently vanishing total factor productivity growth in our developed economies. The second is whether employment will be fully depleted if AI fully substitutes smart AI-based capital for labour. This was not the core of our research, but we have a few side findings to help fuel the current debate.

AI and productivity

Using an output view of profit function, it is well known that growth in technical change, or total productivity growth, is a function of profit deployment as well as the of expansion of output in the long-term (in the short term, we should add a capacity utilisation term; see Karagiannis and Mergos 2000). The expansion of output is positive (negative) if there are increasing (decreasing) returns to scale. We can compute the profit deployment linked to AI from our estimate above, which in our case averages between 5% and 12% depending on the industry. Hence, total relative productivity change between adopting and non-adopting firms could be large, and could be even higher if one believes that economies of scale can emerge out of AI. The range of firm productivity uplift is comparable to that found elsewhere, such as for digital technology in general (Brynjolfsson et al. 2011) or for big data (Tambe 2014, Bughin 2016).

AI and employment

The mainstream narrative among labour economists is that AI-based automation is likely to make many tasks (and, by aggregation, many current occupations) obsolete. The scope and speed at which this might happen may imply major technological unemployment.

Obviously, the full macroeconomic effect will depend on whether new jobs will be created in adopting industries both as a result of new types of occupations or as a way to support expansion in output, and whether productivity gains captured from AI will create large overspills in the rest of the structure of economy (e.g. Gregory et al. 2016). Our simple maths of the productivity gain impact above imply that it could be as large as those from earlier rollouts of digital technologies.

Regarding the effects on own-firm employment, our survey asked about the effects on employment as a result of AI adoption (Figure 3). For more detail, we also highlight companies that identified themselves as only experimenting with AI and not yet adopting at scale; in general, the portion of companies expecting a reduction is rather similar, about 45% for both adopters and experimenters; but those who have already adopted AI show significantly more willingness to increase employment (22% versus 6%). If the portion of increase is only half the portion of firms that anticipate a decrease, this ratio is surprisingly close to the ones observed for new technology introductions across the decades as shown in Atkinson (2013). Zooming in further on companies willing to increase employment, we were also able to see that those companies use AI more to expand output and refine products and services, as anticipated by Spiezia and Vivarelli (2000).

Thus, we conclude that AI is here to stay, and that the adoption of AI by firms is driven by sufficient economic forces. Those forces will further accelerate the substitution of (old) human tasks, but we conjecture from our data that the gain in productivity, together with the innovation that AI can bring into the marketplace, may well be more welcoming than self-defeating, even for future employment (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017).

Figure 3 Expected change in employment due to AI adoption

*About the authors:
Jacques Bughin, Senior partner, McKinsey; Director, McKinsey Global Institute

Eric Hazan, Director (Senior Partner), McKinsey & Company

References:
Acemoglu, D, and P Restrepo (2017), “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets”, NBER Working Paper No. 23285.

Arntz, M, T Gregory and U Zierahn (2016), “The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD countries: A Comparative Analysis”, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper No. 189.

Atkinson, R (2013), “Stop saying that robots are destroying jobs — they are not”, Technology Review, September.

Autor, D (2015), “Why are there still so many jobs? The history and future of workplace automation”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (3): 3–30.

Brynjolfsson E, L Hitt and H Kim, (2011) “Strength in Numbers: How does data-driven decision-making affect firm performance?”, MIT Sloan School of Management, December.

Bughin, J, E Hazan, S Ramaswamy, M Chui, T Allas, P Dahlström, N Henke and M Trench (2017), Artificial Intelligence: the next digital frontier, McKinsey Global Institute.

Bughin, J (2016), “Reaping the benefits of big data in telecom”, Journal of Big Data 3(1): 14.

Bughin, J and N van Zeebroeck (2017), “The best response to digital disruption,” Sloan Management Review, Summer.

Crafts, N, and T C Mills (2017), “Trend TFP Growth in the United States: Forecasts versus Outcomes”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 12029.

Frey, C, and M Osborne (2013), “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?” Oxford Martin School Working Paper, September.

Gregory, T, A Salomons and U Zierahn (2016), “Racing with or against the machine, Evidence from Europe”, ZEW Discussion Paper 16-053.

Karagiannis, G and Mergos, GJ (2000), “Total factor productivity growth and technical change in a profit function framework”, Journal of Productivity Analysis, 14(1), 31–51.

Ng, A (2017), “Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity”, presentation at the Stanford MSx Future Forum.

Spiezia, V and M Vivarelli (2000), “The Analysis of Technological Change and Employment”, in M Pianta and M Vivarelli (eds), The Employment Impact of Innovation: Evidence and Policy, Routledge, pp. 12–25.

Tambe, P (2014), “Big data investment, skills, and firm value”, Management Science 60(6): 1452–69.

By Elias Vahedi*

Turkey started a new trend in its foreign policy in 2016 whose most important components were improvement of ties with Russia, cooperation with Iran and opposition to establishment of a Kurdish state in Syria instead of trying to topple the legitimate government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Since that time, Turkey’s foreign policy has practically moved outside the rail set for it by the United States. Therefore, the United States and Europe took unfriendly positions on Turkey’s failed coup d’état in 2016 and some analysts went as far as claiming that they were even masterminds of the botched coup one way or another.

At the same time, the insistence shown by the United States for helping Kurdish militia in Syria (including the militants of the People’s Protection Units or YPG) and its resistance against extradition to Turkey of US-based political and civil rights activist, Fethullah Gulen, who has been incriminated by Turkey as the main protagonist behind the failed 2016 coup, have been seen by the majority of politicians and political elites in Turkey as signs of Washington’s hostility or, at least, dishonesty in its relations with Ankara. As a result, these developments have further deepened an atmosphere of pessimism toward the United States’ policies in Turkey.

In addition, the crisis in Qatar’s relations with Arab allies of the US and show of serious support for Qatar by Iran and Turkey as well as imposition of new sanctions against Iran and Russia by the United States are all signs of new political alignments among regional and transregional players in West Asia region. On the other hand, these new alignments have been further highlighted by the effort made by Qatar and Turkey to get close to the axis formed by Russia, Iran and China as opposed to the alliance among the United States, Saudi Arabia and the Zionist regime of Israel.

All told, the question is does the existing trend in the region signify a new alignment or, at least, a change in old alignments, or positions taken by Turkey and Qatar are just temporary and ephemeral?

In response, the hypothesis that can be offered is that the change in the previous alignment in the region in which the axis of the United States, Arab countries and Turkey stood in the face of the opposite axis formed by Iran, Russia and China, has caused two important regional actors to distance from the Western – Arab axis and get close to the eastern (resistance) axis.

The gap in relations of Turkey and Qatar with the United States and the Saudi-led alliance in the region dates back to years ago. At that time, the support offered by these two countries to the Muslim Brotherhood as a social and political movement in the Arab world upset the United States and Saudi Arabia. Therefore, they preferred to support a coup d’état staged by Egypt’s former army chief, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, against the country’s then president, Mohamed Morsi.

However, since Turkey and Qatar aimed in their foreign policies to topple Syria’s government, despite fundamental differences with Saudi Arabia and the United States, they were somehow dragged toward the Western – Arab axis, which opposed the Syrian government. After Turkey changed its official stance on the issue of Syria, which took place when the United States did not accept to stop supporting establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region close to Turkey’s border with Syria, trilateral consultations among Russia, Turkey and Iran for the resolution of the crisis in Syria became more serious. The result has so far been holding of five trilateral meetings on Syria, establishment of ceasefire in the Arab country, and humanitarian exchanges in some important conflict zones such as Aleppo, in addition to establishment of no-conflict zones in Syria.

Following intensification of tensions between Qatar and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Doha started to drift away from the Western – Arab axis in the case of Syria and got closer to Turkey and Iran. This development further proves how real new alignments in the region are. The remarkable point in this regard is that while maintaining its past relations with the United States and Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and with the European Union’s member states, on the other hand, Turkey has also adopted policies independent of the West and its regional allies.

This independence is so important to the government of Turkey that despite loud protests from Arab countries, it did not change its mind about military buildup in Qatar and, of course, this holds water for Qatar as well.

Of course, the decision by Turkey and Qatar to distance themselves from the axis formed by the United States, the Zionist regime and the Arab allies of Washington seems more to be a tactic under the present circumstances rather than a strategy. However, the reality, which must be taken into account here, is that some alliances like the military and economic alliance of Turkey with the United States and the European Union first started with these very tactics and through such cooperation modalities.

Qatar is an Arab country, which will not be able to maintain its current position in the absence of ties with its Arab neighbors and also without relations with the United States. Turkey, for its part, has the second most powerful army among the NATO member states and most of its defense and security structures are closely related to NATO.

A symbol of this relation is Incirlik Air Base near the Turkish city of Adana, where scores of warplanes belonging to NATO and its allies are deployed and according to various sources, 50-90 B61 atom bombs belonging to the United States are being kept there. Therefore, experts believe that if Turkey decides to get out of this organization, it would be only possible over a long period of about 20 years. On the other hand, about 60 percent of Turkey’s foreign trade is conducted with the member states of the European Union. Therefore, it would not be possible for Turkey to change its mind about membership in the European Union and replacing its member countries with other countries as trade partners, at least, in short term.

In view of the above facts, it can be concluded that although closeness of Turkey and Qatar to the anti-West resistance axis is not a strategic and long-term decision, it will lead to qualitative and quantitative expansion of ceasefire in Syria while causing these countries to oppose new anti-Palestinian policies of the Zionist regime. Turkey may also decide not to pay heed to new Western sanctions against Iran, Russia and Qatar.

Therefore, the current trend in which Turkey and Qatar have got closer to each other and their convergence with the anti-Western – Arab axis can be considered as a turning point from the viewpoint of the interests of other regional countries, especially Iran.

More cooperation by Iran with the axis formed by Turkey and Qatar, which despite being Sunni states are supporters of the revolutionary movement of the Muslim Brotherhood, will defuse the effort made by the axis of the United States and Saudi Arabia to isolate Iran. On the other hand, Iran’s cooperation with the axis of Turkey and Qatar will prevent this axis from turning into a threat for Iran. If the increasing military presence of Turkey in Qatar is taken into consideration, the importance and necessity of Iran’s presence in this regional alliance will become evident more than before.

* Elias Vahedi
Expert on Turkey and Caucasus Affairs

By Bernhard Schell

The United Nations is apparently incapable of pushing for a political solution to the more than two-year-old conflict plaguing Yemen, one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, which has been devastated by a war between forces loyal to the internationally-recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied to the Houthi rebel movement.

More than 7,600 people have been killed and 42,000 injured since March 2015, the majority in air strikes by a Saudi-led multinational coalition that backs the president, according to independent sources. The conflict and a blockade imposed by the coalition have also triggered a humanitarian disaster, leaving 70% of the population in need of aid.

The UN’s helplessness was underlined during a Security Council meeting in New York on August 18, when the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said: “Death looms for Yemenis by air, land and sea.”

Referring to diseases and epidemics that are at unprecedented levels in Yemen, he added: “Those who survived cholera will continue to suffer the consequences of ‘political cholera’ that infects Yemen and continues to obstruct the road towards peace.”

He noted that while the international community is united in its support of a peaceful solution, certain parties to the conflict take advantage of internal divisions and focus on personal interests. “What is missing at this point is for the parties to the conflict, without any delays, excuses or procrastination, to demonstrate their intention to end the war and put the national interest above ay personal gains,” the UN envoy said.

Every day spent without serious action means more destruction and death, he said, as well as the spread of terrorist groups – such as the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – and “uncontrolled migration” through the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, where more than 41 migrants died in early August after being forced to abandon their boats and jump.

Ould Cheikh Ahmed was reiterating some of the key points from Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Relief Coordinator, Stephen O’Brien who also addressed the Security Council.

Before the conflict, Yemen had been making progress, with fewer people hungry and rising school enrolment, O’Brien said in his statement. “All of this has been sharply reversed,” he said, noting that 17 million Yemenis out of a population of 27 million are hungry; nearly 7 million facing famine, and about 16 million lack access to water or sanitation.

O’Brien highlighted several key challenges, including a funding shortage – the $2.3 billion Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan is only 39 per cent funded. He also underscored the interference to movement of critical commercial and humanitarian supplies and staff.

“De facto authorities in Sana’a or local officials in areas under their control block, delay or otherwise interfere with humanitarian action,” said O’Brien. The humanitarian official urged the international community to ensure that all ports are open to civilian, including to commercial traffic.

He called for those Governments and individuals with influence to influence the fighting parties to respect the international humanitarian and human rights law and to strengthen accountability.

Considering that 1.2 million public employees have not been paid regularly for months, he also urged that civil servant salaries be paid so that the basic services in the country do not collapse. “This human tragedy is deliberate and wanton – it is political and, with will and with courage which are both in short supply, it is stoppable,” he said, reiterating the UN’s ongoing calls for a political solution to the conflict.

The UN has organised three rounds of peace talks. There was hope of a breakthrough at the last round, which opened in Kuwait in April 2016, with both the Houthis and the Saudis seemingly under pressure and willing to negotiate.

However, the talks collapsed three months later, triggering an escalation in the fighting that the UN said resulted in the number of civilian casualties rising dramatically.

The government headed by President Hadi says the political process can only proceed if UN Security Council resolution 2216, which calls for the rebels to withdraw from all areas they control and lay down their arms, is fully implemented.

But reports say that Hadi is on the ropes. “His authority has been undercut by militias funded and controlled by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the very countries fighting to restore him to power,” according to a confidential UN report seen by Foreign Policy.

It adds: “Several of Hadi’s top ministers have broken ranks, establishing a separate transitional council with visions of governing the southern Yemen. The council, according to the UN panel of experts, enjoys sufficient support within the Yemeni military ‘to constitute a significant threat to President Hadi’s ability to govern in the south.'”

“The authority of the legitimate government, already weak or absent in many parts of the country, has eroded significantly this year,” the report states. “The ability of the legitimate government to effectively govern the eight governorates it claims to control is now in doubt.”

The Foreign Policy reports: “For nearly two-and-a-half years, Saudi Arabia and its allies, equipped with American-built aircraft and precision-guided rockets, have prosecuted one of the most advanced airpower campaigns against one of the world’s poorest countries.

“But the Saudi-led coalition’s overwhelming military superiority has brought them no closer to victory. Instead, it has furthered Yemen’s political fragmentation, deepened a humanitarian crisis that has brought the country to the brink of famine, and fed widespread public resentment in response to high civilian casualties.”

Foreign Policy quotes the UN Security Council panel of experts saying: “The Saudi Arabia-led coalition strategic air campaign continues to have little operational or tactical impact on the ground, and is only serving to stiffen civilian resistance.” The coalition is also helping to “consolidate” a military alliance between ethnic Houthi insurgents and Yemen’s disgraced former leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who control 13 of the country’s governorates, including the capital of Sana’a.

The disarray has provided a rich breeding ground for extremists, including the Islamic State and al Qaeda, which, the panel believes, “is looking to launch terrorist attacks against targets in the ‘West.’” The report notes that al Qaeda may be bolstering its ability to carry out attacks on sea vessels, citing the seizure of water borne explosive devices and a marine radar scanner in the terror group’s former stronghold of Mukalla. Al Qaeda local leader, Qasim al-Raymi, recently released a video encouraging “lone wolf’ attacks against targets in the West, the panel noted.

By Samuel White

(EurActiv) — The UK’s Brexit deal could be a make or break scenario for Britain’s farmers, according to a study published by the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) on Wednesday (16 August).

Changes to the UK’s trading relationship with the EU and other global partners once it leaves the single market and customs union could have a major impact on trade flows.

The independent study analysed the impact of three different post-Brexit trade scenarios on agricultural commodity prices in the UK, the volumes farmers produce and the prices they command.

While some post-Brexit changes may lead to lower costs for consumers, they could also slash farm incomes and increase Britain’s reliance on food imports, according to AFBI.

Three scenarios

The three post-Brexit scenarios analysed by the think tank were: a favourable bespoke free trade agreement with the EU, a switch to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules with Most Favoured Nation (MFN) tariffs and unilateral trade liberalisation.

Britain’s Brexit negotiating team, led by David Davis, is aiming to strike a free trade agreement (FTA) with Brussels as soon as possible after leaving the EU. This would allow the UK to negotiate its own trade agreements with other countries while retaining many of the benefits of free trade with the bloc’s 27 countries, such as tariff and quota free access to the single market.

Under a bespoke FTA scenario, the prices received by farmers for their goods (producer price) would remain largely unchanged, varying from -1% to +3% depending on the commodity. According to the study, this would not be enough to cause significant changes to the total quantity or value of British farm produce. Nor would it have a major impact on consumer prices.

However, it may not be possible to negotiate such an in-depth deal in the time available, and farmers are demanding certainty. Meurig Raymond, the president of the farmers union NFU, said: “It’s essential that the government prepare transitional arrangements to avoid a cliff-edge scenario. Farming businesses will need time to adjust to new trading environments.”

“It is vital that the government is very clear on what success looks like for British food and farming. Achieving the right trade deal will be pivotal to many farming businesses and the country’s ability to produce food,” he added

WTO rules a mixed bag

If EU and British negotiators fail to reach a post-Brexit trade agreement before the talks end on 29 March 2019, all UK-EU trade will revert to WTO rules.

Britain currently imports about 40% of its food and its biggest market for both imports and exports of food products is the EU. Even with MFN status, trade tariffs would be high, and AFBI believes this would lead to significant changes in the flow of trade.

Under this scenario, the UK could expect to see significant producer price increases for some commodities, especially milk and dairy (+30%), pigs (+18%) and beef (+17%), with corresponding gains in production volume and output value, according to the think tank. This would boost the UK’s self-sufficiency in these sectors as EU imports became more expensive, but would also drastically increase consumer prices.

However, tariffs would undermine the competitiveness of Britain’s big export commodities. Farmers producing sheep (producer price -30%), wheat (-4%) and barley (-5%) would suffer income losses and the total volume of production would fall.

Unilateral liberalisation

In its final scenario, AFBI modelled what would happen if the British government abolished all tariffs on food imports, while the UK’s trading partners kept MFN tariffs on UK exports.

Such a move would slash prices for UK consumers by opening the market to cheap imports from around the world, but British farmers would suffer as a result.

Producer prices for beef would fall by 45% and sheep by 29%. While these are the most extreme cases, the price, production volume and output value of all British agricultural commodities would fall significantly, the study said.

Raymond warned against such an outcome, arguing that the British government should ensure that “UK farmers are not put at a competitive disadvantage to overseas producers subject to different standards”.

The think tank stressed that producers elsewhere in the world are very competitive and that these results “strongly indicate that there is a more pressing need to improve domestic productivity and competitiveness under this trade scenario”.

By Mark Thornton*

The Opioid epidemic is spreading across the heartland of America. The number of drug overdose deaths from both prescription (e.g., Oxycontin) and black market (e.g., heroin) opiates exceeded 30,000 in 2015. Initial estimates for 2016 indicate yet another new record of deaths. It is such an enormous problem that I taught a special class on it at our undergraduate instructional conference, Mises University, which you can listen to here.

Recently the Commission on Combating the Opioid Crisis issued a preliminary report and recommended that the president declare a national emergency.

From 2002 to 2015 the number of such deaths has increased by 280%. The chart below shows that prescription opiates were the main contributor from 2002 to 2011. Illicit opiates have been the main contributor since:

It is vitally important that we understand what is causing this epidemic and even more important, how do we solve it. Plus, we need to avoid becoming a victim of it. In the past, most people ignored the issue of drug overdoses as merely an urban “junkie” problem, but this epidemic is hitting ordinary Americans such as coal miners, teachers, and high school football players.

The Washington Post asserted that the problem arose because of “aggressive marketing” on the part of the pharmaceutical companies that sell opiate painkillers. Others on the left think it is an arbitrary explosion of demand. They make it sound like market failure, but the “aggressive marketing” was not slick TV commercials. Rather, the drug companies targeted doctors, not consumers. They provided many lucrative carrots to doctors and spent resources lobbying to change regulations and pain prescribing guidelines in order to rig the FDA/AMA system in their favor.

In terms of solutions, leftists advocate spending lots of more money on just about everything they can think of, especially drug addiction treatment programs, but such programs are both extremely expensive and ineffective.

Conservatives tend to think of the cause of the epidemic in terms of the evil Mexicans and Chinese, along with street dealers and drug gangs. The Trump administration thinks that building the Mexican wall will help. They have also advocated for policies that have been demonstrated to be failures, such as expanding minimum mandatory prison sentences and asset forfeiture programs. They think expanding the D.A.R.E. program will help solve the problem, but several government-sponsored reports have discredited the effectiveness of the Drug Awareness Resistance Education program.

The real cause of this epidemic is various government policies and the real solution is the dismantling of those same policies, in perpetuum.

The Four Causes

Let us start with drug prohibition which dates back to the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. Drug prohibition results in a black market where illegal products are not commercially produced and where suppliers are not constrained by the rule of law and product liability law. The result is that illegal drugs are more dangerous than legal drugs. Potency varies greatly from batch to batch and products often contain dangerous impurities and substitute ingredients. Opiate overdoses often occur when an addict is unaware that a particular dose is highly potent or contains Fentanyl, a pain medication that is 50 to a 1,000 times more potent than morphine.

The next cause is called the Iron Law of Prohibition, a phrase first used by Richard Cowan to describe the phenomenon that when drug law enforcement becomes more powerful, the potency of illegal drugs increases. One of the effects of enhancing prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will produce a higher potency drug. For example, during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suppliers switched from producing beer and wine to highly potent spirits, such as gin and whiskey.

A second result of more rigorous prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will switch from lower potency drug types to higher potency drug types. For example, during Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” during the 1980s, smugglers switched from bulky marijuana to highly concentrated cocaine and domestic suppliers turned much of this cocaine into crack cocaine, resulting in the crack cocaine epidemic. The Iron Law of Prohibition explains why we see more and more dangerous drugs on the black market and why we see decreases in overdoses in states that have legalized cannabis.

Government intervention in the economy is a largely unrecognized cause of addiction. Intervention has at least two distinct channels of creating addicts. The first is war. War creates addicts through both painful physical injuries and painful emotional and psychological disorders, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. The second cause is the general impact of widespread government intervention in the economy. Much of government interventionism results in the creation of privileges and monopoly power. For example, licensing requirements provide members of a profession, such as medical doctors, with monopoly profits by restricting the number of practicing physicians. This enriches licensed doctors and impoverishes potential doctors who must find work in another profession. These excess potential doctors thereby suppress wages in other labor markets. Given the pervasiveness of government intervention, this creates two classes in labor markets — the advantaged and the disadvantaged and addiction tends to develop in disadvantaged labor markets where people are more likely to be despondent and lack hope and economic resources.

The three above causes have been around for a long time creating the environment for drug overdoses, but at much lower levels than we see today. The final cause has only been around for a couple of decades, but it is now responsible for the majority of deaths. Alluded to above, Big Pharma undertook “aggressive marketing” in order to encourage doctors to write massive numbers of prescriptions for opiate painkillers and to change to pain prescribing guidelines in order to sell more of these heroin-like pills.

As a result, doctors began prescribing drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin, which are similar to opiates, such as morphine and heroin, for ordinary injuries and minor surgeries. The problem with this is that if you take these pills for 30 or 60 days, there is a distinct possibility that you will become physically addicted to them. The doctor is not going to write you refills for the prescription once the injury has healed.

This leaves the addict with three bad choices. One, you can enter a drug addiction rehabilitation program, but these programs are expensive and are not necessarily effective. Two, you can go cold turkey. However, detoxification comes with a slew of physical and psychological symptoms and can result in suicide and death. Three, you can go into the black market and buy illegal Oxycontin and Vicodin pills. The problem with this option is that such pills are expensive and have an unstable supply.

What happens if you choose this option, but run low on money or have trouble acquiring the pills? Well, very often the drug dealer who sold you the pills can also sell you heroin or tell you where to buy it. Heroin is often cheaper per dose and has a more stable supply. This is how people who would never even consider entering a room in which heroin was present become heroin addicts. This process is what has caused the major surge in drug overdoses.

The solution to the epidemic is to legalize drugs. Doctors should be able to put their patients on drug maintenance and recovery programs. Commercially produced opiates would be pure and relatively safe. Addicts could go about their lives, attempting to recover physically, psychologically, socially, and economically without having to worry about how to obtain and pay for their drugs. Drug addiction is often a multi-faceted problem that simply cannot be fixed with a 30 day rehab experience. Addicts that are successfully detoxed, but without solving more basic problems, often relapse and die because the dose they take is now too strong for their detoxed body.

Legalizing cannabis would also be a key to solving the epidemic. Legal cannabis improves the epidemic through two channels. First, medical formulations of cannabis can be a potent, but non-addictive pain killer. Therefore, legalization leads to a reduced level of opiate use, abuse, and mortality and there are several peer-reviewed studies that confirm this. Second, because cannabis reduces pain and anxiety, and improves sleep and appetite it is very helpful for those who are trying to beat their heroin addiction.

The Opioid epidemic is killing more than 30,000 Americans a year. For most experts, the epidemic is a mystery with regard to its cause and solution. A little progress has been made, but to really eliminate the problem we need to legalize drugs, reduce the size of government, and increase freedom in our lives. We also need to find an answer for the pain epidemic which has shackled too many Americans to Big Pharma and the medical belief that every symptom requires another prescription.

About the author:
* Mark Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He has authored seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio shows.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

(RFE/RL) — U.S. President Donald Trump sidestepped an announcement on U.S. troops levels in Afghanistan during a major address to the nation and warned Pakistan over its alleged support for extremist groups in the region.

Trump, outlining his new strategy for Afghanistan and the South Asia region, said he would not “talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities.”

Speaking at the Fort Myer military base near Washington on August 21, Trump said his new strategy will not be based on “arbitrary timelines,” but conditions on the ground.

The president warned that Washington will no longer tolerate Pakistan offering “safe havens” to extremist groups like the Afghan Taliban, a claim Islamabad denies.

“We can no longer be silent about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorist organizations,” Trump said.

He also said the United States was in Afghanistan not for nation building, but rather, “we are killing terrorists.”

Trump also said the United States needs a plan for an “honorable and enduring outcome” in Afghanistan, and added that a rapid exit would have “unacceptable” consequences.

Trump has long been skeptical of U.S. policy in the region, where the United States has been at war since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

He announced a strategic review soon after taking office in January, and U.S. officials have said he has privately questioned whether sending more troops was prudent.

Trump told his top officials in July that “we aren’t winning…we are losing” the war in Afghanistan to militant groups like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Islamic State (IS).

Options that were considered by U.S. leaders reportedly ranged from pulling U.S. military troops out of Afghanistan entirely, to drawing down troop numbers in favor of outside security contractors, to sending in more troops and stepping up efforts to defeat the Taliban and other militants battling the Afghan government.

Trump’s decision came after he met with his national security team at the Camp David presidential retreat on August 18 to discuss the conflict.

Earlier this year, reports suggest the president sought to give U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan, opening the door for future troop increases requested by General John Nicholson, the top U.S. Army commander in Afghanistan.

Media reports said Mattis sought greater clarity on Trump’s strategy but also recommended an increase of up to 4,000 troops to help strengthen the Afghan army.

Nicholson said in February he needed “a few thousand” more troops, with some potentially drawn from Washington’s NATO allies.

U.S. military and intelligence officials are concerned that a withdrawal or reduced presence of U.S. forces would give the Taliban the upper hand in the current standoff and allow Al-Qaeda and IS militants to use Afghanistan as a base for plotting attacks on the United States and its allies.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 after invoking NATO’s Article Five clause on collective self-defense following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The U.S.-led campaign overthrew the Islamist Taliban government, which was hosting Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his group’s training camps.

U.S. forces have remained bogged down there through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Trump.

“I took over a mess, and we’re going to make it a lot less messy,” Trump said when asked earlier this year about Afghanistan.

Omar Samad, an Afghanistan expert in Washington, says a combination of factors has ensured the United States’ failure so far to achieve its objectives in Afghanistan.

“The U.S. has had an on-off engagement with Afghanistan,” he says. “There have been distractions by other hot spots like Iraq, and Washington has not focused on the real source of the threat in the form of the Taliban’s external sanctuaries and support systems in Pakistan.”

“The strategy has been ineffective because it hasn’t stated clear objectives,” says Michael Kugelman, South Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“The initial objectives — removing Al-Qaeda safe havens and removing its Taliban hosts from power –were clear and achieved very quickly. But ever since then the U.S. has struggled to articulate why it’s in Afghanistan and why Americans continue to die.”

The Taliban has repeatedly urged the United States and its allies to leave Afghanistan, ruling out peace talks with the Kabul government as long as foreign forces remain on Afghan soil.

The strategy in Afghanistan was complicated by internal differences over whether the United States should take a harder line toward Pakistan for failing to shut down alleged Afghan Taliban sanctuaries and arrest Afghan extremist leaders.

U.S. and Afghan officials have said the Afghan Taliban are supported by elements of Pakistan’s military and top intelligence agency, a charge Islamabad denies.

Before Trump’s decision, the proposals under discussion were reported to include the United States launching a review of whether to designate Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism if it didn’t pursue senior leaders of the Afghan Taliban and the allied Haqqani network, considered the most lethal Afghan extremist group.

Such a designation would have triggered harsh U.S. sanctions, including a ban on arms sales and an end to U.S. economic assistance for Pakistan.

“Without inducing a meaningful change in Pakistan’s regional strategic and tactical calculus, a few thousand more U.S troops will not change much on the ground in Afghanistan,” says Mohammad Taqi, a Pakistani analyst. “Without making Pakistan face the consequences of its actions, its behavior won’t change towards Afghanistan.”

A U.S. report found earlier this year that the Taliban controls or contests control of about 40 percent of the country. Furthermore, Afghan security forces are facing an increasing presence of IS militants in the country.

Since peaking at about 100,000 troops in 2010-11, the U.S. force has diminished. The United States currently maintains 8,400 troops in Afghanistan — a cap set last year by then-President Barack Obama.

However, there are at least another 2,000 U.S. troops — mostly special forces — assigned to fight militant groups such as the Taliban and IS.

About 5,000 non-U.S. NATO forces are still in the country.

In an earlier article I argued for expanding tax-deferred retirement accounts because they eliminate the double tax on saving that exists under the current tax system. Here is the basic idea. People earn income and pay income tax on that income. If they save it and then earn interest (or dividends, or capital gains, etc.), they will be charged income tax on income that has already been taxed, amounting to a double tax.

To see that this is the case, consider this simple example (numbers chosen to make the example easy to follow).

Assume that with no income taxes, you decide to buy a new computer which costs $1000. Further assume the interest rate is 5%. Instead of buying the computer, you could put the money in the bank and earn 5% interest, or $50 a year. With no taxes, it costs the same amount to buy a $1000 computer as to receive $50 a year in interest.

Now, assume that there is a 50% income tax. (California’s highest income tax bracket is 13.3%, so combined with the highest federal rate of 39.6%, a high-income Californian could be paying a 52.9% rate.)

With a 50% income tax rate, you would have to earn $2000 to buy the $1000 computer. Half of your income would be taxed away, leaving you with $1000 to buy the computer.

To receive $50 a year in interest at a 5% interest rate, you would have to earn $100 in interest; half would be taxed away, leaving you with $50. To earn $100 in interest at a 5% rate you would have to save $2000, and to save $2000 you would have to earn $4000, half of which would be taxed away before you can put $2000 in the bank.

With a 50% income tax you would have to earn $2000 to buy the computer but $4000 to receive $50 a year in interest, after taxes.

With no income taxes, receiving $50 in interest costs you the same amount as buying a $1000 computer. With a 50% tax rate, it costs you twice as much to receive $50 in interest, after taxes, than to buy the $1000 computer.

This example shows why when income is earned as a return on after-tax income, taxing the earnings amounts to a double tax on saving.

This article was published at The Beacon.

Raven Fight wear, an Australian fight wear firm based in Gosford, New South Wales, Australia has launched “Battle of the Gods- Hanuman V Ganesha” rash guards. They display images of Hindu deities of Lord Ganesha and Lord Hanuman in a battle mode. 1

Rajan Zed, President of Universal society of Hinduism said in a statement released from Nevada, USA that Raven Fight wear and its CEO should offer a formal apology besides withdrawing the aforesaid merchandise from the company’s website and stockists. 1

Every Indian whether living in India or abroad knows about Bhagat Singh but for the foreign readers, let me shed some light on this great man.

Bhagat Singh was born in 1907 in India, when the country was still under British colonial rule. He refused an arranged marriage, left home and turned into a socialist revolutionary. Bhagat Singh pro-actively participated in numerous movements seeking to end the British imperial rule in India. 2

Influenced by Auguste Vaillant, a French anarchist, who bombed the chamber of Deputies in Paris, Bhagat Sigh along with his accomplice, Batukeshwar Dutt threw two bombs inside the Central legislative assembly on 8th April 1929. 2

The bombs were not designed to kill. The smoke from the bombs filled the assembly hall, Singh and Dutt could easily have escaped in the resulting confusion instead they stayed in the assembly premises and shouted slogans of; “Long live the revolution” and threw leaflets, telling the Britishers to leave India. 2

They both courted arrest without offering any resistance. Bhagat Singh wanted his subsequent trial to draw national as well as international attention towards the exploitation of Indians by the Britishers. He hoped to inspire millions of Indians to rise up and revolt against the British rule through his defiant, bold action. 2

Bhagat Singh and his fellow revolutionaries were imprisoned; on 23rd March 1931, Bhagat Singh along with two of his accomplices Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged to death by the Britishers. Bhagat Singh attained martyrdom at a young age of 23. 2

Bhagat Singh was an avid reader and writer. He contributed articles to various publications of his time. He studied the works of Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky-all atheist revolutionaries. 2

Bhagat Singh also turned to Atheism. One of the most prominent article written by him is titled; “Why I am an atheist”. Bhagat Singh has raised excellent points in this write-up. 2

He wrote that any person who challenges the existence of God is labeled as a renegade. Life becomes quite tough for such a person because then he/she doesn’t possess any false hope of assistance from an imaginary God. These individuals have to rely only on themselves to face the adversities of their earthly existence.3

Bhagat Singh stated that if there is an almighty, why he created this world, which is full of inequality, misery and poverty? If it’s his law then God cannot be Omnipotent because then he is bound by laws. 3

Bhagat Singh blasted the Hindu religion by saying that the belief that whosoever undergoes sufferings in this life, must have been a sinner in the previous birth is sheer nonsense. It is illogical to say that those who are oppressors now were Godly people in their previous births and for this reason alone, they hold power in their hands.3

Bhagat Singh wrote that ancestors of Hindus were very shrewd. They came up with all these hoaxes to snatch the power of reasoning from the people. He quoted the writer, Upton Sinclair; “Only make a man firm believer in the immortality of soul, then rob him of all that he possesses. He will willingly help you in the process” 3

Bhagat Singh said that the origins of this world and humans can be explained through scientific logic, as done by thinkers like Charles Darwin. 3

According to Bhagat Singh, God was invented as a deterrent factor by humans and his furies as well as laws were repeatedly propagated to keep man from becoming a danger to the society because rebellion against any King has always been considered a sin in every religion. 3

Bhagat Singh declared; “It is my mode of thinking that has made me an atheist. I don’t think that by strengthening my belief in God and by offering prayers to him, I can bring improvement in my situation, nor can I further deteriorate it. I have read of many atheists facing all troubles boldly, so, I am trying to stand like a man with the head high and erect to the last, even on the gallows.” 3

It’s highly regretful that this brilliant article by Bhagat Singh is not prescribed in the school text books of India. Reading this write-up would imbibe the power of rationality and logic in young generation.

Majority of religious people on this planet are just blindly adhering to their religious beliefs because they were told so, since their childhood by their parents and grandparents.

Young pre-teen children often argue and fight amongst each other claiming their superhero to be the best. One child says Superman is the best, while the other believes Batman to be better while, in reality all of these characters are comic creations.

The situation with grown-ups is similar, people all over the world, argue about their religion comprising of Jesus, Mohammad or Hindu God(s) to be the best.

Throughout human history, millions of people lost their lives at the hands of religious authorities. No religion; Islam, Christianity or Hinduism can claim innocence over these systematic genocides carried out in the name of Gods.

If Hindu religious sentiments are so easily hurt by the rash guards of Raven Fight wear, then simply don’t buy them. No-one is forcing these religious fanatics to buy this merchandise. Why should Raven Fight wear suffer financial losses and withdraw its stock from the market?

Self-proclaimed religious custodians, like this so called President of the Hindu society should experience a paradigm shift in their outlook by reading the aforementioned rational, logical article of Bhagat Singh.

It would broaden their mental horizons, thereby preventing them from wasting time, energy and resources in raising irrelevant issues.

If Gods exist, let them sort out their sentiments amongst each other. Human beings should endeavor to solve the grave challenges of environmental degradation, rising income inequality, overpopulation etc. because there surely is no divine assistance forthcoming to solve these pressing issues.

Sources:
1. http://www.eurasiareview.com/17082017-hindus-wants-australia-fightwear-firm-to-withdraw-battling-gods-rashguards/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/1930/10/05.htm